This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  “That's right!” said the horrible crooked man with the offensive manner. “They've trained you well; you can be trusted. No one can say you don't know when your fire's faded, when it's time to give up fighting and blowing flame rings and just settle down and call yourself Squeaky—”

  The dragon lurched forward, his narrow chest doubling in size.

  Thend couldn't understand what Morlock and the dragon were saying to each other, but he could tell from Morlock's harsh jeering tone that he was baiting the dragon, trying to provoke a rage. When he saw the dragon swell up he knew he should close his eyes and hold his breath: dragons breathe venom as well as fire. But if these were the last few minutes of his life he decided he didn't want to spend them staring at the inside of his eyelids. (He had tried that without much success earlier, anyway.)

  The dragon roared out a blast of flame at Morlock. The red torrent carried him backward and Thend could see him dimly, a crooked darkness in a sheath of flames. Then he disappeared and the dragon stopped roaring.

  There was a dark fog of smoke and steam and venom about the post where Morlock had been hanging. The dragon peered through it with his dimly glowing eyes, trying to find Morlock's body.

  The crooked man had rolled off to one side after the flames burned through his bonds, and he wasn't dead yet, Thend was relieved to see. He knew that Morlock's strange blood protected him from fire, but he hadn't been sure the crooked man could suffer the roar of an angry dragon and live.

  Morlock called out hoarsely, “Tyrfing!”

  The accursed blade flew from its sheath bound to Morlock's pack; glittering, it shot through the smoke-laden air to the hand of the man who had made it. The dim blue dragon leapt back in surprise as it flew past. Then he lunged forward at Morlock, his one remaining foreclaw stretched out.

  Morlock was already running forward. He dodged under the dragon's wolflike jaw as it descended and ran on past the dragon's left foreleg. The dragon turned to swipe at him with his right foreclaw—and missed, forgetting that his right foreleg was a stump. Morlock dashed on, raising the monochrome crystalline blade over his head with both hands.

  Thend wondered where Morlock would strike. He had heard, in songs and tales, that dragons had numerous weak spots and hollows in their chests where a determined warrior might strike a deathblow, could he only get near enough.

  But Morlock didn't strike at the dragon's body, as such, at all. The blade caught the dragon's left wing, folded batlike along his side. Tyrfing severed the joint and passed through much of the leathery flesh before the dragon screamed and rolled over. He was trying to crush Morlock, but the pinions of the dragon's wings gave the man space to scrabble through between the mass of the dragon's serpentine body and the stony earth.

  Rather than roll again, as Thend expected, the dragon leapt to his feet and backed away lumberingly from Morlock.

  As he watched the dragon's movement, slowed by his wounded foreleg, Thend realized why Morlock had attacked the dragon's wing. Now the dragon could neither fly away, with his broken wing, nor run away, with his wounded foot. There was no escape for him.

  Abruptly, surprisingly, Thend felt sorry for the dim blue dragon: mutilated, mocked, mutilated again, and now trapped with that terrible crooked man in this narrow field hedged in with steep slopes. He pushed the feeling down as hard as he could. Morlock might be sort of a bastard, but he was their bastard, fighting desperately for Thend and his family. But the feeling didn't quite go away.

  The dragon meanwhile lunged forward on his unwounded foot and made as if to snap at Morlock with his teeth. Morlock dodged to the dragon's right—and was struck end over end by the dragon's mutilated foreleg.

  That might have been the end of the battle right then, if the dragon had still possessed raptor claws to catch and kill his enemy. And it nearly was: Morlock ended up slumped against the base of the post where he had been hanging; there was no sword in his hand. The dragon leapt at him with a happy roar and he had to crawl, rather than walk, away from the post; there was something wrong with one of his legs.

  The dragon himself was wounded, in wing and foot, and he obviously tried to outthink his opponent. Morlock had only one place to retreat: behind the row of maijarra-wood posts. It turned right to lumber toward the nearer end of the row, attempting to get around them before Morlock retreated through them.

  But Morlock, scrabbling along on all fours, was not attempting to retreat. He crawled toward something gleaming among the fire-blackened stones of the Giving Field: his sword, Tyrfing. Thend wondered why he didn't just call it to him, but then reflected that this trick might be something Morlock might have to set up in advance. In any case, his fingers had closed on the grip of the sword before the dragon realized what was happening.

  The dragon turned to face him, and Morlock lurched to his feet with a harsh crowlike call that might have been a battle cry or a scream of pain for all that Thend knew. Then the crooked man, crookeder than ever now, loped forward, his sword raised high.

  The dragon flinched backward toward the maijarra-wood posts, then turned again to fight.

  But it was already too late. Morlock ran up on the dragon's wounded wing, trailing on the ground, and climbed it like a ladder. The dragon bucked and writhed, but Morlock stabbed down between the spikes protecting the dragon's backbone, and the dragon's back legs collapsed. He ran forward along the dragon's back and stabbed again: the dragon's forelegs gave way and the serpentine body fell wholly to the ground.

  Morlock staggered forward toward the dragon's neck and what Thend guessed would be the killing blow. But he paused and spoke, although Thend couldn't hear what he said and would not have understood it if he had.

  In his native language, which was also the dragon's, Morlock was saying, “I regret my words to you, Gjyrning. Need drove me; I meant none of it.”

  The dragon chuckled smokily and whispered, “You didn't fool me, rokhlan! At least…not entirely. I am old; most of my hoard has been stolen by others; the guile have been sizing me up for fodder. I thought…this way…if I killed you in battle, stole their prize…I could at least die in glory.”

  “Then,” Morlock said.

  “Wait!” Gjyrning gasped.

  “Only a moment, Gjyrning. More deeds await me this dark night.”

  “Morlock…what will you tell them of me…the ones who live under Thrymhaiam?”

  “I can never go there now,” Morlock said, and slid the blade of his sword between the dragon's neck-plates into his skull, killing him. He jumped down and limped away as the dim red eyes grew dark behind him.

  The scene was strangely dark with the dragon dead. Where the dragon had bled there was a sullen glow among the bare blackened stones of the Giving Field, and Thend saw that Morlock's blood, too, lit smoldering fires among what little there was to burn. Most of the light came from the cold bitter moons overhead.

  Morlock limped down the line of posts until he reached Thend. Reaching up his sword, he slashed the thongs holding Thend on the hook. Thend fell to his feet and gasped. “Thanks!” he said, inadequately but sincerely, and then added, “Ouch!” His arms hurt suddenly.

  He looked guiltily at the crooked man, who had suffered far more, but Morlock just said, “Stretching the limbs hurts worse when it stops than when it's happening. Can you use your arms?”

  Thend flapped them around a bit. “Yes,” he said.

  “Then we'll deal with them later. We have things to do.”

  “Right.”

  Thend ran over to where his property was. He found a knife strapped to his pack and came back with it. As Morlock watched, resting on his sword, Thend shinnied up the pole where the Lost One was hanging and slashed the rope that bound him to the hook. The Khroi took the fall on his carapace and slowly rose to stand on his ped-clusters, flexing his boneless arms and turning his head slowly to look at Thend several times with each of the eyes on his pyramidal face.

  “You're welcome,” Thend said pointedly. After what Marh Valone
had said, he was sure that the Khroi could understand him and speak if he chose. The Khroi didn't, though, at least not then. Thend glanced at the werewolf hanging on the next post over.

  But Morlock was already limping there. He put one hand under the hogtied werewolf's back and said politely, “Snap at me and I'll cut you in half.” The werewolf didn't snap at him. Morlock reached up, slashing the bonds holding the werewolf, and carefully put the beast on his own four feet.

  The werewolf spun about and snarled.

  Morlock held Tyrfing at guard and waited.

  The werewolf glanced over at the dark hulk of the slain dragon, then back at Morlock. He backed away a pace, then another, and his gaze dropped.

  “Then,” said Morlock and turned away.

  The werewolf took a long look at Morlock's back, and eventually trotted after him.

  Morlock walked (if that was the right word) straight up to the Khroi and rapped on his pyramidal head as if it were a door.

  “Anyone there?” he asked.

  The Khroi backed away, as if threatened. “Warriors may not speak to outsiders,” said the Khroi at last, speaking through only one of his mouths in a buzzing unclear voice very unlike Marh Valone's. “But I am not a warrior now. I am nothing. Yes, I am here. I see you.”

  “What's your name?” Morlock asked.

  “I have no name,” the Khroi said, “except my true one, which the gods-who-hate-me know but I do not.”

  “What do your horde-mates call you?” Thend asked.

  “That does not matter,” the Khroi said. “I am lost. The gods have remembered me, to my doom, and now I have no horde, lest my doom become theirs.”

  “What do you think you owe Thend, here?” Morlock asked.

  The Lost One looked at Thend with one of his eyes. “Nothing,” he said. “Everything.”

  “I see your point,” said Morlock. (Thend wished he did.) “Does your debt extend to a willingness to act? Will you do something for the chance to go untethered to the gods-who-hate-you?”

  “What?” the Lost One asked reasonably.

  “Thend's mother—”

  Both the Khroi and Thend started a bit at this.

  “—yes, his mother,” Morlock continued, “was one of the captives taken to the Vale of the Mother. Of your mother, of Valona. Will you take us there?”

  “You are the Destroyer,” the Lost One said in his expressionless buzzing voice. “You will slay Valona. You will slay the horde.”

  “No,” Morlock said. “We seek only to rescue our friends. Besides, what is it to you? You have no horde any longer. They cast you out, for their own good, not yours. The only horde-mate you have now, as far as I can see, is Thend. He is not one of the damned; he is not one of the lost. How will it be if you cross into the realm of the gods with one such as him for your horde-mate? Perhaps it will ease the gods' anger.”

  One of the Lost One's eyes still rested unblinkingly on Thend. He did his best to look unlost and undamned, since that seemed necessary to Morlock's plan.

  “Very well,” the Lost One buzzed. “But there must be no killing.”

  “I don't promise that,” Morlock said. “We may need to kill some Khroi to rescue our friends. If need be, we will die fighting. You must join us, join our horde and stand beside us. If not, we leave you here to go your own way. By yourself.”

  The Lost One covered his eyes with his palp-clusters. Then he lowered them and pointed one longer stringy palp like a finger at Thend.

  “He does not know what I am, why I am lost,” the Lost Khroi said. “But you know. He is not our enemy, as you are. And you say this to me. You ask this of me.”

  “If you were my enemy, I would have killed you already,” said the crooked man. “Join us, be one of us, or stay here alone. And you must choose now.”

  The Lost One closed all of his eyes for a long moment, then opened them. “May the gods forget me,” he said. “I go with you to the Vale of the Mother. Follow me; it is not far.”

  Nor was it, as the crow flies, but none of them were crows. Each of them had lived through a long and dreadful day. The werewolf slunk along the ground, dragging his tail. The Lost One was given to fits of stumbling and shuffling; all his limbs would stiffen abruptly, as if from pain or maybe, Thend thought, some sensation the Khroi didn't share with other people. Morlock was perhaps the worst off. Every time the crooked man took a step his whole body twisted, reminding Thend of a millworks he had once seen where something had come askew and the interlocking machinery slowly destroyed itself. But Morlock moved as fast as any of them, never complaining, ripping strips from his clothing as he went to staunch the flow of burning blood from his various wounds. So Thend clenched his teeth and didn't complain about how much his feet and arms hurt.

  The Giving Field was just across a ridge from the Vale of Council, where Thend had first awakened. The Vale of the Mother was on the north side of the Vale of Council, past the long sloping shoulder of a mountain. The journey down into the now-empty Vale of Council was not too bad, but the climb up the far slope tested Thend's resolution not to whine. Fear helped: fear for himself and for his family. There were strange sounds coming from over the far slope.

  They finally came to the crest of the slope, crawling up the last stretch to keep from being seen. That is, Thend and Morlock did; the werewolf and the Lost One would not approach the crest.

  The Vale of the Mother was formed by two shoulders of a mountain (one of which they lay upon). Across the vale was a steep shelving cliff of dark broken stone. Together the barriers formed an irregular triangle with a meadow running down its long narrow center. Thend guessed part of the far mountain had collapsed in older times to form the flattish floor of the valley.

  In the valley itself there was a torchlit swarm of Khroi, male Khroi. They wore the black of elders, the white of warriors; Thend thought he even glimpsed the black, white, and red tabard of the Marh. They were dancing or running an irregular course that looped back on itself twice.

  Where the loops joined lay a massive Khroi: Valona the Mother; Thend was sure of it. She crawled, lengthwise on the ground, too massive and ungainly to stand. Unlike the other Khroi, she had a fourth limb extruding from her upper carapace and another from her lower carapace, so she swayed about on six legs, with two waving like arms above her.

  Behind her she dragged a massive sac full of bulbous objects: an egg-sac, Thend realized. It hung from her thick writhing neck. When the dance reached a certain point she trundled forward. Her pyramidal head split open in three parts and out of the horrifying gap came a horn or spike. The horn stabbed toward certain shadowy figures struggling on the ground, backlit by the torchlit dance. The Mother stabbed one, two, three, four times. And each stab was accompanied by a scream in the mother's voice. Thend's mother's voice. Naeli, not Valona.

  Thend would have screamed himself, but he could not speak; his throat was knotted tight with horror. Shuddering, he got to his feet, not knowing what he would do, but Morlock pulled him down, off his feet and back under the crest of the ridge.

  “We're too late,” Thend hissed, when he found he could speak. “There's nothing we can do!”

  “Shut up,” Morlock said, and turned to the Lost One, who was sitting, rocking in a circle with his palp-clusters over his eyes. “You: listen to me. There are no seers in the Vale of the Mother. Where did they go?”

  Thend, thinking back, realized this was true. He had seen none of the ragged black-and-white streaming cloaks of the seers.

  “They should be there,” the Lost One said after a long pause. “All males of the Horde should be there, to blend their seed with the Mother's eggs and father the next generation.”

  “What about the guards?” Thend asked. “They're not dancing around. If they leave the prisoners at some point—” He choked himself off. He had been thinking that would give them a chance to rescue his family, but then he remembered it was already too late.

  The Lost One lowered his palp-clusters and peered throug
h the shadows at Thend, first with one eye, then with another. “The guards are not males,” he said finally. “They are the Virgin Sisters, the might-have-been-Mothers. They were denied the Royal Chrism and grew up sterile. They will never leave the prisoners until tomorrow's children eat their way clear of the host-bodies. Then the Sisters will tend the twice-born.”

  “The prisoners may leave the Sisters, though,” Morlock said. “Listen, Thend. No, listen to me.”

  “You don't understand,” Thend whispered. “It—she—no chance—we—”

  “No,” said the horrible old man, “it's you who don't understand. There is a thing we can do, but it depends on you. Will the werewolf go and rescue your blood-kin? The Lost One? No. The hardest part of this task will fall on you. If you won't, if you can't do it, we had best leave now and get away while we can.”

  “Do what?”

  “I am going to go into deep vision,” Morlock explained. “I may be able to create an illusion that will baffle the Khroi. Their seers would certainly see through the trick if they were here, but they are not. It may work.”

  “What can I do?” Thend asked.

  “Stay clear of my vision. Wait until the prisoners disappear. They will still be where they were, but you won't see them; no one will. Go to them, then, and free them. Beware the Sisters. Do you understand now? Time is short.”

  I'm just a boy. No, I don't understand. Let's run away, run away now. It's too late. We can't help them and I don't care if we can help them.

  “Yes,” said Thend.

  Morlock drew Tyrfing. The white branches in the black crystalline blade were glowing bright. Morlock's gray eyes, too, emitted a faint light. Then they closed and Morlock fell like a stone and slid some distance down the slope.

  The long silence under the shadow of the crest was seasoned by the birdlike song of the celebrating Khroi, the occasional screams of a victim. Thend looked at the Lost One and at the werewolf, both of whom declined to meet his eye. He crept up to the crest and peered over. If there was some sort of illusion forming anywhere down there, Thend couldn't see what it was.