This Crooked Way (7 page)

Morlock was smiling wryly.

“I suppose that sneer means there was no spell,” the stranger said bitterly. “Well, that doesn't matter. You are here, now, and your pack is here, and there are no risks involved. Or maybe you're thinking I'm an inferior sorcerer because I had to appropriate your legend. But I'm not. Your legend is a historical accident. I can't be held responsible for not being the beneficiary of a historical accident.”

“It was political slander, originally,” Morlock observed, a little weary of the subject.

“Really? That's most interesting. Take some political slander, let simmer a few hundred years, add seasoning, and dish up. Fearful legend, serves one. Very nice.

“Now arises the question of whether I will spare your life or not. I feel you might possibly be a useful adviser, under restraint—sort of the world's expert on having been Morlock, if you see what I mean. Also, I'm sure some of the most interesting artifacts in your pack would be damaged in a mortal combat. So…”

Morlock said nothing.

“Oh, come now,” the stranger said irritably. “
Don't
try to be forbidding. I know exactly what shape you're in. I watched every step of your journey; don't think I didn't. I knew the forest would do my fighting for me! I saw you scrabbling at the lock on my door (what a pitiful performance that was!) and I see now that you can barely stand.”

“And where do you stand? In my place of power. Never doubt it, Morlock: I have a thousand deaths at my beck and call as I stand here. Do you doubt it? You still are silent?” The stranger shrugged. “Very well. Why should you take my word for it?” He waved his hand and spoke an unintelligible word.

The weight on Morlock's crooked shoulders was suddenly heavier by several pounds. In sudden alarm, he unslung his pack and lifted out the choir nexus. Water poured out through the dragon-hide wrapping. The choir was dead.

“You killed my flames,” Morlock said hoarsely. His eyes were stung by abrupt surprising tears.

The stranger laughed incredulously. “‘Killed’? The notion is jejune. I extinguished them. That water might as easily have gone in your lungs instead, or—heated to steam—in your heart or brain. Then it is you who would have been
extinguished.
I killed my hundreds perfecting the techniques, Morlock, and they work. Never doubt it—again.”

“I doubt you will find your own death jejune,” Morlock replied. Tears were still running down his face; he supposed it was a symptom of the fever.

“Don't threaten me, you battered tramp!” the stranger snarled. “You were about to hand me your pack, that I might spare you what remains of your life. Do so now.”

A long moment passed, in which Morlock seemed to consider. Then he slowly lifted the pack, holding it out to the stranger.

The stranger laughed and took the proffered edge. This, the only convenient hold, happened to be the place where he had slit the pack two days ago. When his grip was firm, Morlock pulled back, as firmly. The stranger's grip, resisting the tug, tore the gripgrass woven into the sewn seam.

The gripgrass, starved for nutriment, exploded into dozens of thin wire-tough lashes, binding the stranger's hand inescapably to the repaired slit. The stranger emptied his lungs in an instinctive cry of pain and surprise.

Morlock pulled him off his feet, by way of the pack, hauled him over to the nearest window, and, still holding on to the pack, threw the stranger out. His body slammed against the stone wall of the house and he stared up at Morlock for a long moment, as if gathering breath to speak.

Then his body was dark with winged forms. The catbird scavengers had been waiting for their predator, and he had not disappointed them. In a matter of minutes the stranger was dead, dismembered, and devoured. Morlock drew in a pack stained with blood, shining blue threads of satiated gripgrass woven into the sewn-up slit.

Morlock carefully unwove the grass. It had caused him considerable trouble, preserving its integrity, and it served no purpose now. When he finally disentangled the gripgrass, a matter-of-fact voice near his feet inquired, “Do you want that?”

He looked down to see a single red flame burning a hole in the wooden floor. “Because if you don't want it,” the matter-of-fact flame remarked, “I'll take it.”

Morlock dropped the grass on the floor and the flame casually devoured it.

“A little
too
chewy,” the flame remarked smokily.

“The whole business was somewhat chewy,” Morlock replied. “But it's over now, I guess.” Taking some water from a nearby table, he set about sponging the blood off his backpack.

Morlock set the flame-nexus out to dry and searched the dead sorcerer's house for his stolen book of palindromes. He found it finally, or what was left of it, in a glass jar submerged in watery acid that was eating away the book's pages. It had passed the point of uselessness, so Morlock left it where it was.

Had Morlock been led to the dead sorcerer, or he to Morlock? Was the whole purpose of the encounter to deprive Morlock of the book of palindromes? He suspected as much.

If so, he should trust the book's last omen and continue his journey eastward.

He didn't know what awaited him there, but he gave it some thought as he left the watery sorcerer's house burning behind him in the winterwood.

E
very night for many days, Morlock had been dreaming about a house and a horse. The horse might have been Velox: Morlock couldn't see him or hear him, but he knew he was there, behind the house. The house was just a house, a little weatherworn cottage on an island in a deep blue-water lake between the unclaimed woods and the fuming foothills of the Burning Range. Morlock dreamed he was walking around the house trying to see the horse, but the horse kept moving to keep out of sight. That was all there was to the dream.

The first time, the dream was frustrating. The second time was maddening. The third left him thoughtful. He was deliberately not reaching out with his Sight to make contact with the future, as he suspected his enemy was laying traps for him in the tal-realm. But it seemed as if an especially insistent future was reaching out to make contact with him. He began to have the dream every night, sometimes more than once, as he continued his journey eastward, going deep into the crooked margin of the mountains to avoid a region to the south that some friendly crows had warned him about. His insight also said the place was dense with talic danger.

The fifteenth morning after the dreams began, he walked into a clearing between the unclaimed woods and the fuming foothills of the Burning Range, and there he saw a deep blue-water lake with a small island in it.
There was a wooden footbridge from the mainland to the island, and in the middle of the island was the cottage of his dream.

Morlock stepped onto the bridge. At that instant, with a roar and a clanking of chains, a fair-sized troll leapt out from under the bridge and landed atop the wooden walkway.

“Now I eat you!” the troll proclaimed. “I was set here with the precise and specific mandate to eat anyone on my bridge who crosses it without my permission, as you have done, so now I will eat you!” Its ear-braids quivered with anticipation. “Do you follow me, or shall I explain again?”

“I have not yet crossed the bridge,” Morlock pointed out.

“Oh!” The troll tugged fretfully in turn at the tufts of unbraided hair proceeding from several of its noses. “Oh. Damn it. And I'm hungry, too. All I've had to eat for the longest time has been fish, and a bite or two from the Pernicious Grishk that lives in the lake.”

“What's a grishk?”

“It's pernicious and lives in the lake. And it gets a bite out of me at least as often as I get one from it, so I'm not sure that even counts. Are you going to cross the bridge or what?”

“If you'll stand aside and permit me.”

The troll put several hands in its pockets, and the leftover hands behind its back, and stood toward the edge of the bridge. Morlock crossed over to the island and went up toward the cottage. The troll groaned when it realized how Morlock had tricked it and slunk down into the water under the bridge.

Morlock looked the cottage over carefully. He walked around it once, very slow, widdershins. He saw no hoofprints in the soft ground, of a horse or anything else.

That wasn't surprising. Morlock suspected the dream's meaning, if it meant anything, was that he would get news of Velox here.

He shrugged and knocked on the cottage door. It was opened by an extremely aged old woman with a bloodless wrinkled face and sunken gray eyes.

“Excuse me, madam,” Morlock said, “but I'm looking for my horse—”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” the old woman screamed, hiding behind her half-opened door.

“No,” Morlock said slowly. “Why would it be?”

“And that ‘disguise,’ I suppose you call it.”

“I don't.”

“You don't even not look like you!” she screamed.

“I'm not supposed to not look like me. If I understand what you're saying.”

“Look at those shoulders!” she hooted. “Bent like an ill-made bow! You can wear a black wig and fake a limp until Hell freezes over but you'll never fool me! You never did! You've fooled me too many times before!”

“I don't suppose you've seen a horse around here,” he said rather desperately. “A middle-aged black warhorse with silver eyes?”

“Is that supposed to be
funny?”

“Good day, madam,” he said, giving up. “I'm sorry to have bothered you.” He started to turn away.

“Stop!” she said, peering at him with sea gray eyes out of an ashen face. “What was that you said?”

“I'm sorry to have bothered you.”

“Can't be him,” she muttered to herself.
“Can't
be him. On his best day he wouldn't apologize for disembowelling your pet weasel.”

“I don't have a pet weasel, madam. Just a horse. I'll look elsewhere for him.”

“You'd better come in, then,” she said resignedly. “Your horse might be somewhere about the place. You must pardon me, young man; I'm almost completely crazy.”

“I hadn't noticed, madam,” he lied. It had been a long time since anyone had referred to Morlock as a
young man
but he took it in his somewhat irregular stride.

“Well, I wouldn't notice your horse if he were creeping around in my underwear. An intriguing thought, that.”

Intriguing
wasn't the word Morlock would have chosen, but he didn't know how to say so without seeming rude. At no time in his several centuries of life had a conversation ever gotten so completely away from him. The old lady waved her hands at him imperiously. He shrugged and stepped in through the door.

She led the way into the little room that made up the entirety of her little house and collapsed onto a stool by a table as if her legs wouldn't carry her any further. “What was it you wanted?” she demanded.

“I'm looking for my—”

“Oh, I remember all that. But you really mean it? It wasn't just a chance to get inside and rummage through my, er, things?”

Morlock thought it was possible she was moving her hips suggestively as she squatted on the stool. He decided that he had not noticed this, and that he wasn't going to, either. He shook his head decisively.

“Damn,” she said thickly, and coughed. “I was hoping there was something here you wanted. Because—well, because there's something I want you to do to—for me.”

“What's that?” Morlock asked.

“If experience is any guide, I'm about to die.” She coughed again and rubbed at her nose. Something white fell out of it and wiggled on the table. “I was hoping you'd bury me. I hate the thought of lying around the house and rotting away.” She coughed again. “And there's no one else to do it, you see.”

The white wriggling thing on the table was unquestionably a maggot. Morlock looked at it a moment and said, “I'll bury you, madam. Assuming you die fairly soon, that is. I'm still looking for my horse.”

“This hippophilia really becomes quite tiresome, after a while,” the old lady said crossly. “Is it a nice horse?” she asked wistfully.

“Not very,” Morlock admitted, “but we've been through a lot together. He was stolen from me by someone I think might harm him, so I'm trying to get him back. A dream led me here, but I suppose it was a false one.”

“So,” she said, nodding wisely, “you're a seer of visions. And, I suppose, a maker of things.”

“Yes.”

“The Two Arts! Seeing and Making, the Sight and the Strength! I knew something about them in my day.”

“I'm sure you did.”

“Meaning: you're sure you know more than I ever did. Well. Maybe you're right. But not everyone had my teacher, anyway. Although he taught Ambrosia twice as much as he did me—” She broke off in a coughing fit.

“Ambrosia, madam?” asked Morlock, when her coughing subsided. “Ambrosia Viviana? Do you know her?”

The old lady cackled. “Slightly. She's my daughter. That impresses you, eh? I wish she were here.” She started coughing again.

Ambrosia Viviana was Morlock's sister. That meant this deranged rotting old woman was his mother.

“Hard to die without anyone near me—only a stranger—” she gasped between coughs.

What was he to say?
I'm not a stranger; I'm your son.
Then she might say,
My son is a stranger.

She was still coughing, anyway, bent nearly double. He reached out in a mute meaningless gesture to comfort her, but she shied away and fell from the stool to the floor. “Oh, shit—” she gasped and then vomited a spray of maggots as her limbs spasmed briefly.

She wasn't coughing, or even moving now. Morlock bent down over her and wiped away the maggots from her face. She didn't seem to be breathing. There was no flutter of life beneath the withered breasts. His mother was dead.

There was a small well-kept garden outside the little house. He took the lifeless, strangely light body out there and buried it in the shade of a plum tree. He cut some slate from an outcropping he had seen up the weed-choked road and on it he carved an epitaph.

Here lies, far from her home,
Nimue Viviana
faithful traitor
loveless love
lost and found
Domina Laci
wife to Merlin Ambrosius
mother to Ambrosia Viviana
to Hope Nimuelle
and to Morlock Ambrosius,
who carved these words.
Requiescas in pace, mater perdita.

He set the stone above the fresh grave and then stepped back.

“Nice work,” his father's voice said, in grudging tones, behind him. “She'd have liked the Latin, especially. Was it just a slip, or did you know that
mater perdita
means both ‘lost mother' and ‘damned mother’?”

“I didn't know her well enough for the second one,” Morlock said, without turning.

“Oh, I think she would have enjoyed it,” Merlin's voice replied. “She always liked a play on words.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Don't get weepy on me, boy.”

“I'm not a boy, so I get weepy when it suits me.”

“Aren't you at least surprised I got here so fast?”

Morlock grunted skeptically. “Who says you're here?” he said, and turned.

Merlin's fetch was about a pace behind him.

The fetch is a mind's talic halo. Most people's fetches look like animals or gnomes or specters of some sort, and few ever see them except in dreams or the visionary state. Merlin's was more solid and useful; he had taught it to wear a cloak of visible light that resembled himself, and his conscious mind could dispatch it on errands.

“Did you take my horse?” Morlock asked Merlin's fetch.

Merlin's face twisted with annoyance. “Yes, and a lot of good it did me, too. I was hoping I could adapt its immortality to poor Nimue's case. But it died after only a few experiments, and now she's dead anyway. Oh well. Better luck next wife, I say.”

“Eh.”

“God Avenger, what a bore you are, Morlock! How am I supposed to make conversation with someone who just grunts at my witty remarks and wise sayings?”

Morlock shrugged indifferently. He was fairly sure Merlin was lying to him about something. Encouraging further witty remarks and wise sayings, if that's what they were, didn't seem like a good way of getting at the truth. In fact…

There were a limited number of ways by which a seer could project an
effective fetch very far from his body. The best way involved an anchor that had been put in talic stranj with the seer's focus of power. Breaking the stone would shatter the talic link and disperse the fetch.

Morlock drew Tyrfing and summoned the lowest level of vision.

It was what Merlin had been waiting for. The fetch bristled suddenly with talic force, striking at Morlock's awareness through his vision. Morlock deflected the lightning-like attack with Tyrfing and watched for lines of talic emanation from Merlin's suddenly blazing fetch.

Aha. There.

Morlock dismissed his vision and walked toward an unremarkable blue-gray stone at the edge of the woods.

“Oh, come now,” Merlin's voice sounded irritably behind him. “That's no way to win a quarrel! If you were any kind of—”

Morlock swung Tyrfing once, shattering the stone. Merlin's voice fell silent, and when Morlock turned around the fetch had disappeared.

In all likelihood, Merlin had other anchors hidden nearby. But probably he would wait to use them. Morlock was free from Merlin's peevish ranting, if not from his observation, for a time.

Morlock went into the house and began to sort through his dead mother's things. There was surprisingly little there: the place was almost like the house-sized mausoleums he had seen in Anhi. The Anhikhs often surrounded a dead body with a replica of the place where it had lived, giving its ghost the illusion of being home, so that it would not wander. Morlock found some books and marked-up sheets of paper, a few clothes, some household implements, cold-lamps for reading after dark, some firewood and firemakers beside the narrow hearth. But he found few clothes and no food or drink at all. It was incomplete, unreal.

One of the sheets of paper was a letter Nimue had written to herself.

Hello—

I am you. (Check your handwriting against mine and see if this isn't so.)

You are feeling confused right now and you don't remember much. Don't worry about that. Your memories will return, or at least some of them will.

Your name is Nimue Viviana. You live in this house. If you try to go far from it, someone will try to stop you. Sometimes he will call himself Merlin, sometimes other things. Whatever he says, don't believe him. He thinks he knows what is best for you, which means you cannot trust him about anything. But he can keep you from leaving this place and he will. There is a troll under the bridge and monsters in the water of the lake, and probably other guards besides.