This Crooked Way Part 24

"Wait!" Gjyrning gasped.

"Only a moment, Gjyrning. More deeds await me this dark night."

"Morlock ... what will you tell them of me ... the ones who live under Thrymhaiam?"

"I can never go there now," Morlock said, and slid the blade of his sword between the dragon's neck-plates into his skull, killing him. He jumped down and limped away as the dim red eyes grew dark behind him.

The scene was strangely dark with the dragon dead. Where the dragon had bled there was a sullen glow among the bare blackened stones of the Giving Field, and Thend saw that Morlock's blood, too, lit smoldering fires among what little there was to burn. Most of the light came from the cold bitter moons overhead.

Morlock limped down the line of posts until he reached Thend. Reaching up his sword, he slashed the thongs holding Thend on the hook. Thend fell to his feet and gasped. "Thanks!" he said, inadequately but sincerely, and then added, "Ouch!" His arms hurt suddenly.

He looked guiltily at the crooked man, who had suffered far more, but Morlock just said, "Stretching the limbs hurts worse when it stops than when it's happening. Can you use your arms?"

Thend flapped them around a bit. "Yes," he said.

"Then we'll deal with them later. We have things to do."

"Right."

Thend ran over to where his property was. He found a knife strapped to his pack and came back with it. As Morlock watched, resting on his sword, Thend shinnied up the pole where the Lost One was hanging and slashed the rope that bound him to the hook. The Khroi took the fall on his carapace and slowly rose to stand on his ped-cl.u.s.ters, flexing his boneless arms and turning his head slowly to look at Thend several times with each of the eyes on his pyramidal face.

"You're welcome," Thend said pointedly. After what Marh Valone had said, he was sure that the Khroi could understand him and speak if he chose. The Khroi didn't, though, at least not then. Thend glanced at the werewolf hanging on the next post over.

But Morlock was already limping there. He put one hand under the hogtied werewolf's back and said politely, "Snap at me and I'll cut you in half." The werewolf didn't snap at him. Morlock reached up, slashing the bonds holding the werewolf, and carefully put the beast on his own four feet.

The werewolf spun about and snarled.

Morlock held Tyrfing at guard and waited.

The werewolf glanced over at the dark hulk of the slain dragon, then back at Morlock. He backed away a pace, then another, and his gaze dropped.

"Then," said Morlock and turned away.

The werewolf took a long look at Morlock's back, and eventually trotted after him.

Morlock walked (if that was the right word) straight up to the Khroi and rapped on his pyramidal head as if it were a door.

"Anyone there?" he asked.

The Khroi backed away, as if threatened. "Warriors may not speak to outsiders," said the Khroi at last, speaking through only one of his mouths in a buzzing unclear voice very unlike Marh Valone's. "But I am not a warrior now. I am nothing. Yes, I am here. I see you."

"What's your name?" Morlock asked.

"I have no name," the Khroi said, "except my true one, which the G.o.dswho-hate-me know but I do not."

"What do your horde-mates call you?" Thend asked.

"That does not matter," the Khroi said. "I am lost. The G.o.ds have remembered me, to my doom, and now I have no horde, lest my doom become theirs."

"What do you think you owe Thend, here?" Morlock asked.

The Lost One looked at Thend with one of his eyes. "Nothing," he said. "Everything."

"I see your point," said Morlock. (Thend wished he did.) "Does your debt extend to a willingness to act? Will you do something for the chance to go untethered to the G.o.ds-who-hate-you?"

"What?" the Lost One asked reasonably.

"Thend's mother-"

Both the Khroi and Thend started a bit at this.

11 -yes, his mother," Morlock continued, "was one of the captives taken to the Vale of the Mother. Of your mother, of Valona. Will you take us there?"

"You are the Destroyer," the Lost One said in his expressionless buzzing voice. "You will slay Valona. You will slay the horde."

"No," Morlock said. "We seek only to rescue our friends. Besides, what is it to you? You have no horde any longer. They cast you out, for their own good, not yours. The only horde-mate you have now, as far as I can see, is Thend. He is not one of the d.a.m.ned; he is not one of the lost. How will it be if you cross into the realm of the G.o.ds with one such as him for your hordemate? Perhaps it will ease the G.o.ds' anger."

One of the Lost One's eyes still rested unblinkingly on Thend. He did his best to look unlost and und.a.m.ned, since that seemed necessary to Morlock's plan.

"Very well," the Lost One buzzed. "But there must be no killing."

"I don't promise that," Morlock said. "We may need to kill some Khroi to rescue our friends. If need be, we will die fighting. You must join us, join our horde and stand beside us. If not, we leave you here to go your own way. By yourself."

The Lost One covered his eyes with his palp-cl.u.s.ters. Then he lowered them and pointed one longer stringy palp like a finger at Thend.

"He does not know what I am, why I am lost," the Lost Khroi said. "But you know. He is not our enemy, as you are. And you say this to me. You ask this of me."

"If you were my enemy, I would have killed you already," said the crooked man. "Join us, be one of us, or stay here alone. And you must choose now."

The Lost One closed all of his eyes for a long moment, then opened them. "May the G.o.ds forget me," he said. "I go with you to the Vale of the Mother. Follow me; it is not far."

Nor was it, as the crow flies, but none of them were crows. Each of them had lived through a long and dreadful day. The werewolf slunk along the ground, dragging his tail. The Lost One was given to fits of stumbling and shuffling; all his limbs would stiffen abruptly, as if from pain or maybe, Thend thought, some sensation the Khroi didn't share with other people. Morlock was perhaps the worst off. Every time the crooked man took a step his whole body twisted, reminding Thend of a millworks he had once seen where something had come askew and the interlocking machinery slowly destroyed itself. But Morlock moved as fast as any of them, never complaining, ripping strips from his clothing as he went to staunch the flow of burning blood from his various wounds. So Thend clenched his teeth and didn't complain about how much his feet and arms hurt.

The Giving Field was just across a ridge from the Vale of Council, where Thend had first awakened. The Vale of the Mother was on the north side of the Vale of Council, past the long sloping shoulder of a mountain. The journey down into the now-empty Vale of Council was not too bad, but the climb up the far slope tested Thend's resolution not to whine. Fear helped: fear for himself and for his family. There were strange sounds coming from over the far slope.

They finally came to the crest of the slope, crawling up the last stretch to keep from being seen. That is, Thend and Morlock did; the werewolf and the Lost One would not approach the crest.

The Vale of the Mother was formed by two shoulders of a mountain (one of which they lay upon). Across the vale was a steep shelving cliff of dark broken stone. Together the barriers formed an irregular triangle with a meadow running down its long narrow center. Thend guessed part of the far mountain had collapsed in older times to form the flattish floor of the valley.

In the valley itself there was a torchlit swarm of Khroi, male Khroi. They wore the black of elders, the white of warriors; Thend thought he even glimpsed the black, white, and red tabard of the Math. They were dancing or running an irregular course that looped back on itself twice.

Where the loops joined lay a ma.s.sive Khroi: Valona the Mother; Thend was sure of it. She crawled, lengthwise on the ground, too ma.s.sive and ungainly to stand. Unlike the other Khroi, she had a fourth limb extruding from her upper carapace and another from her lower carapace, so she swayed about on six legs, with two waving like arms above her.

Behind her she dragged a ma.s.sive sac full of bulbous objects: an egg-sac, Thend realized. It hung from her thick writhing neck. When the dance reached a certain point she trundled forward. Her pyramidal head split open in three parts and out of the horrifying gap came a horn or spike. The horn stabbed toward certain shadowy figures struggling on the ground, backlit by the torchlit dance. The Mother stabbed one, two, three, four times. And each stab was accompanied by a scream in the mother's voice. Thend's mother's voice. Naeli, not Valona.

Thend would have screamed himself, but he could not speak; his throat was knotted tight with horror. Shuddering, he got to his feet, not knowing what he would do, but Morlock pulled him down, off his feet and back under the crest of the ridge.

"We're too late," Thend hissed, when he found he could speak. "There's nothing we can do!"

"Shut up," Morlock said, and turned to the Lost One, who was sitting, rocking in a circle with his palp-cl.u.s.ters over his eyes. "You: listen to me. There are no seers in the Vale of the Mother. Where did they go?"

Thend, thinking back, realized this was true. He had seen none of the ragged black-and-white streaming cloaks of the seers.

"They should be there," the Lost One said after a long pause. "All males of the Horde should be there, to blend their seed with the Mother's eggs and father the next generation."

"What about the guards?" Thend asked. "They're not dancing around. If they leave the prisoners at some point-" He choked himself off. He had been thinking that would give them a chance to rescue his family, but then he remembered it was already too late.

The Lost One lowered his palp-cl.u.s.ters and peered through the shadows at Thend, first with one eye, then with another. "The guards are not males," he said finally. "They are the Virgin Sisters, the might-have-been-Mothers. They were denied the Royal Chrism and grew up sterile. They will never leave the prisoners until tomorrow's children eat their way clear of the hostbodies. Then the Sisters will tend the twice-born."

"The prisoners may leave the Sisters, though," Morlock said. "Listen, Thend. No, listen to me."

"You don't understand," Thend whispered. "It-she-no chance-we-"

"No," said the horrible old man, "it's you who don't understand. There is a thing we can do, but it depends on you. Will the werewolf go and rescue your blood-kin? The Lost One? No. The hardest part of this task will fall on you. If you won't, if you can't do it, we had best leave now and get away while we can."

"Do what?"

"I am going to go into deep vision," Morlock explained. "I may be able to create an illusion that will baffle the Khroi. Their seers would certainly see through the trick if they were here, but they are not. It may work."

"What can I do?" Thend asked.

"Stay clear of my vision. Wait until the prisoners disappear. They will still be where they were, but you won't see them; no one will. Go to them, then, and free them. Beware the Sisters. Do you understand now? Time is short."

I'm just a boy. No, I don't understand. Let's run away, run away now. It's too late. We can't help them and I don't care if we can help them.

"Yes," said Thend.

Morlock drew Tyrfing. The white branches in the black crystalline blade were glowing bright. Morlock's gray eyes, too, emitted a faint light. Then they closed and Morlock fell like a stone and slid some distance down the slope.

The long silence under the shadow of the crest was seasoned by the birdlike song of the celebrating Khroi, the occasional screams of a victim. Thend looked at the Lost One and at the werewolf, both of whom declined to meet his eye. He crept up to the crest and peered over. If there was some sort of illusion forming anywhere down there, Thend couldn't see what it was.

He slid down the slope and whispered to Morlock's supine form, "Hey, Morlock. It's not working. Hey!" He reached out and jostled the older man's shoulder.

The world fell away. He was standing above his own body. But he was not himself, as he had always thought of himself: he was a sort of cloud of bright bronze-colored motes as sharp as knives. It was strange, but as he looked/thought his way around himself, he realized that this was his true form, had always been.

He looked through the hill at the valley below. Matter was practically invisible to his talic vision: he could see the shapes of his family lying like a row of colored fires in the Vale of the Mother. One fire was fading down, like the coals of a neglected campfire. Within it lurked bright fishlike forms of alien life.

He found the fire that was the silver network of his mother's life and saw that she had, as he feared, been sown with Khroic eggs. This was grievous and he grieved for it, but emotions and thoughts were strangely altered in the visionary state. It was like the unreality of a dream.

Or the reality of a dream. As he looked at his mother, he realized that he was also looking at himself, looking at his mother. He was here, in this place/time, but he was also there, in another place/time. In fact, there was a whole line of Thend-clouds, proceeding from here-now away into a direction that was neither up nor down nor front nor back. The direction, Thend knew intuitively, was past. How often he had come forward in a dream that was partly a vision, to dwell for a while in this moment of the future and misunderstand it?

He saw the line of Thend-clouds move, whenever the Khroic Mother moved. The Thends-that-were stood peering through the silver network of Naeli's life toward the Khroic mother in her lumbering dance of life and death. That was the source of his terrible dreams. He had been seeing one mother through the mask of another. Now, knowing what he knew, he could separate the mother from the monster.

He wanted to say this to someone, to put it into words so that he could understand it himself, and he thought of Morlock.

Morlock's body was a heap of nearly invisible matter, hardly distinguish able from the mountainside it lay upon. Morlock himself, the real Morlock, stood below in the Vale, a pillar of monochrome flames, transfixed by varicolored streams of dim light. He was drawing the light toward him, and directing it away from him at the almost-invisible cliff face that towered over the vale. Not far away was a lumbering web of many-spiculed fire that could only be the Khroi Mother, in the middle of the double-looped dance of burning souls.

Beyond them all stood the seers.

Thend was aghast. There were so many of them-only a few talic imprints were sharp and clear, but there were many, many others, rank on rank, proceeding away in a direction that was neither right nor left nor up nor down nor front nor back. They were here but not now, Thend realized: the placeness was the same but the timeness was different. These seers had come to this moment in their vision, as Thend had. But all the past-Thends were as definite and real as he was himself. these were different, more indefinite as they were further away in time. They were from the future, from times that didn't fully exist yet, coming back to witness this moment.

Why? Thend wondered. What importance did it have for them? Then he realized that he might be able to find out. If he let his mind drift in the notdirection that was not-past, he might see something of the near future. He attempted it, and his mind filled with fire and death and falling stones.

Thend! he not-heard Morlock not-say. Get out!

The vision abruptly left him and he found himself shivering on the dark mountainside, crouching over Morlock's unconscious form.

He had a horrible sense that time had pa.s.sed, too much time. He leaped up the slope to peer down at his family. They were still there, some of them were still moving. He couldn't tell if any more of them had been sown with eggs; he wished he had thought to look while he was in rapture.

Whatever Morlock had planned didn't seem to be working. The Khroi Mother was lurching forward to implant more eggs. Thend glanced down behind him: the werewolf was lying like a dog at Morlock's feet; the Lost Khroi was crouching with his boneless arms wrapped around his carapace, as if he were suffering from cold or pain. Thend shook his head: there was no help to be expected from either of them. He slipped over the crest and into the Vale of the Mother.

He crept along from one patch of brush to another, hoping their shadows would hide him. Evidently they did, but in the end he had to leave them and burrow his way through a long swathe of mountain gra.s.s that tore at his face and hands. After he had been at this a while he felt himself lifted off the ground by a terribly strong grip on his neck. He was caught in the palpcl.u.s.ters of a Virgin Sister.

Her grip was painful without making it impossible to breathe. He saw over her carapace how the gra.s.s he had crawled through had been pressed down, creating a dark line in the firelight that pointed straight at him. Brilliant, Thend, he said sourly to himself. Really cunning.

Even the Virgin Sister who had captured him appeared astonished by his inept.i.tude. She looked at him with one eye, then another, and opened her mouths to speak, probably to call out to the other Sisters. But she had lost her chance: a blue-eyed gray shadow fixed its jaws around her narrow neck. Its weight bore them together to the ground.

The werewolf. He bit through the Sister's narrow neck and the suddenly lifeless head rolled away downslope to rest in deep gra.s.s. Air whistled through the ragged oozing end of the Sister's neck: she wasn't dead yet. Her palp-cl.u.s.ters tightened around Thend's throat. He grabbed one of the armblades thrust into a hilt hanging from her belt. He shoved the knifelike point deep into the neck hole of the carapace and twisted it about, hoping blindly to strike a vital organ and kill her before she killed him. She convulsed and her palp-cl.u.s.ters loosened, nerveless in death.

The werewolf had already rolled to his feet and was running downhill toward the captives. Thend shrugged: the time for stealth had obviously pa.s.sed. He suddenly realized he had lost his knife somewhere, so he kept his grip on the dead Sister's armblade and ran after the werewolf. The other Sisters hadn't seen them yet; it wasn't clear that anyone had. But someone would soon. Their only chance, and it wasn't much of one, was to run down to the prisoners, free them, and fight their way clear.

That was what Thend was thinking when his family disappeared. He was looking right at them when it happened. They were half sitting, slumped against stakes to which they were bound. Some of them were bleeding. There were garlands of mountain flowers on their heads. Fasra was looking around wildly, per haps she had heard something behind her; she turned and looked straight into Thend's eye. Then they were gone: the prisoners, the stakes they were tied to, everything; there remained in their place an odd patch of shadow in the firelight.

Meanwhile the bonfires flared up, light pa.s.sing from one to the other in an arc like a red rainbow. Khroic voices called out in astonishment, and when the light faded many cried out again. They all were pointing and staring at the cliff wall above the valley.

Thend, looking there too, was astonished to see his family on a rock shelf at the base of the cliff wall. Not only them: Thend himself was there, with a ragged crown of flowers, and Morlock, and the werewolf (the wreath around his gray neck), and even the Lost Khroi.

An illusion, Morlock had said. He was going to make an illusion. This was it. So his family was still there, where they had been. The Khroi Mother, the Virgin Sisters, the warriors, and the elders all turned toward the cliff wall. Thend and the werewolf raced down to the patch of shadow and Thend whispered, "Where are you? I can't see you."

Unfortunately, half a dozen of the Virgin Sisters heard this remark, and turned suddenly back toward Thend and the patch of shadow. They plunged their palp-cl.u.s.ters in the shafts of their armblades and drew them, running straight at Thend and the werewolf.

Thend stood straight and hefted his rather awkward weapon. If he'd only had a moment to free some of his kin, the odds would have been better. But he would do what he could, and hoped the werewolf would fight with him. He hoped that right up to the moment he heard the rustle of the werewolf's feet as it ran away uphill through the deep gra.s.s. Then he had no hope at all.

The Lost One stepped between the Virgin Sisters and Thend.

His motions were stiff and awkward: it was as if all flexibility were gone from those boneless limbs. He was not armed; Thend had no idea what he intended to do. But his presence obviously shocked and appalled the Virgin Sisters: they stopped short and stared at him, turning their heads to look at him with one eye, then another, then a third.

The Lost One gripped his carapace around the neck hole in three places. His boneless arms strained and the carapace ripped apart as if it were rotting from within.

Something, something white and milky-looking dripped down off his inner torso. Thend had never seen a Khroi without his sh.e.l.l before, but somehow the lost Khroi looked wrong, unbalanced, as if part of him were eaten away ...

Eaten away. That fluid: some of it was moving upward, not dripping down. As he watched in increasing horror, as the Lost One fell to the ground and ceased moving, Thend realized the white "fluid" was made of very small particular elements, each one with many legs, eight tiny little legs.

"No!" Thend screamed. "You get out of him!"

He ran over and started stomping on the spiderfolk who had grown in and fed upon his friend, his horde-mate, the Lost One. He was weeping and cursing as he did: the Lost One was obviously dead, had been dead since before Thend had seen him. The spiderfolk had seeded him with eggs and had left them to grow and grow within him. There was no point, but he kept on stomping anyway until he remembered the Virgin Sisters.

They stood some way off. Each one was staring at him intently with a single eye. Long moments pa.s.sed. They sheathed their armblades and walked away. Trembling, not sure what had just happened, Thend turned back to the patch of shadows that concealed his family.