James Enge - This Crooked Way

We were in a cave facing the north. Outside there were mountains piercing the horizon like pale thorns. Through them led the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls-as dangerous as its name sounded or more. But as long as there was no one there who would try to buy or sell me or himself, I wouldn't complain.

It was the bones again: Thend rarely dreamed about anything else anymore. They were climbing the slope toward a rift in the high horizon: the Kirach Kund, the pass leading north through the mountains. And Thend slipped and fell in a slope of scree. He slid downhill for a while, and a bunch of the oddly shaped stones slid down after him. It was embarrassing, but not dangerous, and he wasn't concerned until he noticed something about the nature of the "rocks" around him.

"Hey!" he shouted, his voice ragged from panic. "These are bones!"

He had fallen face-to-face with an unmistakable skull; there were many others scattered about. Some of the skulls were shattered; others had holes bored in them. All were gray as stone, and they were not quite humanshaped. The skulls were, if anything, larger than human, but the arm bones and leg bones were shorter and thicker.

Morlock slid expertly down the edge of the scree and offered Thend a fish-pale hand, pulling him out of the pile of gray bones.

"What were they?" Thend asked. "Where did they come from?"

"They were dwarves," Morlock replied. "There was a great kingdom of the dwarves under these mountains once. Now they are all dead or fled, unless a few hide under the earth so deep their enemies can't find them."

"Their enemies?"

"The Khroi."

The Khroi: the insectlike warriors who ruled the mountain range they were daring to cross.

"They killed them long ago," Morlock said, a strange elegiac tone in his voice. "Now the bones are turning back into the rock from which they grew." He said a word or two in a language Thend didn't know and turned away.

All that was as it had really happened. But when, in his dream, Thend turned around, his mother, Naeli, was standing behind him. There was a large horn or tusk spiking out of her mouth and he was afraid of it. With a quick birdlike motion she bobbed her head and put a hole in his head, just like the holes in the skulls scattered thickly around him.

He woke up with a scream trying to work its way out of his throat. In the end he didn't scream-but it didn't help that Naeli was the person shaking him awake. "Your watch," she said briefly. "And there's trouble."

Thend rolled to his feet and looked around. Everyone was awake, even though it was the middle of the day. (They travelled by night and slept during the day.) His uncle Roble was standing over there by Morlock; Thend's two brothers, Stador and Bann, were with them. Even Thend's younger sister, Fasra, was sitting up in her sleeping cloak. But apart from her, who was usually trouble, Thend didn't see anything that looked like a problem.

Morlock said, "Trouble?" and lifted his wry shoulders in a shrug. When he saw this wasn't enough information for his audience he added, "I saw something that bears a closer look."

"I'll go with you," Roble said.

"No you won't," Naeli disagreed. "You're our two best fighters; one of you has got to stay with the group."

Thend noticed that Stador and Bann were annoyed by this. But it was impossible to argue with the fact: they all remembered how Roble and Morlock had swept away a company of warrior Khroi.

"Well, he'll have to take someone with him," Roble said, conceding Naeli's point. "We decided no one should travel alone."

Morlock's eyebrows raised a little at this. He hadn't realized that the group's rule would be applied to him, obviously. But he was adaptable, and he remarked with his usual eloquence, "Eh."

"I suppose you mean me," Thend's little sister, Fasra, said, a bragging tone in her voice. She could be insufferable, but Thend decided she was right. If you counted toughness as anything other than the ability to lift weight, she was the genuine article. And she wasn't absolutely stupid, Thend reluctantly admitted.

"Thend," Morlock decided.

"But-" Naeli said and stopped. She put her hand on Morlock's arm. His gray eyes met her brown ones. Then she released him and stepped back.

Everything, just everything, annoyed Thend these days, but that annoyed him the most of all: how his mother and Morlock could communicate without words. Also, how she touched this pale-skinned stranger just as unselfconsciously as she did her children or her brother.

Morlock turned away from the group without speaking. Thend followed suit and they went side by side over a ridge to the northwest.

"What was it you saw?" Thend asked finally.

Morlock grunted. "Aside from your face, you mean? You haven't smiled since we left Sarkunden."

"That's not your business!" Thend said fiercely.

Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and said nothing. They walked on a while in silence.

"I'm having bad dreams," Thend admitted finally.

"Tell me," Morlock said.

Thend did, and Morlock said nothing for a while. Then he remarked, "You may have the Sight."

"I don't know what you mean," Thend said, afraid that he did.

"The Sight," Morlock said didactically, "is a talent for receiving sensory or mental impressions through tal, the phase of being which links living spirit to dead matter. Most people see only with their eyes, hear only with their ears, think only with their brains. A seer can gain impressions of things he never saw nor heard, and to some extent think outside material limits, knowing segments of the future and past."

"Then my dreams are true?" Thend asked in horror.

"Dreams are dreams," Morlock said firmly. "They come from many sources: things you have seen or done or heard of, sense impressions, fears, and hopes. Dreams are neither false nor true, but they may contain truths and yours contains one that cannot have come from your own knowledge."

"What? Where did it come from?" Thend asked wildly.

"It may be the shadow of a future event. I hope not, though."

"How do I get rid of it? I can't stand these dreams anymore, Morlock. Every time I look at Naeli I want to vomit."

"The Sight? You can't get rid of it. I'll teach you about it, though. The more your awareness is trained in the use of the Sight, the less it will trouble you."

Thend sighed. "Okay. Should we start now, or just go back to the group?"

"We should look at that, first," Morlock said, pointing.

Thend had been assuming that Morlock pulled him away from the group just to talk to him. Now he glanced ahead and saw what Morlock had seen, but he didn't understand it.

They were walking down from the crest of the ridge into a little rift in the mountain's side, too narrow to be called a valley. The rift was carpeted with the tall green-gold grass that looked soft as cotton but would slash bare feet and legs like finely honed razors. At the bottom of the rift was a stand of trees, a mix of dark-needled pines and fluttering aspens. (They were too high in the mountains for anything Thend considered a proper tree; there were no elms or oaks or stoneleaf majors.)

Two of the pine trees had been stripped, except for a couple of branches each-it was hard to see them, as they stood behind a curtain of aspen leaves. But as he gazed, Thend became surer: those weren't branches; there was something hanging suspended between the stripped pines.