This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  “‘Arrrgh,’ huh?” The guard shook his head. “I don't think there's anything about it in the regulations. To hell with them, anyway.”

  “To hell with regulations?” I asked, amazed. I'd never heard anyone from Narkunden say something like that, not even Reijka, who seemed to be a free spirit.

  “Straight to hell!” he said, grinning around the words. “You know what we got going on, past your zombies or arrrgh or whatever they are?” He gestured at the crowd of armed, torch-bearing men filling up the far side of the bridge.

  “A lynch mob?”

  “A war!” He said it cheerfully. “I already sent messages to the other bridges and the watch commander about it. There hasn't been a war with Aflraun for more than two years. About time. No promotions in peacetime, no hazard pay, no overtime except on holidays and elections. No excitement. A war is good for morale, and they do say it's good for the economy, too. We ought to have a war at least once a year, right after the election.”

  Morlock was doing something. He had put the jar behind him and he was kneeling on the midpoint of the bridge. With his right index finger he traced something—a letter, a rune, or something—on the cornerstone and leaped back.

  The bridge between Morlock and the crowd of corpses fell away, dropping through the dark misty air to the dark water below. Morlock picked up the jar and leaped back again, and more fell away.

  “Hey!” cried the war-loving guard beside me. I wasn't sure if he approved or not; I was having trouble understanding him in general.

  Morlock uncapped the blue jar. I caught a glimpse of a large, distorted gray eye through the mouth of the thing. Then he turned the open end of the jar toward the other side of the broken bridge.

  “Speak to them, Nimue,” Morlock was saying. “They are you. They can't reach you unless they let those other bodies go. Speak to them, Nimue. Speak to yourself.”

  A quavering voice uttering a language I didn't know came out of the uncapped jar. It seemed to be singing a kind of song. In a moment the song was taken up by the hoarse, whistling voices of the corpses across the broken bridge.

  A couple of the corpses shuffled forward and fell away into the misty darkness, splashing in the water below.

  “You must let the bodies go and cross over,” Morlock was whispering. “You have no hope in that flesh; it is not yours. You must let it go and cross over to yourself.”

  A few more bodies fell forward into the water. Then they all fell over where they stood.

  In the misty gap between the two sides of the broken bridge, I saw some kind of shape. The shape itself had no color I could see, but it left strange imprints on the midair mist. Was it a spinning wheel? A monstrous head with hair coiling like snakes? A woman striding through a cloud? None of these things, I think, but something had left those corpses and was coming toward us though the middle of the dark air.

  “I did not know the bridge fell away like that,” marvelled the helmeted blork standing next to me. “Would've been handy a few years ago when they came at us with crank-driven siege breakers. That was the war I made Special Task Co-Leader.”

  The shifting figure outlined in mist reached our side of the broken bridge. Morlock put down the jar and stepped back. A funnel of mist appeared above the jar, dissipated. Morlock waited a moment, then stepped forth and capped the jar.

  “Doesn't she need air?” I asked him, stepping forward.

  “No.” He tucked the jar under his arm and didn't seem to want to say any more.

  So I tried to get him to say more. As we walked down to Narkundenside, the guard tagging along behind us, I asked, “So will she die now? Is the antideath spell broken?”

  “No,” he said. Then, maybe to forestall another question, he added, “There is a third part of her: her core-self. If it is reunited with her shell and her impulse-cloud, she will be herself again.”

  “Impulse-cloud?”

  “Part of the mind under the mind. If it thinks, the thinking has little to do with words.”

  “It looked like a ghost or something, when it was crossing over.”

  Morlock nodded. “An impulse-cloud that survives the death of a body may become a ghost.”

  “A ghost.” I laughed. Morlock looked curiously at me and I explained, “Give credit where it's due. Whisper Street was a perfect place to hide a ghost.”

  “Yes. Except for the bodies.”

  “The bodies?”

  “The bodies missing from the graveyards. An impulse-cloud has a great hunger to be reunited with its body, and then it will settle for any body. Nimue was drawing body after body to her from the graveyards. That's how I found her.”

  “And when you find her final part, her—”

  “Core-self.”

  “—her core, and she's reunified, what will happen then? Can she go on living?”

  “The antideath spell will fail if she becomes unified, probably. That's why Merlin cut her up in the first place.”

  “Why are you doing it, then? I thought you weren't a deviser of…of comfortable deaths.”

  He gave me a crooked smile. “I foresee nothing comfortable about this death, from first to last.”

  We were up with the others now at the Narkunden side of the broken bridge. They said nothing, but eyed the blue jar and listened solemnly. They probably knew more about it than I did; they must have talked about it when I wasn't around (physically or perhaps just mentally).

  “That's no answer. You should be keeping her alive. She's your mother.”

  Morlock lowered his head. I think his expression was pained or angry, but he's hard to read at the best of times and now it was getting on for full night. “She's suffering,” he said after a moment. “She is divided, not herself. How can I make you understand?”

  “Is this what she wants?” Roble asked. “This self-union?”

  Morlock shrugged and spread the fingers of his free hand. “She seems to. Of course, she is not sane. If she were, she would not be suffering this way.”

  There was a silence for a moment and then the bridge guard said, “I don't mean to interrupt, but the city government is going to want someone to pay for the bridge.”

  “Have someone from the Guild of Pontifices stop by my residence. I'll pay them.”

  “I don't know how much it'll cost—”

  “It doesn't matter.”

  The bridge guard took down Morlock's address to give to the guild. As Morlock was about to turn away, he reached out and grabbed the sleeve of Morlock's free arm. “Listen, honorable sir,” he said.

  “I'm listening.”

  “How'd you know the bridge falls away like that? I worked as guard here twenty years, and my dad before that, and I never knew. I'll bet a month's bonus pay that no one who works here knows. How did you know the bridge could do that?”

  “I built it.”

  Different versions of the same smile appeared briefly on the face of my daughter, my brother, my two sons (my surviving sons). I felt it tugging at my own mouth. A proprietary pride. He was one of us, and he had done this thing.

  He was one of us—and Stador had died because of that. He was one of us—and my remaining children and my brother had run past the snapping jaws of death because of that. He was one of us—and we were all in danger because of that.

  And so I knew. I almost feel like I decided before—did I tell you about this? I guess I'm getting tired. But that was when I knew what I had to do. I had to do it. I felt terrible about it, and I still feel bad about it. I knew they would hate me for it, and I guess maybe they do hate me for it.

  But, when the time was right, I was going to have to break that crooked coin and summon Merlin. Events would have to take their course. We were all in danger because Morlock was one of us, and that meant that he could not be, any more.

  That night, after the crooked house was quiet at last, I stood outside in the street door, holding the crooked coin. I let the intent take shape, clear in my mind, and snapped the coin with my thumb and firs
t two fingers.

  The coin clicked as it broke, and then the pieces sagged, as if they were made of rotten flesh. I tossed them into the gutter and lost sight of them. By the time I looked up, Merlin and about twenty slippered thugs were already sneaking around the corner toward me.

  “I hoped you'd do the clever thing, Naeli,” Merlin said, his smarmy sincerity heating up the cold night air.

  I hissed a well-chosen obscenity at him, but he just laughed, then added, “Where's your family?”

  “Asleep in the front two rooms,” I said. “I wanted them to be ready to get out of here.”

  “Fesco,” said the old wizard to one of his thugs, “check that. Go silently and wake no one, or I'll kill you.”

  I held the door open and Fesco shouldered past me.

  “What's your story?” Merlin asked, climbing the steps to stand beside me. “They won't go willingly without my son, or so I guess.”

  “So you know. You sampled them, you white-faced lizard!”

  “All but Fasra,” Merlin admitted good-humoredly. “She scares me a little. There's more there than meets the eye.”

  “There's plenty there that meets the eye!” I snapped.

  “You never heard me say otherwise, madam.”

  “Don't—” I bit off the rest of my usual comeback. Don't call me “madam”; I'm not some Coranian bimbo-herder. Maybe I wasn't, but I didn't feel like bragging about it tonight.

  He smiled unpleasantly at me, his teeth gleaming through the night shadows. Him and his map of the future. How I hated him. How I feared him.

  Our friendly thug Fesco appeared at the doorway and nodded.

  Merlin looked at his other thugs and gestured at me.

  Suddenly there were several thugs on each side of me, and some in front of Merlin, and some behind the rest of us. It was like a military formation. It was awfully crowded on the stairs of the crooked house.

  “I thought you were going to let us go.”

  “Shut up,” he replied briefly. He looked at the thugs surrounding me. “If she doesn't shut up, you make her shut up. Don't kill her, though, unless I tell you to.”

  “Liar,” I whispered hopelessly.

  In his way, Merlin was as hard to irritate as Morlock. Morlock could irritate him, naturally—Morlock can irritate anyone…the master of all irritants, that's what they should call him—but I had never been able to. Until now. What I said then got deeply under his skin. His face turned toward me and I saw his features working strangely in the light of the major moons.

  “I don't intend to betray you, Naeli,” he said. “I simply wish to verify that you have not betrayed me. I keep my word. I suppose Morlock told you differently?”

  I didn't say anything, because he seemed like he was about to do something crazy. Eventually he calmed down and we went, a slippered platoon, into the crooked house.

  In the front room the forms of my brother and two (surviving) sons could be seen in the moonlight from the open window. Merlin eyed them from a distance; then he waved his thugs away and stepped closer to the sleeping forms. He drew a dagger and plunged it into Roble's face. Roble's chest continued to rise and fall, as if he were sleeping. Merlin turned away to stab Thend and Bann. None of them reacted.

  “Damnation,” he said sincerely. He turned to one of his thugs and said, “Fesco. Take Elnun there. Go find the thing in the next room that looks like a girl. Rip it to pieces and come back to me.”

  Appalled, Fesco whispered, “But what if—”

  “You can speak normally,” the wizard interrupted. “Light a lamp or two while you're about it. No need for secrecy. They're long gone. Aren't they, Naeli?”

  “Yes,” I said, since it was now obvious.

  “I wanted so badly for you to do the clever thing,” Merlin complained. “I hoped against hope. You won't say where they went, I suppose?”

  “No.”

  “You may change your mind about that,” said Merlin, “or I may change it for you. What a lot of work that would be, though! I think we'll just search the house, first.”

  “You—” will be wasting your time, I was going to say, but thought twice about it. If he wanted to waste his time, it was fine with me.

  “You!” Merlin repeated mockingly. “You!”

  “Drop dead.”

  “Someday I will. Long after you have died and been forgotten, of course.”

  Fesco returned alone. “It wasn't a girl. Something in its belly bit Elnun when he stabbed it and he's dead.”

  “I told you to make some light,” Merlin complained. “Do it now, and—”

  “Aurelius,” Fesco interrupted, “unless you tell me more about this job, I'm leaving and taking my men with me.”

  “We're here to capture someone,” Merlin said. “That's all you need know.”

  I remembered how some of the bravoes had reacted to Morlock's name in Aflraun, so I decided this might be the time to speak up. “It's Morlock Ambrosius,” I said. “That's who he's sending you after. Heard of him, have you?”

  Fesco was appalled, but skeptical. “Can't be. He'd be centuries old.”

  “He was in Aflraun tonight,” one of the thugs said. “He killed a man and burned down Whisper Street and smashed the keystone of the Aresion Bridge—bam!—with his fist, like this: bam. I heard about it from—I heard about it from—This guy told me.”

  Fesco turned to Merlin. “What about this, Master Aurelius?”

  “His name's not Aurelius, either,” I said. “He's been lying to you about everything.”

  Merlin looked at me for a moment, smiled gently, and said, “I've not been lying, but it is true that I have not told you all that I know. I seldom do. Fesco, my true name is Merlin Ambrosius.”

  Every one, and I mean every one, of those dirty soft-shoe cutthroats went down on one knee.

  “Great Master,” Fesco said, bowing his head reverently, “forgive us and command us.”

  “Get back on your feet and do as I direct,” Merlin said kindly. “You'll still be paid. I don't expect anything from gratitude.”

  “We do not forget. We will never forget.”

  “That's good to know,” Merlin said. “I, too, have a long memory: for good and evil, Naeli. For good and evil.”

  His threat meant nothing to me; I was just trying to fill up time. I wondered what Merlin had done in the past to receive the instant devotion of these alley-bashers.

  The thugs got lamps and divided up into various groups to search the house. Merlin had the now-docile Fesco pick five thugs to accompany him, and me, into the Mystery Zone.

  “The fame of it has reached even across the great river of the north,” Merlin told me slyly. “So I naturally take this chance to visit it without the usual admission price.”

  They went very carefully. Fesco and two thugs preceded us through the Gate of Shadows (the dark room we used to disorient visitors), searching it carefully before Merlin and I entered, followed by the thug rearguard. They tried the same thing with the zone itself, but their formation broke when a couple of the thugs tripped and fell up a wall.

  Merlin waved me through and followed along, an expression of wonder lighting his pale cold features. The two thugs were standing on the wall, disoriented. One of them made it back to the floor, but the other staggered like a drunk and ended up standing on the ceiling.

  “Well,” said Merlin to me, “I won't lie to you, Naeli. I find this remarkable. At times like these, I almost wish Morlock and I were on better terms. I don't suppose you can tell me anything about this?”

  “What's it worth to you?”

  “How mercenary. Or are you talking about your family?”

  “I'm not talking about money, anyway.”

  “Well, if you put it like that, I don't think anything you tell me will be worth any concessions for your family's safety. As long as they are levers I can use to apply pressure on Morlock, I'll use them. When they are not, they've nothing to fear from me. You see how honest I am with you, Naeli.”

>   I was honest with him about something.

  He laughed and said, “You're not the first to say so, though others had more elegant ways of putting it. Well, I think what we have here in your Mystery Zone is some sort of four-dimensional polytope.”

  “It is,” I conceded.

  “Well, that much is obvious, isn't it? But I'm having a little trouble working out the geometry. Is it regular, do you know? Did he ever show you a three-dimensional map of the thing?”

  “No.”

  “He may not have one. He can do multidimensional calculations in his head. God Creator knows where he learned it—not from the dwarves; all the math they know is bookkeeping. He stayed at New Moorhope for a time; perhaps they taught him there.” He shook his head. “No, I just can't work it out. Unless he knows a way to bend gravity?”

  “He says gravity is more malleable in the fifth dimension,” I remembered.

  “Is it?” Merlin said thoughtfully. “Is it really? The four-space polytope must be nested in some sort of fifth-dimensional structure then. Interesting. I'll have to give that notion some serious study, one of these days. I'm indebted to you, Naeli.”

  “Then—” I broke off.

  “Ask your question. I know you've been dying to.”

  “Why are you wasting your time in the one place in Laent where you know Morlock is not?”

  “Of course Morlock is here, Naeli, or will be soon.”

  “Does your map of the future tell you that?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does. Not that I needed it. Yours were the actions I had trouble predicting.”

  “And you never did.”

  “Oh, of course I did. I hoped you'd do the sensible thing, but I rather thought you wouldn't. Shall I outline it for you? Morlock made those simulacra and you sent your family and him away somewhere—possibly with someone you came to know in Narkunden. If necessary, I'll look into that. You told them you'd catch up with them later, after decoying me off their trail. When they were safely away, you summoned me. You have no intention of ever seeing them again and are quite prepared to die. Is that about it?”