This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  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 accumu
late 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.

  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?”