James Enge - This Crooked Way

Both the Khroi and Thend started a bit at this.

11 -yes, his mother," Morlock continued, "was one of the captives taken to the Vale of the Mother. Of your mother, of Valona. Will you take us there?"

"You are the Destroyer," the Lost One said in his expressionless buzzing voice. "You will slay Valona. You will slay the horde."

"No," Morlock said. "We seek only to rescue our friends. Besides, what is it to you? You have no horde any longer. They cast you out, for their own good, not yours. The only horde-mate you have now, as far as I can see, is Thend. He is not one of the damned; he is not one of the lost. How will it be if you cross into the realm of the gods with one such as him for your hordemate? Perhaps it will ease the gods' anger."

One of the Lost One's eyes still rested unblinkingly on Thend. He did his best to look unlost and undamned, since that seemed necessary to Morlock's plan.

"Very well," the Lost One buzzed. "But there must be no killing."

"I don't promise that," Morlock said. "We may need to kill some Khroi to rescue our friends. If need be, we will die fighting. You must join us, join our horde and stand beside us. If not, we leave you here to go your own way. By yourself."

The Lost One covered his eyes with his palp-clusters. Then he lowered them and pointed one longer stringy palp like a finger at Thend.

"He does not know what I am, why I am lost," the Lost Khroi said. "But you know. He is not our enemy, as you are. And you say this to me. You ask this of me."

"If you were my enemy, I would have killed you already," said the crooked man. "Join us, be one of us, or stay here alone. And you must choose now."

The Lost One closed all of his eyes for a long moment, then opened them. "May the gods forget me," he said. "I go with you to the Vale of the Mother. Follow me; it is not far."

Nor was it, as the crow flies, but none of them were crows. Each of them had lived through a long and dreadful day. The werewolf slunk along the ground, dragging his tail. The Lost One was given to fits of stumbling and shuffling; all his limbs would stiffen abruptly, as if from pain or maybe, Thend thought, some sensation the Khroi didn't share with other people. Morlock was perhaps the worst off. Every time the crooked man took a step his whole body twisted, reminding Thend of a millworks he had once seen where something had come askew and the interlocking machinery slowly destroyed itself. But Morlock moved as fast as any of them, never complaining, ripping strips from his clothing as he went to staunch the flow of burning blood from his various wounds. So Thend clenched his teeth and didn't complain about how much his feet and arms hurt.

The Giving Field was just across a ridge from the Vale of Council, where Thend had first awakened. The Vale of the Mother was on the north side of the Vale of Council, past the long sloping shoulder of a mountain. The journey down into the now-empty Vale of Council was not too bad, but the climb up the far slope tested Thend's resolution not to whine. Fear helped: fear for himself and for his family. There were strange sounds coming from over the far slope.

They finally came to the crest of the slope, crawling up the last stretch to keep from being seen. That is, Thend and Morlock did; the werewolf and the Lost One would not approach the crest.

The Vale of the Mother was formed by two shoulders of a mountain (one of which they lay upon). Across the vale was a steep shelving cliff of dark broken stone. Together the barriers formed an irregular triangle with a meadow running down its long narrow center. Thend guessed part of the far mountain had collapsed in older times to form the flattish floor of the valley.

In the valley itself there was a torchlit swarm of Khroi, male Khroi. They wore the black of elders, the white of warriors; Thend thought he even glimpsed the black, white, and red tabard of the Math. They were dancing or running an irregular course that looped back on itself twice.

Where the loops joined lay a massive Khroi: Valona the Mother; Thend was sure of it. She crawled, lengthwise on the ground, too massive and ungainly to stand. Unlike the other Khroi, she had a fourth limb extruding from her upper carapace and another from her lower carapace, so she swayed about on six legs, with two waving like arms above her.

Behind her she dragged a massive sac full of bulbous objects: an egg-sac, Thend realized. It hung from her thick writhing neck. When the dance reached a certain point she trundled forward. Her pyramidal head split open in three parts and out of the horrifying gap came a horn or spike. The horn stabbed toward certain shadowy figures struggling on the ground, backlit by the torchlit dance. The Mother stabbed one, two, three, four times. And each stab was accompanied by a scream in the mother's voice. Thend's mother's voice. Naeli, not Valona.

Thend would have screamed himself, but he could not speak; his throat was knotted tight with horror. Shuddering, he got to his feet, not knowing what he would do, but Morlock pulled him down, off his feet and back under the crest of the ridge.

"We're too late," Thend hissed, when he found he could speak. "There's nothing we can do!"

"Shut up," Morlock said, and turned to the Lost One, who was sitting, rocking in a circle with his palp-clusters over his eyes. "You: listen to me. There are no seers in the Vale of the Mother. Where did they go?"

Thend, thinking back, realized this was true. He had seen none of the ragged black-and-white streaming cloaks of the seers.

"They should be there," the Lost One said after a long pause. "All males of the Horde should be there, to blend their seed with the Mother's eggs and father the next generation."

"What about the guards?" Thend asked. "They're not dancing around. If they leave the prisoners at some point-" He choked himself off. He had been thinking that would give them a chance to rescue his family, but then he remembered it was already too late.

The Lost One lowered his palp-clusters and peered through the shadows at Thend, first with one eye, then with another. "The guards are not males," he said finally. "They are the Virgin Sisters, the might-have-been-Mothers. They were denied the Royal Chrism and grew up sterile. They will never leave the prisoners until tomorrow's children eat their way clear of the hostbodies. Then the Sisters will tend the twice-born."

"The prisoners may leave the Sisters, though," Morlock said. "Listen, Thend. No, listen to me."

"You don't understand," Thend whispered. "It-she-no chance-we-"

"No," said the horrible old man, "it's you who don't understand. There is a thing we can do, but it depends on you. Will the werewolf go and rescue your blood-kin? The Lost One? No. The hardest part of this task will fall on you. If you won't, if you can't do it, we had best leave now and get away while we can."

"Do what?"

"I am going to go into deep vision," Morlock explained. "I may be able to create an illusion that will baffle the Khroi. Their seers would certainly see through the trick if they were here, but they are not. It may work."

"What can I do?" Thend asked.

"Stay clear of my vision. Wait until the prisoners disappear. They will still be where they were, but you won't see them; no one will. Go to them, then, and free them. Beware the Sisters. Do you understand now? Time is short."

I'm just a boy. No, I don't understand. Let's run away, run away now. It's too late. We can't help them and I don't care if we can help them.

"Yes," said Thend.

Morlock drew Tyrfing. The white branches in the black crystalline blade were glowing bright. Morlock's gray eyes, too, emitted a faint light. Then they closed and Morlock fell like a stone and slid some distance down the slope.

The long silence under the shadow of the crest was seasoned by the birdlike song of the celebrating Khroi, the occasional screams of a victim. Thend looked at the Lost One and at the werewolf, both of whom declined to meet his eye. He crept up to the crest and peered over. If there was some sort of illusion forming anywhere down there, Thend couldn't see what it was.