This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  I saw this with a mixture of disgust and ruefulness. The eight-foot section of the worm I had removed was incontestably dead. But the two ends of the worm were clearly alive. Perhaps longer segments of the worm could live independently. If so, the task Morlock and I had set ourselves was doomed to failure. I was exhausted and depressed: all this work for nothing?

  When I raised my head at last I saw them standing there: at least a dozen Bargainers, grinning at me with their needlelike teeth.

  I raised the shovel—I'd left my sword with my pack, some distance away in the woods—and backed away. They stepped forward to follow…and stopped suddenly.

  I laughed. “You can't come farther, can you?” I said. “You've hit the wall. You're bound within the Boneless One's shell!” I laughed again. Suddenly the situation seemed hilarious. But of course I was very tired.

  A big shaggy man, who may have been the leader, stepped back from the wall. He pressed his hand against a medallion hanging around his neck. Then he nodded as if he had received instructions and stepped across the trench, the gap in the Boneless One's anchor-worm.

  His face stretched in surprise as he stood there, on the free side of the trench.

  “You didn't expect that, did you?” I said to him. “The voice has stopped. It can't run you anymore. You're free, if you want to be.”

  The shaggy man looked at me for a moment, seeming to waver, then glanced back at the other Bargainers, watching him solemnly from the other side of the trench. When he turned back to me, his face was resolute. He couldn't lose face before his followers. Being their leader meant more to him than being free. He leaped forward, lashing out with his truncheon. I did my best to ward him off with the shovel, but I'd been halfway to unconsciousness before these guys showed up. Pretty soon his truncheon connected with my head and finished the job.

  I didn't really wake up until we came to the Bargainer village; at least, I didn't completely wake up. I remember hanging like fresh game from a pole carried by two burly Bargainers, and I remember seeing Naeli or the Naeli-thing again and again, but there are many lightless patches. When I came fully to myself I was on my own feet, being dragged along a narrow lane between high houses with narrow windows through which many eyes, some of them human, were peering.

  There were times everyone fell to the ground, as if worshipping, and they dragged me down with them. I was too groggy to understand what was happening or make my escape at these times. Besides, my hands were bound and my legs hobbled.

  They took me to a great open area in the center of the village and bound me to a stake. In the middle of the open area was a tree, tall and twisted like an oak. At the foot of the tree was a mouthlike opening.

  No one had to explain to me what would happen next. I was past swearing, but if there were, in some fireproof lexicon, any word sulphurous enough to express my anger and dismay at the thought of being fed alive to the Boneless One, I would have used it.

  It didn't cheer me at all to see a familiar, crook-shouldered figure slumping at a stake similar to my own on the other side of the clearing. They had got Morlock, too. What was it he'd said? If this doesn't work, we'll try something else.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Let's try something else! I don't think this is working!”

  I don't suppose he heard me, if his earplugs were still in place; anyway, he gave no sign of it. I leaned back against my stake and tried to ready my mind for death.

  But some part of me wouldn't give up, and when a young silver-haired Bargainer girl of twelve or thirteen years came toward me with a knife in her hand I feigned indifference, putting all my weight on the ropes that bound me to the stake. When she came within range I kicked out with my hobbled feet, knocking her over and sending the knife spinning from her hand.

  This proved to be wasted effort, though, as a group of young men immediately surrounded me, slashing at my bonds. As soon as I was free they dragged me away; I stopped resisting when I realized that it was really away: away from the clearing, the tree, the mouthlike hole in the ground.

  Then I recognized them. My nephews, Naeli's boys: Stador, Bann, and Thend.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I shouted, uselessly. We all still had wax plugging our ears.

  They grinned recklessly and shrugged as they ran.

  How mad was I, really? Not at all—as long as we got away.

  They turned aside into one of the narrow houses, one with shutters drawn over the slitlike windows. I followed them in, and, turning around, I saw the Bargainer girl behind us.

  Suddenly I feared a Bargainer's trap. But the door slammed shut and strong arms held mine prisoner as someone took the wax from my ears.

  “Calm down, Roble,” Stador said, his voice uncomfortably loud. (He obviously still had wax in his ears.) “We're safe, here, but we don't have much time.”

  “We sure as hell don't; that little Bargainer wench is in here!” I shouted.

  Someone lit a lamp. I turned and saw the Bargainer girl holding the light. There was a pained expression on her beautiful dark face.

  “Don't you know me, Uncle Roble?” the Bargainer girl said. “I'm Fasra.”

  I was still gaping, speechless, when the door of the house opened again and Naeli slipped in, slamming it shut immediately. She pulled two waxen plugs from her ears (using only her left hand; her right arm hung strangely limp) and grinned a needle-toothed grin at me.

  “Roble, my dear, maybe you'll listen to me at last, eh? I feel like I've been chasing you all around the Whisperer's Wood. Man, if you were as smart as you are tough, you'd really be dangerous.”

  I stared at her teeth, filed to a carnivore grin, and knew this was no illusion. Because the Boneless One only shows you what you want to see, and I didn't want to see this.

  “You Bargained,” I said flatly.

  Naeli looked surprised and offended. “Of course I did! How else could I save Fasra? What did you think I was going to do?”

  “I didn't think you'd Bargain.”

  Now she was just scornful. “There's no difference between us and them,” she said coldly. “It's just what side you happen to be on.”

  This chilled me, because by “us” I knew she meant the Bargainers and by “them” she meant everyone in Four Castles: Besk, Alev, me. I wanted to argue with her, but I couldn't. Wasn't that why I was leaving? Anyway, there never was a time I could get the better of Naeli in an argument.

  “I'm not on either side, anymore, I guess,” I said.

  “That's why I want you to take Fasra and get out of here,” Naeli said hastily. “She's not bound to the Whisperer yet—they wait until after puberty to do that—but they'll bind her soon. Take her away with you and the boys.”

  “Why can't you come?” I asked.

  “The Whisperer has put a compulsion on me,” she said, touching her chest. I saw, underneath her tunic, the outline of a medallion. “That was why I couldn't free you from the stake myself. I could only speak to you when he wasn't noticing me.”

  “And he isn't now?”

  Naeli shook her head. “He hasn't often noticed me in the past day or so. It's almost as if there were two Whisperers now; the village is at war with itself and the Soundless Sound strikes often and often.”

  “Can't you—”

  “I can't leave the woods while the compulsion binds me,” she said, touching the medallion under her tunic again.

  “Is that medallion the source of the compulsion?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I approached her and looked at the cord securing the medallion around her neck. There seemed to be nothing unusual about it.

  “Why don't you take it off?” I asked.

  “I can't; that's part of the compulsion.”

  “Why don't you ask someone to take it off you?”

  “I can't; that's part of the compulsion.”

  “If I take it off you, will you or I or anyone here be harmed?”

  “No.”

  I reached out and took the cord
with each hand and snapped it. The medallion dropped to the ground through Naeli's tunic. She turned and kissed me. I couldn't repress a shudder (I thought I could feel the razor teeth through her lips), but she didn't seem to notice, or perhaps didn't care.

  “Now we can go together,” she said, fierce and happy—strangely like the Naeli I once knew.

  Naeli's boys chimed in, and Fasra, too. Stador explained how Naeli had met them in the woods and brought them to rescue me from the stake, which the compulsion prevented her from doing herself.

  “They believed I was really me, anyway,” Naeli said wryly.

  I shrugged. “The Boneless One sent false images of you to me every night I rode through the lawless hours. I'd be long dead if I trusted everything I saw in the woods.”

  Naeli nodded slowly. “It's hard to say what the Whisperer knows…but he may have known I was thinking of you. I've been trying to figure out a way to get Fasra away from the Bargainers almost since we came here.”

  “So what's the plan now, or are we improvising?”

  “A little of both,” Naeli admitted, with her terrifying smile. “We'll be safe here from the Others; all of the fighting between Bargainers has been in the street. And the Soundless Sound can't reach us here, either. We'll wait until they send the stranger down to the Whisperer, and then we can escape while they're occupied.”

  “Tough luck on the stranger,” I observed.

  Naeli shrugged. She must have seen many people go that route, perhaps some she had known herself.

  For me it was different. We always tried to bring the stray out, Alev and I. And only then (it wasn't my brightest day) did I realize who “the stranger” was. It was my stray, Morlock. Somehow the idea of Morlock and the idea of Alev were bound up together. I thought of Alev, his legs broken in the trap; I thought of Morlock falling down that mouthlike hole.

  “Naeli,” I said slowly. “Alev is dead.”

  “Who is Alev?” said this stranger who was my sister.

  I shook my head. “Never mind. I have to bring the stray out, if I can. You guys can get away in the disturbance. Boys, wait for me a day at the meeting place we set; if I don't come, go on as planned.” I plugged my ears, shutting out their protestations and good-byes, and ran out of the house, leaving the door open behind me.

  Morlock's stake was empty and there was a crowd of people standing around the base of the crooked tree. It was possible I was already too late. I scooped up the knife I had kicked out of Fasra's hand and ran across the clearing. I plunged into the crowd, slashing with the knife in one hand and striking out randomly with my other fist.

  I was like a lit candle applied to wood shavings; soon the Bargainers were all fighting with each other desperately. Some used only their right hand; their left arm swung useless at their sides. Others used only their left hand; their right arms seemed to be disabled. The left-handed people struck only the right-handed people and vice versa. I was careful to use both hands, baffling the Bargainers, who turned from me to attack the enemies they knew: each other.

  I made it all the way to the center of the crowd, where Morlock, his lower body out of sight, was scrabbling desperately at the lip of the mouthlike hole, trying to pull himself out. His mouth was gagged and each of his wrists was looped with a twisted cord, as if they had been bound together.

  I left the knife in a nearby Bargainer and bent down to grab with both hands at one of Morlock's arms.

  Morlock's mouth was moving; it looked as if he was shouting some sort of warning. But the plugs in my ears kept me from hearing him, and the gag in his mouth kept me from reading his lips.

  The ground crumbled under my feet. We fell with several Bargainers into the gaping earth.

  My death grip on Morlock's arm saved me. When we had fallen several feet we jerked to a halt. Looking up through the shadows and the clots of dirt falling from the ragged edge of the hole, I saw Morlock had caught hold of a tree root. He didn't manage to hang on to it, but it slowed us down. He caught the next one and held it, but it bent ominously under our joint weight. There was another root protruding from the hole wall, not so far off, and I managed to pull myself onto it.

  Both of us were so out of breath that talking would have been out of the question, even if we didn't have our ears plugged. While regaining my wind, I looked around at the questionable situation in which we found ourselves.

  We were about midway down the gullet of earth, between the hole in the surface (still mouthlike, but more of a spreading grin now) and the bellylike chamber at the bottom. There was light coming from both directions—from the sky above and from a purplish luminescence emitted by a moss that grew thickly on the curving walls of the chamber below. Immediately under us was a pile of human bones, naked and fleshless with the fluted marks of chewing all over them.

  Scattered around the floor were various Bargainers, flopping around like birds caught in a net. One or two were motionless, perhaps impaled on the sharp broken bones that were scattered over the floor of the chamber.

  And there was something else. It was hard to tell exactly what it was. It looked like two bladders of unequal size, half filled with some sort of fluid, connected to each other by a thickish cord. One of the bladders was about as long as a man's arm; the other was less than half that long, and not as broad. There seemed to be some sort of hair or fur on part of the smaller bladder.

  It was alive. It moved about the bone-paved floor by rolling, and as it rolled I could see it had some appendages—not arms and legs, really, but just floppy little things where arms and legs might be, or might once have been. I couldn't tell what sex it was, or if it had one, but I began to realize that some of the features on the less hairy side of the smaller bladder constituted a face. There was a slack half-open mouth, crusted with filth from the floor; above it a floppy boneless nose, two ear-flaps protruding from the surface of the bladder, and two dark glaring eyes. And across it all was a scar or seam, a dark purplish mark dividing the face almost in half. It passed between the eyes, to the left of the nose, and over the mouth, apparently sealing the lips together at the mouth where it crossed them, so it was almost as if the thing had two mouths.

  The Boneless One (I didn't doubt that's what I was looking at) rolled over to one of the fallen Bargainers, a man who was struggling to regain his feet. Its two mouths pressed against his arm, as if in a kiss. The life went out of him in a moment and he fell dead to the ground.

  After a while it rolled away, or started to, then paused. The appendages on one side of the body flapped uselessly. It was almost as if they were trying to hit the other side of the Boneless One's body. Finally the Boneless One rolled away toward another fallen Bargainer, a woman who was twitching limply, apparently unable to get up.

  This time it looked as if one side of the Boneless One's face was trying to keep the other side from making contact with the victim. Again the useless appendages struggled, each set lashing out at the opposite side of the shapeless body. When the woman screamed, seeing the monster beside her, and began to edge away across the bone-strewn floor, the Boneless One gave up its pointless struggle against itself and rolled quickly over, locking its lips on the woman's left leg. She stopped moving instantly; her face became calm; her eyes closed. Her life was gone, her tal consumed. The Enemy moved on toward the next body.

  It was weird, but I thought I knew what was happening when the Boneless One fought itself. I figured that we had done it, Morlock and I. If he had cut the anchor-worm as I did, it must have divided the Boneless One's influence into two unequal halves. In doing so, we had somehow divided the Boneless One itself, as if there was no difference between the Boneless One and the space where its influence ran. So now there were two Boneless Ones sharing the same body, and obviously each resented the other. I sort of hoped they would figure out some way to kill each other, but I didn't figure it would happen within the next few minutes.

  Maybe, I thought, we should just drop down into the pit, seize some sharp broken bones for we
apons, and try to poke the thing to death. It seemed like someone would have tried that, during the centuries the Boneless One had been eating human lives in this pit. But maybe they fell so far and hit so hard that they were stunned and the Boneless One got them before they could recover.

  Then again, maybe that skin wouldn't be so easy to poke through. It could roll over the carpet of shattered bones without apparently taking any harm at all, not even a scratch. That brownish, pinkish, grayish surface was probably harder than leather. It would take more than a rotten bone to chew a hole in it…

  Chew. I looked again at the bones. They had been gnawed; the toothmarks were clearly visible, even in the wretched purplish light. By what? If the Boneless One was truly boneless, it wouldn't have teeth. Besides, why should it gnaw flesh if it lived on the tal that sustained life itself?

  Rats. There must be rats down there. Maybe a lot of rats. The rats would come in and clean up the meat after the Boneless One had drained the life. So why hadn't they appeared yet?

  The Boneless One finished a third victim and paused, in midcareer toward a fourth. Its right pair of leathery lips wrinkled, as if it were saying something. The left pair of lips twisted in response, and my nerves were struck with the muted sound of the Silent Word. Then the left pair of lips seemed to say something, and the right pair of lips responded with the Silent Word.

  Was there something happening up above—some battle between the Bargainers controlled by the two warring segments of the Boneless One?

  Maybe. Or maybe each side had called out to a cleanup crew of rats, and the other side had knocked them out. Because they were each afraid. Afraid of rats under the other's control…or under no control.

  Rats! Morlock could summon the rats, if he only had his magic pipe with him. Then I realized he probably did: when I had last seen it he had been tucking it into his sleeve.

  I looked toward Morlock, trying to catch his eye. He was hanging on to a root with his left hand, stripping the gag away from his mouth with his right hand. He stared bemusedly at the Boneless One as it drained the life from a fourth victim. I shouted, but he didn't hear me. I grabbed a clump of earth from the side of the pit and tossed it at him. Then he turned toward me, his eyebrows raised as if in inquiry.