James Enge: This Crooked Way

He was sure of it.

He was almost sure of it.

Merlin badly wanted to ascend into visionary rapture and check: if Nimue's shell and impulse-cloud were in the jar, he would know immediately; likewise if they were not.

But he couldn't risk it. He was all too aware that this might be the ultimate trap, baited with exactly what he really wanted. If Morlock and Nimue were in rapport, waiting for him, everything he had done might be for nothing.

He raised the jar up over his head and threw it against a nearby tree root glazed with thick ice.

The ice shattered. The blue glaze on the jar shattered. But the jar itself didn't: it lay there on the ground without a crack.

Merlin nodded. If Morlock had foreseen this moment, he would have made the jar breakable, but with some sort of menace or trap inside. Morlock hadn't. Ergo, Merlin had found the right jar.

He was sure of it.

He was almost sure of it.

Merlin walked over and recovered the jar. He weighed the risks against each other, shook his head, and twisted the cap off.

From the jar's wide mouth flew the indistinct form of a bird, its feathers gleaming with every shade of dim green in the day's dull light. It passed three times around Merlin's head and returned to the mouth of the jar. By then, Merlin had already slumped unconscious to the glittering glazed earth. The jar fell there beside him.

The jar unfolded three long spindly legs from its base. It shook out three long spindly arms from its striated body. The jar-shaped golem rose from where it had fallen and stood uncertainly on the icy ground.

Spindly the arms were, perhaps, but strong. The jar-golem reached down and picked up Merlin's prone body. The jar-mouth, already wide, gaped wider and wider. The jar-golem dropped the sleeping sorcerer into its mouth. Then it clapped the lid back down across its mouth and wrapped its spindly arms tightly around the lid, sealing the container. Its spindly legs crouched down and it waited.

Time passed. Eventually, two women came through the glittering icefanged pinewood.

The jar-golem didn't move. They weren't what it was waiting for.

One woman said to the other, "Should we see if we can help Morlock?"

"Who, dear?" the other replied.

"Morlock."

"That's funny. My son's named Morlock. I've never seen him, not since he was born."

"He was here with us, just a while ago."

"Looking for his horse. Yes, now I remember. I told him to watch out for that troll under the bridge, but he's not one of the world's great listeners, is he, Voin dear?"

"Rhabia. My name is Rhabia."

"Oh, yes. I remember her well. She looked a little like you. Give my regards to her, if you see her. But I have to be getting on, my dear."

"I'd better go with. That's what he's paying me for, anyway."

"Really? How unimaginative of him. Young men in my days had livelier ideas, believe you me. Who is `he,' by the way?"

"Doesn't matter. Are you sure you know where you're going?"

"Oh yes; not a doubt of it. My impulse-cloud and my shell are not very effective at coherent thinking-"

"You don't say."

"I thought I had said it. Oh, Christ, I'm so tired and confused. Never mind: thinking isn't required. I can feel my core-self is near, so near, and I'm tired, so tired. Frightened, too. Can you-can you-?"

The younger woman silently took the arm of the older woman and they passed onward.

The jar-golem waited in the bright clearing under the wet gray sky. Time passed.

Morlock was not expecting the mountain to fall on him and he was utterly unprepared for it.

A glance or two about told him that there was no way to escape the slide entirely. He could make it as far as he could and hope the slide didn't kill him, or …

He curled himself into a ball and summoned visionary withdrawal. He had just ascended to rapture when the avalanche caught him: the sensation was vaguely similar to being kicked by a giant wearing a cotton boot. Then he was above the level of sensation, adrift in the tal-realm.

Reasoning and intention are oddly distorted in vision. If you enter with a strong intention, in talic stranj with a focus of power, intentional action may be relatively easy. But Morlock had simply sought escape, and having found it, he drifted like a cloud in an otherwise empty sky: not acting, not really thinking.

Merlin passed nearby. Morlock noticed this without really concerning himself about it. Sometime afterward, he sensed Rhabia and two segments of Nimue pass by in the other direction.

Merlin, Rhabia. Nimue, but not all of her. That triad prompted a coherent thought. He descended a little in vision as a consequence.

The sun was going down beyond the rim of the world. The world was colder now, even the tal-world, and that made Morlock think, too. Evidently the avalanche had not killed his body outright. But the cold would kill his body soon.

Well, what could he do about it? Little, very little.

What did he have to work with? Little, very little.

How little? he wondered. In the tal-state he was freed from material limits of perception. He had nothing else to do. He tried to find out how small a thing he could perceive.

Time passed, but he was not aware of it.

Eventually he found himself contemplating the void of matter on a very deep level. Most of it was empty to his sight. But in the void moved tiny particles, more swiftly than others, infected with something like life, although they were not all alive.

Some parts of the slide had more of these than the others. There were some on the surface, where the last red light of the day was falling, through the ragged edges of the ice storm's clouds. There was a cloud of them enveloping his freezing body, moving away from it in the emptiness of the dead snow and ice.

Morlock reached out with his mind and started turning these specks of light and warmth back toward his body. The snow and ice around him grew colder, but against his skin there was a layer of warmth. Eventually his body, balled up like a fist, was floating in warm water within an icy womb deep within the body of the avalanche field.

The maker in Morlock, never absent even when unconscious or asleep, was pleased. It was a temporary solution to survival underneath the avalanche.

Of course, it was only temporary. Morlock pondered alternatives.

Eventually, he began to bend the pathways of the particles of heat, denting the side of the icy womb and then breaching it. He used the heat to whittle away an icy tunnel with a core of warm water, angling the tunnel downslope. His unconscious body rolled along with the water downhill into the tunnel, along its length.

The water broke through the side of the avalanche field and ran out. Morlock's body slid afterward and bounced downhill over the glazed slope, like a badly made ball, eventually coming to rest against a rocky obstruction.

Morlock was pleased again. This looked like a permanent solution.

Of course, it created a new problem: his soaked body, exposed to the wintry night air, was losing heat even more rapidly than it had under the ava lanche. He wasn't sure if he could weave the paths of the heat particles in the air as he had in ice and water; everything seemed to move more rapidly. It was an interesting problem, and he thought a little bit about solutions.

But whatever he came up with, it would not be a permanent solution. Eventually the source of heat within his living body would fail and he would die.

Morlock was not afraid of death; he had seen too much of it. It didn't trouble him that he had things to do, obligations unmet, because he knew that everyone leaves a trail of broken promises when they die. He would leave less than some.

On the other hand, there were things he wanted to do, problems he wanted to solve, things he wanted to make. He wondered if he could make an object solely out of the heat particles he saw dancing through the midst of the material void: a heat sculpture, a heat tool, a heat weapon. If he died now, he would never do that.