This Crooked Way (9 page)

Around noon they had reached a point in the conversation where Nimue said, “But how is this going to work? There is a troll down by the bridge who says the most offensive things about me whenever I go down there—I've had to speak quite sharply to him about it. I'm sure he wouldn't hesitate to eat either one of us. And Merlin must have set other protections around the place besides.”

He showed her the jar and explained his plan.

She drew herself up and looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you're not Merlin? He was always putting me in jars.”

He shrugged. “I think this will work. If you have another idea—”

“You shouldn't shrug like that. It draws attention to your shoulders.”

He looked her in the eye and shrugged.

She snickered. “All right. I get the message. And no I don't have any ideas. If I had any ideas I would have told them to that young fellow who came here looking for his horse; he was much politer than you are.”

Morlock took a stoppered green bottle out of his backpack and released the morpheus-bird, its wings feathered with every shade of dim green. It flew once around Nimue's head and then returned to its bottle. He restoppered the bottle as his mother's shell lumped to the ground.

He laid her out flat on the floor and rolled her up as tightly as he could, like a scroll of thick paper with irregular edges. Then he slid her into the narrow mouth of the jar he had made in the woods. There was a cap for the jar but he left it off, in case she needed to speak to him about anything when she awoke. He stowed the jar and the bottle in his pack and went back down to the bridge for the last time.

The troll was waiting for him in the center of the bridge. All of its eyes were on him as he approached. As soon as his shoes hit the planks of the walkway it said to him, “I'll eat you now, if you don't mind.”

“I do, and you won't,” Morlock replied. “By the terms you were set here, you may not.”

“What?” roared the troll with all its mouths.

Morlock explained, “The spell binding you here permits you to eat anyone who has crossed the bridge without your permission. This creates two classes of bridge-crosser: those who have crossed without your permission, and those who have crossed with it. I am clearly in the latter class: you have permitted me to cross the bridge three times. Three is a magic number, you know.”

“It
is?”

“Everyone says so.”

“Oh, pus and broken fangs. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my magic lessons. But I thought that I'd never use it, you see. I always wanted to be a bridge-troll.”

Morlock shrugged and walked by. The troll clenched all its jaws as he passed, and he kept his hand free to summon Tyrfing, if need be. But he reached the far side without a struggle and walked away into the unclaimed woods.

Merlin was waiting for him there.

“You killed the troll, I suppose?” the old necromancer said, stepping out from behind a tree.

“Talked my way past it,” Morlock said. He reached over his shoulder and drew Tyrfing. “If it had been smarter, I might have had to kill it.”

“Morlock and God: protectors of fools. But who'll protect you, Morlock? Do you ever wonder that?”

Morlock shrugged and waited for his father to say something worth answering.

“At least,” Merlin said at last, “the troll kept you busy until I had a chance to get here. Now you face me in my own person, Morlock—not a fetch or an illusion.”

For answer Morlock reached out and passed his left hand through Merlin's chest. It was almost wholly insubstantial, a mere cloak of light and sound for his fetch.

Merlin's face took on the irritated expression it usually wore when he confronted his son. “How did you know?”

There were three or four ways Morlock had known: the absence of any movement among the grasses on which Merlin was supposedly standing was only the most obvious.

But he found that he could say nothing in response. The light particles had taken flight in a complicated four-dimensional pattern around his hand. The pattern drew his attention and held it. He could neither move nor speak.

“Morlock, Morlock,” Merlin's voice chided him. “Of course, you are the master of all makers. I know you never say so, but
I
say so, and I would really rather say it about myself, as we both know. But I am the master seer and life-maker—necromancer, as some ignorantly call it. I knew you would come here: I saw it in my map of the future. I could not risk facing you here myself. So I set this trap for you.

“And the best part of it is, you set it off yourself. If you could have brought yourself to speak to me like a human being, your will would still be free. But I knew that you couldn't resist the temptation to brush my little simulacrum out of your way.”

“Morlock, you are a maker and you think of light as physical. But it, like aether, casts a shadow on the talic and even the spiritual realms. I find it an easy thing to infect a cloud of light with my will, and now that cloud has infected you. You must remain where you are until I see fit to free you. Not even death will be a release: I think my binding spell will hold your self there even if your body rots away. Anyway, we'll see, won't we?”

What Merlin said was both true and false, Morlock felt. His body was bound by the light, but his mind was free. That meant he had at least one choice to make.

“Yes,” Merlin drawled. “You could try that. If you think you can best me in my own art of Seeing.”

Morlock didn't think that he could. It was simply that or surrender, and Morlock, when sober, wasn't the surrendering type.

Recklessly, he summoned the rapture of vision. The world of matter and energy fell away to dim shadows; he stepped into the bright world of understanding and intent, the borderland between the material and spiritual. His own fetch appeared: a black-and-white pillar of flames. Tyrfing, too, took on his monochrome talic presence as an extension of himself.

Merlin's fetch stood before him; shed of its illusory light-cloak, he was a pillar of red flames, his fiery hands grasping the staff and faceted crystal that were his own foci of power.

Pity there are no witnesses to this!
Merlin's awareness remarked directly into Morlock's.
It will become a legendary battle among those-who-know.

Morlock signalled his indifference: the talic equivalent of a shrug.

Merlin struck, a lightning-branch of terror leaping out to infect Morlock's talic limbs.

Morlock banished it with Tyrfing and riposted with a triple-fanged stab of guilt-shame-weariness.

Merlin absorbed it with his diamond-shaped focus and remarked pleasantly,
So much for old favorites. See how you like this!

But that was the end of it.

They had forgotten they were not alone.

They had forgotten because Nimue was spread thin through the world, like a three-cornered spiderweb.

But the tal-world is nearer the spirit-world, where distances matter not at all, and Nimue's physical division did not diminish her talic power.

The three-cornered spiderweb that was Nimue's fetch radiated sudden refusal.

Stop this
, she said, and Merlin's attack died aborning.

It might have been the time for Morlock to strike a final, perhaps a fatal blow, but he didn't want to draw her anger on himself. He dismissed his vision and fell back into the chaos of matter and energy that those-who-do-not-know call the real world.

He was lying on the ground in the forest, Tyrfing still gripped in his hand. Merlin's fetch had vanished and Morlock's body was free to move as he willed.

“Thanks, Mother,” he rasped out when he could speak.

She didn't answer that he could tell.

He struggled to his feet and, sheathing his sword, headed through the woods westward.

Due west was the talic zone of danger he had avoided while travelling eastward. Now he hoped that whatever was projecting it would provide some cover from the malefic necromancer he knew at last for his enemy.

E
very clutch of fosterlings, every phalanx of Virgin Sisters, every warrior-pod, every coven of seers and stand of elders had a copy of the book of Witness, and read this part of the tale from it in the season of Motherdeath. But this was
the
book itself, its leather cover cracked and often repaired, many of its pages inscribed by a pen held in a man's awkward stiff fingers. There were no harmony marks; it was traditional to read the words as written: flat, monovocal, with a single mouth. Some wore a dark-skinned man-mask for the purpose, but Gathenavalona, young Dhyrvalona's nurse, thought that was stupid.

She did think it was important for her charge to see the book itself, not a copy—and to hear it. The book had come into the horde's possession on the night of Motherdeath, and Roble's part of the story was already written within it in his own handwriting. After Motherdeath, when the seers were seeking to understand the catastrophe that had befallen them, they sought out other witnesses to the terrible events, speaking to them in dreams and recording their dream-voices in magic letters that could speak again, when called upon in the proper manner.

Marh Valone was the keeper of the book, and Gathenavalona stood now in his pavilion holding the book in her palp-clusters.

“I thank you again, Marh of Marhs!” she said gratefully. “This is a trust; I feel it deeply. I will return the book unscathed or die.”

The horde-leader's pyramidal head inclined politely to acknowledge her courtesy. “Take it; keep it. Why should she-who-will-be-Valona not know of these things? Some of the elders disapprove, but I see no wrongness in it. Still, Gathenavalona—”

“Yes?” She paused fearfully in the act of backing out of his presence. She was not afraid of him physically: she was perhaps twice his size. She did fear what he might say to her, what sooner or later he must say to her.

He said it. “Old Valona is sterile. Her eggs have no life in them. Since the last implanting, some of the victims have died, some are sick, but there has been no new life. The tribe has no mother. There must be an anointing.”

“Please, may it wait?” she begged, jangling the words disharmoniously from all her mouths. “I promised to tell her the tale of Motherdeath, the whole tale. Only a few more days—”

“Gathenavalona, Gathenavalona. Do you know what the last Marh Valone told me, on the night before I slew him and took his name?”

“Many things, I guess.”

“So many, so many. But one thing he said was, ‘Gathenavalona will always want more time.’”

“After her second birth, I fed her with my own blood,” Gathenavalona said to the implacable Marh Valone. “I taught her to hunt; I kept her safe through all the days and night.”

“Of course you did,” said Marh Valone. “That is what Gathenavalona is for. Now the time is come for an anointing. That is what Dhyrvalona is for.”

Gathenavalona closed all of her eyes, and opened them. She gestured submission, defeat.

Wordlessly the Marh stepped forward. He bent her arms until they gestured weary triumph. “That is the way,” he said. “It is not a time for grieving. Your task is fulfilled and you may rest for a time.”

“I will still grieve.”

“As you like.” His harmonies indicated sympathy, implacability.

“When?” she asked.

“Soon. Prepare yourself. I suggest you say nothing to her.”

“Of course.” What could she say?

She backed out of the Marh's presence.

Dhyrvalona was waiting for her back in the nest.

“Did you get it?” she asked excitedly, while another mouth said, “Is that it?” and her third mouth said, “Marh Valone is the best of marhs!”

“He is not a bad one, I think,” Gathenavalona said wearily. “He cares for the horde, above all.”

“Need we wait for evening?” whispered Dhyrvalona impishly. “Can you read me a tale now?”

She was astonished when her nurse replied with a single mouth, “No need to wait. This is Roble's tale: hear his voice: ‘I will not live three hundred years….’”

I
will not live three hundred years. I'll be dead before I'm eighty and, if I'm not, I'll wish I were. The Strange Gods of the Coranians never knew my name, and I don't know theirs. I'm not a Coranian knight—I'm not a Coranian anything, but especially not a knight. I'm sick of that mistake. People see me in my armor, on my horse, and they scuttle away or call me “sir.” Some of the Riders like that; it's the reason they ride. But I don't need it; if anybody calls me “sir” I tell them straight out. Nobody calls me “sir,” not even my sister's boys.

That night I was riding with Liskin. I wasn't happy about it. Liskin was a whiner, a rule-keeper: I'd heard about him. A rule-keeper, but his regular partner, Ost, was a bloody-truncheon, a dead-or-aliver who had killed ten people on the Road, just for fun, in the past year. There was no mystery about it: this was the sort of thing Ost liked to brag about on his nights off. It's not a crime to kill on the roads or in the woods at night, as long as you bring the body back to a castleyard. It's not a crime, but it's not what the Riders are about, either. A couple of us got together (I wasn't there but I heard about it) and asked Liskin what he was going to do about Ost. “What Ost does is not against the rules,” he said. So the rest of us did what we had to do about Ost. Liskin didn't join us; it was against the rules.

I was the lucky winner who drew Liskin as a new partner, at least temporarily. My regular partner, Alev, had gotten his legs broken in a Bargainer's man-trap the night before. That would never have happened if Alev weren't a rule-breaker and a bad example; we were strictly forbidden to enter the woods around the Bargainer village. But we brought his stray out, and brought him out alive.
That's
what the Riders are about, and not keeping any particular set of rules.

Try and tell that to Liskin. He was on me from the moment I entered the courtyard of Rendel's Castle. My sword and shield were both shorter than regulations allowed, he said; my cloak was dark blue, not black, he said; worst of all I had a long scratch in the black enamel on my armor, he said.

I could have explained to him that long swords and long shields aren't handy for fighting in woodlands; a stabbing sword and a round shield are better. I could have told him that after sunset in the woods, dark blue
is
black, or so close as to make no difference. I could have said, in a reasonable tone, “Look, Liskin: it's twenty days until we get paid and I've got to help feed my sister's children. I can't afford to send my breastplate to the armorer's right now, not for a stupid scratch.” I might have said all this, but I didn't have a chance. Liskin was still talking.

“Roble, you've got a slovenly appearance,” Liskin said, proudly standing next to his own shield, which was leaning against the courtyard wall. “How do you expect anyone you meet on the road to believe you when you say you're not a robber?”

“Well—” I began, but he swept on.

“I tell you, Roble,” he told me, “I never appear for duty without the proper gear in proper order. It isn't safe, and it just isn't right.” He went on to tell me what he'd tolerate from the person he rode with, but I didn't have to listen to any of that. Because I
knew
what he'd tolerate.

I glanced over at his shield, standing tall and stainlessly black beside him. I drew my truncheon and struck it hard, back against the wall, scoring the enamel halfway down the shield. It bounced off the wall and fell facedown on the dirty cobblestones of the courtyard. Hitching my truncheon back on my belt, I looked at Liskin. He stood there, his mouth slightly open.

Neither of us spoke, or had to. Liskin had a spare shield back at the Riders Lodge (he had a spare at every lodge in Four Castles). He could run and get it. But then he wouldn't be back in time for evening muster, which was just about to happen. So he had to ride with a scratched shield or miss muster; either way he broke a rule.

I picked up his shield and handed it to him. After a moment's hesitation he took it. Slinging it over his shoulder, he walked off without another word toward the mustering square. I waited a couple moments before I did the same; by then the mustering officer had actually appeared.

That night we were mustered by old Marmon. He had been a Rider for twenty years, but the time came when he could no longer stand the rough-and-tumble of the roads. By law of the Four Castles, he could eat and sleep at any of the Riders Lodges for the rest of his life, but you no longer got paid after you stopped riding the roads. So Marmon mustered us now and then (which paid a little something), and introduced lonely colleagues to his two “nieces” (which paid considerably better). He was grayer than your grandfather and only forty-five years old.

Marmon walked down the steps of the stabler's house, hefting a hillconch shell to his lips. He blew a curt and negligent blast (strictly for form, as he saw we were all present). But the echoes were still ringing in the courtyard as we lined up on the mustering square.

“Who rides to the east?” he demanded.

“Arens,” said one of the other pair, and, “Teck,” said his partner. Marmon looked them over without enthusiasm.

“Who rides to the west?” Marmon asked eventually.

“Liskin!”

“Roble.”

Marmon stepped over and eyed both of us. “Liskin, you seem to have a scratch on your shield,” he said, and I'd swear the old pimp was smiling.

“Yes, sir. Roble—”

“I'm not your mother, Liskin,” said Marmon sharply, and Liskin shut up.

Marmon stood back and spoke to us all. “Arens and Teck, you're fresh from a month off, so I'll just caution you not to play hero. It's one thing when you're boasting in the tavern; it's another thing when you're out there in the woods. Remember: if you're lost, that's one more for the enemy to feed on. When in doubt, save yourself at least; bring back the bodies if you can.

“More specifically, watch where you step. You'll be riding past the Bargainer village, and they've been setting man-traps all along the road and baiting them with real people. Take a long look at everything, especially the ground, confer with each other, and, when in doubt,
save yourselves
. Go ahead and saddle up.”

They left and Marmon turned to us. Again, he was almost smiling as he looked at Liskin's shield. “You two are new partners,” he said, “and something tells me you're not going to get along. That's fine with me; it's fine with the Four Barons. You don't have to like each other. But do your job. That's all.” He waved us away.

“Marmon,” I asked, “what's the road like between here and Caroc?”

“Nothing unusual. Some older children staying out late—’just walking in the woods, Mother,’ you know. That's about it. Get on the road.”

I turned away with Liskin and ran toward the stables. The sun had almost set.

“He didn't tell us not to be heroes,” Liskin complained.

“I guess he forgot,” I guessed.

It was twilight when Liskin and I rode out of the courtyard of Rendel's Castle and down the main road through Rendel's Town. Liskin and I were both blowing on hillconches as we rode, and off to the east we could hear Arens and Teck doing the same. We made quite a racket between us; there can't have been a person in castle or town who didn't hear us. That, of course, was the idea.

We rode on to the stretch of gravel road at the edge of town, then reined in and turned. Liskin blew another blast on his hillconch, and then I broke the law.

“By the authority of the Four Barons,” I shouted, “Masters of Caroc, Rendel, Etain, and Bleisian (castles and towns and lands between), I declare the limit of the law. From town to town, through all the woods, from northern hill to southern plain, I say the law has vanished with the light and will return only with the sun. Until that time, those who enter the woods or walk the Road are guilty of their own suffering and loss, even to their deaths. Let their souls be cursed and their names be forgotten. I declare all this in the name of the Master of Rendel's Castle (here unspoken) and my own, Roble of the Riders.”

Liskin blew a final blast on his hillconch and I shouted, “Naeli!” Liskin looked at me in surprise (for this was not part of the rite as he knew it), but he didn't say anything. We rode over a small wooden bridge that arched over a narrow stream and galloped down the road into the lawless woods.

The Riders began as a guild of gravediggers, and in a way that's what we still are. Our primary duty is to collect the dead bodies that accumulate along the road during the lawless hours. Equally important is to collect “strays”—people travelling, ignorant, on the road or lost in the woods. These we conduct to a place where law prevails. Finally, there are those who go beyond the law by choice: to kill or rob along the road during the lawless hours. These, too, we bring out of the woods. If they don't resist, then all's well. They have, after all, committed no crime, no matter what they have done. If they resist, we bring them anyway; if necessary, we kill them and bring the bodies out.

That's the one law the Riders carry with them through the lawless hours:
bring the bodies out.
For every body left in the woods after dark became the subject and sustenance of our enemy, the Boneless One, the Whisperer in the Woods.

That was why the Four Barons had long ago declared the woods and the road through them to be beyond the law after dark: to prevent people from straying there. Those who didn't fear the Enemy, whom they had never seen, would be held back by fear of their fellow man, whom they knew all too well.

It had been a good idea, I'd always thought—perhaps the only thing that could have kept Four Castles alive across the centuries. But it was an idea, some were beginning to suspect, that was doomed to failure. Because there are always outsiders who stumble into the woods without suspecting what dwells there. Because many who should know better simply do not do what is best for them. Because there will always be a few who say to themselves,
I won't be killed; I will kill.
(And if they're right they leave a body in the woods, and if they're wrong they leave a body in the woods. Either way the Enemy, the Boneless One, gets what it needs.) And, finally, because of the Bargainers, who grow more numerous every year.

The first trap was on the road itself. It looked like a woman in a white dress being dragged off the road by three men with the narrow filed teeth of Bargainers. Glancing over at Liskin, I saw he had drawn his sword and was preparing for a heroic charge. I whacked him across the visor and said, “It's a trap!” He gaped at me in surprise.

At the sound of my voice the “woman” turned toward us. Her hair and skin were as dark as mine; her nose was as high arched and delicate as my mother's had been. Her voice was ragged with desperation as she cried out, “Help me! Help me! Why won't you help me?”

I should know better by now, but it got to me. It always got to me. Alev, in contrast, was pretty callous and could even make conversation with the traps until they vanished in (I guess) frustration.

“Go to hell,” I muttered desperately; it was the best I could do, usually.

“Help me!” she screamed. “Help me! Why won't you help me?”

“Shut up,” I muttered. “You're not real.”

It went on for a while longer until the Enemy gave up and the illusion-bait disappeared. Left behind (because it was real, not illusion) was an immense man-trap—or horse-trap, really, since it was made to catch our horses as we gallopped to the rescue. I dismounted and went forward to move the thing out of the way and break it with my truncheon. Liskin remained on his horse as lookout, which was in accordance with the Rules and (for once) good sense besides.

“Be careful!” he called to me as I hustled the shattered trap over to the side of the road. “There's sure to be a Bargainer or two nearby in the wood!”

“You think?” I grunted as I hurled the broken metal into the woods. At that moment I was glaring eye-to-eye with a Bargainer crouching in the brush alongside the road. He made no move toward me, nor I to him, but he smiled at me, showing his teeth filed sharp as needles.

My irony had been lost on Liskin. “Of course!” he said. “There had to be someone on hand to attack us and haul the bodies into the wood!”