Part 34 (1/2)
”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.