This Crooked Way Part 13

"What is that?" I asked.

"Sleep," Morlock said. "Let's go."

I looked down at the unconscious face of the old man I had loved and trusted. I found I loved and trusted him still. I would have liked to tell him so, at least once, but you can't have everything you want. If I were Liskin, I'd say it was one of the rules.

As it was, we grabbed our stuff, plugged our ears, and got out of there, running up the Road westward past the end of town. I never saw Besk, or Liskin, or Four Castles ever again. But I dream about them sometimes.

The Road ends at the western edge of Caroc Town, which is the westernmost settlement of Four Castles, but we ran on into the woods. They are tame just there, by the town, and we kept on moving as fast as we could. If there were pursuers behind us we never heard them, thanks to our beeswax earplugs. We held a hard pace, going just south of due west, at Morlock's insistence.

"We don't want to end up in Tychar," he said, when I asked him about it. (We each unplugged one of our ears, so we could confer about our course.) "It's a nasty place."

"I never heard of it," I admitted.

"You wouldn't have got any travellers from that direction. People who go into the winterwood seldom live to tell about it."

"Why don't we head due south, then?"

Morlock walked awhile in silence. "We might do so," he said finally. "It would be less dangerous. But we would eventually end up in the Anhikh komos of cities."

"Kontos?"

"The word means 'parade' or 'dance' or something like that. I suppose you might translate it as 'alliance.' But there is a leader, the Komarkh, who has an authority something like that of the Ontilian Emperor."

I was going to ask why it would be so bad to end up there, when I remembered something Morlock had said earlier, about the Anhikh cities being like Four Castles. It was worth some risk to avoid being caught in another web like the one we were leaving behind us. We replugged our ears and went on.

An hour or two later, I had the oddest feeling-as if a voice that had been whispering at me all my life had just fallen silent. I stopped dead and looked at the others; they clearly felt it, too.

Morlock dropped his pack and pulled from it a short shovel with a pointed blade. He walked back and forth over the ground we had just pa.s.sed a few times, and then started to dig down.

For a sorcerer, he wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty. I had a shovel among my things, so I pulled it out and started to dig as well. All of us unplugged our ears (we knew we were at the limit of the Enemy's influence) and we dug in s.h.i.+fts.

It took a couple hours to lay bare a trench only six feet long and four feet deep; the soil was interwoven with tree roots, living and dead, and we were cutting through wood as often as we were digging in dirt. Nor did we know exactly what we were looking for.

But we had no doubt when we actually found it. At first it looked like a heavy cable, thicker than a man's arm-the kind they use in the mines. Then it seemed more like a monstrous earthworm: it rippled as we looked at it in the afternoon sun. It pa.s.sed from one end of the trench to the other.

"No doubt," Morlock said, "it runs all around Four Castles and the neighboring woods. This is the anchor of the Boneless One's influence."

"You knew it would be here," I said.

"I guessed something like it would be. The Boneless One is extremely powerful; its influence pervades the woods and even the towns. It must emit talic impulses in waves, constantly exerting itself. But even so, the influence would be intense at its center and increasingly vague and slight everywhere else until the talic waves dissipated in the wide world ... unless there were some sort of wavebreak or wall which would rebound the waves back into the wood. "

"So if we put a hole in the wall-"

"-its influence leaks away. Most of Four Castles, at any rate, will be free of it; I don't know about the Bargainers."

"Let's cut it, then," I said.

Morlock started to speak, hesitated, and shrugged his crooked shoulders. He picked up his sharp swordlike shovel and dug it into the wormlike cable, twisting and pus.h.i.+ng until the thing was completely severed. Some blackish green fluid like blood poured out and began to fill the narrow trench.

"Yecch," said Thend (speaking for all of us, I'd say).

The torn ends writhed for a bit, and then pressed against each other like two ragged mouths in a pa.s.sionate kiss. Presently the ragged ends began to merge.

"We need to take out a bigger section," I guessed.

Morlock nodded. He cut again with his shovel while I dug into the wormlike cable in the middle of the trench. When both cuts were through, we put the blades under the severed and suddenly still section of worm-cable and tossed it out of the trench.

Morlock looked bleakly at his ragged shoes, drenched with sticky cold worm blood. "I really need new shoes," he remarked.

"Look!" I said.

The two ragged ends of worm-cable stretched and thinned and crawled toward each other over the gap of bare mud. They met and began to merge.

"Bargain the thing," I muttered. "We need to take an even bigger section."

"I think so," Morlock said. "Roble, look at this." He gestured at the section of worm-cable we had tossed out of the trench. It lay still, turning gray in the green-gold light of afternoon.

"So? It's dead-hey!"

"Yes. If we cut the thing at two widely separate points-might not the stretch between die? We would want them to be widely separated. We want as big a hole as we can make in the Boneless One's wall."

"It might work."

"And if it doesn't, we can try something else. I think the time has come to go different paths. Do you think you can find the border line by yourself? I might be able to fas.h.i.+on you a detector."

I closed my eyes and stepped from one side of the trench to the other and back again. The whispering returned, then vanished again. "I can do it," I said. "It's obvious where the border is."

"Then. I'll travel north and east along the border for a day or so. You travel south and east the same length of time. This time tomorrow, we'll cut the worm, wherever we are on the border. If we're right, the wall will be broken and the dominion of the Boneless One will be over."

"Right!" It was another night without sleep, but I could handle that. There was a trickier issue at hand. I turned to the boys, who were staring solemnly at us.

I call them boys, but one was fully grown and the other two were almost men. All of them were used to fending for themselves, working long and hard, sticking by each other. I hated to send them alone into the wilderness, but I wanted them away from this in case something went wrong.

"Boys," I said, "Morlock is right: we part ways here. I want you to go on west and south for a day's journey. Wait there for three days. If neither Morlock nor I come to meet you there, I want you to head west to-" I looked at Morlock.

"Sarkunden," he said. "There's a man there who owes me a favor. I gave Stador a map and a letter of introduction."

"Good. Don't wait longer for us and don't come back; we'll catch up to you."

"What if you don't?" Stador said matter-of-factly.

"Then make your mother proud. I'm proud of you already."

I hugged each one of them as Morlock stood away, repacking his shovel.

"Then," Morlock said, waving to us all in farewell.

"See you back here in two days," I said, although I knew how doubtful that was, and, in fact, it didn't work out that way.

In a few moments we were headed in three different directions. I tried to not look after the boys, but it was hard.

There was worse stuff, both earlier and later, but for me that night journey was the most difficult part in the whole business. I kept seeing Naeli in the woods, walking on the Enemy's side of the invisible wall. The Naeli-thing kept trying to signal me, but I was wearing my wax earplugs and looked away whenever I saw her. It bothered me, partly because I figured it must mean that the Enemy knew where I was, and what I was trying to do. But mostly it bothered me the way thoughts of Naeli always bothered me: because I had failed her and Fasra when they needed me most.

Toward dawn the Boneless One gave up; or, anyway, I stopped seeing her. I was tempted to lie down and rest when day came, but I forced myself to go on at a steady clip. When I judged it something later than midafternoon I stopped walking and started digging.

I knew, before I was fairly well along, that the Enemy knew I was there and was worried. Because the Naeli-thing appeared again. Although I was standing on the far side of the invisible wall to do my digging, she tried to approach me. I swung at her with the shovel and she backed away.

I saw her lips move. She seemed to be saying, They are coming; they are coming. Run, Roble, run.

"Drop dead," I replied, and resumed my digging, working as fast as I could. Presently the Naeli-thing disappeared into the woods. I didn't doubt she had been telling the truth, in a way. The Enemy probably was sending Bargainers to stop me. I had to finish before they got there.

I did, but only just. I had exposed and severed an eight-foot-long section of the gigantic worm Morlock had called the anchor of the Boneless One's influence. The two frayed ends struggled desperately to meet and reunify, flopping about in the trench sloppy with muddy worm blood. But they couldn't extend so far. Then they stopped struggling and the wounds at their ends closed like mouths. They seemed to be healing even as I watched.

I saw this with a mixture of disgust and ruefulness. The eight-foot sec tion of the worm I had removed was incontestably dead. But the two ends of the worm were clearly alive. Perhaps longer segments of the worm could live independently. If so, the task Morlock and I had set ourselves was doomed to failure. I was exhausted and depressed: all this work for nothing?

When I raised my head at last I saw them standing there: at least a dozen Bargainers, grinning at me with their needlelike teeth.

I raised the shovel-I'd left my sword with my pack, some distance away in the woods-and backed away. They stepped forward to follow ... and stopped suddenly.

I laughed. "You can't come farther, can you?" I said. "You've hit the wall. You're bound within the Boneless One's sh.e.l.l!" I laughed again. Suddenly the situation seemed hilarious. But of course I was very tired.

A big s.h.a.ggy man, who may have been the leader, stepped back from the wall. He pressed his hand against a medallion hanging around his neck. Then he nodded as if he had received instructions and stepped across the trench, the gap in the Boneless One's anchor-worm.

His face stretched in surprise as he stood there, on the free side of the trench.

"You didn't expect that, did you?" I said to him. "The voice has stopped. It can't run you anymore. You're free, if you want to be."

The s.h.a.ggy man looked at me for a moment, seeming to waver, then glanced back at the other Bargainers, watching him solemnly from the other side of the trench. When he turned back to me, his face was resolute. He couldn't lose face before his followers. Being their leader meant more to him than being free. He leaped forward, las.h.i.+ng out with his truncheon. I did my best to ward him off with the shovel, but I'd been halfway to unconsciousness before these guys showed up. Pretty soon his truncheon connected with my head and finished the job.

I didn't really wake up until we came to the Bargainer village; at least, I didn't completely wake up. I remember hanging like fresh game from a pole carried by two burly Bargainers, and I remember seeing Naeli or the Naelithing again and again, but there are many lightless patches. When I came fully to myself I was on my own feet, being dragged along a narrow lane between high houses with narrow windows through which many eyes, some of them human, were peering.

There were times everyone fell to the ground, as if wors.h.i.+pping, and they dragged me down with them. I was too groggy to understand what was happening or make my escape at these times. Besides, my hands were bound and my legs hobbled.

They took me to a great open area in the center of the village and bound me to a stake. In the middle of the open area was a tree, tall and twisted like an oak. At the foot of the tree was a mouthlike opening.

No one had to explain to me what would happen next. I was past swearing, but if there were, in some fireproof lexicon, any word sulphurous enough to express my anger and dismay at the thought of being fed alive to the Boneless One, I would have used it.

It didn't cheer me at all to see a familiar, crook-shouldered figure slumping at a stake similar to my own on the other side of the clearing. They had got Morlock, too. What was it he'd said? If this doesn't work, we'll try something else.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Let's try something else! I don't think this is working!"

I don't suppose he heard me, if his earplugs were still in place; anyway, he gave no sign of it. I leaned back against my stake and tried to ready my mind for death.

But some part of me wouldn't give up, and when a young silver-haired Bargainer girl of twelve or thirteen years came toward me with a knife in her hand I feigned indifference, putting all my weight on the ropes that bound me to the stake. When she came within range I kicked out with my hobbled feet, knocking her over and sending the knife spinning from her hand.

This proved to be wasted effort, though, as a group of young men immediately surrounded me, slas.h.i.+ng at my bonds. As soon as I was free they dragged me away; I stopped resisting when I realized that it was really away: away from the clearing, the tree, the mouthlike hole in the ground.

Then I recognized them. My nephews, Naeli's boys: Stador, Bann, and Thend.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?" I shouted, uselessly. We all still had wax plugging our ears.

They grinned recklessly and shrugged as they ran.

How mad was I, really? Not at all-as long as we got away.

They turned aside into one of the narrow houses, one with shutters drawn over the slitlike windows. I followed them in, and, turning around, I saw the Bargainer girl behind us.

Suddenly I feared a Bargainer's trap. But the door slammed shut and strong arms held mine prisoner as someone took the wax from my ears.

"Calm down, Roble," Stador said, his voice uncomfortably loud. (He obviously still had wax in his ears.) "We're safe, here, but we don't have much time."

"We sure as h.e.l.l don't; that little Bargainer wench is in here!" I shouted.

Someone lit a lamp. I turned and saw the Bargainer girl holding the light. There was a pained expression on her beautiful dark face.

"Don't you know me, Uncle Roble?" the Bargainer girl said. "I'm Fasra."

I was still gaping, speechless, when the door of the house opened again and Naeli slipped in, slamming it shut immediately. She pulled two waxen plugs from her ears (using only her left hand; her right arm hung strangely limp) and grinned a needle-toothed grin at me.

"Roble, my dear, maybe you'll listen to me at last, eh? I feel like I've been chasing you all around the Whisperer's Wood. Man, if you were as smart as you are tough, you'd really be dangerous."

I stared at her teeth, filed to a carnivore grin, and knew this was no illusion. Because the Boneless One only shows you what you want to see, and I didn't want to see this.

"You Bargained," I said flatly.

Naeli looked surprised and offended. "Of course I did! How else could I save Fasra? What did you think I was going to do?"

"I didn't think you'd Bargain."

Now she was just scornful. "There's no difference between us and them," she said coldly. "It's just what side you happen to be on."

This chilled me, because by "us" I knew she meant the Bargainers and by "them" she meant everyone in Four Castles: Besk, Alev, me. I wanted to argue with her, but I couldn't. Wasn't that why I was leaving? Anyway, there never was a time I could get the better of Naeli in an argument.

"I'm not on either side, anymore, I guess," I said.

"That's why I want you to take Fasra and get out of here," Naeli said hastily. "She's not bound to the Whisperer yet-they wait until after p.u.b.erty to do that-but they'll bind her soon. Take her away with you and the boys."

"Why can't you come?" I asked.

"The Whisperer has put a compulsion on me," she said, touching her chest. I saw, underneath her tunic, the outline of a medallion. "That was why I couldn't free you from the stake myself. I could only speak to you when he wasn't noticing me."

"And he isn't now?"

Naeli shook her head. "He hasn't often noticed me in the past day or so. It's almost as if there were two Whisperers now; the village is at war with itself and the Soundless Sound strikes often and often."

"Can't you-"

"I can't leave the woods while the compulsion binds me," she said, touching the medallion under her tunic again.