"Hey!" she shouted over the hissing of the wind-driven snow. She wanted him to know she was coming up behind him: he was probably as nervous as she was.
He turned to face her …sort of. There was just a dark patch where his face ought to be, with a slash for the mouth and two holes for eyes. A large dark hump loomed behind the featureless head…. She stopped, stricken by a sudden panic. But then one of his hands tugged at the dark patch and it came down around his neck; it was just a mask against the snow and the freezing wind. The face revealed was the one she expected to see: dark weather-beaten skin with a crooked smile and gray searching eyes that peered at her through the murk. The hump, she now saw, was just his rather large backpack.
"I don't know if you remember me," she said, almost apologetically. "I'm Rhabia. We sort of met back at Thyrb's."
He nodded.
"I thought we could walk together, at least as far as Seven Stones," she forged on.
He nodded again and gestured at the road beside him, as if it was his to give. When she was level with him he began to trudge forward through the snow again.
"It'll probably be safer for both of us," she explained. "There are werewolves nearby. Gnomes, too."
He nodded a third time, and said, "Werewolves are certainly less likely to attack two than one."
"Cowardly beasts," she agreed.
"Just careful," he disagreed, and pulled his mask back up.
"Do you have to wear that thing?" she complained. "It gave me a turn when I saw it."
"I'm wearing it."
"Oh," she said, shrugging. It wasn't like his face was that much more attractive.
"I had to cut off somebody's nose once."
"Oh?" she said, a little alarmed again.
"Frostbite. Now I wear this thing when it's cold."
"Oh."
"You have just said, `Oh,' three times."
"So what if I have? You think your conversation is winning any prizes, with all this talk of nose-cutting and frostbite? What are you, some sort of surgeon?"
"No. I make things. And you?"
"A little of this, a little of that. Right now I'm taking a message from Thyrb to a goldsmith in Seven Stones." The message was a letter of credit for a large sum of money, but Rhabia thought she'd keep that to herself. Not that she anticipated any trouble from this guy, but you never could tell. "He told me he'd pay me double if I got it to the addressee before tomorrow morning, so I headed out in spite of the snowstorm. Now it'll be midnight before I get to Seven Stones and I'll never find the goldsmith before morning, unless he lives above his shop. So here I am freezing my ass off and Thyrb will keep my bonus after all, may Morlock eat his liver."
Her companion turned to look at her and then looked back at the road. She supposed he was offended by her swearing in Morlock's name. Lots of people didn't like it, especially at or near dark, but she thought that was nonsense. It was one thing to be afraid of gnomes and werewolves, which everyone knew were real. But had anyone ever really seen Morlock Ambrosius? Even if he'd ever really lived, that was hundreds of years ago; he wasn't likely to show up here and now.
"I doubt he would," her companion remarked, sounding more amused than offended.
"Who would? Would what?" Her train of thought had distracted her from the conversation.
"I doubt Morlock would chew on Thyrb's liver."
"How would you know?"
"Eh. Who eats liver by choice?"
"There is that, of course," she admitted. "Even on Thyrb there must be more attractive cuts of meat. His heart, for instance, for a very light snack."
"You loathe Thyrb, but you work for him," her companion observed.
"I'll take his money to do a job I'm willing to do, but I don't work for him. I work for myself. You must understand that, being a journeyman …what is it you make, exactly?"
"Many things."
"All right, so you're a journeyman tinker. Someone pays you to mend his kettle, but is he your boss? I ask you."
"I see your point."
"Say, what is your name, anyway?"
Her companion trudged on for a few steps through the knee-high snow without saying anything. Rhabia began to think he might not have heard her (the wind was blowing something fierce) and was about to repeat herself when he said, "As a matter of fact, it's Morlock."
A qualm of fear gripped Rhabia's heart. Here she was, alone in the middle of a howling blizzard, surrounded by werewolves and gnomes, taking a stroll with Morlock Ambrosius…. But, no. It couldn't be him. Her fear receded.
"Isn't that funny?" she said, a trace of nervousness still present in her laugh. "I suppose it causes you a lot of trouble."
"Now and then," Morlock admitted.
"You should change it."
"My name is my name. I don't trust people who go by pseudonyms."
"I suppose some people even think you're Morlock Ambrosius."
"It has happened. What makes you so sure I'm not?"
He's trying to scare nae, Rhabia thought, and laughed again, more confidently. "I've seen you by daylight, Morlock. Yesterday, at Thyrb's Retreat."
"So?"
"Everybody knows that Morlock Ambrosius will turn to stone if he stands in the light of day."
"I didn't know it," Morlock admitted, "and I thought I'd heard all the Morlock stories. Gnomes will turn to stone in sunlight, or so I'm told by those-who-know."
"Well, maybe Morlock is, or was, a gnome? Morlock Ambrosius, I mean, not you."
"No, gnomes, as I understand it, begin as worms living in the intestines of dragons."
"Eww."
"Eh. Neither birth nor death is ever a nice business."
"Wise. Very wise. Get back to the worms."
Morlock made a two-handed gesture that seemed to mean something, and continued, "When the dragon dies, they eat their way out of the corpse and dig into the ground, spinning a chrysalis around them. In due time two gnomes will be born from the chrysalis."
"Two?"
"Yes, the gut-worm of the dragon has both male and female ends. So a male and a female gnome will be born from the chrysalis. Although I'm not sure how they reproduce, if at all."
"Weird. You know a lot about gnomes."
"Never seen one. When I knew I was going to travel through these mountains I asked around about them."
"But everyone says Morlock grew up with the gnomes-"
"Not gnomes. Dwarves. He was raised by the dwarves as a fosterling, after his parents went into exile from the Wardlands."
"Wow. You know a lot about Morlock, too."
"That's more or less inevitable," he pointed out, and she had to concede the point.
"Who was the great mind that named you Morlock, anyway?" she asked.
"It was my mother's idea, I believe. There were a lot of Mor- names in her family: Morgan, Morgause, Mordred, Morholt. Morlock sounded good to her."
"She can't have liked you much. Letting you in for all this confusion with Morlock Ambrosius."
"Well, we never really knew each other. I was raised by foster parents. Dwarves, in fact."
"Screw you," she said amiably, and they walked on for a while without speaking, leaning into the bitter white wind.
Hours later the storm was getting worse, and the day was long gone. If it weren't for the trees lining the road, much of the time they wouldn't even have known where to walk, the snow was so thick. The wind blew it in deep drifts, almost impossible to cross. Then beyond there would be a stretch where the snow hardly covered their toes.
They were struggling through an especially rough patch, now. The snow had been packed into a drift higher than Rhabia's hips. Morlock got a short pointed shovel from his pack and began to clear a narrow way through the drift; Rhabia followed.
"We've got to get to town!" she shouted. "This storm will kill us!"
"We could make some sort of shelter in the woods!" he called back. "But …"
He didn't need to finish. It was no good saving yourself from the storm, only to offer yourself to passing werewolves and gnomes. Damn Thyrb and his letter of credit, anyway, Rhabia thought sourly.