This Crooked Way (35 page)

“Have you got a firemaker?”

“Yes.”

“Set it off.”

There was a thumping sound as Bann set down the thing he was carrying, and I heard the cloak being cast aside. I saw the flame my son suddenly held in his hand, although I couldn't see the hand.

Then there was a stream of sparks and a deep vibrating sound, like a tuning fork as big as a house. The stream of sparks became a pillar of fire stretching up toward the dark blue sky. Then, when it was twenty or thirty feet above us, it burst.

Glowing dust showered down from whatever-it-was, all along the length of Whisper Street. The dust didn't seem to be affected by the invisibility spell on the Street, so that whatever it fell on suddenly became visible, a ghostly glowing shadow of itself.

Chaos erupted. People did not come to Whisper Street to see and be seen. Many of them had quietly slipped off their clothes, the better to conduct their conversations, and these people in particular panicked. A man and a woman in the Overripe Fruit Society suddenly realized they were married, and the sound of their happy reunion rose in fell shrieks above the cries of dismay that filled the once-whispering street.

I saw dusty simulacra of my children and brother standing nearby, and a dusty glowing statue of Morlock, holding a jar in his hands.

“Do you hear me?” he was saying. “Do you see me?”

The dancers were still dancing, unbemused by their sudden visibility. They were dressed in their funeral finest, but their flesh was wearing away; for many of them it was already in rags, or oozing out through the seams of their shrouds. But at the sound of Morlock's voice they turned and looked at him. (I say looked, even though many of their eyes were gone, the empty sockets gaping like tiny dark mouths.)

“Nimue Viviana,” said Morlock. “Listen to me. I am Morlock Ambrosius. I can take you back to yourself. I can give you rest. Follow me.”

The still dancers stood still a moment longer. Then they took a step toward Morlock.

Beyond them I saw the dusty glowing shapes of many armed men.

“Morlock,” I said.

“Now!” he cried. “Follow me!” He turned and ran. They followed, their dead feet resounding like thunder along the street.

“I'm a step or two ahead of you, I think,” I said.

“Stay that way,” he said. “Go down to the Aresion Gate and take the bridge across the river. If I fall behind, don't wait for me.”

“Who's Nimue Viviana?” I asked.

“My mother.”

“Oh. I thought she was the crazy lady in the jar.”

“She is.”

“What…?”

“Merlin split her in three parts to try to keep her from dying. Part of her is in the jar. Part is possessing these corpses. Part is elsewhere.”

“The antideath spell.”

Morlock's glowing dusty face turned to me as he ran and nodded. “Did she tell you of that? Good.”

“So you'll break the antideath spell?”

“If I can.”

“And she'll die?”

“Probably.”

“So he wasn't lying.”

“Merlin?” Morlock shrugged as he ran. “Don't count on that. He lies when it suits him.”

“But not this time.”

“Seems not.”

The disorderly troop of corpses that followed us—followed Morlock, more precisely—shoved people out of their way and trampled them if they would not go. There were screams of pain and anger behind us, screams of fear before us, on every side the despairing shrieks of those who had tried to feed some obsession of Whisper Street and hide it from the world. For some reason it all reminded me very much of life as a Bargainer. Maybe it was the night work, or the corpses.

We finally reached the Aresion Gate and ran through it, stampeding the panicky toll-takers before us. The glow of the dust faded in the ordinary unwhispering street; in the red irregular light from house windows and the rare street-lamps, we all looked as if we had just come out of a hay barn or an attic.

Many of those windows slammed shut as he passed. By now we constituted a full-fledged riot, and as we ran through the dark streets of western Aflraun, already filling with evening mist from the river, I heard the whistles and horns of the night guard being summoned. There were no guards on Aflraunside of the bridge, though, so we thundered past and across the foggy river.

Most of us did, anyway. The others were almost on the far side when I turned and saw that Morlock had slowed almost to a halt in the middle of the bridge.

“Morlock, come on!” I shouted. A bunch of people were entering the bridge from Aflraunside. Some wore uniforms; some didn't. I didn't want words with any of them. The shuffling corpses formed a pretty effective traffic block, even for each other, but I supposed the soldiers could force their way through if they really wanted to.

But now Morlock absolutely stopped, and the rout of corpses stopped, too, staring at him and his blue jar.

A guard from Narkundenside came up beside me. “You can't bring that many zombies into the city,” he said. “I don't care what paper you've got on them.”

“I don't think they're zombies,” I said.

“What are they then?”

“Arrrgh!” If a harthrang was a demon possessing a corpse, what was one-third of an old lady possessing a herd of corpses? Possibly those-who-know have a technical term for it, but I didn't and don't know it.

“‘Arrrgh,’ huh?” The guard shook his head. “I don't think there's anything about it in the regulations. To hell with them, anyway.”

“To hell with regulations?” I asked, amazed. I'd never heard anyone from Narkunden say something like that, not even Reijka, who seemed to be a free spirit.

“Straight to hell!” he said, grinning around the words. “You know what we got going on, past your zombies or arrrgh or whatever they are?” He gestured at the crowd of armed, torch-bearing men filling up the far side of the bridge.

“A lynch mob?”

“A war!” He said it cheerfully. “I already sent messages to the other bridges and the watch commander about it. There hasn't been a war with Aflraun for more than
two years.
About time. No promotions in peacetime, no hazard pay, no overtime except on holidays and elections. No excitement. A war is good for morale, and they do say it's good for the economy, too. We ought to have a war at least once a year, right after the election.”

Morlock was doing something. He had put the jar behind him and he was kneeling on the midpoint of the bridge. With his right index finger he traced something—a letter, a rune, or something—on the cornerstone and leaped back.

The bridge between Morlock and the crowd of corpses fell away, dropping through the dark misty air to the dark water below. Morlock picked up the jar and leaped back again, and more fell away.

“Hey!” cried the war-loving guard beside me. I wasn't sure if he approved or not; I was having trouble understanding him in general.

Morlock uncapped the blue jar. I caught a glimpse of a large, distorted gray eye through the mouth of the thing. Then he turned the open end of the jar toward the other side of the broken bridge.

“Speak to them, Nimue,” Morlock was saying. “They are you. They can't reach you unless they let those other bodies go. Speak to them, Nimue. Speak to yourself.”

A quavering voice uttering a language I didn't know came out of the uncapped jar. It seemed to be singing a kind of song. In a moment the song was taken up by the hoarse, whistling voices of the corpses across the broken bridge.

A couple of the corpses shuffled forward and fell away into the misty darkness, splashing in the water below.

“You must let the bodies go and cross over,” Morlock was whispering. “You have no hope in that flesh; it is not yours. You must let it go and cross over to yourself.”

A few more bodies fell forward into the water. Then they all fell over where they stood.

In the misty gap between the two sides of the broken bridge, I saw some kind of shape. The shape itself had no color I could see, but it left strange imprints on the midair mist. Was it a spinning wheel? A monstrous head with hair coiling like snakes? A woman striding through a cloud? None of these things, I think, but
something
had left those corpses and was coming toward us though the middle of the dark air.

“I did not know the bridge fell away like that,” marvelled the helmeted blork standing next to me. “Would've been handy a few years ago when they came at us with crank-driven siege breakers. That was the war I made Special Task Co-Leader.”

The shifting figure outlined in mist reached our side of the broken bridge. Morlock put down the jar and stepped back. A funnel of mist appeared above the jar, dissipated. Morlock waited a moment, then stepped forth and capped the jar.

“Doesn't she need air?” I asked him, stepping forward.

“No.” He tucked the jar under his arm and didn't seem to want to say any more.

So I tried to get him to say more. As we walked down to Narkundenside, the guard tagging along behind us, I asked, “So will she die now? Is the antideath spell broken?”

“No,” he said. Then, maybe to forestall another question, he added, “There is a third part of her: her core-self. If it is reunited with her shell and her impulse-cloud, she will be herself again.”

“Impulse-cloud?”

“Part of the mind under the mind. If it thinks, the thinking has little to do with words.”

“It looked like a ghost or something, when it was crossing over.”

Morlock nodded. “An impulse-cloud that survives the death of a body may become a ghost.”

“A ghost.” I laughed. Morlock looked curiously at me and I explained, “Give credit where it's due. Whisper Street was a perfect place to hide a ghost.”

“Yes. Except for the bodies.”

“The bodies?”

“The bodies missing from the graveyards. An impulse-cloud has a great hunger to be reunited with its body, and then it will settle for any body. Nimue was drawing body after body to her from the graveyards. That's how I found her.”

“And when you find her final part, her—”

“Core-self.”

“—her core, and she's reunified, what will happen then? Can she go on living?”

“The antideath spell will fail if she becomes unified, probably. That's why Merlin cut her up in the first place.”

“Why are you doing it, then? I thought you weren't a deviser of…of comfortable deaths.”

He gave me a crooked smile. “I foresee nothing comfortable about this death, from first to last.”

We were up with the others now at the Narkunden side of the broken bridge. They said nothing, but eyed the blue jar and listened solemnly. They probably knew more about it than I did; they must have talked about it when I wasn't around (physically or perhaps just mentally).

“That's no answer. You should be keeping her alive. She's your mother.”

Morlock lowered his head. I think his expression was pained or angry, but he's hard to read at the best of times and now it was getting on for full night. “She's suffering,” he said after a moment. “She is divided, not herself. How can I make you understand?”

“Is this what she wants?” Roble asked. “This self-union?”

Morlock shrugged and spread the fingers of his free hand. “She seems to. Of course, she is not sane. If she were, she would not be suffering this way.”

There was a silence for a moment and then the bridge guard said, “I don't mean to interrupt, but the city government is going to want someone to pay for the bridge.”

“Have someone from the Guild of Pontifices stop by my residence. I'll pay them.”

“I don't know how much it'll cost—”

“It doesn't matter.”

The bridge guard took down Morlock's address to give to the guild. As Morlock was about to turn away, he reached out and grabbed the sleeve of Morlock's free arm. “Listen, honorable sir,” he said.

“I'm listening.”

“How'd you know the bridge falls away like that? I worked as guard here twenty years, and my dad before that, and I never knew. I'll bet a month's bonus pay that no one who works here knows. How did you know the bridge could do that?”

“I built it.”

Different versions of the same smile appeared briefly on the face of my daughter, my brother, my two sons (my surviving sons). I felt it tugging at my own mouth. A proprietary pride. He was one of us, and he had done this thing.

He was one of us—and Stador had died because of that. He was one of us—and my remaining children and my brother had run past the snapping jaws of death because of that. He was one of us—and we were all in danger because of that.

And so I knew. I almost feel like I decided before—did I tell you about this? I guess I'm getting tired. But that was when I knew what I had to do. I
had
to do it. I felt terrible about it, and I still feel bad about it. I knew they would hate me for it, and I guess maybe they do hate me for it.

But, when the time was right, I was going to have to break that crooked coin and summon Merlin. Events would have to take their course. We were all in danger because Morlock was one of us, and that meant that he could not be, any more.

That night, after the crooked house was quiet at last, I stood outside in the street door, holding the crooked coin. I let the intent take shape, clear in my mind, and snapped the coin with my thumb and first two fingers.