Travellers' Rest (4 page)

“Hm,” said Morlock, still gazing with interest at the rickety shelf and the glass cage on it.

“That’s a big word for you,” cried Wyrth, goaded against his will into speech.

Kyrkylio had not once looked at Wyrth and he didn’t do so now. But he said to Morlock, “I can resect as well as augment, in case your servant’s loquacity troubles you.”

This was the perfect opportunity for Morlock to engage in some rallying at Wyrth’s expense, but as usual he failed to rise to the occasion. “If you threaten my apprentice again,” Morlock said flatly, “I will hold your oath violated.”

Kyrkylio unfolded his wings in vexation, then refolded them. “I meant no threat. Certainly I would rather avoid a conflict, if possible, as I assume you would.”

“Hm.”

“You killed my servant Iagiawôn, but I do not resent it. I know your reputation, and no doubt he gave you some cause of offense. Live by the sword; die by the sword. Let me show you—”

“What are those?” asked Morlock, pointing at the glass cage.

“Those. Oh. That. Yes. Well.”

Wyrth took a closer look at the cage that so fascinated Morlock. Inside it was a cloud of bugs that seemed to consist largely of wings and teeth. They were attacking the inside of the cage and had succeeded in etching the inside of the glass. Behind them, at the bottom of the cage, was a greenish lump of flesh with a single human eye.

“That was a failure of mine, I’m afraid,” Kyrkylio said. His lower, more insectile arms reached up and gently caught his upper, more human ones. Wyrth wondered if it was a gesture of concern or contemplation, like a man rubbing his hands together. “I attempted to make a single creature that was a collective of both sessile and motile parts. Unfortunately, the creature whose brain I used for the purpose was most unsuitable. It declined to reproduce and seems to resent me intensely. Periodically I must recage the collective, as the motile rovers eat through the glass. They would do me harm if they could. I could wish I had made their natural defenses a little less, oh, offensive.”

“Hm.”

By now the lifemaker’s insectile claws had sunk deeply into his more human arms, and a yellowish ichor began to exude from the scaly skin.

“I beg your pardon,” Wyrth said to Kyrkylio, “but you seem to be harming yourself.”

“What? Oh! That’s nothing. Er—thank you.” The insectile claws retracted suddenly (guiltily?) and Wyrth realized that much of the patterning on Kyrkylio’s skin must be from this sort of self-injury. The lifemaker was a being at war with himself. Wyrth wished he could bring this to his master’s attention somehow, but Morlock was still examining the rickety shelf.

“You should fix this,” he observed to Kyrkylio. “If the cage fell and broke, you’d be in a bad way.”

“Yes, yes, yes. I have plans to see to it.” The horns clicked irritably.

Kyrkylio showed Morlock a few more of his experiments that once had been men, women, and children and then said, “But I suppose you will be eager to tell me the purpose of your visit. It is pleasant for solitary adepts like you and me to visit and talk shop, but we both have our work to do.”

“I’ve come about a girl you took from the town. Her name is Iuinoe.”

“I’m afraid I don’t keep track of my subjects’ names. I give the successful ones new identities, and the others I dispose of.”

“That’s a problem.”

“I hope this is not some sort of, well, rescue mission. Our oaths were quite explicit, and I have instrumentalities to protect me if you violate your oath.”

“I said I’d ask about her. So I’m asking.”

“Well. I’m not really sure I can help you. The adults in town mostly surrender their children to me when they have a choice between that and surrendering themselves, so a lot of girls have passed through here. When was she taken?”

“Don’t know. She was from the hostelry, though.”

“Oh! The one with the sister!”

“Yes. She has a sister.”

“Now I know the one you mean. I would have shown her to you, but she isn’t finished yet. Come along; we’ll have a look at her.”

Kyrkylio grabbed a lamp with one of his hands and conducted them (or Morlock, really; he still hadn’t looked directly at Wyrth) up a short corridor to a kind of cell. It was lined with glass, like the cage that held the malefic collective being.

Inside the cell was a sort of animal. It looked like a cross between a partially shaven ape and a spider. It had eight legs, except the legs were really arms, and at the end of each was a human hand. The creature’s head was set on a hump in the middle of its back. When it saw them, its eyes gaped wide in fear and horror and it backed away, twisting its head from side to side. Its mouth moved, but Wyrth could not hear the words through the glass cage. It seemed to be saying “Help me!” … or perhaps “Kill me!”

“Now, you will notice,” Kyrkylio said, with professional enthusiasm, “how ineffectively she uses her additional limbs. She has a powerful emotional impetus to cover herself, but how awkwardly her limbs answer to her desire! She really only uses one pair fully; another pair she uses like legs; and the others she hardly uses at all. I’ve tried a number of experiments to train her in their use, but they all failed and now I’m convinced there is a real lack of cerebral capacity for the purpose.”

Morlock said nothing, but Kyrkylio hardly noticed.

“So the next natural step would be to augment her cerebrum, or perhaps add a new one. I’ve tried attaching several external grafts, but she rejected them all—you may be able to see the scar tissue just there at the base of her neck. So my latest thought, since she talks so much of her sister, was to make use of the younger girl. The two brains seem more likely to be complementary. I hope you won’t ask me to reconsider; I’m quite set on the project.”

“I’m set against it.”

“Well. Perhaps I can find a way to persuade you. Will you be in town long?”

“Long enough.”

“For the sake of collegial relations, I’m willing to suspend this project for a time. I don’t promise to end it, of course: I expect some collegiality in return! But perhaps we can negotiate some sort of agreement.”

“Maybe,” Morlock said. From his tone Wyrth knew this meant
Maybe when the ground gapes wide and swallows the three moons
, but Kyrkylio didn’t seem to be aware of it. The lifemaker’s bristly nose-heavy face beamed with professional cordiality, or something.

Kyrkylio escorted them to the exit of his cave, burbling happily about the nightmares he was compounding in its various nooks. As they passed by the rickety shelf, its glass cage buzzed with the attacks of the vengeful collective within.

“I can remove that for you,” Morlock said.

“As a gesture of good faith?” Kyrkylio seemed taken by the idea, yet also reluctant. “That’s very collegial of you. Very collegial indeed. I must say, I don’t know how all those horrible stories about you got started.”

Morlock shrugged. “I would take it out of here. That’s all. You’re in danger from it every moment, you know.”

“I know. But I hate to give up on a project, even when I know it’s failed.” Kyrkylio looked at the glass cage with longing and hatred. His insectile limbs started clawing at his human ones again, but in the throes of making his decision, he didn’t seem to be aware of it. “All right,” he said suddenly. “Please take it away. I’ll be grateful to you for it.”

“Eh,” Morlock said, and picked the glass cage up from the sagging shelf. The eye in the greenish fleshy mound looked sharply at him through the etched glass, then sharply at Kyrkylio. The vicious rovers redoubled their attacks on the glass wall.

“Now,” said the weevilly lifemaker as they reached the threshold of the cave, “I decline to annul my oath, and I hope you’ll do the same. It’s a good foundation for a collegial alliance, I think. We’ll visit again soon, and perhaps I can change your mind about my little project.”

Morlock said nothing to this; instead, he and Wyrth walked out of the cave into the blue of gloaming. Kyrkylio stood on the far side of the threshold and watched them for a moment, then turned back toward the inner cave.

When Morlock had taken three strides away from the cave threshold he turned and tossed the glass cage back into the lifemaker’s lair.

The cage shattered with a satisfying crash. It was followed by Kyrkylio’s shriek, “Your oath! Your oath! I invoke it!”

“I’m not in your cave, Kyrkylio,” Morlock called. “Nor am I harming you. Reach an agreement with your failed project.”

From where they stood, the maker and his apprentice could see the battle between the lifemaker and the life he had made, or marred. The fierce little rovers were chewing through Kyrkylio’s winged carapace. He could not reach them with either set of arms, his horns, or his proboscis, though he tried with all of them. He smashed his back against the walls of his cave, against tables in his workshop, and he did succeed in smashing some of the rovers as they fed on him. But others made it through his shell, and soon they were safe inside the lifemaker’s body. He shrieked in horror and pain and something like ecstasy as they tore through him, and finally his body fell across his own threshold, twitching and fluttering its wings uselessly. Presently it grew still. Moments later, amid a burst of yellowish ichor, a cloud of rovers emerged from the cavities where Kyrkylio’s eyes had been. The lifemaker was dead.

The cloud of ichor-stained rovers hovered in midair, looking out of the cave at Morlock and Wyrth. The dwarf was wondering if they shouldn’t retreat, lest they become the next item on the rovers’ menu. But they suddenly turned away and descended on the ruins of the glass cage.

Going back home? Wyrth wondered. Where else did they have to go?

Morlock stepped over the corpse on the threshold and Wyrth hesitantly followed him. As he did, he saw what the rovers were doing. They were attacking the greenish lump with the human eye—the sessile portion of their collective self, if Wyrth had understood the now-dead lifemaker.

Suddenly, as one, the rovers ceased to move. The half-eaten fleshy lump was also still.

“Suicide,” Morlock said. “Its vengeance on Kyrkylio was complete and it had nothing else to live for.”

Wyrth nodded slowly, and then he said, “God Sustainer. There’s a whole cave of things like that in here.”

“Yes, we have work to do. Go down to the Travellers’ Rest and get our backpacks. Tell them as little as you can.”

Wyrth gaped at him for a moment. The crooked man opened his hands and waited. Wyrth finally took the hint. He ran out of the cave and sprinted down the hill. When he returned, Morlock had already begun the long grim task before them.

A few days later, lost children and strangers began to wander down from the hills into the half-empty town of Boulostreion. All were seamed with scars where they had been patched together by Morlock Ambrosius and his apprentice.

Some said this was the vengeance of the Evil One on them for accepting the wicked bargain with the slain lifemaker, and some said it was a trick of Morlock’s for his own amusement. Some waited anxiously for the return of their lost ones; some feared it, and the attendant explanations of why they had been sacrificed for the good of others. Not every family who had lost someone was blessed or cursed by a return, but once again there were two daughters under the roof at the Travellers’ Rest.

One day, without talking to anyone else in her family, Raelio put aside her morning’s work and walked up into the terror-haunted hills. Few walked there still, because Morlock was now known to be living in the lair of the lifemaker he had killed and dragged to hell. But Raelio was not afraid of Morlock, because she knew they hated the same things.

Long before she saw the cave she knew where it was: there was a tall column of greasy black smoke rising like an accusing finger at the sky. She figured that was the place, and it was.

When she arrived there she saw that Morlock and Wyrth were burning things. The cave inside was bare, as far as she could see. Their backpacks were lying on the hill, laced up and ready for travel.

“You’re going home,” she said accusingly to the crooked man’s shoulders.

He turned and looked at her with his cold gray eyes. “I have no home,” he said.

“Ah,” she said, after some thought of Travellers’ Rest, and the strange silences there these days, “a home’s not so great, I guess.”

He shrugged.

“You’re leaving, anyway. Not staying and taking over Kyrkylio’s business. People say you are, but they’re liars, I guess.”

“They’re wrong, anyway. You can tell them.”

“I tell them all the time, only they never listen. Listen, Iuinoe—she says … she said you should kill her, but you didn’t kill her.”

Morlock shrugged.

“I guess you don’t say much. Anyway. I wanted to say. Thanks for not killing her. She was talking like she was going to kill herself for a while, but now I don’t think she’s going to. Not totally sure, anyway.”

“It was hard for her,” the dwarf said. “We can’t even guess how horrible it was. Remember that, and help her all you can.”

“How?”

Wyrth shrugged uneasily and looked at his master. Morlock opened his hands and turned away to shoulder his backpack. The dwarf stared after him, then followed to do the same.