by James Enge
“Why?”
Charis glared at the crooked man as if insulted by so obvious a question. “All of you!” he shouted, waving his remaining arm. “The Khroi. The guards. Vennon. The water-gangs. You. All of you, everywhere, surrounding me with open mouths like baby birds squawking, ‘I want this, I want that, Do this, Don't do that, Tell me this, Don't tell him that, Give this to me, Take this from me.’ Everyone screaming me me me and none of them me.”
Morlock opened his hands and waited: he still didn't understand.
“It was my chance to escape,” Charis said wearily. “The new face didn't have to look like my old face. Everyone knew who I was, but if I succeeded no one would know who I was. I wouldn't owe anybody anything; nobody would owe me anything. I could have been anyone. Anyone.”
“Who is it you want to be?” Morlock asked patiently.
Charis thought for a moment. “No one,” he said finally. He pushed himself over with his remaining arm, spun off the edge, and was lost in the red gloom. We heard his body make wet solid impact with the cliff several times as he fell.
“There goes my chance at a promotion,” said Thrennick wistfully after a few moments of silence. “Master Morlock—”
“I am not your master.”
“Fine; I just want you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“If you ever come back to Sarkunden—”
“Yes?”
“Please don't look me up. I mean, I still have nightmares about the last time.”
The soldiers went back to the city through the sewers, but we took another narrow rocky passage up into the light. I couldn't believe how good the fresh air tasted and felt in my lungs, and my eyes drank down the light till I could feel it in my toes. Then I looked at the others and I noticed they were all bleeding as much as I was, if not more. This seemed to me very funny and terribly sad, more or less at the same time, but Naeli said a little hysteria under the circumstances wasn't unreasonable.
We were in a cave facing the north. Outside there were mountains piercing the horizon like pale thorns. Through them led the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls—as dangerous as its name sounded or more. But as long as there was no one there who would try to buy or sell me or himself, I wouldn't complain.
I t was the bones again: Thend rarely dreamed about anything else anymore. They were climbing the slope toward a rift in the high horizon: the Kirach Kund, the pass leading north through the mountains. And Thend slipped and fell in a slope of scree. He slid downhill for a while, and a bunch of the oddly shaped stones slid down after him. It was embarrassing, but not dangerous, and he wasn't concerned until he noticed something about the nature of the “rocks” around him.
“Hey!” he shouted, his voice ragged from panic. “These are bones!”
He had fallen face-to-face with an unmistakable skull; there were many others scattered about. Some of the skulls were shattered; others had holes bored in them. All were gray as stone, and they were not quite human-shaped. The skulls were, if anything, larger than human, but the arm bones and leg bones were shorter and thicker.
Morlock slid expertly down the edge of the scree and offered Thend a fish-pale hand, pulling him out of the pile of gray bones.
“What were they?” Thend asked. “Where did they come from?”
“They were dwarves,” Morlock replied. “There was a great kingdom of the dwarves under these mountains once. Now they are all dead or fled, unless a few hide under the earth so deep their enemies can't find them.”
“Their enemies?”
“The Khroi.”
The Khroi: the insectlike warriors who ruled the mountain range they were daring to cross.
“They killed them long ago,” Morlock said, a strange elegiac tone in his voice. “Now the bones are turning back into the rock from which they grew.” He said a word or two in a language Thend didn't know and turned away.
All that was as it had really happened. But when, in his dream, Thend turned around, his mother, Naeli, was standing behind him. There was a large horn or tusk spiking out of her mouth and he was afraid of it. With a quick birdlike motion she bobbed her head and put a hole in his head, just like the holes in the skulls scattered thickly around him.
He woke up with a scream trying to work its way out of his throat. In the end he didn't scream—but it didn't help that Naeli was the person shaking him awake. “Your watch,” she said briefly. “And there's trouble.”
Thend rolled to his feet and looked around. Everyone was awake, even though it was the middle of the day. (They travelled by night and slept during the day.) His uncle Roble was standing over there by Morlock; Thend's two brothers, Stador and Bann, were with them. Even Thend's younger sister, Fasra, was sitting up in her sleeping cloak. But apart from her, who was usually trouble, Thend didn't see anything that looked like a problem.
Morlock said, “Trouble?” and lifted his wry shoulders in a shrug. When he saw this wasn't enough information for his audience he added, “I saw something that bears a closer look.”
“I'll go with you,” Roble said.
“No you won't,” Naeli disagreed. “You're our two best fighters; one of you has got to stay with the group.”
Thend noticed that Stador and Bann were annoyed by this. But it was impossible to argue with the fact: they all remembered how Roble and Morlock had swept away a company of warrior Khroi.
“Well, he'll have to take someone with him,” Roble said, conceding Naeli's point. “We decided no one should travel alone.”
Morlock's eyebrows raised a little at this. He hadn't realized that the group's rule would be applied to him, obviously. But he was adaptable, and he remarked with his usual eloquence, “Eh.”
“I suppose you mean me,” Thend's little sister, Fasra, said, a bragging tone in her voice. She could be insufferable, but Thend decided she was right. If you counted toughness as anything other than the ability to lift weight, she was the genuine article. And she wasn't absolutely stupid, Thend reluctantly admitted.
“Thend,” Morlock decided.
“But—” Naeli said and stopped. She put her hand on Morlock's arm. His gray eyes met her brown ones. Then she released him and stepped back.
Everything, just everything, annoyed Thend these days, but that annoyed him the most of all: how his mother and Morlock could communicate without words. Also, how she touched this pale-skinned stranger just as unselfconsciously as she did her children or her brother.
Morlock turned away from the group without speaking. Thend followed suit and they went side by side over a ridge to the northwest.
“What was it you saw?” Thend asked finally.
Morlock grunted. “Aside from your face, you mean? You haven't smiled since we left Sarkunden.”
“That's not your business!” Thend said fiercely.
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and said nothing. They walked on a while in silence.
“I'm having bad dreams,” Thend admitted finally.
“Tell me,” Morlock said.
Thend did, and Morlock said nothing for a while. Then he remarked, “You may have the Sight.”
“I don't know what you mean,” Thend said, afraid that he did.
“The Sight,” Morlock said didactically, “is a talent for receiving sensory or mental impressions through tal, the phase of being which links living spirit to dead matter. Most people see only with their eyes, hear only with their ears, think only with their brains. A seer can gain impressions of things he never saw nor heard, and to some extent think outside material limits, knowing segments of the future and past.”
“Then my dreams are true?” Thend asked in horror.
“Dreams are dreams,” Morlock said firmly. “They come from many sources: things you have seen or done or heard of, sense impressions, fears, and hopes. Dreams are neither false nor true, but they may contain truths and yours contains one that cannot have come from your own knowledge.”
“What? Where did it come from?” T
hend asked wildly.
“It may be the shadow of a future event. I hope not, though.”
“How do I get rid of it? I can't stand these dreams anymore, Morlock. Every time I look at Naeli I want to vomit.”
“The Sight? You can't get rid of it. I'll teach you about it, though. The more your awareness is trained in the use of the Sight, the less it will trouble you.”
Thend sighed. “Okay. Should we start now, or just go back to the group?”
“We should look at that, first,” Morlock said, pointing.
Thend had been assuming that Morlock pulled him away from the group just to talk to him. Now he glanced ahead and saw what Morlock had seen, but he didn't understand it.
They were walking down from the crest of the ridge into a little rift in the mountain's side, too narrow to be called a valley. The rift was carpeted with the tall green-gold grass that looked soft as cotton but would slash bare feet and legs like finely honed razors. At the bottom of the rift was a stand of trees, a mix of dark-needled pines and fluttering aspens. (They were too high in the mountains for anything Thend considered a proper tree; there were no elms or oaks or stoneleaf majors.)
Two of the pine trees had been stripped, except for a couple of branches each—it was hard to see them, as they stood behind a curtain of aspen leaves. But as he gazed, Thend became surer: those weren't branches; there was something hanging suspended between the stripped pines.
“What is it?” he asked Morlock.
“A Khroi, I think,” the crooked man replied.
They went on down among the trees and long before they stood in front of the stripped-bare pine trunks, Thend saw that Morlock was right.
The buglike Khroi's flexible arms were bound to its chest and its three legs were wound over and over with the same silken substance. It hung from the surface of a great spiderweb woven between the two naked pines.
“Is it dead?” Thend wondered.
“He,” Morlock corrected.
“How do you know? What do the females look like?”
Morlock grunted. “Hope you never find out,” he added after a moment.
He crouched down to examine the ground as Thend looked up to find that one of the Khroi's three eyes was open and watching them. The iris was the same dull purplish color as the carapace, but it was still an oddly human eye to peer out of so strange a face and Thend was troubled by it.
“Well,” said Morlock, standing up, “I am no tracker, to read a story from bent pine needles. But clearly the spiderfolk have done this. If we are travelling over their territory it is bad, in a way, but also good. That is why we are clinging to the western edge of the pass; the Khroi avoid it, for they fear the spiderfolk.”
“Shouldn't we, too?” Thend asked.
Morlock spread his hands, which meant nothing to Thend.
“Why did they put it—him up here?”
Morlock shrugged. “They do it sometimes. It may have a ripening effect. Also—”
“They're going to eat him?”
“Of course. Spiderfolk will eat any kind of motile life, including each other, if nothing better is available.”
“Shouldn't we let him go?”
Thend always found Morlock's face hard to read, but it seemed he was surprised. “A Khroi? No.”
That made Thend mad. “Why? Just because he's a Khroi?”
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. “The spiders kill the Khroi. The Khroi kill the spiders. I see no reason to interfere: either will prey on humankind, given a chance.”
Now Thend was madder. “To you, the Khroi are just the monsters who killed the dwarves.” He pointed at the Khroi hanging in the spiderweb. “Do you see him? Have you even looked at him? Have you never known a Khroi as an individual, as a person?”
Morlock's cold gray eyes fixed on Thend. “I travelled extensively with one, once.”
“And? When the journey was done did he kill you? Did he leave you to die?”
“He killed himself.”
“He—Arrrgh!” Conversations with Morlock were always taking these abrupt left turns. Thend never had never gotten used to it, but at least by now he knew when there was no more point in talking. He turned away, drew his knife, and started slashing away at the web-stuff.
Morlock didn't help, but he didn't interfere either. When Thend had severed enough strands of the web the bound Khroi fell to the earth with a wheezing sound that might have been a cry of distress or relief. Thend cut his narrow boneless legs free of the sticky silken stuff and then, more cautiously, freed the Khroi's arms. At last he stood back, waiting to see what would happen. If the Khroi was too ill to move, what would they do? It was possible the Khroi was past saving.
The Khroi slowly rose to the ped-clusters his kind used for feet. He flexed each of his arms and legs all along their length, an eerie sight. There were a few wounds on his head and arms that were leaking the dark fluid the Khroi used for blood, but none of the wounds appeared to be disabling. He turned so that one of his three eyes faced Morlock and another faced Thend. The Khroi had needle-toothed mouths at the three corners along the base of their pyramidal heads, and this one clacked his mandibles once or twice, a mannerism Thend thought might be like clearing his throat. But then, instead of speaking, he jumped over and bit Thend on the shoulder, right through his jacket and shirt into the flesh below.
“Hey!” screamed Thend, and Morlock was there, kicking the Khroi in the midsection. The Khroi flew through the air and rolled a few feet on the ground, slamming into the base of a tree. He leapt back on his legs with unbelievable swiftness, gripping a sharp rock in one of its stringy palp-clusters, so unlike hands.
Morlock drew his sword, Tyrfing. Sunlight glittered along its black-and-white, strangely crystalline blade. “You have your weapon,” he observed ironically. “I have mine.”
The Khroi lifted the sharp rock and marred himself with it, scraping it savagely along his purplish carapace by the neck. He kept pounding with the rock until the point broke off, stuck in his shell like a tooth. He dropped the rock, looked at the two of them with two of his eyes, and then fled away through the trees.
“How's that wound?” Morlock asked, turning away and sheathing his sword.
“It's the best kind,” Thend snapped. “Hurts and everything.”
“Well,” Morlock said, smiling a little, “it's not too deep.” He tore a strip from the hem of Thend's jacket and said, “Hold this on it. When we get back to camp I'll whomp up a poultice to keep off infection.”
“Whomp,” Thend muttered as he pressed the cloth against his wound. He felt as if the world was whomping him. “He didn't have to bite me.”
“I think he was marking you,” Morlock said. “So he would know you again, if he saw you.”
“He meant it as a favor?” Thend demanded, pointing at his wound with his free hand.
“He did the same thing to himself,” Morlock pointed out.
“So that I'd recognize him?”
The crooked man nodded.
“I hope I never have to.”
The crooked man nodded again.
They climbed back up out of the rift, each wrapped in silence and his own thoughts.
“What was it?” Roble asked, when they returned to the little camp. No one had gone to sleep yet; they were all standing there, waiting.
“A Khroi, bound by the spiderfolk,” Morlock replied. “When he got loose, he bit Thend,” he added, as Naeli's eyes strayed to the bloody rag Thend was pressing against his neck.
“Whenever my children go somewhere with you, they get hurt,” Naeli snarled at Morlock.
Thend dreaded what would come next. Morlock would explain what had really happened and Naeli would focus her rage on Thend. When he was no more than nine she had run off into the woods to save her daughter from the Bargainers and the Whisperer in the Woods, and he hadn't seen her for more than six years. Now the Whisperer was dead, they had been reunited and Naeli apparently intended to take up where they had left of
f: with Thend as a nine-year-old. He resented her long absence; he resented her assumption that he hadn't grown or matured during the time when she'd abandoned him. But no matter what he thought about her, there was something in his mother's black burning eyes that could turn his knees to jelly. He braced himself for the worst.
Morlock shrugged and said, “What's that smell?”
“If you think you can shrug this off—” Naeli began threateningly.
“Shut up, you stupid moron,” Thend shrieked. “I cut the thing loose and it bit me. Morlock got it off me. It's my damn fault, now leave me alone! I mean him,” he ended lamely.
Naeli looked again at Morlock, then moved over by Thend. She moved his hand from the wound and examined it. “It's not serious,” she conceded. “But it might have been. He should have stopped you.”
“He said not to,” Thend whispered. Thinking back, he wasn't sure that was true, but it was close enough.
“He should have stopped you,” his mother repeated in a voice that was loud enough to be heard by everyone there. “Part of taking care of a child is telling him no and making it stick.”
This was so fearfully unjust to everyone, just everyone in the world, that Thend couldn't even speak. And Thend wasn't a child, even if he wasn't a man yet. If he never made any of his own decisions, how would he ever become a man? He felt he would have been in a better position to make this case if his face wasn't covered with tears and snot, so he let his mother lead him off to have his wound cleaned and bandaged, but he was seething inside with unshed fury. And his skin crawled whenever she touched him.
“What's that smell?” Morlock asked again.
“You really want to know?” Roble asked. “I thought you were just putting Naeli off.”
“I really want to know.”
“A sort of cat-beast attacked us while you were over the hill. Actually, there was a regular pack of them, but when Bann speared one they all seemed to be frightened of its blood: it's got a pretty pungent stink, as you noticed. Anyhow, then they ran away.”