He woke up with a scream trying to work its way out of his throat. In the end he didn't scream-but it didn't help that Naeli was the person shaking him awake. "Your watch," she said briefly. "And there's trouble."
Thend rolled to his feet and looked around. Everyone was awake, even though it was the middle of the day. (They travelled by night and slept during the day.) His uncle Roble was standing over there by Morlock; Thend's two brothers, Stador and Bann, were with them. Even Thend's younger sister, Fasra, was sitting up in her sleeping cloak. But apart from her, who was usually trouble, Thend didn't see anything that looked like a problem.
Morlock said, "Trouble?" and lifted his wry shoulders in a shrug. When he saw this wasn't enough information for his audience he added, "I saw something that bears a closer look."
"I'll go with you," Roble said.
"No you won't," Naeli disagreed. "You're our two best fighters; one of you has got to stay with the group."
Thend noticed that Stador and Bann were annoyed by this. But it was impossible to argue with the fact: they all remembered how Roble and Morlock had swept away a company of warrior Khroi.
"Well, he'll have to take someone with him," Roble said, conceding Naeli's point. "We decided no one should travel alone."
Morlock's eyebrows raised a little at this. He hadn't realized that the group's rule would be applied to him, obviously. But he was adaptable, and he remarked with his usual eloquence, "Eh."
"I suppose you mean me," Thend's little sister, Fasra, said, a bragging tone in her voice. She could be insufferable, but Thend decided she was right. If you counted toughness as anything other than the ability to lift weight, she was the genuine article. And she wasn't absolutely stupid, Thend reluctantly admitted.
"Thend," Morlock decided.
"But-" Naeli said and stopped. She put her hand on Morlock's arm. His gray eyes met her brown ones. Then she released him and stepped back.
Everything, just everything, annoyed Thend these days, but that annoyed him the most of alclass="underline" how his mother and Morlock could communicate without words. Also, how she touched this pale-skinned stranger just as unselfconsciously as she did her children or her brother.
Morlock turned away from the group without speaking. Thend followed suit and they went side by side over a ridge to the northwest.
"What was it you saw?" Thend asked finally.
Morlock grunted. "Aside from your face, you mean? You haven't smiled since we left Sarkunden."
"That's not your business!" Thend said fiercely.
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders and said nothing. They walked on a while in silence.
"I'm having bad dreams," Thend admitted finally.
"Tell me," Morlock said.
Thend did, and Morlock said nothing for a while. Then he remarked, "You may have the Sight."
"I don't know what you mean," Thend said, afraid that he did.
"The Sight," Morlock said didactically, "is a talent for receiving sensory or mental impressions through tal, the phase of being which links living spirit to dead matter. Most people see only with their eyes, hear only with their ears, think only with their brains. A seer can gain impressions of things he never saw nor heard, and to some extent think outside material limits, knowing segments of the future and past."
"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 assuming 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 grass 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 pass; 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 slashing 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.