This Crooked Way Part 14

"Is that medallion the source of the compulsion?" I asked.

"Yes."

I approached her and looked at the cord securing the medallion around her neck. There seemed to be nothing unusual about it.

"Why don't you take it off?" I asked.

"I can't; that's part of the compulsion."

"Why don't you ask someone to take it off you?"

"I can't; that's part of the compulsion."

"If I take it off you, will you or I or anyone here be harmed?"

"No."

I reached out and took the cord with each hand and snapped it. The medallion dropped to the ground through Naeli's tunic. She turned and kissed me. I couldn't repress a shudder (I thought I could feel the razor teeth through her lips), but she didn't seem to notice, or perhaps didn't care.

"Now we can go together," she said, fierce and happy-strangely like the Naeli I once knew.

Naeli's boys chimed in, and Fasra, too. Stador explained how Naeli had met them in the woods and brought them to rescue me from the stake, which the compulsion prevented her from doing herself.

"They believed I was really me, anyway," Naeli said wryly.

I shrugged. "The Boneless One sent false images of you to me every night I rode through the lawless hours. I'd be long dead if I trusted everything I saw in the woods."

Naeli nodded slowly. "It's hard to say what the Whisperer knows ... but he may have known I was thinking of you. I've been trying to figure out a way to get Fasra away from the Bargainers almost since we came here."

"So what's the plan now, or are we improvising?"

"A little of both," Naeli admitted, with her terrifying smile. "We'll be safe here from the Others; all of the fighting between Bargainers has been in the street. And the Soundless Sound can't reach us here, either. We'll wait until they send the stranger down to the Whisperer, and then we can escape while they're occupied."

"Tough luck on the stranger," I observed.

Naeli shrugged. She must have seen many people go that route, perhaps some she had known herself.

For me it was different. We always tried to bring the stray out, Alev and 1. And only then (it wasn't my brightest day) did I realize who "the stranger" was. It was my stray, Morlock. Somehow the idea of Morlock and the idea of Alev were bound up together. I thought of Alev, his legs broken in the trap; I thought of Morlock falling down that mouthlike hole.

"Naeli," I said slowly. "Alev is dead."

"Who is Alev?" said this stranger who was my sister.

I shook my head. "Never mind. I have to bring the stray out, if I can. You guys can get away in the disturbance. Boys, wait for me a day at the meeting place we set; if I don't come, go on as planned." I plugged my ears, shutting out their protestations and good-byes, and ran out of the house, leaving the door open behind me.

Morlock's stake was empty and there was a crowd of people standing around the base of the crooked tree. It was possible I was already too late. I scooped up the knife I had kicked out of Fasra's hand and ran across the clearing. I plunged into the crowd, slas.h.i.+ng with the knife in one hand and striking out randomly with my other fist.

I was like a lit candle applied to wood shavings; soon the Bargainers were all fighting with each other desperately. Some used only their right hand; their left arm swung useless at their sides. Others used only their left hand; their right arms seemed to be disabled. The left-handed people struck only the righthanded people and vice versa. I was careful to use both hands, baffling the Bargainers, who turned from me to attack the enemies they knew: each other.

I made it all the way to the center of the crowd, where Morlock, his lower body out of sight, was scrabbling desperately at the lip of the mouthlike hole, trying to pull himself out. His mouth was gagged and each of his wrists was looped with a twisted cord, as if they had been bound together.

I left the knife in a nearby Bargainer and bent down to grab with both hands at one of Morlock's arms.

Morlock's mouth was moving; it looked as if he was shouting some sort of warning. But the plugs in my ears kept me from hearing him, and the gag in his mouth kept me from reading his lips.

The ground crumbled under my feet. We fell with several Bargainers into the gaping earth.

My death grip on Morlock's arm saved me. When we had fallen several feet we jerked to a halt. Looking up through the shadows and the clots of dirt falling from the ragged edge of the hole, I saw Morlock had caught hold of a tree root. He didn't manage to hang on to it, but it slowed us down. He caught the next one and held it, but it bent ominously under our joint weight. There was another root protruding from the hole wall, not so far off, and I managed to pull myself onto it.

Both of us were so out of breath that talking would have been out of the question, even if we didn't have our ears plugged. While regaining my wind, I looked around at the questionable situation in which we found ourselves.

We were about midway down the gullet of earth, between the hole in the surface (still mouthlike, but more of a spreading grin now) and the bellylike chamber at the bottom. There was light coming from both directions-from the sky above and from a purplish luminescence emitted by a moss that grew thickly on the curving walls of the chamber below. Immediately under us was a pile of human bones, naked and fleshless with the fluted marks of chewing all over them.

Scattered around the floor were various Bargainers, flopping around like birds caught in a net. One or two were motionless, perhaps impaled on the sharp broken bones that were scattered over the floor of the chamber.

And there was something else. It was hard to tell exactly what it was. It looked like two bladders of unequal size, half filled with some sort of fluid, connected to each other by a thickish cord. One of the bladders was about as long as a man's arm; the other was less than half that long, and not as broad. There seemed to be some sort of hair or fur on part of the smaller bladder.

It was alive. It moved about the bone-paved floor by rolling, and as it rolled I could see it had some appendages-not arms and legs, really, but just floppy little things where arms and legs might be, or might once have been. I couldn't tell what s.e.x it was, or if it had one, but I began to realize that some of the features on the less hairy side of the smaller bladder const.i.tuted a face. There was a slack half-open mouth, crusted with filth from the floor; above it a floppy boneless nose, two ear-flaps protruding from the surface of the bladder, and two dark glaring eyes. And across it all was a scar or seam, a dark purplish mark dividing the face almost in half. It pa.s.sed between the eyes, to the left of the nose, and over the mouth, apparently sealing the lips together at the mouth where it crossed them, so it was almost as if the thing had two mouths.

The Boneless One (I didn't doubt that's what I was looking at) rolled over to one of the fallen Bargainers, a man who was struggling to regain his feet. Its two mouths pressed against his arm, as if in a kiss. The life went out of him in a moment and he fell dead to the ground.

After a while it rolled away, or started to, then paused. The appendages on one side of the body flapped uselessly. It was almost as if they were trying to hit the other side of the Boneless One's body. Finally the Boneless One rolled away toward another fallen Bargainer, a woman who was twitching limply, apparently unable to get up.

This time it looked as if one side of the Boneless One's face was trying to keep the other side from making contact with the victim. Again the useless appendages struggled, each set las.h.i.+ng out at the opposite side of the shapeless body. When the woman screamed, seeing the monster beside her, and began to edge away across the bone-strewn floor, the Boneless One gave up its pointless struggle against itself and rolled quickly over, locking its lips on the woman's left leg. She stopped moving instantly; her face became calm; her eyes closed. Her life was gone, her tal consumed. The Enemy moved on toward the next body.

It was weird, but I thought I knew what was happening when the Boneless One fought itself. I figured that we had done it, Morlock and I. If he had cut the anchor-worm as I did, it must have divided the Boneless One's influence into two unequal halves. In doing so, we had somehow divided the Boneless One itself, as if there was no difference between the Boneless One and the s.p.a.ce where its influence ran. So now there were two Boneless Ones sharing the same body, and obviously each resented the other. I sort of hoped they would figure out some way to kill each other, but I didn't figure it would happen within the next few minutes.

Maybe, I thought, we should just drop down into the pit, seize some sharp broken bones for weapons, and try to poke the thing to death. It seemed like someone would have tried that, during the centuries the Boneless One had been eating human lives in this pit. But maybe they fell so far and hit so hard that they were stunned and the Boneless One got them before they could recover.

Then again, maybe that skin wouldn't be so easy to poke through. It could roll over the carpet of shattered bones without apparently taking any harm at all, not even a scratch. That brownish, pinkish, grayish surface was probably harder than leather. It would take more than a rotten bone to chew a hole init...

Chew. I looked again at the bones. They had been gnawed; the toothmarks were clearly visible, even in the wretched purplish light. By what? If the Boneless One was truly boneless, it wouldn't have teeth. Besides, why should it gnaw flesh if it lived on the tal that sustained life itself?

Rats. There must be rats down there. Maybe a lot of rats. The rats would come in and clean up the meat after the Boneless One had drained the life. So why hadn't they appeared yet?

The Boneless One finished a third victim and paused, in midcareer toward a fourth. Its right pair of leathery lips wrinkled, as if it were saying something. The left pair of lips twisted in response, and my nerves were struck with the muted sound of the Silent Word. Then the left pair of lips seemed to say something, and the right pair of lips responded with the Silent Word.

Was there something happening up above-some battle between the Bargainers controlled by the two warring segments of the Boneless One?

Maybe. Or maybe each side had called out to a cleanup crew of rats, and the other side had knocked them out. Because they were each afraid. Afraid of rats under the other's control ... or under no control.

Rats! Morlock could summon the rats, if he only had his magic pipe with him. Then I realized he probably did: when I had last seen it he had been tucking it into his sleeve.

I looked toward Morlock, trying to catch his eye. He was hanging on to a root with his left hand, stripping the gag away from his mouth with his right hand. He stared bemusedly at the Boneless One as it drained the life from a fourth victim. I shouted, but he didn't hear me. I grabbed a clump of earth from the side of the pit and tossed it at him. Then he turned toward me, his eyebrows raised as if in inquiry.

"Rats!" I shouted. But either he didn't hear me (or couldn't read my lips) or he didn't see what I was driving at. Desperately, I tapped my left arm with my right hand, and then mimed playing a flute. All this activity caused my grip on the root to loosen and I almost fell. But by the time I had regained my perch Morlock was laughing (not at my acrobatics, I hope) and drawing the pipe from his sleeve-pocket.

He put the pipe in his mouth and began to play. I couldn't hear it, exactly, but somehow the feel of it penetrated the wax earplugs, almost like the Silent Word. It was a squeaky, spiky, chittering tune; it went on and on, never repeating but somehow always the same.

The rats began to appear, rising like a dark tide from the ground. The Boneless One seemed to try to halt them with the Silent Word, but its magic was masked by the endless chittering song from Morlock's pipe.

The Boneless One tried to eat the lives of the rats as they approached. Many died, but there were always more behind. The dark tide rose over the swollen shapeless form of the Boneless One and covered it.

The mindless whisper I always heard within me rose to an almost audible shriek and fell silent at last. The rats moved on to the other bodies scattered around the floor, leaving behind a b.l.o.o.d.y stain on the bone carpet and nothing else. The Boneless One was dead.

Morlock's pipe stuttered and shrieked. The living rats fled in terror. Morlock pocketed the pipe and tentatively unplugged one ear.

Both of my ears were already clear. The air was free of Silent Words; my mind was free of demonic whispers.

"Good idea about the rats," Morlock said laconically.

"I never liked rats before," I said, "but now I do. When I settle down, I'm going to keep tame ones, like birds."

Morlock grunted and climbed back up onto the root. "Up or down?" he asked.

I looked down at the bone-carpeted bellylike chamber, scattered with half-eaten motionless Bargainers. I looked upward to the light.

"Up," I said, and we went up.

We hadn't been at it long before Naeli's voice fell down to us from the light, followed by a rope. I swarmed up it and Morlock followed.

Naeli had tied it to the twisted tree standing above the mouthlike hole. The boys and Fasra were standing uneasily, with knives and clubs in their hands, at the edge of the hole. Further off, a ragged halo of Bargainers stood, glaring at us as we emerged from the pit.

"Let's get going," Naeli said to me crisply. "Some of these people don't seem to like what we're doing."

"I thought they'd scatter as soon as the Boneless One was dead," I muttered.

"Some did. But most of these guys were Bargainers because they wanted to be, and they suspect you of killing their G.o.d."

"That was Morlock," I said, gesturing at the bedraggled, crooked figure emerging from the hole.

"Roble's idea. Call it a mutual effort," he said. His gray gaze crossed Naeli's dark one; it was like swords clas.h.i.+ng.

"Man, were you a lot of trouble," Naeli said. "I thought you were going to get us all killed. Morlock? I'm Naeli. This is Fasra. I guess you know my boys. Let's get out of here."

Morlock shook his head. "You go on," he said. "I have to find Tyrfing."

"A friend of yours?" demanded Naeli.

"My sword."

"Oh, that thing. The Whisperer had us bury it outside of town. I'll show you where it is." She turned and charged straight toward the crowd. We followed in a wedge behind. The Bargainers split up and ran as we approached, and soon we were out of town. We heard the Bargainers, although we didn't see them, gathering nearby in the woods as we dug down to recover Morlock's sword. So as soon as we had it we started moving westward as fast as our feet could take us.

That was days ago. We discussed going back to Four Castles, but rejected the idea. Naeli, with her filed teeth, would be an outcast there. And the thought of living among Coranians, who had fed on human lives to extend their own, was repugnant to me. Perhaps one of the three remaining Barons would pick up where the Boneless One had left off; perhaps they had already been stomped to bits by someone following Morlock's lead. Maybe Liskin would be the new power in Four Castles; he was already pretty boneless. It didn't matter. Four Castles was already far off and a little unreal to me, like somewhere you've read about in a book. It wasn't my place anymore. I don't have a place, at the moment; these days I have people instead.

Each day we move a little further west than I've ever been, camping at sunset. It's night, as I write this, but no one is sleeping. The boys and Fasra are sitting by the fire, swapping stories with each other and some jar from Morlock's backpack that thinks it's an old lady. Morlock is peering about inside Naeli's mouth; he says he can carve supplements for Naeli's teeth, so that she will have a slightly less wolflike smile.

I'm sitting here writing, not saying much-speaking aloud maybe one word for every thousand I scribble down. In a way, I think I miss the wordless whispering I have always heard in my head. It helped show me what I was by being what I was not: I was the enemy of the Enemy. But not now: in the last few days, I helped kill a Baron, the Enemy that lived in the woods, and (with them) my whole way of life. But here I am, somehow still alive. I don't feel like speaking much until I figure out who I am, now that the Enemy is dead.

This much I know. I will not live three hundred years. But, however long I live, I will wear no one else's uniform. I will swear loyalty to one person at a time. However long I live, my life will belong to me, and to those I know and care about. Except for that rule of love, all my hours are lawless now.

It's late; we had all better get some sleep. New lands, and new lives, tomorrow.

FAS RA' S STORY.

Ix PAYMENT.

IN.

FULL.

WHO IS THE THIRD WHO WALKS ALWAYS BESIDE YOU? WHEN I COUNT, THERE ARE ONLY YOU AND I TOGETHER BUT WHEN I LOOK AHEAD UP THE WHITE ROAD THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER ONE WALKING BESIDE YOU GLIDING WRAPT IN A BROWN MANTLE, HOODED I DO NOT KNOW WHETHER A MAN OR A WOMAN -BUT WHO IS THAT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU?.

-ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND.

he truth is my blood and breath, master: I cannot lie. I could sell either the youth or the maiden for six fingers of silver in Menebacikhukh, that benighted city of the Anhikh Komos where I was born. I will give you three silver fingers for either of them, seven for both."

We were crossing the marketplace in Sarkunden when the slave-trader put a long corpselike hand on one of Morlock Ambrosius's slightly uneven shoulders and made his pitch. Before that day I'd never so much as seen the walls of a city this big. From what I'd seen inside those walls, I didn't think I was going to like big cities much, even before the slaver spoke to Morlock. As the maiden under discussion, I waited for Morlock's response with real interest.

Morlock shot a cold gray glance at the Anhikh slave-trader and pointed out, "Buying or selling human beings has been illegal in the Ontilian Empire for more than two hundred years."

"The contract would be unofficial, of course. I would trust to the honor I see in your face, and perhaps, for form's sake, a guarantee placed in the hands of some mutually reliable person." He let his eyes linger on me, stroking his lips in an oddly salacious gesture.

"Is he a slaver or a con man, Thend?" Morlock asked my brother. "What do you say, Fasra?" he added, glancing at me.

"Whatever's creepier," I said flatly.

"I might go as high as eight fingers of silver," the Anhikh continued, "in spite of the unfas.h.i.+onably dark color of their skin and their lack of manners. The latter would soon be mended, yes indeed it would. What do you say, master? What is your response, your (shall we say) wholly unofficial response?"

"I am not your master," was the first part of Morlock's unofficial response. The second part left the slave-dealer on all fours, gasping with pain.

"Keeps," Thend muttered to Morlock. Following his glance, I saw a couple of armored figures approaching.

Morlock nodded and paused his unofficial responses while the soldiers made their way through the market crowd. They wore gear exactly like the city guards who stood at the gates, except they had the fist insignia on their s.h.i.+elds: Keepers of the Peace.

"No fighting in the Market," the senior Keep said, as he came up. "You'll have to come along."