James Enge - This Crooked Way

I didn't, so I just told him mine in return. Then I added hesitantly, "Um. Strictly speaking, I should kill these Bargainers."

"Oh?" Morlock didn't seem surprised-it was hard to read his expression, for a fact-but he didn't seem inclined to cooperate, either.

"Or I could herd them to Caroc Castle when they awake. It would be tricky work, but just possible."

"What would happen to them there?"

"They'd be killed."

Morlock shook his head. "I don't know what lies between your people and theirs, but I can't stand here while you kill"-he glanced around the clearing-"forty-seven people."

"It doesn't appeal to me, either," I grumbled. "Then I'd have to haul them out, or burn the bodies…. Let's just bind them and leave them. It's not the first Rule I've ever broken."

Somehow Morlock's face indicated approval without changing expression in the slightest. We bound the rest of the Bargainers (clubbing them into unconsciousness as necessary), Morlock recovered his pack and bedroll from the campsite, and we buried the fire in moist earth.

I led the way back to the Road. At first I thought that I had reached the wrong part-it's easy to lose your way in the woods after dark, and Liskin and my horse weren't anywhere to be found.

But there was some fresh horse dung on the Road, as if more than one horse had been there for a while recently. And I did recognize the place.

"Liskin, you worm," I muttered to myself.

"Liskin?"

"My partner. I left him holding my horse when I saw your campfire from the Road." I gestured at the horse crap on the Road. "Some of that's probably his."

"So we walk."

"Right." I thought about going back for the three bodies of the Bargainers I had killed and decided against it. There was no way we could bring those corpses out without a horse, and if we tried to burn them needletoothed Bargainers would come like moths out of the wood. Much as I hated to, I'd just have to leave the Enemy a little snack tonight.

"You should dump some of that iron," Morlock suggested, gesturing at my armor. "You'll move faster."

"I'm used to it. Besides, I can't leave a Rider's armor on the Road-some Bargainer might find it and use it to trick someone."

Morlock nodded, and we started down the Road. Morlock kept his eyes on the right side of the Road, I watched the left, and every now and then one of us looked over his shoulder to check the Road behind us.

"These Bargainers," Morlock said presently, "they live in the wood?"

"Yes."

"Why are you at war with them?"

"They serve the Enemy who lives in the wood, the Boneless One. They take us, when they can, to feed it. We kill them, when we can, to prevent that." I gnawed my lip. "I should have done something about those damn Bargainers. I don't know why it made a difference that there were so many. They'd've taken forty-seven of us and bragged about it afterward."

"Probably," Morlock agreed flatly. I glanced at him, but his eyes were scanning the roadside. He seemed neither skeptical nor surprised to find people preying on each other the way the Bargainers did on us.

He seemed to be a pretty reasonable person. I wanted to ask him why he'd been talking so crazily when I first spoke to him, but I didn't want to insult him. "What's talic stranj?" I asked, eventually.

His grim face twisted in a one-sided grin. "You're wondering whether I'm crazy."

There didn't seem to be any point in denying it. "Yes."

"Some people who are crazy can't stay in their own heads. They keep drifting into other people's, or abroad in the world. Have you ever known anyone like that?"

"No. I haven't known that many crazy people."

"There can't be too many people like that in these woods. Your Whisperer-"

"He's not mine."

"-he would eat them, I think. But I was trained by such a person to ascend to the rapture of vision and see all three phases of the world."

"Uh-huh. Three phases?" I was getting nervous again. Walking through woods thick with Bargainers, with the Enemy lurking unseen, was bad enough; I didn't like adding a crazy Coranian to the mix.

He shrugged his wry shoulders and said, "Hear me out and decide if I'm crazy. There are matter and spirit, yes? The things we see and feel and touch, and the minds that lie behind them."

"All right. Say there are."

"But how does dead matter impinge on a living mind? How does a living mind make dead matter respond?"

"You tell me."

"Through the middle phase: tal. Tal is the medium through which the spirit realm takes action in the world of matter and the medium through which matter affects the spirit."

"So ghosts-"

"Not just ghosts. People. Squirrels. Dogs. Bugs. Any entity that can take volitional action in the material world is a fusion of three bodies: material, talic, and spiritual. Physical death occurs when tal is no longer able to unite matter and spirit. In rapture I can ascend from material perception to talic perception, with at least a glimpse of the spiritual realm beyond."

"Hm. Not my line of work."

He laughed, surprising me. "Yes it is." He waved his hand at the road. "You collect dead bodies-"

"When someone doesn't run off with my horse."

11 -and people in the woods. Why?"

"So that the Enemy won't eat them. What's good for him is bad for us."

"What do you suppose the Enemy eats?"

"You're telling me you know?"

"I do know. I sensed its specific hunger when I was in rapture. It feeds on tal. The tal of living beings, men and women, when it can. A living consciousness is haloed in tal. But the dead still possess tal, which will fade over time, like the heat of a dead body."

"And it can live on this?"

"Yes. It would have some harmful effects, over time, but a person with certain skills could prolong his life indefinitely by absorbing the tal of others. It's the sort of magic Coranians have always been good at."

Coranians. He said it like it didn't include him. That set me back. He was pale skinned, like a Coranian himself, he spoke Coranian like it was his native language. "Aren't you a Coranian?" I asked. "You speak the language."

"I share the language," he said, not as if he were angry or embarrassed, just stating a fact. "But my people didn't call it Coranian. You must know some Coranians yourself: you speak the language well."

"They pretty much run Four Castles. The Four Barons and the gentry are all white-sk-Coranians."

"Hm."

"They live a long time," I added. "Three hundred years, or so some of them claim."

"Hm."

"You don't think-?" I began.

The Silent Word hit me again, like before but worse. It was like being buried in a bright avalanche of silence. I found myself sprawled on the ground and got up shaking my head.

"Look, I was just asking," I said stiffly. "You didn't have to pound my head with your magic word."

But Morlock was climbing to his feet as well. "I didn't," he said, a little unsteadily. "I think-"

It struck again, a dark inhuman voice shouting the silent word through the trees.

We rose from the ground a while later and looked at each other. Morlock dropped his backpack on the ground and began to paw through it frantically. We both lost consciousness several times as the voice in the woods shouted the Silent Word at us. But finally, as I watched him with a certain disinterest-I was getting a little groggy; it was like taking repeated punches to the head-he pulled something shiny out of the pack and put it to his lips.

It was a pennywhistle or a pipe or some other kind of cut-rate flute. He began to play a little tune on it just as the Silent Word rang again out of the woods.

I staggered a little but didn't fall. There was some sort of magic in the pipe's music that masked the stunning force of the Silent Word.

Using his right hand to finger the pipe as he continued to play, he reached down and slid one strap of his pack over his left shoulder. Then he switched hands and put the strap over his right shoulder.