This Crooked Way (23 page)

But it had caught hold of him just long enough to keep his momentum going. His feet tumbled over the edge and his body began to follow as he clutched desperately for a hold on the bare dirt and rock of the ledge.

This, I guess, was the moment for a Charis-like calculation of who owed what to whom. Should I have tried to figure out if Charis was still in my debt? (I had, after all, saved his life twice, and he'd only saved mine once—but I hadn't acted
in order
to save his life whereas he…) Well, I didn't. I didn't even think about Thrennick wanting Charis alive. There was a roaring in my ears like a river of fire, and I rolled over to seize the arm of this evil icy man who was, apparently, one of my blood—chosen, if not given.

He was saying something. I didn't pay any attention; I was trying to dig my feet into the ground. I hoped my weight, pressing down on the rough surface of the ledge, would be enough to anchor his.

The trouble was: it wasn't. In a silence that seemed to fill the whole world I heard the most horrible sound I've ever heard: my body scraping over the stones of the ledge.

“Help here!” I shrieked, into the sudden silence, and slipped a little further toward the gulf.
I really should let go now
, I told myself.
Can't do this, can't go over the edge with him.
But I clung even harder to his arm, so hard that my fingers sank deep into the flesh. That seemed weird, even then, but I didn't have time to think why.

Then Naeli grabbed on to my feet, arresting my slide toward the cliff. I sobbed gratefully and hung on to Charis's arm.

But he was still sliding away from me. I didn't understand it. I wasn't moving, but he was still sliding off the edge of the cliff.

Then his arm ripped away from his body. I was left with it and, no doubt, a dopey look on my face. I'll never forget Charis's expression as he slipped, one-armed, away from me into the abyss.

Morlock was abruptly there. One leg thrown forward so that his foot was at the brink, he bent over and seized Charis by the neck. As Charis gasped and choked Morlock lifted him out of the brink and tossed him beside me on the ledge.

I was still gripping the severed arm tensely. When I realized this I let it go, kicked Naeli away hysterically, and jumped to my feet. I didn't know what Charis was, but I didn't want to be near him.

Morlock, however, had no such qualms. He was kneeling down beside Charis. At first I thought that he was holding Charis's one remaining hand: a pretty sentimental act for a man like Morlock, but you never know. Then I realized: he was feeling for a pulse.

And not finding one, apparently. “Remarkable!” he said to Charis's tormented face. “The skin temperature is lifelike. If there were a heartbeat, the likeness would be perfect.”

“I was working on that,” Charis said sullenly. “It's a minor issue.”

“You still have a heart, though?” Morlock inquired, with an air of polite interest.

“Oh, yes,” Charis replied. “I couldn't dispense with it. The entire torso is essentially intact.”

“May I?” asked Morlock.

“If—Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter,” Charis said gloomily.

Morlock reached into the horrible man's open shirt and felt around a little.

“That's not human skin,” he said flatly, withdrawing his hand.

“Well, I decided to venture on a clay integument for my torso,” Charis admitted, “but the organs are still functioning. They have less to do now, of course.”

“You anticipate an extended lifespan?” Morlock asked. “Less wear and tear on the organs? You may be right. Anyway, this is an admirable achievement. Really remarkable.”

That was when I started to laugh quietly to myself. An admirable achievement! That thing!

“What's wrong?” Bann said to me. “What's happening?”

“Don't you see?” I said, or shrieked, I'm not sure which. “He's turned himself into a golem.”

Morlock looked over at me. “Not entirely,” he said mildly. “Charis's limbs and skin may be golemic but the rest of him, his core, is as it was. Do you,” he said to Charis, “get full sensation from your clay skin?”

Charis shuddered. “No, thank God Avenger. Really, Morlock the Maker!” he said, drawing himself up. “I don't think you fully appreciate what you call my achievement.”

“Explain it, then,” Morlock suggested.

“Do you suppose that I myself did these delicate operations on my own frame? I had to have golems do it. For each operation I created a team of golem-surgeons with careful and elaborately written life-scrolls. The slightest error in any golem's composition and I would not have survived a single operation.”

“What makes you think you
did
survive?” I shouted. Then I put my hand over my mouth and sat down. I didn't feel that great; I don't suppose any of us did. Naeli and Thend both came and sat down on either side of me, each one putting an arm around me. That made me feel a little better.

Charis droned on wearily, “My face became so many masks. It wasn't mine anymore. As the Khroi's agent, I spied on the city. As your debtor, I spied on the Khroi. As the Khroi's agent, I had to hunt down the man spying on them. If my plans had succeeded, all my debts would be paid. I would have given you your information, surrendered you to the Khroi, and destroyed the spy in the city. But now all my bargains are broken.”

“You would have destroyed yourself to fulfill a bargain?” Morlock asked.

“My crowning deed as a maker,” Charis replied, smiling faintly. “When this…business interrupted me, I was writing the life-scroll of a golem which could replace my entire face.”

“Oh.”

Charis seemed to think Morlock was insufficiently impressed. “Don't you see? The delicacy of the operation—the need to inculcate the golem with my every skill so that the new face would be such a masterwork of artifice that no one would realize it was artificial!”

“Why?”

Charis glared at the crooked man as if insulted by so obvious a question. “All of you!” he shouted, waving his remaining arm. “The Khroi. The guards. Vennon. The water-gangs.
You.
All of you, everywhere, surrounding me with open mouths like baby birds squawking, ‘I want this, I want that, Do this, Don't do that, Tell me this, Don't tell him that, Give this to me, Take this from me.’ Everyone screaming
me me me
and none of them me.”

Morlock opened his hands and waited: he still didn't understand.

“It was my chance to escape,” Charis said wearily. “The new face didn't have to look like my old face. Everyone knew who I was, but if I succeeded no one would know who I was. I wouldn't owe anybody anything; nobody would owe me anything. I could have been anyone.
Anyone.”

“Who is it you want to be?” Morlock asked patiently.

Charis thought for a moment. “No one,” he said finally. He pushed himself over with his remaining arm, spun off the edge, and was lost in the red gloom. We heard his body make wet solid impact with the cliff several times as he fell.

“There goes my chance at a promotion,” said Thrennick wistfully after a few moments of silence. “Master Morlock—”

“I am not your master.”

“Fine; I just want you to do me a favor.”

“What?”

“If you ever come back to Sarkunden—”

“Yes?”

“Please don't look me up. I mean, I still have nightmares about the
last
time.”

The soldiers went back to the city through the sewers, but we took another narrow rocky passage up into the light. I couldn't believe how good the fresh air tasted and felt in my lungs, and my eyes drank down the light till I could feel it in my toes. Then I looked at the others and I noticed they were all bleeding as much as I was, if not more. This seemed to me very funny and terribly sad, more or less at the same time, but Naeli said a little hysteria under the circumstances wasn't unreasonable.

We were in a cave facing the north. Outside there were mountains piercing the horizon like pale thorns. Through them led the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls—as dangerous as its name sounded or more. But as long as there was no one there who would try to buy or sell me or himself, I wouldn't complain.

I
t was the bones again: Thend rarely dreamed about anything else anymore. They were climbing the slope toward a rift in the high horizon: the Kirach Kund, the pass leading north through the mountains. And Thend slipped and fell in a slope of scree. He slid downhill for a while, and a bunch of the oddly shaped stones slid down after him. It was embarrassing, but not dangerous, and he wasn't concerned until he noticed something about the nature of the “rocks” around him.

“Hey!” he shouted, his voice ragged from panic. “These are bones!”

He had fallen face-to-face with an unmistakable skull; there were many others scattered about. Some of the skulls were shattered; others had holes bored in them. All were gray as stone, and they were not quite human-shaped. The skulls were, if anything, larger than human, but the arm bones and leg bones were shorter and thicker.

Morlock slid expertly down the edge of the scree and offered Thend a fish-pale hand, pulling him out of the pile of gray bones.

“What were they?” Thend asked. “Where did they come from?”

“They were dwarves,” Morlock replied. “There was a great kingdom of the dwarves under these mountains once. Now they are all dead or fled, unless a few hide under the earth so deep their enemies can't find them.”

“Their enemies?”

“The Khroi.”

The Khroi: the insectlike warriors who ruled the mountain range they were daring to cross.

“They killed them long ago,” Morlock said, a strange elegiac tone in his voice. “Now the bones are turning back into the rock from which they grew.” He said a word or two in a language Thend didn't know and turned away.

All that was as it had really happened. But when, in his dream, Thend turned around, his mother, Naeli, was standing behind him. There was a large horn or tusk spiking out of her mouth and he was afraid of it. With a quick birdlike motion she bobbed her head and put a hole in his head, just like the holes in the skulls scattered thickly around him.

He woke up with a scream trying to work its way out of his throat. In the end he didn't scream—but it didn't help that Naeli was the person shaking him awake. “Your watch,” she said briefly. “And there's trouble.”

Thend rolled to his feet and looked around. Everyone was awake, even though it was the middle of the day. (They travelled by night and slept during the day.) His uncle Roble was standing over there by Morlock; Thend's two brothers, Stador and Bann, were with them. Even Thend's younger sister, Fasra, was sitting up in her sleeping cloak. But apart from her, who was usually trouble, Thend didn't see anything that looked like a problem.

Morlock said, “Trouble?” and lifted his wry shoulders in a shrug. When he saw this wasn't enough information for his audience he added, “I saw something that bears a closer look.”

“I'll go with you,” Roble said.

“No you won't,” Naeli disagreed. “You're our two best fighters; one of you has got to stay with the group.”

Thend noticed that Stador and Bann were annoyed by this. But it was impossible to argue with the fact: they all remembered how Roble and Morlock had swept away a company of warrior Khroi.

“Well, he'll have to take someone with him,” Roble said, conceding Naeli's point. “We decided no one should travel alone.”

Morlock's eyebrows raised a little at this. He hadn't realized that the group's rule would be applied to him, obviously. But he was adaptable, and he remarked with his usual eloquence, “Eh.”

“I suppose you mean me,” Thend's little sister, Fasra, said, a bragging tone in her voice. She could be insufferable, but Thend decided she was right. If you counted toughness as anything other than the ability to lift weight, she was the genuine article. And she wasn't absolutely stupid, Thend reluctantly admitted.

“Thend,” Morlock decided.

“But—” Naeli said and stopped. She put her hand on Morlock's arm. His gray eyes met her brown ones. Then she released him and stepped back.

Everything, just everything, annoyed Thend these days, but that annoyed him the most of all: how his mother and Morlock could communicate without words. Also, how she touched this pale-skinned stranger just as unselfconsciously as she did her children or her brother.

Morlock turned away from the group without speaking. Thend followed suit and they went side by side over a ridge to the northwest.

“What was it you saw?” Thend asked finally.

Morlock grunted. “Aside from your face, you mean? You haven't smiled since we left Sarkunden.”

“That's not your business!” Thend said fiercely.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and said nothing. They walked on a while in silence.

“I'm having bad dreams,” Thend admitted finally.

“Tell me,” Morlock said.

Thend did, and Morlock said nothing for a while. Then he remarked, “You may have the Sight.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Thend said, afraid that he did.

“The Sight,” Morlock said didactically, “is a talent for receiving sensory or mental impressions through tal, the phase of being which links living spirit to dead matter. Most people see only with their eyes, hear only with their ears, think only with their brains. A seer can gain impressions of things he never saw nor heard, and to some extent think outside material limits, knowing segments of the future and past.”

“Then my dreams are
true?”
Thend asked in horror.

“Dreams are dreams,” Morlock said firmly. “They come from many sources: things you have seen or done or heard of, sense impressions, fears, and hopes. Dreams are neither false nor true, but they may contain truths and yours contains one that cannot have come from your own knowledge.”

“What? Where did it come from?” Thend asked wildly.

“It may be the shadow of a future event. I hope not, though.”

“How do I get rid of it? I can't stand these dreams anymore, Morlock. Every time I look at Naeli I want to vomit.”

“The Sight? You can't get rid of it. I'll teach you about it, though. The more your awareness is trained in the use of the Sight, the less it will trouble you.”

Thend sighed. “Okay. Should we start now, or just go back to the group?”

“We should look at that, first,” Morlock said, pointing.

Thend had been assuming that Morlock pulled him away from the group just to talk to him. Now he glanced ahead and saw what Morlock had seen, but he didn't understand it.

They were walking down from the crest of the ridge into a little rift in the mountain's side, too narrow to be called a valley. The rift was carpeted with the tall green-gold grass that looked soft as cotton but would slash bare feet and legs like finely honed razors. At the bottom of the rift was a stand of trees, a mix of dark-needled pines and fluttering aspens. (They were too high in the mountains for anything Thend considered a proper tree; there were no elms or oaks or stoneleaf majors.)

Two of the pine trees had been stripped, except for a couple of branches each—it was hard to see them, as they stood behind a curtain of aspen leaves. But as he gazed, Thend became surer: those weren't branches; there was something hanging suspended between the stripped pines.

“What is it?” he asked Morlock.

“A Khroi, I think,” the crooked man replied.

They went on down among the trees and long before they stood in front of the stripped-bare pine trunks, Thend saw that Morlock was right.

The buglike Khroi's flexible arms were bound to its chest and its three legs were wound over and over with the same silken substance. It hung from the surface of a great spiderweb woven between the two naked pines.

“Is it dead?” Thend wondered.

“He,” Morlock corrected.

“How do you know? What do the females look like?”

Morlock grunted. “Hope you never find out,” he added after a moment.

He crouched down to examine the ground as Thend looked up to find that one of the Khroi's three eyes was open and watching them. The iris was the same dull purplish color as the carapace, but it was still an oddly human eye to peer out of so strange a face and Thend was troubled by it.

“Well,” said Morlock, standing up, “I am no tracker, to read a story from bent pine needles. But clearly the spiderfolk have done this. If we are travelling over their territory it is bad, in a way, but also good. That is why we are clinging to the western edge of the pass; the Khroi avoid it, for they fear the spiderfolk.”

“Shouldn't we, too?” Thend asked.

Morlock spread his hands, which meant nothing to Thend.

“Why did they put it—
him
up here?”

Morlock shrugged. “They do it sometimes. It may have a ripening effect. Also—”

“They're going to
eat
him?”

“Of course. Spiderfolk will eat any kind of motile life, including each other, if nothing better is available.”

“Shouldn't we let him go?”

Thend always found Morlock's face hard to read, but it seemed he was surprised. “A Khroi? No.”

That made Thend mad. “Why? Just because he's a Khroi?”

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. “The spiders kill the Khroi. The Khroi kill the spiders. I see no reason to interfere: either will prey on humankind, given a chance.”

Now Thend was madder. “To you, the Khroi are just the monsters who killed the dwarves.” He pointed at the Khroi hanging in the spiderweb. “Do you see him? Have you even looked at him? Have you never known a Khroi as an individual, as a person?”

Morlock's cold gray eyes fixed on Thend. “I travelled extensively with one, once.”

“And? When the journey was done did he kill
you?
Did he leave
you
to die?”

“He killed himself.”

“He—Arrrgh!” Conversations with Morlock were always taking these abrupt left turns. Thend never had never gotten used to it, but at least by now he knew when there was no more point in talking. He turned away, drew his knife, and started slashing away at the web-stuff.

Morlock didn't help, but he didn't interfere either. When Thend had severed enough strands of the web the bound Khroi fell to the earth with a wheezing sound that might have been a cry of distress or relief. Thend cut his narrow boneless legs free of the sticky silken stuff and then, more cautiously, freed the Khroi's arms. At last he stood back, waiting to see what would happen. If the Khroi was too ill to move, what would they do? It was possible the Khroi was past saving.

The Khroi slowly rose to the ped-clusters his kind used for feet. He flexed each of his arms and legs all along their length, an eerie sight. There were a few wounds on his head and arms that were leaking the dark fluid the Khroi used for blood, but none of the wounds appeared to be disabling. He turned so that one of his three eyes faced Morlock and another faced Thend. The Khroi had needle-toothed mouths at the three corners along the base of their pyramidal heads, and this one clacked his mandibles once or twice, a mannerism Thend thought might be like clearing his throat. But then, instead of speaking, he jumped over and bit Thend on the shoulder, right through his jacket and shirt into the flesh below.

“Hey!” screamed Thend, and Morlock was there, kicking the Khroi in the midsection. The Khroi flew through the air and rolled a few feet on the ground, slamming into the base of a tree. He leapt back on his legs with unbelievable swiftness, gripping a sharp rock in one of its stringy palp-clusters, so unlike hands.

Morlock drew his sword, Tyrfing. Sunlight glittered along its black-and-white, strangely crystalline blade. “You have your weapon,” he observed ironically. “I have mine.”

The Khroi lifted the sharp rock and marred himself with it, scraping it savagely along his purplish carapace by the neck. He kept pounding with the rock until the point broke off, stuck in his shell like a tooth. He dropped the rock, looked at the two of them with two of his eyes, and then fled away through the trees.

“How's that wound?” Morlock asked, turning away and sheathing his sword.

“It's the best kind,” Thend snapped. “Hurts and everything.”

“Well,” Morlock said, smiling a little, “it's not too deep.” He tore a strip from the hem of Thend's jacket and said, “Hold this on it. When we get back to camp I'll whomp up a poultice to keep off infection.”

“Whomp,” Thend muttered as he pressed the cloth against his wound. He felt as if the world was whomping him. “He didn't have to bite me.”

“I think he was marking you,” Morlock said. “So he would know you again, if he saw you.”

“He meant it as a
favor?”
Thend demanded, pointing at his wound with his free hand.

“He did the same thing to himself,” Morlock pointed out.

“So that I'd recognize him?”

The crooked man nodded.

“I hope I never have to.”

The crooked man nodded again.

They climbed back up out of the rift, each wrapped in silence and his own thoughts.

“What was it?” Roble asked, when they returned to the little camp. No one had gone to sleep yet; they were all standing there, waiting.

“A Khroi, bound by the spiderfolk,” Morlock replied. “When he got loose, he bit Thend,” he added, as Naeli's eyes strayed to the bloody rag Thend was pressing against his neck.

“Whenever my children go somewhere with you, they get hurt,” Naeli snarled at Morlock.