by James Enge
Morlock said flatly, “I think you should go to Ontil, the imperial capital. I still have some friends there and they can help you find a place to stand. I'll give you a letter.”
“While you go north alone,” Naeli said icily. “Into the Kirach Kund, without the information Charis was going to get for you.”
That was what Morlock had been expecting from Charis: information from the imperial scouts on what the Khroic hordes in the mountains were up to. It might make the difference in surviving the trip through the deadly pass. He said he'd already paid for it and all he needed to do was pick it up. (He'd told us the whole story, but I've forgotten half of it, and I'm not sure I believe the half that I remember.) That was what had led to the fiasco in the Market today.
Morlock wasn't saying anything, as usual, but it was the way he wasn't saying it.
“Come on, Morlock,” said Roble, a little impatiently. “If you're going to dump us here the least you owe us is an explanation.”
I didn't see this at all. But apparently it convinced Morlock because he said, “All right. I'm going to try to find Charis. He's probably still alive—he's good at that sort of thing, and his enemies don't seem to have found him yet.”
“And he may have your information.”
“Um. Yes.”
“Morlock! Spit it out!” Roble said it, but it might have been any of us.
The crooked man shrugged. “It's a question of who's really after him. The guard? He's been a goose laying golden eggs for them for years now. The Sandboys? I expect the same is true: he seemed to be greasing every palm in town when I was last here. No one has any motive to kill him.”
“So there's someone else,” Roble said. “Is it important who?”
“It might be,” Morlock said.
“Why?”
“Charis would have attracted the hostile attention of this person shortly after he was fishing for information about the Kirach Kund—and the Khroi. It may be a mere coincidence, or the Khroi may have a powerful agent in this city. I want to know if this is true.”
“Then we'll stay and help you find out,” Roble said. “Afterward we can take up the question of who's going where.”
“The hell we will!” Naeli said fiercely. “Morlock, you are not going to abandon us in this damnable place where everything and everybody is for sale.”
“Ontil isn't like Sarkunden,” Morlock said. “Nor do you know what the Kirach Kund is like.”
“I know this much—”
“Let's table it,” Roble said briskly. “I say we eat and sleep and start looking for Charis tonight when the Sandboys are in their little sandbeds.”
Roble was pretty good at breaking up arguments. Maybe it was all those years of living with my mom. Anyway, that was what we did, but it didn't work exactly as he'd planned it.
We always kept watch at night, and we didn't see any reason to change that because we were camping in a house instead of an open field. (We didn't want to wake up and find the house surrounded by Keeps or Sandboys.) With seven of us no one had to stay up long, although it was a pain to stand watch in the middle of the night, so we rotated. That night, Morlock took the first watch and I took the second. Thend was third, and boy was he grumpy when I woke him. We argued about what time it was, and afterward I was too mad to sleep, so I wandered around the house to find someone awake to talk to. That was how I noticed that Morlock's room, on the second floor of the abandoned house, was empty, the unfastened shutters flapping gently in the night breeze.
It sort of looked like he'd climbed out the window, so I poked my head out and looked around. It took a while to spot him, but I finally saw a crooked silhouette right up at the end of the alley: Morlock.
I climbed out the window and followed him.
If you'd asked me why at the time, I couldn't have explained it. It certainly wasn't any echo of my mother's romantic feelings: I thought Morlock was repulsive. But I liked him and was mad at him in a way I didn't try to understand.
Now that I've seen my daughters with their father, I understand a little better. I never knew my father, and I was always latching on to older men in the Bargainer village—some of them pretty creepy. (It was only thanks to Naeli's vigilance that I was still a virgin at thirteen.) Morlock was another one of these stand-ins for my father, I think. In lots of ways he was a pretty bad fit, but in some he was a good one. My mother and he seemed to have something going on, or something about to begin, for one thing. For another, he had a wholly disinterested kindness for me and for Thend. In any case, I always felt safe with him—I knew he'd always stand between me and danger. The only other person I ever felt that way about was Naeli, and I knew there were some things she couldn't handle. I wasn't sure if that was true about Morlock. (Turns out there was plenty, but I didn't know that then.)
Anyway: I followed him. At first I tried to catch up, and then I realized that might not be too smart—if he noticed me while we were still close to the house, he might take me back and wake Naeli and Roble, and there would be screaming and shouting offensive to my sensitive spirit. So I started to sneak along, just near enough to keep him in sight.
After a while I realized something: I wasn't the only person following him. There was a furtive shadow slinking along among other shadows lining the street between Morlock and me. A Sandboy, I figured: maybe one of them had trailed Morlock to the house, in spite of what he'd thought, and was now following him to find out where Charis was (if Morlock was right about that).
I crept closer to the shadowy figure, very gradually and carefully so as to not give myself away. I wanted a closer look at him and, when I got one, I suddenly realized that I recognized the guy, even though (strictly speaking) I'd never seen him before. He was very dirty and bedraggled, but his greasy hair was a pale yellow and his sickly skin was white as a wax candle in dim ambient moonlight. His eyes, I bet, would be green. Charis—the original master wonder-worker of that nasty little establishment Morlock had burned down this afternoon.
I didn't like this. Maybe Morlock was wrong: maybe Charis himself had lured Morlock into town, hoping to kill him off and cancel his debts that way.
I waited until he had crept a little closer to Morlock and I had crept a little closer to him. Then, when he was crossing from one hiding place to another in the shadow-stitched street, I took him out, or tried to.
My brothers played this game called vinch-ball, and it is so stupid I could burst. I knew more about it than I wanted to, because I'd watched them play it so much, and because when they weren't playing it they were usually talking about it. Like most boys' games, it involved hitting people and knocking them over for no clearly defined reason. Well, I had a reason and, thanks to vinch-ball (I wish I'd never said that, but it's true), I knew how to tackle someone bigger than me and bring him down.
I hit Charis from behind, about the level of his knees. He gave a thin scream and fell backward. I scrambled out of the way and pounced on him. All that went according to plan.
Unfortunately I'd underestimated Charis. He was even thinner and weedier than his golem-figure, and his muscles were as soft as mud. But he was a grown man and he fought with the strength of desperation. I was starting to lose the fight when someone else joined the mix.
It was Thend. Between us, we managed to pin Charis's arms behind him as he wriggled, facedown on the street beneath us. He was still struggling and gasping, and I didn't know how long we could hold him, when suddenly he went limp.
I looked up. Morlock was standing over us.
“Charis,” he said.
“Master Morlock,” Charis replied, his voice muffled. “Would you please get your servants off me?”
“I am not your master,” Morlock replied coldly, “nor theirs.”
We let him go anyway and even helped him to his feet.
“How did you get here?” I demanded from Thend.
“Good thing I did get here,” he sniffed.
“That's not an answer! Who's on guard back at”—I
realized I shouldn't say too much in front of Charis—”back there?”
“Roble,” Thend said. “He saw you go and sent me after you.”
“He's asleep—”
“Roble's awake, or ought to be,” Morlock said. “We agreed that I would go scout for Charis and he would wait for a message, in case I got into trouble.”
“How are you going to send him a message?” Thend asked.
“If you need to know, I'll tell you,” Morlock said, not like he was mad. He turned to Charis. “You don't look well,” he observed.
“Thanks to you!” Charis snapped. “When I acquired your information, the Khroi became…interested in me. They ordered their man in the city to hunt me down.”
“Who is he?” Morlock asked. “Perhaps I can defend you from him.”
“No!” Charis seemed genuinely frightened. “Please don't…don't help. I wish no more obligations to you. No more to anyone. I'll find a way to destroy…the agent, or escape him…somehow. If I can pay you what I already owe, I will gladly close our account.”
“Then?”
“If you're asking me where your information is—”
“I am.”
“—it is under lock and key, safe in my house.”
“Then we will go to your house.”
“No!” Charis shouted. “I can't! They're watching for me there!”
“We will trust to your walls and your golems for the few moments we'll be there.”
“I don't have any golems,” Charis sobbed. “They won't obey me anymore. The Khroi's agent got to them somehow. I haven't set foot inside my house for three months. The last time I did the golems tried to kill me. Kill me!”
“Hm,” said Morlock. “Didn't you write a stop-word into your golems' life-scrolls? Something that would bring them to a halt if they started to go astray?”
“Of course. What do you take me for?”
Morlock looked like he was about to tell him, then said, “Never mind that.”
“Well, it didn't work anymore, that's all.”
“I wrote stop-words into the golems I made for you a few months ago.”
“Oh, I know all about that. I took the scrolls out and changed their safe-words to my own. And now that won't work. You look like you don't believe me, but it's perfectly true.”
Morlock didn't answer this; he was silent for a moment, obviously thinking. “You obtained the information and secured it in your house?” he asked.
“Yes. I—”
“Was the place well hidden?”
“Yes. The—”
“Did you tell anyone the location? Did your golems see you hide it?”
“No. Whenever I—”
“Is it in a room with a window?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Charis stared at Morlock for a moment and said, “Yes, there's a window. But it was shuttered when I hid the information; no one could see in, if that's what you're—”
“Then we will go to your house.”
“But I can't—”
Morlock stopped him with a single glance. Oh, how I've tried to do that, but it never works, even with my daughters.
We went to Charis's house: a fortresslike palace of native blue-stone, not far from the western wall of the city. It was surrounded by a dry moat. There was no obvious way to cross the moat, but at one point in the wall there was a great bronze door; maybe that could be lowered like a bridge. Bow slits lined the walls above the moat; every now and then I caught the gleam of watching eyes.
We lurked in the shadows of a half-ruined building across the way from the bronze door while Charis pointed out to Morlock the window of the room where the information was hidden. “But we'll never reach it,” Charis said despairingly, and I had to agree: the window was halfway up a smooth featureless wall. Even if we could get across the moat without being spotted we could never climb up. And, even if we could get in the front door (which we couldn't), I didn't like the thought of trying to sneak through a house of killer golems.
But Morlock, when Charis had made the layout clear to him, just nodded and took something out of a pocket sewn into his cloak. (His clothing was full of weird pockets.) It looked like a big feathery ball; he unfolded two winglike branches, revealing a glassy sphere hanging in the middle. It was like a bird with no head, black wings, and a glass body.
I had no idea what it was, but Charis did. “No!” he gasped. “Not—”
“Keep him quiet,” Morlock said to us.
We did, enthusiastically.
Morlock held the bird-thing in his right hand. He struck flame with something he was holding in his left hand and applied it to the glass sphere. Nothing happened at first, but then something lit up inside the glass sphere. The wings stretched out and seemed almost to come alive.
Morlock said a couple of words I didn't understand and tossed the wing-thing into the air. It hovered above us for a moment, the glowing sphere casting a weird red light on our heads. Then it flew away toward the blue-stone facing of Charis's house, its red heart trailing fire through the blue-black darkness. It hit the house exactly on the opposite side of where the information was hidden (if Charis was telling the truth). The wing-thing exploded when it hit the wall and flame splashed out, taking root even in the stone and continuing to burn.
“Wow!” Thend remarked brilliantly.
“Do it again!” I said.
Morlock grinned crookedly at us and gestured that we should let Charis go.
“My house!” he groaned.
“It's not your house right now,” Morlock pointed out. “If we succeed tonight, it may be your house again.”
“I don't see how.”
“Then the fire loses you nothing. In any case, I'll pay you for the damage. We cross to the moat now.”
“What about the watchers?” I asked.
“There won't be any. All his golems are instructed to fight fires when they occur. I noticed it when I was last here. He's terrified of fire.”
“And why not?” Charis groaned.
Morlock did the shut-him-up-with-a-look thing again and we all ran across the open space and jumped down into the dry moat. Morlock led us around until we were just under the window of the room we wanted. He took something that looked like a big bean out of another pocket and, holding it up to his mouth, muttered some words to it. Then he put it down on the ground.
The bean burst like a hatching egg, and out of it crawled a vine with broad greenish black leaves. It crawled straight up the side of the moat and the wall above it.
“Wow!” said Thend. “That'll be handy in the mountains.”
Morlock looked rueful. “I'm afraid it's my last one. I had four, but I traded three of them to this boy for his cow.”
“That's crazy!”
“Well, I really needed the cow.” The vine stopped growing. “I'll go first,” Morlock said. “Send Charis after me. Then both of you come up; no one is to wait below.”
“Morlock,” I whispered, “I'm not sure I can climb all the way up to that window.”
Morlock replied quietly, “Just take a firm grip on the vine and hold on.” He did so, and vanished. I looked up and saw the vine was carrying him upward to the window. He fiddled with the shutters for a moment, then looked down to us and gestured. He disappeared into the now-open window.
“What a thief he could have been!” Thend whispered to me. “Robbery. Lock picking. House breaking. He can do it all.”
“Tell him sometime,” Charis said, with a pale unpleasant leer. “As long as I'm there to watch.”
“Up the vine, you,” I snapped.
His face got a mutinous look for a moment, but then he looked at ours. He turned and grabbed the vine. It carried him up the wall to the window and he climbed in.
Thend went next; I was last. It was like falling straight upward, and I nearly lost my grip at the top. But I didn't quite, and scrambled through the casement into the room I thought we'd never reach.
; “Close the shutters,” Morlock said, still quietly, but not whispering. There was a big commotion coming from other parts of the house; it looked like Morlock's plan was working so far. He struck a light and set it on a nearby table.
“What's that?” I asked in a quavering voice, just before it moved.
It: vaguely manlike, but half again as tall as a man, and broad in proportion, with thick trunklike limbs. Its huge hairless head had big batwing ears dangling on either side and one great blue eye occupying its whole face: no nose or mouth. I thought it was a statue, set with its back against the door to keep it shut, until it stepped forward, clenching one hand and raising a spear in the other.
Morlock's sword was strapped over his back and he drew it just as the creature moved, thanks to my warning, I think. He leaped forward and struck off the thing's head. The head went spinning off and bounced against the door…but there didn't seem to be any effect on the creature at all. It grabbed Morlock with its left hand and threw him like a rag doll against the far wall. Then it threw its spear, pinning Morlock's sword arm to the wall. It strode up to him and grabbed his left arm with its right. It clenched its left hand and began striking Morlock on the head and body with its great stonelike fist: heavy blows, killing blows.
Thend cursed and ran forward to grab the thing's left arm. It was the bravest thing I'd seen since Roble ran off to fight the whole Bargainer village and the God in the Ground with one thin knife (my knife, as it happens, and I never got it back, either, but maybe that's not important).
But it was perfectly useless. The headless thing kept on pummelling Morlock, dragging Thend back and forth with each blow. It didn't even seem to know he was there.
I looked around for Charis. He was crouched under a table across the room. Useless sack of quivering snot—but what good could he do? What could any of us do? The thing would kill Morlock and then each one of us. Unless I could make it to the window and the vine would take me down…
It was the only course that made any sense. I couldn't help Morlock or Thend. There was no use in my dying, too.