Part 35 (1/2)

”It is not safe to leave the hill!” stated the listener in the first voice's harshest tones.

Morlock put the jar of drugged water down like a gavel, ending the discussion. ”I'm going to find water,” he told the listener. ”I should be back by nightfall. Good day.”

The listener gave vent to a chirping protest, not unlike one of his own mushrooms. Morlock paid it no heed, pausing only to gather the empty water bottles from his pack before walking down the hill.

Morlock found a clear mountain stream running northward about a hundred paces east of the listener's hill. He filled his water bottles, washed himself thoroughly, and sat down to a light breakfast of water, flatbread, and dried meat, not materially different from the forty-odd breakfasts that had preceded it.

This, he reflected gloomily, was not his sort of task. The subtleties of deep healing were beyond him, and they were clearly what was needed here. Oh, he knew enough of the art to keep himself in one piece during his dangerous and mostly solitary wanderings through the unguarded lands. But a higher kind of healer was called for, here: an Illion, a Noree, a Merlin. (He considered consulting Nimue, or at least as much of her as was available. But he was reluctant to loose her impulse-cloud anywhere near that hungry darkness under the hill.) Anyway, what would they have told him, if they had been there to advise him? Walk away! Yes, he was sure of it. They would have known that Morlock, for all his intelligence about things and ideas, saw people in fairly simple terms, and they would have told him that this was not simple.

Now that he had committed himself to something that was probably beyond him, he felt he understood something of the complexities. The problem? A darkness on a man's face. The solution? Remove it. Very easy. Except ...

Except: the man had cooperated in the placing of the darkness. It partook of his life and grew, entwined itself through him, became part of him. It was not a sort of blemish on his face that could be removed; it was rooted in the man's consenting soul. The listener might object to the darkness' propensity to spread, but he did not object to the darkness itself, to its nature, to its presence in him. Perhaps he could not; perhaps the choice, once made, was irrevocable.

Morlock shook his head. That sort of thinking was useless. He would not accomplish his task by moaning about how difficult it was.

He thought about the darkness infesting the man, about what it was. A sort of mouth, really, feeding upon the listener's vitality. It would steal the man's tal and therefore drain off his physical energy (although the thing in the pit needed only the former). In that case, there must be a ”throat”-a channel to carry the stolen tal down the darkness in the pit. It should have been visible when Morlock had ascended to tal-rapture, and perhaps it had been, but he had not thought to look for it. That, at least, was an error he could correct.

Errors ... The listener believed, or said, that the darkness was a natural part of the underworld, older than time. But Morlock had been raised, quite literally, underground, and he knew different. He knew, too, from his violent rapport with the darkness last night that it was not sessile in nature, nor was it native to the hill.

I have lasted longer than many listeners, the listener had said. This was possibly true, but it implied he could not last much longer. And: It told nze you were coming. How had it known that? Why had it told the listener?

In the old days, before it was trapped, it had been able to travel from place to place to find its victims. Now it had to lure them into coming to it. Had the darkness selected Morlock as the listener's successor? He could always refuse to be seduced by the voice in the darkness ... but its ability to persuade was proven by its survival for such an unthinkable length of time in such a Creator-forsaken wasteland. It would be safest simply to leave, to walk away, to make his given word into a lie.

Morlock gloomily eyed the mouth of his water bottle, but found no answer there.

He returned to the hill from the south, just for the change. There, at the base of the hill, just inside the wolfbane hedge, he found the listener's well.

Moved by curiosity, he lowered the metal bucket by its chain into the well and drew up some water. It was clear and cold; Morlock's intuition detected no spiritual taint. He took some in his hand and prepared to taste it.

”It's poisoned!” he heard the listener's first voice say. He looked up and saw the other standing on the hillside above him.

”How do you know?”

”The darkness told me.”

Morlock shrugged and tasted the water. It had the faint metallic tang of the best well water.

”If you have no ideas,” the listener suggested brightly (in the second voice), ”you could go down and consult the voice in the dark.”

”I have two ideas,” Morlock said sharply. It was true, although he had been unaware of it until that moment. That was the way his mind worked.

The listener's half-face fell, as if he were disappointed. ”But suppose they don't work?” he asked.

”Then I will think of two more,” said Morlock Ambrosius, and drank the water in his hand.

Creation takes place in a sacred silence or an untamed ecstatic cacophony. It needn't be solitary, but those present tend to be initiates: creators, or a.s.sisting the creation, if only with their attention.

Healing was different, Morlock had found, and he didn't like it.

”What is that?” asked the listener, in the shrillest weakest tones of his second voice.

”It is a focus of power,” Morlock said curtly.

They were in the living area of the listener's cave. The listener eyed the focus fearfully and said, ”It looks like a sword.”

Morlock refrained from replying; the focus obviously was a sword, its blade a crystalline black interwoven with veins of white.

”Is that Tyrfing?” the listener asked. ”Doesn't it have a curse on it?”

”That's a story,” was Morlock's careful reply. It was true, and sounded like a denial.

”Couldn't you have killed the werewolves with that?” the listener asked, a little less hysterically.

”I was intending to,” Morlock said, ”when I ran into your hedge of wolfbane. It seemed like a lucky chance at the time.” He paused, then continued more slowly, ”Like any focus, Tyrfing can be used as a weapon. But the psychic penalty of using a focus to destroy a life is ... extreme. It amounts to experiencing your opponent's death yourself. I would take many a risk before I chose to do that.”

Before the listener could ask another question Morlock summoned the rapture of vision. The listener's physical form vanished behind a screen of dim green flames, themselves obscured and interwoven with the alien darkness. Morlock looked down at his tal-pattern of black-and-white flames. Concentrating, he forced himself to reach out and take hold of the sword, Tyrfing.

Tyrfing's dark crystalline blade became alive with Morlock's distinctive tal-pattern: a black fire seen through white branches.

Few seers could move their bodies once they had summoned the rapture of vision, but Morlock had trained himself to it. And once he took up Tyrfing, whose nature reflected and amplified his own ability, he could move without difficulty.

Stand by the door! he said to the listener, who started, and then backed carefully away to the cave entrance.

As soon as he looked for it, Morlock saw the dark umbilical cord extending from the clot of darkness infecting the listener. The other end disappeared into the pa.s.sage leading to the darkness under the hill.

Morlock was pleased. So far his guess had proven right. The colony of darkness infecting the listener was sending nourishment of a spectral kind back to the darkness imprisoned underground.

The cord did not recede from him as he approached; he wondered whether it could perceive him. There was probably a limit to how much it could move, at any rate. The hill and its cave were woven with magic intended to bind the darkness and make it helpless.

Morlock lifted his blazing sword and severed the connecting darkness.

He was successful, but the success was momentary. As he watched, the two severed ends of the dark cord, wriggling like snakes, lifted up and rejoined seamlessly above his sword. He swung the blade again; the cord of darkness again parted and re-formed almost instantly.

Morlock turned away and shook off the rapture like an irritating acquaintance. The world of matter and energy loomed up; the world of the spirit receded. The black-and-white flames sank down; Tyrfing became a blade of black, white-veined crystal. Glancing over, he saw the listener had taken on his mundane appearance also.

The listener's mouth was wide open, his visible eye was closed, his halfface clenched in the grip of a powerful emotion. His body was shaking. In the confusion and weariness that follows rapture, Morlock did not immediately understand what was happening. He speculated gloomily that this attempt had been as pointlessly agonizing to the listener as the last one.

Then, slowly, he understood. The listener was laughing-in relief, uncontrollable amus.e.m.e.nt, contempt.

Morlock reflected that he was holding a sword. The listener had none, was quite unprepared. A single swift motion of his arm and the listener's laughter would be quelled forever. And it would fulfill his agreement: he would sever the listener from his darkness and his life in one gesture. Simple, elegant, direct. Morlock could bury the body and be on his way, all promises kept.

Morlock's internal struggle was intense, but brief. What decided for him, in the end, was the rule of fair bargaining that had been taught him in childhood by the dwarvish clan who fostered him. ”A bargain is more than words,” his harven-father, Tyrtheorn, used to say. ”A bargain is a trust. Keep the bargain. Keep the trust.”

It was the rule that kept him from killing the listener, only the rule. He had seen too much death to suppose that anyone had a right to life, and he did not believe that the listener would ever do enough good to justify his own life, even to himself. Morlock himself would certainly prefer to be murdered rather than live with an alien darkness poisoning his spirit. And just coincidentally, he found that he hated the listener enough to kill him. Everything pointed in one direction, a river of darkness urging him toward what he really wanted to do anyway.... Only the rule stood in the way: ”Keep the bargain. Keep the trust.”

Morlock sighed and sheathed his sword. It occurred to him that he was not going to kill anybody at the moment. He would have liked to speak with his harven-father, but Tyrtheorn had been dead these three hundred years.

The listener was silent at last, watching him carefully. There was an air almost of disappointment in the cave. Perhaps the darkness longed to be free of the listener even as he longed to be free of it. What would have happened if Morlock had killed the man in unguarded rage? Would the mouth of darkness have been free to settle on Morlock before he was aware of it? It may, at least, have hoped so, and directed the listener to provoke Morlock to murderous rage. He wondered if he had ever seen the listener behave naturally-had ever seen him act except at the prompting of the darkness that owned him.

”Are you out of ideas?” the listener asked finally.