This Crooked Way Part 7

"Aren't you at least surprised I got here so fast?"

Morlock grunted skeptically. "Who says you're here?" he said, and turned.

Merlin's fetch was about a pace behind him.

The fetch is a mind's talic halo. Most people's fetches look like animals or gnomes or specters of some sort, and few ever see them except in dreams or the visionary state. Merlin's was more solid and useful; he had taught it to wear a cloak of visible light that resembled himself, and his conscious mind could dispatch it on errands.

"Did you take my horse?" Morlock asked Merlin's fetch.

Merlin's face twisted with annoyance. "Yes, and a lot of good it did me, too. I was hoping I could adapt its immortality to poor Nimue's case. But it died after only a few experiments, and now she's dead anyway. Oh well. Better luck next wife, I say."

"Eh."

"G.o.d Avenger, what a bore you are, Morlock! How am I supposed to make conversation with someone who just grunts at my witty remarks and wise sayings?"

Morlock shrugged indifferently. He was fairly sure Merlin was lying to him about something. Encouraging further witty remarks and wise sayings, if that's what they were, didn't seem like a good way of getting at the truth. In fact ...

There were a limited number of ways by which a seer could project an effective fetch very far from his body. The best way involved an anchor that had been put in talic stranj with the seer's focus of power. Breaking the stone would shatter the talic link and disperse the fetch.

Morlock drew Tyrfing and summoned the lowest level of vision.

It was what Merlin had been waiting for. The fetch bristled suddenly with talic force, striking at Morlock's awareness through his vision. Morlock deflected the lightning-like attack with Tyrfing and watched for lines of talic emanation from Merlin's suddenly blazing fetch.

Aha. There.

Morlock dismissed his vision and walked toward an unremarkable bluegray stone at the edge of the woods.

"Oh, come now," Merlin's voice sounded irritably behind him. "That's no way to win a quarrel! If you were any kind of-"

Morlock swung Tyrfing once, shattering the stone. Merlin's voice fell silent, and when Morlock turned around the fetch had disappeared.

In all likelihood, Merlin had other anchors hidden nearby. But probably he would wait to use them. Morlock was free from Merlin's peevish ranting, if not from his observation, for a time.

Morlock went into the house and began to sort through his dead mother's things. There was surprisingly little there: the place was almost like the house-sized mausoleums he had seen in Anhi. The Anhikhs often surrounded a dead body with a replica of the place where it had lived, giving its ghost the illusion of being home, so that it would not wander. Morlock found some books and marked-up sheets of paper, a few clothes, some household implements, cold-lamps for reading after dark, some firewood and firemakers beside the narrow hearth. But he found few clothes and no food or drink at all. It was incomplete, unreal.

One of the sheets of paper was a letter Nimue had written to herself.

h.e.l.lo- I am you. (Check your handwriting against mine and see if this isn't so.) You are feeling confused right now and you don't remember much. Don't won y about that. Your memories will return, or at least some of them will.

Your name is Nimue Viviana. You live in this house. If you try to go far from it, someone will try to stop you. Sometimes he will call himself Merlin, sometimes other things. Whatever he says, don't believe him. He thinks he knows what is best for you, which means you cannot trust him about anything. But he can keep you from leaving this place and he will. There is a troll under the bridge and monsters in the water of the lake, and probably other guards besides.

The confusion you are feeling are the effects of the antideath spell that Merlin has put on you. You must find a way to break it somehow. The more you remember about Merlin the more impossible this will seem but, trust me, you know a lot of magic yourself. You just have to remember it. Don't be discouraged.

Good luck. I'll be rooting for you!

With sincere self-regard, NIMUE VIVIANA.

Morlock was sitting by the window, rereading this odd letter for the second time, when a shadow fell on the page. He looked up to see his mother standing over him, as filthy as if she had just clawed her way out of the grave, which she evidently had. Her face was twisted with anger, and in her unsteady hands she held the shovel he had buried her with. She lifted the shovel and struck him with it.

The blow fell without much weight; he was more stunned by the event itself. When she began to wrestle the shovel aloft to hit him again, he stood up and took it from her.

"Who are you!" she shouted-an accusation of strangerhood more than a question. "Why are you here, going through my things!" She paused and put a filthy hand to her filthy forehead. "Who am I?" she asked, and it was a real question.

He handed her the letter and stood aside to let her sit by the window.

She read the letter through. "Get me something to write with, won't you, dear?" she said presently.

He already had a wax tablet and stylus in his hand, and he handed them to her. She scratched away for a while on the tablet, then looked at the letter, shrewdly comparing the scripts. "Looks the same," she said to Morlock, finally. "But maybe he wrote the letter. He's a pretty good forger, unless I'm thinking about someone else."

Guessing she meant Merlin, Morlock said, "He'd have told you to trust him."

"Unless he wanted to manipulate me by telling me something, as himself, that he really wanted me to disbelieve. I seem to remember now that he likes these little tricks and disguises and things."

"Yes, but-" Morlock began, and spread his hands.

"-but," she concluded for him, "he can never stand for these little theatrical games to go on for very long. Like any unprofessional actor, his favorite part of any performance is taking his bows. 'Oh, Merlin, how clever you are; you've fooled me again.' a.s.shole."

"Yes."

"I can see you know him well. Even if you don't say much, and you slouch. Stand straight, young man."

"I'm as straight as I'll ever be," Morlock replied sharply.

She glanced at him with a watery gray eye. "Oh? Are you one of then? The Ambrosii?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

Reluctantly, he said, "Morlock."

She took it without flinching. "Well. We meet at last, eh? Not one for sentimental reunions, are you?"

"No."

"Good. I let Merlin think I was crazy about you because it seemed to irritate him, but it would be awkward to a.s.sume a doting-mother-with-dutifulson act this late in our respective lives, wouldn't it? It was different with my daughters. I actually knew them. Are they still ... ?"

"They were fine when I last saw them, early in winter."

"Who's in charge? Has Hope taken over?"

"Ambrosia is usually in charge."

"Still? Must be getting a little elderly, though. Thought Hope would show a little more backbone by now. Anyone would get tired of being pushed around by Ambrosia for-"

"I am very fond of Ambrosia," he interrupted her.

"Oh, who isn't? She sees to that. Never mind. I love them both better than you ever will, young man."

"Mother," he said (the word coming rather awkwardly to his lips), "I am over four hundred years old."

"What!" she shouted, then sat there bemused for a while, her lips twitching as if she were talking to herself, but no words could be heard.

"I suppose you must be," she said aloud at last. "Yes, it is starting to come back to me, I guess. I really thought I had beaten him, this timethought I'd broken his antideath spell and I really was going to go west. Then this young fellow came to the door and I asked him to bury me-oh, that was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"You were looking for your horse. Did you ever find it?"

"Merlin took him."

"Oh, I'm so sorry. You should see what he does with animals in his workshops; says it's all part of his craft of lifemaking. Cruelty, I call it. Was it a nice horse?" she asked wistfully.

"Not very, but we've been through a lot together."

"That's what you said last time-have we had this conversation before?"

"Part of it."

"You must pardon me, young man; I'm almost completely crazy. What was your name again?"

"Is that part of the antideath spell?"

"Is what? The craziness? Yes, exactly. I'm not all here, in any sense of the words. Merlin cut my selfhood in three parts and hid them from each other."

"Oh?"

"Don't believe me?" She shrugged and reached up both hands to the back of her head. She undid something there, and then abruptly turned her head inside out. There was no skull or apparently any sort of bone or organ inside the empty skin, at least as far as he could see down the fleshy tunnel of her throat. The inner surface of her skin did display a large number of maggots, however.

He was deeply horrified, but he tried not to show it. "No bones, eh?" he remarked.

"No nothing: just my sh.e.l.l," her voice replied, somewhat m.u.f.fled.

"I suppose some spell transmitting magnified talic impulses provides the equivalent of skeletal support and organic functions?"

"I guess so," she said, refolding her head so that her face reappeared. "He wouldn't tell me about it-I suppose he thought I'd try to counter-inscribe the spell somehow. Which I have, a few times, but nothing seems to work."

"Hm. Er-"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, don't grunt at me. What is it?"

"You seem to have-there's an infestation of. . . "

"The maggots, you mean? Well, well, quite the observant one, aren't we? Yes, young fellow, one of the hazards of perpetually dying is the occasional infestation, as you so sweetly put it, of maggots."

"If you rinse yourself out with salt water, that may clear them away."

"If it were that easy-Salt water, you say?"

"Yes."

"Sting, won't it?"

"It won't kill you."

"Is that supposed to be funny? Oh, never mind; I guess it is, sort of."

"Where's the rest of you?"

"Which one of us is crazy, anyway? Haven't you been listening? I don't know. I'm just the sh.e.l.l of myself. There are three of me now: my sh.e.l.l, my impulse-cloud, and my core self. If there is a way for me to know where they are, I don't know it. I don't know half of what I used to know, and what I do know I often can't remember."

"But he couldn't have done this unless ..." Morlock broke off.

But she had heard. "Unless I consented?" she asked. "Ah, but I did consent. Of course I did. Young man-what's your name?"

"Morlock."

"Morlock. That was my son's name. I haven't seen him since the day he was born, and yet sometimes I feel that I loved him the most of all my children. When-"

"Enough of that. Merlin's not here."

"Yes, perhaps you're right. Anyway, have you ever been in imminent danger of death?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Good. Excellent. Well: wouldn't you have done anything, absolutely anything in that moment to go on living?"

"No."

"What? You're lying."

"No."

"I can take your word on that, can I, Epimenides? Well, anyway, I was on the point of death, and he talked nae into it. I was afraid, and he ... he said he could cure death and even the common cold if he had enough time-this was just a temporary measure. A temporary measure. Do you know how long it's been since then?"

"If he built the house for this purpose: between one hundred fifty and two hundred years."

Nimue looked at him with somber gray eyes and said in a subdued voice, "That's about right. Say, you sounded a bit like him, just then. You're not him in disguise, are you? What's your name?"

"Morlock."

"Ha. That's a laugh. My son's name is Morlock."

"You mentioned that."

"I tend to repeat myself at times. You'll have to forgive me, young man, but I'm almost completely crazy."

"Because of the antideath spell."