by James Enge
The water broke through the side of the avalanche field and ran out. Morlock's body slid afterward and bounced downhill over the glazed slope, like a badly made ball, eventually coming to rest against a rocky obstruction.
Morlock was pleased again. This looked like a permanent solution.
Of course, it created a new problem: his soaked body, exposed to the wintry night air, was losing heat even more rapidly than it had under the avalanche. He wasn't sure if he could weave the paths of the heat particles in the air as he had in ice and water; everything seemed to move more rapidly. It was an interesting problem, and he thought a little bit about solutions.
But whatever he came up with, it would not be a permanent solution. Eventually the source of heat within his living body would fail and he would die.
Morlock was not afraid of death; he had seen too much of it. It didn't trouble him that he had things to do, obligations unmet, because he knew that everyone leaves a trail of broken promises when they die. He would leave less than some.
On the other hand, there were things he wanted to do, problems he wanted to solve, things he wanted to make. He wondered if he could make an object solely out of the heat particles he saw dancing through the midst of the material void: a heat sculpture, a heat tool, a heat weapon. If he died now, he would never do that.
Morlock was not afraid of death, but given the alternative, he found he preferred life. He dismissed his vision.
The weight of the dark cold world fell on him. The cold was an agony, but under it burned darker, deeper pain from his bruised and battered body.
He forced his stiff aching limbs to unbend.
He was shuddering in the bitter dark rain so much that he could hardly make his limbs obey him. But he somehow made his way across the avalanche field, like a frozen sea that lurched occasionally under his feet, to the clearing where his pack and the jar-golem were.
The jar-golem rose to stand: this was what it had waited for.
As for Morlock: there were flames in the nexus, dry clothes in the pack, and the man who was trying to kill him was trapped in a jar. It looked as if he would live long enough to do some more making.
Night was much deeper and the storm had changed from sleet to snow by the time Morlock made it at last to Merlin's cave in the cleft of the mountains.
He expected to see signs of destruction, and he did find some. There had been a doorway securing the cave, but water had filled its frame and frozen till it burst outward. He saw two pair of footprints in the rubble: Nimue's and Rhabia's, no doubt.
Beyond the broken door was a stone stairway with a two-headed watchbeast—one side orange, the other purple. Both sides were dead, their gaping mouths stopped with frozen water.
Morlock passed down the stairway into Merlin's lair and came at last to an oval room in which lay the bodies of two women, one dead and one dying.
On the far side of the room Morlock saw his mother's body, lying motionless amid a shattered block of warm ice.
On the near side of the room lay Rhabia. She had been caught by a trap: a steel hoop had passed through one leg and bound her to the floor. She was struggling to stop the bleeding—an obviously long struggle which had so far failed, given the pool of blood surrounding her on the floor. She looked up and saw Morlock.
“Took awhile, didn't you?” she said with false bravado. He could see the relief growing, the fear fading in her eyes.
“I suppose,” he said. He looked the situation over, then drew Tyrfing and broke the steel hoop on either side of Rhabia's wounded thigh.
“I'm going to slide it out,” he told her. “It's going to hurt.”
“Can't you put me to sleep with your green bird?” Rhabia said anxiously. “Like when you fixed my fingers?”
She flexed her hand where Nurgnatz had bitten off her fingers. Morlock hadn't really fixed them, simply replaced them with mechanical analogues that worked fairly well.
“No.” He nodded toward the jar-golem, who had followed him into the oval room and was standing by the door. “Busy.”
“Oh.” She looked away. “All right, then.”
She passed out before the metal was out of her leg. Morlock worked swiftly to sew up her wound before she woke. He wrapped her in a sleeping cloak and left her on the floor, since he was unsure where else he could put her safely.
The rest of the floor was dense with traps. Morlock made his way past them to where his mother's dead body lay.
The chunks of ice were warm as blood: Morlock didn't fully understand what they were. He suspected they were a product of water-magic, something perhaps he should know more about. But clearly they had been used to preserve (and imprison) Nimue's core-self. Her impulse-cloud and shell must have been able to break through the warm ice somehow and reunify.
Death would have followed almost instantly. As Morlock looked down on Nimue's face, he thought it looked different than he had come to know it from her shell. Was it because now she had joined with her core-self? Because she was dead indeed? He wasn't sure. He had never really known her, and now she was dead. Again.
He shrugged. He cut a hole in the side of the cave and buried her there, carving on the wall beside her the same epitaph he had used the first time he buried her.
By then, Rhabia had regained consciousness. He made a fire on the floor, as if they were in the middle of a wood, and brewed some redleaf tea to help her heal and replace her blood. She drank it with many complaints, clearly relishing the warmth, and when it was done she obviously felt stronger. Tossing aside the cup she said, “Do you want to know how it was?”
Morlock thought about what he had seen. “No. Unless you think there is something I should know.”
“That's more thinking than we bargained for. You'll agree I carried out my part?”
Morlock went into his pack to get the agreed-upon sum of gold and handed it to her. The gold meant nothing to him; he could have easily have doubled the amount, or given her as much as she could carry. But he knew that the gold was important to her, not only for itself, but as a symbol of independence. The bag of coins he handed her had the exact amount they had agreed on back in Seven Stones.
She shook it with some enthusiasm. “No more working for Thyrb,” she exulted. “Maybe I can even set up my own retreat.”
Morlock nodded.
“Well,” she said after a few moments, “I think I'll be getting out of here. Especially if the guy who dropped that mountainside on you is just asleep in there.”
Morlock nodded. “Go back the way you came,” he suggested. “It seems to be clear of traps.”
“Right.” She turned to go, paused, turned back. “Think you'll ever be back up Seven Stones way?”
Morlock thought about how angry Merlin would probably be when he freed himself. He thought about Roble and Naeli and her children, and how much they had suffered from knowing him. He thought of Stador, dead under a head of rocks in the Kirach Kund. “No,” he said.
“Oh. Good-bye, then.”
“Good fortune to you.”
She left, and he turned away to explore the rest of Merlin's cave.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. In a room that looked more like a butchering shed than a wizard's workshop, he found a metal dish with a pair of silver eyes in it.
They looked at him—quizzically, perhaps with a little fear, certainly with recognition. He recognized them, too: they belonged to his horse, Velox.
“Hello, my friend,” Morlock said, not sure if Velox could hear him, not sure if he would understand if he did. He was never sure about Velox.
Merlin, of course, had been lying when he had told Morlock that Velox was dead. Morlock had suspected as much. For one thing, he wasn't sure that Velox could die. An unusual beast in many ways.
Velox's separate pieces all seemed to be present in the dreadful blood-soaked room. Morlock settled down to reassemble them. He was tired, his body battered and aching, but the task itself gave him strength. This was a deed he had
set himself to do, and it was near to completion now.
Slowly, the immortal steed took shape in the stony womb beneath the mountain.
Trapped in the jar, the old man struggled against his bonds of clay and sleep.
Already far off, the wounded woman walked away through the long cold night.
1. ASTRONOMICAL REMARKS
T he sky of Laent has three moons: Chariot, Horseman, and Trumpeter (in descending order of size).
The year has 375 days. The months are marked by the rising or setting of the second moon, Horseman. So that (in the year before This Crooked Way begins) Horseman sets on the first day of Bayring, the penultimate month. It rises again on the first of Borderer, the last month. It sets very early in the morning on the first day of Cymbals, the first month of the new year. All three moons set simultaneously on this occasion. (The number of months are uneven—fifteen—so that Horseman rises or sets on the first morning of the year in alternating years.)
The period of Chariot (the largest moon, whose rising and setting marks the seasons) is 187.5 days. (So a season is 93.75 days.)
The period of Horseman is 50 days.
The period of Trumpeter is 15 days. A half-cycle of Trumpeter is a “call.” Calls are either “bright” or “dark” depending on whether Trumpeter is aloft or not. (Usage: “He doesn't expect to be back until next bright call.”)
The seasons are not irregular, as on Earth. But the moons' motion is not uniform through the sky: motion is faster near the horizons, slowest at the zenith. Astronomical objects are brighter in the west, dimmer in the east.
The three moons and the sun rise in the west and set in the east. The stars have a different motion entirely, rotating NWSE around a celestial pole. The pole points at a different constellation among a group of seven (the polar constellations) each year. (Hence, a different group of nonpolar constellations is visible near the horizons each year.) This seven-year cycle (the Ring) is the basis for dating, with individual years within it named for their particular polar constellations.
The Polar constellations are: the Reaper, the Ship, the Hunter, the Door, the Kneeling Man, the River, the Wolf.
There is an intrapolar constellation, the Hands, within the space inscribed by the motion of the pole.
This calendar was first developed in the Wardlands, and then spread to the unguarded lands by exiles. In the Wardlands, years are dated from the founding of New Moorhope, the center of learning. The action of This Crooked Way begins in the 464th Ring, Moorhope year 3245, the Year of the River. But in the Ontilian Empire, the years are dated from the death of Uthar the Great, a system that came into widespread use north and south of the Kirach Kund.
2. THE YEAR OF THIS CROOKED WAY
The novel begins early in the month of Brenting, 333 A.U.
48th Ring, A.U. 333: Year of the River
1. Cymbals.
New Year. Winter begins.
1st: Chariot, Horseman, and Trumpeter all set.
8th 23rd: Trumpeter rises.
2. Jaric.
1st: Horseman rises. 13th: Trumpeter rises.
3. Brenting.
1st: Horseman sets. 3rd and 18th: Trumpeter rises.
4. Drums.
1st: Horseman rises. 8th and 23rd: Trumpeter rises.
Midnight of 94th day of the year (19 Drums):
Chariot rises. Spring begins.
5. Rain.
1st: Horseman sets. 13th: Trumpeter rises.
6. Marrying.
1st: Horseman rises. 3rd and 18th: Trumpeter rises.
7. Ambrose.
1st: Horseman sets. 8th and 23rd: Trumpeter rises.
8. Harps.
1st: Horseman rises. 13th: Trumpeter rises.
Evening of the 188th day of year (19 Harps):
Chariot sets; Midyear—Summer begins.
9. Tohrt.
1st: Horseman sets. 3rd and 18th: Trumpeter rises.
10. Remembering.
1st: Horseman rises. 8th and 23rd: Trumpeter rises.
11. Victory.
1st: Horseman sets. 13th: Trumpeter rises.
12. Harvesting.
1st: Horseman rises. 3rd and 18th: Trumpeter rises.
6th: Chariot rises, noon of 281st day of year. Fall begins.
13. Mother and Maiden.
1st: Horseman sets. 8th and 23rd: Trumpeter rises.
14. Bayring.
1st: Horseman rises. 13th: Trumpeter rises.
15. Borderer.
1st: Horseman sets. 3rd and 18th: Trumpeter rises.
W hen the Allied forces firebombed Dresden in 1945, their real target was, of course, the Dresden Museum of Occult Antiquities, the infamous Übersinnlichaltertumswissenschaftmuseum, which was believed to be the site of the Axis magical weapons research program. Destruction of the central complex was so complete that we will never know whether the fear was justified.
Because it was considered bizarre and questionable even by that institution's unusual standards, the Von Brauch collection had long been exiled to a basement storage facility off the main site. For that and other fortuitous reasons, a significant amount of the collection survived, including an almost undamaged holograph copy of Von Brauch's so-called Gray Book (Liber Glaucus), which until recently was our best source of information about the sorcerous Ambrosii.
I actually had the chance to see this codex when the museum reopened to the public a few years ago. Note taking, or any kind of image making, is forbidden by the curator. (Supposedly this is for the safety of the visitors: “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” etc.; more likely it's so that the museum can sell copyrighted images in its splendid gift shop.) But, while a docent was distracted, I managed to scratch out an awkward version of Von Brauch's manuscript map of the continent of Laent—a map which has never, as far as I know, been published. This sketch was used by the talented Chuck Lukacs to create the map that adorns this book.
But I can't, and don't wish to, deny that most of my knowledge of Von Brauch comes from the magisterial edition with commentary by H. N. Emrys (Amsterdam, 1967), the capstone of a career devoted to the Ambrosian legends. Emrys took some criticism for her agnostic approach to the so-called authenticity question—whether these legends represent an actual tradition of storytelling about Merlin's family or whether they were the mere inventions of a pseudonymous fantasist. (No principality of “Brauch” has been discovered on the map of Germany, and it looks as if Von Brauch, like many of those-who-know, operated under a nom de guerre.) Folklorists will long remember Corvino's searing review of Emrys' lifework, comparing her stance on the “authenticity question” to Jung's tacit endorsement of UFOlogy.
Emrys's vindication was a long time coming, but nowadays her agnosticism seems almost too conservative. With Gabriel McNally's publication of a rich selection of Khroic ekshal (Minneapolis, 2000), with translations and a theoretical framework of tonal notations, we can now be certain there are not only one but several independent traditions of storytelling about the Ambrosii. The “authenticity question” has now been replaced by the “historicity question”—that is, “Do the Ambrosian stories contain some core of historical fact (like the Trojan War legends) or are they purely imaginary?” It's an interesting issue, one I don't propose to address (since my interests are more mythographic than historical), except to point out how rare purity is.
The legendary material we have falls into three groupings, which naturally have some overlap:
1. Stories about Merlin Ambrosius, particularly before he becomes entangled in the history of Britain.
2. Stories about Ambrosia Viviana, and her rise to power over a significant portion of Laent. (Stories about Merlin and Nimue's other daughter, Hope Nimuelle, are less common, for obvious reasons.)
3. Stories about Morlock Ambrosius, the so-called master of all makers. It's this third group that is the most various and the most problematic. In some, he is a helpless drunk. In some, he is merely a cardboard villain—Richard III without the charm. In some, he
is improbably (almost tediously) noble. The Khroi incorporated him into their malefic angelology. Old Danish stories tell about his confrontation with Wayland Smith. The Canterbury recension of Mandeville's Travels includes a description of his workshop which is as ingenious as it is implausible.
These stories may each work (or not work) on their own, but they don't work together. It's not a question of historicity—I again waive any discussion of whether the stories are “true.” It's that they don't cohere. In a small way, the traditions about Morlock resemble those about Hercules: they can't be stitched together to create a mythic biography (as can be done for Perseus, for instance, or Hrolf Kraki, or Atalanta, or many another legendary hero). So, in representing some of these legends in fictional form, I am not attempting to create a prose epic about Morlock, a multivolume Morlockiad. (Folklorists will recall the sad case of C. Linwood, who hysterically insisted that no reviews be made of his “eikosapentalogy” based on the legends of Uthar the Great until the twenty-fifth and final volume of the work was complete. He died before the project was more than a quarter finished, and today the work is almost unknown.) I'm just trying to tell some of the Morlock tales that are interesting, in ways that suit the particular story (or set of stories).
In retelling the legends about Lord Urdhven's attempted usurpation (in Blood of Ambrose), it seemed best to use the form of a Bildungsroman or “education of a hero,” especially since the scant stories we have about Lathmar VII the Rebuilder tend to illuminate apparently contradictory traditions about Morlock and Ambrosia. It's a familiar form, too—perhaps overfamiliar. As Gabriel McNally recently wrote to me, “You can't swing a dead cat in the fantasy section of any bookstore without knocking three or four of these pig-tender-becomes-king books off the shelf.” (I was intrigued by this image of the respectable philologist swinging dead carnivores in bookshops, but in later communications he insisted that it was just a thought experiment and that, anyway, the charges had been dropped.)
With This Crooked Way I turned to another venerable form in popular American fantasy, the episodic novel or “fix-up.” Episodic novels have a bad reputation these days, and I don't think that's entirely undeserved. But this is a very traditional form in sf/f generally and sword-and-sorcery in particular. For some, that would be no recommendation at all. The past is dead. The future is now. The reason to jump off the cliff is that no one has done it yet. But when it comes to cliff jumping, I am not especially innovative. I like to look down and see a deep, soft carpet of my predeceased predecessors before I leap. In any case, the episodic novel meshes well with the segmented nature of the sources (which I have cobbled together from Von Brauch and McNally's translations of the Khroic song-cycles).