Morlock was facing similar challenges, but not voluntarily. He was trying to retain a thread of his sanity untainted by the rising tide of madness in his mind. For long stretches of the day and night he could not see or hear anything that made sense. He would sit with his back against the wall amid a cloudy chaos of nothingness that masked the world. There was pain also: a steady knifelike pain radiating from the spike in his head, and cascades of dull aches in his joints that came and went.
If he had been himself in the midst of these distortions, it might not have been so bad. But, increasingly, he was not. Day after day he became more concerned that his fingers were growing backward into his hands, his hands withdrawing into his arms. He spent hour after hour measuring his hands against the bricks in the cell walls. He always seemed to get different results-sometimes encouraging, sometimes not.
There were times he knew his obsessions were just that: the madness working its way into his mind. But, in a way, that made it worse. There was nothing he could do to stop the madness. If he ever made it free from the cell, he would still be a prisoner of the madness.
He wondered, too, if he had the courage to leave the cell anymore. Khretnurrliu was outside all the time, now, very close to the bars. Often he held his severed head through the bars, and the rotting lips whispered silent threats and unspeakable curses against the man who had killed him. The only way Morlock could escape was to not be that man somehow. The madness, the cell, became his refuge. He feared the ghosts and the freedom that lay without.
Hate could help him with this, and sometimes he drank deep of it, trem bling with the desire to kill his tormentors as he had killed Khretnurrliu. But this, too, had its dangers. Like any strong drink, like any drug, the rage left behind it a cold absence, a weakness that only the return of rage itself could heal.
In the arena of his mind, in the chaos of his heart, he fought thousands of battles every day. Sometimes, through the dim distorting vision of the world-as-it-was, he saw Rokhlenu peering at him with deep concern. He would have allayed his friend's concern if he'd known how.
Fortunately, Morlock's obsessions, his endless internal war, the fog he lived in day and night-all these things made him a very boring prisoner. Occasionally he engaged in low-voiced conversations with Rokhlenu, but apart from that he sat by the cell bars day and night, rocking back and forth and flexing his muscles to keep from cramping. The guards kept close watch on him at first, but eventually they grew used to seeing him there and they relaxed their vigil.
It was necessary to sit by the doorway for a simple reason. Khretnurrliu was always just to the left or right of his field of vision. If he stayed by the door and refrained from looking into the cell, Khretnurrliu could not enter. It was a simple and reasonable solution to keep the ghost from entering and destroying them. Rokhlenu, when Morlock explained the matter to him, eventually agreed, although they didn't have many conversations after that. More often, Morlock saw him in low-voiced converse with Hrutnefdhu on the other side of the cell door.
Morlock had long ago twisted his old bandages into a strangling cord, wrapping it around his wrist as if it were a bracelet. He didn't doubt he could use it effectively against the guards, or at least one of them, if he could somehow get into the corridor. Rokhlenu could take care of another. If they were quick enough, each might use a fallen guard's weapon on another guard. All that was possible, if they could get into the corridor.
But what could they do against Khretnurrliu? That was the real question, and Morlock gnawed at it alone through the lonely days and hours, as Rokhlenu didn't seem interested in discussing it. Morlock knew little about trapping or combating ghosts, and what little he knew involved the Sight that was now lost to him.
He had once seen the execution of a criminal in the Anhikh Komos. After expulsion from the city communion, the malefactor was beheaded and his limbs bound with a light thread to keep the ghost from roaming about, malefacting even after death. Morlock had pointed out to a local that the thread wasn't much of a bond, and the local had told him it wasn't meant to bind the dead body but the ghost. Perhaps that was what he could do about Khretnurrliu: bind the ghost with a rope of light thread.
Morlock thought he could probably make a thread from his own hair, which was getting pretty long. He chose the grayer hairs on the grounds that they were more likely to baffle the grayish rotting ghost: like is always frustrated by like. He knotted a great length of the grayish hairs together over a number of days, working with his hands behind his back or under his legs so that the guards and Khretnurrliu could not see.
He tested his first attempt and it broke on the first tug. That annoyed him, and it also raised the latent maker in his madness. He could make a better thread than that-and did, though it took many days and many wild hairs. In the end he had a long thin string of grayish twine that was fairly strong. He himself could break it, but he didn't think Khretnurrliu could, not with his muscles hanging off his bones in greenish strands.
It was a trivial accomplishment, in a way, but it gave him a fierce satisfaction. He would have boasted about it to Rokhlenu, but of course that would give everything away. Anyway, Rokhlenu wasn't very communicative lately. He was very kind and very patient, reminding Morlock to eat and drink when he forgot (as he invariably did), but Morlock did not want kindness or patience in response to this heroic deed. He wanted awe or nothing. If he could explain to Rokhlenu how important the problem was, maybe he could spring the twine on him as a solution and get an appropriate response. But it would require distraction on the guards' part if he were to escape their attention, and he thought this unlikely. He looked up and glanced at them.
He saw, with some surprise, that there were only two: one in the day shape, one in the night shape. The day-shape guard was not an archer-anyway, he didn't have a bow. They were both werewolves of very little bite; the wolf had only one tooth on a cord around his neck; and the man had only a cord with no teeth. The man was looking idly down the corridor; the wolf was asleep.
Morlock was astonished, and more than a little offended. Didn't they know how dangerous he was? Didn't they have any sense of responsibility? He looked at Khretnurrliu, who was wearing the rotting body of a decapitated wolf today, and somehow he knew his enemy was as offended as he. Morlock was minded to complain about it, although he didn't know who would listen.
Then his attention was speared by something else. The grayish iron of the bar securing the cell gate was almost exactly the same color as the silvery twine he had labored so long to make. He wondered if the twine was strong enough to sustain the weight of the metal bar. He thought it was. If he could manage to loop the twine around the bar unobserved, there was a good chance he could ease it out of its slot and throw the cell door open.
He wished there were some way he could warn Rokhlenu of his plan, but there wasn't. Rokhlenu was very difficult to talk to lately; Morlock wondered if his cellmate might be going mad. The thought of insanity bothered Morlock very much; he hated the thought of losing his selfhood that way. He was glad he wasn't going insane. But if Rokhlenu was, there was little he could do but kill him before Morlock caught his illness: it was the reasonable thing to do.
Or was it? There was some reason why Morlock should not kill Rokhlenu; he was sure of it. Only he couldn't remember what it was. It would certainly be good to have someone fighting alongside him in the corridor.
Neither of the guards was looking. The one was still asleep. Morlock unobtrusively tossed a loop of twine for the end of the lock-bar …and missed.
Morlock was shocked. He could not remember the last time he had thrown anything at anything and missed. On the other hand, he couldn't remember much at all. His time in prison might have lasted only a few days or weeks, but everything before it seemed faint and unreal. Perhaps he really wasn't much good at throwing things.