This Crooked Way (2 page)

M
ore or less at the same time, young Dhyrvalona said,

“I don't understand?”

“Why didn't he take the drink?”

“Was he afraid it was poisoned?”

“A harmony,” her nurse sang to her. “A harmony of meanings, Dhyrvalona dear. You may have three mouths, but I don't have three minds. Harmonize your questions the way you harmonize your voices; let your wisdom vibrate in the listener's mind, and she may return the favor.”

Little Dhyrvalona's three adorable mouths harmonized three different but related obscenities she had heard her armed guards use.

Gathenavalona, Dhyrvalona's nurse, snapped her mandibles and extended all three of her arms in angular gestures of rebuke.

After a tense moment, young Dhyrvalona covered each of her three eyes with a palp-cluster, an expression of grief or sorrow—in this context, an apology. She peered through her palps to see how her nurse was taking it.

Gathenavalona relaxed the tension in her mandibles, giving her pyramidal face a less forbidding appearance. Her arms changed from harsh angles
to soothing curves, and she stroked the top of Dhyrvalona's pointed head with one gentle palp-cluster.

Humbly, Dhyrvalona sang,

“But I still don't understand.”

“Learning is a lasting joy.”

“Ignorance is an endable grief.”

Gathenavalona gestured strong approval and replied, more prosaically, “You know how the one-faced fill their one-mouths with rotten grape juice and old barley water?”

“Ick.”

“So nasty.”

“A single mouth! How ugly and stupid!”

The remarks didn't harmonize in sound or sense, but the nurse was not inclined to be strict with her charge these days. Young Dhyrvalona was growing up; soon she would take the place of old Valona in the Vale of the Mother. That would be a proud and sad day for the nurse, and she wanted the days and nights until then to be less proud and less sad.

“The juice makes some one-faceds happy; it makes some sad; it makes some sick. For Morlock—”

“Maker!”

“Traveller!”

“Destroyer!”

“—for Morlock Ambrosius, it does all these things. The farmer did not intend to harm him. His kindness would have harmed him, though. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Neither do you.”

“The Destroyer is beyond understanding.”

Gathenavalona sang.

“Empty your mind of lies.”

“Fill your mind with truth.”

“Nothing is beyond understanding.”

Young Dhyrvalona opened her eyes and her ear-lids, indicating a willingness to be instructed.

The nurse sang.

“Kindness can kill.”

“Enmity can heal.”

“Surgeon and destroyer both wield sharp blades.”

Young Dhyrvalona gestured acknowledgement, but incomplete understanding.

The nurse sang.

“We are nothing to Morlock.”

“Morlock is nothing to us.”

“Yet, on a day, we met and wounded each other.”

The nurse paused and resumed.

“A mother was wounded.”

“A mother was slain.”

“A mother stood waiting in death's jaws.”

The nurse paused and resumed.

“Morlock stole the hatred of the gods.”

“The gods stole our hatred of Morlock.”

“That end/beginning was our beginning/end.”

The nurse paused and resumed.

“That is why, once a year, we wear the man-masks.”

“That is why, once a year, we curse the gods-who-hate-us.”

“That is why, once a year, we sing of who destroyed us.”

Young Dhyrvalona cried out impatiently,

“All right, I'm trying to be good.”

“Night is falling; the time for tales is ending.”

“You haven't even told me about the horse!”

Gathenavalona blinked one eye in amusement and sang indulgently.

“A horse is almost like us.”

“Horses have four legs, anyway, not two.”

“For a man to lose a horse is a serious thing…”

Young Dhyrvalona snuggled down into her nest and prepared to be entertained. She knew this part of the story well, of course: the nurse told her a little more every year, but this was one of the earliest parts and she had heard it many times.

This year, her nurse had promised, she would tell her the whole tale, even if it took many nights, every night of the annual festival. The grown-ups of the Khroic clan of Valona's heard the whole story every year, and now she would too. That was because, the nurse had explained to her, she was almost a grown-up now. Young Valona could see that this made the nurse sad, but she herself was very happy; she couldn't wait to grow up. And she was so glad it was the season of Motherdeath, the happiest time of the year.

M
orlock awoke because the earth was shuddering beneath him. He'd been raised under the mountains of Northhold and he knew in his bones that, if the ground moved, he had better move, too.

He rolled to one side to free himself from his sleeping cloak and leaped to his feet. By then the stone monster had plunged its fist or paw deep into the ground where Morlock had been lying.

The stone monster. It was clearly made of stone; at first he thought it was striped like a tiger, but then he saw that it was ringed or ridged down its long leonine body to the end of its four limbs. It swung its heavy maneless head toward him, clicking oddly as it moved; the stone teeth in its crooked ill-matched jaws streamed with some red fluid in the gray morning light. Its eyes gleamed like moonlit crystal or water as they focused on him and it prepared to leap.

“Tyrfing!” Morlock shouted, and held out his hand for his sword. It didn't come to him: even though he was not in rapture, he felt the talic impulse as it tried to reach him. Something was holding it back.

The stone beast jumped at him and he leaped to one side. The old wound in his leg was already aching; he hoped he wouldn't have to try to outrun this thing. He reached down and grabbed two fistfuls of dirty snow and threw them at the stone beast's eyes.

It responded strangely, like a startled animal, blinking fiercely and shaking its head to get the grit from its eyes.

In Morlock's opinion, those eyes were made of glass or crystal in some maker's workshop; the beast's whole body was a cunningly made puzzle, its joints clicking as pieces shifted so that it could move. He doubted that the thing could feel as an animal's body feels.

But it
acted
as if it could feel the dirt in its eyes; it expected to feel discomfort from the snow. At the very least, it was perplexed when something obscured its vision.

That told him something: he was not facing a golem. Golems do only what they have been designed to do, fulfilling the instructions on their life-scrolls. It was unlikely that a maker would waste scroll space telling a golem to react emotionally like an animal when something got in its eyes. Somehow a living entity was directing the motions of the stone monster.

And if it was alive, it could be killed.

Morlock's back was against the trunk of an oak tree, its crooked limbs leafless and whistling in the breeze of the winter morning. He reach up and tore one of the limbs loose from the trunk.

The stone beast, floundering through the snow, charged Morlock, who circled behind the tree. If he moved carefully, he could keep to the hardened crust of snow and move faster than the beast. It lunged toward him; he continued around the tree and, leaping into the trench of snow left in the stone beast's wake, he struck the beast as hard as he could across the back of its lumpy head.

The stone beast snarled, a grinding sound of rock on rock, and swung about to face him. Morlock fled back around the tree. The stone beast rose up on three legs and struck the trunk of the tree with its right forepaw. The oak tree shattered, the trunk split down the middle.

Giving vent to the turbulence of his emotions, Morlock said “Eh,” and ran.

The beast was after him in a moment, but he took a twisting path though the nearby trees, keeping to the surface crust of snow when he could, and managed to stay barely ahead of the thing. Twice he managed to get in more blows to its head—once from the side, once from behind—and he thought that its movements were getting more sluggish, the beast groggier.

His twisting course took him toward the nearby Sar River. His thought was that, if worse came to worst, he could swim away from his stone enemy (although the cold water in this cold weather might kill him faster than the monster could).

As he zigged to avoid the stone beast's lumbering zag, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that one of the thing's glass eyes was cracked. The stone head kept twitching and shaking, as if to free the eye of some obstruction. (The shattered eye itself?)

He whirled about and swung the branch with both hands, striking the beast on the side of its head with the broken eye. The glass fell away and all that remained was a dark hole in the stone beast's face. It drew back, as if aghast. A thin trickle of blood, like tears, ran down the gray stone face from the empty eye socket.

Morlock turned on his heel and ran straight toward the river.

It was after him in a moment, but he had reached the icy marsh along the river's edge before it caught up with him. It came forward in a great leap and knocked him off his feet in the shallow ice-sheathed water as it landed behind him. The great stone body surged as Morlock scrabbled for his club on the icy surface of the water and struggled to regain his feet in the soft ground. The moments passed like hours; it seemed impossible that the beast would not recover and strike him dead before he could arm himself. But, in fact, it didn't. When he regained his feet he saw why.

The beast was stuck in the mud under the shallow water, unable to free its deadly limbs from the soft ground. Morlock realized this was his chance; he vaulted past the beast's snapping jaws and one-eyed face to land on its broad shoulders. Standing there he delivered savage blow after savage blow to the back of the beast's head. The stone body writhed and chittered beneath him, but in time it began to move slower and slower. At last it fell still; its snout slumped into the icy stream, and bloody water bubbled from the empty eye socket. The thing was dead.

Morlock staggered off the beast's back and tossed aside his now-splintered club. He took a few moments to breathe and gather his strength. But not too long: the cold was a pain gnawing at him, especially the limbs that had been soaked in the river.

He went to change into dry clothes, shivering by the smoking remains of last night's fire. He saw his sword, Tyrfing, bound in its sheath to a nearby boulder; he doubted that the stone beast's paws could have managed that, even if its brain could have planned it. That bothered him. He saw Velox nowhere, and that bothered him very much. He remembered the red fluid on the stone monster's stony teeth.

In dry clothes, after freeing Tyrfing, he went in search of Velox. And he found what he had feared he might: what was evidently the scene of a struggle, some distance away from Morlock's camp. There were the marks of savage bloody blows in the snow and the stiff unyielding earth below. There were some stray horsehairs, bloody hoofmarks in the snow and earth, but no body, not even stray bones or flesh.

He had seen something like this in his youth, where a monster had dismembered and eaten a horse on the long road facing the western edge of the world.

“Doubtful,” Morlock reminded himself. There was more, or perhaps less, to this scene than met the eye.

He spent the rest of the morning dragging the dead body of the stone beast from the swampy margin of the river. He took his time because he wanted to avoid getting soaked again, using xakth-fiber ropes and a pulley system to haul the thing up from the water to an open area not far from his camp.

Not pausing for breakfast or lunch—eating didn't seem advisable, given his plans—he took Tyrfing and gutted the stone beast, laying bare its insides from its stumpy tail to its blunt snout.

There was indeed some kind of fleshy brain in the rocky skull. It was badly swollen from the beating Morlock had given it, but he didn't think it was a man's or a woman's brain. A dragon's? A dwarf's? Something else? Morlock couldn't tell. He was no connoisseur of brains.

The contents of the stone belly told an interesting tale indeed. There were multitudes of splintered bone fragments, a cracked hoof or two, an oddly familiar pair of black horse-ears, a brown equine eye, other more horrible things, all swimming in a strange pale fluid that stank like a torturer's conscience.

That was enough. Morlock wiped his sword carefully and sheathed it, then walked away. The stone belly told an interesting tale: that the beast had killed and eaten Velox before attacking Morlock. And the tale was a lie. Most
black horses have brown eyes, but Velox did not, and there simply was not enough bulk in the stone beast's belly to account for an entire horse.

Morlock boiled water, washed his hands, made tea, and thought.

Every lie is shaped by the truth it is meant to conceal. What did the lie in the stone beast's belly tell him?

That Velox was probably alive, for one thing—seized by a maker skilled enough to make the stone beast and ruthless enough to use it. He knew of only one such, but there might be many; it would be best to keep an open mind.

Normally he would have sought out a crow who might have seen something, for he had an affinity for crows, but they were rarer in this region than they had been once. Using his Sight to search for the maker and his stolen horse might be a mistake, though. There were traps that could be set in the realms of vision that could capture or harm even the wary. Still, he needed more information before he set out in search of Velox. And there might be a way…

He went to his pack and sorted through it until he found a certain book.

He had written it himself in the profoundly subtle “palindromic” script of ancient Ontil. Each page was a mirror image of the one it faced; both pages had to be inscribed simultaneously. There was a page for each of the days of the year, and one for each day of the “counter-year” that runs backward as time moves forward. It was useful for reading the future or the past; merely to possess it sometimes gave one clairvoyant experiences. He had fashioned it over a long period, beginning last year, after he had some indication that he might have to confront a maker as gifted as himself whose talents in the Sight were even greater than his.

He turned to the day's date and read the palindromes for that day and its counter-day. Most of them meant nothing to him. But there was one that he came back to again and again.

Alfe runilmao vo inila. Alinio vo amlinu refla.

Which might be rendered:
From the skulls, [he] walked south. A maker goes into the north.

“The skulls” might be “the River of Skulls”: the Kirach Kund (to give it the Dwarvish name by which it was generally known). It was the high pass that divided the Whitethorn and Blackthorn ranges, the only way past those towering mountains…for those who had the courage to take it.

This didn't make his decision for him: like any omen it might mean anything or nothing. But his intuition confirmed it: he would go north.

Another man might have weighed the odds on recovering the horse against the fact that he preferred to walk. He would have thought twice about whether getting the horse back was worth it.

But there was a bond of loyalty between Morlock and Velox, and Morlock was not the sort to question that bond, or the obligations it might entail.

Also, he had nothing else to do. He struck camp and, before the sun had descended much from its zenith, he was walking along the river northward to Sarkunden.