This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  “Your—” I said, sitting across from him.

  He rapped his knuckles, and a blue-and-white-clad servant appeared from a door I hadn't noticed in the wall of the hostel behind Aurelius.

  “Would you like something to eat? Something to drink?”

  “Not until I know what this is about.”

  He laughed and said, “Tea for me, Zyrn. Bring two cups, in case she changes her mind.” The servant stepped back into the doorway and disappeared.

  “What's your interest in Morlock?” I asked. “And why are you bothering me about it?”

  He didn't answer. He looked at me assessingly and after a moment said, “I suppose I can see it. You resemble Morlock's wife somewhat: a crude copy of a more sophisticated original—”

  “His wife?” I snapped, nearly jumping out of my chair. I'd had no idea Morlock was married. It seemed as odd as a tree stump or a broken boulder being married.

  “Well, ex-wife,” Aurelius conceded. “His exile from the Wardlands technically dissolved the union. But I'm a little old-fashioned, and I don't think these bonds are so easily broken. I see he didn't tell you about her. Well, maybe that's not significant. He doesn't talk much, does he?”

  “What's this about?” I demanded. “What are you getting at?”

  “I'd rather go at this slower,” Aurelius admitted, “but I realize you don't have all day. I am interested, as you put it, in Morlock for a number of reasons, but the most urgent one is that he's trying to kill my wife. I'm bothering you about it because he's already killed one of your sons and may succeed in destroying your entire family.”

  What he said about my family was so like what I feared that I froze for a moment. But I didn't want to give him a single clue how close to my heart he had struck, so I said, as calmly as I could, “My son was killed by the Khroi. Morlock wasn't even present at the time. I was, though, and there was nothing I could do about it. Thanks for reminding me, you heartless bastard.”

  “I'm sorry,” he said, with every appearance of regret. “Really I am. I'm trying to appeal to you through your wounded heart because we have a common interest, a desperately serious one. I ask you to think about this painful subject only to avoid more pain for yourself and your family. Of course the Khroi killed Stador, but who was really responsible? The Khroi aren't much more than animals. Why were you in that mountain pass? Would you ever have gone there but for him? And now your son is dead.”

  “You don't give a damn about my son. About any of us.”

  “That's true, in a way,” he admitted cheerfully. “You're nothing to me. But my wife is. We can help each other. We must help each other. We must save what we can of the people we love.”

  I met his blue eyes and, Strange Gods forgive me, he looked earnest. More than that: honest. Like I could trust him. And I wanted to believe him. It let me off the hook, you see. Morlock had warned us and warned us that the Kirach Kund was dangerous, and we hadn't listened to him. Of course, he hadn't given us all the details. If he had, we would have chosen differently, of course. Of course we would have. That made it his fault, not ours. It had to be that way. It had to be that way, because if Morlock wasn't responsible, then we were. Or, more precisely, I was. I had killed my son.

  I said nothing as all of this was chewing through my brains. Zyrn, the blue-and-white-clad servant, brought the tea and vanished again, without Aurelius so much as looking at him. The old man poured us each a cup of tea, sweetening his own with honey and milk from jars on the table and leaving mine black. We both drank. The cups emptied and Aurelius refilled them.

  “How did you know I didn't take honey or milk?” I asked. It wasn't important to me; I just felt the silence had to be broken.

  He bent forward eagerly. “The same way I knew you would ask that. The same way I knew you would have to shop in Aflraun today. I read it in my map of the future.”

  “Oh?” I said faintly.

  “Yes, indeed.” He reached inside his heavy white cloak and drew forth a rolled-up sheet of some kind of heavy paper. He reminded me a little of Morlock at that moment: the crooked man's clothes were full of odd pockets and things.

  Aurelius moved the teapot aside and spread the sheet out on the table. It was filled with odd lines of different colors. The lines were in motion, tangling with each other, untangling. I realized suddenly that they were sinking deeper into the paper, as if it were a box, and rising out of it. I blinked a few times and looked away, feeling dizzy.

  “It's a little unsettling at first, isn't it?” Aurelius said eagerly. “It's all due to my new scholium of teleomancy. What is the future, except the actions we will take in the future? And we will take those actions because of certain intentions; nobody does anything for no reason. And all those future intentions are rooted in our present concerns. If we could sample the intentions of a significant number of people in a community and trace how they would interact, we could foretell the future with a certain amount of accuracy.”

  “Without using the Sight,” I said.

  “Yes.” He seemed not to want to talk about that, but he went so far as to add, “The visions of two seers can overlap, you see, and one will know what the other knows. Where's the advantage in that?”

  A knowledge-hoarder. I knew the type: almost everyone who has a little magical knowledge hides it in his gown until he can spring it on someone and get something for it. Aurelius all of a sudden seemed less like Morlock. If you expressed the slightest interest in Morlock's latest wonder-working, he would tell you about it until your ears got sore; it was the one thing that made him verbose.

  That meant Aurelius was telling me because he expected to get something out of it. I considered the possibilities and finally said, “You're telling me this to impress me. You can do something Morlock can't.”

  “Oh, so many things!” Aurelius cried out, his wrinkled face filled with a boyish enthusiasm. I wondered how old he was, really.

  “And you want me to help you against Morlock,” I added.

  “I do,” he agreed. “For my sake, and for the sake of my beloved wife. And I think you will, too, for the sake of your family. It's suffered so much. Why need it suffer any more?”

  It was a strong argument with me. I pick my loyalties carefully, and anyone outside the line has to look out for themselves. There was definitely a line between Morlock and my children. But there was a line between Morlock and Aurelius, too: I didn't know Aurelius, except that he frankly wanted something from me. I had no real reason to trust him.

  “No,” said Aurelius deliberately. “You don't.”

  I looked up. His eyes were on the squirming lines of his map. He raised his gaze slowly and smiled at me.

  “You've sampled me,” I said. “You have a window into my intentions.”

  “Yes, Naeli, I took that liberty the last time you crossed Whisper Street to get to the marketplace.”

  “But you haven't sampled Morlock's.”

  “Oh, but I have. I did it some months ago, before you knew him, I believe.” His face fell as he continued, “I almost had him in my grip, then. But he…he had help and got away.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Yes,” Aurelius replied wearily, “good for him. I am an evil old man who wants his wife to outlive him, and Morlock is the shining sacred hero who would make that impossible. Have it as you would like. The question is what you will do, what you are willing to do, to protect what remains of your family. You could have saved Stador: not in the Vale of the Mother, indeed, but by keeping him away from there, by taking another path. The powers surrounding you are immense, Naeli: I show you this”—he gestured negligently at the strange map that he was so proud of—”merely to give you a sense of that. You must use foresight to walk between the dangers safely, to protect yourself and the people you care about.”

  “You haven't told me what you want me to do.”

  “And I'm not going to, not today. You're not sure of your own mind yet, and so there's no way I can be sure of you, either.
Find some way to decide, some grounds for your decision.”

  “I can hardly do that without knowing what the decision will be about.”

  “It will involve a break with Morlock, an absolute break: I can tell you that.”

  “Suppose I ask Morlock about you?”

  “Then you will have made your decision. I can tell you this: he has not told you everything about himself. Has he mentioned the old lady he keeps in a jar?”

  “What?” Every other thing the old man said seemed to knock me off my feet. It was a good thing I was sitting down.

  “He keeps a crazy old lady in a jar. God Creator knows why; I don't. The jar should be somewhere in his workshop, if you can get in there.”

  I pushed my cup away from me and my chair away from the table. “Thanks for the tea,” I said, and stood. “I'll let you know about the other thing.”

  “If I'm not here,” Aurelius said, still not standing, “leave a message with Zyrn, or anyone who works in the hostel. ‘Yes' or ‘No' will do.”

  “Won't you know my decision from your crazy map?”

  “Probably,” said the old man, and smiled a crooked smile.

  It was a long walk home, and I had a lot to think about. I went straight to Whisper Street and paid the lower fee to become invisible with the rest. I felt like someone was watching me, and for once I looked on the invisibility of the street as a comfort. That was probably a mistake: the trip was especially unpleasant, with passersby whispering at me and jostling me, especially a strange troupe of people who said nothing and smelled very bad doing a strange shuffling dance that blocked almost the entire street. I finally made my way past, groggy with the reek, and exited from Whisper Street near the Aresion Bridge. In fact, I was very groggy, for some reason, and I don't even remember most of the walk.

  It was late afternoon by the time I found myself back at the crooked house in Narkunden. Thend and Morlock were working in the front room when I entered the house—I don't think they heard me. They were replacing the window frames: something to do with the “demon-sconce” Morlock thought we needed now, no doubt. They worked together companionably, speaking little except, “Hand me that hammer,” and that sort of thing. I listened to them, trying to decide how I felt about Morlock—and Thend, too, as he was almost a stranger to me.

  Never stranger than when he said abruptly, “The future is split in two. I feel like I'm split in two.”

  I wanted to rush in and hug him. I had no idea what he meant, but I knew he was hurting. But I stood there in the shadows, listening.

  “You worry too much about the future,” I heard Morlock say. “Don't let your Sight block out the things you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, feel with your hands. All these things are real, too. Don't let your gift become a curse; it needn't be. And if you don't watch where you're hammering you're going to lose a finger.”

  If there was one right thing to say, this was clearly it. Thend laughed; it eased my heart to hear him.

  I wish I'd turned away then, because he next said, in a low voice I almost couldn't hear, “She tears me in two. She thinks I'm just a boy, but I'm already almost a man.”

  My fears about who “she” was were unfortunately confirmed when Morlock said, “I'm no expert on mothers. I only met my own quite recently. Or one-third of her, anyway.”

  “Death and Justice, you are weird.”

  I could almost hear Morlock shrug. “Eh.”

  They started hammering again and I sneaked off.

  I drifted away, lost in dark thoughts. Without planning it, I ended up in the hallway outside Morlock's workshop. The lock on the door glanced at me with a coppery eye and released its long bronze fingers from the door handle. I pulled it open and entered.

  There was always a lot going on in Morlock's workshop, whether he was there or not. Today I saw his snarky little flames crawling like fiery ants over a couple of blue glazed jars. I thought of what Aurelius had said, and I wondered if Morlock was planning to make a collection of old ladies in jars.

  “Hi, Naeli!” the flames said to me, among other things I won't repeat. They just get more irresponsible if you encourage them, so I didn't, not too much, and proceeded to look around the room.

  At the end of a long worktable was a blue glazed jar, not so very different from the ones the flames were working on. Next to it on the table lay its lid. Next to that was a book lying open, face up. The text seemed to be about some kind of gnome, although dragons or man-dragons came into it, too (for reasons that weren't clear; I didn't want to flip pages to find out). A sound of humming or singing was coming from the jar.

  I approached it cautiously, but not so much that the person humming didn't hear me. “Who is that?” a quavering voice asked. “Is that you…whatever-your-name-is?”

  “It's me,” I said, going closer.

  “Who's ‘me’?” said the voice irritably. It was obviously coming from the jar.

  I went closer and looked in the mouth of the jar, and was startled by what seemed to be a watery gray eye peering out.

  “Oh!” said the voice. “I know you. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I know you. Fasra!”

  “No, I—”

  “Shut up, won't you dear? Let's see. Aloê?”

  “No.”

  “Voin?”

  “No.”

  “Reijka?”

  “No! Give up?”

  “My dear. Oh, my dear. If you only knew me, you would know that I never…I never…Let's see, who were you again?”

  “Naeli.”

  “No, don't be ridiculous. She's dead.”

  “You may be thinking of someone else—”

  “—or not well. Not at all well. They were in here talking about it.”

  “Were they really?”

  “Well, I don't know, truthfully, my dear. I'm not well myself. I'm almost completely crazy, as a matter of fact, so you'll have to forgive me if I wander a bit. Could you get me a bit of water, Fasra dear?”

  “Naeli.”

  “Is Fasra there?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I thought she was. Could you get me a bit of water, Voin dear?”

  I looked around and saw a glass pitcher full of clear water nearby.

  “I hope this is safe,” I said, picking up the pitcher. “How do I…?”

  “Just pour it through the mouth of the jar like last time,” the old woman's voice said. “Thank you, dear.”

  I poured a little water through the mouth of the jar, and after a moment the old woman said, “That's fine! That's enough! Thank you so very much, dear little, um what's-your-name.”

  “Are you thirsty?” I asked. “Can I help you out of the jar somehow?”

  “Oh, I never drink or eat—that's a function of the antideath spell. I just needed a little water for a focus. Morlock is not very strong on the water-magics, poor fellow, and I'm trying to teach him a little, but I have the damndest time trying to remember them myself.”

  “Should you be doing magic if your memory is failing?” I asked, a little alarmed.

  She laughed wheezily and said, “Oh dear! Oh my dear! Who said my memory was failing?”

  “You did.”

  “You made that up!” she said accusingly. “You are always making things up! I've had occasion to warn you about that before, young lady!”

  “We just met,” I pointed out hopelessly.

  Silence. Then, wearily: “I'm sorry. Most of me is missing, you see, and my memory is really not very good. It comes and it goes.”

  “I don't suppose—” I began, and broke off. It had occurred to me that she might be Aurelius's wife, the one he claimed Morlock was trying to kill. But there didn't seem to be any use in asking her a question I was having trouble even putting into words.

  “Never suppose, my dear. Supposing makes a sup of pos and ing.”

  “What?”

  “Did I say it wrong? It was supposed to be funny. I must have said it wrong. Anyway, you can only ask, my dear. If I know, an
d can remember, I'll answer. I've become very fond of you, Fasra dear, in my way.”

  I was going to ask her how she knew Fasra, then, but I decided I had more chance of a straight answer from Fasra herself. “Do you know an old man named Aurelius?” I asked.

  “Aurelius? Aurelius Ambrosius?”

  “Maybe,” I said slowly. “His surname might be Ambrosius.”

  “Oh my dear! Oh my dear! I may not be the freshest buzzard in the flock, but I'm not old enough to have known Aurelius Ambrosius! He died fighting against the Saxons before I was born! At least,” her quavering voice lost its brief burst of confidence, “I think he did.”

  “Maybe it was someone else?”

  “Maybe who was someone else? I'm not following you, dear. Anyway, now that Fasra has finally brought me some water, I think I'll try fashioning my water-focus. Is Morlock there?”

  “No.”

  “That's right. That's right. They were going to go somewhere and talk about poor Naeli without that silly old woman interrupting them. How I wish she would shut up, sometimes! Because so often it turns out I'm the only one in the room.”

  “Um. Good-bye, then.”

  “What?” the old woman's voice squawked. “Who's there? Oh, thank God, they brought me a little water. Maybe I should try making a water-focus.…”

  I sneaked away, shushed the flames as they tried to banter with me, and fled the workshop.

  I was feeling kind of light-headed—had since I left Aurelius, in fact, and I wandered around the house a little without thinking of anything in particular. When I looked up I was in the big room we had made our refectory. Fasra and Reijka were sitting at the table, looking at me solemnly.

  “Hello there,” I said, a little bolder than I felt. “How goes the letter writing?”

  “Oh, Mama,” said Fasra, and she got up and ran to me. “Oh, Mama,” she said weepily, burying her face in my chest as she wrapped her arms around me.

  “What is all this?” I asked, amazed. “What's wrong, honey?”

  “Nothing,” she said, raising her wet, darkly luminous eyes to meet mine. “Nothing. Oh, Mama.”

  Reijka had risen, too, and her cool green eyes seemed to measure me. “Maybe we'd better have a look at you, Naeli,” she said. “I never really got a chance to examine you. The other day,” she added significantly.