James Enge - This Crooked Way

"Look!" I said.

The two ragged ends of worm-cable stretched and thinned and crawled toward each other over the gap of bare mud. They met and began to merge.

"Bargain the thing," I muttered. "We need to take an even bigger section."

"I think so," Morlock said. "Roble, look at this." He gestured at the section of worm-cable we had tossed out of the trench. It lay still, turning gray in the green-gold light of afternoon.

"So? It's dead-hey!"

"Yes. If we cut the thing at two widely separate points-might not the stretch between die? We would want them to be widely separated. We want as big a hole as we can make in the Boneless One's wall."

"It might work."

"And if it doesn't, we can try something else. I think the time has come to go different paths. Do you think you can find the border line by yourself? I might be able to fashion you a detector."

I closed my eyes and stepped from one side of the trench to the other and back again. The whispering returned, then vanished again. "I can do it," I said. "It's obvious where the border is."

"Then. I'll travel north and east along the border for a day or so. You travel south and east the same length of time. This time tomorrow, we'll cut the worm, wherever we are on the border. If we're right, the wall will be broken and the dominion of the Boneless One will be over."

"Right!" It was another night without sleep, but I could handle that. There was a trickier issue at hand. I turned to the boys, who were staring solemnly at us.

I call them boys, but one was fully grown and the other two were almost men. All of them were used to fending for themselves, working long and hard, sticking by each other. I hated to send them alone into the wilderness, but I wanted them away from this in case something went wrong.

"Boys," I said, "Morlock is right: we part ways here. I want you to go on west and south for a day's journey. Wait there for three days. If neither Morlock nor I come to meet you there, I want you to head west to-" I looked at Morlock.

"Sarkunden," he said. "There's a man there who owes me a favor. I gave Stador a map and a letter of introduction."

"Good. Don't wait longer for us and don't come back; we'll catch up to you."

"What if you don't?" Stador said matter-of-factly.

"Then make your mother proud. I'm proud of you already."

I hugged each one of them as Morlock stood away, repacking his shovel.

"Then," Morlock said, waving to us all in farewell.

"See you back here in two days," I said, although I knew how doubtful that was, and, in fact, it didn't work out that way.

In a few moments we were headed in three different directions. I tried to not look after the boys, but it was hard.

There was worse stuff, both earlier and later, but for me that night journey was the most difficult part in the whole business. I kept seeing Naeli in the woods, walking on the Enemy's side of the invisible wall. The Naeli-thing kept trying to signal me, but I was wearing my wax earplugs and looked away whenever I saw her. It bothered me, partly because I figured it must mean that the Enemy knew where I was, and what I was trying to do. But mostly it bothered me the way thoughts of Naeli always bothered me: because I had failed her and Fasra when they needed me most.

Toward dawn the Boneless One gave up; or, anyway, I stopped seeing her. I was tempted to lie down and rest when day came, but I forced myself to go on at a steady clip. When I judged it something later than midafternoon I stopped walking and started digging.

I knew, before I was fairly well along, that the Enemy knew I was there and was worried. Because the Naeli-thing appeared again. Although I was standing on the far side of the invisible wall to do my digging, she tried to approach me. I swung at her with the shovel and she backed away.

I saw her lips move. She seemed to be saying, They are coming; they are coming. Run, Roble, run.

"Drop dead," I replied, and resumed my digging, working as fast as I could. Presently the Naeli-thing disappeared into the woods. I didn't doubt she had been telling the truth, in a way. The Enemy probably was sending Bargainers to stop me. I had to finish before they got there.

I did, but only just. I had exposed and severed an eight-foot-long section of the gigantic worm Morlock had called the anchor of the Boneless One's influence. The two frayed ends struggled desperately to meet and reunify, flopping about in the trench sloppy with muddy worm blood. But they couldn't extend so far. Then they stopped struggling and the wounds at their ends closed like mouths. They seemed to be healing even as I watched.

I saw this with a mixture of disgust and ruefulness. The eight-foot sec tion of the worm I had removed was incontestably dead. But the two ends of the worm were clearly alive. Perhaps longer segments of the worm could live independently. If so, the task Morlock and I had set ourselves was doomed to failure. I was exhausted and depressed: all this work for nothing?

When I raised my head at last I saw them standing there: at least a dozen Bargainers, grinning at me with their needlelike teeth.

I raised the shovel-I'd left my sword with my pack, some distance away in the woods-and backed away. They stepped forward to follow …and stopped suddenly.

I laughed. "You can't come farther, can you?" I said. "You've hit the wall. You're bound within the Boneless One's shell!" I laughed again. Suddenly the situation seemed hilarious. But of course I was very tired.

A big shaggy man, who may have been the leader, stepped back from the wall. He pressed his hand against a medallion hanging around his neck. Then he nodded as if he had received instructions and stepped across the trench, the gap in the Boneless One's anchor-worm.

His face stretched in surprise as he stood there, on the free side of the trench.

"You didn't expect that, did you?" I said to him. "The voice has stopped. It can't run you anymore. You're free, if you want to be."

The shaggy man looked at me for a moment, seeming to waver, then glanced back at the other Bargainers, watching him solemnly from the other side of the trench. When he turned back to me, his face was resolute. He couldn't lose face before his followers. Being their leader meant more to him than being free. He leaped forward, lashing out with his truncheon. I did my best to ward him off with the shovel, but I'd been halfway to unconsciousness before these guys showed up. Pretty soon his truncheon connected with my head and finished the job.

I didn't really wake up until we came to the Bargainer village; at least, I didn't completely wake up. I remember hanging like fresh game from a pole carried by two burly Bargainers, and I remember seeing Naeli or the Naelithing again and again, but there are many lightless patches. When I came fully to myself I was on my own feet, being dragged along a narrow lane between high houses with narrow windows through which many eyes, some of them human, were peering.

There were times everyone fell to the ground, as if worshipping, and they dragged me down with them. I was too groggy to understand what was happening or make my escape at these times. Besides, my hands were bound and my legs hobbled.

They took me to a great open area in the center of the village and bound me to a stake. In the middle of the open area was a tree, tall and twisted like an oak. At the foot of the tree was a mouthlike opening.

No one had to explain to me what would happen next. I was past swearing, but if there were, in some fireproof lexicon, any word sulphurous enough to express my anger and dismay at the thought of being fed alive to the Boneless One, I would have used it.