This Crooked Way (26 page)

The Marh stopped moving away and looked with one eye, then another, at the marked Khroi as he spoke. (Did the Marh's gesture indicate surprise? Attentiveness? Some emotion a man could never feel? Thend wasn't sure.) A moment of silence followed, and then Marh Valone turned to Thend. “Our Lost One has requested that you also be given to the dragons. It is a sin against our future, but no one has ever done for one of us what you dared to do, and I grant this favor to the Lost One. I will not pray for you to the gods-who-hate-us, and so they may forgive you. I have spoken; let others obey.”

“No!” shouted Fasra. “Leave him with us!”

But each of them was firmly held by three of the giant Khroi-guards; there was nothing any of them could do.

“I'm sorry,” Morlock muttered. “You chose your guide unwisely. Good-bye.”

The guile of dragons rose into the air and flew away southward like a storm. The noise of their passage made further speech useless, and Thend could have said nothing anyway: that fist of fear was gripping his throat again. He looked at his mother, whom he had loved and feared, and at Roble, the man who was closer to him than his long-dead father, the man he had wished he could be, and all he wanted was to die with them. But the Marh's cruel kindness had denied him even that.

The others watched without words as Thend and Morlock were dragged away. The werewolf was picked up and carried, too, and the Khroi that Thend had saved, “the Lost One” as Marh Valone had called him, walked slowly alongside them.

“Why is it a favor to be given to the dragons?” Thend called to Morlock after they had been dragged for a while. (The dragons had long gone on ahead and they could hear each other now.) “Won't they—?”

“They'll kill us and eat us,” Morlock said. “The others will die too, as hosts for the Khroi young, in the Vale of the Mother. It is slower, more painful, more horrible.”

“And this is all
your
fault somehow?”

“No!” said Morlock.

Thend wished he could say something to comfort the crooked man. Not that there
was
anything to say. So he said nothing.

Suddenly they were surrounded by a faster-moving group. Thend had a crazy hope that the others had gotten away and come to rescue them—but it was only the dancing Khroi in black-and-white rags. They spoke to the gigantic Khroi guards in birdlike harmonious voices, and the guards (looking nervously at each other) stopped dragging the captives along.

The dancing Khroi stretched out their arms imploringly and sang at Morlock, just as they had to the Khroic marh before, but this time Thend could understand them, as they sang in the language Thend thought of as Coranian.

“Spare us,” the Khroi sang, “spare us, Destroyer. You are a seer, like ourselves, although you do not walk always in the tal-realm as we do. Spare us, have mercy on us, do not destroy us, and we will not pray for you to the gods-who-hate-us and they may forgive you.”

“I will spare you,” Morlock agreed, “if you spare me and my friends. I will give mercy for mercy, blood for blood.”

“We cannot spare you,” the Khroic seers sang. “The warriors act; we advise; the Sisters and the elders, led by the Marh, decide. His word is our law; we cannot break it. But only your word is your law. You can spare us, even if we destroy you. Please, please, let us kill you in peace.”

“Is it horde law for you to plead with prisoners like this?” Morlock said. “Did you not defy the marh's command to return to your place on the slope? You pick and choose the laws you will obey. You choose the destruction before you, just as he does. Spare me and my friends or I
will
destroy you. Blood for blood: that is my law.”

The Khroic seers put their palp-clusters over their eyes and moaned. The gigantic guards took this as a sign that the interview was over and they dragged Morlock and Thend onward.

“How can you destroy them?” Thend called when the wailing seers had passed out of earshot.

“Why would I want to?” Morlock replied glumly. “Death is their dream, not mine. If only I could understand why! I took care to not explore this journey with visions, for I knew the Khroi had seers and one seer's vision can encompass another's. I wanted to pass under their notice, but they were waiting for me all along. It is strange….”

Presently they came to a wide flat area where a dozen or so posts of maijarra wood had been driven deeply into the stony ground: the Giving Field. A faded blue dragon was waiting there. The claw had been severed from his right forelimb and the fresh wound was still oozing blood or pus that smoked sullenly on the ground. His dim red eyes watched glumly as the Khroi guards lifted up their prisoners and hung them from hooks driven into the maijarra wood high above the ground. The Khroi whom Thend had saved from the spiders was bound and hung there, too. Then, without ceremony, the guards left them alone with the dragon.

“Is this it?” Thend called over to Morlock. The prisoners were hung in a line, with Thend and Morlock on either end. The werewolf was next to Morlock and the Khroi was next to Thend.

“No,” Morlock said. “I suppose the dragons are settling which one of them gets which one of us, along with our stuff.” At this, Thend noticed that their packs and weapons had been brought along by the guards and left off to the side of the Giving Field.

There was a long period while Thend wondered how the dragons would decide these important issues. A fight? A contest? A vote? Some combination of these? Should he hope that it would take a long time or no time at all?

Meanwhile Morlock was looking at the leather thong binding his hands, at the packs, at the Dragon who watched him grimly without ever looking away.

“Do you think you can unhook yourself from that thing?” Thend called over.

“No,” said the crooked man. “Not with our friend watching. And listening.”

This last was a mild rebuke, Thend realized. The dragon was not an animal; it might be able to understand them. If Thend had a good idea, he should probably keep it to himself and hope that Morlock had it, too. Unfortunately, Thend had no more ideas, good or bad.

“Thend,” Morlock said presently, “I'm sorry.”

Thend was embarrassed. He should never have blamed Morlock, even as a stupid joke. “It's all right,” he said. “I know it's not really your fault.”

“Not about that,” Morlock said, but he didn't say what he
was
apologizing about. Which meant he couldn't. Which meant it was an Idea. And he was apologizing because it might end up getting Thend killed, even if it got Morlock free.

Thend thought carefully about his response. He didn't want to die, but if Morlock got away maybe there was something he could do to save Thend's family. That was tough luck for Thend, of course, but it wasn't like his chances looked good at the moment anyway. He couldn't say anything to discourage Morlock from whatever crazy plan he'd come up with, and he couldn't say anything to suggest to the dragon that there
was
a crazy plan.

“It's still all right,” Thend said at last. “I understand.” And he hoped

Morlock had understood him as well as he had understood Morlock. (If he had.)

Morlock said something, but not to Thend and not anything Thend understood. He looked straight into the dragon's dimly burning eyes and said it: in Dragonish, Thend guessed, or some language the dragon understood.

Thend was right. What Morlock said was,
“Hey, Smoky! What's taking your masters so long?”

The dragon snarled, a long low rumbling, like stones grinding together under the earth, and said, “I have no master but Marh Valone, kharum of my guile.”

“You actually answer to that insect?” Morlock asked. “He told you to stay here and keep your murky eyes on us?”

“No!” the dragon snapped. After some long bitter moments of silence he added, “My guile-mates asked me to wait here and watch you.”

“Oh,” said Morlock distantly. “I see. I think.”

The dragon lashed his tail in a catlike gesture of irritation and looked with glowing disfavor at Morlock.

“It is a position of considerable trust,” the dragon insisted.

“I'm sure they can trust you, Smoky,” the crooked man replied generously. “I'm sure you'd never
even think
of
taking
something that was
theirs
.”

There were several barbs to this insult: that the dragon wouldn't have the courage or cunning to steal from his guile-mates, that the prizes were unequivocally theirs not his, and “Smoky,” which implied that the dragon's fire was not as bright and hot as a dragon's fire should be.

“Don't call me ‘Smoky’!” the dragon snarled.

“Do you prefer ‘Three-Claw’?” the hanging man asked, with an appearance of civility. “Your leg might grow back in time, but I see that you're a dragon of, well, of a certain age and perhaps you don't expect to live much—”

“My name is Gjyrning,” the dragon hissed. “Use it when you address me or die.”

“I'll die anyway,” Morlock pointed out. “But I'm not worried: you can be…trusted. Remember, Smoky?”

The dragon smiled—not a gesture of amusement or friendliness in a dragon—and said nothing. Venomous dark smoke leaked out between the terrible green-black teeth.

“Gjyrning…Gjyrning…” the crooked man said, as if thinking aloud. “Doesn't that mean ‘puff of lightly warm steam’? I seem to remember—”

The dragon barked, “It means ‘mourning—suffering—death’!”

“So you knew how your career would end from the beginning,” the crooked man said, almost as if he were impressed. “I wish more dragons would pick suitable names. I captured a dragon once outside of Thrymhaiam whose name meant, so he claimed, ‘World-shaking-conflagration-of-eternal-flames,’ but his fire wasn't hot enough to kindle dry leaves. It was too much trouble to kill him, so I gave him to the Elder of Theorn Clan as a gift. The dwarves used him as a beast of burden. They could ‘trust' him, too, because every time he tried to steal something they would beat him with sticks and he'd squeak out some smoke at either end. He soon learned his place. They called him Squeaky. That's a fine name for an elderly blue dragon whose fire is not as hot as he thinks it is, don't you think?”

Gjyrning, an elderly blue dragon whose fire was not as hot as it had been, lumbered across the open field, his jaws streaming fire and smoke. But his stump was clearly troubling him; he kept putting his weight on it, as if the right claw-foot were there, and stumbling. He halted about twenty (human) paces from the stakes and visibly brought himself under control.

“That's right!” said the horrible crooked man with the offensive manner. “They've trained you well;
you
can be trusted. No one can say you don't know when your fire's faded, when it's time to give up fighting and blowing flame rings and just settle down and call yourself Squeaky—”

The dragon lurched forward, his narrow chest doubling in size.

Thend couldn't understand what Morlock and the dragon were saying to each other, but he could tell from Morlock's harsh jeering tone that he was baiting the dragon, trying to provoke a rage. When he saw the dragon swell up he knew he should close his eyes and hold his breath: dragons breathe venom as well as fire. But if these were the last few minutes of his life he decided he didn't want to spend them staring at the inside of his eyelids. (He had tried that without much success earlier, anyway.)

The dragon roared out a blast of flame at Morlock. The red torrent carried him backward and Thend could see him dimly, a crooked darkness in a sheath of flames. Then he disappeared and the dragon stopped roaring.

There was a dark fog of smoke and steam and venom about the post where Morlock had been hanging. The dragon peered through it with his dimly glowing eyes, trying to find Morlock's body.

The crooked man had rolled off to one side after the flames burned through his bonds, and he wasn't dead yet, Thend was relieved to see. He knew that Morlock's strange blood protected him from fire, but he hadn't been sure the crooked man could suffer the roar of an angry dragon and live.

Morlock called out hoarsely,
“Tyrfing!”

The accursed blade flew from its sheath bound to Morlock's pack; glittering, it shot through the smoke-laden air to the hand of the man who had made it. The dim blue dragon leapt back in surprise as it flew past. Then he lunged forward at Morlock, his one remaining foreclaw stretched out.

Morlock was already running forward. He dodged under the dragon's wolflike jaw as it descended and ran on past the dragon's left foreleg. The dragon turned to swipe at him with his right foreclaw—and missed, forgetting that his right foreleg was a stump. Morlock dashed on, raising the monochrome crystalline blade over his head with both hands.

Thend wondered where Morlock would strike. He had heard, in songs and tales, that dragons had numerous weak spots and hollows in their chests where a determined warrior might strike a deathblow, could he only get near enough.

But Morlock didn't strike at the dragon's body, as such, at all. The blade caught the dragon's left wing, folded batlike along his side. Tyrfing severed the joint and passed through much of the leathery flesh before the dragon screamed and rolled over. He was trying to crush Morlock, but the pinions of the dragon's wings gave the man space to scrabble through between the mass of the dragon's serpentine body and the stony earth.

Rather than roll again, as Thend expected, the dragon leapt to his feet and backed away lumberingly from Morlock.

As he watched the dragon's movement, slowed by his wounded foreleg, Thend realized why Morlock had attacked the dragon's wing. Now the dragon could neither fly away, with his broken wing, nor run away, with his wounded foot. There was no escape for him.

Abruptly, surprisingly, Thend felt sorry for the dim blue dragon: mutilated, mocked, mutilated again, and now trapped with that terrible crooked man in this narrow field hedged in with steep slopes. He pushed the feeling down as hard as he could. Morlock might be sort of a bastard, but he was
their
bastard, fighting desperately for Thend and his family. But the feeling didn't quite go away.

The dragon meanwhile lunged forward on his unwounded foot and made as if to snap at Morlock with his teeth. Morlock dodged to the dragon's right—and was struck end over end by the dragon's mutilated foreleg.