This Crooked Way (36 page)

The coin clicked as it broke, and then the pieces sagged, as if they were made of rotten flesh. I tossed them into the gutter and lost sight of them. By the time I looked up, Merlin and about twenty slippered thugs were already sneaking around the corner toward me.

“I hoped you'd do the clever thing, Naeli,” Merlin said, his smarmy sincerity heating up the cold night air.

I hissed a well-chosen obscenity at him, but he just laughed, then added, “Where's your family?”

“Asleep in the front two rooms,” I said. “I wanted them to be ready to get out of here.”

“Fesco,” said the old wizard to one of his thugs, “check that. Go silently and wake no one, or I'll kill you.”

I held the door open and Fesco shouldered past me.

“What's your story?” Merlin asked, climbing the steps to stand beside me. “They won't go willingly without my son, or so I guess.”

“So you know. You sampled them, you white-faced lizard!”

“All but Fasra,” Merlin admitted good-humoredly. “She scares me a little. There's more there than meets the eye.”

“There's plenty there that meets the eye!” I snapped.

“You never heard me say otherwise, madam.”

“Don't—” I bit off the rest of my usual comeback.
Don't call me “madam”; I'm not some Coranian bimbo-herder.
Maybe I wasn't, but I didn't feel like bragging about it tonight.

He smiled unpleasantly at me, his teeth gleaming through the night shadows. Him and his map of the future. How I hated him. How I feared him.

Our friendly thug Fesco appeared at the doorway and nodded.

Merlin looked at his other thugs and gestured at me.

Suddenly there were several thugs on each side of me, and some in front of Merlin, and some behind the rest of us. It was like a military formation. It was awfully crowded on the stairs of the crooked house.

“I thought you were going to let us go.”

“Shut up,” he replied briefly. He looked at the thugs surrounding me. “If she doesn't shut up, you make her shut up. Don't kill her, though, unless I tell you to.”

“Liar,” I whispered hopelessly.

In his way, Merlin was as hard to irritate as Morlock. Morlock could irritate him, naturally—Morlock can irritate anyone…the master of all irritants, that's what they should call him—but I had never been able to. Until now. What I said then got deeply under his skin. His face turned toward me and I saw his features working strangely in the light of the major moons.

“I don't intend to betray you, Naeli,” he said. “I simply wish to verify that you have not betrayed me. I keep my word. I suppose Morlock told you differently?”

I didn't say anything, because he seemed like he was about to do something crazy. Eventually he calmed down and we went, a slippered platoon, into the crooked house.

In the front room the forms of my brother and two (surviving) sons could be seen in the moonlight from the open window. Merlin eyed them from a distance; then he waved his thugs away and stepped closer to the sleeping forms. He drew a dagger and plunged it into Roble's face. Roble's chest continued to rise and fall, as if he were sleeping. Merlin turned away to stab Thend and Bann. None of them reacted.

“Damnation,” he said sincerely. He turned to one of his thugs and said, “Fesco. Take Elnun there. Go find the thing in the next room that looks like a girl. Rip it to pieces and come back to me.”

Appalled, Fesco whispered, “But what if—”

“You can speak normally,” the wizard interrupted. “Light a lamp or two while you're about it. No need for secrecy. They're long gone. Aren't they, Naeli?”

“Yes,” I said, since it was now obvious.

“I wanted so badly for you to do the clever thing,” Merlin complained. “I hoped against hope. You won't say where they went, I suppose?”

“No.”

“You may change your mind about that,” said Merlin, “or I may change it for you. What a lot of work that would be, though! I think we'll just search the house, first.”

“You—”
will be wasting your time
, I was going to say, but thought twice about it. If he wanted to waste his time, it was fine with me.

“You!” Merlin repeated mockingly. “You!”

“Drop dead.”

“Someday I will. Long after you have died and been forgotten, of course.”

Fesco returned alone. “It wasn't a girl. Something in its belly bit Elnun when he stabbed it and he's dead.”

“I told you to make some light,” Merlin complained. “Do it now, and—”

“Aurelius,” Fesco interrupted, “unless you tell me more about this job, I'm leaving and taking my men with me.”

“We're here to capture someone,” Merlin said. “That's all you need know.”

I remembered how some of the bravoes had reacted to Morlock's name in Aflraun, so I decided this might be the time to speak up. “It's Morlock Ambrosius,” I said. “That's who he's sending you after. Heard of him, have you?”

Fesco was appalled, but skeptical. “Can't be. He'd be centuries old.”

“He was in Aflraun tonight,” one of the thugs said. “He killed a man and burned down Whisper Street and smashed the keystone of the Aresion Bridge—
bam!
—with his fist, like this:
bam.
I heard about it from—I heard about it from—This guy told me.”

Fesco turned to Merlin. “What about this, Master Aurelius?”

“His name's not Aurelius, either,” I said. “He's been lying to you about everything.”

Merlin looked at me for a moment, smiled gently, and said, “I've not been lying, but it is true that I have not told you all that I know. I seldom do. Fesco, my true name is Merlin Ambrosius.”

Every one, and I mean
every one
, of those dirty soft-shoe cutthroats went down on one knee.

“Great Master,” Fesco said, bowing his head reverently, “forgive us and command us.”

“Get back on your feet and do as I direct,” Merlin said kindly. “You'll still be paid. I don't expect anything from gratitude.”

“We do not forget. We will never forget.”

“That's good to know,” Merlin said. “I, too, have a long memory: for good and evil, Naeli. For good and evil.”

His threat meant nothing to me; I was just trying to fill up time. I wondered what Merlin had done in the past to receive the instant devotion of these alley-bashers.

The thugs got lamps and divided up into various groups to search the house. Merlin had the now-docile Fesco pick five thugs to accompany him, and me, into the Mystery Zone.

“The fame of it has reached even across the great river of the north,” Merlin told me slyly. “So I naturally take this chance to visit it without the usual admission price.”

They went very carefully. Fesco and two thugs preceded us through the Gate of Shadows (the dark room we used to disorient visitors), searching it carefully before Merlin and I entered, followed by the thug rearguard. They tried the same thing with the zone itself, but their formation broke when a couple of the thugs tripped and fell up a wall.

Merlin waved me through and followed along, an expression of wonder lighting his pale cold features. The two thugs were standing on the wall, disoriented. One of them made it back to the floor, but the other staggered like a drunk and ended up standing on the ceiling.

“Well,” said Merlin to me, “I won't lie to you, Naeli. I find this remarkable. At times like these, I almost wish Morlock and I were on better terms. I don't suppose you can tell me anything about this?”

“What's it worth to you?”

“How mercenary. Or are you talking about your family?”

“I'm not talking about money, anyway.”

“Well, if you put it like that, I don't think anything you tell me will be worth any concessions for your family's safety. As long as they are levers I can use to apply pressure on Morlock, I'll use them. When they are not, they've nothing to fear from me. You see how honest I am with you, Naeli.”

I was honest with him about something.

He laughed and said, “You're not the first to say so, though others had more elegant ways of putting it. Well, I think what we have here in your Mystery Zone is some sort of four-dimensional polytope.”

“It is,” I conceded.

“Well, that much is obvious, isn't it? But I'm having a little trouble working out the geometry. Is it regular, do you know? Did he ever show you a three-dimensional map of the thing?”

“No.”

“He may not have one. He can do multidimensional calculations in his head. God Creator knows where he learned it—not from the dwarves; all the math they know is bookkeeping. He stayed at New Moorhope for a time; perhaps they taught him there.” He shook his head. “No, I just can't work it out. Unless he knows a way to bend gravity?”

“He says gravity is more malleable in the fifth dimension,” I remembered.

“Is it?” Merlin said thoughtfully. “Is it really? The four-space polytope must be nested in some sort of fifth-dimensional structure then. Interesting. I'll have to give that notion some serious study, one of these days. I'm indebted to you, Naeli.”

“Then—” I broke off.

“Ask your question. I know you've been dying to.”

“Why are you wasting your time in the one place in Laent where you know Morlock is
not?”

“Of course Morlock is here, Naeli, or will be soon.”

“Does your map of the future tell you that?”

“As a matter of fact, it does. Not that I needed it. Yours were the actions I had trouble predicting.”

“And you never did.”

“Oh, of course I did. I
hoped
you'd do the sensible thing, but I rather thought you wouldn't. Shall I outline it for you? Morlock made those simulacra and you sent your family and him away somewhere—possibly with someone you came to know in Narkunden. If necessary, I'll look into that. You told them you'd catch up with them later, after decoying me off their trail. When they were safely away, you summoned me. You have no intention of ever seeing them again and are quite prepared to die. Is that about it?”

He was exactly correct, so I told him he was wrong.

He ignored me. “You don't really know Morlock, though, it seems. Once the family is well away, or on its way, he'll be back.”

“Why?”

“Are you being modest? The oldest reason in the world.”

I laughed.

“You may overestimate the number of women who have looked on him without some mixture of fear and disgust.”

“Who says I don't?”

Merlin looked at me almost sadly. “I'm being honest with you. Why can't you be honest with me?”

I really think he thought I was being unfair. He admitted to causing the death of one of my sons, and was willing to kill everyone I cared about as a secondary effect of his schemes. But I disappointed him because I wasn't more forthcoming about who might or might not have been the recipient of my girlish laughter. Death and Justice, what a mirror-kisser he was.

In the uncomfortable silence that stretched out between us, we suddenly heard, faint and far off, the harsh sound of men screaming in the last extremity of pain or fear.

“He's here,” Merlin said in a businesslike tone. “Fesco—”

He never finished. There was an earthquake, or something—the floor started to shift under our feet. The ground was pretty lively in Four Castles; we lived just south of the Burning Range and we were always suffering earthquakes. (My husband died in one, when a quake collapsed the mine he was working in.) So I knew what I had to do: get out.

But as I turned on my heel and the floor writhed like a snake beneath me, I saw the door at the end of the hall slide out of sight. Then the shaking threw me off my feet: we were all of us tossed in a heap, including the guy who had been on the ceiling, and I had to concentrate on not getting impaled by their drawn blades.

I was successful, but a couple of them weren't. When the rest of us shook loose from each other and stood up, two of Merlin's thugs didn't. One was Fesco: he was coughing up blood and seemed unlikely to be doing much else for the rest of the time he had left. The other was the guy who had been on the ceiling: he had fallen straight on somebody's sword. He wasn't moving at all.

“Two down,” I said. “Five to go.”

Merlin glanced at me sharply, and then his withered face bent in a sneer. “You're an optimist, young woman. Still, it was clever of him to build this toy to trap me with. The ingenuity of its making is relatively trivial, you understand; one expects that of him. It's his cunning use of it that really impresses me. He's learning, old as he is. If he had Ambrosia's unsparing ruthlessness or Hope's steady devotion, he might really become dangerous someday.”

He looked up and down the Mystery Zone. The hallway had changed shape. It was now longer, with a sharp turn at either end.

“Two of you,” Merlin said, “lead off. The other two, follow. Let's see what the other side of this place looks like.”

The four surviving thugs (Fesco had stopped breathing) all looked as if they had to think once or twice before deciding to accept Merlin's orders. But they did, falling into place without a word to him or each other, and we moved up the corridor. When they reached the turn, one of the lead thugs shouted, “They're down there!” and ran on ahead around the turn.

We heard boots thundering up the corridor behind us.

“Penned in!” Merlin hissed. “Can he have brought allies?” He grabbed my arm and hustled me around the bend.

Allies. I was terrified that this meant Roble and my children—what other allies did Morlock have? I glimpsed back as Merlin dragged me around the turn in the hallway. There were armed men approaching up the hallway behind us—not anyone related to me, I thanked the Strange Gods: the sweating frightened faces were pale as fish-bellies. They did seem a little familiar, though.

Merlin stopped as soon as he had dragged me around the bend. He turned around. There were sounds of fighting from both ends of the corridor. I looked down and saw the lead thugs fighting with someone just around the bend. Turning back, I saw our rearguard thugs fighting with someone just around the corner.

“Stop it!” shouted Merlin. “Stop it, you idiots! You'll kill each other!”

All the fighting stopped. I saw two bodies lying on the corridor floor ahead of us. They looked awfully familiar also: one of them was certainly Fesco.