This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  He slid down the slope and whispered to Morlock's supine form, “Hey, Morlock. It's not working. Hey!” He reached out and jostled the older man's shoulder.

  The world fell away. He was standing above his own body. But he was not himself, as he had always thought of himself: he was a sort of cloud of bright bronze-colored motes as sharp as knives. It was strange, but as he looked/thought his way around himself, he realized that this was his true form, had always been.

  He looked through the hill at the valley below. Matter was practically invisible to his talic vision: he could see the shapes of his family lying like a row of colored fires in the Vale of the Mother. One fire was fading down, like the coals of a neglected campfire. Within it lurked bright fishlike forms of alien life.

  He found the fire that was the silver network of his mother's life and saw that she had, as he feared, been sown with Khroic eggs. This was grievous and he grieved for it, but emotions and thoughts were strangely altered in the visionary state. It was like the unreality of a dream.

  Or the reality of a dream. As he looked at his mother, he realized that he was also looking at himself, looking at his mother. He was here, in this place/time, but he was also there, in another place/time. In fact, there was a whole line of Thend-clouds, proceeding from here-now away into a direction that was neither up nor down nor front nor back. The direction, Thend knew intuitively, was past. How often he had come forward in a dream that was partly a vision, to dwell for a while in this moment of the future and misunderstand it?

  He saw the line of Thend-clouds move, whenever the Khroic Mother moved. The Thends-that-were stood peering through the silver network of Naeli's life toward the Khroic mother in her lumbering dance of life and death. That was the source of his terrible dreams. He had been seeing one mother through the mask of another. Now, knowing what he knew, he could separate the mother from the monster.

  He wanted to say this to someone, to put it into words so that he could understand it himself, and he thought of Morlock.

  Morlock's body was a heap of nearly invisible matter, hardly distinguishable from the mountainside it lay upon. Morlock himself, the real Morlock, stood below in the Vale, a pillar of monochrome flames, transfixed by varicolored streams of dim light. He was drawing the light toward him, and directing it away from him at the almost-invisible cliff face that towered over the vale. Not far away was a lumbering web of many-spiculed fire that could only be the Khroi Mother, in the middle of the double-looped dance of burning souls.

  Beyond them all stood the seers.

  Thend was aghast. There were so many of them—only a few talic imprints were sharp and clear, but there were many, many others, rank on rank, proceeding away in a direction that was neither right nor left nor up nor down nor front nor back. They were here but not now, Thend realized: the placeness was the same but the timeness was different. These seers had come to this moment in their vision, as Thend had. But all the past-Thends were as definite and real as he was himself: these were different, more indefinite as they were further away in time. They were from the future, from times that didn't fully exist yet, coming back to witness this moment.

  Why? Thend wondered. What importance did it have for them? Then he realized that he might be able to find out. If he let his mind drift in the not-direction that was not-past, he might see something of the near future. He attempted it, and his mind filled with fire and death and falling stones.

  Thend! he not-heard Morlock not-say. Get out!

  The vision abruptly left him and he found himself shivering on the dark mountainside, crouching over Morlock's unconscious form.

  He had a horrible sense that time had passed, too much time. He leaped up the slope to peer down at his family. They were still there, some of them were still moving. He couldn't tell if any more of them had been sown with eggs; he wished he had thought to look while he was in rapture.

  Whatever Morlock had planned didn't seem to be working. The Khroi Mother was lurching forward to implant more eggs. Thend glanced down behind him: the werewolf was lying like a dog at Morlock's feet; the Lost Khroi was crouching with his boneless arms wrapped around his carapace, as if he were suffering from cold or pain. Thend shook his head: there was no help to be expected from either of them. He slipped over the crest and into the Vale of the Mother.

  He crept along from one patch of brush to another, hoping their shadows would hide him. Evidently they did, but in the end he had to leave them and burrow his way through a long swathe of mountain grass that tore at his face and hands. After he had been at this a while he felt himself lifted off the ground by a terribly strong grip on his neck. He was caught in the palp-clusters of a Virgin Sister.

  Her grip was painful without making it impossible to breathe. He saw over her carapace how the grass he had crawled through had been pressed down, creating a dark line in the firelight that pointed straight at him. Brilliant, Thend, he said sourly to himself. Really cunning.

  Even the Virgin Sister who had captured him appeared astonished by his ineptitude. She looked at him with one eye, then another, and opened her mouths to speak, probably to call out to the other Sisters. But she had lost her chance: a blue-eyed gray shadow fixed its jaws around her narrow neck. Its weight bore them together to the ground.

  The werewolf! He bit through the Sister's narrow neck and the suddenly lifeless head rolled away downslope to rest in deep grass. Air whistled through the ragged oozing end of the Sister's neck: she wasn't dead yet. Her palp-clusters tightened around Thend's throat. He grabbed one of the armblades thrust into a hilt hanging from her belt. He shoved the knifelike point deep into the neck hole of the carapace and twisted it about, hoping blindly to strike a vital organ and kill her before she killed him. She convulsed and her palp-clusters loosened, nerveless in death.

  The werewolf had already rolled to his feet and was running downhill toward the captives. Thend shrugged: the time for stealth had obviously passed. He suddenly realized he had lost his knife somewhere, so he kept his grip on the dead Sister's armblade and ran after the werewolf. The other Sisters hadn't seen them yet; it wasn't clear that anyone had. But someone would soon. Their only chance, and it wasn't much of one, was to run down to the prisoners, free them, and fight their way clear.

  That was what Thend was thinking when his family disappeared. He was looking right at them when it happened. They were half sitting, slumped against stakes to which they were bound. Some of them were bleeding. There were garlands of mountain flowers on their heads. Fasra was looking around wildly, perhaps she had heard something behind her; she turned and looked straight into Thend's eye. Then they were gone: the prisoners, the stakes they were tied to, everything; there remained in their place an odd patch of shadow in the firelight.

  Meanwhile the bonfires flared up, light passing from one to the other in an arc like a red rainbow. Khroic voices called out in astonishment, and when the light faded many cried out again. They all were pointing and staring at the cliff wall above the valley.

  Thend, looking there too, was astonished to see his family on a rock shelf at the base of the cliff wall. Not only them: Thend himself was there, with a ragged crown of flowers, and Morlock, and the werewolf (the wreath around his gray neck), and even the Lost Khroi.

  An illusion, Morlock had said. He was going to make an illusion. This was it. So his family was still there, where they had been. The Khroi Mother, the Virgin Sisters, the warriors, and the elders all turned toward the cliff wall. Thend and the werewolf raced down to the patch of shadow and Thend whispered, “Where are you? I can't see you.”

  Unfortunately, half a dozen of the Virgin Sisters heard this remark, and turned suddenly back toward Thend and the patch of shadow. They plunged their palp-clusters in the shafts of their armblades and drew them, running straight at Thend and the werewolf.

  Thend stood straight and hefted his rather awkward weapon. If he'd only had a moment to free some of his kin, the odds would have been better. But he would do what he cou
ld, and hoped the werewolf would fight with him. He hoped that right up to the moment he heard the rustle of the werewolf's feet as it ran away uphill through the deep grass. Then he had no hope at all.

  The Lost One stepped between the Virgin Sisters and Thend.

  His motions were stiff and awkward: it was as if all flexibility were gone from those boneless limbs. He was not armed; Thend had no idea what he intended to do. But his presence obviously shocked and appalled the Virgin Sisters: they stopped short and stared at him, turning their heads to look at him with one eye, then another, then a third.

  The Lost One gripped his carapace around the neck hole in three places. His boneless arms strained and the carapace ripped apart as if it were rotting from within.

  Something, something white and milky-looking dripped down off his inner torso. Thend had never seen a Khroi without his shell before, but somehow the lost Khroi looked wrong, unbalanced, as if part of him were eaten away…

  Eaten away. That fluid: some of it was moving upward, not dripping down. As he watched in increasing horror, as the Lost One fell to the ground and ceased moving, Thend realized the white “fluid” was made of very small particular elements, each one with many legs, eight tiny little legs.

  “No!” Thend screamed. “You get out of him!”

  He ran over and started stomping on the spiderfolk who had grown in and fed upon his friend, his horde-mate, the Lost One. He was weeping and cursing as he did: the Lost One was obviously dead, had been dead since before Thend had seen him. The spiderfolk had seeded him with eggs and had left them to grow and grow within him. There was no point, but he kept on stomping anyway until he remembered the Virgin Sisters.

  They stood some way off. Each one was staring at him intently with a single eye. Long moments passed. They sheathed their armblades and walked away. Trembling, not sure what had just happened, Thend turned back to the patch of shadows that concealed his family.

  “Death and Justice,” his mother's voice hissed out of the empty air. “Get away from here, Thend, before they come back!”

  “I don't think they're coming back,” he said, his voice (and his legs) a little wobbly. “Keep talking so I can find you.”

  So his mother told him he was a deranged maniac who ought not to be allowed loose and that she hadn't raised her children to be bug food, and would he please go away now, and he followed her voice to find the stake she was bound to. He found the ropes by feel and slashed them with the edge of the armblade. Once freed she stopped protesting but took the armblade from him and set about freeing the others: apparently she could still see them within this strange patch of shadow Morlock had made. The most terrible moment came when Stador's body slumped to the earth, half out of the zone of shadow, and Thend saw that his face was slack and lifeless, the wreath of sacrificial flowers falling from his head. He was dead, unmistakably dead. The others emerged, tearing the wreaths from their heads, alive but bleeding.

  No, Fasra wasn't bleeding. He had saved at least one of his family, at least one, if they could get away.

  Meanwhile the Khroic horde was swarming about the base of the cliff, just below where the illusion-prisoners were. Someone was bound to look back here sooner or later. So Thend's heart fell when his mother stooped down to pick up Stador's dead body.

  “Leave him,” Roble said, his voice harsh with the horror of what he was saying. “He's dead.”

  Naeli looked up, her dark eyes blazing. “With those things in him? No!”

  Thend knew exactly what she meant. The eggs would hatch; the hatchlings would eat their way through Stador's dead flesh, the way the spiderfolk had eaten the Lost One. If they brought the corpse away they could burn it or something, deny their enemies a future from Stador's death. He grabbed Stador's legs. Roble muttered under his breath and helped him and so did Bann, weeping silently. Together they hustled the corpse up the slope toward the crest. If they could only make it that far, Thend thought, they would be safe. He didn't know why he felt that way, but he did.

  But they didn't make it that far. Suddenly there was a roaring that drowned out even the chaos of Khroic voices, and the sky was filled with a fiery light that made the bonfires look dim. The guile of dragons had come. Now the dragons would hunt them down, just like before. There was no escape. There never had been a chance of it, just a false hope. He stumbled and nearly fell as he continued to run, burdened by Stador's dead body. He noted without understanding that they were casting no shadows on the ground, that they were moving within a patch of shadow. Then he did understand.

  The others were now muttering with despair, echoing his own, and Roble was saying, “If we have to die, I'd rather try to fight—”

  “Listen, I don't think they can see us,” Thend said hurriedly. “It's something Morlock is doing.”

  “I saw us on the cliff,” Fasra said quietly, in a dim lost way that made Thend want to weep; he wasn't sure why.

  Shockingly, Roble snickered. “That sneaky bastard,” he said. “How did you get away from the dragons, Thend? Another one of Morlock's tricks?”

  Thend remembered the mutilated blue dragon, its red eyes fading as its corpse cooled in the moonlight. “Sort of,” he said. “Tell you later.”

  “They're killing them,” Fasra said, in that same vague oh-look-at-that tone. “They're killing all of them. Us, too.”

  They were at the crest, but they turned then to see what she was talking about.

  The Khroi and the dragons were fighting. Many of the Khroi were already dead, and one of the dragons lay smoldering between the bonfires. Several dragons were smashing the base of the cliff with their tails, burying the illusion-prisoners in shattered stone.

  “Why?” gasped Naeli.

  Thend thought he knew. Another one of Morlock's tricks, indeed: why else had he put up images of himself, of Thend, of the Lost Khroi and the werewolf? They were the dragons' prizes, but Morlock had made it look as if the horde had stolen them from the guile. He must have known how the fiercely greedy dragons would react….

  Then the cliff gave way and the mountainside fell into the narrow valley, nearly filling it. The shock blew Thend and his family off their feet, and when they arose they saw that the horde had been completely destroyed. Several of the dragons had been caught in the collapse and struggled feebly in the smoking rubble, but their former compatriots left them there and flew away: north, west, south, east, alone.

  Choking from the dust, they hauled Stador's corpse over the crest of the (now very shallow) valley and put him down not far from Morlock.

  The crooked man was returning from his vision, the werewolf standing over him. His sword was dark, and presently he opened his eyes. He sheathed his sword and struggled to his feet.

  The werewolf, backing away, snarled at him.

  “Probably,” Morlock replied. “I thank you, though.”

  The werewolf disappeared into the moonlit, dust-choked night.

  “He thinks he's safer travelling alone,” Morlock remarked. “Poor old Stador,” he said, his eyes falling on the dead body. “It was a grim death.”

  “Maybe you can think of a better one for the rest of us,” Naeli whispered. “Except for Fasra and Thend. Take care of them, please.”

  “I'm not a deviser of comfortable deaths,” Morlock rasped. “If Thend helps me, we can cut those eggs from you before they hatch. The Khroi aren't like the spiderfolk; there may only be three or four eggs in each of you. It will hurt worse than death, and then you may die anyway…”

  “Of course!” Thend said. “Mother, we can do this. I'll go into deep vision, and I can tell Morlock where to cut.”

  Both Naeli and Morlock turned to look at him. Then they looked at each other. “Something like that,” Morlock said.

  “Well,” Naeli said wearily, “as long as he isn't a miner…”

  So the long night after the long day was followed by another long day. They found a cave where Morlock and he faced the terrible task of cutting open his kin to save their live
s, then sewing them up like old clothes with thread and patches. Then they faced the easier, but somehow even more ghoulish task of extracting the Khroi eggs from Stador's dead body. At last they buried Stador in a cairn of stones.

  Naeli started to weep then, and she wept until she fell asleep, and even then she sobbed from time to time. Thend sat by her until she slept, wishing he could do something to ease her pain, sorry for her, tired of her. Tired of everything, really. That was the problem with surviving: you had so much work to do!

  He pointed this out to Morlock, when all the others were asleep, and Morlock said, “Rest then. I'll watch.”

  Thend shook his head wearily, although he knew he would sleep soon no matter what. He said to Morlock, “So you did destroy them, in the end. They were right about you.”

  “No,” Morlock replied.

  Thend knew he was on dangerous ground. He was too stupid to think of shrewd questions, but he needed Morlock to say something more than this. He tried to express this all by opening his hands and grumbling a bit.

  Morlock looked at him with a one-sided smile for a time and said, “Should I have lain down and died for Marh Valone's convenience? Should I have let him kill you, your whole family, simply to settle his fears? He would have found something else to be afraid of, Thend. Those who rule by fear will always be ruled by it, until they are destroyed by it. Now, at last, Marh Valone need fear no more.”

  “So that's why you did it? A sort of mercy killing?”

  “I did not kill Marh Valone. He turned a blade on himself when the dragons appeared over the Vale of the Mother. You should sleep.”

  “I can't stand the thought of sleeping,” Thend admitted. “I'm afraid of the visions.”

  “It won't be so bad,” said Morlock, and unstoppered a green bottle he held in his hand. A green bird flew out and circled round Thend's head, and before he knew it he was dreaming.

  His dream was a vision, but in truth it wasn't as bad as he had feared. He saw the seers of Valona's horde, fleeing into the eastern mountains, along with a few of the Virgin Sisters. They carried with them an infant girl-Khroi they had anointed with Royal Chrism. They were already calling her Valona: the horde would go on.