This Crooked Way (46 page)

He curled himself into a ball and summoned visionary withdrawal. He had just ascended to rapture when the avalanche caught him: the sensation was vaguely similar to being kicked by a giant wearing a cotton boot. Then he was above the level of sensation, adrift in the tal-realm.

Reasoning and intention are oddly distorted in vision. If you enter with a strong intention, in talic stranj with a focus of power, intentional action may be relatively easy. But Morlock had simply sought escape, and having found it, he drifted like a cloud in an otherwise empty sky: not acting, not really thinking.

Merlin passed nearby. Morlock noticed this without really concerning himself about it. Sometime afterward, he sensed Rhabia and two segments of Nimue pass by in the other direction.

Merlin, Rhabia. Nimue, but not all of her. That triad prompted a coherent thought. He descended a little in vision as a consequence.

The sun was going down beyond the rim of the world. The world was colder now, even the tal-world, and that made Morlock think, too. Evidently the avalanche had not killed his body outright. But the cold would kill his body soon.

Well, what could he do about it? Little, very little.

What did he have to work with? Little, very little.

How little? he wondered. In the tal-state he was freed from material limits of perception. He had nothing else to do. He tried to find out how small a thing he could perceive.

Time passed, but he was not aware of it.

Eventually he found himself contemplating the void of matter on a very deep level. Most of it was empty to his sight. But in the void moved tiny particles, more swiftly than others, infected with something like life, although they were not all alive.

Some parts of the slide had more of these than the others. There were some on the surface, where the last red light of the day was falling, through the ragged edges of the ice storm's clouds. There was a cloud of them enveloping his freezing body, moving away from it in the emptiness of the dead snow and ice.

Morlock reached out with his mind and started turning these specks of light and warmth back toward his body. The snow and ice around him grew colder, but against his skin there was a layer of warmth. Eventually his body, balled up like a fist, was floating in warm water within an icy womb deep within the body of the avalanche field.

The maker in Morlock, never absent even when unconscious or asleep, was pleased. It was a temporary solution to survival underneath the avalanche.

Of course, it was only temporary. Morlock pondered alternatives.

Eventually, he began to bend the pathways of the particles of heat, denting the side of the icy womb and then breaching it. He used the heat to whittle away an icy tunnel with a core of warm water, angling the tunnel downslope. His unconscious body rolled along with the water downhill into the tunnel, along its length.

The water broke through the side of the avalanche field and ran out. Morlock's body slid afterward and bounced downhill over the glazed slope, like a badly made ball, eventually coming to rest against a rocky obstruction.

Morlock was pleased again. This looked like a permanent solution.

Of course, it created a new problem: his soaked body, exposed to the wintry night air, was losing heat even more rapidly than it had under the avalanche. He wasn't sure if he could weave the paths of the heat particles in the air as he had in ice and water; everything seemed to move more rapidly. It was an interesting problem, and he thought a little bit about solutions.

But whatever he came up with, it would not be a permanent solution. Eventually the source of heat within his living body would fail and he would die.

Morlock was not afraid of death; he had seen too much of it. It didn't trouble him that he had things to do, obligations unmet, because he knew that everyone leaves a trail of broken promises when they die. He would leave less than some.

On the other hand, there were things he wanted to do, problems he wanted to solve, things he wanted to make. He wondered if he could make an object solely out of the heat particles he saw dancing through the midst of the material void: a heat sculpture, a heat tool, a heat weapon. If he died now, he would never do that.

Morlock was not afraid of death, but given the alternative, he found he preferred life. He dismissed his vision.

The weight of the dark cold world fell on him. The cold was an agony, but under it burned darker, deeper pain from his bruised and battered body.

He forced his stiff aching limbs to unbend.

He was shuddering in the bitter dark rain so much that he could hardly make his limbs obey him. But he somehow made his way across the avalanche field, like a frozen sea that lurched occasionally under his feet, to the clearing where his pack and the jar-golem were.

The jar-golem rose to stand: this was what it had waited for.

As for Morlock: there were flames in the nexus, dry clothes in the pack, and the man who was trying to kill him was trapped in a jar. It looked as if he would live long enough to do some more making.

Night was much deeper and the storm had changed from sleet to snow by the time Morlock made it at last to Merlin's cave in the cleft of the mountains.

He expected to see signs of destruction, and he did find some. There had been a doorway securing the cave, but water had filled its frame and frozen till it burst outward. He saw two pair of footprints in the rubble: Nimue's and Rhabia's, no doubt.

Beyond the broken door was a stone stairway with a two-headed watchbeast—one side orange, the other purple. Both sides were dead, their gaping mouths stopped with frozen water.

Morlock passed down the stairway into Merlin's lair and came at last to an oval room in which lay the bodies of two women, one dead and one dying.

On the far side of the room Morlock saw his mother's body, lying motionless amid a shattered block of warm ice.

On the near side of the room lay Rhabia. She had been caught by a trap: a steel hoop had passed through one leg and bound her to the floor. She was struggling to stop the bleeding—an obviously long struggle which had so far failed, given the pool of blood surrounding her on the floor. She looked up and saw Morlock.

“Took awhile, didn't you?” she said with false bravado. He could see the relief growing, the fear fading in her eyes.

“I suppose,” he said. He looked the situation over, then drew Tyrfing and broke the steel hoop on either side of Rhabia's wounded thigh.

“I'm going to slide it out,” he told her. “It's going to hurt.”

“Can't you put me to sleep with your green bird?” Rhabia said anxiously. “Like when you fixed my fingers?”

She flexed her hand where Nurgnatz had bitten off her fingers. Morlock hadn't really fixed them, simply replaced them with mechanical analogues that worked fairly well.

“No.” He nodded toward the jar-golem, who had followed him into the oval room and was standing by the door. “Busy.”

“Oh.” She looked away. “All right, then.”

She passed out before the metal was out of her leg. Morlock worked swiftly to sew up her wound before she woke. He wrapped her in a sleeping cloak and left her on the floor, since he was unsure where else he could put her safely.

The rest of the floor was dense with traps. Morlock made his way past them to where his mother's dead body lay.

The chunks of ice were warm as blood: Morlock didn't fully understand what they were. He suspected they were a product of water-magic, something perhaps he should know more about. But clearly they had been used to preserve (and imprison) Nimue's core-self. Her impulse-cloud and shell must have been able to break through the warm ice somehow and reunify.

Death would have followed almost instantly. As Morlock looked down on Nimue's face, he thought it looked different than he had come to know it from her shell. Was it because now she had joined with her core-self? Because she was dead indeed? He wasn't sure. He had never really known her, and now she was dead. Again.

He shrugged. He cut a hole in the side of the cave and buried her there, carving on the wall beside her the same epitaph he had used the first time he buried her.

By then, Rhabia had regained consciousness. He made a fire on the floor, as if they were in the middle of a wood, and brewed some redleaf tea to help her heal and replace her blood. She drank it with many complaints, clearly relishing the warmth, and when it was done she obviously felt stronger. Tossing aside the cup she said, “Do you want to know how it was?”

Morlock thought about what he had seen. “No. Unless you think there is something I should know.”

“That's more thinking than we bargained for. You'll agree I carried out my part?”

Morlock went into his pack to get the agreed-upon sum of gold and handed it to her. The gold meant nothing to him; he could have easily have doubled the amount, or given her as much as she could carry. But he knew that the gold was important to her, not only for itself, but as a symbol of independence. The bag of coins he handed her had the exact amount they had agreed on back in Seven Stones.

She shook it with some enthusiasm. “No more working for Thyrb,” she exulted. “Maybe I can even set up my own retreat.”

Morlock nodded.

“Well,” she said after a few moments, “I think I'll be getting out of here. Especially if the guy who dropped that mountainside on you is just asleep in there.”

Morlock nodded. “Go back the way you came,” he suggested. “It seems to be clear of traps.”

“Right.” She turned to go, paused, turned back. “Think you'll ever be back up Seven Stones way?”

Morlock thought about how angry Merlin would probably be when he freed himself. He thought about Roble and Naeli and her children, and how much they had suffered from knowing him. He thought of Stador, dead under a head of rocks in the Kirach Kund. “No,” he said.

“Oh. Good-bye, then.”

“Good fortune to you.”

She left, and he turned away to explore the rest of Merlin's cave.

Eventually, he found what he was looking for. In a room that looked more like a butchering shed than a wizard's workshop, he found a metal dish with a pair of silver eyes in it.

They looked at him—quizzically, perhaps with a little fear, certainly with recognition. He recognized them, too: they belonged to his horse, Velox.

“Hello, my friend,” Morlock said, not sure if Velox could hear him, not sure if he would understand if he did. He was never sure about Velox.

Merlin, of course, had been lying when he had told Morlock that Velox was dead. Morlock had suspected as much. For one thing, he wasn't sure that Velox could die. An unusual beast in many ways.

Velox's separate pieces all seemed to be present in the dreadful blood-soaked room. Morlock settled down to reassemble them. He was tired, his body battered and aching, but the task itself gave him strength. This was a deed he had set himself to do, and it was near to completion now.

Slowly, the immortal steed took shape in the stony womb beneath the mountain.

Trapped in the jar, the old man struggled against his bonds of clay and sleep.

Already far off, the wounded woman walked away through the long cold night.