There were times everyone fell to the ground, as if worshipping, and they dragged me down with them. I was too groggy to understand what was happening or make my escape at these times. Besides, my hands were bound and my legs hobbled.
They took me to a great open area in the center of the village and bound me to a stake. In the middle of the open area was a tree, tall and twisted like an oak. At the foot of the tree was a mouthlike opening.
No one had to explain to me what would happen next. I was past swearing, but if there were, in some fireproof lexicon, any word sulphurous enough to express my anger and dismay at the thought of being fed alive to the Boneless One, I would have used it.
It didn't cheer me at all to see a familiar, crook-shouldered figure slumping at a stake similar to my own on the other side of the clearing. They had got Morlock, too. What was it he'd said? If this doesn't work, we'll try something else.
"Hey!" I shouted. "Let's try something else! I don't think this is working!"
I don't suppose he heard me, if his earplugs were still in place; anyway, he gave no sign of it. I leaned back against my stake and tried to ready my mind for death.
But some part of me wouldn't give up, and when a young silver-haired Bargainer girl of twelve or thirteen years came toward me with a knife in her hand I feigned indifference, putting all my weight on the ropes that bound me to the stake. When she came within range I kicked out with my hobbled feet, knocking her over and sending the knife spinning from her hand.
This proved to be wasted effort, though, as a group of young men immediately surrounded me, slashing at my bonds. As soon as I was free they dragged me away; I stopped resisting when I realized that it was really away: away from the clearing, the tree, the mouthlike hole in the ground.
Then I recognized them. My nephews, Naeli's boys: Stador, Bann, and Thend.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I shouted, uselessly. We all still had wax plugging our ears.
They grinned recklessly and shrugged as they ran.
How mad was I, really? Not at all-as long as we got away.
They turned aside into one of the narrow houses, one with shutters drawn over the slitlike windows. I followed them in, and, turning around, I saw the Bargainer girl behind us.
Suddenly I feared a Bargainer's trap. But the door slammed shut and strong arms held mine prisoner as someone took the wax from my ears.
"Calm down, Roble," Stador said, his voice uncomfortably loud. (He obviously still had wax in his ears.) "We're safe, here, but we don't have much time."
"We sure as hell don't; that little Bargainer wench is in here!" I shouted.
Someone lit a lamp. I turned and saw the Bargainer girl holding the light. There was a pained expression on her beautiful dark face.
"Don't you know me, Uncle Roble?" the Bargainer girl said. "I'm Fasra."
I was still gaping, speechless, when the door of the house opened again and Naeli slipped in, slamming it shut immediately. She pulled two waxen plugs from her ears (using only her left hand; her right arm hung strangely limp) and grinned a needle-toothed grin at me.
"Roble, my dear, maybe you'll listen to me at last, eh? I feel like I've been chasing you all around the Whisperer's Wood. Man, if you were as smart as you are tough, you'd really be dangerous."
I stared at her teeth, filed to a carnivore grin, and knew this was no illusion. Because the Boneless One only shows you what you want to see, and I didn't want to see this.
"You Bargained," I said flatly.
Naeli looked surprised and offended. "Of course I did! How else could I save Fasra? What did you think I was going to do?"
"I didn't think you'd Bargain."
Now she was just scornful. "There's no difference between us and them," she said coldly. "It's just what side you happen to be on."
This chilled me, because by "us" I knew she meant the Bargainers and by "them" she meant everyone in Four Castles: Besk, Alev, me. I wanted to argue with her, but I couldn't. Wasn't that why I was leaving? Anyway, there never was a time I could get the better of Naeli in an argument.
"I'm not on either side, anymore, I guess," I said.
"That's why I want you to take Fasra and get out of here," Naeli said hastily. "She's not bound to the Whisperer yet-they wait until after puberty to do that-but they'll bind her soon. Take her away with you and the boys."
"Why can't you come?" I asked.
"The Whisperer has put a compulsion on me," she said, touching her chest. I saw, underneath her tunic, the outline of a medallion. "That was why I couldn't free you from the stake myself. I could only speak to you when he wasn't noticing me."
"And he isn't now?"
Naeli shook her head. "He hasn't often noticed me in the past day or so. It's almost as if there were two Whisperers now; the village is at war with itself and the Soundless Sound strikes often and often."
"Can't you-"
"I can't leave the woods while the compulsion binds me," she said, touching the medallion under her tunic again.
"Is that medallion the source of the compulsion?" I asked.
"Yes."
I approached her and looked at the cord securing the medallion around her neck. There seemed to be nothing unusual about it.
"Why don't you take it off?" I asked.
"I can't; that's part of the compulsion."
"Why don't you ask someone to take it off you?"
"I can't; that's part of the compulsion."
"If I take it off you, will you or I or anyone here be harmed?"
"No."
I reached out and took the cord with each hand and snapped it. The medallion dropped to the ground through Naeli's tunic. She turned and kissed me. I couldn't repress a shudder (I thought I could feel the razor teeth through her lips), but she didn't seem to notice, or perhaps didn't care.
"Now we can go together," she said, fierce and happy-strangely like the Naeli I once knew.
Naeli's boys chimed in, and Fasra, too. Stador explained how Naeli had met them in the woods and brought them to rescue me from the stake, which the compulsion prevented her from doing herself.
"They believed I was really me, anyway," Naeli said wryly.
I shrugged. "The Boneless One sent false images of you to me every night I rode through the lawless hours. I'd be long dead if I trusted everything I saw in the woods."
Naeli nodded slowly. "It's hard to say what the Whisperer knows …but he may have known I was thinking of you. I've been trying to figure out a way to get Fasra away from the Bargainers almost since we came here."
"So what's the plan now, or are we improvising?"
"A little of both," Naeli admitted, with her terrifying smile. "We'll be safe here from the Others; all of the fighting between Bargainers has been in the street. And the Soundless Sound can't reach us here, either. We'll wait until they send the stranger down to the Whisperer, and then we can escape while they're occupied."
"Tough luck on the stranger," I observed.
Naeli shrugged. She must have seen many people go that route, perhaps some she had known herself.
For me it was different. We always tried to bring the stray out, Alev and 1. And only then (it wasn't my brightest day) did I realize who "the stranger" was. It was my stray, Morlock. Somehow the idea of Morlock and the idea of Alev were bound up together. I thought of Alev, his legs broken in the trap; I thought of Morlock falling down that mouthlike hole.
"Naeli," I said slowly. "Alev is dead."
"Who is Alev?" said this stranger who was my sister.
I shook my head. "Never mind. I have to bring the stray out, if I can. You guys can get away in the disturbance. Boys, wait for me a day at the meeting place we set; if I don't come, go on as planned." I plugged my ears, shutting out their protestations and good-byes, and ran out of the house, leaving the door open behind me.
Morlock's stake was empty and there was a crowd of people standing around the base of the crooked tree. It was possible I was already too late. I scooped up the knife I had kicked out of Fasra's hand and ran across the clearing. I plunged into the crowd, slashing with the knife in one hand and striking out randomly with my other fist.