James Enge - This Crooked Way

He turned slowly, a full circle, examining every rock, stone, bush, or tree in sight. He saw no trace of his shoes. He moved forward, as quietly as pos sible, striving to make no sound that might cover the shoes' retreat. He saw nothing. He heard nothing.

After taking ten paces forward, he halted. He had missed them somehow; they could not have come much farther than this. He turned and looked back the way he had come. Then, on a bitterly sharp impulse, he glanced up at the forest roof. Far out of reach, the shoes stood nonchalantly upon a blue-black tree limb.

He crouched down and groped about on the forest floor. Latching on to a fist-sized rock, he rose again and pegged it with deadly accuracy at the rakishly tilted right shoe. Then he held the branch, like a crooked javelin, ready in his other hand in case he needed something to throw at the other shoe.

But he didn't. The right shoe tumbled almost to the ground before the other followed it, hurtling from the bough like a stone shot from a sling. Morlock wasted a moment wondering about the nature of the thing that had stepped into his shoes. Before he shook off his speculations the shoes began hopping like a pair of leather toads across the forest floor.

Then, in an instant, the chase was over.

The left shoe had hurled itself forward to land in a dimly blue patch of gripgrass (less greenish in color and finer than the weed carpeting the poisonous wood). In doing so it had bent the stems and torn the central roots of dozens of blades of the bluish grass.

Each offended blade divided into several long wire-tough lashes that instantly wrapped around the first solid object they touched. The left shoe was swiftly bound to the forest floor. Moreover, some of the released lashes inevitably snapped across their quiescent brethren; in less than a human vein-pulse the whole patch of gripgrass had come to greedy life. It snatched the right shoe, flying overhead, and bound it to the earth next to its mate. Even then a faint blue cloud of yearning tendrils floated on the air until the unoccupied blades re-formed themselves and slowly sank back into quiescence.

Their more fortunate kin clung tightly to their new prey, so that its death and corruption might provide food for the whole patch, not to mention serve as bait for an unwary carrion eater. This time they had caught nothing more nourishing than a pair of old shoes, but even if they had known they would not have cared; it is not in the nature of gripgrass to be choosy, and what they possess they do not surrender.

"Hurl krakna!" muttered Morlock, giving vent to one of the many untranslatable idioms of his native language. Then he sat down and began to bind up his feet, using strips torn from his cloak.

It is not every master maker who carries a choir of flames in his backpack. For one thing, few master makers have backpacks, being typically as sessile as clams. Also, flames are not readily portable; they require care of a peculiar sort; they are fickle and given to odd ideas. Nevertheless Morlock, a gifted maker of gems, knew that there was nothing so helpful in tending a seedstone as a choir of wise old flames.

The sphere of smoke clinging to the choir nexus was dense and hot, so Morlock kept his face well out of the way as he removed the dragon-hide wrapping of the nexus; there were the signs of a heated conversation in progress.

"In a former-"

"How do you expect-"

"-life, I was a salamander. Mere words can't imagine how much I meant-

-expect me to breathe?"

11 -to myself, bright as a brick in the Burning Wall …°

"Remember lumbering through fossil-bright burning fields?"

"I prefer wood to coal. Would you feed us more? Would you? Eh? Would you?"

A shower of bright sharp laughs, like sparks, flew up into the dim air of the winterwood.

"I'm hungry!" cried a lone flame, when the laughter had passed. "Feed me! I'M GOING OUT! FEED ME!"

Morlock glanced into the nexus. "Friends," he said patiently, "fully half the coal I gave you last night is unconsumed. You needn't go out."

"Coal is boring!" the desperate flame cried. "Death before boredom!"

"Death before boredom!" the choir cried as one.

"Most of us like coal, you understand," a flame confided agreeably. "But we all support the principle."

"Principle first, always," another flame agreed. "And more coal, please."

"It makes my light so dark and heavy. And all those strange memories!"

"Strange memories, yes. Remember all those fish!"

"I remember remembering. Strange to be a fish."

"No coal!" hollered the desperate flame. "No coal!"

"Snuff yourself."

"Friends," said Morlock, "I come to offer you variety."

"Variety," one observed snidely. "How dull!"

"I have a task for a single flame-outside the nexus."

This shocked them into silence. It was the nexus that sustained them beyond the ordinary term of flamehood, giving them time to develop their intelligence. In twenty years of life, many of them had never blown a spark outside the nexus.

"Well, what is it?" one flame demanded matter-of-factly.

With equal matter-of-factness, Morlock held up one of his clothbound feet. "My shoes have run away into a plot of gripgrass. I want one of you to eat them free."

He waited patiently while the choir exhausted itself in laughter and jeers.

"Gripgrass is something none of you has tasted," Morlock continued. "Furthermore, if one of you volunteers I will give the whole choir two double handfuls of leaves, the smoke of which is poisonous to man."

"Nonsense!" cried a panicky voice, in which Morlock thought he recognized the coal-hater. "Coal's good enough for us! Nothing better! More coal or nothing!"

"I like coal well enough," the matter-of-fact voice said, "but it will never taste so good to me unless I try gripgrass."

"Then," Morlock said, and snapped his fingers. The flame hurtled up and landed in Morlock's palm. Morlock immediately fed it with a strip of bark from the branch he still carried.

"This bark tastes a bit odd," remarked the flame smokily.

"It is kin to gripgrass," Morlock replied. "Do not talk, but listen. Time is your enemy as long as you are outside the nexus. Yonder is the gripgrass hiding my shoes. Do you see them?"

"Smell 'em."

"Then. I'll place you on the forest floor; work your way into the gripgrass and burn the shoes free, then proceed to the far side of the patch. The nexus will be there and you can climb back inside. Do not speak unless you are in trouble; then I will do what I can for you. Do not propagate or you will lose yourself in your progeny. Plain enough?"

The red wavering flame nodded and danced anxiously. Morlock put it down and watched it burn a black smoking beeline for the dim blue patch of gripgrass.

Morlock absently brushed the pile of ashes from his palm, but did not check for blisters. It took a flame hot enough to melt gold to do harm to his flesh; like his crooked shoulders and his skill at magic, that was the heritage of Ambrosius.

Having placed the nexus beyond the gripgrass patch, just out of lashreach, Morlock sat down beside it and began to whittle idly at the branch he still held in his hand. The pale bluish scraps of wood he fed to the flames were still resident in the nexus.

"This wood has a cold marshy taste," a flame remarked, not disapprovingly.

"I don't think I like it," another said. "But I'd need more to be sure."

"Don't blow the smoke over here," said Morlock, annoyed. He'd taken enough poison today as it was; his feet were numb with it. He tossed another pile of wood scraps in the nexus; that was when the gripgrass plot lashed out again.

Morlock had been expecting this. If a plant's central stem was burned through it would not (because it could not) unleash. The central stem would respond to the burning of a peripheral stem, and some central stems would fall and set off the inevitable chain reaction.