This Crooked Way Part 37

"You have just 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.s 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 nae, 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 pa.s.sing werewolves and gnomes. d.a.m.n 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 cla.s.s 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 glittered 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l." 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.

"This appears to be a trap set by a gnome," Morlock said. "We were meant to leap forward in relief onto the clear road and fall into the pit."

"Screw you!"

"You're not my type," Morlock replied sharply, a little annoyed for the first time.

"Why? Too strong? Too independent? Too-"

"Too stupid. Listen, won't you? This is life or death for us."

Rhabia settled down. Wordlessly, she motioned him to continue.

"The gnome will be nearby, and he will have set more traps. We had better leave the road, and we had better split up. I'll go south of the road; you go north. If you run into trouble, call out and I'll do what I can for you."

"Fine. Except I'll go south and you'll go north. And if you get in trouble, be sure to call out. Someone might give a d.a.m.n."

Morlock shrugged and stowed the shovel in his pack. Rhabia stormed off into the woods on the south side of the road and began to make her way toward Seven Stones.

She hadn't gone very far when she heard some sort of noise from the woods on the north side of the road. She wasn't sure what it was, but it had to have been pretty loud, or she wouldn't have heard anything over the howling wind.

"Morlock!" she hollered, peering through the snow-swept darkness.

There was a small light, there, on the other side of the road. And there was something that looked a little like Morlock, only it was several feet off the ground, struggling in the limbs of a tree. Only the tree limbs were prehensile, like a monkey's tail, and the more she looked at it, the less it looked like a tree.

And down by the light ... holding the light: what was that? Shorter than most men, with a flat head, covered with yellowish woolly fur, with ears pointing toward the horizon ... a gnome? It was fussing with something bulky that lay on the ground. Morlock's pack?

This was clearly her chance to escape. The road-pit was between her and them. Even if the gnome saw her, what could he do about it? This was clearly her chance to escape. Too bad for Morlock, of course, but so what? The trouble was ... there was something about some poor fool trapped in a situation that was his own d.a.m.n fault that brought out the maternal in her. Usually her good sense trumped any impulse to intervene between the fool and his fate. But she was uneasily aware that, had she not snappishly overruled Morlock, that might be her struggling over there in the not-tree. Plus there was something he'd said....

... all out and I'll do what I can for you....

But the shoe was on the other foot, apparently, and it was up to her to do something for him, if she could. Rhabia swore silently but sincerely and drew her long knife, the one balanced for throwing. The gnome, or whatever it was, had a tendency to dance around a bit, but eventually he grew still again. She took aim and threw.

It was a good throw. In that light, at that distance, in that weather, she had no hope it would be a fatal blow. (Where were the internal organs in a gnome, anyway?) But at least it might hurt him; at best it might seriously trouble him.

At the last minute, though, the dagger slid aside and the point buried itself in snow. It might have been a gust of wind, but Rhabia didn't think so. The gnome dove and grabbed the dagger. He seemed to sniff it, and then he looked directly, searingly intently at her.

"d.a.m.n." Morlock-if it was Morlock (she thought it was)-was no longer struggling in the tree ... if it was a tree (she didn't think it was). That gnome had nothing else to do now but come after her. She would have run off into the woods, but she found she couldn't move.