James Enge: This Crooked Way

Young Dhyrvalona snuggled down into her nest and prepared to be entertained. She knew this part of the story well, of course: the nurse told her a little more every year, but this was one of the earliest parts and she had heard it many times.

This year, her nurse had promised, she would tell her the whole tale, even if it took many nights, every night of the annual festival. The grown-ups of the Khroic clan of Valona's heard the whole story every year, and now she would too. That was because, the nurse had explained to her, she was almost a grown-up now. Young Valona could see that this made the nurse sad, but she herself was very happy; she couldn't wait to grow up. And she was so glad it was the season of Motherdeath, the happiest time of the year.

Morlock awoke because the earth was shuddering beneath him. He'd been raised under the mountains of Northhold and he knew in his bones that, if the ground moved, he had better move, too.

He rolled to one side to free himself from his sleeping cloak and leaped to his feet. By then the stone monster had plunged its fist or paw deep into the ground where Morlock had been lying.

The stone monster. It was clearly made of stone; at first he thought it was striped like a tiger, but then he saw that it was ringed or ridged down its long leonine body to the end of its four limbs. It swung its heavy maneless head toward him, clicking oddly as it moved; the stone teeth in its crooked ill-matched jaws streamed with some red fluid in the gray morning light. Its eyes gleamed like moonlit crystal or water as they focused on him and it prepared to leap.

"Tyrfing!" Morlock shouted, and held out his hand for his sword. It didn't come to him: even though he was not in rapture, he felt the talic impulse as it tried to reach him. Something was holding it back.

The stone beast jumped at him and he leaped to one side. The old wound in his leg was already aching; he hoped he wouldn't have to try to outrun this thing. He reached down and grabbed two fistfuls of dirty snow and threw them at the stone beast's eyes.

It responded strangely, like a startled animal, blinking fiercely and shaking its head to get the grit from its eyes.

In Morlock's opinion, those eyes were made of glass or crystal in some maker's workshop; the beast's whole body was a cunningly made puzzle, its joints clicking as pieces shifted so that it could move. He doubted that the thing could feel as an animal's body feels.

But it acted as if it could feel the dirt in its eyes; it expected to feel discomfort from the snow. At the very least, it was perplexed when something obscured its vision.

That told him something: he was not facing a golem. Golems do only what they have been designed to do, fulfilling the instructions on their lifescrolls. It was unlikely that a maker would waste scroll space telling a golem to react emotionally like an animal when something got in its eyes. Somehow a living entity was directing the motions of the stone monster.

And if it was alive, it could be killed.

Morlock's back was against the trunk of an oak tree, its crooked limbs leafless and whistling in the breeze of the winter morning. He reach up and tore one of the limbs loose from the trunk.

The stone beast, floundering through the snow, charged Morlock, who circled behind the tree. If he moved carefully, he could keep to the hardened crust of snow and move faster than the beast. It lunged toward him; he continued around the tree and, leaping into the trench of snow left in the stone beast's wake, he struck the beast as hard as he could across the back of its lumpy head.

The stone beast snarled, a grinding sound of rock on rock, and swung about to face him. Morlock fled back around the tree. The stone beast rose up on three legs and struck the trunk of the tree with its right forepaw. The oak tree shattered, the trunk split down the middle.

Giving vent to the turbulence of his emotions, Morlock said "Eh," and ran.

The beast was after him in a moment, but he took a twisting path though the nearby trees, keeping to the surface crust of snow when he could, and managed to stay barely ahead of the thing. Twice he managed to get in more blows to its head-once from the side, once from behind-and he thought that its movements were getting more sluggish, the beast groggier.

His twisting course took him toward the nearby Sar River. His thought was that, if worse came to worst, he could swim away from his stone enemy (although the cold water in this cold weather might kill him faster than the monster could).

As he zigged to avoid the stone beast's lumbering zag, he glanced over his shoulder and saw that one of the thing's glass eyes was cracked. The stone head kept twitching and shaking, as if to free the eye of some obstruction. (The shattered eye itself?)

He whirled about and swung the branch with both hands, striking the beast on the side of its head with the broken eye. The glass fell away and all that remained was a dark hole in the stone beast's face. It drew back, as if aghast. A thin trickle of blood, like tears, ran down the gray stone face from the empty eye socket.

Morlock turned on his heel and ran straight toward the river.

It was after him in a moment, but he had reached the icy marsh along the river's edge before it caught up with him. It came forward in a great leap and knocked him off his feet in the shallow ice-sheathed water as it landed behind him. The great stone body surged as Morlock scrabbled for his club on the icy surface of the water and struggled to regain his feet in the soft ground. The moments passed like hours; it seemed impossible that the beast would not recover and strike him dead before he could arm himself. But, in fact, it didn't. When he regained his feet he saw why.

The beast was stuck in the mud under the shallow water, unable to free its deadly limbs from the soft ground. Morlock realized this was his chance; he vaulted past the beast's snapping jaws and one-eyed face to land on its broad shoulders. Standing there he delivered savage blow after savage blow to the back of the beast's head. The stone body writhed and chittered beneath him, but in time it began to move slower and slower. At last it fell still; its snout slumped into the icy stream, and bloody water bubbled from the empty eye socket. The thing was dead.

Morlock staggered off the beast's back and tossed aside his nowsplintered club. He took a few moments to breathe and gather his strength. But not too long: the cold was a pain gnawing at him, especially the limbs that had been soaked in the river.

He went to change into dry clothes, shivering by the smoking remains of last night's fire. He saw his sword, Tyrfing, bound in its sheath to a nearby boulder; he doubted that the stone beast's paws could have managed that, even if its brain could have planned it. That bothered him. He saw Velox nowhere, and that bothered him very much. He remembered the red fluid on the stone monster's stony teeth.

In dry clothes, after freeing Tyrfing, he went in search of Velox. And he found what he had feared he might: what was evidently the scene of a struggle, some distance away from Morlock's camp. There were the marks of savage bloody blows in the snow and the stiff unyielding earth below. There were some stray horsehairs, bloody hoofmarks in the snow and earth, but no body, not even stray bones or flesh.

He had seen something like this in his youth, where a monster had dismembered and eaten a horse on the long road facing the western edge of the world.