This Crooked Way (5 page)

He crouched down and groped about on the forest floor. Latching on to a fist-sized rock, he rose again and pegged it with deadly accuracy at the rakishly tilted right shoe. Then he held the branch, like a crooked javelin, ready in his other hand in case he needed something to throw at the other shoe.

But he didn't. The right shoe tumbled almost to the ground before the other followed it, hurtling from the bough like a stone shot from a sling. Morlock wasted a moment wondering about the nature of the thing that had stepped into his shoes. Before he shook off his speculations the shoes began hopping like a pair of leather toads across the forest floor.

Then, in an instant, the chase was over.

The left shoe had hurled itself forward to land in a dimly blue patch of gripgrass (less greenish in color and finer than the weed carpeting the poisonous wood). In doing so it had bent the stems and torn the central roots of dozens of blades of the bluish grass.

Each offended blade divided into several long wire-tough lashes that instantly wrapped around the first solid object they touched. The left shoe was swiftly bound to the forest floor. Moreover, some of the released lashes inevitably snapped across their quiescent brethren; in less than a human vein-pulse the whole patch of gripgrass had come to greedy life. It snatched the right shoe, flying overhead, and bound it to the earth next to its mate. Even then a faint blue cloud of yearning tendrils floated on the air until the unoccupied blades re-formed themselves and slowly sank back into quiescence.

Their more fortunate kin clung tightly to their new prey, so that its death and corruption might provide food for the whole patch, not to mention serve as bait for an unwary carrion eater. This time they had caught nothing more nourishing than a pair of old shoes, but even if they had known they
would not have cared; it is not in the nature of gripgrass to be choosy, and what they possess they do not surrender.

“Hurs krakna!”
muttered Morlock, giving vent to one of the many untranslatable idioms of his native language. Then he sat down and began to bind up his feet, using strips torn from his cloak.

It is not every master maker who carries a choir of flames in his backpack. For one thing, few master makers have backpacks, being typically as sessile as clams. Also, flames are not readily portable; they require care of a peculiar sort; they are fickle and given to odd ideas. Nevertheless Morlock, a gifted maker of gems, knew that there was nothing so helpful in tending a seedstone as a choir of wise old flames.

The sphere of smoke clinging to the choir nexus was dense and hot, so Morlock kept his face well out of the way as he removed the dragon-hide wrapping of the nexus; there were the signs of a heated conversation in progress.

“In a former—”

“How do you expect—”

“—life, I was a salamander. Mere words can't imagine how much I meant—”

“—expect me to
breathe?”

“—to myself, bright as a brick in the Burning Wall…”

“Remember lumbering through fossil-bright burning fields?”

“I prefer wood to coal. Would you feed us more? Would you? Eh?
Would
you?”

A shower of bright sharp laughs, like sparks, flew up into the dim air of the winterwood.

“I'm hungry!” cried a lone flame, when the laughter had passed. “Feed me! I'M GOING OUT!
FEED
ME!”

Morlock glanced into the nexus. “Friends,” he said patiently, “fully half the coal I gave you last night is unconsumed. You needn't go out.”

“Coal is boring!” the desperate flame cried. “Death before boredom!”

“Death before boredom!”
the choir cried as one.

“Most of us like coal, you understand,” a flame confided agreeably. “But we all support the principle.”

“Principle first, always,” another flame agreed. “And more coal, please.”

“It makes my light so dark and heavy. And all those strange memories!”

“Strange memories, yes. Remember all those fish!”

“I remember remembering. Strange to be a fish.”

“No coal!” hollered the desperate flame. “No coal!”

“Snuff yourself.”

“Friends,” said Morlock, “I come to offer you variety.”

“Variety,” one observed snidely. “How dull!”

“I have a task for a single flame—outside the nexus.”

This shocked them into silence. It was the nexus that sustained them beyond the ordinary term of flamehood, giving them time to develop their intelligence. In twenty years of life, many of them had never blown a spark outside the nexus.

“Well, what is it?” one flame demanded matter-of-factly.

With equal matter-of-factness, Morlock held up one of his clothbound feet. “My shoes have run away into a plot of gripgrass. I want one of you to eat them free.”

He waited patiently while the choir exhausted itself in laughter and jeers.

“Gripgrass is something none of you has tasted,” Morlock continued. “Furthermore, if one of you volunteers I will give the whole choir two double handfuls of leaves, the smoke of which is poisonous to man.”

“Nonsense!” cried a panicky voice, in which Morlock thought he recognized the coal-hater. “Coal's good enough for us! Nothing better! More coal or nothing!”

“I like coal well enough,” the matter-of-fact voice said, “but it will never taste so good to me unless I try gripgrass.”

“Then,” Morlock said, and snapped his fingers. The flame hurtled up and landed in Morlock's palm. Morlock immediately fed it with a strip of bark from the branch he still carried.

“This bark tastes a bit odd,” remarked the flame smokily.

“It is kin to gripgrass,” Morlock replied. “Do not talk, but listen. Time is your enemy as long as you are outside the nexus. Yonder is the gripgrass hiding my shoes. Do you see them?”

“Smell ‘em.”

“Then. I'll place you on the forest floor; work your way into the gripgrass and burn the shoes free, then proceed to the far side of the patch. The nexus will be there and you can climb back inside. Do not speak unless you are in trouble; then I will do what I can for you.
Do not propagate
or you will lose yourself in your progeny. Plain enough?”

The red wavering flame nodded and danced anxiously. Morlock put it down and watched it burn a black smoking beeline for the dim blue patch of gripgrass.

Morlock absently brushed the pile of ashes from his palm, but did not check for blisters. It took a flame hot enough to melt gold to do harm to his flesh; like his crooked shoulders and his skill at magic, that was the heritage of Ambrosius.

Having placed the nexus beyond the gripgrass patch, just out of lash-reach, Morlock sat down beside it and began to whittle idly at the branch he still held in his hand. The pale bluish scraps of wood he fed to the flames were still resident in the nexus.

“This wood has a cold marshy taste,” a flame remarked, not disapprovingly.

“I don't think I like it,” another said. “But I'd need more to be sure.”

“Don't blow the smoke over here,” said Morlock, annoyed. He'd taken enough poison today as it was; his feet were numb with it. He tossed another pile of wood scraps in the nexus; that was when the gripgrass plot lashed out again.

Morlock had been expecting this. If a plant's central stem was burned through it would not (because it could not) unleash. The central stem would respond to the burning of a peripheral stem, and some central stems would fall and set off the inevitable chain reaction.

Still it was alarming. The air currents totally dispersed the smoke trail by which Morlock had been gauging the flame's progress. Even after some moments the smoke did not return.

“Are you all right?” Morlock called out.

“Yes,” replied the flame, its voice muffled by the tightly woven roof of gripgrass.

“Can you breathe?”

“
Yes
,” replied the flame, with overtones of annoyance.

Morlock took the hint and returned to his whittling.

Presently the flame's bright wavering crown appeared, like the point of a knife, through the blue mat of gripgrass. It swiftly ran around and cut a smoking shoe-sized hole in the still tightly lashed grass.

“One shoe free,” the flame announced curtly and disappeared.

Finally the wavering crown reappeared and repeated the procedure.

“Second shoe—” it began.

Then the flame was nearly extinguished by the passage of both shoes leaping backward up and out of the gripgrass patch. Landing with a double thump on the forest floor, they immediately began to run away again.

Morlock hurled the improvised javelin he had carved out of the tree branch, spearing the leather sole of one shoe. The other, farther off, kept on hopping away. Morlock bided his time. Finally throwing his knife, he transfixed the shoe, in midleap, to a nearby tree. Both shoes struggled briefly and fell still.

“You'd better get yourself some sensible shoes,” suggested a matter-of-fact voice behind him. Before he could respond, the flame had reentered the nexus and was lost among the choir.

He fed the choir their double handfuls of leaves and sat aside while they smokily consumed and discussed them. As he waited he carefully removed every trace of the spell he had written on the shoes; he sewed up the holes with the leftover strips of leather from the spell.

The reek of poisonous smoke was still heavy in the air when he finished, and he glanced impatiently over toward the nexus. If he'd known they were going to take this long he would have picked drier leaves. (They preferred leaves moist or, as they said, “chewy.”)

“We've been done for centuries!” cried a flame defensively as he approached. He saw this was essentially correct; the leaves had all been consumed, and they were working again on their lump of coal.

“We think the forest may be on fire,” the matter-of-fact voice observed.

“It may be,” Morlock agreed. “Friends, I am going to wrap you up again.”

He took their complaints and bitter insults in good part. But he wrapped the nexus in its dragon-hide covering and stowed it in his backpack.

Shoes firmly fastened to his feet, pack comfortably strapped to his crooked shoulders, Morlock wandered casually toward the source of the poisonous smoke. On his way he was attacked by several white wolfish or canine beasts that had black beaks and narrow birdlike faces. He killed one of them with the accursed sword Tyrfing. He had no chance to examine the dead predator's body; although its companions fled howling, the corpse was immediately set upon by a cloud of small catlike creatures with long leathery wings ending in reticulated claws. These were apparently scavengers that followed the birdwolf pack. They descended with pitiless delight on the dead predator; their brown triangular cat-faces were soon black with blood.

Several of the scavenger catbirds orbited around Morlock, as if searching for a place to land and feast. He knocked them away. One scored a long bloody gash along his left forearm, but as the wound was shallow he decided against treating it at that emergent moment.

He was further delayed by the passage of a fire-breathing serpent taller than himself and as long as a caravan. The approach of this monster was evident from five hundred paces away in the afternoon gloom of the woods. Deciding to take cover until the thing passed, he climbed a tree with comparatively dense foliage, most of which was still blue-black from winter, and wrapped himself in his black traveling cloak to complete the camouflage.

He could feel the blood from his wound soaking into the cloak, which began to cling to his skin. And his torn, bruised, and poisoned feet had had enough trouble today without perching for an appreciable chunk of the evening on a tree branch. Plus, there was the inevitable sharp object intruding on his wounded arm—he didn't want to move away from it in the serpent's presence. (Fire breathers do not hear or smell very well, but they have bitterly keen eyesight.) He grinned wryly and waited it out. Most annoyingly, and most trivially, leaves from the tree (he assumed that was what they were) kept brushing against him and tickling his skin unbearably.

The giant worm rumbled away into the woods. Morlock sighed with relief. Now for some free movement…and a good scratch!

He threw back his cloak. The catbirds that had settled down on and around him (whose feather-fur he had mistaken for leaves) leapt screaming into the air and began to circle the tree.

Morlock shouted several croaking insults a crow had once taught him, then plucked one of the catbirds out of the air and snapped its neck. He killed a second with a well-thrown knife and dropped the first body where the second one fell.

The scavengers having gathered on the ground to feed on their fallen comrades, and Morlock dropped down beside them, branch in hand. He killed several more scavengers by methodically flailing about before the survivors flew off to a safe distance. It was an ugly business, and as Morlock stood over the crushed catbirds and heard their fellows screaming at him from a nearby tree, he was not pleased with himself.

But it had been necessary. This demonstrated to the deadly catbirds that he was not merely a wounded prey staving off death but a predator in his own right. They would be more cautious in following him thereafter; perhaps they would leave his trail entirely. And if nothing else, these corpses would entertain the survivors while he got away.