by James Enge
What Morlock said was, “Tyrfing!”
Wyrth dropped to the floor. Morlock’s sword, Tyrfing (its black-and-white blade glittering in the light from the open door to the street), flew over his head and into Morlock’s open hand.
The stranger looked without dismay at the sword that had suddenly come to Morlock’s hand when called. “I see it. You are a sorcerer.”
“I am Morlock Ambrosius,” the crooked man replied.
The man and the woman screamed together and hid their faces. The girl seemed frightened, too, but she kept watching.
“I have a name, too,” the stranger said slyly. “A name that makes people scream, a name they are afraid to say.”
He tossed back his cloak, and Wyrth saw that his frame was not so very large after all. What made him seem bulky was the fact that he had six arms, each of them armed with a sword. “I am Iagiawôn,” the stranger said triumphantly. “Iagiawôn the Many-Handed!” He advanced, spinning the blades as if his wrists were on pivots.
“I told you,” Wyrth shouted at Morlock, “we should have gone to the next town!”
“Get them out of here,” Morlock said and retreated a step or two, Tyrfing raised to guard against the rippling hedge of blades.
“That means you!” Wyrth shouted at the family huddling behind the counter. But only the girl seemed to hear him, and she was caught tight in her parents’ double embrace.
Wyrth muttered a brief but sincere curse and dashed across the entryway, sparing a moment to kick at the back of Iagiawôn’s left knee, spoiling his sixfold thrust at Morlock. Unfortunately it did no other harm; the joint had some sort of buglike carapace to protect it. Wyrth half expected one of the six freakishly mobile arms to swing around and stab at him with a sword, but that didn’t happen. When Wyrth realized it wasn’t happening, he knew that was important somehow, but he didn’t have time to think about it.
Wyrth dragged Sunlar and his wife to their feet and pushed them across the floor into the dining hall. “Is there a back door in here?” he asked the wide-eyed girl, there obviously being no point in addressing a sensible question to the sobbing hysterical adults.
“Yes—” the girl began.
“What’s the point?” Sunlar wailed. “Morlock can find us wherever we go! Unless you think Iagiawôn can kill him?”
Wyrth lived on terms of irritable cheerfulness with life, and very few things really made him genuinely angry. But this was one of them.
“You snivelling swill-vendor!” he shouted up at Sunlar’s startled tear-stained face. “Morlock is risking his life out there for you and your family, even though he probably doesn’t remember your names. And you’re in here hoping the monster who came to take your daughter—your second daughter as I understand it—you’re hoping he fulfills his wish and cuts Morlock open. Well, don’t worry about it. However the fight works out, you won’t have to worry about Morlock coming after you; all those old stories are lies. Go on; get out of here; run as far and as fast as you can. But remember: every day of your life from now on is the gift of Morlock Ambrosius.”
He turned away from the family and grabbed a heavy drinking mug molded (badly) from pewter. He ran back into the entryway and saw Morlock was continuing a circling retreat, dodging the occasional sixfold thrust.
Wyrth threw the mug as hard as he could at Iagiawôn’s head, hoping it would bash out whatever the insectile thug used for brains. Wyrth was not hampered by any superstitions about fair fighting.
Unfortunately, it did worse than no good. Iagiawôn turned slightly to face the flying mug and caught it in his spinning blades; it shattered like glass. One of the larger chunks bounced off Morlock’s knee and he staggered a bit. Iagiawôn gleefully stabbed at him with his sheaf of blades, but Morlock managed to keep his feet and fend off the blades with a sweeping slash, like a reaper mowing glittering deadly stalks of hay.
“I told you to get them out!” Morlock shouted to Wyrth past his antagonist.
Wyrth hesitated. That meant Morlock thought there was a real likelihood Iagiawôn would win the fight, and Wyrth and the others would be in danger. On the other hand, Wyrth thought he could better Morlock’s odds if he stayed. On the other other hand, Wyrth hadn’t been doing a very good job of helping so far. … How many hands was that?
Hands. Suddenly Wyrth realized the importance of something he had noticed earlier. Iagiawôn had six hands, but he couldn’t use them independently. When he moved them, he moved them all in the same way.
He shouted to Morlock in Dwarvish. “Hwaet! Vakt sorn knektan wyruma thledhan; dal sar aknekt ma kapt!” (Hey! The bug has six clever hands but just one stupid head!)
“Yes,” Morlock said. “Get. Them. Out.”
Wyrth was about to say they were out when he noticed the innkeeper and his family watching the fight from the doorway just behind him.
“Go,” he said, pushing them back. “Go, get out. It’s life or death for you.”
He led them into the dining hall, each clash of the blades feeling like a thrust through his own heart. But what could he do? If Morlock thought this was worth spending his life on, Wyrth had better make sure it was not for nothing.
There was a clatter that caused him to look over his shoulder. Iagiawôn had leapt up on the counter to rain cuts down at Morlock’s head. The monster must have been confident about the carapace protecting his legs.
But Morlock didn’t attack him directly. The crooked man jumped to one side and shattered the counter itself with a single slash of Tyrfing’s glittering unbreakable blade. Iagiawôn hit the ground rolling on his shoulder—he had a lot of shoulder to roll on—and was almost instantly on his feet.
Morlock grabbed a stretch of the shattered counter in his left hand, extended Tyrfing, and stabbed at his enemy. Iagiawôn caught the accursed blade in a sixfold bind. Morlock swung the length of wood he held in his left hand and buried the end of it in Iagiawôn’s skull. The six-armed swordsman slumped to the splinter-strewn floor. He was dead by the time Wyrth ran up to stand by Morlock.
“Are you all right?” the dwarf said to his craft-master. “That chunk of metal seemed to hit you pretty hard. Sorry about that, by the way.”
“It’s all right,” Morlock said. “Wyrth.”
“Morlock.”
“‘Out’ does not mean ‘part way into the next room.’ In case this situation comes up again.”
“How likely is that?” Wyrth shouted back, stung. “More important, how would I carry the news to my father under Thrymhaiam that I ran away while you fought to your death against a six-armed beast?”
“I’d prefer that to seeing you die next to me.”
“But I wouldn’t, and neither would my father, as well you know.”
“You think too much of your father’s opinion.”
“And you think too little of it. No, I’ve heard what you said, Master Morlock, and I’ll consider it. You’ll note I obeyed you sufficiently as to be no damn use at all, anyway.”
Morlock’s scarred face bent slightly in a one-sided smile. “It’s a start. Let’s haul the meat into the sideyard. If that suits you, Sunlar?”
The hosteller and his family had approached tentatively and were eyeing the dead body with interest and some dismay. Sunlar realized he had been addressed and jumped. Morlock repeated his question. Sunlar nodded mutely, and Morlock remarked to Wyrth, “I want to have a look at his wrists, at least, before we eat.”
“They must be ball-and-socket joints, I guess.”
“Plainly. Though how the musculature attaches is not plain at all, at least to me.”
“Will we have time to make a few incisions?” Wyrth wondered.
“Yes.” Morlock gestured at the greasy smoke billowing from the back of the house. “Lunch will be a little late.”
Sunlar and his wife both shrieked and ran back into the kitchen, calling for Raelio to follow them. She did, reluctantly, keeping an eye on Morlock and Wyrth as they hauled the dead body of the monstrous bravo outside.
/> Lunch, when it arrived, was more splendid than anything they had ordered. The fish were fresh, caught that very day, Wyrth guessed (from Gar Vindisc’s pricey stream, possibly). The shellback steaks were, the finicky dwarf had to admit, more than passable, and there were several of them. Wyrth kept fending off a stream of offers of expensive wines and exotic beers. But the thrinnel ran like water, and the water ran like more water, and there was nothing murky about it. Dessert was a plate of spicy custards and a bowl of multicolored fruit, none of which Wyrth recognized but all of which were juicy, tart, and delicious.
Morlock ate sparingly. Killing a man didn’t put him off his appetite, and Iagiawôn was a borderline case anyway, but food was just fuel to Morlock and whenever he stopped being hungry he just stopped eating. Wyrth had more expansive ideas, and finished off whatever Morlock left behind.
Through the meal they discussed how Iagiawôn had been put together. He had clearly been built through a series of surgeries; the network of scars was easy to read in his skin and his bones. By this Kyrkylio, no doubt—a lifemaker who had a dwelling somewhere in the hills north of town, it seemed.
This much they discovered by inveigling Raelio in innocent conversation, but she wasn’t much inclined to talk to them. But as Wyrth was in the final stages of his victorious campaign against the magnificent lunch, she looked straight at Morlock and said, “Is my sister still alive? They took her to the hills. I figure you’d know if she was dead. She was a terrible liar.”
Wyrth would have said something, but his mouth was full of custard.
Morlock, whose mouth wasn’t, shrugged. “I don’t fight angels over human souls,” he said.
“My mother says so.”
“Who gave your sister to Kyrkylio?” Morlock asked.
The girl turned away. “No one. No one. The monster, he—he took her. My mother said it was for the best. She said they would leave us alone now.”
“Why do the townspeople let the monster prey on them?”
“It was part of a deal, a long time ago. The sorcerer he … I guess he gave people stuff, things they could never get otherwise.”
“The shellbacks,” Morlock suggested.
“Yes. Yes. I guess so. Other things, too. And they. They wanted to pay him but he wouldn’t. He didn’t want money. This was a long time ago; my mother said so. They said they would let the sorcerer take people once in a while. It was travellers mostly. For a long time it was only travellers. But now no one comes here. So the monster he … The sorcerer sends him out and he takes people. And people let him mostly. But you didn’t.”
“I hadn’t had lunch yet.”
“You’re a liar!” the girl shrieked, tears running down her face. “Everyone lies! My mother said … about my sister … like it didn’t even matter! She’d’a said the same when he took me. When I was gone, as if I was never here. And you. I saw your face. I saw it. You hated him. Like I hated him. And you hit him. Like I wanted to hit him. When he took my sister. I wanted to hit him and hit him and hit him until he’s dead and leaves us alone, just leave us alone, why won’t he leave us alone!”
“I hated him,” Morlock admitted. “It’s a weakness. But now he is dead and my hate is dead.”
“Mine isn’t,” the girl said through gritted teeth. “I went out to the yard after you were done cutting him, I was so glad you cut him, but I went out afterward and kicked him and kicked him and spit on him and cursed him and kicked him. But it didn’t matter and now I still hate him. I think it’s because he took my sister and she’s still gone. He didn’t take your sister.”
“No,” Morlock agreed. “He didn’t.”
Wyrth would have liked to see the late unlamented Iagiawôn try to abduct Morlock’s sister, Ambrosia Viviana, dark eminence behind the imperial throne of Ontil. The ensuing mayhem would have been entertaining to everyone except Iagiawôn. He almost said so, but he had noticed Morlock’s brief responses were getting the girl to talk more than Wyrth’s inveiglements had.
“You didn’t say is she dead,” the girl said quietly. “I figure you know because she is such a liar. Her name’s Iuinoe. I love her, but she lies all the time, like about the dance and Vikels’s harp and boys and things.”
“I don’t know,” Morlock said.
“Can you find out?” asked the dark-eyed weeping girl. “Can you find out is she dead? My mother says she is, says she must be, but I don’t know. I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. I want to know. I want her back and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry what I said to her about Vikels’s harp.”
“I guess we can find out for you, Raelio,” Wyrth said, reading the inevitable in Morlock’s scarred taciturn face. “It’s the least we can do for this splendid lunch.”
A passing crow agreed to carry a message to Kyrkylio’s lair in the hills. He knew the place well and enjoyed going there; it was always surrounded by interesting piles of offal that exhibited a pleasing variety of decay. If he were not a crow of few squawks, like Morlock himself, really, he could have expanded in some detail about the odd sorts of carrion Kyrkylio threw out. For instance, there was this one time—
Wyrth agreed hastily that there were times when concision was really the thing. Morlock often had to warn him about running on and boring people with extraneous detail, especially about subjects like carrion, which are really more interesting when they’re actually present.
The crow, not the swiftest bird in the sky, finally took the hint and flew off with the message clutched in his claws. The message proposed a meeting between Morlock and Kyrkylio.
Less than an hour later, a shimmering blue beetle flew in through the doorway of the Traveller’s Rest. It carried in its horns an oath, specific and binding, and a message agreeing to the meeting if the oath was sworn. An ambiguous clause in the oath would have made anyone who swore it subject to Kyrkylio’s control. Morlock struck out the clause, and sent it back via the beetle along with a note, Agree to meet on fair terms or we will meet with no terms. I am Morlock Ambrosius; I will not tell you twice.
Wyrth was skeptical of Morlock’s diplomacy, but when the blue beetle returned it carried a reasonable oath that self-bound the swearer at fearful cost not to harm Kyrkylio while visiting in his lair, except in self-defense. A tal-imprint interwoven with the text showed that Kyrkylio had already taken an oath swearing not to harm Morlock and Wyrth while they were in his lair except in self-defense.
“Too swift; too reasonable,” said Wyrth. “We shouldn’t do this.”
But they did, and the eastering sun of midafternoon saw them climbing the slope to Kyrkylio’s hill-cave lair. The adept met them, standing carefully within the shadows over the threshold, but voluble in welcome for the maker he considered his colleague. Wyrth he didn’t so much as glance at, nor waste a word on.
And Kyrkylio was a man of many words, to the extent he was a man at all. He liked to emphasize his words with a dramatic sweep of his long, bristly proboscis, and when he had said something especially decisive he would clack his horns together—as punctuation or something, Wyrth guessed.
All this, and the spotted golden carapace that adorned his back, and the four arms with their curving clawed fingers, made it hard to think of him as a man. The lower pair of arms seemed more insectile, flexible but armored with yellow chitinous plates. The upper arms were more nearly human, though they were textured with brownish crisscrosses that seemed to have been incised into the scaly pale skin.
The eyes on either side of that buglike nose were pale blue and weary looking, deep in dark sockets. And the adept’s pale sagging cheeks were lined with pain or age (or both). But his voice soared with enthusiasm as he guided Morlock around his cave, rather like a boy showing off his bug collection.
Except in this case it was more like a bug with a boy collection. Anyway, there was an object in a wooden cage that had certainly been a boy at one time, at least in part. But the back of his head had been removed along with its burden of brain. In its place was a forest of yellowish te
ndrils, each one ending in a red mouthlike opening. The mouths murmured quietly to themselves as the tendrils waved back and forth, but it was not clear that the sounds had any meaning. What had been the boy’s face was as hard and immobile as a piece of wood; there was no life left there.
“And here is something that might interest you,” Kyrkylio was saying. He gestured with one of his right arms while the other hung down, slowly clenching and unclenching its insectile fingers. “I developed it as an attachment for poor Iagiawôn.” Wyrth finally managed to tear his eyes away from the adept’s hands and follow his gesture. Morlock was already bemusedly examining the thing; it lay pulsating on a glass tray. It looked like a crown or necklace and it was made chiefly of eyes, strung like beads on a gleaming cable of nerve.
“It was intended,” Kyrkylio explained, “to give him a complete range of vision and, ideally, let him watch for dangers even when he was asleep. But you inconveniently slew him before I had a chance to perfect the instrument.”
“Doubt he could have used it,” Morlock said, looking away toward a glass jar or cage that stood on a rickety shelf nearby.
“Why do you say so?” Kyrkylio replied, stung in his makerly pride.
“Incomplete command of his augmented limbs. A lack of innate capacity maybe. The limbs themselves were well made.”
Wyrth was fascinated by the struggle in Kyrkylio’s face. It was as if two different people were trying to talk through the same mouth. The face twisted; the mouth issued a rasping quack that was not clearly even intended as a word.
“Thank you,” Kyrkylio said at last. “Iagiawôn was inadequate in many ways. A merely human brain seems unable to effectively master multiple limbs. They rarely use to advantage the ones they were born with.”
Wyrth was inclined to agree about the deficiencies of the human brain; he’d encountered few he could cordially respect. But since he was standing next to one of them, he discreetly kept his meat-hole shut. Also, he thought it was interesting that Kyrkylio referred to humanity as a group separate from himself. Was he a man who’d become part bug, or was he a bug who’d grown to resemble a man? The point was moot, perhaps. The speculations whirled within Wyrth like a cyclone, but he resolved not to speak. It was for Morlock to pursue these avenues of investigation, for Wyrth to watch and learn from the master.