This Crooked Way Part 36

"I'll tell you if it works," Morlock replied sharply.

The listener's less-than-half-face looked hurt. Morlock was angry at the listener for being so oppressively weak, but he was also angry at himself for giving way to his irritation.

"Look," he said finally, "you seem tired. Why don't you go to sleep?"

The listener nodded slowly, with his skull-like less-than-a-face. He turned away and stumbled wearily up the hill.

Morlock stepped into the Perfect Occlusion, now lit within by brittle blue light. He drew the chunk of twilight from under his cloak and the strip of moonlight from the jar of cool water. He spent the rest of the day sharpening its edge on the lump of shadow.

Just after sunset, Morlock carried two jars of water up to the listener's cave. One was hot-just off the fire, in fact. One was cold, just drawn from the well (with the restored bucket and chain). Under one arm was the wax tablet.

The listener was still sleeping. Morlock put the two jars of water by the listener's pallet and dropped the wax tablet in the hot water to soften it. Then he returned to the Perfect Occlusion.

When he reentered the cave, he held the blade of moonlight in his right hand, the stone in the left. Dropping the stone next to the jars, he lifted the shining insubstantial blade and cut open the listener's chest.

He could hardly see the listener's heart, tangled about as it was with tendrils of invading darkness. The heart is the source or entry point of human tal; it would naturally be the focus of the darkness' attack, but would hold out until the end.

The end was dreadfully near. The listener's insides were rotten with darkness. Morlock clenched his teeth and reached through the tendrils of darkness until his fingers closed on the breathing fist-sized heart. He drew it out between the pale slats of the listener's ribs.

The listener stopped breathing.

Morlock moved with cautious speed. Until now the only danger had been that the listener would wake up. Now it was possible he never would. Morlock literally held the man's life in his hands.

He placed the heart in the jar of cold water. It quickly sank to the bottom, heavy with unshed blood and tal, pulsing futilely like a fish without fins. Water ran over the rim. He drew the wax tablet from the hot water and pressed it over the mouth of the cold jar, sealing the heart inside.

Now he picked up the fist-sized stone and (bending aside the pale ribs) placed it on the heart's dark pedestal.

The listener drew a long shuddering breath.

Morlock carefully folded back the listener's flesh, and it rejoined seamlessly. The filthy robe, too, healed like the second skin it was.

The listener choked out something in his sleep. Morlock couldn't tell what it was. He gathered up the jars and carried them away, along with the shining insubstantial blade.

Morlock was eating flatbread and dried meat, sitting between his fire and the Perfect Occlusion, when the listener came down the hill.

"Good evening," Morlock said. "How are you?"

"I feel strange," the listener said, in a rather hollow version of the second voice.

"Would you like some bread and meat?"

The listener shook his head impatiently. "Food is horrible," he declared, in a slightly tinny version of the imperious first voice. "Flesh is nasty. Life is unclean."

Morlock was in no position to disagree. He ate some more meat instead.

"Something has changed," the listener said insistently.

Morlock said nothing. He wasn't ready to tell the truth, and would not lie.

"I'll go ask the voice in the darkness," said the listener.

"If you do," Morlock replied, "it will kill you."

The listener looked at him for a moment, a single eye peering out of a mostly eaten face. He turned away and walked up the hill. Morlock watched him go into the cave and disappear. Then he followed the other, going up the hill and entering the listener's living quarters.

He was alone; the listener had gone on down the pit where the voice whispered in the darkness.

Morlock sat down and waited.

The night pa.s.sed quickly. Morlock dozed on and off. The listener did not return until just before sunrise.

Morlock heard some scrabbling in the pa.s.sage at the back of the cave. He looked over and saw the listener's hand clenching and unclenching on the threshold.

Morlock leaped to his feet and ran over. He drew the listener out of the pa.s.sage and carried him over to the pallet.

Darkness had spread across the listener's face and throat, leaving only one frightened blue eye. His body jerked convulsively; he seemed only to control his right arm. The skin on his other arm was sallow, with poisonously dark veins woven into the slack muscle.

Morlock understood, of course. In fact, he had been expecting this. The darkness had devoured all of the listener's tal ... or at least enough of it that he could no longer control his own body, or even make it breathe.

Pity bit Morlock like a snake. He knelt down by the convulsing listener and took his living hand. The listener turned his remaining eye to look at him. But Morlock could say no word of comfort. What was there to say?

The listener screamed. It came out as a mere gasp, since his vocal cords no longer knew how to respond, but Morlock understood. Some moments later, the listener's fingers relaxed in the nervelessness of death. Morlock let them go and the hand fell to the ground with a conclusive thud.

Immediately the darkness began to rise from the listener's corpse. Tendril after tendril lifted, forming a complex drifting cloud in midair. Morlock stood up and watched it warily, prepared to draw Tyrfing if it moved toward him. But it didn't. When the last tendril lifted from the listener's corpse, the whole cloud drifted slowly, almost reluctantly, into the pa.s.sage leading to the pit. It merged with the mundane darkness there and disappeared.

Morlock nodded. Without its anchor in the listener's psyche the darkness was dragged back to its trap under the hill.

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 pa.s.sageway 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.s by twice in a generation, and there is no danger of one stumbling across the darkness by accident; that pa.s.sage 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.

XIV.

WHERE.

NUR~NATZ.

DWELL5.

"ANYONE HERE?" HE ASKED, AND ECHO ANSWERED, "HERE!".

-OVID, METAMORPHOSES.

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 antic.i.p.ated 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 wryshouldered 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."