This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  “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.

  Having retrieved, cleaned, and sheathed his knife (the grip was covered by razor-thin teethmarks), Morlock made his way into the woods. He looked back once and saw that the forest floor where the dead catbirds had been was alive with dark winged forms.

  Heading straight into the smoke-bearing wind, he walked until he found the fire. By that time night had entirely risen, and he could see from a distance that it was a kind of campfire. A tree had been cut and sectioned, certain sections quartered and several of the quarters set afire, all with considerable labor, no doubt. The hapless campers, one man and one woman, lay unconscious before the fire. You might have thought them overcome by weariness until you noticed their faces, greenish even in the red firelight. Apparently they'd been poisoned by the fire they'd set and were in danger of dying.

  Morlock felt the tug of sympathy; he also felt there was something wrong with this scene. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the cloud of scavenger catbirds settle silently down on a nearby tree. He found he couldn't walk away and leave these as catbird fodder.

  He beat down the flames with his hands and heaved earth over the fuming coals. He sat down some distance away from the pair and bound up his wounded arm as he waited for them to awaken.

  Morlock kept thinking he should get about his own business. But the scavengers were still out there in the darkness watching what he would do. He waited, thinking long, slow thoughts to pass the time. Twice he roused himself to kill several large carnivorous beetles the size and temperament of snapping turtles who were approaching him hungrily. He tossed the dead beetles out into the wood, where the catbirds devoured them.

  Finally the woman stirred. A long yawn broke off in a gasp as she sat suddenly up.

  “Vren,” she said, in the lingua franca of the Ontilian Empire, “the fire has gone out!”

  “Not exactly ‘gone out,’” Morlock observed, in the same language. “I extinguished it.”

  Now both man and woman were standing. “Who are you?” the woman demanded. “Where are you?”

  “I am a traveller,” Morlock said cautiously. He rarely gave his name, south of the Whitethorn Range. “I am somewhat behind you and off to one side, as you can tell from my voice. Passing by, I noticed your fire and found you overcome with its fumes.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Are the trees poisonous, too?”

  “Yes. You will find all life in Tychar inimical to you.”

  “Including yourself?” she shot back.

  “Possibly,” Morlock admitted. “There are some strange things about you two. How did you happen to fell,
section, and burn one of these trees without noticing its nature?”

  “We tell you nothing,” Vren said sullenly.

  “Be quiet, Vren,” the woman said without heat. “We had the kembril do it, traveller. We had a spell, and we spoke it, and the kembril came. It brought us fire and food, as we commanded. The food was good, at least. The fire was…local.”

  Morlock did not recognize the word kembril, but he thought he understood the gist of the story. “You are sorcerers, then?”

  “We are thieves, mostly,” the woman said frankly. “(Be quiet, Vren! He saved our lives.) But we steal magic by choice. We are going to rob a sorcerer who lives in the winterwood. Maybe then we'll be sorcerers, with a little practice.”

  “There is a sorcerer in the wood?”

  “Yes,” said the woman reverently, “the greatest and evillest in the world: Morlock Ambrosius himself. He has settled in Tychar.”

  “Hmph,” said Morlock, glad of the darkness. “This is news to me.”

  “Well,” said the woman complacently, “few know of it. We were lucky enough to rob one of his sorcerous correspondents in Sarkunden, our hometown. We thought…well, for such as us it is the opportunity of a lifetime. We have a map.”

  Morlock had expected nothing else, except an offer to join their quest. That was forthcoming in another moment; he accepted with a thoughtful glumness that seemed to surprise his new companions.

  The two thieves, Urla and Vren, went back to sleep, trusting as children, after Morlock offered to stand guard for the rest of the night. Or perhaps they were not so childlike, Morlock reflected: he had already had his chance to rob or kill them; they had more reason to trust him than he did to trust them, which was why he had taken the watch.

  They walked all the next day and into the next night, avoiding death narrowly on a number of occasions. Each time, however, the catbird scavengers fed well on the corpses of their attackers. Morlock believed they had come to look on him as their patron predator. He found this annoying; there was nothing he could do about it, though.

  That night they slept in shifts. Morlock took the last watch—something of a risk, perhaps. He had come to trust his companions, although he had occasion to think them somewhat timorous.

  And he needed sleep. It had been long since he had woken up, south of the forest, to find himself robbed. His arm wound was infected and the poison in his system was slow to dissipate. He expected that tomorrow would be a very bad day indeed.

  It was all too soon when Urla's voice woke him from a hellish dream and he crawled out of his sleeping cloak to stand watch over his companions. He sharpened a stick and absentmindedly speared any of the carnivorous beetles who crawled too near him or the sleepers. There was no fire, so he watched by the starlight and moonlight that managed to filter through the blue-black branches and leaves. He found that his left arm was swollen and sluggish, and so used his right hand almost exclusively.

  At last dawn came. Morlock, having viewed the thieves' crude map several times the previous day, spent the last few moments of his watch calculating how long it might take them to reach the house of “Morlock.”

  He glanced idly back along the way they had come, noting that their trail was vividly marked by silver dew on the blue-green coarse grass of the winterwood. His eyes moved on; it was time to wake Urla and Vren—then he looked sharply back. His trail was visible: grasses bent by his passage dark among their silvery kin, footprints clearly outlined in the mold of the forest floor. But there was no sign of any others beside his.

  Troubled, he looked down on his companions, now waking on their own in the dim blue dawn. He was sure they were real—that is, they were not mere illusions; they did not have the talic aura an illusion must project. Yet if they had left no trail in the woods, they could hardly be real.

  Real, yet not real. He stared at them as they greeted one another, chatted, shook the dew off their blankets…. The grass moved beneath their feet, he noticed. But did it move enough for a real man and woman?

  Vren was groaning. “Back to the packs! I thought mine would split my shoulders yesterday.”

  Urla sympathized and Morlock stepped over. “Let's trade,” he suggested. “I'll carry yours, and you mine.”

  Vren looked surprised, then glanced at Morlock's formidable pack. “It's probably worse than mine,” he grumbled.

  “It's not so bad as it looks,” Morlock insisted. “Give it a heft.”

  Vren hesitated. Both he and Urla wore tense troubled expressions. Morlock bent down and picked up Vren's pack. It was as light as a spiderweb.

  Morlock dropped it and straightened; reaching out with both hands, he seized his companions under their chins. Pulling up strongly, he tore off both their faces.

  In the holes that had been faces there were forests of silvery spines. They vibrated tensely for a few moments, then grew still. The skins of Urla and Vren separated and fell away, exposing the creatures that had worn them as a hand wears a glove…or a puppet. These “hands” had small insectlike bodies and hundreds of long silvery legs that took a roughly spherical shape around the central body.

  Morlock had heard of such things. Given the outer shell of a person, and having fed on that person's brain, they could sustain his or her living likeness. But they had no muscle or significant mass of their own, so that the seeming person would be light as gauze. They were marginally intelligent; at least they could feign an intelligence suited to the guise they wore. But shorn of their disguise they would unthinkingly return to their creator for protection and guidance.

  So these did, rolling away in the dim blue woods. Morlock shouldered his pack and followed them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a few of the catbirds drop down and devour the discarded skins. The rest of the cloud followed silently on his trail.

  The silver-spine creatures were not moving quickly, but Morlock was dazed with poison and fever; he almost lost them twice. Using his left arm had torn the wound open again, and it throbbed with each leaden heartbeat. Still he kept moving. The hunt was almost over.

  They came at last to a dark stone house in the dim blue woods. The spheres of silver tines paused, then began to wander aimlessly along the walls, seeking ingress.

  Morlock found two dead bodies lying against the door of the house. One had been a man, the other a woman. They had been flayed, their skulls broken like eggshells and drained. Carrion eaters had torn their flesh. These, Morlock guessed, were the originals of Urla and Vren. Morlock covered the bodies with earth and deadwood, sealing their quasi-comradeship.

  Then he turned to the wooden door of the stone house. It was locked; he crouched down to examine the lock with his fingers. Only then did he understand how ill he was; his right hand was trembling too much to perform any subtle work and his left hand was swollen into useless immobility.

  Morlock stood back and unslung his pack. He drew out the choir nexus and unwrapped it. He explained the matter in a single terse sentence; a moment later, fifteen volunteer flames were eating their way into the door around the lock. When they had passed through Morlock cried “Stay clear!” and kicked in the door.

  He paused for a moment on the threshold, shuddering with fever chill and pain. (The blood-beats of exertion were agony to his wounded arm.) Then he passed into the entry hall and swore. The flames had stayed clear all right. From burn marks in the many rugs and tapestries it appeared they had scattered in search of adventure and interesting combustibles.

  Well, he had no time to look for them. He stowed the nexus in his backpack and took that on his shoulders again. The hallway led him to a winding stairway; Morlock ascended it, feeling that the sorcerer's workroom would be on the upper floor.

  It was. In fact, the workroom occupied the entire upper floor of the house. As he entered it, his enemy, at the far end of the long room, rose to greet him.

  The room was full of water. It was lit (quite apart from the tall unglazed windows) by glass cylinders filled with a bubbling white fluid that emitted a harsh
bluish light; these were set like torches along the walls. The stained worktables that lined the room were crowded with retorts, alembics, beakers, tubes, and tubing, all of them emitting or gathering liquid. In the middle of the room was a circular sheet of gray bubbling water, suspended in midair. At the far end of the room was a crystal globe fill with very bright, very clear water. Morlock guessed this was the sorcerer's focus. At any rate, he was seated before it with a fixed inward stare when Morlock entered the room, and he turned around and smiled broadly, as if in welcome.

  “There are flames like rats loose in my house,” he explained, rising. “Fortunately they have proven rather easy to detect and extinguish. I hate flames, I suppose as much as you love them. Mine is a watery sort of magic, as you will have guessed.”

  The stranger advanced through the room as he spoke, his manner suggesting that Morlock was an expected guest and he himself was a slightly remiss host. He wore garments of white and blue; otherwise he was a mirror image of Morlock: the same dark unruly hair, the same weather-beaten features, the same alarmingly pale gray eyes. The stranger even had crooked shoulders and walked with a slight limp, as Morlock did.

  “Unimpressive,” Morlock remarked. “Certainly not original.”

  The stranger looked surprised, then amused. “Oh, my appearance. But I assure you, my dear fellow, it is no mere ploy. Years of labor have gone into this work, and perhaps the rest of my life will go into perfecting it. You see, I have decided to usurp your personality.”

  Morlock shrugged.

  “I'm not joking, either,” the stranger continued. “Not that I'm surprised by your indifference. That's what gave me the idea, in a way.

  “You see, I was sitting in a tavern (forgive my loquacity, but I have so looked forward to telling you all this) and a drunk was singing some nasty ghost story you were supposed to have had a part in. And I was thinking how…well, how unlike your legend you are. (Most of those-who-know know that.) And I thought, too, how little use you have put your legend to. It really is a remarkable resource, coupled with your true abilities. You are truly feared, south of the Kirach Kund. Yet you wander from place to place like…like some kind of magical tinker, when you might command fear and respect the way a general commands an army.”