James Enge - This Crooked Way

Roble and Naeli waited until we were within speaking distance and then Naeli said, "Are you all right?"

"We're fine," Thend said.

"What about Morlock?" Roble said.

"Well, there were Sandboys-" I said.

"What's a Sandboy?" Roble and Naeli said, almost together.

I don't know how many people there are in your family. In mine it seemed like there were always twice as many people as there actually were, and every one of them was trying to interrupt me whenever I said something. I let Thend do most of the talking, only chiming in when he screwed something up, the way he does sometimes, or when someone was picking on him, the way Stador and Bann always were.

Thend's pretty determined, and he set out to tell the story from the beginning. There were a lot of interruptions, questions, and explanations and it took a long time, but he finally did it.

Naeli looked at Roble. "What do you think? Should we go and see what we can do?"

Roble scowled and shrugged. He looked at Thend: "What do you think?"

Thend opened his hands and said, "The fight's over by now. He's away or they caught him. Maybe they killed him, but Morlock thought they wanted him alive."

"They might have lost their tempers, though," Roble observed dryly. "He can be irritating."

"Tell me about it," Thend snorted.

Then the topic was whether we ought to go to the Sandboys and bribe them to release Morlock. I didn't know what we were going to bribe them with, as we'd left our homes with little more than the clothes on our backs, but nobody asked for my opinion anyway. I guess that's the price of not saying much: people assume you don't have much to say.

I finally did say something, though. "Hey!" I shouted, and pointed at the open doorway of the house. Morlock was standing there in the shadows of the entry hall.

Naeli and Roble wanted him to come out and tell his part of the story, but he gestured at them without speaking and backed into the house. Then we all realized that it was one thing for us to be standing talking in the street; it was another thing for him: an imperial outlaw who had a water-gang out after him. And we realized all this without him having to say a word, which was how he liked it. He didn't like to say two words if one or none would do.

We trooped inside. In the dusty entryway within, empty except for our gear, Roble said, "Well? What happened with the Sandboys?"

"Lost them," Morlock said. I saw Roble's face fall when he realized that was all we were going to hear about Morlock's big fight in the marketplace. Thinking back on those bloody bodies falling to the ground, I was just as pleased, but men look at these things differently, I've noticed. "Came in through the back door and heard you out there," Morlock added, in a burst of eloquence.

He sat down beside his big heavy backpack, a little abruptly.

"Are you wounded?" Naeli said sharply, going and kneeling beside him.

"Old wound in my leg," he explained. "It aches a little when I fight-or run."

My mother began to massage his leg.

Stador and Bann looked a little blank. Roble got this grin on his dark face. Like, Bless you, my children. Thend looked mad-he didn't like any of the signs that our mother and Morlock were getting close. Jealousy, I guess: he'd lost her for six years or more, had just gotten her back, and was in no mood to share her with a stranger whose skin made one think of mushrooms and dead fish. Personally, I was happy for her. She was younger then than I am now, a vigorous and beautiful woman in the last summery glory of her youth. But back then I thought of her as quite old, almost as old as Morlock, and I didn't see why two old people shouldn't be happy together. I wasn't surprised that she took to him either: the only other men she'd seen for the last six years had been either sacrifices to the God in the Ground, or the men of the Bargainer village, all of them pretty repulsive types. I actually don't think she'd been with anyone since my father died, and that was well before I was born, maybe fourteen years since.

The only two people who didn't seem to have any emotional reaction to what was going on were Morlock and Naeli themselves. Naeli was saying, in a matter-of-fact voice, "What are we going to do now?"

Morlock said flatly, "I think you should go to Ontil, the imperial capital. I still have some friends there and they can help you find a place to stand. I'll give you a letter."

"While you go north alone," Naeli said icily. "Into the Kirach Kund, without the information Charis was going to get for you."

That was what Morlock had been expecting from Charis: information from the imperial scouts on what the Khroic hordes in the mountains were up to. It might make the difference in surviving the trip through the deadly pass. He said he'd already paid for it and all he needed to do was pick it up. (He'd told us the whole story, but I've forgotten half of it, and I'm not sure I believe the half that I remember.) That was what had led to the fiasco in the Market today.

Morlock wasn't saying anything, as usual, but it was the way he wasn't saying it.

"Come on, Morlock," said Roble, a little impatiently. "If you're going to dump us here the least you owe us is an explanation."

I didn't see this at all. But apparently it convinced Morlock because he said, "All right. I'm going to try to find Charis. He's probably still alive-he's good at that sort of thing, and his enemies don't seem to have found him yet."

"And he may have your information."

"Um. Yes."

"Morlock! Spit it out!" Roble said it, but it might have been any of us.

The crooked man shrugged. "It's a question of who's really after him. The guard? He's been a goose laying golden eggs for them for years now. The Sandboys? I expect the same is true: he seemed to be greasing every palm in town when I was last here. No one has any motive to kill him."

"So there's someone else," Roble said. "Is it important who?"

"It might be," Morlock said.

"Why?"

"Charis would have attracted the hostile attention of this person shortly after he was fishing for information about the Kirach Kund-and the Khroi. It may be a mere coincidence, or the Khroi may have a powerful agent in this city. I want to know if this is true."

"Then we'll stay and help you find out," Roble said. "Afterward we can take up the question of who's going where."

"The hell we will!" Naeli said fiercely. "Morlock, you are not going to abandon us in this damnable place where everything and everybody is for sale."

"Ontil isn't like Sarkunden," Morlock said. "Nor do you know what the Kirach Kund is like."

"I know this much-"

"Let's table it," Roble said briskly. "I say we eat and sleep and start looking for Charis tonight when the Sandboys are in their little sandbeds."

Roble was pretty good at breaking up arguments. Maybe it was all those years of living with my mom. Anyway, that was what we did, but it didn't work exactly as he'd planned it.

We always kept watch at night, and we didn't see any reason to change that because we were camping in a house instead of an open field. (We didn't want to wake up and find the house surrounded by Keeps or Sandboys.) With seven of us no one had to stay up long, although it was a pain to stand watch in the middle of the night, so we rotated. That night, Morlock took the first watch and I took the second. Thend was third, and boy was he grumpy when I woke him. We argued about what time it was, and afterward I was too mad to sleep, so I wandered around the house to find someone awake to talk to. That was how I noticed that Morlock's room, on the second floor of the abandoned house, was empty, the unfastened shutters flapping gently in the night breeze.

It sort of looked like he'd climbed out the window, so I poked my head out and looked around. It took a while to spot him, but I finally saw a crooked silhouette right up at the end of the alley: Morlock.