This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  “A carnival.” I thought about it, and some icy pain deep within me eased a little. Not tied to any town with its stupid rules and laws. I'd known some travelling players in Four Castles and had always admired their camaraderie and freedom. “Not a bad life.”

  “Eh.”

  “Did you travel with them?” I asked. “With Reijka's parents? Is that how you know her?”

  “Yes, Lonijka Kingheart and her husband took me in once.” He looked away; there seemed to be some painful memory hidden behind the words. “That was around the time Reijka was born.”

  “Huh.”

  “Good fortune to you,” he muttered, and turned away.

  Wait, was what I did not say. Maybe I should have. Whatever I should have said, I didn't say it. I didn't say anything, but just stood there with my jaw clamped shut as he hobbled away and disappeared around a corner.

  I did like him at first, and a little bit toward the end, too. But not enough to die in that stupid vendetta between his father and him—and not enough to forget that my son had died in it. I waited until he was gone, and then I walked away in exactly the opposite direction.

  That was quite a while ago. I suppose by now one of them has killed the other, or maybe they're both dead. I never did hear how it played out. I sort of wish I knew, but more importantly I wish I knew if it was safe to see my family again. I've been working on a farm north of Narkunden for the past two years, and the farmer just came in and told me to knock off work for the night.

  A carnival is coming to town.

  T he day of anointing is a proud day in the life of a Gathenavalona. So the elders say; but the Sisters are silent. Gathenavalona did feel proud, a little, as she watched the ceremonies. The carapace and face-shell of her charge were peeled carefully away, and the royal jelly applied directly to her purplish pulsating flesh. Old Valona was there, wearing the Wreath of Parting, and Marh Valone crowned the new Valona with a Wreath of Becoming. There was a dance, which the Sisters partook in, since it involved no mating. There were speeches and ceremonies and stories and feasting from dawn nearly to dusk. This would be a very special season of Motherdeath, some said the best kind of all.

  Gathenavalona tried to be happy, but her heart wasn't in it. At her former charge's insistence, she went along to the new Mother's Nest and settled in for the night together.

  “The place is too big for me,” said young Valona (Dhyrvalona no more since her anointing). The jelly gleamed all over her exposed skin.

  “You'll grow into it,” Gathenavalona predicted. “The Mother is the greatest of all the Khroi.”

  “When will my egg-sac grow in?” Valona asked sleepily.

  “Soon.”

  “Will you still sleep in my nest when I'm big?” Valona asked, sounding sleepier yet.

  Gathenavalona closed her eyes. “If you wish it,” she whispered at last.

  Young Valona sang:

  “Gathenavalona! Speak up!”

  “Gathenavalona! Stand tall!”

  “Gathenavalona! No one hears what you don't say.”

  It was the sort of thing a nurse says to a young Khroi after her Second Birth. Gathenavalona laboriously blinked one eye. Her former charge was making a joke, and she felt obliged to register amusement.

  Two of Valona's half-open eyes opened wide, and she was clearly concerned; her soft gleaming head was somehow more expressive without its chitinous shell.

  “Would you like to hear a story?” Gathenavalona asked, with feigned gaiety, before Valona asked her a question she would have to answer.

  Young Valona's eyes went half shut again. “Yes,” she said thickly, with just one of her mouths. “Tell stories. Am tired. Feel strange.” She rolled over and lay at ease in the Mother's Nest.

  Gathenavalona sat down beside her and told her stories until long after she was sure the new horde mother had fallen asleep. She did not weep, because Khroi do not weep.

  I t's a long way from Aflraun to the eastern reaches of the Lost Woods, long even as the proverbial crow flies. And Morlock Ambrosius, despite certain legends to the contrary, was not a crow: he had to walk on, not fly over, the mazelike paths meandering through the foothills of the Blackthorn Range. Seven kinds of danger would walk those paths with him: thieves, earthquakes, volcanic outbursts, dark-gnomes, werewolves, dragons, and (most terrible of all, perhaps) the dragon-taming Khroi.

  He was prepared for a bad journey. In fact, he counted on one. (There was some chance he would be followed, or at least observed.) But the journey was far from over before he realized that he hadn't prepared enough. This reflection struck him most forcibly on the journey's forty-second night: he was being stalked by a pack of werewolves and he had run out of both silver and wolfbane.

  So he ran. Werewolves, in their nocturnal form, are like other wolves: if they flush a quarry who is determined and able to elude them, they usually give up and seek easier game (the very young, the very old, the gullible, and the morbid). But with his dark unruly hair, slightly crooked shoulders, and loping irregular stride, Morlock had a rather wolfish look about him. It wasn't impossible that they thought him a werewolf incapable of making the nocturnal change. There were such, Morlock knew, and these imperfect monsters (more were than wolf) were persecuted ruthlessly by their more perfectly ambiguous brethren.

  He came to the verge of an unexpectedly bowl-like valley with a high toothlike hill in its center. He didn't like the looks of the place. He would have turned back or gone along the verge—except for his pursuers. Listening carefully, he thought they had broken from single file and were fanning out behind him. Whichever way he turned he would meet them. His only chance lay ahead. It would be better to confront them, if he had to, on a hill, with his back to the slope.

  Leaping over the verge, he dashed down into the valley. Here he actually began to gain on them, and on the valley's level floor he held his own. The high hill loomed over him, black against the night-blue darkness of the sky, the silver drifts of stars, the blank unequal eyes of the major moons setting in the east.

  Then: the chase was over. He stumbled and fell across a low hedge trimmed with flowers, planted at the base of the hill. But even as he leapt to his feet to defend himself from the imminent predators, he laughed. There was no mistaking the sweet clear scent of aconite rising from the broken leaves.

  Wolfbane! He laughed again as he drew his sword and cut a pile of loose stalks with a single stroke. He thrust the sword into the earth and reached over one shoulder to draw a jar of fire-wylm from his pack. He scattered some wylm on the branches and they burst into flame. Swiftly he corked the jar and thrust it in a pocket.

  Lifting a cluster of burning stems as a makeshift torch, he saw his pursuers: seven dark wolf-shapes, still as stones, watching the light with green glittering eyes.

  After recovering his sword, he whirled the torch in the air, to feed the flame and spread the smoke, both deadly to his pursuers. He barked at them, the short staccato barks of an aggressor, and moved forward to the edge of the wolfbane and then beyond it, sweeping the burning stalks from side to side before him.

  If he had challenged them earlier, they would have done their best to tear him to bits. But the werewolves were now far from anything they considered their territory; the intruder had made no claim on it, properly running when challenged; and since he dared to handle wolfbane, he was clearly no kin of theirs.

  There was a brief but unhurried consultation as Morlock slowly advanced against them. They touched each other's noses and wagged their tails. Then, without a glance in Morlock's direction, they vanished one after another into the arc of shadows beyond the dying flames. When he was sure they were gone, he dropped the burning stems and ground them under his feet, turning then to stomp out the lingering flames in the wolfbane-lined hedge. Finally he moved back behind the hedge to catch his breath in relative safety.

  But glancing up, he realized he wasn't alone. A tall robed figure stood farther up the hill, its features invisible in the shadows.
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  “Why have you trespassed on my hill?” the figure demanded, in a harsh deep voice. “You have stolen my herbs and wantonly cut and burned a hole in my hedge.”

  “I was defending my life,” Morlock said sharply. Then he continued more slowly, “Still, I regret having harmed something you value. I'm willing to recompense you, within reason.”

  “What could you have that I would want?” the other demanded scornfully. “A dwarvish hoard in your peddler's pack? Or merely a map to find one, which you will reluctantly part with, for a nominal fee?”

  “I am Morlock Ambrosius. Many a dwarvish hoard has been spent to buy the things my hands have made. If you reject my offer, I won't insist. Thanks for the wolfbane.” He turned to go.

  “Wait!” said the other.

  “I'll wait,” Morlock said, turning back, “but not for long.”

  There was a brief pause, and then the figure spoke again, in a light hesitating voice. It was hard to believe the same person was speaking. “I apologize, Morlock Traveller, for my harsh words. Your offer is generous, but…It raises a difficult question. Will you accept hospitality while we discuss it?”

  Morlock stood with his weight on his good leg and thought for a moment. He didn't like or trust this person. But the thought of walking away from an unpaid debt nagged at him. He had been raised with too much respect for property, or so he had often been told. But that was the way he was. He nodded reluctantly.

  The robed figure turned and walked up the steep hill. Morlock followed.

  They came at last to a cave entrance on the west side of the hill. There was no door, but the entrance had once been sealed by a wall of mortared stone—the edges were ragged, if weathered, and Morlock noticed the stones that had been the wall in a grass-covered heap nearby. The opening was radiant with firelight.

  The fire was in the center of the chamber within; a pot of herbs was boiling over above it. The infusion stank like poison. A ring of flat stones encircled the fire, blackened through long use. There were some other signs the cave had long been occupied: the pallet of rotting straw along the wall, the dust that covered some of the crude bowls and cups. Yet…the place had the air of a temporary camp, as if the tenant had stopped here briefly some years ago and had never happened to leave.

  Morlock glanced at his host, who seemed to be waiting for him to say something. At first Morlock thought the man (it was clearly a man) was standing so that a shadow fell over part of his face. But there was no obstruction between the man and the fire, and the shadow was too dark for any such mundane cause. It was not as if the man's skin were dark, either—the features on the left side, including the eye, were invisible, wholly concealed under the layer of shadow.

  “Half of your face appears to be missing,” Morlock said then. He was not famous for his tact, but in a situation like this tact was hard to define.

  “My face is still there,” the other replied, in the light wavering tone Morlock thought of as his second voice. “The darkness simply…overlays it.”

  “You want me to remove the darkness,” Morlock said flatly.

  “Yes…that is…most of it. I need some of it to help me hear.” In fact, the other seemed uncertain whether he wanted to be rid of the darkness or not; the half of his face which Morlock could see was round and almost expressionless, marked only by confusion.

  “I don't understand,” Morlock replied finally.

  The other nodded. “I realize that. How could you? Perhaps if…or…Follow me,” he directed abruptly in his first voice, the deeper, more commanding one.

  Morlock shrugged the pack off his crooked shoulders. He took a water bottle out of it and had several long drinks, rinsing away the dust and dry phlegm of his long run. Then he corked the bottle, repacked it, and joined the other who stood fidgeting at the back of the cave.

  The man ducked down his head as Morlock approached, and scurried into a low passage that opened up at the back of the cave. More deliberately, but not actually lagging, Morlock followed him.

  The passage ended at the verge of a pit. Pausing there the other said, “Do you hear anything? Listen!”

  After a moment of listening to echoes, Morlock said, “The pit is deep, but there's no breeze. I guess this is the only entrance.”

  The other hissed in irritation, just long enough to sound faintly beastlike. “Not that! Do you hear nothing else?”

  “No.”

  “Then we must go down,” the other said. Somehow he sounded both pleased and disturbed—perhaps faintly jealous.

  “Not without light.”

  The other immediately began to protest. “But a torch will simply muddy the air, which is stale enough. Besides, you will hear better in the dark.” He continued for awhile in this vein.

  Morlock said nothing. After the other had completed his cycle of protests and repeated a few of them he finally fell silent, expecting a rebuttal that never came. Morlock waited. Eventually the other went and fetched a lit lamp from his dwelling area.

  The light revealed that the pit was about forty feet across. Broad stone steps spiralled downward along the wall of the pit. Sulkily the two-voiced, shadow-faced man handed Morlock the lamp and led him downward.

  If nothing else, the lamplight helped Morlock avoid a kind of fungus that sprouted all along the dank stone wall. The fungus grew a cap, like a mushroom or a toadstool, but each cap had as many as seven stalks underneath it, giving them a sinister spiderish look. Each cap, too, had a slash across it like a lipless mouth, and some of these emitted chirping cries of protest as the circle of lamplight passed over them.

  At the bottom of the pit was a rough stone floor at a fairly steep slope. The lower part of the slope was hidden by a darkness that the light of the lamp did not dispel. In the rough stone of the floor was a smooth hollow in the shape of a man lying prone. The head of the shape was eclipsed by the tidepool of darkness at the lowest part of the pit.

  Morlock knelt and traced the unclear outlines of the shape. His maker's instincts told him that it had not been made, but worn into stone by long use, like cart tracks in the cobblestones of a busy street. He wondered how many times someone had lain there to wear away that template form, how many years, how many someones it had taken to make that shape.

  Looking up, he caught the eye of the other, who was watching him eagerly. “Do you hear it now?” the other asked.

  Morlock rose to his feet and concentrated. “I hear a sort of murmuring. I can make no sense of it.”

  The other sighed. “I first heard that voice…well, some years ago, I suppose. Difficult to say how many…I was travelling south to…to look for treasure in the mountains,” he said, with a sudden blurt of boyish enthusiasm. “I hardly knew what real treasure awaited me,” he said more slowly.

  Morlock refrained from comment.

  “I camped in the cave at the top of the hill—others had been there before me. I explored the passage, thinking the dwarves might have made it when they ruled these lands. It was there that I first heard the voice in the darkness. It guided me down the stairs and spoke to me as I sat here. Finally…after a while…”

  “You put your face in it,” Morlock said flatly, since the other seemed to be unable to come to the point.

  “I listened to it,” the other said defensively. “The pattern”—he gestured at the smooth form at Morlock's feet—”was here even then. Many people have sought wisdom here.”

  “Where have they gone, I wonder?” Morlock asked dryly.

  “Not everyone has the passion for…for true knowledge,” the listener said complacently. “It”—he gestured at the pool of shadow—”tells me I have lasted longer than many listeners.”

  “Impressive,” Morlock acknowledged.

  “After a while…I forget how long it was…it, the voice, it suggested that it leave a part of itself inside me, so that I could hear it better. I resisted for a long time, but…I finally agreed to let it…do it. There was just a little darkness at first; you hardly noticed it. And I
did hear the voice better…much more clearly. I didn't realize the darkness would spread.…”

  Morlock waited for him to continue, but he seemed to be finished.

  “What does the darkness tell you?” Morlock asked.

  The listener fidgeted uneasily. “It told me you were coming,” he said after a lengthy silence. “But usually it tells me…secrets. Ways of looking at…at things.”

  “Hm.” Morlock wondered if the listener was hiding his hard-won secrets or hiding, even from himself, that they didn't exist.

  “After all,” the listener said in a rush of enthusiasm, “what you see is simply a vein or artery in a vast network of darkness that stretches far beyond the mountains and down into the heart of the earth. It is older than time and knows more.”

  Morlock doubted all this, although he didn't say so. He was beginning to have more definite, more local ideas about this darkness. He asked, “Why do you think the darkness tells you its secrets?”

  The listener looked pleased but confused, as if the question had never occurred to him before. “Well…I'm not sure…Perhaps it was lonely.”

  The ringing naivete of this suggestion struck Morlock unpleasantly. He glanced at the mouth of darkness open in the lowest corner of the room. Lonely? Hungry was nearer the mark, he guessed.

  “I can't breathe here,” Morlock said then, and turned away to walk up the winding stairs. After a moment's hesitation the listener followed him upward.

  When they had returned to the listener's squalid living quarters, Morlock put down the lamp and said, “I want to examine the darkness on your face. Sit down.”

  The listener obeyed him, a look of alarm on his visible features. Tentatively, Morlock put the fingers of his right hand into the darkness on the listener's face. The darkness formed no barrier; it was less substantial than fog. Almost immediately Morlock's fingers touched the surface of the listener's cheek. There were long gouges in the otherwise unlined skin of the listener's face.