by James Enge
He was exactly correct, so I told him he was wrong.
He ignored me. “You don't really know Morlock, though, it seems. Once the family is well away, or on its way, he'll be back.”
“Why?”
“Are you being modest? The oldest reason in the world.”
I laughed.
“You may overestimate the number of women who have looked on him without some mixture of fear and disgust.”
“Who says I don't?”
Merlin looked at me almost sadly. “I'm being honest with you. Why can't you be honest with me?”
I really think he thought I was being unfair. He admitted to causing the death of one of my sons, and was willing to kill everyone I cared about as a secondary effect of his schemes. But I disappointed him because I wasn't more forthcoming about who might or might not have been the recipient of my girlish laughter. Death and Justice, what a mirror-kisser he was.
In the uncomfortable silence that stretched out between us, we suddenly heard, faint and far off, the harsh sound of men screaming in the last extremity of pain or fear.
“He's here,” Merlin said in a businesslike tone. “Fesco—”
He never finished. There was an earthquake, or something—the floor started to shift under our feet. The ground was pretty lively in Four Castles; we lived just south of the Burning Range and we were always suffering earthquakes. (My husband died in one, when a quake collapsed the mine he was working in.) So I knew what I had to do: get out.
But as I turned on my heel and the floor writhed like a snake beneath me, I saw the door at the end of the hall slide out of sight. Then the shaking threw me off my feet: we were all of us tossed in a heap, including the guy who had been on the ceiling, and I had to concentrate on not getting impaled by their drawn blades.
I was successful, but a couple of them weren't. When the rest of us shook loose from each other and stood up, two of Merlin's thugs didn't. One was Fesco: he was coughing up blood and seemed unlikely to be doing much else for the rest of the time he had left. The other was the guy who had been on the ceiling: he had fallen straight on somebody's sword. He wasn't moving at all.
“Two down,” I said. “Five to go.”
Merlin glanced at me sharply, and then his withered face bent in a sneer. “You're an optimist, young woman. Still, it was clever of him to build this toy to trap me with. The ingenuity of its making is relatively trivial, you understand; one expects that of him. It's his cunning use of it that really impresses me. He's learning, old as he is. If he had Ambrosia's unsparing ruthlessness or Hope's steady devotion, he might really become dangerous someday.”
He looked up and down the Mystery Zone. The hallway had changed shape. It was now longer, with a sharp turn at either end.
“Two of you,” Merlin said, “lead off. The other two, follow. Let's see what the other side of this place looks like.”
The four surviving thugs (Fesco had stopped breathing) all looked as if they had to think once or twice before deciding to accept Merlin's orders. But they did, falling into place without a word to him or each other, and we moved up the corridor. When they reached the turn, one of the lead thugs shouted, “They're down there!” and ran on ahead around the turn.
We heard boots thundering up the corridor behind us.
“Penned in!” Merlin hissed. “Can he have brought allies?” He grabbed my arm and hustled me around the bend.
Allies. I was terrified that this meant Roble and my children—what other allies did Morlock have? I glimpsed back as Merlin dragged me around the turn in the hallway. There were armed men approaching up the hallway behind us—not anyone related to me, I thanked the Strange Gods: the sweating frightened faces were pale as fish-bellies. They did seem a little familiar, though.
Merlin stopped as soon as he had dragged me around the bend. He turned around. There were sounds of fighting from both ends of the corridor. I looked down and saw the lead thugs fighting with someone just around the bend. Turning back, I saw our rearguard thugs fighting with someone just around the corner.
“Stop it!” shouted Merlin. “Stop it, you idiots! You'll kill each other!”
All the fighting stopped. I saw two bodies lying on the corridor floor ahead of us. They looked awfully familiar also: one of them was certainly Fesco.
“There's only one turn in the corridor,” Merlin muttered. “It's bent back on itself. Then—wait a moment—”
He didn't have a moment. A hatch opened in the ceiling in the middle of the hallway and Morlock dropped out of it. He held a sword in one hand, not Tyrfing, and a dagger in the other. He raised the sword to guard as his boots struck the floor. The hatch shut by itself; you couldn't even see a line where its edges were.
The four surviving thugs figured they knew what to do. The two behind us rushed past to engage Morlock. So did the two at the other end of the corridor.
“Wait!” shouted Merlin. “Oh, hell and damnation. There they go.”
Morlock turned sidewise and dodged down the corridor. He threw the dagger, and one of the thugs caught it in his left eye, stumbled, fell, and was motionless. Meanwhile, Morlock was efficiently passing his sword through the other thug's midsection. He ran on down the corridor (we could hear his footfalls growing closer around the corner behind us) with the remaining two thugs in close pursuit. Suddenly he swerved to one side and scrabbled at the right-hand wall. Another hatch opened up and he dove inside. It swung shut behind him and disappeared. There was some smoke hanging in the air.
“Wonderful! Excellent!” shouted Merlin. He turned about and, passing by me, stepped around the corner. He simultaneously appeared at the far end of the corridor. He looked up at me and said, “Join me, won't you, Naeli?”
I didn't take the same route he did, because it bothered me, but walked straight down past dead Fesco and the other cold thug beside him, the still living thug trying desperately to staunch the bleeding in his abdomen, the motionless thug with the dagger in his eye.
“Four down,” I said. “Three to go.”
“Oh, shut up and have a look at this!” Merlin said impatiently.
This was a trail of fire guttering along the corridor. It disappeared next to the wall where Morlock had disappeared.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Blood!” Merlin crowed. “The blood of an Ambrosius. One of our men must have wounded him.”
“Your men,” I said.
“Have it your way, you fool,” Merlin said tersely. He turned toward the wall and gently felt about with his hands, so long and clever, so much like Morlock's, but even paler and acrawl with stark blue veins.
“Got it!” he whispered, and the hatch swung open.
We all crowded forward to look.
Through the hatch there was a narrow side corridor. No door was visible and the hallway dead-ended in a blank wall, but there was a window on the left-hand wall through which part of a moon and some stars were visible.
“That's our exit, I think,” Merlin said smugly.
The two thugs tried to shoulder through, but Merlin stopped them. “No! One ahead, one behind. He may have many ways in and out of this corridor. We must still be vigilant.”
The thugs argued for a while who should go first; then they decided to flip a coin for it. The winner smiled, tossed the coin to the loser, and stepped through the hatch.
It all happened in a moment, but here's what I think I saw.
As he stepped through the hatch he stumbled. As he fell face forward, his hair and beard suddenly streamed out in front of him. His nose even got longer, pointing upward, and his face seemed to slide upward on his skull. He made a small quacking sound of surprise and then he fell, straight up the hallway, and hit the blank wall at the end of the short hallway so hard that he splashed, like a bag full of red jelly.
“I really must pay more attention to fifth-dimensional gravity effects,” remarked Merlin coolly, as he threw the hatch shut.
“But—” said the surviving thug.
Morlock had exited another hatch in the wall and was coming toward us, bloody sword in hand.
“Five down,” I said to the last thug. “Two to go.”
“Shut up!” he groaned.
Fiery blood was dripping from one of Morlock's hands, but somehow that only made him seem more sinister as he limped toward us.
“I don't want this,” the thug said to Morlock in a pleading tone. “I never wanted this. They never told me I would have to do this.”
“Then put your sword down,” Morlock rasped. “Do it now.”
“You do and you'll face my wrath,” Merlin called.
“Mother of stones,” the thug hissed, “how I hate you both!” He raised his sword and leaped at Morlock. The crooked man flipped burning blood in his eyes. The thug clawed at his face and Morlock stabbed him through the chest. Moments later he was dead on the corridor floor.
“You used to gather a better group of swordsmen,” Morlock remarked.
“I was in a hurry,” Merlin replied. “Anyway,” the thrifty necromancer added as he drew something from his left sleeve, “at least I don't have to pay them now.”
He threw the thing in his hand—it looked a little like a stick—and said something. I didn't quite hear it, but I felt the shock: it had to be the activating word of a magic spell. Then the stick didn't look like a stick anymore: instead it was something like a narrow silver bird with a long sharp beak. It flew under Morlock's guard and through his side, appearing on the far side scattering fire and blood from its razor-sharp feathers.
Morlock gasped. Maybe I'm going to sound stupid here, but: that was shocking to me. I'd seen all sorts of things happen to Morlock in the time I'd known him, but I'd never heard him make a sound like that. Worse, the thing spun about in midair and came back at him through the fiery cloud that had begun to envelope him. He tried to block it with his sword, but it spun low and passed through his right leg. He sobbed with pain, but managed to catch the thing between his sword and the floor. He snapped it somehow—I could hardly see him because of the wall of fire rising from his blood on the floorboards—and it seemed to go dark, just a stick again, a broken one now. Then he slumped to his knees, and bloody fire rose like a curtain in front of him.
I turned to look at Merlin. There was a sad contemplative look on the old man's face. But he was taking another of these flying sticks from his other sleeve. He was going to throw it. There was nothing Morlock would be able to do about it, even if he was still conscious. (It was hard to tell. I couldn't see much of him.) This one would kill him for sure. Merlin raised the stick to throw it.
I moved at the same time, and as he let go the stick and started to say the magic word to activate its deadly spell, I punched him in the throat.
His face rippled, as if I were seeing it reflected in troubled water. His dark blue eyes looked at me with shock and an unspoken accusation. (Mirror-kisser! He couldn't believe everyone wasn't on his side, somehow.) The silvery thing fell back toward him as I jumped away. It didn't look like a stick, or a bird. Instead it was more like a long narrow-lipped mouth full of narrow pointy little teeth—a Bargainer's mouth. Breaking the spell as Merlin uttered it had caused the weapon to recoil on the old man somehow. It was more than I had planned, but I admit I felt a certain satisfaction as the mouth-thing landed on Merlin's neck and chest and began to gnaw at him.
I turned away toward Morlock and was horrified to see how much worse he was, now supine on the burning floor in a pool of his own burning blood. Then the floorboards gave way and he fell from sight.
I jumped after him. It was the stupidest thing I'd ever done—I think it holds the record to this day, in fact. What if we'd ended up in a hallway like the one that had killed Merlin's penultimate thug? I would have ended up in a red smear next to Morlock, that's all. But in the moment of emergency I had some crazy idea I could help—grab him before he fell too far. (And maybe I just wanted out of that horrible one-turn trap, even if it killed me.)
We fell, but not with the deadly speed that had killed Merlin's unwary thug. It was more the way snow falls: we drifted amid glowing debris down a long shaft with dark walls. At the bottom was a floor with a door set into it.
The door was locked with one of Morlock's own devices. The crystalline eye looked at him and released the hold its long bronze fingers had on the door.
“Go through,” Morlock whispered through the ember-lit darkness. It was the first clear sign I had that he was still alive.
I kicked aside some burning debris and swung the door open wide.
The street outside the crooked house beckoned to me. Only the ground fell away at right angles to the threshold of the door. It looked as if I were about to fall straight through a hole into the moonlit sky. A wave of vertigo swept over me.
“Hurry,” hissed the bleeding, burning, crooked man.
I sat down on the threshold of the doorway and swung my legs into it. Gravity on the far side grabbed them and dragged them toward the ground. I inched my way out and found myself on my back, staring upward at the sky.
I rolled aside as Morlock jumped out the door and landed on his feet. He landed with a pronounced wobble and started staggering down the street, no less wobbly as he went, still trailing gouts of burning blood.
I hopped to my feet and caught up with him. “Hey, wait a moment,” I said, reaching out for him.
“Keep away,” he snarled. “Don't wait. Move. Merlin. After us.”
“Morlock, he has to be dead. Did you see what that thing was doing to him?”
“Unlikely!” That was all he said. He actually pulled a needle and thread out of his pockets and started sewing himself up as he hobbled along. It was pretty horrible, but just stumbling along watching was even worse, so I said, “Can I help?”
“No. Blood. Burn you.”
“Your clothes don't burn,” I pointed out.
“Dephlogistonated.”
“Deef—what does that mean?”
“My clothes don't burn.”
“Have you got some gloves that have been dephloginated, or whatever you call it?”
He didn't stop walking (if you could call it that) or using the needle to sew up the terrible gash in his side. But his face became more thoughtful, less a mask of pain. “Hm,” he said at last. “Dephlogistonated gloves. Excellent idea, really.”
“Then you have some?”
“No.” The pain clamped down on his features again.
When he was done sewing up his side he settled on a curb for a moment to wrap bandages torn from his cloak around his wounded leg.
“Morlock,” I said, as he rose to move again, “we have to talk.”
He grimaced. “No doubt. Walk, too. I go south.”
“Back through the Kirach Kund?” I said. “Is that where you sent them? You—”
“Can't go meet them!” he interrupted.
I relaxed a little. That was the hardest part of the conversation I'd anticipated: telling Morlock we had come to a parting of ways. Then I thought a little about what he'd said.
“Do you mean you can't, or I can't?” I asked.
“I can't,” he said. “You shouldn't. Think it through.”
I would have much preferred that he explain it to me: both because he knew more than I did, and so that I could argue with him. But getting words out of Morlock was like uprooting tree stumps, even at the best of times—which this wasn't.
Anyway, I could see what he meant clearly enough. If Merlin had some way of tracing us or following us, we would lead him straight to Roble and the children. Then we'd be back in the same situation: all of us at risk because of this duel between Morlock and Merlin.
“Do they know?” I asked finally.
“No,” Morlock admitted. “They expect us.”
“Why—?” I started to ask, then broke off.
Morlock snarled at me, and sounded like nothing so much as the werewolf we had met in the mountains. I waited, but he d
idn't say anything else.
Anyway, maybe it was clear enough. He was fond of Roble and the children. Maybe even of that milky wench, Reijka Kingheart. And he'd had to walk away from them, his last words to them a lie: “I'll see you soon,” or something like that. Otherwise they would have come with, or followed after, and he couldn't have that. Maybe that was it. Something was bothering him, anyway.
Abruptly, he stopped. It was as emphatic as shouting: I knew he had something important to say. His pale eyes, lit strangely by moonlight, stabbed through the shadows at me.
“I go south, then east over the Nar,” he said. He swallowed painfully and continued. “You: north maybe. Northside of Narkunden, maybe Semendar or Aithonford—places to work, hide, be safe.”
“All right,” I said. “When do you think I can see my children? Where will they be?”
He shrugged. “Spring or summer maybe.”
“That's half a year or more!”
He shrugged again. “By then, eh. By then this thing between me and Merlin. It will be over. I think. I think he. He won't care about you then.”
Merlin might not care about my family, but…I suddenly thought of that look of betrayal he had fixed on me. He might be interested in looking me up to settle a score. It might be better for my family if I didn't come near them for a while, a long while.
It tore my heart, but I knew they would deal with it better than I would. And every mother knows that time of parting will come eventually: I just hadn't expected it to come that suddenly, to lose all my children at once. All my surviving children. I thought of Stador rotting in that hole in the mountains and sighed.
“How will I find them when it's time?” I asked at last.
I guess I expected him to pull some magical whatsit out of his pocket, but what he said was, “Look for Kingheart's Cavalcade of Wonders.”
“What?”
“It's a carnival. A travelling show that goes from town to town.”
“That's the business proposition Reijka had for me?”
“Yes. Her parents ran a carnival, but they wanted a settled life for her. They bought her a citizenship in Narkunden, a prenticeship with a physician. But she hates it and now she's starting her own show.”