This Crooked Way (4 page)

Morlock shook his head. “I understand the Sarkunden garrison still runs scouting missions into the Kirach Kund,” he said, naming the mountain pass to the north of Sarkunden.

“Ye-e-es,” Charis said slowly.

“I can't remain in the empire, as you know. I can't go west—”

“No one goes into the Wardlands.”

“In any case, I can't. I dislike Anhi and Tychar, and therefore would not go east.”

“You intend to cross the Kirach Kund!”

“Yes. It is done from time to time, I believe.”

“By armed companies. Nor do they always survive.”

Morlock lifted his wry shoulders in a shrug. “I have done it. But I was once taken prisoner by the Khroi and am reluctant to risk it again.”

“The Khroi take only prey, never prisoners. You will excuse my being so downright, but we live in the Khroi's shadow, here, and we know something about them.”

“They made an exception for me, once. They may not make the same mistake again. It would be better for me if I knew what the imperial scouts know—what hordes are allied to each other, which are at war, where the latest fighting is, where dragon-cavalry has been seen.”

“I see.” Charis's face twisted. “I have never meddled with strictly military matters before. It will strain my relationship with the garrison commander.”

Morlock lifted his crooked shoulders in a shrug. “You could hire a number of human servants. If—”

“No!” Charis shouted. “No people! I won't have it!” His nostrils flared with hatred; he neglected to move his eyebrows expressively.

“Very well,” he said at last. “I'll get you your news. You make me my golems.” And they settled down to haggle over details.

On the appointed day, Charis strode into Morlock's workroom, unable to disguise his feelings of triumph. “Oh, Morlock, you must come and see this. Say, you've been cleaning up in here!”

A shrug from the crooked shoulders. “My work's done. I hope you like your golems.”

“They're
marvellous
. I'm so grateful. One of them speaks nothing but Kaenish! And I don't know a word!”

A smile was a rare crooked thing on Morlock's dark face. “You'll have to learn, I guess.”

“Wonderful. But come along to my workshop. The guardsman will be along presently, and I badly want to show you this before you depart. Oh, do leave that,” he said, as the other began to reach for the sword belt hanging on the wall. “You won't want it, and there's no place for it in my room.”

They went together to Charis's workshop. Body parts fashioned in clay of various shades lay scattered all over the room. There was a positive clutter of arms on the worktable—Charis had mentioned to Morlock at supper last night that he was “on an arm jag,” and now it could be seen what he meant.

Charis worked by inspiration, crafting dozens of arms or legs, for instance, as the mood took him, getting a feel for the body part and creating subtle differences between the members in the series. In the end he would construct golems like jigsaw puzzles out of pieces he had already made, and improvise a life-scroll that suited the body. His other skills as a sorcerer were quite minor, as he freely admitted, but his pride as a golem maker was fully justified.

So far, though, irises had defeated him. In everything else he had proved a ready pupil to Morlock, even in the manipulation of globes of molten glass, a difficult magic. But creating the fan-ring assemblies of paper-thin sheets of gem had proved the most challenging task of Making he had ever undertaken.

His latest efforts lay on the worktable, two small rings of purple amethyst flakes, glittering among the chaos of clay arms. He watched anxiously as the other bent down to examine them.

“Hm.” A hand reached out. “An aculeus, please.” Charis quickly handed over the needlelike probe. The skilled hands made the artificial irises expand, contract, expand again. Finally the maker's form straightened (insofar as it ever could, Charis thought, glancing scornfully at the crooked shoulders), saying, “Excellent. You should have no trouble now making lifelike eyes for your golems.”

Charis sighed in relief. “I'm so glad to hear you say so. Really, I'm deeply in your debt.”

A shrug. “You can pay me easily, with news from the pass.”

“I'm afraid that would hardly cover it,” Charis said regretfully, and pushed him over, onto the table. The clay arms instantly seized him and held him, a long one wrapping itself like a snake across his mouth, effectively gagging him.

Charis carefully swept the artificial irises off the table into his left hand and, moving back, commanded, “Table: stand.”

The table-shaped golem tipped itself vertically and, unfolding two stumpy human legs from under one of its edges, stood. Its dozens of mismatched arms still firmly held Morlock's struggling form.

“I'm sorry about this—I really am,” Charis said hastily, in genuine embarrassment. “When push came to shove, though, it occurred to me that my relationship with the garrison commander simply couldn't take the strain of fishing for secret military information. You've no idea how stuffy he is. Also, I'm not convinced the news would be as useful to you as you think, and you might hold a grudge against me. You've given me so much, and I'm afraid—that is, I don't like to think about you holding a grudge, that's all. So this is better—not for you, I quite see that. But for me. Guardsmen!”

From a side door three imperial guardsmen entered, the fist insignia of Keepers of the Peace inscribed on their breastplates. They eyed the inhuman golem and its struggling victim with distaste and fear.

“Have it let him go,” the senior guard directed. “We'll take him in.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Charis exploded. “This man is the most powerful maker in the worlds, and a dangerous swordsman besides. If you
think that he is going to quietly walk between you to his place of execution, you—Look here: let's not quarrel. You'll get your reward whether you bring him in dead or alive. I simply can't risk his surviving to take revenge on me, don't you see? Cut his head off here. That's what we agreed. Don't worry about the golem; it was made for this purpose.”

“They say Ambrosius's blood is poison,” one of the other guardsmen offered quaveringly. “They say—”

“Gentlemen, it is your own blood you ought to be concerned about,” Charis remarked. “This man is lethal. He has been condemned to death by the Emperor himself. You have him helpless. I've paid you well to come here, and you'll be paid even better when you bring his head to your captain. What more needs to be said?”

The senior guard nodded briskly and said, “Tervin: your sword.”

“Hey!” shouted the junior addressed. “I'm not going to—”

“No. I am. But I'm not going to use my own sword. I paid a hundred eagles for that thing, and I don't want it wrecked if his blood eats metal, like they say. Your weapon's standard issue. Give it to me.”

Tervin silently surrendered his sword; the senior guard stepped forward and remarking, in a conversational tone, “In the name of the Emperor,” lopped off the head of the struggling victim. The sword bit deeply into the table-golem; several of the arms fell with the severed head to the floor.

The senior guard leapt back immediately to avoid the gush of poisonous Ambrosial blood, then took another step back when he saw that there
was
no gush of blood. The headless form in the table-golem's arms continued its useless struggle.

“No,” croaked Charis, his throat dry. “This can't be happening.”

He stepped forward, as if against his own will, and touched the gleaming edge of the severed neck. It was clay. He reached down into the open throat and drew out a life-scroll inscribed in Morlock Ambrosius's peculiar hooked style. The body ceased to move.

“They told me you were cheap,” Morlock's voice sounded behind and below him.

He turned and, looking down, met the calm gray gaze of the severed head that looked like Morlock's.

“They told me you were cheap,” the severed head remarked again, “so I expected this. I am somewhere you can't reach me. Have the information ready when I send for it and I'll hold no grudges. But do not betray me again.”

“I won't,” whispered Charis, knowing he would have nightmares about this moment as long as he lived. “I promise. I promise I won't.” Then he turned away from the suddenly lifeless head to soothe the frightened guards with gold.

That night the unbeheaded and authentic Morlock lay dreaming in the high cold hills north of Sarkunden, but he wasn't aware of it. To him it seemed he was lying, wrapped in his sleeping cloak, watching the embers of his fire, wondering why he was still awake.

An old woman walked into the cool red circle of light around Morlock's dying campfire. He could not see her face. She bent down and took the book of palindromes from Morlock's backpack and flipped through it until she reached the page for that day. She carried it over and showed it to him. Her index finger pointed to a palindrome:
Molh lomolov alinio cret. Terco inila vo lom olhlom.

Which might be rendered:
Blood red as sunset marks the road north. Son walks east into the eastering sun.

He looked up from the book to her face. He still could not see it. He wasn't able to see it, he realized suddenly, because he never had seen it. Then he awoke.

He opened his eyes to find the book of palindromes open in his hand. It was his index finger resting on the palindrome he had read in his dream.

Morlock got up and restowed the book in his pack. Then he settled down and built up the fire to make tea: he doubted he would sleep any more that night.

He was caught up in some conflict he didn't understand with a seer whose skill surpassed his own. Any omen or vision he received was doubly important because of this, but it was doubly suspect as well.

He much preferred Making to Seeing: the subtleties of vision were often lost on him. In a way, he had made the book of palindromes so that he would have some of the advantages of Seeing through an instrument of Making. He
thought the omen pointing him northward was a real omen, and it was possible that this one was, too. But it was possible that one or both had been sent by his enemy to mislead him.

Morlock drank his tea and thought the matter over all night. By sunrise he had struck camp and was walking along the crooked margin of the mountains eastward, keeping his eyes open for he knew not what.

O
ne morning, after many days of travel eastward, Morlock awoke to find his pack had been slit and the book of palindromes stolen. He spent some time thinking about why the thief had stolen that one thing, and what the theft might mean. In the end, he shouldered his violated pack, belted on his sword, and took after the thief.

Morlock was a master of makers, not trackers, but the ground was soft in early spring and the track fairly easy to follow, perhaps too easy. The trail led north and east, toward a place Morlock had particularly wanted to avoid.

When the thief's trail took him as far as the winterwood, as he had known it must, Morlock Ambrosius sat down to think. To enter there was to gamble with his life, and Morlock hated gambling: it was wasteful and he was thrifty—some said cheap. Still, there was the book…. And the note. It had been staked to the ground, just next to his slit pack…staked with a glass thorn from the same pack. (The chamber of the thorn was broken and the face inside was dark and lifeless. Another score to settle!) The message was simply a stylized figure of a hand with the fingers pointing northward…toward the forest of Tychar, the winterwood. The meaning was as clear as the slap in the face the symbol represented:
Forget your book. It's gone where you can't follow.
The note was addressed “Ambrosius.”

So it was someone who knew him, someone bold enough to rob him, someone who had preferred, when he was vulnerable, to insult him rather than kill him. He had a desire to meet this person.

As he sat, pondering the dark blue trunks of the winterwood, he found the desire had not faded.

He kindled a fire with the
Pursuer
instrumentality. As he was waiting for it to grow to optimal strength, he took off his pack and set about repairing the slit. There was a patch of gripgrass not far away; he spotted it by the long deerlike bones of an animal it had killed. He drew a few plants from the ground, taking care not to break the stems or tear the central roots. He sewed up the slit in his pack, carefully weaving the gripgrass plants into the seam.

The fire was high enough, then, so he took the thief's note and burned it in the
Pursuer
fire with a pinch of chevetra leaf. The smoke traveled north and east, against the wind, toward the forest: that was the way the thief had gone.

They called it “the winterwood.” The trees stood on high rocky ground; it was cold there, even in summer. The trees there, of a kind that grew nowhere else, flowered in fall and faded in spring. They resembled dark oaks, except their leaves were a dim blue and their bark had a bluish cast.

Just now it was early spring; patches of snow lay, like chewed crusts, beneath the hungry-looking trees. The leaves, crooked blue veins showing along the withered gray surfaces, were like the hands of dying men. They rustled irritably in the chill persistent breeze, as if impatient to meet and merge with the earth.

Morlock did not share their impatience. When he saw the smoke from his magical fire enter the tree-shadowed arch of a pathway (a clear path leading deep into those untravelled woods) he shook his head suspiciously.

So he sat down again and took off his shoes. After writing his name and a few other words on the heel of his left shoe, he trimmed a strip of leather from the sole and tied it around his bare left foot at the arch. He did the same with the other shoe (and foot). He muttered a few more words (familiar to those-who-know). Then he picked up the shoes, one in each hand, and tossed them onto the path. They landed, side by side, toes forward, about two paces distant.

He stood up and moved his feet experimentally. The empty shoes mimicked the motion of his feet. He stepped forward onto the path; the shoes
politely maintained the two-pace distance, hopping ahead of him step by step. Morlock nodded, content. Then he strapped his backpack to his slightly crooked shoulders and walked, barefoot, into the deadly woods.

Morlock first became aware of the trap through a sensation of walking on air.

He stopped in his tracks and looked at his shoes. They stood on an ordinary stretch of path, dry earth speckled with small sharp stones. But just in front of his bare feet he saw a dark shoe-shaped patch of nothingness.

Morlock nodded and scraped his right foot on the path; the right shoe mimicked it, brushing away a paper-thin surface of earth suspended in the air, revealing the nothingness beneath.

“Well made,” Morlock the Maker conceded. No doubt the pit beneath the path concealed some deadly thing—that was rather crude. But Morlock liked the sheet of earth hanging in the air, and would have liked to know how it was done.

Carefully approaching the verge of the pit, he peered through the empty footprint. The pit was about twice as deep as Morlock was tall. At its bottom was a fire-breathing serpent with vestigial wings, perhaps as long as the pit was deep. The serpent wore a metal collar, apparently bolted to its spine; the collar was fastened to a chain anchored to the sheer stone wall of the pit. The serpent, seeing Morlock, roared its rage and disappointment.

“Who set you here, serpent?” Morlock asked.

“I set myself,” the worm sneered. “This chain is a clever ruse to deceive the unwary.”

“I have gold,” Morlock observed.

The serpent fell quiet. Its red-slotted eyes took on a greenish tint.

Morlock reached into his pocket and brought forth a single coin. He swept away the dirt hanging in the air and held the coin out for the serpent to see.

It saw. Its tongue flickered desperately in and out. Finally it said, “Very well. Throw me the coin.”

Morlock dropped the gold disc into the pit. “Tell me now.”

The serpent roared in triumph, “I
tell you nothing!
Only a fool gives gold for nothing. Go away, fool.”

Morlock (he knew the breed) patiently reached back into his pack and brought forth a handful of gold coins.

Silence fell like a thunderbolt. Morlock held the gold coins out and let the serpent stare at them through his fingers.

“Tell me now,” Morlock said at last.

“It was a magician from beyond the Sea of Worlds,” the serpent replied, too readily. “He said I could eat your flesh, but must leave the bones. I said I would break the bones and eat the marrow, and no power in the world could stop me. He called me a bold worm, strong and logical. He agreed about the bones. Then he rode away on a horse as tall as a tree.”

Morlock allowed a single coin to fall into the pit.

“More!” The word rose on a tongue of flame through the mist of venom blanketing the serpent.

“I will give you two more. For the truth.”

“All!” shouted the worm. “All! All! All!”

“The truth.”

“It was a Master Dragon of the Blackthorn Range. He—”

Morlock snapped the fingers of his left hand twice. The two coins that had fallen into the pit rose glittering out of the cloud of venom and landed on his outstretched palm.

“Thief!” the serpent screamed.

“Liar,” Morlock replied. In the language they were speaking it was the same word.

There was a long silence, broken by the serpent's roar of defeat. “I don't
know
who he was! He came on me while I was asleep. I didn't wake up until he drove this bolt into my neck. Take your gold and go!”

“What did he look like?” Morlock demanded. “Describe him.”

“Describe him! Describe him!” the serpent hissed despairingly. “He was no different from you.”

Morlock shrugged. He'd met serpents better able to distinguish between human beings. But he had never supposed his interlocutor a genius among worms. He opened both his hands and scattered gold into the pit.

As he rose to go the serpent called, “Wait!”

Morlock waited.

“I'm hungry,” the serpent said insinuatingly.

“Then?”

“Must I be more explicit? I was promised a meal, yourself, if I permitted myself to be staked in this pit. I am staked in this pit, and have been denied the meal by the most offensive sort of trickery. You are the responsible party, and your double obligation is clear. I ask only that you remove any buckles or metal objects you may have about your person, for I have a bad tooth—”

“No.”

“But this tooth—”

“You may not eat me.”

“Be reasonable. I won't eat you all at once,” the serpent offered hopefully.

Morlock shook his head, declining this reasonable offer. “Nevertheless,” he added slowly (for it occurred to him this creature would certainly die if it remained staked in the pit), “I will set you free for some slight charge. Perhaps a single gold coin.”

There was a pause as the worm struggled between the prospect of certain death or the loss of any part of its new wealth. “Never!” it snarled at last.

Morlock walked away. The worm's voice followed him, carrying threats and abuse but never an offer to change. Morlock ignored it and presently it ceased.

The path came to an end just beyond the pit. This left him at something of a loss as to where to go next, but there was one good thing about it: he could put his shoes back on.

He sat down and tugged the leather strips from his dusty feet, breaking the spell. He heard footsteps and looked up to see his shoes running away into the dense bluish woods.

Morlock was aghast. Some spirit or invisible creature had clearly stepped into his shoes as they preceded him down the path. When the spell was broken they had stolen the shoes.

He had to recover those shoes. He had made them with his own hands; he had worn them for months; he had written his own name and other magical words on them. He would never be safe if he did not recover them.

Leaping to his feet, he heard footsteps crackling eastward through the blue-green underbrush. Heedlessly he followed them.

It was not long before the poisonous blue leaves began to sting his bare feet. These had already been scratched and bruised by his barefoot walk down the stony path. The slight pain from the poison naggingly reminded him that if he walked for long in these woods without protection for his feet the poison would accumulate in his lower limbs and they would die. Then he would face the unpleasant alternatives of self-amputation or death.

The shoes seemed to be aware of his danger. At every turn they plunged into the thickest underbrush, treading down hard to leave a path sharp with broken sticks and poison leaves.

But their strategy was not an unqualified success. Whatever their guiding intelligence was, it did not provide Morlock's sheer physical mass: an undoubted advantage in storming through wild shrubbery. The shoes became entangled for long moments in places where Morlock simply brushed through or leapt over, and he closed steadily.

In a gap without trees he drew to a halt and listened, knee-deep in leafy poison. Silence fell in the winterwood. The crashing through blue bracken and greenish underbrush had ceased. His shoes had taken cover somewhere.

His heart fell. He was bound to lose a waiting game. He seized the first heavy branch that came to hand, tore it loose from its tree, and began to beat savagely about the dense covert of bushes.

It was sheer luck he glanced up to see his fugitive shoes weaving and dodging among the close-set trees on the opposite side of the narrow clearing. Morlock gave a crowlike caw of dismay and dashed off in pursuit. But almost as soon as he spotted them they disappeared in the woods beyond.

Morlock forced himself to halt at the place he had last seen the shoes. He listened. Again a sly chill quiet had descended on the winterwood. There was no light footfall, no crunch of leaf or snap of twig—not so much as the rustle of leather soles edging forward in the grass. The shoes had taken cover again. And they were nearby; he was sure of it.

He turned slowly, a full circle, examining every rock, stone, bush, or tree in sight. He saw no trace of his shoes. He moved forward, as quietly as possible,
striving to make no sound that might cover the shoes' retreat. He saw nothing. He heard nothing.

After taking ten paces forward, he halted. He had missed them somehow; they could not have come much farther than this. He turned and looked back the way he had come. Then, on a bitterly sharp impulse, he glanced up at the forest roof. Far out of reach, the shoes stood nonchalantly upon a blue-black tree limb.