I was still gripping the severed arm tensely. When I realized this I let it go, kicked Naeli away hysterically, and jumped to my feet. I didn't know what Charis was, but I didn't want to be near him.
Morlock, however, had no such qualms. He was kneeling down beside Charis. At first I thought that he was holding Charis's one remaining hand: a pretty sentimental act for a man like Morlock, but you never know. Then I realized: he was feeling for a pulse.
And not finding one, apparently. "Remarkable!" he said to Charis's tormented face. "The skin temperature is lifelike. If there were a heartbeat, the likeness would be perfect."
"I was working on that," Charis said sullenly. "It's a minor issue."
"You still have a heart, though?" Morlock inquired, with an air of polite interest.
"Oh, yes," Charis replied. "I couldn't dispense with it. The entire torso is essentially intact."
"May I?" asked Morlock.
"If-Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter," Charis said gloomily.
Morlock reached into the horrible man's open shirt and felt around a little.
"That's not human skin," he said flatly, withdrawing his hand.
"Well, I decided to venture on a clay integument for my torso," Charis admitted, "but the organs are still functioning. They have less to do now, of course."
"You anticipate an extended lifespan?" Morlock asked. "Less wear and tear on the organs? You may be right. Anyway, this is an admirable achievement. Really remarkable."
That was when I started to laugh quietly to myself. An admirable achievement! That thing!
"What's wrong?" Bann said to me. "What's happening?"
"Don't you see?" I said, or shrieked, I'm not sure which. "He's turned himself into a golem."
Morlock looked over at me. "Not entirely," he said mildly. "Charis's limbs and skin may be golemic but the rest of him, his core, is as it was. Do you," he said to Charis, "get full sensation from your clay skin?"
Charis shuddered. "No, thank God Avenger. Really, Morlock the Maker!" he said, drawing himself up. "I don't think you fully appreciate what you call my achievement."
"Explain it, then," Morlock suggested.
"Do you suppose that I myself did these delicate operations on my own frame? I had to have golems do it. For each operation I created a team of golem-surgeons with careful and elaborately written life-scrolls. The slightest error in any golem's composition and I would not have survived a single operation."
"What makes you think you did survive?" I shouted. Then I put my hand over my mouth and sat down. I didn't feel that great; I don't suppose any of us did. Naeli and Thend both came and sat down on either side of me, each one putting an arm around me. That made me feel a little better.
Charis droned on wearily, "My face became so many masks. It wasn't mine anymore. As the Khroi's agent, I spied on the city. As your debtor, I spied on the Khroi. As the Khroi's agent, I had to hunt down the man spying on them. If my plans had succeeded, all my debts would be paid. I would have given you your information, surrendered you to the Khroi, and destroyed the spy in the city. But now all my bargains are broken."
"You would have destroyed yourself to fulfill a bargain?" Morlock asked.
"My crowning deed as a maker," Charis replied, smiling faintly. "When this …business interrupted me, I was writing the life-scroll of a golem which could replace my entire face."
"Oh."
Charis seemed to think Morlock was insufficiently impressed. "Don't you see? The delicacy of the operation-the need to inculcate the golem with my every skill so that the new face would be such a masterwork of artifice that no one would realize it was artificial!"
"Why?"
Charis glared at the crooked man as if insulted by so obvious a question. "All of you!" he shouted, waving his remaining arm. "The Khroi. The guards. Vernon. The water-gangs. You. All of you, everywhere, surrounding me with open mouths like baby birds squawking, `I want this, I want that, Do this, Don't do that, Tell me this, Don't tell him that, Give this to me, Take this from me.' Everyone screaming me me me and none of them me."
Morlock opened his hands and waited: he still didn't understand.
"It was my chance to escape," Charis said wearily. "The new face didn't have to look like my old face. Everyone knew who I was, but if I succeeded no one would know who I was. I wouldn't owe anybody anything; nobody would owe me anything. I could have been anyone. Anyone."
"Who is it you want to be?" Morlock asked patiently.
Charis thought for a moment. "No one," he said finally. He pushed himself over with his remaining arm, spun off the edge, and was lost in the red gloom. We heard his body make wet solid impact with the cliff several times as he fell.
"There goes my chance at a promotion," said Thrennick wistfully after a few moments of silence. "Master Morlock-"
"I am not your master."
"Fine; I just want you to do me a favor."
"What?"
"If you ever come back to Sarkunden-"
"Yes?"
"Please don't look me up. I mean, I still have nightmares about the last time."
The soldiers went back to the city through the sewers, but we took another narrow rocky passage up into the light. I couldn't believe how good the fresh air tasted and felt in my lungs, and my eyes drank down the light till I could feel it in my toes. Then I looked at the others and I noticed they were all bleeding as much as I was, if not more. This seemed to me very funny and terribly sad, more or less at the same time, but Naeli said a little hysteria under the circumstances wasn't unreasonable.
We were in a cave facing the north. Outside there were mountains piercing the horizon like pale thorns. Through them led the Kirach Kund, the River of Skulls-as dangerous as its name sounded or more. But as long as there was no one there who would try to buy or sell me or himself, I wouldn't complain.
X
DESTROYER
AND NIGHT WAS MOTHER TO HATEFUL DOOM AND THE DARK DESTROYER; SHE GAVE BIRTH TO DEATH AND SLEEP AND THE TRIBE OF DREAMS.
It was the bones again: Thend rarely dreamed about anything else anymore. They were climbing the slope toward a rift in the high horizon: the Kirach Kund, the pass leading north through the mountains. And Thend slipped and fell in a slope of scree. He slid downhill for a while, and a bunch of the oddly shaped stones slid down after him. It was embarrassing, but not dangerous, and he wasn't concerned until he noticed something about the nature of the "rocks" around him.
"Hey!" he shouted, his voice ragged from panic. "These are bones!"
He had fallen face-to-face with an unmistakable skull; there were many others scattered about. Some of the skulls were shattered; others had holes bored in them. All were gray as stone, and they were not quite humanshaped. The skulls were, if anything, larger than human, but the arm bones and leg bones were shorter and thicker.
Morlock slid expertly down the edge of the scree and offered Thend a fish-pale hand, pulling him out of the pile of gray bones.
"What were they?" Thend asked. "Where did they come from?"
"They were dwarves," Morlock replied. "There was a great kingdom of the dwarves under these mountains once. Now they are all dead or fled, unless a few hide under the earth so deep their enemies can't find them."
"Their enemies?"
"The Khroi."
The Khroi: the insectlike warriors who ruled the mountain range they were daring to cross.
"They killed them long ago," Morlock said, a strange elegiac tone in his voice. "Now the bones are turning back into the rock from which they grew." He said a word or two in a language Thend didn't know and turned away.
All that was as it had really happened. But when, in his dream, Thend turned around, his mother, Naeli, was standing behind him. There was a large horn or tusk spiking out of her mouth and he was afraid of it. With a quick birdlike motion she bobbed her head and put a hole in his head, just like the holes in the skulls scattered thickly around him.