This Crooked Way (29 page)

“Why?” gasped Naeli.

Thend thought he knew. Another one of Morlock's tricks, indeed: why else had he put up images of himself, of Thend, of the Lost Khroi and the werewolf? They were the dragons' prizes, but Morlock had made it look as if the horde had stolen them from the guile. He must have known how the fiercely greedy dragons would react….

Then the cliff gave way and the mountainside fell into the narrow valley, nearly filling it. The shock blew Thend and his family off their feet, and when they arose they saw that the horde had been completely destroyed. Several of the dragons had been caught in the collapse and struggled feebly in the smoking rubble, but their former compatriots left them there and flew away: north, west, south, east, alone.

Choking from the dust, they hauled Stador's corpse over the crest of the (now very shallow) valley and put him down not far from Morlock.

The crooked man was returning from his vision, the werewolf standing over him. His sword was dark, and presently he opened his eyes. He sheathed his sword and struggled to his feet.

The werewolf, backing away, snarled at him.

“Probably,” Morlock replied. “I thank you, though.”

The werewolf disappeared into the moonlit, dust-choked night.

“He thinks he's safer travelling alone,” Morlock remarked. “Poor old Stador,” he said, his eyes falling on the dead body. “It was a grim death.”

“Maybe you can think of a better one for the rest of us,” Naeli whispered. “Except for Fasra and Thend. Take care of them, please.”

“I'm not a deviser of comfortable deaths,” Morlock rasped. “If Thend helps me, we can cut those eggs from you before they hatch. The Khroi aren't like the spiderfolk; there may only be three or four eggs in each of you. It will hurt worse than death, and then you may die anyway…”

“Of course!” Thend said. “Mother, we can do this. I'll go into deep vision, and I can tell Morlock where to cut.”

Both Naeli and Morlock turned to look at him. Then they looked at each other. “Something like that,” Morlock said.

“Well,” Naeli said wearily, “as long as he isn't a miner…”

So the long night after the long day was followed by another long day. They found a cave where Morlock and he faced the terrible task of cutting open his kin to save their lives, then sewing them up like old clothes with thread and patches. Then they faced the easier, but somehow even more ghoulish task of extracting the Khroi eggs from Stador's dead body. At last they buried Stador in a cairn of stones.

Naeli started to weep then, and she wept until she fell asleep, and even then she sobbed from time to time. Thend sat by her until she slept, wishing he could do something to ease her pain, sorry for her, tired of her. Tired of everything, really. That was the problem with surviving: you had so much work to do!

He pointed this out to Morlock, when all the others were asleep, and Morlock said, “Rest then. I'll watch.”

Thend shook his head wearily, although he knew he would sleep soon no matter what. He said to Morlock, “So you did destroy them, in the end. They were right about you.”

“No,” Morlock replied.

Thend knew he was on dangerous ground. He was too stupid to think of shrewd questions, but he needed Morlock to say something more than this. He tried to express this all by opening his hands and grumbling a bit.

Morlock looked at him with a one-sided smile for a time and said, “Should I have lain down and died for Marh Valone's convenience? Should I have let him kill you, your whole family, simply to settle his fears? He would have found something else to be afraid of, Thend. Those who rule by fear will always be ruled by it, until they are destroyed by it. Now, at last, Marh Valone need fear no more.”

“So that's why you did it? A sort of mercy killing?”

“I did not kill Marh Valone. He turned a blade on himself when the dragons appeared over the Vale of the Mother. You should sleep.”

“I can't stand the thought of sleeping,” Thend admitted. “I'm afraid of the visions.”

“It won't be so bad,” said Morlock, and unstoppered a green bottle he held in his hand. A green bird flew out and circled round Thend's head, and before he knew it he was dreaming.

His dream was a vision, but in truth it wasn't as bad as he had feared. He saw the seers of Valona's horde, fleeing into the eastern mountains, along with a few of the Virgin Sisters. They carried with them an infant girl-Khroi they had anointed with Royal Chrism. They were already calling her Valona: the horde would go on.

They saw him, too, for the Khroic seers always walk in vision, and one seer's vision encompasses another.

We will remember you, Horde Mate of the Lost One
, they said, not with words.

All right, Thend replied in the same fashion.
Remember the Lost One, too. He was better than any of you.

Thend turned away from them in a direction that was neither up, nor down, nor any side. It was still a little frightening, but he wouldn't let the fear rule him. Turning away from the past, he looked straight into the future.

1.
In Morlock's world the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. See the appendix on astronomy and the calendar. (JE)

I
admit it: I liked him at first. That's partly due to the kind of men I'd been buried in for more than a dozen years: half-witted townies who thought a youngish widow was anybody's meat; needle-toothed Bargainers who thought of anybody as meat for their God in the Ground. Morlock wasn't much to look at, maybe, but he wasn't like that. Plus he had very impressive hands: strong and many-skilled. I remember the first time I saw him lacing up both his shoes simultaneously, one hand per shoe, while keeping up his side of a conversation (as much as he ever did, anyway). Or the time my fifteen-year-old Thend bent his knife, using it as a prybar. Morlock took the blade, a steel blade mind you, in his hands and bent it back. It wasn't quite straight, but at least it would fit into the scabbard. Then that night, when we made camp, he set up a kind of portable forge full of flames that talked back to him, and he remade the blade better than before—all without a word of recrimination. And anytime a crow came by he would have a conversation with it, tossing it grain from his pocket for bits of semi-useless information. And he did this stuff like someone buying a pound of cheese: it was perfectly ordinary. How can you not like a man like that?

Well: I learned. It started the first time one of my children came back from one of his crazy expeditions bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. This is not the way to win a mother's heart. The world is full of dangers, and one of them is going to kill every one of us eventually: as a reasonable person, I accept this. As a mother, I don't and never will; I refuse to be reasonable about risks to my children, and the risks seemed to increase any time Morlock was in the neighborhood.

By the time we reached Narkunden, north of the Kirach Kund, one of my children was actually dead: Stador, my oldest boy, had been killed by the Khroi in the mountains. I don't want to talk about it except—no, I don't want to talk about it at all. It's enough to say that we were there because of Morlock and I blamed him for it. I still do.

I was the only one, it seemed. My brother Roble thought the world of Morlock, and so did my children, my surviving children. He would do the most remarkable things. For instance, we settled in Narkunden for a while to heal up (most of us were wounded by the Khroi—yes, those are the scars you've noticed on me). Morlock and my sons built a weird crooked little house on the edge of town, right by the river, and he set up a workshop on the top floor and he started to make things for sale in the city; that's what we mostly lived on, before we opened up the Mystery Zone.

The Mystery Zone was a hallway that ran around one corner of the house, and Morlock had fixed it somehow that you could walk up the wall and stand on the ceiling. It began as a nuisance-distraction. People knew Morlock lived in the crooked house, and they were always trying to bribe us to let them into his workshop when they thought he wasn't around. Actually, he didn't care, but we were sick of it, so he built the Zone onto the house and suggested we run them through there instead. My daughter, Fasra, dreamed up a line of patter to go with it—how a magical experiment had shattered the law of gravity locally, and how the place was somewhat dangerous to enter. We made them sign a contract not to sue us if they were maimed or killed by the wild magic of the Mystery Zone. That made them wild to get in; pretty soon we were making more money from the Mystery Zone than anything else.

“Why not just make a bucketful of gold and save all the footwork?” I asked Morlock once. He could literally do that; I'd seen him. (Yes, it seems like an awfully convenient skill to have, but, no, I don't know his recipe.)

“Against the law,” he answered. Apparently Narkunden didn't like having their markets flooded with artificial gold and they'd passed a law, so that any sorcerer who wanted to spend money in the city had to show proof he'd earned the stuff, not made it. I didn't believe this until one of these guys actually showed up at the door one day and demanded to go through our books, and even then I couldn't quite believe it. I mean, I had lived most of my life under the dictatorship of a monster who fed on human souls, but at least he didn't send agents to root around in your cash box.

“So why stay here?” I asked Morlock after the first of these regular visits.

He grunted at me. He actually does that: you say something to him like a person, and he just makes a sort of noise.

Anyway, his latest gimmick was glass. He'd noticed that some types of glass seemed to slow down light, so he made glass that slowed it down even more—incredibly slow. There were chunks of it scattered around the house, still holding the luminous image of a leaf or a sunset or a face that had been trapped in them days ago. Bann, my eldest (surviving), was excited by this and got Morlock to teach him how to do it: his idea was that you could create a block of glass that would slow down the light passing through it to a full stop, creating perfect and permanent images of things.

Meanwhile Morlock's mind was moving in a different direction. One morning he appeared at breakfast holding a big lens of gray glass and wearing a half smile that, for him, was a shout of triumph.

“Um,” my brother Roble said, peering through the lens. “This is maybe the murkiest piece of glass I've ever seen.”

“Keep an eye on Naeli,” Morlock suggested.

Roble swivelled to face me and I saw his brown eye quite clearly through the glass.

“Naeli, would you wave your hand?” Morlock said.

Exasperated, I flipped him a gesture I'd learned among the Bargainers.

“Wait a second!” Roble said. “She moved before you asked her! This thing sees into the future!”

“Yes.”

My sons, Bann and Thend, and even my daughter, Fasra (who hadn't been showing much interest in anything since that terrible night when Stador died), looked intrigued and swarmed behind Roble, peering at the glass over his shoulder.

“It's so murky—I can hardly see anything,” Bann complained.

By now Roble was holding the lens up high so they could peer through it. I caught a glimpse of my children, my surviving children, a corsage of expectant quizzical looks in the bright glass.

“I don't know what you mean,” I said. “I can see you all clearly.”

“Your mouth moved before you spoke!” Thend called. I heard his voice before I saw his lips move. Then I understood the glass worked two ways, and I was seeing a few seconds into the past. I wondered if a lens could be built for me to somehow see Stador again, alive and well and happy. And I wondered if I would dare to look through it if I held it in my hand.

“How does it work?” Bann asked.

If you want to get Morlock to run his mouth, ask him a question like that. They started talking about a bunch of things I neither understood nor wanted to. But in the end Bann said, “But why is the glass so cloudy?”

“The future hasn't happened yet,” I said impatiently. “The odds of you seeing any particular event are very low.”

Silence. If you want to shock your children, show them you have a little intelligence. “Flip the glass,” I suggested. “The other side looks into the past and everything is very clear. All those events are fixed.”

They did, and now I was looking into the lens of the future. Seen through the glass, my children's healthy brown skins wore the grayish sheen of death. Their eyes were almost invisible, shadowed by uncertainty. I looked away. Someday, they would die, and I would die, and everyone would die, and I couldn't blame it all on Morlock. But somehow, just then, I wanted to.

Now Bann was holding the glass and walking around the room. “I see furniture clearer than people,” he said, “but the walls and floor and ceiling are clearer than the furniture. Is that because their positions are more certain in the future?”

“Exactly,” Morlock said approvingly.

Bann passed the glass to Thend and stared off at nothing. After a moment or two he turned to Morlock and said, “Would the positions of some people be more certain than others? A watchman who has a fixed route at a fixed time, or…?”

Morlock shrugged and opened his hands. He seemed to expect we would know what that meant.

“Let's go down to the street and check!” Thend shouted, and ran out the door. We all trailed after him.

The street was full of passersby. We were on the edge of the city of Narkunden, but Narkunden's sister city Aflraun was right across the nearby Nar River, and when the city-states weren't actually at war, there was a brisk traffic back and forth across the bridges. I didn't enter into the discussion about whether some people were easier to see than others, because I really didn't give a damn. I'd only followed the others out to make sure that Morlock didn't kill one of my children by accident in the street.

Oh, you think I'm exaggerating? All right: so I'm in the street standing next to Morlock as he holds the lens. And he's flipping it back and forth to get the contrast between a-few-seconds-past and a-few-seconds-future. While he's gazing through the past lens I look idly past him and see someone standing behind him. In the real world, this other guy's just standing there, making a kind of shrugging motion. In the future glass, he's stabbing Morlock in the neck.

I punched him. No, not Morlock, though I kind of wanted to: the other guy, the guy about to stab him. I hit him hard, right on an eye, and the eye burst like a rotten grape, and some kind of darkish foul fluid that wasn't blood poured out.

Roble had seen it too, and Morlock instantly figured out what was happening (whatever he is, he isn't stupid), and they each grabbed one of the guy's arms. He had a knife in each hand, and I shouted to the children to get back in the house. They looked at me uncertainly, as if they were about to refuse, but then they looked at me closer and decided there might be something scarier in the street than a guy with two knives and they ran back inside. I didn't need any glass to see the future: the next time I gave them an order like that they might not obey it. But that was tomorrow's problem; I turned back to today's, which, like most of my problems, involved Morlock.

He and Roble each had one of the assassin's arms in both of their hands. I stood free, ready to help if needed or take the guy down if he wriggled loose (as he was struggling to do).

Suddenly the assassin stood still. Maybe he realized that he just wasn't going to get away. There was something weird about his face, apart from the rotten-smelling goo leaking over it. It was totally expressionless, even when he was fighting, like he wasn't really there somehow. The pale features had a blue-green cast, like a corpse.

“Let me go,” he said in a voice as dead as his face. “I will self-bind not to harm you or yours.”

“No,” said Morlock.

“I can buy my freedom with knowledge,” said the man with the smashed eye. “I can tell you so many things, so many secrets.”

“I know who sent you,” Morlock said coldly. “Shall I tell you a secret? Demons are not immortal.”

The man with the broken eye screamed. Except, I guess, maybe he wasn't a man. He screamed and screamed. Then he fell limp to the ground, and the knives clattered on the stones of the street.

“Street-killings, even in self-defense, are an implicit violation of your residency contract,” a scandalized voice remarked.

I groaned. Of course! The city government sent this weedy pale fellow, Glemmurn, once a month to inspect our books and make sure that we weren't spending more money than we actually earned in the city. And today, of all days, was the date for our inspection.

“We didn't kill him,” Roble observed. “All we did was defend ourselves when he attacked us. And in fact—this body's been dead for some time: give it a niff.”

Glemmurn, his pale face greenish with horror, stepped toward the corpse with the broken eye, took one whiff of the air surrounding it, and staggered backward. “Savage Triumphator!” he groaned. “An unregistered zombie!”

“Don't worry,” I said. (The poor thrept seemed really horrified.) “It's dead, or dezombied, or whatever you call it.”

“You don't understand!” he wailed. “That just creates more paperwork: unauthorized deactivization of an unregistered zombie is itself a code violation—there will be incident reports and witness affidavits and second-death certificates and tax assessments on the labor of the zombie and tax-penalty assessments on the unpaid labor taxes…. I'll be in the office all night long. And I promised to take my nonobligated semipartner Zaria to the election rally this evening out at Remer Fields.”

“Well, there'll be other election rallies,” I said.

He looked at me as if he suspected I might be an unregistered zombie myself. “Of course there will,” he said sadly, “but she won't need to wait for one. My meta-cousin Vestavion will be all too willing to escort her tonight. That serial monogamist, that man-of-many-contented-partners, that winsome glib glad-footer! After all: you know the effect election rallies have on women. The speeches! The chanting! The policy presentations! It makes them crazy. I might as well start saving up now for their wedding morsel: they're as good as preengaged.”

“Look—” I said, hoping to stop him before he confided in me again.

“I've warned her about him,” he said confidingly. “But he's an accountant with a private banking firm, and I think she's swept up in the glamour of all that—”