This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  He reached down and picked up the withered corpse, as light as a straw man or a rag doll. He carried it out of the cave and down the hill, laying it beside the Perfect Occlusion in which were hidden the moonlight blade and the dead man's heart.

  Then he took a mallet out of his pack and returned to the cave.

  The passageway down to the pit was easy to destroy. It had been built; its maker had deliberately balanced stress with counterstress. Morlock simply had to unbalance them.

  Unpleasant work (he hated wrecking things), but nothing compared to what he had already done. The dwarvish maker who had made this passage and the demon-trap at the bottom of yonder pit had undoubtedly been a genius. But also a fool: if he had only had the presence of mind to perform this selfsame act, his own life and that of countless others would have been bettered, if not saved.

  “Better late than never,” observed Morlock, who was fond of a proverb. He shattered the keystone of the last arch and it collapsed in ruin.

  When the last sunlight had faded from the sky, Morlock brought out the sealed jar and the moonlight blade. He opened up the corpse's chest with the shining insubstantial blade, then laid the instrument aside. He reached under the dry slats of the ribs and pulled out the fist-sized stone.

  Breaking the seal on the jar, Morlock reached in and drew forth the live struggling heart. He forced it under the ribs and watched as it wriggled into its accustomed place.

  The corpse gurgled and convulsed. Morlock held it down as he carefully folded back the severed flesh. It rejoined seamlessly, and the dirty robe likewise, like a second skin. Morlock let the corpse go and stood back as it gurgled and convulsed its way into life.

  In time the body stopped writhing and lay still, breathing heavily as it stared up into the night sky. Presently he lifted his head and looked over at Morlock.

  “What's your name?” Morlock asked. It was something he'd long wondered.

  “Trannon,” the other replied in a light tenor, very unlike either the first or the second voice.

  “Trannon, I am Morlock Ambrosius.”

  They greeted each other solemnly.

  “I am headed east from here,” Morlock said after telling Trannon the whole story for the third time. “The nearest town, though, is Heath Harbor, somewhat north of here. I can take you there—”

  Trannon refused. “I know Heath Harbor well. I can reach there easily enough, if that's what I decide to do.”

  Morlock pondered this comment as he finished folding up the disestablished Perfect Occlusion. When he had packed it away and tied the water bottles to his pack, he turned back to Trannon.

  “What do you intend to do?” he asked bluntly.

  Trannon looked thoughtful—at least, as thoughtful as he could. (Except for the reddish brown gouges on the left side of his face, the experience had left him looking rather unmarked and ingenuous.) “Perhaps I'll stay,” he said. “I can serve to warn people away from this spot—” He stopped short when he saw the expression on Morlock's face.

  “That seems to me to be habit speaking,” Morlock said carefully. “If there's one thing you must do, it's get away from here. Travellers don't pass by twice in a generation, and there is no danger of one stumbling across the darkness by accident; that passage is closed.”

  “Still—suppose—”

  Morlock shook his head. “The decision is yours to make, but consider: if there is danger for anyone in this place, there is double for you. No, I will not debate this. The decision is yours.”

  Trannon nodded solemnly and said nothing.

  Morlock gave him a few blocks of dried meat and flatbread, over Trannon's protests. “You can't get to your mushrooms now,” he pointed out, “and you won't find game very plentiful unless you go further north.” He also gave Trannon the moonlight blade. “I don't know if it will be any use to you, but it is well made and will last for some time, if you keep it out of sunlight and firelight. If nothing else, you can sell it in Heath Harbor.”

  Trannon accepted the blade without protest. Possibly, Morlock thought, he felt he had earned it.

  Morlock threw his pack over his crooked shoulders. “Well, Trannon,” he said. “We may meet again, or not. Either way, good fortune to you.”

  “Good-bye, Morlock Traveller,” the other said. “Thank you.”

  Morlock walked away quickly. He had the feeling that Trannon was intent on doing something that would wreck everything Morlock had done. That was his choice; Morlock had discharged his own obligations, and they in no way included being Trannon's nursemaid forever. But the thought still bothered him.

  He looked back when he reached the far side of the valley, and saw Trannon motionless in the moonlight beneath the toothlike hill.

  Morlock set himself to climb the slope before him. When he reached the crest he looked back again. The other had disappeared. Morlock shrugged and walked on eastward.

  When he finally got to sleep, late the next morning, Morlock's rest was broken by a nightmare. He dreamed that he had opened his own chest with a moonlight blade, intent on replacing his heart with a stone. But when he reached in to remove the heart, he found neither heart, nor stone, nor anything.

  T he storm was getting thicker and the day was getting darker—if you could even call it day anymore. Rhabia was having second thoughts about her decision to walk alone from Thyrb's Retreat to the town of Seven Stones. On a good day she could have almost made the trip by now, but she hadn't anticipated how much the snow would slow her down. This was a bad road to travel at night; there were gnomes and werewolves living nearby. Unfortunately, it was too late to turn back: for all she knew the danger lay behind her. She'd have to trust to luck and keep going.

  For a moment it looked as if her luck had deserted her: she saw a silhouette even darker than the sky, looming in the snow ahead on the road. Then she recognized the crooked form and laughed: it was just that odd wry-shouldered man who had been staying at Thyrb's. She ran on to join him. He was no particular favorite of hers—she didn't even know his name—but there was safety in numbers on this haunted road.

  “Hey!” she shouted over the hissing of the wind-driven snow. She wanted him to know she was coming up behind him: he was probably as nervous as she was.

  He turned to face her…sort of. There was just a dark patch where his face ought to be, with a slash for the mouth and two holes for eyes. A large dark hump loomed behind the featureless head…. She stopped, stricken by a sudden panic. But then one of his hands tugged at the dark patch and it came down around his neck; it was just a mask against the snow and the freezing wind. The face revealed was the one she expected to see: dark weather-beaten skin with a crooked smile and gray searching eyes that peered at her through the murk. The hump, she now saw, was just his rather large backpack.

  “I don't know if you remember me,” she said, almost apologetically. “I'm Rhabia. We sort of met back at Thyrb's.”

  He nodded.

  “I thought we could walk together, at least as far as Seven Stones,” she forged on.

  He nodded again and gestured at the road beside him, as if it was his to give. When she was level with him he began to trudge forward through the snow again.

  “It'll probably be safer for both of us,” she explained. “There are werewolves nearby. Gnomes, too.”

  He nodded a third time, and said, “Werewolves are certainly less likely to attack two than one.”

  “Cowardly beasts,” she agreed.

  “Just careful,” he disagreed, and pulled his mask back up.

  “Do you have to wear that thing?” she complained. “It gave me a turn when I saw it.”

  “I'm wearing it.”

  “Oh,” she said, shrugging. It wasn't like his face was that much more attractive.

  “I had to cut off somebody's nose once.”

  “Oh?” she said, a little alarmed again.

  “Frostbite. Now I wear this thing when it's cold.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have j
ust said, ‘Oh,’ three times.”

  “So what if I have? You think your conversation is winning any prizes, with all this talk of nose-cutting and frostbite? What are you, some sort of surgeon?”

  “No. I make things. And you?”

  “A little of this, a little of that. Right now I'm taking a message from Thyrb to a goldsmith in Seven Stones.” The message was a letter of credit for a large sum of money, but Rhabia thought she'd keep that to herself. Not that she anticipated any trouble from this guy, but you never could tell. “He told me he'd pay me double if I got it to the addressee before tomorrow morning, so I headed out in spite of the snowstorm. Now it'll be midnight before I get to Seven Stones and I'll never find the goldsmith before morning, unless he lives above his shop. So here I am freezing my ass off and Thyrb will keep my bonus after all, may Morlock eat his liver.”

  Her companion turned to look at her and then looked back at the road. She supposed he was offended by her swearing in Morlock's name. Lots of people didn't like it, especially at or near dark, but she thought that was nonsense. It was one thing to be afraid of gnomes and werewolves, which everyone knew were real. But had anyone ever really seen Morlock Ambrosius? Even if he'd ever really lived, that was hundreds of years ago; he wasn't likely to show up here and now.

  “I doubt he would,” her companion remarked, sounding more amused than offended.

  “Who would? Would what?” Her train of thought had distracted her from the conversation.

  “I doubt Morlock would chew on Thyrb's liver.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Eh. Who eats liver by choice?”

  “There is that, of course,” she admitted. “Even on Thyrb there must be more attractive cuts of meat. His heart, for instance, for a very light snack.”

  “You loathe Thyrb, but you work for him,” her companion observed.

  “I'll take his money to do a job I'm willing to do, but I don't work for him. I work for myself. You must understand that, being a journeyman…what is it you make, exactly?”

  “Many things.”

  “All right, so you're a journeyman tinker. Someone pays you to mend his kettle, but is he your boss? I ask you.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Say, what is your name, anyway?”

  Her companion trudged on for a few steps through the knee-high snow without saying anything. Rhabia began to think he might not have heard her (the wind was blowing something fierce) and was about to repeat herself when he said, “As a matter of fact, it's Morlock.”

  A qualm of fear gripped Rhabia's heart. Here she was, alone in the middle of a howling blizzard, surrounded by werewolves and gnomes, taking a stroll with Morlock Ambrosius…. But, no. It couldn't be him. Her fear receded.

  “Isn't that funny?” she said, a trace of nervousness still present in her laugh. “I suppose it causes you a lot of trouble.”

  “Now and then,” Morlock admitted.

  “You should change it.”

  “My name is my name. I don't trust people who go by pseudonyms.”

  “I suppose some people even think you're Morlock Ambrosius.”

  “It has happened. What makes you so sure I'm not?”

  He's trying to scare me, Rhabia thought, and laughed again, more confidently. “I've seen you by daylight, Morlock. Yesterday, at Thyrb's Retreat.”

  “So?”

  “Everybody knows that Morlock Ambrosius will turn to stone if he stands in the light of day.”

  “I didn't know it,” Morlock admitted, “and I thought I'd heard all the Morlock stories. Gnomes will turn to stone in sunlight, or so I'm told by those-who-know.”

  “Well, maybe Morlock is, or was, a gnome? Morlock Ambrosius, I mean, not you.”

  “No, gnomes, as I understand it, begin as worms living in the intestines of dragons.”

  “Eww.”

  “Eh. Neither birth nor death is ever a nice business.”

  “Wise. Very wise. Get back to the worms.”

  Morlock made a two-handed gesture that seemed to mean something, and continued, “When the dragon dies, they eat their way out of the corpse and dig into the ground, spinning a chrysalis around them. In due time two gnomes will be born from the chrysalis.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes, the gut-worm of the dragon has both male and female ends. So a male and a female gnome will be born from the chrysalis. Although I'm not sure how they reproduce, if at all.”

  “Weird. You know a lot about gnomes.”

  “Never seen one. When I knew I was going to travel through these mountains I asked around about them.”

  “But everyone says Morlock grew up with the gnomes—”

  “Not gnomes. Dwarves. He was raised by the dwarves as a fosterling, after his parents went into exile from the Wardlands.”

  “Wow. You know a lot about Morlock, too.”

  “That's more or less inevitable,” he pointed out, and she had to concede the point.

  “Who was the great mind that named you Morlock, anyway?” she asked.

  “It was my mother's idea, I believe. There were a lot of Mor-names in her family: Morgan, Morgause, Mordred, Morholt. Morlock sounded good to her.”

  “She can't have liked you much. Letting you in for all this confusion with Morlock Ambrosius.”

  “Well, we never really knew each other. I was raised by foster parents. Dwarves, in fact.”

  “Screw you,” she said amiably, and they walked on for a while without speaking, leaning into the bitter white wind.

  Hours later the storm was getting worse, and the day was long gone. If it weren't for the trees lining the road, much of the time they wouldn't even have known where to walk, the snow was so thick. The wind blew it in deep drifts, almost impossible to cross. Then beyond there would be a stretch where the snow hardly covered their toes.

  They were struggling through an especially rough patch, now. The snow had been packed into a drift higher than Rhabia's hips. Morlock got a short pointed shovel from his pack and began to clear a narrow way through the drift; Rhabia followed.

  “We've got to get to town!” she shouted. “This storm will kill us!”

  “We could make some sort of shelter in the woods!” he called back. “But…”

  He didn't need to finish. It was no good saving yourself from the storm, only to offer yourself to passing werewolves and gnomes. Damn Thyrb and his letter of credit, anyway, Rhabia thought sourly.

  “What brings you out in this mess, anyway?” she shouted. “I've got money riding on this, but you…”

  “Going to visit my mother,” he shouted back. This was so unexpected an answer that it hardly seemed stranger when he added, “Or one-third of her, anyway.”

  After an appalled moment Rhabia decided it was just another one of his sick jokes. She pounded on the left and lower shoulder and shouted, “Hey! Better let me shovel for awhile. You can follow along and work on a better class of witticism.”

  He surrendered the shovel without a word and stepped aside. She led for a while then and he followed.

  At last they came to a place where the road was almost clear, all the way to the next bend.

  “Whooo!” cried Rhabia gratefully, and would have stepped forward.

  Morlock pulled her back beside him. “Wait,” he said.

  “Why? Take your hands off me, pal.”

  “How did this stretch of road get so clear?”

  “How did the last stretch get so packed? The wind, Morlock.”

  “Look at the edges of the road. The drifts are squared off. Somebody cleared this patch of road deliberately.”

  “So? We can thank them when we see them.”

  “I think we'd rather not see them.”

  He reached back over his left shoulder and grabbed a handle which she had thought was just part of the framework of his backpack. In fact, it was the grip of a sword, slung across his back in a shoulder-scabbard.

  It was a pretty weird-looking sword. The blade glitte
red darkly in the dim light, like polished basalt. But there were veins of white crystal in the black. As she watched, flabbergasted, the white veins began to glow and flicker. The blade was soon like a strip of black-and-white flames, and Morlock's gray eyes glowed with their own light behind his dark mask.

  The light in the sword and in Morlock's eyes faded.

  “Have you got anything that will burn?” he asked her.

  Wordlessly she felt through her pockets. She found the note Thyrb had sent her this afternoon, asking her to come see him, and she held it out to Morlock.

  He shucked off one of his gloves and stuffed it in his belt. Then he drew the edge of his blade across his palm. Blood, black in the dim light, sprang forth. He reached out with the wounded hand and took the note.

  As soon as the paper came in contact with his blood it began to burn. When it was well lit, he dropped the burning note onto the strangely clear stretch of road.

  It fell to the snowy ground…and through it. Somehow Rhabia could still see the note as it was ten feet or more under the surface. Eventually it was lost: extinguished by the snow or burned out.

  “What the hell is that?” snapped Rhabia, gesturing broadly at the road, Morlock himself, the sword.

  Morlock pulled his mask down and met her eye. “This is my sword: Tyrfing.”

  Tyrfing. It was a name from the legends…the legends that spoke of a crook-backed monster whose blood was a fiery poison….

  “Who are you?” she shouted. “Who are you really?”

  “I told you, but you kept talking yourself out of believing it. I'm Morlock Ambrosius.”

  “Screw you!” she shouted, and continued to curse him violently to his face. It didn't mean anything, except to show him she wasn't scared. Which she was, of course.

  He sheathed the sword, pulled on his glove, and put his left hand on her right arm. “Rhabia,” he said urgently, interrupting her torrent of obscenity, “despite whatever stories you've heard, I'm not here to feast on your internal organs, or haul you off to hell.” He took the shovel from her nerveless hands and turned back to the road. He crouched down and swung the shovel firmly down onto the patch of open road. The road disappeared, revealing a yawning dark pit below. Morlock withdrew the shovel and the road reappeared.