This Crooked Way Part 8

"Yes! He was so clever. And I didn't notice: he never said it was a lifespell or a youth-spell. It prevents death, but doesn't really permit life."

"And you want to break the spell."

The old woman was silent for a time. "Sometimes I do. When I remember. Then I'm desperate to. But. The other parts of me. They drag me back to life. Anyway. I don't want to die. I just want to be. I just want to be nae again, alive, and whole, and in one place, even if I die the next second."

"You probably will."

"Doesn't matter. I don't expect you to understand."

Morlock stared glumly out the window for a moment or two, considering the path that had led him here. At last he said, "I can probably arrange that."

"What?"

"I can bring the separate segments of your self to the same location. They will reunite and I suspect you will die shortly thereafter."

"Heh. He won't love you for it. Merlin, I mean."

"He hates me already."

"Oh? Then we shall be friends. What's your name?"

"Morlock Ambrosius. I'm your son."

"That explains why you'd bother, then. Excuse me, young man, I have to go down to the lake and wash. I've gotten all dirty somehow."

"Don't forget the salt."

"The salt. Oh, that's right. My son was just here telling me about maggot infestations, the insolent son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h, and I should know. Or was that a dream?"

Morlock didn't answer, and Nimue, taking a basin and a block of salt, went down to the lake behind the cottage. Morlock went down to the bridge. As soon as he stepped onto it, the troll appeared again and landed on the bridge ahead of him.

"Now I've got you!" the troll shouted.

"I still haven't crossed the bridge without permission," Morlock pointed out.

"No, but you will."

"I was going to, yes. I wanted to go into the woods and feed deeply and richly on walnuts and acorns until I had swollen up to twice my natural size. Otherwise I'd hardly be worth eating, as you see; I've been living on flatbread and dried meat-and not much of that-for months."

"You might be more worth eating then, but I'd never get the chance. If you get off the island you'll keep on going into the woods and someone else will get to eat you."

"No, I plan to come back and talk with the woman in the cottage."

"You won't be back. She's crazy, you know. I always hide when she comes down by the bridge here. She scares me."

"She's my mother."

"Oh. Sorry." Several of the troll's faces peered at him. "I guess I see the resemblance at that," it admitted. There was a long pause. "Walnuts, eh?" The troll licked several of its lips. "All right. Go on: don't be too long." It jumped off the side of the bridge and disappeared.

Morlock crossed back over the bridge and went off into the woods. He built a potter's wheel, found some clay, and threw a vase. It was long and narrow in external form, about two feet long; he folded the outside through a higher dimension so that the inside was about the size of a small room. He had no kiln, but he took out his choir of flames and explained to them what he needed. They were not very bright, as flames go: the few survivors from the debacle in the winterwood had propagated to fill the nexus, and most of the flames were rather youthful. But Morlock explained to them what he needed and stayed there to keep them on task, and by the following morning the vase was baked and glazed to Morlock's exacting specifications. He stowed the nexus and the jar in his backpack and returned to the wooden bridge leading to the island in the lake.

When he stepped onto the bridge the troll climbed out of the water and drew itself up onto the walkway. The majority of its eyes looked doubtfully at Morlock and it said, "You don't seem to be twice your previous size. What was that? Hyperbole? I dislike rhetorical tropes that verge on dishonesty."

"Unfortunately, there are no walnuts or acorns in the woods. It's spring and they won't be ripe until autumn."

"Now wait a moment. Just wait a moment."

"I expect my mother will give me a good breakfast. Mothers are famous for that."

"I wouldn't know," the troll replied. "We reproduce by fission."

"I'd heard. You must be pretty close to splitting, to judge by the number of extrusions from your central body."

"Yes, pretty close now, pretty close. If I can ever get anything to eat."

"I'll be headed back this way after I speak with my mother, whether she gives me anything to eat or not."

The troll's mouths were tight with skeptical sneers. Morlock guessed that if he were trying to leave the island instead of entering it there would have been more discussion. As it was the troll nodded him on with one of its smaller heads and it climbed with quiet dignity back under the bridge.

The door was closed. He knocked on it. Nimue half opened the door and peered through the gap, her watery gray eyes unlit by any recognition. "Yes?" she asked suspiciously.

"I'm your son, Morlock Ambrosius. Yesterday I offered to rea.s.semble the segments of your self."

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

He went through the whole matter with her again. Sometimes she remembered him; more often she did not; sometimes it seemed as if she did, but it turned out she was thinking of someone else. Not infrequently she railed at him, thinking he was Merlin.

He found it went easier if he didn't think of her as one person but as a group of people. He had to discuss the matter with all of them and bring them all to agreement before they could go on. Every now and then someone new would come in and he would have to start over. It was not the kind of work he had ever been good at, but there it was: the task he had to do, the task he had set himself.

Around noon they had reached a point in the conversation where Nimue said, "But how is this going to work? There is a troll down by the bridge who says the most offensive things about me whenever I go down there-I've had to speak quite sharply to him about it. I'm sure he wouldn't hesitate to eat either one of us. And Merlin must have set other protections around the place besides."

He showed her the jar and explained his plan.

She drew herself up and looked at him suspiciously. "Are you sure you're not Merlin? He was always putting me in jars."

He shrugged. "I think this will work. If you have another idea-"

"You shouldn't shrug like that. It draws attention to your shoulders."

He looked her in the eye and shrugged.

She snickered. "All right. I get the message. And no I don't have any ideas. If I had any ideas I would have told them to that young fellow who came here looking for his horse; he was much politer than you are."

Morlock took a stoppered green bottle out of his backpack and released the morpheus-bird, its wings feathered with every shade of dim green. It flew once around Nimue's head and then returned to its bottle. He restoppered the bottle as his mother's sh.e.l.l lumped to the ground.

He laid her out flat on the floor and rolled her up as tightly as he could, like a scroll of thick paper with irregular edges. Then he slid her into the narrow mouth of the jar he had made in the woods. There was a cap for the jar but he left it off, in case she needed to speak to him about anything when she awoke. He stowed the jar and the bottle in his pack and went back down to the bridge for the last time.

The troll was waiting for him in the center of the bridge. All of its eyes were on him as he approached. As soon as his shoes. .h.i.t the planks of the walkway it said to him, "I'll eat you now, if you don't mind."

"I do, and you won't," Morlock replied. 'By the terms you were set here, you may not."

"What?" roared the troll with all its mouths.

Morlock explained, "The spell binding you here permits you to eat anyone who has crossed the bridge without your permission. This creates two cla.s.ses of bridge-crosser: those who have crossed without your permission, and those who have crossed with it. I am clearly in the latter cla.s.s: you have permitted me to cross the bridge three times. Three is a magic number, you know."

"It is?"

"Everyone says so."

"Oh, pus and broken fangs. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my magic lessons. But I thought that I'd never use it, you see. I always wanted to be a bridge-troll."

Morlock shrugged and walked by. The troll clenched all its jaws as he pa.s.sed, and he kept his hand free to summon Tyrfing, if need be. But he reached the far side without a struggle and walked away into the unclaimed woods.

Merlin was waiting for him there.

"You killed the troll, I suppose?" the old necromancer said, stepping out from behind a tree.

"Talked my way past it," Morlock said. He reached over his shoulder and drew Tyrfing. "If it had been smarter, I might have had to kill it."

"Morlock and G.o.d: protectors of fools. But who'll protect you, Morlock? Do you ever wonder that?"

Morlock shrugged and waited for his father to say something worth answering.

"At least," Merlin said at last, "the troll kept you busy until I had a chance to get here. Now you face me in my own person, Morlock-not a fetch or an illusion."

For answer Morlock reached out and pa.s.sed his left hand through Merlin's chest. It was almost wholly insubstantial, a mere cloak of light and sound for his fetch.

Merlin's face took on the irritated expression it usually wore when he confronted his son. "How did you know?"

There were three or four ways Morlock had known: the absence of any movement among the gra.s.ses on which Merlin was supposedly standing was only the most obvious.

But he found that he could say nothing in response. The light particles had taken flight in a complicated four-dimensional pattern around his hand. The pattern drew his attention and held it. He could neither move nor speak.

"Morlock, Morlock," Merlin's voice chided him. "Of course, you are the master of all makers. I know you never say so, but I say so, and I would really rather say it about myself, as we both know. But I am the master seer and lifemaker-necromancer, as some ignorantly call it. I knew you would come here: I saw it in my map of the future. I could not risk facing you here myself. So I set this trap for you.

"And the best part of it is, you set it off yourself. If you could have brought yourself to speak to me like a human being, your will would still be free. But I knew that you couldn't resist the temptation to brush my little simulacrum out of your way.

"Morlock, you are a maker and you think of light as physical. But it, like aether, casts a shadow on the talic and even the spiritual realms. I find it an easy thing to infect a cloud of light with my will, and now that cloud has infected you. You must remain where you are until I see fit to free you. Not even death will be a release: I think my binding spell will hold your self there even if your body rots away. Anyway, we'll see, won't we?"

What Merlin said was both true and false, Morlock felt. His body was bound by the light, but his mind was free. That meant he had at least one choice to make.

"Yes," Merlin drawled. "You could try that. If you think you can best me in my own art of Seeing."

Morlock didn't think that he could. It was simply that or surrender, and Morlock, when sober, wasn't the surrendering type.

Recklessly, he summoned the rapture of vision. The world of matter and energy fell away to dim shadows; he stepped into the bright world of understanding and intent, the borderland between the material and spiritual. His own fetch appeared: a black-and-white pillar of flames. Tyrfing, too, took on his monochrome talic presence as an extension of himself.

Merlin's fetch stood before him; shed of its illusory light-cloak, he was a pillar of red flames, his fiery hands grasping the staff and faceted crystal that were his own foci of power.

Pity there are no witnesses to this! Merlin's awareness remarked directly into Morlock's. It will become a legendary battle among those-who-know.

Morlock signalled his indifference: the talic equivalent of a shrug.

Merlin struck, a lightning-branch of terror leaping out to infect Morlock's talic limbs.

Morlock banished it with Tyrfing and riposted with a triple-fanged stab of guilt-shame-weariness.

Merlin absorbed it with his diamond-shaped focus and remarked pleasantly, So much for old favorites. See how you like this!

But that was the end of it.

They had forgotten they were not alone.

They had forgotten because Nimue was spread thin through the world, like a three-cornered spiderweb.

But the tal-world is nearer the spirit-world, where distances matter not at all, and Nimue's physical division did not diminish her talic power.

The three-cornered spiderweb that was Nimue's fetch radiated sudden refusal.

Stop this, she said, and Merlin's attack died aborning.

It might have been the time for Morlock to strike a final, perhaps a fatal blow, but he didn't want to draw her anger on himself. He dismissed his vision and fell back into the chaos of matter and energy that those-who-donot-know call the real world.

He was lying on the ground in the forest, Tyrfing still gripped in his hand. Merlin's fetch had vanished and Morlock's body was free to move as he willed.

"Thanks, Mother," he rasped out when he could speak.

She didn't answer that he could tell.

He struggled to his feet and, sheathing his sword, headed through the woods westward.

Due west was the talic zone of danger he had avoided while travelling eastward. Now he hoped that whatever was projecting it would provide some cover from the malefic necromancer he knew at last for his enemy.

UII.

INTERLUDE:.

BOOK.

OF.