This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  She crept carefully up the long tunnel leading away from the many-mirrored room. There were mirrors on the wall of the tunnel, too, and more love poetry from Nurgnatz to himself. Unfortunately there were no branches to the tunnel, only little lightless alcoves along the way, full of bones and bad smells.

  When she was investigating one of these to see if it was the entrance to another tunnel a dry dead voice said, “Make stop.”

  Rhabia leapt back. She wished she had a weapon—but, on balance, the voice hadn't sounded dangerous.

  “Make who stop what?” she asked the unseen speaker.

  “Make me stop. Make him stop. Make him make me stop. Stop. Please stop.” The dead voice droned on in the dark.

  There was another sound along with the voice—an often repeated, soft squishing sort of noise. She couldn't place it. She stepped over to one of the dim flameless globes buried in the wall and pulled it loose and returned to the alcove where the dry hopeless voice was begging for something to stop.

  After she saw what was happening she wished she had passed on without looking. A pudgy white-skinned man was sitting there on the floor of the alcove. Over half his body the skin and fat had been torn away so that the raw red muscle glared at her in the dim light of the globe. As she watched in horror his fingers reached out and tore away a strip of his own skin. Then he tossed it in a metal dish that sat nearby him on the floor. This was the constant squishy sound she had been unable to identify.

  “Don't do that!” she yelped.

  “Don't! Don't! Don't!” he begged. “But he makes me. He makes me make myself. Make me stop. Make him make me stop.”

  Nurgnatz had placed a compulsion on the man; that was clear. It was also, unfortunately, clear why. The imprints of Nurgnatz's clever little hands were painted in blood around the rim of the metal dish. Nurgnatz liked skin and fat, and he was making the man strip his own flesh off. Occasionally Nurgnatz would stop by and have a snack….

  Rhabia turned away, causing the man to panic. The tone of his voice didn't change, perhaps could not change, but he said faster than before, “Stop. Stop. Make it stop. Make me stop. Stop.” All the while his hand continued stripping away little bits of his own flesh.

  Maybe Morlock could do something for him, Rhabia thought desperately. But Morlock was likely to have enough to do in helping himself. She couldn't help this man, but she couldn't leave him behind, begging the empty dark to make it stop. That maternal instinct again; what a nuisance it was!

  “Listen,” she said, turning back to the man. “There's only one way I can make you stop. Do you understand?” She put the light-globe down on the ground.

  “Make it stop,” he said, the eyes in his mutilated face meeting hers eagerly as she took hold of his half-raw throat. “Make me stop. Make me stop. Make—” Then he couldn't talk anymore. His hand stopped tearing at his flesh, but she held on until she was sure he was dead.

  “A little of this, little of that,” she whispered, staring at her hands. She had never strangled anyone before. The exertion had been agony to her wounded hand, but that's not why she was weeping silently as she turned away.

  She came at last to the end of the tunnel, which was its beginning in the upper chamber of Nurgnatz's cave.

  There was a big pit in the center of the cave now. The pit was full of blazing coals. Over the pit stood a large metal grill, and on the grill lay Morlock Ambrosius, trussed hand and foot with chains. The chains were bound with leather strips to stakes thrust into the ground at the head and foot of the grill. It was apparently pretty hot; she could see the air wiggling over the grill, and Morlock's clothes were smoldering.

  Nearby stood Nurgnatz, poking at Morlock uncertainly with a long fork. “Ready to talk now?” the gnome rasped. He patted Morlock's backpack, on the floor of the cave next to him. “If I have to, I'll burn this stupid thing. What good will anything that's in it do anyone then, eh? You made the stuff; don't you want it used?”

  “Not by you,” said the smoldering maker through clenched teeth.

  Nurgnatz continued to proffer reasonable arguments why Morlock should do everything that Nurgnatz wanted, and Morlock continued to reply with terse refusals.

  Rhabia stopped listening. Her attention was transfixed by the backpack—specifically by the sword grip emerging from the sheath hidden in the framework. If she could get hold of that somehow, maybe something could be done. But the trick would be to get past Nurgnatz, who was stronger than he looked. Fortunately, she thought as she edged forward, the headless bear or whatever it was didn't seem to be present.

  Unfortunately, it was present; Rhabia just didn't see it because it was behind her. She discovered this when it grabbed her by her upper arms and lifted her off the ground.

  “Oh—” she began, then shut up. Mere profanity could not begin to express her frustration and despair.

  Nurgnatz turned to look at her with his gorgeous dark eyes. It was hard to read expression on his wart-infested face, but he seemed pleased to see her. “Ah, my dear. Mustn't be anxious. All in due time; we will become as close as you desire. But may I say that I found your fingers quite delicious. In fact, perhaps,” he said, moving closer, “perhaps just a snack—”

  Rhabia waited until he was close to her, and then kicked him as hard as she could in his face. She had the satisfaction of feeling his snout crunch against her toe-caps.

  He reeled back, squealing a raspy scream. “Why is it always this way?” he wailed, wiping blood away from his nose and licking it off his fingers. “Nobody loves me.” Lick. “I live here all alone in splendid isolation—” Lick. “—with no one to enjoy my beauty—” Lick. “—and whenever—”

  “Look, Nurgnatz,” she cut in. “Eat me if you can, but don't ask me to feel sorry for you. Tell it to your sister.”

  “She hated me. Everyone hates me, and all I want is to be loved!”

  She suggested he perform an act which was sometimes a gesture of love, but not in this case. “With that toasting fork of yours,” she added.

  He whistled oddly. The extra pair of arms extruded from the headless bear's stomach and gripped her legs firmly. “I will love you,” the gnome said quietly, “in my own way. And you will be one with me, and, for a while, I won't be lonely anymore.” He sidled toward her.

  “Nurgnatz,” Morlock said, no longer through clenched teeth. “Turn me over. I'm done on this side.”

  The gnome, annoyed at the interruption, wheeled around and stabbed Morlock viciously with the fork. The tines entered his shoulder and sank deep. Nurgnatz drew the fork out and was going to stab him again, but never got the chance. Blood from Morlock's wound fell on the hot coals and burst into a cloud of orange flame.

  Nurgnatz screamed and jumped back from the fire. Meanwhile the fire was eating away at the leather thong binding Morlock's wrist-chains to the stake. He pulled the chains loose and sat up to quickly untie the thong binding his feet-chains. In seconds he had rolled off the grill, although his hands and feet were still chained.

  “Hey!” Nurgnatz shouted, in apparent disapproval.

  Morlock, holding out his hands, called, “Tyrfing!”

  Morlock's sword leapt out of its sheath, flew across the fire pit, and landed in his outstretched right hand. He gripped it with both hands and held the blade at guard.

  “Not bad,” Nurgnatz said, with professional courtesy. “A talic impulse woven into the crystalline lattice of the blade, I suppose?”

  For a wonder, Rhabia actually understood this. In her years of doing a little of this, a little of that, she had learned a very little about magic. And she knew what tal was: the quasi-material force by which living souls impelled mere matter into motion. Every living consciousness was haloed with tal. Morlock must have implanted some tal into the sword, so that it would come to his hand when he spoke its name.

  “Impressive, in its rather primitive way,” the gnome said superciliously. “Still, have a look at this!”

  Nurgnatz muttered a few words that Rhab
ia didn't quite catch. A golden sword dropped out of the ceiling and stood at guard opposite Morlock.

  To Rhabia's dismay, Morlock was obviously dismayed. He stared at the blade hanging in midair and essayed a tentative cut at its grip. The golden blade executed exactly the same move, and the two magic blades clashed in midair. Morlock withdrew his sword to guard, and the golden blade mimicked the act.

  “A talic construct?” Morlock speculated.

  “Precisely. You really are almost my equal—at least professionally,” Nurgnatz added with a vain smirk. “It perceives the talic impulses of your intended action before you have time to execute it, and matches its action to yours.”

  “You used the tal of your dead victims, I suppose?” Morlock asked.

  “Some of them. I find that the extraction process spoils the flavor of the meat.”

  Morlock nodded. “Interesting. Still, tal is produced only by a living consciousness. Every action your construct takes depletes its reserves of tal. Eventually it will run out and have to be recharged.”

  Nurgnatz snickered. “Oh, it can outlast you, Morlock; don't worry about that.”

  Morlock had hooked his foot around one of the legs of the grill, and he flipped it into the air at the golden sword. It executed the same move as before, severing the grill in midair. The two unequal chunks of iron fell to the floor of the cave with dull thumps, as heavy as Rhabia's heart.

  “Oh, I forgot to mention,” Nurgnatz added smugly. “It learns. Any attack or defensive move you make, it can remember and use at any time.”

  “Is this as bad as it looks?” Rhabia called out to Morlock.

  “Nothing,” said Morlock, “is as bad as Nurgnatz looks.”

  The gnome, evidently considering this a joke, threw back his head and laughed. Morlock quickly crouched down (the golden sword opposite him mimicking the position of Tyrfing). He shifted Tyrfing to his right hand alone and scooped up coals from the fire pit with his now-free left hand. He tossed the coals at Nurgnatz.

  The gnome's laugh turned into a rippling screech. The fiery coals set alight the grease thickly layering his warts. “My warts!” he cried desperately. “My warts! My beautiful warts!” He ran around the cave frantically, patting at the flames, which only spread to his greasy bloodstained hands. At last he dodged out the dark cave entrance and rolled in the snow outside.

  Morlock tried to follow him, but he was hampered by the chains on his feet and a sudden attack of the golden sword. He was forced to stop and defend himself and, apparently by reflex, slashed in counterattack, teaching his opponent a new move. It used the attack instantly, forcing Morlock to retreat past Nurgnatz. He gave the grovelling gnome a good stomp as he passed, but it wasn't enough to disable his enemy.

  Nurgnatz rolled to his feet and started sputtering. “You burned a great hole in my warts! It'll take a century to regrow them the way they were! And then the others will be that much longer! I'll never be the same again!”

  Morlock shrugged (somehow expressing total indifference to Nurgnatz's wart-care regimen) and backed away slowly. The golden sword followed, making occasional cuts at him, which he met without counterattacks. It was obviously difficult for him to restrain his swordsman's impulses to attack, but he seemed to be playing a waiting game as he disappeared into the darkness beyond the cave, followed by the golden sword.

  Nurgnatz growled impatiently, and then began to whistle. Rhabia found that the headless bear holding her was starting to move toward the cave entrance.

  “Morlock, look out!” she called. “We're coming for you!” That didn't sound quite right. “I mean—”

  “Understood,” Morlock's laconic reply came from the darkness outside.

  The headless bear carried her out of the cave and past the whistling gnome.

  The snowstorm had ceased, but some of the drifts would be hip-deep on a tall man. Morlock was not especially tall, and he was hobbled by chains on his legs.

  The sky above was clear. Somber Chariot glared over the eastern horizon, but there was another light in the sky, a dim gray light. By it, Rhabia caught sight of Morlock, floundering away from an attack by the golden sword. He caught each slash of the golden sword on the edge of his, but all the time he retreated, step by hobbled step backward.

  The whistling commands of the gnome drove the headless bear to run a great circle and dash at Morlock from the side. The crooked man hopped out of the way, but the chains tangling his legs caused him to fall.

  Rhabia thought the fight was over. But the golden sword didn't know how to attack something lying on the ground.

  Nurgnatz realized this belatedly and issued a whistling command that sent the headless bear back toward Morlock, no doubt to stomp him as he lay struggling in the snow. But by then Morlock had rolled to his feet and was hobbling backward again, deflecting slashes from the golden sword.

  Rhabia was getting dizzy trying to follow the fight from her moving vantage point in the grip of the headless bear. But at least it was a little lighter now, and easier to see things.

  The gnome was beginning to whistle a command to the headless bear again when Morlock called out, “I underestimated you, Nurgnatz.”

  The gnome broke off his whistle to respond, “Of course! Ugly people like you always assume that we beautiful people succeed by beauty alone. We could, of course. At least I could. But my other virtues drive me to omniform excellence. Yes, omniform excellence,” he repeated, pleased with the phrase. He rounded his yellowish gray lips to whistle again.

  “‘Omniform excellence!’” Morlock said, dodging back from a cut by the golden blade. “What is that, exactly?”

  “Excellence in every form, you stupid, ugly crooked man!” squeaked the gnome angrily.

  “Tell me, since you must know,” Morlock said, backing away again so that Nurgnatz had to shamble forward to hear him, “are the forms of excellence infinite in number?”

  Nurgnatz held forth for some time on the different types of excellence. He summed up his disquisition some considerable time later with the modest suggestion that there was in essence one true type of excellence, the state of being Nurgnatz, but that this one excellence had a potentially infinite number of Nurgnatzian attributes.

  “Ah,” said Morlock. “Light begins to dawn.”

  “Yes, of course,” Nurgnatz said querulously. “I should think by now you would understand—”

  “I meant literally,” Morlock observed.

  Nurgnatz gaped at him for a moment, then swung around to see the brightness imminent at the top of a nearby hill. The silver light of Chariot had given way to the reddish gray of dawn. Nurgnatz wasted no time screaming but bounded instantly toward his cave.

  But the snow was very deep, the ambient light already in the air was stiffening his gnomish limbs, and Morlock had retreated very far from the cave entrance. Nurgnatz was only halfway between Morlock and Rhabia, yet in the grip of the long-unmoving headless bear, when the tide of golden light swept up and left him a still gray statue of a terrified, fire-scarred gnome.

  The golden sword fell and was buried in the snow, its activating spell cancelled by the death of its caster.

  Rhabia also fell to the ground, dropped by the headless bear. It went down on all fours and wandered away, past the stone image of its former master, into the snow-thick woods beyond.

  Rhabia climbed to her feet and went to meet Morlock, already hobbling toward her through the drifts of snow. His face was gray with weariness in the gold light of morning. Maybe he was immune from fire and had flammable blood, like all those crazy legends said. But for the first time, as she looked at him, he looked as if he might really be centuries old—and feeling every second of it.

  “Better get those chains off you,” she said gruffly. This damn maternal instinct of hers kicked in at the weirdest times.

  “There are some tools in my pack,” he said.

  She sniffed. “That's what we risked death for? A hammer and chisel?”

  He turned to spear her with
his searching gray eyes. “You risked death to help me, when you could have walked away. I won't forget it.”

  “Ah.” She waved her wounded hand in dismissal. “It evens out. I lost my bonus from Thyrb, but I bet I can sell that gnome statue for ten times what Thyrb was going to pay me. So the debt runs the other way, really. I at least owe you a decent breakfast when we get to town.”

  “I don't think—”

  Her maternal instinct didn't have to put up with anyone thinking at her. “Listen, pal,” she cut in. “I've had a long day and night of men who think the damn world revolves around them. So you will eat your damn breakfast and thank me nicely for it afterward.”

  There was some more negotiation on this point, but in the end she had her way. And it was after that memorable breakfast that Morlock offered her a job that bid fair to free her from Thyrb and his ilk forever.

  I t was the last day of the season of Motherdeath, and new Valona's egg-sac had fully grown in. That day they had a rare daylight implanting. The Sisters watched as the males of the tribe wove their dance about young Valona, fertilizing her eggs, reverencing her and the life she represented. Then she implanted her first eggs in old Valona. The first eggs of a Khroi mother were supposed to be very lucky, and those implanted in an old mother doubly lucky. So good days were obviously in store for the horde. Gathenavalona tried to be happy, and she was a little.

  After the ceremonies and the afternoon feast, Gathenavalona went to the Mother's Nest. She found Marh Valone waiting outside.

  “Why are you here, Gathenavalona?” he asked. His harmonies implied it was not a rhetorical question.

  “You knew I would be, it seems,” she replied.

  He gestured expectancy.

  She gestured compliance and said, “I promised to tell her the whole tale of Motherdeath, back when she was only Dhyrvalona. I wish to keep my promise.” Her harmonies vibrated with determination. She would fight, if need be, to keep her word.

  “That is a good story,” Marh Valone said earnestly. “It is the story of the change that began and has not yet ended. The realization that the gods may not hate us, that our own actions can harm us or save us. The Khroi slept for centuries in dreams of the gods' hatred. Now we have begun to wake up. You can be a part of that new day, Gathenavalona.”