Part 21 (2/2)
”Then my dreams are true?” Thend asked in horror.
”Dreams are dreams,” Morlock said firmly. ”They come from many sources: things you have seen or done or heard of, sense impressions, fears, and hopes. Dreams are neither false nor true, but they may contain truths and yours contains one that cannot have come from your own knowledge.”
”What? Where did it come from?” Thend asked wildly.
”It may be the shadow of a future event. I hope not, though.”
”How do I get rid of it? I can't stand these dreams anymore, Morlock. Every time I look at Naeli I want to vomit.”
”The Sight? You can't get rid of it. I'll teach you about it, though. The more your awareness is trained in the use of the Sight, the less it will trouble you.”
Thend sighed. ”Okay. Should we start now, or just go back to the group?”
”We should look at that, first,” Morlock said, pointing.
Thend had been a.s.suming that Morlock pulled him away from the group just to talk to him. Now he glanced ahead and saw what Morlock had seen, but he didn't understand it.
They were walking down from the crest of the ridge into a little rift in the mountain's side, too narrow to be called a valley. The rift was carpeted with the tall green-gold gra.s.s that looked soft as cotton but would slash bare feet and legs like finely honed razors. At the bottom of the rift was a stand of trees, a mix of dark-needled pines and fluttering aspens. (They were too high in the mountains for anything Thend considered a proper tree; there were no elms or oaks or stoneleaf majors.) Two of the pine trees had been stripped, except for a couple of branches each-it was hard to see them, as they stood behind a curtain of aspen leaves. But as he gazed, Thend became surer: those weren't branches; there was something hanging suspended between the stripped pines.
”What is it?” he asked Morlock.
”A Khroi, I think,” the crooked man replied.
They went on down among the trees and long before they stood in front of the stripped-bare pine trunks, Thend saw that Morlock was right.
The buglike Khroi's flexible arms were bound to its chest and its three legs were wound over and over with the same silken substance. It hung from the surface of a great spiderweb woven between the two naked pines.
”Is it dead?” Thend wondered.
”He,” Morlock corrected.
”How do you know? What do the females look like?”
Morlock grunted. ”Hope you never find out,” he added after a moment.
He crouched down to examine the ground as Thend looked up to find that one of the Khroi's three eyes was open and watching them. The iris was the same dull purplish color as the carapace, but it was still an oddly human eye to peer out of so strange a face and Thend was troubled by it.
”Well,” said Morlock, standing up, ”I am no tracker, to read a story from bent pine needles. But clearly the spiderfolk have done this. If we are travelling over their territory it is bad, in a way, but also good. That is why we are clinging to the western edge of the pa.s.s; the Khroi avoid it, for they fear the spiderfolk.”
”Shouldn't we, too?” Thend asked.
Morlock spread his hands, which meant nothing to Thend.
”Why did they put it-him up here?”
Morlock shrugged. ”They do it sometimes. It may have a ripening effect. Also-”
”They're going to eat him?”
”Of course. Spiderfolk will eat any kind of motile life, including each other, if nothing better is available.”
”Shouldn't we let him go?”
Thend always found Morlock's face hard to read, but it seemed he was surprised. ”A Khroi? No.”
That made Thend mad. ”Why? Just because he's a Khroi?”
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. ”The spiders kill the Khroi. The Khroi kill the spiders. I see no reason to interfere: either will prey on humankind, given a chance.”
Now Thend was madder. ”To you, the Khroi are just the monsters who killed the dwarves.” He pointed at the Khroi hanging in the spiderweb. ”Do you see him? Have you even looked at him? Have you never known a Khroi as an individual, as a person?”
Morlock's cold gray eyes fixed on Thend. ”I travelled extensively with one, once.”
”And? When the journey was done did he kill you? Did he leave you to die?”
”He killed himself.”
”He-Arrrgh!” Conversations with Morlock were always taking these abrupt left turns. Thend never had never gotten used to it, but at least by now he knew when there was no more point in talking. He turned away, drew his knife, and started slas.h.i.+ng away at the web-stuff.
Morlock didn't help, but he didn't interfere either. When Thend had severed enough strands of the web the bound Khroi fell to the earth with a wheezing sound that might have been a cry of distress or relief. Thend cut his narrow boneless legs free of the sticky silken stuff and then, more cautiously, freed the Khroi's arms. At last he stood back, waiting to see what would happen. If the Khroi was too ill to move, what would they do? It was possible the Khroi was past saving.
The Khroi slowly rose to the ped-cl.u.s.ters his kind used for feet. He flexed each of his arms and legs all along their length, an eerie sight. There were a few wounds on his head and arms that were leaking the dark fluid the Khroi used for blood, but none of the wounds appeared to be disabling. He turned so that one of his three eyes faced Morlock and another faced Thend. The Khroi had needle-toothed mouths at the three corners along the base of their pyramidal heads, and this one clacked his mandibles once or twice, a mannerism Thend thought might be like clearing his throat. But then, instead of speaking, he jumped over and bit Thend on the shoulder, right through his jacket and s.h.i.+rt into the flesh below.
”Hey!” screamed Thend, and Morlock was there, kicking the Khroi in the midsection. The Khroi flew through the air and rolled a few feet on the ground, slamming into the base of a tree. He leapt back on his legs with unbelievable swiftness, gripping a sharp rock in one of its stringy palpcl.u.s.ters, so unlike hands.
Morlock drew his sword, Tyrfing. Sunlight glittered along its black-andwhite, strangely crystalline blade. ”You have your weapon,” he observed ironically. ”I have mine.”
The Khroi lifted the sharp rock and marred himself with it, sc.r.a.ping it savagely along his purplish carapace by the neck. He kept pounding with the rock until the point broke off, stuck in his sh.e.l.l like a tooth. He dropped the rock, looked at the two of them with two of his eyes, and then fled away through the trees.
”How's that wound?” Morlock asked, turning away and sheathing his sword.
”It's the best kind,” Thend snapped. ”Hurts and everything.”
”Well,” Morlock said, smiling a little, ”it's not too deep.” He tore a strip from the hem of Thend's jacket and said, ”Hold this on it. When we get back to camp I'll whomp up a poultice to keep off infection.”
”Whomp,” Thend muttered as he pressed the cloth against his wound. He felt as if the world was whomping him. ”He didn't have to bite me.”
”I think he was marking you,” Morlock said. ”So he would know you again, if he saw you.”
”He meant it as a favor?” Thend demanded, pointing at his wound with his free hand.
”He did the same thing to himself,” Morlock pointed out.
”So that I'd recognize him?”
The crooked man nodded.
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