Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas

Author:Suzy McKee Charnas
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1999-06-11T23:00:00+00:00

13

Bek remembered standing with the others on the Boyhouse roof, staring at the billowing smoke, and chanting. The smoke stank (it was by that same cooked-flesh stench that he had recognized the purpose of the Bayo Rendery); but the boys breathed it joyfully. It was the smell of evil being punished as no boy could ever be punished, for only witches were burned, and only fems were witches – always excepting, of course, the special case of DarkDreamers, but what boy ever imagined he would be one of those?

The chants naming the wickedness of the Ancient fems were always shouted with extraordinary venom by the younger boys, who were closest to the separation from their own dams. The older boys were privileged to bellow out the list of the virtues of men, virtues which fitted men to master fems and boys in the name of order. Most boys of any age never came close enough to fems to observe their dreadfulness personally or knew many truly decent adult men among the Boyhouse Teachers; but they were convinced, and they chanted their throats raw.

Bek thought of gray-robed pilgrims stumbling along the narrow trail that led out over the black peninsula of stone to Endpath. The intervening step – that of walking to a dreaming at the Hall as one of the adult brotherhood of the Holdfast – was missing from his own experience. Watching now, he felt less substantial than the coiling smoke.

‘Well,’ Kelmz said, glancing out once, uninterestedly, ‘what’s been arranged?’

‘Do you know Senior Kendizen of the Quarterbacks?’ Servan asked.

‘That famishing fem-lover? Sure.’

Servan gave him a narrow stare; Bek was startled too. Mature men did not ordinarily run down their peers before Juniors. ‘Kendizen is bringing someone here who can tell us where to find Karz Kambl.’

‘And you think Kambl will tell you where to find Maggomas,’ Kelmz said. ‘Well, maybe he will.’ He rubbed at his eyes, which were red-rimmed from hard use. ‘I’ll keep watch at the doors. You don’t want that fem sidling in here; and your contacts may be less dependable than you think. Like everything else.’

Frowning after his broad back, Servan said, ‘I told you it was time to get rid of him. I’ve seen men torn loose from their certainties before. They generally end up as wreckage on Skidro, and starve in an alley, if they last that long.’

‘Not Kelmz,’ Bek said, curtly.

‘I grant you,’ Servan said, settling himself on the deep sill of the window, ‘he’s full of surprises for an old man. Take that dream of his; people do sometimes dream of beasts – the other unmen were still men of a sort, after all, but the beasts were entirely different. The lure of the alien is strong.’ With his foot, he stirred one of the pages on the floor. The picture showed a stick-legged, brownish creature in mid-leap, its placid face in strange contrast to the urgency of its movement.

‘Most men don’t go so far as to dream that they literally are beasts themselves.

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