Travellers' Rest Read Free Page B

must be ball-and-socket joints, I guess.”
    “Plainly. Though how the musculature attaches is not plain at all, at least to me.”
    “Will we have time to make a few incisions?” Wyrth wondered.
    “Yes.” Morlock gestured at the greasy smoke billowing from the back of the house. “Lunch will be a little late.”
    Sunlar and his wife both shrieked and ran back into the kitchen, calling for Raelio to follow them. She did, reluctantly, keeping an eye on Morlock and Wyrth as they hauled the dead body of the monstrous bravo outside.

    Lunch, when it arrived, was more splendid than anything they had ordered. The fish were fresh, caught that very day, Wyrth guessed (from Gar Vindisc’s pricey stream, possibly). The shellback steaks were, the finicky dwarf had to admit, more than passable, and there were several of them. Wyrth kept fending off a stream of offers of expensive wines and exotic beers. But the thrinnel ran like water, and the water ran like more water, and there was nothing murky about it. Dessert was a plate of spicy custards and a bowl of multicolored fruit, none of which Wyrth recognized but all of which were juicy, tart, and delicious.
    Morlock ate sparingly. Killing a man didn’t put him off his appetite, and Iagiawôn was a borderline case anyway, but food was just fuel to Morlock and whenever he stopped being hungry he just stopped eating. Wyrth had more expansive ideas, and finished off whatever Morlock left behind.
    Through the meal they discussed how Iagiawôn had been put together. He had clearly been built through a series of surgeries; the network of scars was easy to read in his skin and his bones. By this Kyrkylio, no doubt—a lifemaker who had a dwelling somewhere in the hills north of town, it seemed.
    This much they discovered by inveigling Raelio in innocent conversation, but she wasn’t much inclined to talk to them. But as Wyrth was in the final stages of his victorious campaign against the magnificent lunch, she looked straight at Morlock and said, “Is my sister still alive? They took her to the hills. I figure you’d know if she was dead. She was a terrible liar.”
    Wyrth would have said something, but his mouth was full of custard.
    Morlock, whose mouth wasn’t, shrugged. “I don’t fight angels over human souls,” he said.
    “My mother says so.”
    “Who gave your sister to Kyrkylio?” Morlock asked.
    The girl turned away. “No one. No one. The monster, he—he took her. My mother said it was for the best. She said they would leave us alone now.”
    “Why do the townspeople let the monster prey on them?”
    “It was part of a deal, a long time ago. The sorcerer he … I guess he gave people stuff, things they could never get otherwise.”
    “The shellbacks,” Morlock suggested.
    “Yes. Yes. I guess so. Other things, too. And they. They wanted to pay him but he wouldn’t. He didn’t want money. This was a long time ago; my mother said so. They said they would let the sorcerer take people once in a while. It was travellers mostly. For a long time it was only travellers. But now no one comes here. So the monster he … The sorcerer sends him out and he takes people. And people let him mostly. But you didn’t.”
    “I hadn’t had lunch yet.”
    “You’re a liar!” the girl shrieked, tears running down her face. “Everyone lies! My mother said … about my sister … like it didn’t even matter! She’d’a said the same when he took me. When I was gone, as if I was never here. And you. I saw your face. I saw it. You hated him. Like I hated him. And you hit him. Like I wanted to hit him. When he took my sister. I wanted to hit him and hit him and hit him until he’s dead and leaves us alone, just leave us alone, why won’t he leave us alone!”
    “I hated him,” Morlock admitted. “It’s a weakness. But now he is dead and my hate is dead.”
    “Mine isn’t,” the girl said through gritted teeth. “I went out to the yard after you were done cutting him, I