This Crooked Way

by James Enge

  Glemmurn was obviously impressed, and as she rose from where she had been crouching beside the dead body I thought he was going to ask for the bounty of her franchise, and to hell with nonobligated semipartner Zaria. But then she told him she wasn't going to fill out his stupid paperwork and his face turned to stone.

  “This body has been dead for several days; decomposition is well established. I found several symbols carved into the flesh that appear to be the anchors for some sort of reanimating spell. I attest it to you in the presence of these gentlemen—and this lady,” she said, nodding companionably toward me. I'd have corrected her about my status (and theirs) except that in Narkunden everyone is a gentleperson, even noncitizens like us. “But I'm not going to go to your office and swear out a statement in front of a justiciar. Not unless you're going to pay me for my time.”

  “Citizen Kingheart, my department's budget—”

  “Listen, I have the same budget as you: thirty hours a day, no more or less. If you want a significant amount of my time, compensate me. You know as well as I do that you can put all our names and statements in your report and that will be as good as an affidavit, since agents have field-justiciar status for the purpose of taking testimony.”

  “Yes, but I don't like to use it unless it's necessary.”

  “Great weeping walnuts: be a man. Don't do any paperwork for him, gentlemen. He only wants it to bulk up his files. They weigh it all at the end of the year, and the bureaucrat with the heaviest stack gets some sort of promotion. That's what my ex-obligated full-partner used to say, anyway.”

  “Citizen Kingheart, I must caution you not to encourage resident contractees to shirk—”

  “I am a citizen, and I know my rights and theirs. Anyway, don't you have a date tonight? Zaria was telling me about it. You want to stand here all day talking?”

  Glemmurn jumped like he'd been stung by a queck-bug and looked anxiously up at the sun. “All right,” he said. “I'd better check the books inside before I leave. Just pin your second-death certificate to the corpse.”

  “Done.”

  “Er. Someone should—”

  “I'll take it to the body dump,” Morlock said.

  “Hurry back, Ambrosius,” Reijka said. “I've got a proposition for you. Not the one you've been dreaming of either.”

  “Eh,” said Morlock, but I didn't like the way he said it—a little more cordial than his usual grunt. I was worried that he too might be susceptible to her autumnal charms. (The woman was seven years older than me at least. Not that it's any big deal; I'm just saying.) He stuffed a rag in the body's broken eye and tossed it over his shoulder as he walked away up the street.

  “I like a man who's not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Reijka said, which was so much like what I was thinking that it made me mad. “I'd better go inside, too—see how you all are healing up,” she added.

  “Any excuse to get my clothes off, is that it?” Roble bantered at her.

  “They are rotten clothes,” she agreed smoothly. “Though looking at skin as hairy as yours won't be much of an improvement. Don't you ever shave your shoulders?”

  “No. Do you?”

  I turned away. Again, I could have told her that Roble didn't care for girls much, but she was a big enough girl to find that out for herself.

  Reijka examined Roble and Bann first while I hovered nervously nearby and Glemmurn looked over our books with Fasra. Presently I heard Fasra's voice rising, and I reluctantly abandoned my post to see what was happening.

  Fasra was not actually upset. She was explaining with some enthusiasm the biggest source of income showing in our books, the Mystery Zone. Glemmurn was looking more skeptical by the second.

  “I don't understand,” he was saying as I came up to them. “How can anyone stand on a wall? And how can that result in money coming into your cashbox? I'm afraid—”

  “The money's easy,” I interrupted. “People give it to us. For the rest, I'd better show you. Fasra, we'd better tell Glemmurn all we know about this.”

  I was telling her it was time to baffle him with brilliance. Fasra smiled gently and nodded. We left the books and the cash box in Thend's care and together we led Glemmurn to the Mystery Zone part of the house.

  “What we tell the rubes,” Fasra explained, “is that an uncontrolled outburst of Morlock's magic shattered the laws of gravity locally.”

  “Name of a nameless name!” Glemmurn gasped in shock.

  “Oh, that's just nonsense,” I reassured the pasty little man. “Really, Morlock and Bann built the thing. We don't know how it works, but no laws were broken—‘natural or local,’ as Morlock says.”

  We led Glemmurn through the Gate of Shadows (a dimly lit anteroom) and into the Mystery Zone (a sort of hallway that ran around one corner of the crooked house). He watched solemnly as Fasra walked up a wall and poured herself a cup of water, and the water flowed uphill from where he was standing. She went through the elaborate patter we give the rubes, and then explained the actual situation as best we understood it. She really was dazzling: that girl could talk a landfish into a kettle of boiling water. And then, because he still wasn't saying anything, she did the same thing again.

  He still hadn't said anything when we led him back out of the Mystery Zone, but he was shaking his head slowly. Reijka, Roble, and the boys were sitting around the counter where we kept the cashbox and the books, deep in conversation about something, but they broke off and looked up as we approached. At that point, Glemmurn realized it was his turn to say something.

  “I am deeply concerned,” he said.

  That was when I knew we were screwed.

  “Not only are you earning money through magical means,” he continued, “but you are also engaging in deliberate deception. When you tell visitors—”

  “Oh, that's just for entertainment purposes,” Reijka interrupted. “No one really believes it. They just started giving tours in the Mystery Zone because everyone was sneaking up to the back door and trying to bribe their way into Morlock's workshop.”

  I felt I could grow to love this woman.

  “Nevertheless,” Glemmurn said doggedly, “I find that these noncitizen residents have been conducting business in a magical structure nonapproved by city regulating authorities. I appreciate the fact that Morlock Ambrosius may be reluctant to reveal the, er, sorcerous secrets of this, er, ‘Mystery Zone,’ but I must insist—”

  “It's a four-dimensional polytope,” Morlock's voice said.

  We all jumped a little. For a guy with a bad leg, he moves pretty sneakily: no one heard him come in.

  “A what?” Glemmurn asked.

  “It's a four-dimensional polytope—a structure which exists in four dimensions. There's a fifth-dimensional sheath, also. Gravity is more malleable in the fifth dimension.”

  “I don't wish to be party to your, er, sorcerous knowledge—”

  “Eh. I never know what people mean by ‘sorcerous.’” Morlock seemed miffed, possibly because he had been tempted into saying more than three words in a row, and looking around the room afterward, he realized he might as well have kept his mouth shut for all the good it had done. Bann might have understood him; the rest of us didn't. He added gruffly, “Consult the mathematicians in your Lyceum. There used to be a pretty good geometer on the faculty.”

  “But still, the deception involved—”

  Of course it was hopeless. When somebody says “but still” they mean, You may be right but I'll never change my mind no matter what you say.

  He didn't, either. When Reijka threatened him with her semipartner the professional litigator, he agreed to take the case to his superiors, but in the meantime we were embargoed from spending any money in the city of Narkunden.

  “If that's all you can say,” Reijka concluded, “you might as well get out of here and spread your peculiar brand of joy in someone else's life. And I hope Zaria takes up exclusive full-partnership with Vestavion. He may be a bit of an oily fledge, but at least he i
sn't a dusty old droop with his cranny full of queck-bugs.”

  It takes a person with a certain amount of character to stand up in the face of unanimous disapproval from a roomful of people, and Glemmurn wasn't made that way. He babbled something about “just doing the job,” then fled before any of us could give him our opinion of his job.

  “Well,” Reijka said, breaking the dismal silence that Glemmurn left behind him, “if his bosses don't reverse him, I'll take the matter up with the borough syndic. But for the time being you'll have to shop across the river in Aflraun, I guess.”

  “Why didn't we settle in Aflraun in the first place?” Fasra wondered. “It's a lot more wide open there.”

  Roble looked at Morlock and, when it was clear the crooked man was not going to say anything, said, “We needed a place to heal up, after the mountains. And it's safer here.”

  “Except for harthrangs,” Morlock added thoughtfully. “There might be a few more around town: bodies have been disappearing from the graveyards. That's what they were saying at the body dump. I'll place a demon-sconce around the house.”

  “You'll want Bann and Thend to help with that, I guess,” I said. (He always did: Thend for Seeing, Bann for Making.) “I'll go across the river and buy us a couple days' worth of food. Roble, why don't you and Fasra hold the fort here?”

  “Holding the fort is boring,” Fasra grumbled. “I'll never get any interesting scars that way.”

  When I realized she was referring to our nightmare among the Khroi, I was speechless for a moment. I had been on the verge of suggesting that Stador come along with me and do the heavy lifting, and suddenly I remembered that Stador was dead and rotting in a hole in the mountains. And here she was making a joke about it. On the other hand, Fasra's jokes were rare and fragile things these days. I wanted to cloud up and storm at her, but in the end I just said lightly, “You could get a scar. Sooner than you think.”

  “I think she means it, kid,” Reijka said, grinning at me. “Never mind. I'll stick around and we'll write an angry letter to the syndic and a friendly one to my litigator.”

  “Why not the other way around?”

  “The litigators are the ones who run this town. The syndics and bureaucrats just think they do…”

  I grabbed a bag of money off the counter and walked out the door. It was a little brusque, but I wanted to get out of hearing range before I started snuffling. In fact, I made it almost all the way to the Aresion Bridge over the River Nar when suddenly for some reason I remembered how Stador had looked in the green-and-gold shirt he had worn to his first Castleday when he was six years old. It wasn't like I was trying to remember it; the image forced its way into my mind. It was followed by a wave of others and I had to stand there in the middle of the street, clutching my bag of coins and weeping, until the tide of memories receded and I could think about something else again. That's how grief works for me. It's always there, but you can almost forget about it for a while; you think you might be over it. Then it drags you down and drowns you in itself.

  What can I say? I don't know if you have kids. If you do, I suggest you die before they do. It'll save you a lot of trouble.

  Eventually, I made it to the bridge. The Narkundenside guards gave me kind of a funny look; maybe they'd been watching me weep. But they didn't say anything about it: they just asked to see my proof-of-residence. By the time I'd crossed the bridge to Aflraunside, my eyes were dry (if somewhat sore) and the guards there didn't even glance at my card; they just wanted their bridge toll.

  Aflraun is a lot livelier than Narkunden. If you want a banker, a bookkeeper, an academic, you go to Narkunden. If you want to buy or sell something, if you want to fight with somebody, if you want to become famous (or at least notorious), you go to Aflraun.

  For one thing, the towns are run very differently. Narkunden has a democratic charter where the syndics go to the people for reelection every year, and any important law has to be passed by a citizen assembly, and all citizens get the same vote. Aflraun, on the other hand, is a democratic timocracy. All citizens get a vote, but your vote counts more depending on how important you are. You can acquire importance (the technical term is “gradient”) through money, or other achievements, but one of the most common ways to achieve it is through dueling, as the victor in a duel automatically inherits the timocratic gradient of the person he kills.

  Noncitizens aren't exempt from the constant duelling, but noncombatants are: duellists actually lose gradient if they are seen challenging or provoking someone not carrying unconcealed weapons.

  More people prefer to live in Narkunden: it's safe, quiet, law abiding. But they swarm over the bridges to spend money and time in Aflraun. Commercial magic is not illegal there; neither is prostitution (another way to gain gradient, but apparently only if you do it right) nor public brawling nor most other things.

  Then there is Whisper Street. I find it hard to explain Whisper Street; you'll have to bear with me for a moment. It is a place where, for a fee, you can become invisible and say anything you want. Physical contact is forbidden (not that it doesn't happen sometimes), but no speech of any sort is regulated. You can be anyone or anything that you want, as long as you can convince someone else of it. Apparently it is the city's great moneymaker, greater than people coming to watch the duels or engage in the gray-market activities banned in Narkunden and elsewhere. Whisper Street gets a little longer every year, to accommodate all the people who want to participate. Morlock said to me once that someday the whole city will be inside Whisper Street, and I'm not sure he was joking.

  I'm not a fan of Whisper Street. If you'd ever been a widowed mother in Four Castles, you would have had your fill of being invisible. That's one thing. Then, after that, I was a Bargainer, kidnapping people on the Road, robbing them and carrying them away to the God in the Ground. I did it because I had to do it to save my daughter. I'll tell you the whole story sometime if you're in the mood to listen. But the point was that I was always doing things I hated. “This isn't me,” I had to keep saying. “This isn't me.”

  But you are what you do. It was me, doing all those terrible things. I escaped when I could. But while I was there, that's what I did and that's what I was. What was I, now that I had escaped? I still wasn't sure. But, in any case, I didn't want to take my face off and pretend to be somebody else. I wasn't that sure I could ever find myself again. Maybe this doesn't make any sense: it was how I felt.

  The point is, I had to cross Whisper Street to get to the main market of Aflraun, but I didn't want to participate. You have to pay to become invisible on Whisper Street, but you pay a little more to not become invisible: they give you a little wreath to wear that exempts you from the spell. I paid my fee, got my wreath, and started to make my way across the broad empty avenue, jostled by whispering people who didn't seem to be there.

  It can be pretty icky, and it was that time. I passed by a group of people who were discussing in low tones their sexual practices involving overripe fruit. A couple others were shrieking at each other a set of accusations involving serial murder, treason, and genocide. The argument seemed to have started over a difference of opinion about some athlete or politician, but even that wasn't clear.

  I was about halfway across when a voice spoke insinuatingly in my ear, “Why do you travel with the man who killed your son?”

  I didn't think the comment was addressed to me. Crossing Whisper Street you're apt to hear almost anything, and you'll go crazy if you try to take even half of it half seriously. Still, the voice had struck a particularly raw nerve. “Drop dead,” I muttered, and would have passed on.

  “It's Stador who's dead, and Morlock who killed him,” the voice said, keeping up with me.

  I stopped in my tracks and snatched at the direction the voice had come from. Of course he (I was sure it was a he) avoided me easily. “Who are you, you coward?” I snarled.

  “I'll wait for you in the portico by the Badonhill Hostel,” said the voice. “Ask for Aurelius:
that's who I am.”

  “I've got more important business than interviewing liars—”

  “Then do it. I said I'll wait for you. Good-bye, Naeli the Cat.”

  That really frightened me. Naeli does mean “the cat” in the homespeech my mother and father used to speak. I never learned much of it: they wanted me to speak Coranian and Castellan (the language they call Ontilian in the Empire of Ontil). In the north a few people knew Coranian, and many spoke dialects of Castellan/Ontilian. But I had never met anyone outside of Four Castles who knew the homespeech of my parents. It gave me this weird feeling that the speaker knew more about me than I knew myself. I didn't like it, so I shouted at him for a while, but he didn't speak again.

  I bought the food, and I sent it back to the crooked house in Narkunden by way of a chartered porter. When my hands were free I asked my way to the Badonhill Hostel. It was northward, not too far from the Camlann Bridge, more than two miles downriver. With all the walking I had already done, it didn't sound appealing. But by then I already knew I was going to go confront Aurelius, so I went.

  The Badonhill Hostel looked like the oldest building in the city, but it was in extremely good repair. It towered over a small market area, but there wasn't much business going on that day. In the portico outside the hostel there were tables, and at one of them a man was sitting who looked even older than the building, if possible, but also in extremely good repair. He wore a white cloak over blue clothes; he was reading a book sewn into a blue binding with a white star on the cover. He looked up as I approached: dark blue eyes under white bristling eyebrows.

  “You're Aurelius, I bet,” I said.

  “You win the bet,” he said. He didn't rise but gestured at a chair and said, “Won't you sit down? My people will bring you something.”