James Enge - This Crooked Way

"Of course!" Thend said. "Mother, we can do this. I'll go into deep vision, and I can tell Morlock where to cut."

Both Naeli and Morlock turned to look at him. Then they looked at each other. "Something like that," Morlock said.

"Well," Naeli said wearily, "as long as he isn't a miner . .

So the long night after the long day was followed by another long day. They found a cave where Morlock and he faced the terrible task of cutting open his kin to save their lives, then sewing them up like old clothes with thread and patches. Then they faced the easier, but somehow even more ghoulish task of extracting the Khroi eggs from Stador's dead body. At last they buried Stador in a cairn of stones.

Naeli started to weep then, and she wept until she fell asleep, and even then she sobbed from time to time. Thend sat by her until she slept, wishing he could do something to ease her pain, sorry for her, tired of her. Tired of everything, really. That was the problem with surviving: you had so much work to do!

He pointed this out to Morlock, when all the others were asleep, and Morlock said, "Rest then. I'll watch."

Thend shook his head wearily, although he knew he would sleep soon no matter what. He said to Morlock, "So you did destroy them, in the end. They were right about you."

"No," Morlock replied.

Thend knew he was on dangerous ground. He was too stupid to think of shrewd questions, but he needed Morlock to say something more than this. He tried to express this all by opening his hands and grumbling a bit.

Morlock looked at him with a one-sided smile for a time and said, "Should I have lain down and died for Marh Valone's convenience? Should I have let him kill you, your whole family, simply to settle his fears? He would have found something else to be afraid of, Thend. Those who rule by fear will always be ruled by it, until they are destroyed by it. Now, at last, Marh Valone need fear no more."

"So that's why you did it? A sort of mercy killing?"

"I did not kill Math Valone. He turned a blade on himself when the dragons appeared over the Vale of the Mother. You should sleep."

"I can't stand the thought of sleeping," Thend admitted. "I'm afraid of the visions."

"It won't be so bad," said Morlock, and unstoppered a green bottle he held in his hand. A green bird flew out and circled round Thend's head, and before he knew it he was dreaming.

His dream was a vision, but in truth it wasn't as bad as he had feared. He saw the seers of Valona's horde, fleeing into the eastern mountains, along with a few of the Virgin Sisters. They carried with them an infant girl-Khroi they had anointed with Royal Chrism. They were already calling her Valona: the horde would go on.

They saw him, too, for the Khroic seers always walk in vision, and one seer's vision encompasses another.

We will remember you, Horde Mate of the Lost One, they said, not with words.

All right, Thend replied in the same fashion. Remember the Lost One, too. He was better than any of you.

Thend turned away from them in a direction that was neither up, nor down, nor any side. It was still a little frightening, but he wouldn't let the fear rule him. Turning away from the past, he looked straight into the future.

–

I admit it: I liked him at first. That's partly due to the kind of men I'd been buried in for more than a dozen years: halfwitted townies who thought a youngish widow was anybody's meat; needle-toothed Bargainers who thought of anybody as meat for their God in the Ground. Morlock wasn't much to look at, maybe, but he wasn't like that. Plus he had very impressive hands: strong and many-skilled. I remember the first time I saw him lacing up both his shoes simultaneously, one hand per shoe, while keeping up his side of a conversation (as much as he ever did, anyway). Or the time my fifteen-yearold Thend bent his knife, using it as a prybar. Morlock took the blade, a steel blade mind you, in his hands and bent it back. It wasn't quite straight, but at least it would fit into the scabbard. Then that night, when we made camp, he set up a kind of portable forge full of flames that talked back to him, and he remade the blade better than before-all without a word of recrimination. And anytime a crow came by he would have a conversation with it, tossing it grain from his pocket for bits of semi-useless information. And he did this stuff like someone buying a pound of cheese: it was perfectly ordinary. How can you not like a man like that?

Well: I learned. It started the first time one of my children came back from one of his crazy expeditions bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. This is not the way to win a mother's heart. The world is full of dangers, and one of them is going to kill every one of us eventually: as a reasonable person, I accept this. As a mother, I don't and never will; I refuse to be reasonable about risks to my children, and the risks seemed to increase any time Morlock was in the neighborhood.

By the time we reached Narkunden, north of the Kirach Kund, one of my children was actually dead: Stador, my oldest boy, had been killed by the Khroi in the mountains. I don't want to talk about it except-no, I don't want to talk about it at all. It's enough to say that we were there because of Morlock and I blamed him for it. I still do.

I was the only one, it seemed. My brother Roble thought the world of Morlock, and so did my children, my surviving children. He would do the most remarkable things. For instance, we settled in Narkunden for a while to heal up (most of us were wounded by the Khroi-yes, those are the scars you've noticed on me). Morlock and my sons built a weird crooked little house on the edge of town, right by the river, and he set up a workshop on the top floor and he started to make things for sale in the city; that's what we mostly lived on, before we opened up the Mystery Zone.

The Mystery Zone was a hallway that ran around one corner of the house, and Morlock had fixed it somehow that you could walk up the wall and stand on the ceiling. It began as a nuisance-distraction. People knew Morlock lived in the crooked house, and they were always trying to bribe us to let them into his workshop when they thought he wasn't around. Actually, he didn't care, but we were sick of it, so he built the Zone onto the house and suggested we run them through there instead. My daughter, Fasra, dreamed up a line of patter to go with it-how a magical experiment had shattered the law of gravity locally, and how the place was somewhat dangerous to enter. We made them sign a contract not to sue us if they were maimed or killed by the wild magic of the Mystery Zone. That made them wild to get in; pretty soon we were making more money from the Mystery Zone than anything else.

"Why not just make a bucketful of gold and save all the footwork?" I asked Morlock once. He could literally do that; I'd seen him. (Yes, it seems like an awfully convenient skill to have, but, no, I don't know his recipe.)

"Against the law," he answered. Apparently Narkunden didn't like having their markets flooded with artificial gold and they'd passed a law, so that any sorcerer who wanted to spend money in the city had to show proof he'd earned the stuff, not made it. I didn't believe this until one of these guys actually showed up at the door one day and demanded to go through our books, and even then I couldn't quite believe it. I mean, I had lived most of my life under the dictatorship of a monster who fed on human souls, but at least he didn't send agents to root around in your cash box.