Welclass="underline" I learned. It started the first time one of my children came back from one of his crazy expeditions bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. This is not the way to win a mother's heart. The world is full of dangers, and one of them is going to kill every one of us eventually: as a reasonable person, I accept this. As a mother, I don't and never will; I refuse to be reasonable about risks to my children, and the risks seemed to increase any time Morlock was in the neighborhood.
By the time we reached Narkunden, north of the Kirach Kund, one of my children was actually dead: Stador, my oldest boy, had been killed by the Khroi in the mountains. I don't want to talk about it except-no, I don't want to talk about it at all. It's enough to say that we were there because of Morlock and I blamed him for it. I still do.
I was the only one, it seemed. My brother Roble thought the world of Morlock, and so did my children, my surviving children. He would do the most remarkable things. For instance, we settled in Narkunden for a while to heal up (most of us were wounded by the Khroi-yes, those are the scars you've noticed on me). Morlock and my sons built a weird crooked little house on the edge of town, right by the river, and he set up a workshop on the top floor and he started to make things for sale in the city; that's what we mostly lived on, before we opened up the Mystery Zone.
The Mystery Zone was a hallway that ran around one corner of the house, and Morlock had fixed it somehow that you could walk up the wall and stand on the ceiling. It began as a nuisance-distraction. People knew Morlock lived in the crooked house, and they were always trying to bribe us to let them into his workshop when they thought he wasn't around. Actually, he didn't care, but we were sick of it, so he built the Zone onto the house and suggested we run them through there instead. My daughter, Fasra, dreamed up a line of patter to go with it-how a magical experiment had shattered the law of gravity locally, and how the place was somewhat dangerous to enter. We made them sign a contract not to sue us if they were maimed or killed by the wild magic of the Mystery Zone. That made them wild to get in; pretty soon we were making more money from the Mystery Zone than anything else.
"Why not just make a bucketful of gold and save all the footwork?" I asked Morlock once. He could literally do that; I'd seen him. (Yes, it seems like an awfully convenient skill to have, but, no, I don't know his recipe.)
"Against the law," he answered. Apparently Narkunden didn't like having their markets flooded with artificial gold and they'd passed a law, so that any sorcerer who wanted to spend money in the city had to show proof he'd earned the stuff, not made it. I didn't believe this until one of these guys actually showed up at the door one day and demanded to go through our books, and even then I couldn't quite believe it. I mean, I had lived most of my life under the dictatorship of a monster who fed on human souls, but at least he didn't send agents to root around in your cash box.
"So why stay here?" I asked Morlock after the first of these regular visits.
He grunted at me. He actually does that: you say something to him like a person, and he just makes a sort of noise.
Anyway, his latest gimmick was glass. He'd noticed that some types of glass seemed to slow down light, so he made glass that slowed it down even more-incredibly slow. There were chunks of it scattered around the house, still holding the luminous image of a leaf or a sunset or a face that had been trapped in them days ago. Bann, my eldest (surviving), was excited by this and got Morlock to teach him how to do it: his idea was that you could create a block of glass that would slow down the light passing through it to a full stop, creating perfect and permanent images of things.
Meanwhile Morlock's mind was moving in a different direction. One morning he appeared at breakfast holding a big lens of gray glass and wearing a half smile that, for him, was a shout of triumph.
"Um," my brother Roble said, peering through the lens. "This is maybe the murkiest piece of glass I've ever seen."
"Keep an eye on Naeli," Morlock suggested.
Roble swivelled to face me and I saw his brown eye quite clearly through the glass.
"Naeli, would you wave your hand?" Morlock said.
Exasperated, I flipped him a gesture I'd learned among the Bargainers.
"Wait a second!" Roble said. "She moved before you asked her! This thing sees into the future!"
"Yes."
My sons, Bann and Thend, and even my daughter, Fasra (who hadn't been showing much interest in anything since that terrible night when Stador died), looked intrigued and swarmed behind Roble, peering at the glass over his shoulder.
"It's so murky-I can hardly see anything," Bann complained.
By now Roble was holding the lens up high so they could peer through it. I caught a glimpse of my children, my surviving children, a corsage of expectant quizzical looks in the bright glass.
"I don't know what you mean," I said. "I can see you all clearly."
"Your mouth moved before you spoke!" Thend called. I heard his voice before I saw his lips move. Then I understood the glass worked two ways, and I was seeing a few seconds into the past. I wondered if a lens could be built for me to somehow see Stador again, alive and well and happy. And I wondered if I would dare to look through it if I held it in my hand.
"How does it work?" Bann asked.
If you want to get Morlock to run his mouth, ask him a question like that. They started talking about a bunch of things I neither understood nor wanted to. But in the end Bann said, "But why is the glass so cloudy?"
"The future hasn't happened yet," I said impatiently. "The odds of you seeing any particular event are very low."
Silence. If you want to shock your children, show them you have a little intelligence. "Flip the glass," I suggested. "The other side looks into the past and everything is very clear. All those events are fixed."
They did, and now I was looking into the lens of the future. Seen through the glass, my children's healthy brown skins wore the grayish sheen of death. Their eyes were almost invisible, shadowed by uncertainty. I looked away. Someday, they would die, and I would die, and everyone would die, and I couldn't blame it all on Morlock. But somehow, just then, I wanted to.
Now Bann was holding the glass and walking around the room. "I see furniture clearer than people," he said, "but the walls and floor and ceiling are clearer than the furniture. Is that because their positions are more certain in the future?"
"Exactly," Morlock said approvingly.
Bann passed the glass to Thend and stared off at nothing. After a moment or two he turned to Morlock and said, "Would the positions of some people be more certain than others? A watchman who has a fixed route at a fixed time, or …?"
Morlock shrugged and opened his hands. He seemed to expect we would know what that meant.
"Let's go down to the street and check!" Thend shouted, and ran out the door. We all trailed after him.
The street was full of passersby. We were on the edge of the city of Narkunden, but Narkunden's sister city Aflraun was right across the nearby Nat River, and when the city-states weren't actually at war, there was a brisk traffic back and forth across the bridges. I didn't enter into the discussion about whether some people were easier to see than others, because I really didn't give a damn. I'd only followed the others out to make sure that Morlock didn't kill one of my children by accident in the street.
Oh, you think I'm exaggerating? All right: so I'm in the street standing next to Morlock as he holds the lens. And he's flipping it back and forth to get the contrast between a-few-seconds-past and a-few-seconds-future. While he's gazing through the past lens I look idly past him and see someone standing behind him. In the real world, this other guy's just standing there, making a kind of shrugging motion. In the future glass, he's stabbing Morlock in the neck.