by James Enge
“They're the biggest water-gang in town, that's all! They wanted to take over Charis's business, but he wouldn't sell. It got pretty ugly. Then the big bucket of the Sandboys sent for me and he said they were moving in, whether Charis liked it or not. There was nothing I could do about it. If I went along with them, they'd keep me on to run the business for them. I was supposed to make the golem of Charis to keep up appearances. The gangs can't own businesses, you know—not legally.”
“Fasra,” said Morlock, “is there anyone outside?”
The shop was on the edge of a marketplace of a big city on market day. Of course there was someone outside, and I almost said so. But then I figured he meant someone in particular, so I had a look.
“Uh,” I said. “A bunch of guys with metal sticking out of their faces. They've got swords and clubs and they're staring at the shop.”
“The Sandboys,” Stokkvenn said, shrugging. He was a little more at ease, looking Morlock in the eye now. Like he was thinking, Maybe you have my number, but someone else has yours.
“Stokkvenn,” said Morlock, “your story doesn't work.”
Stokkvenn instantly lost whatever ground he'd gained. “It's all I know!” he cried. “It's the truth!”
“It may be all you know, but it's not the truth. I was lured here with an authentic-looking message; either Charis or an excellent forger wrote it. It accompanied an immunity-pass which must have taken a great deal of expense or effort to acquire. Why would your Sandboys take the trouble?”
“I don't know! I can't tell you what I don't know!”
“Where is Charis, the real Charis, now?”
“I don't know. I think the Sandboys took him. He's probably dead.”
“Unlikely. I think he's still alive, and someone wants me to lead them to him. Any thoughts, Stokkvenn?”
“None. I'm sorry. I've told you all I can.”
“Hm,” Morlock said. He dropped the life-scroll and vaulted over the counter. “Unfortunately, I believe you.”
“Unfortunately?” Stokkvenn repeated faintly as Morlock took him by the shoulders.
“Unfortunate for me,” Morlock said, “since all my questions are unanswered. Unfortunate for you, because you are now useless to me.”
Morlock nodded at me, and I swung the shop door wide.
“No,” Stokkvenn gasped.
“Coming out!” Morlock shouted, and threw Stokkvenn headfirst, stumbling into the street. There were some shouts, and meaty thumps, and I heard Stokkvenn's voice sobbing. A few moments later, when I peeked past Morlock out the door, Stokkvenn was gone. I never learned whether he lived or died.
“Not fair, Crookback!” someone shouted. “You said you were coming out!”
“I didn't mean me,” Morlock called back. “Come in, if you like. I am Morlock Ambrosius; I await you.”
There was some audible grumbling at this. They'd have had to come through the doorway one at a time, and apparently they'd heard some stories about Morlock that made them reluctant to try it. We'd only been travelling with Morlock a couple months, and I could have told them some stories myself.
“We'll burn the place down!” someone shouted.
“So what?” Morlock replied easily. “I'll walk away in the flames, and you will not follow me.”
It was true that he could do that, but Thend and I couldn't. I hoped he was bluffing and looked anxiously at Thend. He shrugged and grinned nervously.
Morlock shut the shop door and barred it. He went over to the lifeless golem and ripped its ears off. He did something to them—I couldn't really see it in the shop's dim light, and what I saw I couldn't understand—and then he took one of them and fixed it to the doorpost with a long shining thing like a glass nail.
“Find the roof door,” he said to Thend and me.
“Are you sure there is one?” I asked.
“I hope there is,” he said and turned back to the golem ears, muttering a few words in a language I didn't know.
We found the roof door pretty quickly: it was a kind of a hatch in the ceiling of the back room. We called Morlock and he came back, one of the ears still in his hand. He handed it to me, thanks a lot, and climbed up the ladder to the roof hatch. He unbolted it quietly and tentatively peeked out. It was sort of funny, or would have been if I hadn't been holding a severed ear.
He lowered the hatch and dropped down to the floor. “Go on up to the roof,” he said to us. “Stay low. I'll join you in a moment.”
I was going to hand him his nasty ear back, but he'd already turned away. I followed Thend up to the roof and we crouched low, to keep out of sight of the Sandboys in the street before the shop (and, presumably, in the alley behind).
“Shut up,” Thend whispered to me.
“I'm not doing anything,” I whispered back.
“I heard you move and say something.”
I'd heard the same thing, but it wasn't me. I held up the golem ear. Startled, he put his ear against the thing and then gestured that I should do the same from the other side.
We heard Morlock's voice as he moved around in the shop downstairs: “—‘blood of Ambrose’—unlikely. This really might be phlogopos juice, though. Yes. That'll do.” After a few moments the severed ear emitted a crackling sound.
I realized that he had somehow enchanted the golem ears. We were hearing what the ear nailed to the shop door was hearing. This was what I thought, but what I said was, “He talks to himself when he's alone!”
Thend shrugged. “Sure. He's almost completely crazy: hadn't you noticed?”
I told Thend something I'd noticed about him, and he was hotly denying it when Morlock appeared through the hatch.
The crooked man pinned my brother with a single gray glance and Thend snapped his mouth shut.
“Can you jump across to that roof?” Morlock asked Thend, pointing at the nearest building.
Thend nodded.
“Do it, then. If you think anyone on the street saw you leap, keep on going and don't wait for us. We'll meet you back with Roble and Naeli. Got it?”
Thend nodded again.
“Then,” said Morlock.
Thend ran, crouching, across the roof of Charis's shop, and leapt to the nearest roof. He waited there, crouching. No one called out; no one seemed to have seen him. He gestured that we should follow.
“Go,” said Morlock.
“Why are you so sure I can?” I asked.
He looked at me, surprised. “You can run faster and jump farther than any of your brothers—except Stador, perhaps. If Thend can do it, you can do it. Go.”
I was mad. “I'm not one of your stupid golems!” I hissed.
He looked at me more carefully. “Fasra, I'm sorry to seem abrupt. I set fire to Charis's shop after I sent you up here, and soon the gangsters will notice and risk breaking in. We should be well away by then. So: go. Now.”
“Take your nasty ear!” I whispered furiously, shoving it at him. I ran across the roof and jumped to the next one. Morlock followed, holding the golem ear to one of his own, looking solemn and ridiculous.
We had crossed a few more roofs when Morlock abruptly dropped the golem ear, crushing it under his shoe. “They're breaking into Charis's shop,” he said. “We'll try going down to street level here: they'll soon realize we escaped across the roofs.”
He pulled up the roof hatch of the building we were on. He did it so casually, I thought the thing was unbolted…but then I saw the latch dangling from the undrawn bolt. He dropped down into the hatch and reached up to help us down.
As my eyes were still adjusting to the dimness within a big bulky guy approached us and shouted at Morlock, “Hey! Customers not allowed on roof! Get out of here! You two”—he gestured at Thend and me—”get back to rooms.”
I saw now that the walls were covered in red velvet, and there were some pungent odors assaulting my nose—some sweet, some less so. I'd worked as a housekeeper—and that's all, by the way—at the village cathouse, so it was all pretty familiar.<
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“Uncle Morlock,” I said, in a high-pitched little-girl falsetto, “what sort of place is this?”
The big bulky guy looked at me, puzzled, and then back to Morlock.
“I beg your pardon for the intrusion, and the damage to your roof door,” Morlock said, presenting the big guy with a gold coin.
“Damage?” The big guy looked at the broken latch and said, “Oh, yeah.”
He didn't seem too mad, though, and he was even less so when Morlock presented him with a second gold coin.
A third coin made the guy positively beam with welcome. “No problem!” he said. “Drop in any time! Stay as long as you like! What was name again?”
“Morlock Ambrosius. But we'll have to leave immediately,” Morlock said. “We were escaping from a fire up the street and—”
“Fire?” said the big guy, not so friendly anymore. He shouldered past us and hauled himself halfway through the roof hatch. He must have seen the plume of smoke over Charis's shop right away because he dropped down and ran up the corridor shouting, “Fire! Fire! Fire up street! Everyone out! Fire up street!”
The corridor was suddenly full of screaming people in varying states of undress. Morlock drew me and my brother back against one wall and we waited for the riptide of frightened people to pass away.
“Why didn't you mention the fire before you gave him the money?” I asked Morlock, thinking that he could have saved himself three gold coins.
Morlock looked at me almost pityingly and said, “Then he wouldn't have waited to take the money.”
Morlock's back was to Thend, who mouthed the word crazy to me. To emphasize the point he crossed his eyes, drew his upper lip above his teeth, and, after putting his wrists to either side of his forehead, waggled his hands gently. It was pretty funny, but I didn't react until Morlock glanced over at Thend and Thend's face froze in panic. Then I laughed.
The hallway was mostly clear by then, and we followed the tail end of the crowd down a rickety flight of stairs and into the street. It was full of people now, some panicking, some laughing, some screaming…and some who were cool and intent, their faces and their hands bristling with metal.
“Sandboys!” I hissed at Morlock.
He followed my gaze and said, “Both of you go. Get back to Naeli and Roble. I'll meet you.”
Then he drew his dagger and long pointed sword. Somehow he was standing differently, too—sort of sideways, with his feet at right angles to each other. Then his sword flickered out and one of the Sandboys fell to the ground spewing blood. Morlock moved again—it was almost like dancing; I could not believe that crooked ugly man could move so gracefully—and another Sandboy was down, leaking blood onto the cobblestones. His sword and his dagger were dripping red now; several Sandboys were down, but more were approaching through the crowd.
“Come on!” Thend shouted in my ear.
I turned away and ran weeping through the hysterical crowd, heedless of whether Thend was following or not. It had all been sort of funny up to that point—even the worst parts with the golem-Charis and Stokkvenn. But it wasn't funny now. Those weren't golem bodies hitting the ground. Real men were trying to kill Morlock, and he would kill as many as he needed to escape. I wondered who would succeed and I wondered why I cared.
I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me. I'm not sure why I'm telling you about this at all: maybe because most of these people are lost to me now, and telling you about them almost brings them back. In any case, since I'm telling you about it, I want you to get the right idea.
I wasn't squeamish. I couldn't afford to be. From the time I was seven until just a few months ago I'd been living in a village where human sacrifice was a daily occurrence. Every night the adults of the village would go out into the woods and onto the Road and capture people to feed to the God in the Ground. I'd been taken that way myself, lost in the woods as a child. I'd only been saved because my mother went and pledged her service to the God in the Ground. In local slang, we became Bargainers, and we stayed in the Bargainer village until I was thirteen. Then Roble and Morlock killed the God in the Ground and freed my mother and we had to flee. I'd seen plenty of death, too much for a girl my age, too much for a person of any age, and it wasn't the deaths in the marketplace that disturbed me, exactly.
Part of it was the blood. The God in the Ground preferred to consume his victims alive in his pit under the Hungry Tree, so it was rare that any Bargainer had occasion to shed blood or see it. The sight of the blood sickened me and excited me in a way I can't explain.
Part of it was the thought that Morlock might die. My mother had condemned herself to years of horror for my sake. I loved her for it, and I was grateful, but there was no way I could ever pay her back. If Morlock died covering our escape, there would be another unpayable debt on my conscience, and I wanted no more of them.
All of which I offer as part-explanation for the fact that, as I ran, I sobbed, “Why won't they leave me alone?”
“I think they're after Morlock, not us,” Thend gasped helpfully as he jogged beside me.
I told him to shut his piehole and ran weeping back to mother.
Our mother, Naeli, was sitting on the front steps of an abandoned house. When she saw us approaching without Morlock she stood and called out, “Roble.”
Our uncle Roble and our two older brothers, Stador and Bann, came out of the house. All of the houses on this street were abandoned; nearly half the buildings within the city walls were empty. The city had once been much wealthier, much more populous. That was before the Khroi came, conquering the mountains and closing the pass to the north: the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls—the place that was death to enter. (And which, for some reason, we were going to enter.) Since the north-south trade had been cut off there'd been less money to go around, less reason for anyone to live in Sarkunden, and the city was rotting away from inside. Maybe that was why everyone in Sarkunden was a money-hungry bastard. Or maybe they would have been money-hungry bastards wherever they happened to live.
Roble and Naeli waited until we were within speaking distance and then Naeli said, “Are you all right?”
“We're fine,” Thend said.
“What about Morlock?” Roble said.
“Well, there were Sandboys—” I said.
“What's a Sandboy?” Roble and Naeli said, almost together.
I don't know how many people there are in your family. In mine it seemed like there were always twice as many people as there actually were, and every one of them was trying to interrupt me whenever I said something. I let Thend do most of the talking, only chiming in when he screwed something up, the way he does sometimes, or when someone was picking on him, the way Stador and Bann always were.
Thend's pretty determined, and he set out to tell the story from the beginning. There were a lot of interruptions, questions, and explanations and it took a long time, but he finally did it.
Naeli looked at Roble. “What do you think? Should we go and see what we can do?”
Roble scowled and shrugged. He looked at Thend: “What do you think?”
Thend opened his hands and said, “The fight's over by now. He's away or they caught him. Maybe they killed him, but Morlock thought they wanted him alive.”
“They might have lost their tempers, though,” Roble observed dryly. “He can be irritating.”
“Tell me about it,” Thend snorted.
Then the topic was whether we ought to go to the Sandboys and bribe them to release Morlock. I didn't know what we were going to bribe them with, as we'd left our homes with little more than the clothes on our backs, but nobody asked for my opinion anyway. I guess that's the price of not saying much: people assume you don't have much to say.
I finally did say something, though. “Hey!” I shouted, and pointed at the open doorway of the house. Morlock was standing there in the shadows of the entry hall.
Naeli and Roble wanted him to come out and tell his part of the story, but he gestured at them with
out speaking and backed into the house. Then we all realized that it was one thing for us to be standing talking in the street; it was another thing for him: an imperial outlaw who had a water-gang out after him. And we realized all this without him having to say a word, which was how he liked it. He didn't like to say two words if one or none would do.
We trooped inside. In the dusty entryway within, empty except for our gear, Roble said, “Well? What happened with the Sandboys?”
“Lost them,” Morlock said. I saw Roble's face fall when he realized that was all we were going to hear about Morlock's big fight in the marketplace. Thinking back on those bloody bodies falling to the ground, I was just as pleased, but men look at these things differently, I've noticed. “Came in through the back door and heard you out there,” Morlock added, in a burst of eloquence.
He sat down beside his big heavy backpack, a little abruptly.
“Are you wounded?” Naeli said sharply, going and kneeling beside him.
“Old wound in my leg,” he explained. “It aches a little when I fight—or run.”
My mother began to massage his leg.
Stador and Bann looked a little blank. Roble got this grin on his dark face. Like, Bless you, my children. Thend looked mad—he didn't like any of the signs that our mother and Morlock were getting close. Jealousy, I guess: he'd lost her for six years or more, had just gotten her back, and was in no mood to share her with a stranger whose skin made one think of mushrooms and dead fish. Personally, I was happy for her. She was younger then than I am now, a vigorous and beautiful woman in the last summery glory of her youth. But back then I thought of her as quite old, almost as old as Morlock, and I didn't see why two old people shouldn't be happy together. I wasn't surprised that she took to him either: the only other men she'd seen for the last six years had been either sacrifices to the God in the Ground, or the men of the Bargainer village, all of them pretty repulsive types. I actually don't think she'd been with anyone since my father died, and that was well before I was born, maybe fourteen years since.
The only two people who didn't seem to have any emotional reaction to what was going on were Morlock and Naeli themselves. Naeli was saying, in a matter-of-fact voice, “What are we going to do now?”