Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [30]
“Ah. Hm.” Dag rubbed his nose with his hook. His features were outlined in the orange glow from the fire, lapped by the light with the rest of him falling into shadow. The walls of the shack seemed to recede into a fathomless darkness. “Well, simply that malice ground takes up Lakewalker mortality readily, as the ground of bone takes up that of blood.”
Fawn frowned. “You have to figure, bones take up blood because they were once both together.”
“That’s right.”
“So…” She suddenly wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. “So…?”
“Legend would have it—legend is just like they say, only more dried up, you know?”
She nodded cautiously.
“In fact, no one alive now knows for sure. Those who knew died in the knowing, one, two thousand years ago. Chronicles were lost, time was lost—was it two centuries or five or ten that dropped out, how many generations disappeared in the dark?”
“They kept the plunkins going, anyhow.”
His lips curved briefly. “There is that.”
“So what is this thing that’s known or not known?”
“Well, there is more than one version of how malices came into the world. We know they didn’t used to be here.”
“You’ve seen, what, twenty-seven of them? Up close? I don’t want to know what other people say. What do you believe?”
He sighed. “They say is all I have to go on, for most of it. They say the old lords of the lake league worked great magics in great groups. They combined up under the mastery of the high king. One king, the last king, greater and more cunning than any before, at the apex of the greatest array of mages ever assembled, reached beyond the bounds of the world for…something. Some say immortality. Some say power. The king stories mostly assume evil intent because of evil results—if there is punishment, there must have been a crime. They blame pride and selfishness, or whatever vice they’re especially miffed with. I’m not so sure. Maybe he was attempting to capture some imagined good to share, and it all went horribly wrong.
“You know I said the old lords used their magic to alter plants, animals, and themselves. And their children.” He tapped his temple with the backside of his hook, and Fawn realized he thought his eye color was a relic of those efforts. “Extended life, improved groundsense and ability to move the world through its ground.” He glanced, briefly and uneasily, at his left arm held up, and she knew he was thinking about his ghost hand again. He let it drop again to his side. “We Lakewalkers, we think, are the descendants of lesser hinterland lords—what must the great ones have been like?
“Anyway. In their attempt to enhance themselves, the high lords drew in something from outside the world. God, demon, other. If they’d kidnapped a god, it would explain why the gods shun us. And the king combined with it, or it with him. And became something that was neither. Vast, distorted, powerful, insane, and consuming ground instead of…of whatever they’d intended.”
“Wait, are you saying your own king became the first malice?” Fawn rolled up on her elbow to stare in astonishment.
Dag tilted his head in doubt. “He became something. Some lords fell under his power—legend says—and some broke away. A war of matter and magic followed, which sank the lakes and left the Dead Lake and the Western Levels. Whether the malice-king’s enemies discovered how to destroy him, or it was another accident, any who knew died in the finding out. Someone back then must have discovered how to share mortality. It must have been a great sharing, is all I can say. Our malices came from some cataclysmic ground transformation when he, or it, was at last destroyed, and blew up into those ten thousand—or however many—shards or seeds or eggs. But that’s what we think the malices are all trying to do, clumsily, when they come out of the ground. Become kings again.
“Hence—to return roundabout to your original question—affinity. Malices take up Lakewalker mortality because