This Crooked Way (39 page)

The listener looked pleased but confused, as if the question had never occurred to him before. “Well…I'm not sure…Perhaps it was lonely.”

The ringing naivete of this suggestion struck Morlock unpleasantly. He glanced at the mouth of darkness open in the lowest corner of the room. Lonely? Hungry was nearer the mark, he guessed.

“I can't breathe here,” Morlock said then, and turned away to walk up the winding stairs. After a moment's hesitation the listener followed him upward.

When they had returned to the listener's squalid living quarters, Morlock put down the lamp and said, “I want to examine the darkness on your face. Sit down.”

The listener obeyed him, a look of alarm on his visible features. Tentatively, Morlock put the fingers of his right hand into the darkness on the listener's face. The darkness formed no barrier; it was less substantial than fog. Almost immediately Morlock's fingers touched the surface of the listener's cheek. There were long gouges in the otherwise unlined skin of the listener's face.

“You have clawed at the darkness,” Morlock observed.

The listener nodded, a little guiltily. “I was…frustrated. Frightened. I didn't think it would spread. I didn't know what would happen if it would spread further…I still don't. Did I hurt myself?”

The wounds felt swollen and hot to Morlock's touch. “Can't you tell?” he asked.

The listener shrugged. “It is…a little numb, under the darkness. I can't move that side of my face very well, either.”

“Can you see from your left eye?”

“Sometimes,” the listener replied truculently, and Morlock knew he was lying.

Morlock withdrew his hand and looked at his fingertips. No darkness adhered to them; he would have been surprised if it had. He rubbed his two sets of fingertips against each other meditatively, checking for any numbness. There was none. There had been almost no sensation at all as his fingers had entered the darkness, only a kind of feeling that was hard to define, because it was not felt by the fingers at all. Few could define that feeling or recognize what it implied, but Morlock was one of them.

“Do you know what tal is?” he asked.

“No,” the listener replied.

Morlock nodded, unsurprised. “It is a medium,” he explained, “nonphysical in nature, but capable of physical effects. It is the means by which consciousness works its will through the body. All conscious beings possess tal; some, like elementals, have no physical bodies at all, only tal-schemata which respond to the various elements.”

“Ah,” said the listener vaguely, clearly considering the point irrelevant.

“The darkness on your face is tal,” Morlock explained. “But it is not your own, at least not originally. It is a sort of colony from an alien awareness, and it serves the ends of that awareness.”

“How?” the listener demanded. His visible features displayed both alarm and skepticism.

Morlock had some ideas on that subject, but he did not intend to discuss them. Anything he told the listener he would also tell the darkness. “That is not germane. If you want the darkness removed from your face, I will undertake to do it.”

The listener looked both hopeful and anxious. “Would you…If you could leave part of it? Say, under the ear, or…or even on the temple—”

“I am not a barber,” Morlock interrupted sharply. “Nor do I undertake half-works or not-quite-accomplishments. I do a thing or I don't. Choose.”

The choice was clearly far from easy. The struggle on the listener's visible features lasted for some time. But finally he muttered in the hesitant “second” voice, “Yes. Remove it.”

Morlock did not hesitate. He clasped his hands and summoned the rapture of vision, forcing his consciousness from his body and into the tal-world.

The listener burst into a quiet green-gold fire. Morlock himself became a monochrome torrent of black-and-white flames. The stone and dirt about them, having no tal, sank away almost to invisibility in Morlock's vision. But he felt the warm many-centered glow from a nest of mice in the wall of the cave, and through the stones he caught the brief flash of a passing night-bird, like the streak of a meteor in the lifeless sky.

The darkness lay across the green flickering fire of the listener's face. Morlock reached out with the black-and-white flames of his hands and laid hold of it.

In fact, Morlock did not move. But he commanded his tal-self to move, without his body (which it normally overlaid). To his awareness, it was as if he had laid his hands on the darkness.

And the darkness was alien. He knew that as soon as he came into contact with it. And it knew him. Not by name, perhaps (though it did not say what it knew, it can be difficult to tell what such darknesses may know). But it knew his kind. It had been lured here and trapped by a master maker of the dwarvish race, after the darkness had attacked and devoured several members of the maker's family. This all happened millennia before Morlock was born.

The dwarvish maker, after his great victory over the darkness, became its next victim. He had been the first of many who had lain on the stone and put his face in the darkness: listening there for the voices of his lost beloved ones. He had lain there until his life was drained away. Morlock heard his voice, among many others, whispering in the dark. But the only secret he learned was the untellable sorrow of their eternal agony.

This he learned as the darkness confronted him through the medium of Morlock's vision. Then Morlock seized hold of the darkness that had implanted itself in the listener's face and tried to tear it loose.

The listener screamed. Morlock heard it dimly through his ears. He heard it, more directly and more terribly, through his unmasked awareness. The green fire that was the listener's talic self writhed like a serpent and seemed to grow dim, as if he were dying.

After a moment's hesitation, Morlock redoubled his efforts. But the resistance was too great: he saw that the sessile darkness had deep barbed roots in the light of the listener's being. As he strained, his inner vision perceived that many of the green flames of the listener's tal had dark centers, reminding him of the myriad staring eyes in a peacock's tail.

He let his grip relax, and the nauseating rapport with the darkness was broken. The green flames of the listener's being leapt up again. It seemed to Morlock, though, that they were not as bright as they had been before.

He reimposed his talic self upon his body, and his awareness inhabited his flesh again. He came out of the trance like a swimmer surfacing after a dive through deep water. His face was clammy with sweat, and his clenched hands were shaking.

The listener lay unconscious on the floor of the cave, his visible features twisted in convulsive agony. The darkness seemed to cover more of his face than it had. Morlock made sure he was still breathing (and likely to go on doing so). Then he carried the listener to his pallet and put him to bed.

Morlock didn't like the feeling in the cave, so he laid his bedroll outside on the hill. From the time that he withdrew from the vision until he fell asleep, and afterward, his thoughts were unrelievedly dark.

It was not just that he had failed. He had actually made matters worse. And he had no idea what he should do next.

The next day dawned, chill and bloodless: the new sun was hidden by high clouds. Morlock rose, stretched his sore muscles, and took a meditative walk around the listener's hill, which was planted with an alarming variety of poisonous herbs.

Returning finally to the cave entrance, he found the listener standing there, smiling with the right side of his face. “So,” he said in the commanding voice with which he had first addressed Morlock, “how do you like my garden?”

“It seems to run to poisons.”

The listener, stung, replied hotly, “It is all ‘poisons' as you call them. But, to those-who-know, a handful of the right ‘poisons' can bring life out of death. You found my wolfbane useful enough last night, didn't you?”

Morlock did not reply. It occurred to him again that the listener's two voices were not merely manners of speech, but two almost totally different personalities. The matter had an obvious explanation: one voice expressed the listener's true personality; one voice spoke for the invading shadow. He wondered if the explanation was true.

“Would you care for some breakfast?” the listener asked diffidently, in his second voice.

“Yes, indeed,” Morlock replied. “Thank you.” He was suddenly quite hungry.

He was less hungry when he saw that “breakfast” was a squirming bowlful of seven-legged mushrooms from the deeper cave. The listener took a wriggling mushroom from the bowl and, ignoring its chirp of protest, spitted it on a pointed stick and held it in the fire until it stopped moving or screaming. Then he offered it to Morlock.

“No, thank you,” Morlock said. “Some water perhaps.”

The listener shrugged indifferently and tossed the blackened mushroom into the flames. He handed Morlock a warm drinking jar and drew a live mushroom from the bowl. He pulled its writhing stalks off and ate them one by one as its chirps of pain subsided into silence.

The water in the jar was dark; an oily substance rode the surface and he could see dark leaves drifting in the fluid below. There was a bitter, familiar reek: the nightleaf plant, he thought—used by the Anhikh mind-sculptors to prepare their victims.

“I asked you for water,” he said to the listener, who paused in his mushroom dismembering. “This appears to be an infusion of nightleaf.”

“The water from the well is poisonous,” the listener explained, in his overly ingenuous second voice. “The darkness told me how to purify it with herbs.”

“Why don't you seek out another source?” Morlock asked.

“There is none on the hill.”

Morlock saw the way things were drifting, but (to see what reaction he would get) asked, “Why not look further? There must be some nearby.”

“It is not safe to leave the hill!” stated the listener in the first voice's harshest tones.

Morlock put the jar of drugged water down like a gavel, ending the discussion. “I'm going to find water,” he told the listener. “I should be back by nightfall. Good day.”

The listener gave vent to a chirping protest, not unlike one of his own mushrooms. Morlock paid it no heed, pausing only to gather the empty water bottles from his pack before walking down the hill.

Morlock found a clear mountain stream running northward about a hundred paces east of the listener's hill. He filled his water bottles, washed himself thoroughly, and sat down to a light breakfast of water, flatbread, and dried meat, not materially different from the forty-odd breakfasts that had preceded it.

This, he reflected gloomily, was not his sort of task. The subtleties of deep healing were beyond him, and they were clearly what was needed here. Oh, he knew enough of the art to keep himself in one piece during his dangerous and mostly solitary wanderings through the unguarded lands. But a higher kind of healer was called for, here: an Illion, a Noreê, a Merlin. (He considered consulting Nimue, or at least as much of her as was available. But he was reluctant to loose her impulse-cloud anywhere near that hungry darkness under the hill.)

Anyway, what would they have told him, if they had been there to advise him?
Walk away!
Yes, he was sure of it. They would have known that Morlock, for all his intelligence about things and ideas, saw people in fairly simple terms, and they would have told him that this was not simple.

Now that he had committed himself to something that was probably beyond him, he felt he understood something of the complexities. The problem? A darkness on a man's face. The solution? Remove it. Very easy. Except…

Except: the man had cooperated in the placing of the darkness. It partook of his life and grew, entwined itself through him, became part of him. It was not a sort of blemish on his face that could be removed; it was rooted in the man's consenting soul. The listener might object to the darkness' propensity to spread, but he did not object to the darkness itself, to its nature, to its presence in him. Perhaps he could not; perhaps the choice, once made, was irrevocable.

Morlock shook his head. That sort of thinking was useless. He would not accomplish his task by moaning about how difficult it was.

He thought about the darkness infesting the man, about what it was. A sort of mouth, really, feeding upon the listener's vitality. It would steal the man's tal and therefore drain off his physical energy (although the thing in the pit needed only the former). In that case, there must be a “throat”—a channel to carry the stolen tal down the darkness in the pit. It should have been visible when Morlock had ascended to tal-rapture, and perhaps it had been, but he had not thought to look for it. That, at least, was an error he could correct.

Errors…The listener believed, or said, that the darkness was a natural part of the underworld, older than time. But Morlock had been raised, quite literally, underground, and he knew different. He knew, too, from his violent rapport with the darkness last night that it was not sessile in nature, nor was it native to the hill.

I have lasted longer than many listeners
, the listener had said. This was possibly true, but it implied he could not last much longer. And:
It told me you were coming.
How had it known that? Why had it told the listener?

In the old days, before it was trapped, it had been able to travel from place to place to find its victims. Now it had to lure them into coming to it. Had the darkness selected Morlock as the listener's successor? He could always refuse to be seduced by the voice in the darkness…but its ability to persuade was proven by its survival for such an unthinkable length of time in such a Creator-forsaken wasteland. It would be safest simply to leave, to walk away, to make his given word into a lie.

Morlock gloomily eyed the mouth of his water bottle, but found no answer there.