This Crooked Way (18 page)

Thend's pretty determined, and he set out to tell the story from the beginning. There were a lot of interruptions, questions, and explanations and it took a long time, but he finally did it.

Naeli looked at Roble. “What do you think? Should we go and see what we can do?”

Roble scowled and shrugged. He looked at Thend: “What do you think?”

Thend opened his hands and said, “The fight's over by now. He's away or they caught him. Maybe they killed him, but Morlock thought they wanted him alive.”

“They might have lost their tempers, though,” Roble observed dryly. “He can be irritating.”

“Tell me about it,” Thend snorted.

Then the topic was whether we ought to go to the Sandboys and bribe them to release Morlock. I didn't know what we were going to bribe them with, as we'd left our homes with little more than the clothes on our backs, but nobody asked for my opinion anyway. I guess that's the price of not saying much: people assume you don't have much to say.

I finally did say something, though. “Hey!” I shouted, and pointed at the open doorway of the house. Morlock was standing there in the shadows of the entry hall.

Naeli and Roble wanted him to come out and tell his part of the story, but he gestured at them without speaking and backed into the house. Then we all realized that it was one thing for us to be standing talking in the street; it was another thing for him: an imperial outlaw who had a water-gang out after him. And we realized all this without him having to say a word, which was how he liked it. He didn't like to say two words if one or none would do.

We trooped inside. In the dusty entryway within, empty except for our gear, Roble said, “Well? What happened with the Sandboys?”

“Lost them,” Morlock said. I saw Roble's face fall when he realized that was all we were going to hear about Morlock's big fight in the marketplace. Thinking back on those bloody bodies falling to the ground, I was just as pleased, but men look at these things differently, I've noticed. “Came in through the back door and heard you out there,” Morlock added, in a burst of eloquence.

He sat down beside his big heavy backpack, a little abruptly.

“Are you wounded?” Naeli said sharply, going and kneeling beside him.

“Old wound in my leg,” he explained. “It aches a little when I fight—or run.”

My mother began to massage his leg.

Stador and Bann looked a little blank. Roble got this grin on his dark face. Like,
Bless you, my children.
Thend looked mad—he didn't like any of the signs that our mother and Morlock were getting close. Jealousy, I guess: he'd lost her for six years or more, had just gotten her back, and was in no mood to share her with a stranger whose skin made one think of mushrooms and dead fish. Personally, I was happy for her. She was younger then than I am now, a vigorous and beautiful woman in the last summery glory of her youth. But back then I thought of her as quite old, almost as old as Morlock, and I didn't see why two old people shouldn't be happy together. I wasn't surprised that she took to him either: the only other men she'd seen for the last six years had been either sacrifices to the God in the Ground, or the men of the Bargainer village, all of them pretty repulsive types. I actually don't think she'd been with anyone since my father died, and that was well before I was born, maybe fourteen years since.

The only two people who didn't seem to have any emotional reaction to what was going on were Morlock and Naeli themselves. Naeli was saying, in a matter-of-fact voice, “What are we going to do now?”

Morlock said flatly, “I think you should go to Ontil, the imperial capital. I still have some friends there and they can help you find a place to stand. I'll give you a letter.”

“While you go north alone,” Naeli said icily. “Into the Kirach Kund, without the information Charis was going to get for you.”

That was what Morlock had been expecting from Charis: information from the imperial scouts on what the Khroic hordes in the mountains were up to. It might make the difference in surviving the trip through the deadly pass. He said he'd already paid for it and all he needed to do was pick it up. (He'd told us the whole story, but I've forgotten half of it, and I'm not sure I believe the half that I remember.) That was what had led to the fiasco in the Market today.

Morlock wasn't saying anything, as usual, but it was the way he wasn't saying it.

“Come on, Morlock,” said Roble, a little impatiently. “If you're going to dump us here the least you owe us is an explanation.”

I didn't see this at all. But apparently it convinced Morlock because he said, “All right. I'm going to try to find Charis. He's probably still alive—he's good at that sort of thing, and his enemies don't seem to have found him yet.”

“And he may have your information.”

“Um. Yes.”

“Morlock! Spit it out!” Roble said it, but it might have been any of us.

The crooked man shrugged. “It's a question of who's really after him. The guard? He's been a goose laying golden eggs for them for years now. The Sandboys? I expect the same is true: he seemed to be greasing every palm in town when I was last here. No one has any motive to kill him.”

“So there's someone else,” Roble said. “Is it important who?”

“It might be,” Morlock said.

“Why?”

“Charis would have attracted the hostile attention of this person shortly after he was fishing for information about the Kirach Kund—and the Khroi. It may be a mere coincidence, or the Khroi may have a powerful agent in this city. I want to know if this is true.”

“Then we'll stay and help you find out,” Roble said. “Afterward we can take up the question of who's going where.”

“The hell we will!” Naeli said fiercely. “Morlock, you are
not
going to abandon us in this damnable place where everything and everybody is for sale.”

“Ontil isn't like Sarkunden,” Morlock said. “Nor do you know what the Kirach Kund is like.”

“I know this much—”

“Let's table it,” Roble said briskly. “I say we eat and sleep and start looking for Charis tonight when the Sandboys are in their little sandbeds.”

Roble was pretty good at breaking up arguments. Maybe it was all those years of living with my mom. Anyway, that was what we did, but it didn't work exactly as he'd planned it.

We always kept watch at night, and we didn't see any reason to change that because we were camping in a house instead of an open field. (We didn't want to wake up and find the house surrounded by Keeps or Sandboys.) With seven of us no one had to stay up long, although it was a pain to stand watch in the middle of the night, so we rotated. That night, Morlock took the first watch and I took the second. Thend was third, and boy was he grumpy when I woke him. We argued about what time it was, and afterward I was too mad to sleep, so I wandered around the house to find someone awake to talk to. That was how I noticed that Morlock's room, on the second floor of the abandoned house, was empty, the unfastened shutters flapping gently in the night breeze.

It sort of looked like he'd climbed out the window, so I poked my head out and looked around. It took a while to spot him, but I finally saw a crooked silhouette right up at the end of the alley: Morlock.

I climbed out the window and followed him.

If you'd asked me why at the time, I couldn't have explained it. It certainly wasn't any echo of my mother's romantic feelings: I thought Morlock was repulsive. But I liked him and was mad at him in a way I didn't try to understand.

Now that I've seen my daughters with their father, I understand a little better. I never knew my father, and I was always latching on to older men in the Bargainer village—some of them pretty creepy. (It was only thanks to Naeli's vigilance that I was still a virgin at thirteen.) Morlock was another one of these stand-ins for my father, I think. In lots of ways he was a pretty bad fit, but in some he was a good one. My mother and he seemed to have something going on, or something about to begin, for one thing. For another, he had a wholly disinterested kindness for me and for Thend. In any case, I always felt
safe
with him—I knew he'd always stand between me and danger. The only other person I ever felt that way about was Naeli, and I knew there were some things she couldn't handle. I wasn't sure if that was true about Morlock. (Turns out there was plenty, but I didn't know that then.)

Anyway: I followed him. At first I tried to catch up, and then I realized that might not be too smart—if he noticed me while we were still close to the house, he might take me back and wake Naeli and Roble, and there would be screaming and shouting offensive to my sensitive spirit. So I started to sneak along, just near enough to keep him in sight.

After a while I realized something: I wasn't the only person following him. There was a furtive shadow slinking along among other shadows lining the street between Morlock and me. A Sandboy, I figured: maybe one of them had trailed Morlock to the house, in spite of what he'd thought, and was now following him to find out where Charis was (if Morlock was right about that).

I crept closer to the shadowy figure, very gradually and carefully so as to not give myself away. I wanted a closer look at him and, when I got one, I suddenly realized that I recognized the guy, even though (strictly speaking) I'd never seen him before. He was very dirty and bedraggled, but his greasy hair was a pale yellow and his sickly skin was white as a wax candle in dim ambient moonlight. His eyes, I bet, would be green. Charis—the original master wonder-worker of that nasty little establishment Morlock had burned down this afternoon.

I didn't like this. Maybe Morlock was wrong: maybe Charis himself had lured Morlock into town, hoping to kill him off and cancel his debts that way.

I waited until he had crept a little closer to Morlock and I had crept a little closer to him. Then, when he was crossing from one hiding place to another in the shadow-stitched street, I took him out, or tried to.

My brothers played this game called vinch-ball, and it is so stupid I could burst. I knew more about it than I wanted to, because I'd watched them play it so much, and because when they weren't playing it they were usually talking about it. Like most boys' games, it involved hitting people and knocking them over for no clearly defined reason. Well, I had a reason and, thanks to vinch-ball (I wish I'd never said that, but it's true), I knew how to tackle someone bigger than me and bring him down.

I hit Charis from behind, about the level of his knees. He gave a thin scream and fell backward. I scrambled out of the way and pounced on him. All that went according to plan.

Unfortunately I'd underestimated Charis. He was even thinner and weedier than his golem-figure, and his muscles were as soft as mud. But he was a grown man and he fought with the strength of desperation. I was starting to lose the fight when someone else joined the mix.

It was Thend. Between us, we managed to pin Charis's arms behind him as he wriggled, facedown on the street beneath us. He was still struggling and gasping, and I didn't know how long we could hold him, when suddenly he went limp.

I looked up. Morlock was standing over us.

“Charis,” he said.

“Master Morlock,” Charis replied, his voice muffled. “Would you please get your servants off me?”

“I am not your master,” Morlock replied coldly, “nor theirs.”

We let him go anyway and even helped him to his feet.

“How did you get here?” I demanded from Thend.

“Good thing I
did
get here,” he sniffed.

“That's not an answer! Who's on guard back at”—I realized I shouldn't say too much in front of Charis—”back there?”

“Roble,” Thend said. “He saw you go and sent me after you.”

“He's asleep—”

“Roble's awake, or ought to be,” Morlock said. “We agreed that I would go scout for Charis and he would wait for a message, in case I got into trouble.”

“How are you going to send him a message?” Thend asked.

“If you need to know, I'll tell you,” Morlock said, not like he was mad. He turned to Charis. “You don't look well,” he observed.

“Thanks to you!” Charis snapped. “When I acquired your information, the Khroi became…interested in me. They ordered their man in the city to hunt me down.”

“Who is he?” Morlock asked. “Perhaps I can defend you from him.”

“No!” Charis seemed genuinely frightened. “Please don't…don't help. I wish no more obligations to you. No more to anyone. I'll find a way to destroy…the agent, or escape him…somehow. If I can pay you what I already owe, I will gladly close our account.”

“Then?”

“If you're asking me where your information is—”

“I am.”

“—it is under lock and key, safe in my house.”

“Then we will go to your house.”

“No!” Charis shouted. “I can't! They're watching for me there!”

“We will trust to your walls and your golems for the few moments we'll be there.”

“I don't have any golems,” Charis sobbed. “They won't obey me anymore. The Khroi's agent got to them somehow. I haven't set foot inside my house for three months. The last time I did the golems tried to kill me. Kill me!”