James Enge - This Crooked Way

He slid down the slope and whispered to Morlock's supine form, "Hey, Morlock. It's not working. Hey!" He reached out and jostled the older man's shoulder.

The world fell away. He was standing above his own body. But he was not himself, as he had always thought of himself: he was a sort of cloud of bright bronze-colored motes as sharp as knives. It was strange, but as he looked/thought his way around himself, he realized that this was his true form, had always been.

He looked through the hill at the valley below. Matter was practically invisible to his talic vision: he could see the shapes of his family lying like a row of colored fires in the Vale of the Mother. One fire was fading down, like the coals of a neglected campfire. Within it lurked bright fishlike forms of alien life.

He found the fire that was the silver network of his mother's life and saw that she had, as he feared, been sown with Khroic eggs. This was grievous and he grieved for it, but emotions and thoughts were strangely altered in the visionary state. It was like the unreality of a dream.

Or the reality of a dream. As he looked at his mother, he realized that he was also looking at himself, looking at his mother. He was here, in this place/time, but he was also there, in another place/time. In fact, there was a whole line of Thend-clouds, proceeding from here-now away into a direction that was neither up nor down nor front nor back. The direction, Thend knew intuitively, was past. How often he had come forward in a dream that was partly a vision, to dwell for a while in this moment of the future and misunderstand it?

He saw the line of Thend-clouds move, whenever the Khroic Mother moved. The Thends-that-were stood peering through the silver network of Naeli's life toward the Khroic mother in her lumbering dance of life and death. That was the source of his terrible dreams. He had been seeing one mother through the mask of another. Now, knowing what he knew, he could separate the mother from the monster.

He wanted to say this to someone, to put it into words so that he could understand it himself, and he thought of Morlock.

Morlock's body was a heap of nearly invisible matter, hardly distinguish able from the mountainside it lay upon. Morlock himself, the real Morlock, stood below in the Vale, a pillar of monochrome flames, transfixed by varicolored streams of dim light. He was drawing the light toward him, and directing it away from him at the almost-invisible cliff face that towered over the vale. Not far away was a lumbering web of many-spiculed fire that could only be the Khroi Mother, in the middle of the double-looped dance of burning souls.

Beyond them all stood the seers.

Thend was aghast. There were so many of them-only a few talic imprints were sharp and clear, but there were many, many others, rank on rank, proceeding away in a direction that was neither right nor left nor up nor down nor front nor back. They were here but not now, Thend realized: the placeness was the same but the timeness was different. These seers had come to this moment in their vision, as Thend had. But all the past-Thends were as definite and real as he was himself. these were different, more indefinite as they were further away in time. They were from the future, from times that didn't fully exist yet, coming back to witness this moment.

Why? Thend wondered. What importance did it have for them? Then he realized that he might be able to find out. If he let his mind drift in the notdirection that was not-past, he might see something of the near future. He attempted it, and his mind filled with fire and death and falling stones.

Thend! he not-heard Morlock not-say. Get out!

The vision abruptly left him and he found himself shivering on the dark mountainside, crouching over Morlock's unconscious form.

He had a horrible sense that time had passed, too much time. He leaped up the slope to peer down at his family. They were still there, some of them were still moving. He couldn't tell if any more of them had been sown with eggs; he wished he had thought to look while he was in rapture.

Whatever Morlock had planned didn't seem to be working. The Khroi Mother was lurching forward to implant more eggs. Thend glanced down behind him: the werewolf was lying like a dog at Morlock's feet; the Lost Khroi was crouching with his boneless arms wrapped around his carapace, as if he were suffering from cold or pain. Thend shook his head: there was no help to be expected from either of them. He slipped over the crest and into the Vale of the Mother.

He crept along from one patch of brush to another, hoping their shadows would hide him. Evidently they did, but in the end he had to leave them and burrow his way through a long swathe of mountain grass that tore at his face and hands. After he had been at this a while he felt himself lifted off the ground by a terribly strong grip on his neck. He was caught in the palpclusters of a Virgin Sister.

Her grip was painful without making it impossible to breathe. He saw over her carapace how the grass he had crawled through had been pressed down, creating a dark line in the firelight that pointed straight at him. Brilliant, Thend, he said sourly to himself. Really cunning.

Even the Virgin Sister who had captured him appeared astonished by his ineptitude. She looked at him with one eye, then another, and opened her mouths to speak, probably to call out to the other Sisters. But she had lost her chance: a blue-eyed gray shadow fixed its jaws around her narrow neck. Its weight bore them together to the ground.

The werewolf. He bit through the Sister's narrow neck and the suddenly lifeless head rolled away downslope to rest in deep grass. Air whistled through the ragged oozing end of the Sister's neck: she wasn't dead yet. Her palp-clusters tightened around Thend's throat. He grabbed one of the armblades thrust into a hilt hanging from her belt. He shoved the knifelike point deep into the neck hole of the carapace and twisted it about, hoping blindly to strike a vital organ and kill her before she killed him. She convulsed and her palp-clusters loosened, nerveless in death.

The werewolf had already rolled to his feet and was running downhill toward the captives. Thend shrugged: the time for stealth had obviously passed. He suddenly realized he had lost his knife somewhere, so he kept his grip on the dead Sister's armblade and ran after the werewolf. The other Sisters hadn't seen them yet; it wasn't clear that anyone had. But someone would soon. Their only chance, and it wasn't much of one, was to run down to the prisoners, free them, and fight their way clear.

That was what Thend was thinking when his family disappeared. He was looking right at them when it happened. They were half sitting, slumped against stakes to which they were bound. Some of them were bleeding. There were garlands of mountain flowers on their heads. Fasra was looking around wildly, per haps she had heard something behind her; she turned and looked straight into Thend's eye. Then they were gone: the prisoners, the stakes they were tied to, everything; there remained in their place an odd patch of shadow in the firelight.

Meanwhile the bonfires flared up, light passing from one to the other in an arc like a red rainbow. Khroic voices called out in astonishment, and when the light faded many cried out again. They all were pointing and staring at the cliff wall above the valley.

Thend, looking there too, was astonished to see his family on a rock shelf at the base of the cliff wall. Not only them: Thend himself was there, with a ragged crown of flowers, and Morlock, and the werewolf (the wreath around his gray neck), and even the Lost Khroi.

An illusion, Morlock had said. He was going to make an illusion. This was it. So his family was still there, where they had been. The Khroi Mother, the Virgin Sisters, the warriors, and the elders all turned toward the cliff wall. Thend and the werewolf raced down to the patch of shadow and Thend whispered, "Where are you? I can't see you."