This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  Defeated, I turned and walked away in silence. They watched me go and then, no doubt, rode off down the lawless road. It was long after dark when I finally reached my house. My sister's sons were sitting huddled around the cold fireplace in the front room.

  “Where is Naeli?” I asked stupidly, as if I didn't know. I guess part of me expected her to be there, to always be there.

  “She went to find you,” Stador, the eldest boy said. “She said you would help her.…”

  I don't remember the rest of that night, or much of the following days. There were the funerals, strangely bitter with no bodies to bury. And I apprenticed my sister's youngest boy to Besk. A month and a half later I enlisted in the Riders.

  I thought it would be difficult to join. But it wasn't. There were always places falling vacant.

  The trouble with Liskin, I discovered, was that you could shut him up, but he wouldn't stay shut. He kept wanting to talk: about whether we were riding fast enough, about whether we were riding too fast, about whether we should have hunted down the Bargainers tending the trap. The subject didn't matter; he just wanted to run his mouth. But, when you're riding through the woods during the lawless hours, you have to pay attention to what's happening around you. You can't do that with someone nattering in your ear all the time.

  Finally, I had to rein in and tell him. I added, as an afterthought, that it was crazy to try to carry on a conversation in full armor on trotting horses.

  Up till then he had been nodding (like, chastened). But this he wanted to argue about. “Oh, I don't know, Roble—”

  “Bargain it, Liskin,” I swore, then stopped. Over his shoulder I could see a flicker of red light filtering through the night-black branches of the forest.

  “Stray!” I said, and pointed.

  He turned to look and said, “Or another trap.”

  “Either way, there are bodies to bring out.” I dismounted.

  Liskin didn't. “Roble,” he said, “it's against the Rules to go that far from the Road.”

  “Then don't,” I replied. “But if there were any rules in these woods we wouldn't be here.” I drew my sword and left the Road, plunging into the forest that had swallowed my sister and her child.

  The light was a longish way from the Road. It took me endless moments to wend through the close-set tree trunks until I approached close enough to see that the light was from a campfire. Someone was sitting beside it.

  You get an eye for spotting illusions after you've been in the Riders for awhile. The illusion-bait is always something you want to see, the thing that's too good to be true. It's the image in your mind most likely to kick you forward before you have a chance to think.

  There are a lot of variations the Enemy could play on this method: traps baited with simulacra of your enemies; traps baited with images of people you don't recognize; traps baited with sleeping or otherwise defenseless Bargainers, and so on. But the Enemy never does this; maybe it can't. Maybe the Enemy, for all its immortality and power, is a little stupid.

  So I knew that what I saw before me was real. Because I was not in the least impressed.

  The stray was about average height. He had white skin, like a Coranian, but it had been burned on his face and hands. He looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors: all his clothing (as dark as a Rider's) was travel-worn and weather-stained, and his shoes had been mended more than once. He had crooked shoulders and dark unruly hair. All in all: the sort of person you might expect to find at your back door, begging for a meal or a mug of beer. He was too unpleasant not to be real.

  I looked the situation over carefully. Just because he wasn't an illusion, it didn't mean this wasn't a trap. Alev and I had found that out yesterday. And even if it wasn't a trap, Bargainers might have spotted the stray and staked him out, just as I had. Then, the stray himself might be dangerous (though he didn't look it).

  I slowly made my way all around the campsite, assuring myself at every step that there were no Bargainers to compete with me for this stray. The stray himself didn't seem to notice me; he was intent on some carving he was doing with a long pointed knife.

  Finally I stepped into the firelight. The stray looked up at me without surprise. I was wondering what language I should speak to him when he solved the problem by addressing me in a kind of Coranian.

  “Do you speak for the singing wood?” he asked sleepily.

  “No,” I said, as clearly as I could. Obviously the vagrant was half-enchanted: his disturbingly pale gray eyes seemed to be glowing slightly. “I've come to take you out of the woods.”

  He shook his head. “I will stay here tonight and listen,” he said sleepily. “And perhaps, tomorrow night, I will answer. If—”

  “If you stay here tonight, you will die here tonight. I'm paid to prevent that. Come along with me and I'll take you to the nearest castle.”

  He shook his head again casually and said, “There is a great hunger in these woods, though. Felt it immediately. Something like it only once before. I fell asleep in the middle of a forest fire. I heard a deep golden voice calling to me. I passed from sleep to the rapture of vision, and tried to speak with it. But it knew nothing except hunger, an inhuman and utterly destructive hunger. Then I awoke and realized: I had been in talic stranj with the heart of the flames.” He laughed fondly at the memory.

  “Talic stranj, eh?” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. Happens to me all the damn time.” This stray was probably crazy or a sorcerer or both. (They go together like shell brisket and earth-apples.) That meant that I would probably have to kill him to get him out. And I'd have to do it fast, before the Bargainers arrived. I covertly loosened my sword in its sheath.

  He noticed, damn him. He was no longer as sleepy or as stupid as he had first seemed. We stayed that way for a moment, looking at each other, saying nothing.

  When the Bargainers hit me from behind, the first thing that I thought was, Bargain it! It is a trap! That flashed through my mind as I fell like a stone, as if I were unconscious (though I wasn't). Three of them stayed to guard me, and the rest moved into the circle of firelight

  I rolled to my feet (try it in full armor sometime; but I spent my off months exercising, not soaking up beer in the taverns) and drew my sword. I cut two of their throats before they were ready for me; the third turned to meet me, though, his club held high.

  As we fought, I realized this wasn't a trap. The stray had a long sword with an odd flashing blade and was fighting the Bargainers as fiercely as I was. That was something. But there were so many of them!

  I killed my third Bargainer easily enough. They're not usually armored and they don't carry weapons to kill, only a long club, like our truncheons, to knock people unconscious. (The Boneless One is said to prefer live victims.) They're best at stealth, and the Enemy helps them there. But right now stealth wasn't on the table; Bargainers were pouring out of the woods on several sides.

  I ran into the clearing and was going to charge the Bargainers around the stray when someone called my name. I turned my head and saw what I most wanted to see: Alev limping toward me through the wood. “Roble!” he shouted. “Bargain it! It is a trap! Come this way!”

  I took three steps without thinking. It was impossible not to. Then I did think. I turned back to the Bargainers and found several of them bearing down on me. I met the club of one with my truncheon and slashed wildly at another with my sword. Then they leapt back and encircled me, beginning a long, slow, carefully coordinated attack certain of victory. They had most of the night, and my attention was divided several ways. They had only to stay out of reach of my sword and wait for my inevitable mistake. I didn't need to glance back into the wood to know that Alev was not there, had never been there. His image had been a sending of the Enemy.

  Over the shoulder of a Bargainer, I saw the stray do something pretty smart: he leaped up and caught hold of a branch with his left hand. Then he lifted himself into the tree as the Bargainers surrounding him swarmed in to grab him.
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br />   To start with, it's pretty impressive to see a grown man lift himself into a perch using one hand. But, more importantly, it meant he was probably safe now. The Bargainers didn't carry swords or axes or arrows; if they tried to climb up he could probably knock them off as they came. And the forest was so dense, he could go from tree to tree if he wanted to escape his pursuers on the ground.

  Of course, it was also tough luck for me. Even if I had been able to hold off the Bargainers surrounding me, I wouldn't be able to fight the whole crowd. But I had known I was taking a risk coming into the wood. The stray was safe—that was the reason I had taken my risk—but he might not know it.

  “You're all right!” I shouted at the stray. “Stay up there until dawn and they'll go away!”

  The stray looked at me, right at me with those gray eyes that pierced like spear points. Then he scanned the clearing, looking at the Bargainers drifting away from the tree and toward me.

  “Stay up there!” I shouted desperately. I was afraid he'd throw his safety away in a futile attempt to assist me. “I'm done! You're not! You can't help me!”

  He sheathed his sword and braced his back against the tree trunk.

  I had to duck from a club launched at me by a Bargainer, so I didn't see what happened next.

  But I heard it. I heard part of it, anyway. It was a sound impossible to hear, but audible just the same. A word, spoken in a human voice, but a word that resonated with power, a bright black hammer of a word. I passed out before the word was finished.

  When I came to myself I was lying in the clearing. Someone was moving about nearby. I struggled groggily to my feet and reached for a weapon.

  But there was no need: the only person moving about was the stray. He was binding the hands of the Bargainers, who were strewn unconscious about the clearing.

  “Good evening,” he said, nodding toward me as his hands worked ceaselessly. “You might stand by to clop a few of these fellows on the head, if they start waking up before I can bind them. They should be coming out of it soon.”

  “It?” I said, picking up my truncheon.

  “I spoke one of the Silent Words. Your helmet shielded you from some of it, so you woke up sooner, but these others aren't dead. They're just stunned, as you were. I am Morlock Ambrosius, by the way.” He glanced directly at me, as if to see whether I recognized the name.

  I didn't, so I just told him mine in return. Then I added hesitantly, “Um. Strictly speaking, I should kill these Bargainers.”

  “Oh?” Morlock didn't seem surprised—it was hard to read his expression, for a fact—but he didn't seem inclined to cooperate, either.

  “Or I could herd them to Caroc Castle when they awake. It would be tricky work, but just possible.”

  “What would happen to them there?”

  “They'd be killed.”

  Morlock shook his head. “I don't know what lies between your people and theirs, but I can't stand here while you kill”—he glanced around the clearing—”forty-seven people.”

  “It doesn't appeal to me, either,” I grumbled. “Then I'd have to haul them out, or burn the bodies…. Let's just bind them and leave them. It's not the first Rule I've ever broken.”

  Somehow Morlock's face indicated approval without changing expression in the slightest. We bound the rest of the Bargainers (clubbing them into unconsciousness as necessary), Morlock recovered his pack and bedroll from the campsite, and we buried the fire in moist earth.

  I led the way back to the Road. At first I thought that I had reached the wrong part—it's easy to lose your way in the woods after dark, and Liskin and my horse weren't anywhere to be found.

  But there was some fresh horse dung on the Road, as if more than one horse had been there for a while recently. And I did recognize the place.

  “Liskin, you worm,” I muttered to myself.

  “Liskin?”

  “My partner. I left him holding my horse when I saw your campfire from the Road.” I gestured at the horse crap on the Road. “Some of that's probably his.”

  “So we walk.”

  “Right.” I thought about going back for the three bodies of the Bargainers I had killed and decided against it. There was no way we could bring those corpses out without a horse, and if we tried to burn them needle-toothed Bargainers would come like moths out of the wood. Much as I hated to, I'd just have to leave the Enemy a little snack tonight.

  “You should dump some of that iron,” Morlock suggested, gesturing at my armor. “You'll move faster.”

  “I'm used to it. Besides, I can't leave a Rider's armor on the Road—some Bargainer might find it and use it to trick someone.”

  Morlock nodded, and we started down the Road. Morlock kept his eyes on the right side of the Road, I watched the left, and every now and then one of us looked over his shoulder to check the Road behind us.

  “These Bargainers,” Morlock said presently, “they live in the wood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you at war with them?”

  “They serve the Enemy who lives in the wood, the Boneless One. They take us, when they can, to feed it. We kill them, when we can, to prevent that.” I gnawed my lip. “I should have done something about those damn Bargainers. I don't know why it made a difference that there were so many. They'd've taken forty-seven of us and bragged about it afterward.”

  “Probably,” Morlock agreed flatly. I glanced at him, but his eyes were scanning the roadside. He seemed neither skeptical nor surprised to find people preying on each other the way the Bargainers did on us.

  He seemed to be a pretty reasonable person. I wanted to ask him why he'd been talking so crazily when I first spoke to him, but I didn't want to insult him. “What's talic stranj?” I asked, eventually.

  His grim face twisted in a one-sided grin. “You're wondering whether I'm crazy.”

  There didn't seem to be any point in denying it. “Yes.”

  “Some people who are crazy can't stay in their own heads. They keep drifting into other people's, or abroad in the world. Have you ever known anyone like that?”

  “No. I haven't known that many crazy people.”

  “There can't be too many people like that in these woods. Your Whisperer—”

  “He's not mine.”

  “—he would eat them, I think. But I was trained by such a person to ascend to the rapture of vision and see all three phases of the world.”

  “Uh-huh. Three phases?” I was getting nervous again. Walking through woods thick with Bargainers, with the Enemy lurking unseen, was bad enough; I didn't like adding a crazy Coranian to the mix.

  He shrugged his wry shoulders and said, “Hear me out and decide if I'm crazy. There are matter and spirit, yes? The things we see and feel and touch, and the minds that lie behind them.”

  “All right. Say there are.”

  “But how does dead matter impinge on a living mind? How does a living mind make dead matter respond?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Through the middle phase: tal. Tal is the medium through which the spirit realm takes action in the world of matter and the medium through which matter affects the spirit.”

  “So ghosts—”

  “Not just ghosts. People. Squirrels. Dogs. Bugs. Any entity that can take volitional action in the material world is a fusion of three bodies: material, talic, and spiritual. Physical death occurs when tal is no longer able to unite matter and spirit. In rapture I can ascend from material perception to talic perception, with at least a glimpse of the spiritual realm beyond.”

  “Hm. Not my line of work.”

  He laughed, surprising me. “Yes it is.” He waved his hand at the road. “You collect dead bodies—”

  “When someone doesn't run off with my horse.”

  “—and people in the woods. Why?”

  “So that the Enemy won't eat them. What's good for him is bad for us.”

  “What do you suppose the Enemy eats?”

  “You're telling me yo
u know?”

  “I do know. I sensed its specific hunger when I was in rapture. It feeds on tal. The tal of living beings, men and women, when it can. A living consciousness is haloed in tal. But the dead still possess tal, which will fade over time, like the heat of a dead body.”

  “And it can live on this?”

  “Yes. It would have some harmful effects, over time, but a person with certain skills could prolong his life indefinitely by absorbing the tal of others. It's the sort of magic Coranians have always been good at.”

  Coranians. He said it like it didn't include him. That set me back. He was pale skinned, like a Coranian himself; he spoke Coranian like it was his native language. “Aren't you a Coranian?” I asked. “You speak the language.”

  “I share the language,” he said, not as if he were angry or embarrassed, just stating a fact. “But my people didn't call it Coranian. You must know some Coranians yourself: you speak the language well.”

  “They pretty much run Four Castles. The Four Barons and the gentry are all white-sk—Coranians.”

  “Hm.”

  “They live a long time,” I added. “Three hundred years, or so some of them claim.”

  “Hm.”

  “You don't think—?” I began.

  The Silent Word hit me again, like before but worse. It was like being buried in a bright avalanche of silence. I found myself sprawled on the ground and got up shaking my head.

  “Look, I was just asking,” I said stiffly. “You didn't have to pound my head with your magic word.”

  But Morlock was climbing to his feet as well. “I didn't,” he said, a little unsteadily. “I think—”

  It struck again, a dark inhuman voice shouting the silent word through the trees.

  We rose from the ground a while later and looked at each other. Morlock dropped his backpack on the ground and began to paw through it frantically. We both lost consciousness several times as the voice in the woods shouted the Silent Word at us. But finally, as I watched him with a certain disinterest—I was getting a little groggy; it was like taking repeated punches to the head—he pulled something shiny out of the pack and put it to his lips.