James Enge - This Crooked Way

But Morlock didn't strike at the dragon's body, as such, at all. The blade caught the dragon's left wing, folded batlike along his side. Tyrfing severed the joint and passed through much of the leathery flesh before the dragon screamed and rolled over. He was trying to crush Morlock, but the pinions of the dragon's wings gave the man space to scrabble through between the mass of the dragon's serpentine body and the stony earth.

Rather than roll again, as Thend expected, the dragon leapt to his feet and backed away lumberingly from Morlock.

As he watched the dragon's movement, slowed by his wounded foreleg, Thend realized why Morlock had attacked the dragon's wing. Now the dragon could neither fly away, with his broken wing, nor run away, with his wounded foot. There was no escape for him.

Abruptly, surprisingly, Thend felt sorry for the dim blue dragon: mutilated, mocked, mutilated again, and now trapped with that terrible crooked man in this narrow field hedged in with steep slopes. He pushed the feeling down as hard as he could. Morlock might be sort of a bastard, but he was their bastard, fighting desperately for Thend and his family. But the feeling didn't quite go away.

The dragon meanwhile lunged forward on his unwounded foot and made as if to snap at Morlock with his teeth. Morlock dodged to the dragon's right-and was struck end over end by the dragon's mutilated foreleg.

That might have been the end of the battle right then, if the dragon had still possessed raptor claws to catch and kill his enemy. And it nearly was: Morlock ended up slumped against the base of the post where he had been hanging; there was no sword in his hand. The dragon leapt at him with a happy roar and he had to crawl, rather than walk, away from the post; there was something wrong with one of his legs.

The dragon himself was wounded, in wing and foot, and he obviously tried to outthink his opponent. Morlock had only one place to retreat: behind the row of maijarra-wood posts. It turned right to lumber toward the nearer end of the row, attempting to get around them before Morlock retreated through them.

But Morlock, scrabbling along on all fours, was not attempting to retreat. He crawled toward something gleaming among the fire-blackened stones of the Giving Field: his sword, Tyrfing. Thend wondered why he didn't just call it to him, but then reflected that this trick might be something Morlock might have to set up in advance. In any case, his fingers had closed on the grip of the sword before the dragon realized what was happening.

The dragon turned to face him, and Morlock lurched to his feet with a harsh crowlike call that might have been a battle cry or a scream of pain for all that Thend knew. Then the crooked man, crookeder than ever now, loped forward, his sword raised high.

The dragon flinched backward toward the maijarra-wood posts, then turned again to fight.

But it was already too late. Morlock ran up on the dragon's wounded wing, trailing on the ground, and climbed it like a ladder. The dragon bucked and writhed, but Morlock stabbed down between the spikes protecting the dragon's backbone, and the dragon's back legs collapsed. He ran forward along the dragon's back and stabbed again: the dragon's forelegs gave way and the serpentine body fell wholly to the ground.

Morlock staggered forward toward the dragon's neck and what Thend guessed would be the killing blow. But he paused and spoke, although Thend couldn't hear what he said and would not have understood it if he had.

In his native language, which was also the dragon's, Morlock was saying, "I regret my words to you, Gjyrning. Need drove me; I meant none of it."

The dragon chuckled smokily and whispered, "You didn't fool me, rokhlan! At least …not entirely. I am old; most of my hoard has been stolen by others; the guile have been sizing me up for fodder. I thought …this way …if I killed you in battle, stole their prize …I could at least die in glory."

"Then," Morlock said.

"Wait!" Gjyrning gasped.

"Only a moment, Gjyrning. More deeds await me this dark night."

"Morlock …what will you tell them of me …the ones who live under Thrymhaiam?"

"I can never go there now," Morlock said, and slid the blade of his sword between the dragon's neck-plates into his skull, killing him. He jumped down and limped away as the dim red eyes grew dark behind him.

The scene was strangely dark with the dragon dead. Where the dragon had bled there was a sullen glow among the bare blackened stones of the Giving Field, and Thend saw that Morlock's blood, too, lit smoldering fires among what little there was to burn. Most of the light came from the cold bitter moons overhead.

Morlock limped down the line of posts until he reached Thend. Reaching up his sword, he slashed the thongs holding Thend on the hook. Thend fell to his feet and gasped. "Thanks!" he said, inadequately but sincerely, and then added, "Ouch!" His arms hurt suddenly.

He looked guiltily at the crooked man, who had suffered far more, but Morlock just said, "Stretching the limbs hurts worse when it stops than when it's happening. Can you use your arms?"

Thend flapped them around a bit. "Yes," he said.

"Then we'll deal with them later. We have things to do."

"Right."

Thend ran over to where his property was. He found a knife strapped to his pack and came back with it. As Morlock watched, resting on his sword, Thend shinnied up the pole where the Lost One was hanging and slashed the rope that bound him to the hook. The Khroi took the fall on his carapace and slowly rose to stand on his ped-clusters, flexing his boneless arms and turning his head slowly to look at Thend several times with each of the eyes on his pyramidal face.

"You're welcome," Thend said pointedly. After what Marh Valone had said, he was sure that the Khroi could understand him and speak if he chose. The Khroi didn't, though, at least not then. Thend glanced at the werewolf hanging on the next post over.

But Morlock was already limping there. He put one hand under the hogtied werewolf's back and said politely, "Snap at me and I'll cut you in half." The werewolf didn't snap at him. Morlock reached up, slashing the bonds holding the werewolf, and carefully put the beast on his own four feet.

The werewolf spun about and snarled.

Morlock held Tyrfing at guard and waited.

The werewolf glanced over at the dark hulk of the slain dragon, then back at Morlock. He backed away a pace, then another, and his gaze dropped.

"Then," said Morlock and turned away.

The werewolf took a long look at Morlock's back, and eventually trotted after him.

Morlock walked (if that was the right word) straight up to the Khroi and rapped on his pyramidal head as if it were a door.

"Anyone there?" he asked.

The Khroi backed away, as if threatened. "Warriors may not speak to outsiders," said the Khroi at last, speaking through only one of his mouths in a buzzing unclear voice very unlike Marh Valone's. "But I am not a warrior now. I am nothing. Yes, I am here. I see you."

"What's your name?" Morlock asked.

"I have no name," the Khroi said, "except my true one, which the godswho-hate-me know but I do not."

"What do your horde-mates call you?" Thend asked.

"That does not matter," the Khroi said. "I am lost. The gods have remembered me, to my doom, and now I have no horde, lest my doom become theirs."

"What do you think you owe Thend, here?" Morlock asked.

The Lost One looked at Thend with one of his eyes. "Nothing," he said. "Everything."

"I see your point," said Morlock. (Thend wished he did.) "Does your debt extend to a willingness to act? Will you do something for the chance to go untethered to the gods-who-hate-you?"

"What?" the Lost One asked reasonably.

"Thend's mother-"