This Crooked Way (45 page)

Nurgnatz rolled to his feet and started sputtering. “You burned a great hole in my warts! It'll take a century to regrow them the way they were! And then the others will be that much longer! I'll never be the same again!”

Morlock shrugged (somehow expressing total indifference to Nurgnatz's wart-care regimen) and backed away slowly. The golden sword followed, making occasional cuts at him, which he met without counterattacks. It was obviously difficult for him to restrain his swordsman's impulses to attack, but he seemed to be playing a waiting game as he disappeared into the darkness beyond the cave, followed by the golden sword.

Nurgnatz growled impatiently, and then began to whistle. Rhabia found that the headless bear holding her was starting to move toward the cave entrance.

“Morlock, look out!” she called. “We're coming for you!” That didn't sound quite right. “I mean—”

“Understood,” Morlock's laconic reply came from the darkness outside.

The headless bear carried her out of the cave and past the whistling gnome.

The snowstorm had ceased, but some of the drifts would be hip-deep on a tall man. Morlock was not especially tall, and he was hobbled by chains on his legs.

The sky above was clear. Somber Chariot glared over the eastern horizon, but there was another light in the sky, a dim gray light. By it, Rhabia caught sight of Morlock, floundering away from an attack by the golden sword. He caught each slash of the golden sword on the edge of his, but all the time he retreated, step by hobbled step backward.

The whistling commands of the gnome drove the headless bear to run a great circle and dash at Morlock from the side. The crooked man hopped out of the way, but the chains tangling his legs caused him to fall.

Rhabia thought the fight was over. But the golden sword didn't know how to attack something lying on the ground.

Nurgnatz realized this belatedly and issued a whistling command that sent the headless bear back toward Morlock, no doubt to stomp him as he lay struggling in the snow. But by then Morlock had rolled to his feet and was hobbling backward again, deflecting slashes from the golden sword.

Rhabia was getting dizzy trying to follow the fight from her moving vantage point in the grip of the headless bear. But at least it was a little lighter now, and easier to see things.

The gnome was beginning to whistle a command to the headless bear again when Morlock called out, “I underestimated you, Nurgnatz.”

The gnome broke off his whistle to respond, “Of course! Ugly people like you always assume that we beautiful people succeed by beauty alone. We could, of course. At least I could. But my other virtues drive me to omniform excellence. Yes, omniform excellence,” he repeated, pleased with the phrase. He rounded his yellowish gray lips to whistle again.

“‘Omniform excellence!’” Morlock said, dodging back from a cut by the golden blade. “What is that, exactly?”

“Excellence in every form, you stupid, ugly crooked man!” squeaked the gnome angrily.

“Tell me, since you must know,” Morlock said, backing away again so that Nurgnatz had to shamble forward to hear him, “are the forms of excellence infinite in number?”

Nurgnatz held forth for some time on the different types of excellence. He summed up his disquisition some considerable time later with the modest suggestion that there was in essence one true type of excellence, the state of being Nurgnatz, but that this one excellence had a potentially infinite number of Nurgnatzian attributes.

“Ah,” said Morlock. “Light begins to dawn.”

“Yes, of course,” Nurgnatz said querulously. “I should think by now you would understand—”

“I meant literally,” Morlock observed.

Nurgnatz gaped at him for a moment, then swung around to see the brightness imminent at the top of a nearby hill. The silver light of Chariot had given way to the reddish gray of dawn. Nurgnatz wasted no time screaming but bounded instantly toward his cave.

But the snow was very deep, the ambient light already in the air was stiffening his gnomish limbs, and Morlock had retreated very far from the cave entrance. Nurgnatz was only halfway between Morlock and Rhabia, yet in the grip of the long-unmoving headless bear, when the tide of golden light swept up and left him a still gray statue of a terrified, fire-scarred gnome.

The golden sword fell and was buried in the snow, its activating spell cancelled by the death of its caster.

Rhabia also fell to the ground, dropped by the headless bear. It went down on all fours and wandered away, past the stone image of its former master, into the snow-thick woods beyond.

Rhabia climbed to her feet and went to meet Morlock, already hobbling toward her through the drifts of snow. His face was gray with weariness in the gold light of morning. Maybe he was immune from fire and had flammable blood, like all those crazy legends said. But for the first time, as she looked at him, he looked as if he might really be centuries old—and feeling every second of it.

“Better get those chains off you,” she said gruffly. This damn maternal instinct of hers kicked in at the weirdest times.

“There are some tools in my pack,” he said.

She sniffed. “That's what we risked death for? A hammer and chisel?”

He turned to spear her with his searching gray eyes.
“You
risked death to help me, when you could have walked away. I won't forget it.”

“Ah.” She waved her wounded hand in dismissal. “It evens out. I lost my bonus from Thyrb, but I bet I can sell that gnome statue for ten times what Thyrb was going to pay me. So the debt runs the other way, really. I at least owe you a decent breakfast when we get to town.”

“I don't think—”

Her maternal instinct didn't have to put up with anyone thinking at her. “Listen, pal,” she cut in. “I've had a long day and night of men who think the damn world revolves around them. So you will eat your damn breakfast and thank me nicely for it afterward.”

There was some more negotiation on this point, but in the end she had her way. And it was after that memorable breakfast that Morlock offered her a job that bid fair to free her from Thyrb and his ilk forever.

I
t was the last day of the season of Motherdeath, and new Valona's egg-sac had fully grown in. That day they had a rare daylight implanting. The Sisters watched as the males of the tribe wove their dance about young Valona, fertilizing her eggs, reverencing her and the life she represented. Then she implanted her first eggs in old Valona. The first eggs of a Khroi mother were supposed to be very lucky, and those implanted in an old mother doubly lucky. So good days were obviously in store for the horde. Gathenavalona tried to be happy, and she was a little.

After the ceremonies and the afternoon feast, Gathenavalona went to the Mother's Nest. She found Marh Valone waiting outside.

“Why are you here, Gathenavalona?” he asked. His harmonies implied it was not a rhetorical question.

“You knew I would be, it seems,” she replied.

He gestured expectancy.

She gestured compliance and said, “I promised to tell her the whole tale of Motherdeath, back when she was only Dhyrvalona. I wish to keep my promise.” Her harmonies vibrated with determination. She would fight, if need be, to keep her word.

“That is a good story,” Marh Valone said earnestly. “It is the story of the change that began and has not yet ended. The realization that the gods may not hate us, that our own actions can harm us or save us. The Khroi slept for centuries in dreams of the gods' hatred. Now we have begun to wake up. You can be a part of that new day, Gathenavalona.”

“Not as Gathenavalona,” she begged. “Give me a new name, and a new destiny.”

Marh Valone's three mouths issued a quiet harmony of resignation, grief, and gladness. He reached out with one palp-cluster and traced the line of one of her jaws, an almost shocking gesture of intimacy between a grown male and a grown female.

“You will have a new name and a new destiny,” he said. “Do you know what I feared? Many a Gathena will kill herself, or her charge, in the time of anointing or afterward. As always, you make me proud.”

She gestured gratitude and an inability to speak.

He waved her past. “Go then. Keep your promise to her. When you emerge from the nest, I will have a new name for you, a new task.”

Gathenavalona passed by him and climbed into the nest.

New Valona's bulk nearly filled the vast Mother's Nest. She had grown so much after that night of the first anointing.

Her limbs had thickened and grown; her body was more massive, especially her neck with the enormous burden of her egg-sac. Her internal organs had swelled to support her greater size—most of them, anyway. She crawled along lengthwise, of course: she was too enormous to stand on her hind legs and ped-clusters. All her palp-clusters had become heavy, padlike ped-clusters. She had regrown the quadrilimbs that all Khroi are second-born with; they were as massive as her other legs.

Valona's eyes fell on her old nurse, standing at the entrance to the nest. Gathenavalona looked in vain for any glint of recognition in those eyes. The transformation wrought by the royal jelly magnified the body many times, but the enormous ovaries in a Mother's abdomen seemed to crowd out most of the room for the brain. Mature Khroi mothers never spoke, and it was hard to say what they understood.

Valona caught sight of a trough of food at the base of her nest. She moved toward it, grunting with excitement.

Gathenavalona thought of her promise to Dhyrvalona. She thought of Marh Valone's promise: a new name and a new destiny.

She kept her promise. As young Valona ate to sustain her vast bulk, her old nurse told her how the story ended.

A
s the ice storm raged about him, the crooked man stood in a cleft of the mountains watching another crooked man walk a twisting path through the shattered icy stones of the rock-slide to the west. He saw the man fall among the ice-glazed stones, saw him struggle to his feet again, saw him continue his slow meandering way eastward.

“A plodder,” muttered Merlin, and shook his head. It was the only way Morlock would ever reach anything, the older Ambrosius decided: by finding out where it was and walking straight toward it, literally or metaphorically. Well, it was a way to get somewhere. Unfortunately, it left you open to observation and attack by your enemies, a fact Morlock had never learned, apparently.

Merlin shook his head and sighed. This had been a long hard struggle, and it was nearly over. In a way, he would miss it, he decided. That was why he was withholding his final weapon. But that was not the only reason.

Merlin grimly noted that Morlock was not carrying his backpack. He had hidden it somewhere before coming to the confrontation he anticipated between himself and his father. Merlin's map of the future had predicted this, and that was why he planned to avoid any such confrontation.

They were high in the mountains, well above the treeline on the north face of the Blackthorns. Morlock, of course, was approaching from the west. He knew where Merlin was, because Merlin was necessarily near the core-self of Nimue, and Nimue's shell and impulse-cloud together were able to tell where her final segment lay. They had told Morlock, and he proceeded to walk directly toward his goal, along the path Merlin had foreseen.

Several days earlier, Merlin had deliberately started several avalanches on the slopes above Morlock's future route, and halted them with a network of force-wefts. He had only been waiting until Morlock was directly in their path to loose the wefts. And now Morlock was, and if he did not loose them soon there was some chance that Morlock would be able to make his way out of the danger zone before the avalanche caught him.

Merlin took one last look at his only living son, then sighed. He took a rune-slate from a pocket in his left sleeve, and he broke it with his fingers. It was bound-in-state to the force wefts; once it was broken, they were no more.

The avalanche started. First there was a low rumble, and the man far below, antlike in his distance and his vulnerability, began to run. Of course, Morlock had been raised among mountains and he knew that sound well. The torrent of snow and ice and stone rolled down toward him like a tidal wave, took him, buried him, rolled onward until it exhausted itself on the slopes below. Soon enough the slide was quiet and the icy rain was glazing the fresh surface of snow. If Morlock hadn't had his neck broken or his body crushed in the avalanche, it was only a matter of time until he smothered. The long struggle between father and son was over.

Merlin sighed again. Unlike Morlock, he was an introspective man, and he understood how complex his own motives were. If Morlock had succeeded in reuniting Nimue's segments and negating the antideath spell, it would have been terrible; he would have been furious at his defeat and the loss of his beloved wife. But it would have been a relief, too: a relief to be free from the endless struggle against death. Death was an enemy even more plodding and relentless than Morlock, even harder to defeat. Now he would have to carry on that fight.

“And so I will,” he decided. “I'll win, too,” he added, because there was no penalty for bravado, at least when no one was listening.

“Anyway,” he said to himself, “now I am the master of all makers again. By default.” He scowled. Well, he reflected, in any fight the last man standing is the winner.

Merlin pulled his cowl over his head and stepped out of the cleft's shelter into the bright bitter rain. His cloak and his shoes did not get wet (a man does not reach the second half of his second millennium without being able to avoid these inconveniences), but still from time to time the wind turned and a dash of freezing rain stung his face. It was irritating, but he bore it. He had just won a victory, a great victory. No doubt he would feel the full impact of it presently.

Now it was his turn to meander across the treacherous ground he had used to kill his son. There was no reason to hurry, so he did not. He was careful to avoid using the sight—for one thing, he needed all his material senses to keep himself from Morlock's icy fate; for another he could not risk a confrontation with Nimue. It was possible that he might defeat her, in her divided state, but it would be difficult to defeat her and Morlock in tandem, and something told him that Morlock, though doomed, was not dead yet. In fact, as he passed by the western edge of the avalanche-field, his insight told him there was someone in visionary withdrawal. Morlock, no doubt: it was shrewd to go into withdrawal, reducing the body's needs almost to nothing, waiting for help to come. But there was no one to come rescue him; Morlock would die there of cold, if nothing else.

Merlin scowled again and turned away. It occurred to him that for most people, for the short-lived people of a day (like that Naeli woman, or Nimue herself, really), children were the chief weapon in the struggle against death. He had been forced to sacrifice one of his children to win a brief respite in his struggle against death—not even a real victory, just a respite. Perhaps death might not be merely a plodder, might be an extremely subtle antagonist who could sneak through your windows even as you were locking your door. Never mind. Merlin would not stop fighting because he did not know how to stop. If Morlock had chosen to fight beside him instead of against him, it would have been different; they might even have forced death to retreat a step or two. That would have been a famous victory.

A shared one, of course. Merlin had never been one for sharing out the glory. He cursed a little, shook some ice from his cloak, put his head down and trudged onward into the sharp stinging rain.

Eventually Merlin came to the place where he had first observed Morlock approaching. Then he had to go more slowly, consulting his map of the future every so often. Morlock might be dead, or merely doomed, but his intention still shaped the present and the future. It crossed with Merlin's…there. Down below in the crooked line of pine trees, abristle with heavy spikes of shining ice.

Merlin passed onward cautiously, not just because of the terrain. Morlock was clever enough to have laid traps for Merlin, anticipating this moment. (Not cunning enough to avoid the moment itself: that was reserved for a genius on the level of Merlin himself.)

There were no traps. He came at last to a clearing in the glittering icehung pine trees. The map told him that Morlock's pack was hidden here, but he saw nothing of it. Either it was not here or Morlock had placed a wilderment on it so that it was invisible.

Merlin smiled within the shadows of his cowl. He could go into rapture and use his trans-material senses to see if the pack and (more importantly) Nimue's two lost segments were present. But there were so many risks to this. Morlock and Nimue might be already in rapport, awaiting the chance to capture Merlin's fetch. Morlock might have fashioned some nonmaterial trap out of talic impulses. No, he could not engage in vision until he was surer of his ground.

But no wilderment is perfect. They create visual flaws where they merge with their environment. Merlin walked around the clearing, eyes open for clues: an icicle sparkling on the wrong side in the gloomy day's light, a twig that disappeared midway of its length, a misplaced shadow. Soon he had quite a list, and he charted them on a mental map of the clearing. The center of the wilderment was that locus…
there.

Merlin walked toward a pine tree, no more remarkable than any others on the edge of the clearing. He was wary of traps on all sides, but there seemed to be none. He reached down into the space he had calculated as the wilderment's center. His hand disappeared, and simultaneously met the rough surface of Morlock's concealed backpack. He drew in a deep breath and hefted the pack out of the wilderment.

It took a couple of tries. “God Avenger, this thing is heavy,” Merlin grunted as he finally dragged the thing into visibility in the unspelled center of the clearing.

His long hands leaped, as if of their own accord, to the lacings of the pack, then halted.

“Caution, caution,” Merlin reminded himself. There was no hurry. He would go slow.

It was well he did. The pack was sealed with a spell to prevent theft, and there was a particularly nasty trap inside, for anyone clever enough to pierce the spell. Merlin counter-inscribed the spell and defanged the trap. There seemed to be no other barriers. At last he unlaced the pack and, with trembling fingers, lifted out a blue jar.

The rest he would leave for whoever found it. He scorned to loot the pack of the master of all makers: he was Merlin Ambrosius, and his name did not echo and re-echo down the centuries because he was a successful thief of other men's magic. He had what he wanted.

He was sure of it.

He was almost sure of it.

He kept remembering that empty jar Morlock had taunted him with in Aflraun. This jar was not empty—it had a certain heft to it. He spun it in his hands, and certain irregularities of weight suggested to him that the jar was bigger on the inside than the outside, as it should be if it was the right jar. Yes, this was what he was looking for.

He was sure of it.

He was almost sure of it.

Merlin badly wanted to ascend into visionary rapture and check: if Nimue's shell and impulse-cloud were in the jar, he would know immediately; likewise if they were not.

But he couldn't risk it. He was all too aware that this might be the ultimate trap, baited with exactly what he really wanted. If Morlock and Nimue were in rapport, waiting for him, everything he had done might be for nothing.

He raised the jar up over his head and threw it against a nearby tree root glazed with thick ice.

The ice shattered. The blue glaze on the jar shattered. But the jar itself didn't: it lay there on the ground without a crack.

Merlin nodded. If Morlock had foreseen this moment, he would have made the jar breakable, but with some sort of menace or trap inside. Morlock hadn't. Ergo, Merlin had found the right jar.

He was sure of it.

He was
almost
sure of it.

Merlin walked over and recovered the jar. He weighed the risks against each other, shook his head, and twisted the cap off.

From the jar's wide mouth flew the indistinct form of a bird, its feathers gleaming with every shade of dim green in the day's dull light. It passed three times around Merlin's head and returned to the mouth of the jar. By then, Merlin had already slumped unconscious to the glittering glazed earth. The jar fell there beside him.

The jar unfolded three long spindly legs from its base. It shook out three long spindly arms from its striated body. The jar-shaped golem rose from where it had fallen and stood uncertainly on the icy ground.

Spindly the arms were, perhaps, but strong. The jar-golem reached down and picked up Merlin's prone body. The jar-mouth, already wide, gaped wider and wider. The jar-golem dropped the sleeping sorcerer into its mouth. Then it clapped the lid back down across its mouth and wrapped its spindly arms tightly around the lid, sealing the container. Its spindly legs crouched down and it waited.

Time passed. Eventually, two women came through the glittering ice-fanged pinewood.

The jar-golem didn't move. They weren't what it was waiting for.

One woman said to the other, “Should we see if we can help Morlock?”

“Who, dear?” the other replied.

“Morlock.”

“That's funny. My son's named Morlock. I've never seen him, not since he was born.”

“He was here with us, just a while ago.”

“Looking for his horse. Yes, now I remember. I told him to watch out for that troll under the bridge, but he's not one of the world's great listeners, is he, Voin dear?”

“Rhabia. My name is Rhabia.”

“Oh, yes. I remember her well. She looked a little like you. Give my regards to her, if you see her. But I have to be getting on, my dear.”

“I'd better go with. That's what he's paying me for, anyway.”

“Really? How unimaginative of him. Young men in my days had livelier ideas, believe you me. Who is ‘he,’ by the way?”

“Doesn't matter. Are you sure you know where you're going?”

“Oh yes; not a doubt of it. My impulse-cloud and my shell are not very effective at coherent thinking—”

“You don't say.”

“I thought I had said it. Oh, Christ, I'm so tired and confused. Never mind: thinking isn't required. I can feel my core-self is near, so near, and I'm tired, so tired. Frightened, too. Can you—can you—?”

The younger woman silently took the arm of the older woman and they passed onward.

The jar-golem waited in the bright clearing under the wet gray sky. Time passed.

Morlock was not expecting the mountain to fall on him and he was utterly unprepared for it.

A glance or two about told him that there was no way to escape the slide entirely. He could make it as far as he could and hope the slide didn't kill him, or…