James Enge: This Crooked Way

The golden sword fell and was buried in the snow, its activating spell cancelled by the death of its caster.

Rhabia also fell to the ground, dropped by the headless bear. It went down on all fours and wandered away, past the stone image of its former master, into the snowthick woods beyond.

Rhabia climbed to her feet and went to meet Morlock, already hobbling toward her through the drifts of snow. His face was gray with weariness in the gold light of morning. Maybe he was immune from fire and had flammable blood, like all those crazy legends said. But for the first time, as she looked at him, he looked as if he might really be centuries old-and feeling every second of it.

"Better get those chains off you," she said gruffly. This damn maternal instinct of hers kicked in at the weirdest times.

"There are some tools in my pack," he said.

She sniffed. "That's what we risked death for? A hammer and chisel?"

He turned to spear her with his searching gray eyes. "You risked death to help me, when you could have walked away. I won't forget it."

"Ah." She waved her wounded hand in dismissal. "It evens out. I lost my bonus from Thyrb, but I bet I can sell that gnome statue for ten times what Thyrb was going to pay me. So the debt runs the other way, really. I at least owe you a decent breakfast when we get to town."

"I don't think-"

Her maternal instinct didn't have to put up with anyone thinking at her. "Listen, pal," she cut in. "I've had a long day and night of men who think the damn world revolves around them. So you will eat your damn breakfast and thank me nicely for it afterward."

There was some more negotiation on this point, but in the end she had her way. And it was after that memorable breakfast that Morlock offered her a job that bid fair to free her from Thyrb and his ilk forever.

It was the last day of the season of Motherdeath, and new Valona's egg-sac had fully grown in. That day they had a rare daylight implanting. The Sisters watched as the males of the tribe wove their dance about young Valona, fertilizing her eggs, reverencing her and the life she represented. Then she implanted her first eggs in old Valona. The first eggs of a Khroi mother were supposed to be very lucky, and those implanted in an old mother doubly lucky. So good days were obviously in store for the horde. Gathenavalona tried to be happy, and she was a little.

After the ceremonies and the afternoon feast, Gathenavalona went to the Mother's Nest. She found Marh Valone waiting outside.

"Why are you here, Gathenavalona?" he asked. His harmonies implied it was not a rhetorical question.

"You knew I would be, it seems," she replied.

He gestured expectancy.

She gestured compliance and said, "I promised to tell her the whole tale of Motherdeath, back when she was only Dhyrvalona. I wish to keep my promise." Her harmonies vibrated with determination. She would fight, if need be, to keep her word.

"That is a good story," Marh Valone said earnestly. "It is the story of the change that began and has not yet ended. The realization that the gods may not hate us, that our own actions can harm us or save us. The Khroi slept for centuries in dreams of the gods' hatred. Now we have begun to wake up. You can be a part of that new day, Gathenavalona."

"Not as Gathenavalona," she begged. "Give me a new name, and a new destiny."

Math Valone's three mouths issued a quiet harmony of resignation, grief, and gladness. He reached out with one palp-cluster and traced the line of one of her jaws, an almost shocking gesture of intimacy between a grown male and a grown female.

"You will have a new name and a new destiny," he said. "Do you know what I feared? Many a Gathena will kill herself, or her charge, in the time of anointing or afterward. As always, you make me proud."

She gestured gratitude and an inability to speak.

He waved her past. "Go then. Keep your promise to her. When you emerge from the nest, I will have a new name for you, a new task."

Gathenavalona passed by him and climbed into the nest.

New Valona's bulk nearly filled the vast Mother's Nest. She had grown so much after that night of the first anointing.

Her limbs had thickened and grown; her body was more massive, especially her neck with the enormous burden of her egg-sac. Her internal organs had swelled to support her greater size-most of them, anyway. She crawled along lengthwise, of course: she was too enormous to stand on her hind legs and ped-clusters. All her palp-clusters had become heavy, padlike pedclusters. She had regrown the quadrilimbs that all Khroi are second-born with; they were as massive as her other legs.

Valona's eyes fell on her old nurse, standing at the entrance to the nest. Gathenavalona looked in vain for any glint of recognition in those eyes. The transformation wrought by the royal jelly magnified the body many times, but the enormous ovaries in a Mother's abdomen seemed to crowd out most of the room for the brain. Mature Khroi mothers never spoke, and it was hard to say what they understood.

Valona caught sight of a trough of food at the base of her nest. She moved toward it, grunting with excitement.

Gathenavalona thought of her promise to Dhyrvalona. She thought of Math Valone's promise: a new name and a new destiny.

She kept her promise. As young Valona ate to sustain her vast bulk, her old nurse told her how the story ended.

As the ice storm raged about him, the crooked man stood in a cleft of the mountains watching another crooked man walk a twisting path through the shattered icy stones of the rockslide to the west. He saw the man fall among the ice-glazed stones, saw him struggle to his feet again, saw him continue his slow meandering way eastward.

"A plodder," muttered Merlin, and shook his head. It was the only way Morlock would ever reach anything, the older Ambrosius decided: by finding out where it was and walking straight toward it, literally or metaphorically. Well, it was a way to get somewhere. Unfortunately, it left you open to observation and attack by your enemies, a fact Morlock had never learned, apparently.

Merlin shook his head and sighed. This had been a long hard struggle, and it was nearly over. In a way, he would miss it, he decided. That was why he was withholding his final weapon. But that was not the only reason.

Merlin grimly noted that Morlock was not carrying his backpack. He had hidden it somewhere before coming to the confrontation he anticipated between himself and his father. Merlin's map of the future had predicted this, and that was why he planned to avoid any such confrontation.

They were high in the mountains, well above the treeline on the north face of the Blackthorns. Morlock, of course, was approaching from the west. He knew where Merlin was, because Merlin was necessarily near the core-self of Nimue, and Nimue's shell and impulse-cloud together were able to tell where her final segment lay. They had told Morlock, and he proceeded to walk directly toward his goal, along the path Merlin had foreseen.