This Crooked Way Part 34

"I was defending my life," Morlock said sharply. Then he continued more slowly, "Still, I regret having harmed something you value. I'm willing to recompense you, within reason."

"What could you have that I would want?" the other demanded scornfully. "A dwarvish h.o.a.rd in your peddler's pack? Or merely a map to find one, which you will reluctantly part with, for a nominal fee?"

"I am Morlock Ambrosius. Many a dwarvish h.o.a.rd has been spent to buy the things my hands have made. If you reject my offer, I won't insist. Thanks for the wolfbane." He turned to go.

"Wait!" said the other.

"I'll wait," Morlock said, turning back, "but not for long."

There was a brief pause, and then the figure spoke again, in a light hesitating voice. It was hard to believe the same person was speaking. "I apologize, Morlock Traveller, for my harsh words. Your offer is generous, but ... It raises a difficult question. Will you accept hospitality while we discuss it?"

Morlock stood with his weight on his good leg and thought for a moment. He didn't like or trust this person. But the thought of walking away from an unpaid debt nagged at him. He had been raised with too much respect for property, or so he had often been told. But that was the way he was. He nodded reluctantly.

The robed figure turned and walked up the steep hill. Morlock followed.

They came at last to a cave entrance on the west side of the hill. There was no door, but the entrance had once been sealed by a wall of mortared stone-the edges were ragged, if weathered, and Morlock noticed the stones that had been the wall in a gra.s.s-covered heap nearby. The opening was radiant with firelight.

The fire was in the center of the chamber within; a pot of herbs was boiling over above it. The infusion stank like poison. A ring of flat stones encircled the fire, blackened through long use. There were some other signs the cave had long been occupied: the pallet of rotting straw along the wall, the dust that covered some of the crude bowls and cups. Yet ... the place had the air of a temporary camp, as if the tenant had stopped here briefly some years ago and had never happened to leave.

Morlock glanced at his host, who seemed to be waiting for him to say something. At first Morlock thought the man (it was clearly a man) was standing so that a shadow fell over part of his face. But there was no obstruction between the man and the fire, and the shadow was too dark for any such mundane cause. It was not as if the man's skin were dark, either-the features on the left side, including the eye, were invisible, wholly concealed under the layer of shadow.

"Half of your face appears to be missing," Morlock said then. He was not famous for his tact, but in a situation like this tact was hard to define.

"My face is still there," the other replied, in the light wavering tone Morlock thought of as his second voice. "The darkness simply ... overlays it."

"You want me to remove the darkness," Morlock said flatly.

"Yes ... that is ... most of it. I need some of it to help me hear." In fact, the other seemed uncertain whether he wanted to be rid of the darkness or not; the half of his face which Morlock could see was round and almost expressionless, marked only by confusion.

"I don't understand," Morlock replied finally.

The other nodded. "I realize that. How could you? Perhaps if ... or ... Follow me," he directed abruptly in his first voice, the deeper more commanding one.

Morlock shrugged the pack off his crooked shoulders. He took a water bottle out of it and had several long drinks, rinsing away the dust and dry phlegm of his long run. Then he corked the bottle, repacked it, and joined the other who stood fidgeting at the back of the cave.

The man ducked down his head as Morlock approached, and scurried into a low pa.s.sage that opened up at the back of the cave. More deliberately, but not actually lagging, Morlock followed him.

The pa.s.sage ended at the verge of a pit. Pausing there the other said, "Do you hear anything? Listen!"

After a moment of listening to echoes, Morlock said, "The pit is deep, but there's no breeze. I guess this is the only entrance."

The other hissed in irritation, just long enough to sound faintly beastlike. "Not that! Do you hear nothing else?"

"No."

"Then we must go down," the other said. Somehow he sounded both pleased and disturbed-perhaps faintly jealous.

"Not without light."

The other immediately began to protest. "But a torch will simply muddy the air, which is stale enough. Besides, you will hear better in the dark." He continued for awhile in this vein.

Morlock said nothing. After the other had completed his cycle of protests and repeated a few of them he finally fell silent, expecting a reb.u.t.tal that never came. Morlock waited. Eventually the other went and fetched a lit lamp from his dwelling area.

The light revealed that the pit was about forty feet across. Broad stone steps spiralled downward along the wall of the pit. Sulkily the two-voiced, shadow-faced man handed Morlock the lamp and led him downward.

If nothing else, the lamplight helped Morlock avoid a kind of fungus that sprouted all along the dank stone wall. The fungus grew a cap, like a mushroom or a toadstool, but each cap had as many as seven stalks underneath it, giving them a sinister spiderish look. Each cap, too, had a slash across it like a lipless mouth, and some of these emitted chirping cries of protest as the circle of lamplight pa.s.sed over them.

At the bottom of the pit was a rough stone floor at a fairly steep slope. The lower part of the slope was hidden by a darkness that the light of the lamp did not dispel. In the rough stone of the floor was a smooth hollow in the shape of a man lying p.r.o.ne. The head of the shape was eclipsed by the tidepool of darkness at the lowest part of the pit.

Morlock knelt and traced the unclear outlines of the shape. His maker's instincts told him that it had not been made, but worn into stone by long use, like cart tracks in the cobblestones of a busy street. He wondered how many times someone had lain there to wear away that template form, how many years, how many someones it had taken to make that shape.

Looking up, he caught the eye of the other, who was watching him eagerly. "Do you hear it now?" the other asked.

Morlock rose to his feet and concentrated. "I hear a sort of murmuring. I can make no sense of it."

The other sighed. "I first heard that voice ... well, some years ago, I suppose. Difficult to say how many ... I was travelling south to ... to look for treasure in the mountains," he said, with a sudden blurt of boyish enthusiasm. "I hardly knew what real treasure awaited me," he said more slowly.

Morlock refrained from comment.

"I camped in the cave at the top of the hill-others had been there before me. I explored the pa.s.sage, thinking the dwarves might have made it when they ruled these lands. It was there that I first heard the voice in the darkness. It guided me down the stairs and spoke to me as I sat here. Finally ... after a while ..."

"You put your face in it," Morlock said flatly, since the other seemed to be unable to come to the point.

"I listened to it," the other said defensively. "The pattern"-he gestured at the smooth form at Morlock's feet-"was here even then. Many people have sought wisdom here."

"Where have they gone, I wonder?" Morlock asked dryly.

"Not everyone has the pa.s.sion for ... for true knowledge," the listener said complacently. "It"-he gestured at the pool of shadow-"tells me I have lasted longer than many listeners."

"Impressive," Morlock acknowledged.

"After a while ... I forget how long it was ... it, the voice, it suggested that it leave a part of itself inside me, so that I could hear it better. I resisted for a long time, but ... I finally agreed to let it ... do it. There was just a little darkness at first; you hardly noticed it. And I did hear the voice better ... much more clearly. I didn't realize the darkness would spread...."

Morlock waited for him to continue, but he seemed to be finished.

"What does the darkness tell you?" Morlock asked.

The listener fidgeted uneasily. "It told me you were coming," he said after a lengthy silence. "But usually it tells me ... secrets. Ways of looking at ... at things."

"Hm." Morlock wondered if the listener was hiding his hard-won secrets or hiding, even from himself, that they didn't exist.

"After all," the listener said in a rush of enthusiasm, "what you see is simply a vein or artery in a vast network of darkness that stretches far beyond the mountains and down into the heart of the earth. It is older than time and knows more."

Morlock doubted all this, although he didn't say so. He was beginning to have more definite, more local ideas about this darkness. He asked, "Why do you think the darkness tells you its secrets?"

The listener looked pleased but confused, as if the question had never occurred to him before. "Well ... I'm not sure ... Perhaps it was lonely."

The ringing naivete of this suggestion struck Morlock unpleasantly. He glanced at the mouth of darkness open in the lowest corner of the room. Lonely? Hungry was nearer the mark, he guessed.

"I can't breathe here," Morlock said then, and turned away to walk up the winding stairs. After a moment's hesitation the listener followed him upward.

When they had returned to the listener's squalid living quarters, Morlock put down the lamp and said, "I want to examine the darkness on your face. Sit down."

The listener obeyed him, a look of alarm on his visible features. Tentatively, Morlock put the fingers of his right hand into the darkness on the listener's face. The darkness formed no barrier; it was less substantial than fog. Almost immediately Morlock's fingers touched the surface of the listener's cheek. There were long gouges in the otherwise unlined skin of the listener's face.

"You have clawed at the darkness," Morlock observed.

The listener nodded, a little guiltily. "I was ... frustrated. Frightened. I didn't think it would spread. I didn't know what would happen if it would spread further ... I still don't. Did I hurt myself?"

The wounds felt swollen and hot to Morlock's touch. "Can't you tell?" he asked.

The listener shrugged. "It is ... a little numb, under the darkness. I can't move that side of my face very well, either."

"Can you see from your left eye?"

"Sometimes," the listener replied truculently, and Morlock knew he was lying.

Morlock withdrew his hand and looked at his fingertips. No darkness adhered to them; he would have been surprised if it had. He rubbed his two sets of fingertips against each other meditatively, checking for any numbness. There was none. There had been almost no sensation at all as his fingers had entered the darkness, only a kind of feeling that was hard to define, because it was not felt by the fingers at all. Few could define that feeling or recognize what it implied, but Morlock was one of them.

"Do you know what tal is?" he asked.

"No," the listener replied.

Morlock nodded, unsurprised. "It is a medium," he explained, "nonphysical in nature, but capable of physical effects. It is the means by which consciousness works its will through the body. All conscious beings possess tal; some, like elementals, have no physical bodies at all, only tal-schemata which respond to the various elements."

"Ah," said the listener vaguely, clearly considering the point irrelevant.

"The darkness on your face is tal," Morlock explained. "But it is not your own, at least not originally. It is a sort of colony from an alien awareness, and it serves the ends of that awareness."

"How?" the listener demanded. His visible features displayed both alarm and skepticism.

Morlock had some ideas on that subject, but he did not intend to discuss them. Anything he told the listener he would also tell the darkness. "That is not germane. If you want the darkness removed from your face, I will undertake to do it."

The listener looked both hopeful and anxious. "Would you ... If you could leave part of it? Say, under the ear, or . . . or even on the temple-"

"I am not a barber," Morlock interrupted sharply. "Nor do I undertake half-works or not-quite-accomplishments. I do a thing or I don't. Choose."

The choice was clearly far from easy. The struggle on the listener's visible features lasted for some time. But finally he muttered in the hesitant "second" voice, "Yes. Remove it."

Morlock did not hesitate. He clasped his hands and summoned the rapture of vision, forcing his consciousness from his body and into the tal-world.

The listener burst into a quiet green-gold fire. Morlock himself became a monochrome torrent of black-and-white flames. The stone and dirt about them, having no tal, sank away almost to invisibility in Morlock's vision. But he felt the warm many-centered glow from a nest of mice in the wall of the cave, and through the stones he caught the brief flash of a pa.s.sing night-bird, like the streak of a meteor in the lifeless sky.

The darkness lay across the green flickering fire of the listener's face. Morlock reached out with the black-and-white flames of his hands and laid hold of it.

In fact, Morlock did not move. But he commanded his tal-self to move, without his body (which it normally overlaid). To his awareness, it was as if he had laid his hands on the darkness.

And the darkness was alien. He knew that as soon as he came into contact with it. And it knew him. Not by name, perhaps (though it did not say what it knew, it can be difficult to tell what such darknesses may know). But it knew his kind. It had been lured here and trapped by a master maker of the dwarvish race, after the darkness had attacked and devoured several members of the maker's family. This all happened millennia before Morlock was born.

The dwarvish maker, after his great victory over the darkness, became its next victim. He had been the first of many who had lain on the stone and put his face in the darkness: listening there for the voices of his lost beloved ones. He had lain there until his life was drained away. Morlock heard his voice, among many others, whispering in the dark. But the only secret he learned was the untellable sorrow of their eternal agony.

This he learned as the darkness confronted him through the medium of Morlock's vision. Then Morlock seized hold of the darkness that had implanted itself in the listener's face and tried to tear it loose.

The listener screamed. Morlock heard it dimly through his ears. He heard it, more directly and more terribly, through his unmasked awareness. The green fire that was the listener's talic self writhed like a serpent and seemed to grow dim, as if he were dying.

After a moment's hesitation, Morlock redoubled his efforts. But the resistance was too great: he saw that the sessile darkness had deep barbed roots in the light of the listener's being. As he strained, his inner vision perceived that many of the green flames of the listener's tal had dark centers, reminding him of the myriad staring eyes in a peac.o.c.k's tail.

He let his grip relax, and the nauseating rapport with the darkness was broken. The green flames of the listener's being leapt up again. It seemed to Morlock, though, that they were not as bright as they had been before.

He reimposed his talic self upon his body, and his awareness inhabited his flesh again. He came out of the trance like a swimmer surfacing after a dive through deep water. His face was clammy with sweat, and his clenched hands were shaking.

The listener lay unconscious on the floor of the cave, his visible features twisted in convulsive agony. The darkness seemed to cover more of his face than it had. Morlock made sure he was still breathing (and likely to go on doing so). Then he carried the listener to his pallet and put him to bed.

Morlock didn't like the feeling in the cave, so he laid his bedroll outside on the hill. From the time that he withdrew from the vision until he fell asleep, and afterward, his thoughts were unrelievedly dark.

It was not just that he had failed. He had actually made matters worse. And he had no idea what he should do next.

The next day dawned, chill and bloodless: the new sun was hidden by high clouds. Morlock rose, stretched his sore muscles, and took a meditative walk around the listener's hill, which was planted with an alarming variety of poisonous herbs.

Returning finally to the cave entrance, he found the listener standing there, smiling with the right side of his face. "So," he said in the commanding voice with which he had first addressed Morlock, "how do you like my garden?"

"It seems to run to poisons."

The listener, stung, replied hotly, "It is all 'poisons' as you call them. But, to those-who-know, a handful of the right 'poisons' can bring life out of death. You found my wolfbane useful enough last night, didn't you?"

Morlock did not reply. It occurred to him again that the listener's two voices were not merely manners of speech, but two almost totally different personalities. The matter had an obvious explanation: one voice expressed the listener's true personality; one voice spoke for the invading shadow. He wondered if the explanation was true.

"Would you care for some breakfast?" the listener asked diffidently, in his second voice.

"Yes, indeed," Morlock replied. "Thank you." He was suddenly quite hungry.

He was less hungry when he saw that "breakfast" was a squirming bowlful of seven-legged mushrooms from the deeper cave. The listener took a wriggling mushroom from the bowl and, ignoring its chirp of protest, spitted it on a pointed stick and held it in the fire until it stopped moving or screaming. Then he offered it to Morlock.

"No, thank you," Morlock said. "Some water perhaps."

The listener shrugged indifferently and tossed the blackened mushroom into the flames. He handed Morlock a warm drinking jar and drew a live mushroom from the bowl. He pulled its writhing stalks off and ate them one by one as its chirps of pain subsided into silence.

The water in the jar was dark; an oily substance rode the surface and he could see dark leaves drifting in the fluid below. There was a bitter, familiar reek: the nightleaf plant, he thought-used by the Anhikh mind-sculptors to prepare their victims.

"I asked you for water," he said to the listener, who paused in his mushroom dismembering. "This appears to be an infusion of nightleaf."

"The water from the well is poisonous," the listener explained, in his overly ingenuous second voice. "The darkness told me how to purify it with herbs."

"Why don't you seek out another source?" Morlock asked.

"There is none on the hill."

Morlock saw the way things were drifting, but (to see what reaction he would get) asked, "Why not look further? There must be some nearby."