This Crooked Way Part 6

"Oh, come now," the stranger said irritably. "Don't try to be forbidding. I know exactly what shape you're in. I watched every step of your journey; don't think I didn't. I knew the forest would do my fighting for me! I saw you scrabbling at the lock on my door (what a pitiful performance that was!) and I see now that you can barely stand.

"And where do you stand? In my place of power. Never doubt it, Morlock: I have a thousand deaths at my beck and call as I stand here. Do you doubt it? You still are silent?" The stranger shrugged. "Very well. Why should you take my word for it?" He waved his hand and spoke an unintelligible word.

The weight on Morlock's crooked shoulders was suddenly heavier by several pounds. In sudden alarm, he unslung his pack and lifted out the choir nexus. Water poured out through the dragon-hide wrapping. The choir was dead.

"You killed my flames," Morlock said hoa.r.s.ely. His eyes were stung by abrupt surprising tears.

The stranger laughed incredulously. "'Killed'? The notion is jejune. I extinguished them. That water might as easily have gone in your lungs instead, or-heated to steam-in your heart or brain. Then it is you who would have been extinguished. I killed my hundreds perfecting the techniques, Morlock, and they work. Never doubt it-again."

"I doubt you will find your own death jejune," Morlock replied. Tears were still running down his face; he supposed it was a symptom of the fever.

"Don't threaten me, you battered tramp!" the stranger snarled. "You were about to hand me your pack, that I might spare you what remains of your life. Do so now."

A long moment pa.s.sed, in which Morlock seemed to consider. Then he slowly lifted the pack, holding it out to the stranger.

The stranger laughed and took the proffered edge. This, the only convenient hold, happened to be the place where he had slit the pack two days ago. When his grip was firm, Morlock pulled back, as firmly. The stranger's grip, resisting the tug, tore the gripgra.s.s woven into the sewn seam.

The gripgra.s.s, starved for nutriment, exploded into dozens of thin wiretough lashes, binding the stranger's hand inescapably to the repaired slit. The stranger emptied his lungs in an instinctive cry of pain and surprise.

Morlock pulled him off his feet, by way of the pack, hauled him over to the nearest window, and, still holding on to the pack, threw the stranger out. His body slammed against the stone wall of the house and he stared up at Morlock for a long moment, as if gathering breath to speak.

Then his body was dark with winged forms. The catbird scavengers had been waiting for their predator, and he had not disappointed them. In a matter of minutes the stranger was dead, dismembered, and devoured. Morlock drew in a pack stained with blood, shining blue threads of satiated gripgra.s.s woven into the sewn-up slit.

Morlock carefully unwove the gra.s.s. It had caused him considerable trouble, preserving its integrity, and it served no purpose now. When he finally disentangled the gripgra.s.s, a matter-of-fact voice near his feet inquired, "Do you want that?"

He looked down to see a single red flame burning a hole in the wooden floor. "Because if you don't want it," the matter-of-fact flame remarked, "I'll take it."

Morlock dropped the gra.s.s on the floor and the flame casually devoured it.

"A little too chewy," the flame remarked smokily.

"The whole business was somewhat chewy," Morlock replied. "But it's over now, I guess." Taking some water from a nearby table, he set about sponging the blood off his backpack.

Morlock set the flame-nexus out to dry and searched the dead sorcerer's house for his stolen book of palindromes. He found it finally, or what was left of it, in a gla.s.s jar submerged in watery acid that was eating away the book's pages. It had pa.s.sed the point of uselessness, so Morlock left it where it was.

Had Morlock been led to the dead sorcerer, or he to Morlock? Was the whole purpose of the encounter to deprive Morlock of the book of palindromes? He suspected as much.

If so, he should trust the book's last omen and continue his journey eastward.

He didn't know what awaited him there, but he gave it some thought as he left the watery sorcerer's house burning behind him in the winterwood.

VI.

An

OLD LADY.

AND.

A LAKE.

AS LOVE, IF LOVE BE PERFECT, CASTS OUT FEAR, So HATE, IF HATE BE PERFECT, CASTS OUT FEAR.

-TENNYSON, MERLIN AND VIVIEN.

very night for many days, Morlock had been dreaming about a house and a horse. The horse might have been Velox: Morlock couldn't see him or hear him, but he knew he was there, behind the house. The house was just a house, a little weatherworn cottage on an island in a deep blue-water lake between the unclaimed woods and the fuming foothills of the Burning Range. Morlock dreamed he was walking around the house trying to see the horse, but the horse kept moving to keep out of sight. That was all there was to the dream.

The first time, the dream was frustrating. The second time was maddening. The third left him thoughtful. He was deliberately not reaching out with his Sight to make contact with the future, as he suspected his enemy was laying traps for him in the tal-realm. But it seemed as if an especially insistent future was reaching out to make contact with him. He began to have the dream every night, sometimes more than once, as he continued his journey eastward, going deep into the crooked margin of the mountains to avoid a region to the south that some friendly crows had warned him about. His insight also said the place was dense with talic danger.

The fifteenth morning after the dreams began, he walked into a clearing between the unclaimed woods and the fuming foothills of the Burning Range, and there he saw a deep blue-water lake with a small island in it. There was a wooden footbridge from the mainland to the island, and in the middle of the island was the cottage of his dream.

Morlock stepped onto the bridge. At that instant, with a roar and a clanking of chains, a fair-sized troll leapt out from under the bridge and landed atop the wooden walkway.

"Now I eat you!" the troll proclaimed. "I was set here with the precise and specific mandate to eat anyone on my bridge who crosses it without my permission, as you have done, so now I will eat you!" Its ear-braids quivered with antic.i.p.ation. "Do you follow me, or shall I explain again?"

"I have not yet crossed the bridge," Morlock pointed out.

"Oh!" The troll tugged fretfully in turn at the tufts of unbraided hair proceeding from several of its noses. "Oh. d.a.m.n it. And I'm hungry, too. All I've had to eat for the longest time has been fish, and a bite or two from the Pernicious Grishk that lives in the lake."

"What's a grishk?"

"It's pernicious and lives in the lake. And it gets a bite out of me at least as often as I get one from it, so I'm not sure that even counts. Are you going to cross the bridge or what?"

"If you'll stand aside and permit me."

The troll put several hands in its pockets, and the leftover hands behind its back, and stood toward the edge of the bridge. Morlock crossed over to the island and went up toward the cottage. The troll groaned when it realized how Morlock had tricked it and slunk down into the water under the bridge.

Morlock looked the cottage over carefully. He walked around it once, very slow, widdershins. He saw no hoofprints in the soft ground, of a horse or anything else.

That wasn't surprising. Morlock suspected the dream's meaning, if it meant anything, was that he would get news of Velox here.

He shrugged and knocked on the cottage door. It was opened by an extremely aged old woman with a bloodless wrinkled face and sunken gray eyes.

"Excuse me, madam," Morlock said, "but I'm looking for my horse-"

"Is that supposed to be funny?" the old woman screamed, hiding behind her half-opened door.

"No," Morlock said slowly. "Why would it be?"

"And that 'disguise,' I suppose you call it."

"I don't."

"You don't even not look like you!" she screamed.

"I'm not supposed to not look like me. If I understand what you're saying."

"Look at those shoulders!" she hooted. "Bent like an ill-made bow! You can wear a black wig and fake a limp until h.e.l.l freezes over but you'll never fool me! You never did! You've fooled me too many times before!"

"I don't suppose you've seen a horse around here," he said rather desperately. "A middle-aged black warhorse with silver eyes?"

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

"Good day, madam," he said, giving up. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." He started to turn away.

"Stop!" she said, peering at him with sea gray eyes out of an ashen face. "What was that you said?"

"I'm sorry to have bothered you."

"Can't be him," she muttered to herself. "Can't be him. On his best day he wouldn't apologize for disembowelling your pet weasel."

"I don't have a pet weasel, madam. Just a horse. I'll look elsewhere for him."

"You'd better come in, then," she said resignedly. "Your horse might be somewhere about the place. You must pardon me, young man; I'm almost completely crazy."

"I hadn't noticed, madam," he lied. It had been a long time since anyone had referred to Morlock as a young Haan but he took it in his somewhat irregular stride.

"Well, I wouldn't notice your horse if he were creeping around in my underwear. An intriguing thought, that."

Intriguing wasn't the word Morlock would have chosen, but he didn't know how to say so without seeming rude. At no time in his several centuries of life had a conversation ever gotten so completely away from him. The old lady waved her hands at him imperiously. He shrugged and stepped in through the door.

She led the way into the little room that made up the entirety of her little house and collapsed onto a stool by a table as if her legs wouldn't carry her any further. "What was it you wanted?" she demanded.

"I'm looking for my-"

"Oh, I remember all that. But you really mean it? It wasn't just a chance to get inside and rummage through my, er, things?"

Morlock thought it was possible she was moving her hips suggestively as she squatted on the stool. He decided that he had not noticed this, and that he wasn't going to, either. He shook his head decisively.

"d.a.m.n," she said thickly, and coughed. "I was hoping there was something here you wanted. Because-well, because there's something I want you to do to-for me."

"What's that?" Morlock asked.

"If experience is any guide, I'm about to die." She coughed again and rubbed at her nose. Something white fell out of it and wiggled on the table. "I was hoping you'd bury me. I hate the thought of lying around the house and rotting away." She coughed again. "And there's no one else to do it, you see."

The white wriggling thing on the table was unquestionably a maggot. Morlock looked at it a moment and said, "I'll bury you, madam. a.s.suming you die fairly soon, that is. I'm still looking for my horse."

"This hippophilia really becomes quite tiresome, after a while," the old lady said crossly. "Is it a nice horse?" she asked wistfully.

"Not very," Morlock admitted, "but we've been through a lot together. He was stolen from me by someone I think might harm him, so I'm trying to get him back. A dream led me here, but I suppose it was a false one."

"So," she said, nodding wisely, "you're a seer of visions. And, I suppose, a maker of things."

"Yes."

"The Two Arts! Seeing and Making, the Sight and the Strength! I knew something about them in my day."

"I'm sure you did."

"Meaning: you're sure you know more than I ever did. Well. Maybe you're right. But not everyone had my teacher, anyway. Although he taught Ambrosia twice as much as he did me-" She broke off in a coughing fit.

"Ambrosia, madam?" asked Morlock, when her coughing subsided. "Ambrosia Viviana? Do you know her?"

The old lady cackled. "Slightly. She's my daughter. That impresses you, eh? I wish she were here." She started coughing again.

Ambrosia Viviana was Morlock's sister. That meant this deranged rotting old woman was his mother.

"Hard to die without anyone near me-only a stranger-" she gasped between coughs.

What was he to say? I'm not a stranger; I'm your son. Then she might say, My son is a stranger.

She was still coughing, anyway, bent nearly double. He reached out in a mute meaningless gesture to comfort her, but she shied away and fell from the stool to the floor. "Oh, s.h.i.t-" she gasped and then vomited a spray of maggots as her limbs spasmed briefly.

She wasn't coughing, or even moving now. Morlock bent down over her and wiped away the maggots from her face. She didn't seem to be breathing. There was no flutter of life beneath the withered b.r.e.a.s.t.s. His mother was dead.

There was a small well-kept garden outside the little house. He took the lifeless, strangely light body out there and buried it in the shade of a plum tree. He cut some slate from an outcropping he had seen up the weed-choked road and on it he carved an epitaph.

Here lies, far from her home, Nimue Viviana faithful traitor loveless love lost and found Domina Laci wife to Merlin Ambrosius mother to Ambrosia Viviana to Hope Nimuelle and to Morlock Ambrosius, who carved these words. Requiescas in pace, mater perdita.

He set the stone above the fresh grave and then stepped back.

"Nice work," his father's voice said, in grudging tones, behind him. "She'd have liked the Latin, especially. Was it just a slip, or did you know that mater perdita means both 'lost mother' and 'd.a.m.ned mother'?"

"I didn't know her well enough for the second one," Morlock said, without turning.

"Oh, I think she would have enjoyed it," Merlin's voice replied. "She always liked a play on words."

"I wouldn't know."

"Don't get weepy on me, boy."

"I'm not a boy, so I get weepy when it suits me."