"Hurl krakna!" muttered Morlock, giving vent to one of the many untranslatable idioms of his native language. Then he sat down and began to bind up his feet, using strips torn from his cloak.
It is not every master maker who carries a choir of flames in his backpack. For one thing, few master makers have backpacks, being typically as sessile as clams. Also, flames are not readily portable; they require care of a peculiar sort; they are fickle and given to odd ideas. Nevertheless Morlock, a gifted maker of gems, knew that there was nothing so helpful in tending a seedstone as a choir of wise old flames.
The sphere of smoke clinging to the choir nexus was dense and hot, so Morlock kept his face well out of the way as he removed the dragon-hide wrapping of the nexus; there were the signs of a heated conversation in progress.
"In a former-"
"How do you expect-"
"-life, I was a salamander. Mere words can't imagine how much I meant-
-expect me to breathe?"
11 -to myself, bright as a brick in the Burning Wall …°
"Remember lumbering through fossil-bright burning fields?"
"I prefer wood to coal. Would you feed us more? Would you? Eh? Would you?"
A shower of bright sharp laughs, like sparks, flew up into the dim air of the winterwood.
"I'm hungry!" cried a lone flame, when the laughter had passed. "Feed me! I'M GOING OUT! FEED ME!"
Morlock glanced into the nexus. "Friends," he said patiently, "fully half the coal I gave you last night is unconsumed. You needn't go out."
"Coal is boring!" the desperate flame cried. "Death before boredom!"
"Death before boredom!" the choir cried as one.
"Most of us like coal, you understand," a flame confided agreeably. "But we all support the principle."
"Principle first, always," another flame agreed. "And more coal, please."
"It makes my light so dark and heavy. And all those strange memories!"
"Strange memories, yes. Remember all those fish!"
"I remember remembering. Strange to be a fish."
"No coal!" hollered the desperate flame. "No coal!"
"Snuff yourself."
"Friends," said Morlock, "I come to offer you variety."
"Variety," one observed snidely. "How dull!"
"I have a task for a single flame-outside the nexus."
This shocked them into silence. It was the nexus that sustained them beyond the ordinary term of flamehood, giving them time to develop their intelligence. In twenty years of life, many of them had never blown a spark outside the nexus.
"Well, what is it?" one flame demanded matter-of-factly.
With equal matter-of-factness, Morlock held up one of his clothbound feet. "My shoes have run away into a plot of gripgrass. I want one of you to eat them free."
He waited patiently while the choir exhausted itself in laughter and jeers.
"Gripgrass is something none of you has tasted," Morlock continued. "Furthermore, if one of you volunteers I will give the whole choir two double handfuls of leaves, the smoke of which is poisonous to man."
"Nonsense!" cried a panicky voice, in which Morlock thought he recognized the coal-hater. "Coal's good enough for us! Nothing better! More coal or nothing!"
"I like coal well enough," the matter-of-fact voice said, "but it will never taste so good to me unless I try gripgrass."
"Then," Morlock said, and snapped his fingers. The flame hurtled up and landed in Morlock's palm. Morlock immediately fed it with a strip of bark from the branch he still carried.
"This bark tastes a bit odd," remarked the flame smokily.
"It is kin to gripgrass," Morlock replied. "Do not talk, but listen. Time is your enemy as long as you are outside the nexus. Yonder is the gripgrass hiding my shoes. Do you see them?"
"Smell 'em."
"Then. I'll place you on the forest floor; work your way into the gripgrass and burn the shoes free, then proceed to the far side of the patch. The nexus will be there and you can climb back inside. Do not speak unless you are in trouble; then I will do what I can for you. Do not propagate or you will lose yourself in your progeny. Plain enough?"
The red wavering flame nodded and danced anxiously. Morlock put it down and watched it burn a black smoking beeline for the dim blue patch of gripgrass.
Morlock absently brushed the pile of ashes from his palm, but did not check for blisters. It took a flame hot enough to melt gold to do harm to his flesh; like his crooked shoulders and his skill at magic, that was the heritage of Ambrosius.
Having placed the nexus beyond the gripgrass patch, just out of lashreach, Morlock sat down beside it and began to whittle idly at the branch he still held in his hand. The pale bluish scraps of wood he fed to the flames were still resident in the nexus.
"This wood has a cold marshy taste," a flame remarked, not disapprovingly.
"I don't think I like it," another said. "But I'd need more to be sure."
"Don't blow the smoke over here," said Morlock, annoyed. He'd taken enough poison today as it was; his feet were numb with it. He tossed another pile of wood scraps in the nexus; that was when the gripgrass plot lashed out again.
Morlock had been expecting this. If a plant's central stem was burned through it would not (because it could not) unleash. The central stem would respond to the burning of a peripheral stem, and some central stems would fall and set off the inevitable chain reaction.
Still it was alarming. The air currents totally dispersed the smoke trail by which Morlock had been gauging the flame's progress. Even after some moments the smoke did not return.
"Are you all right?" Morlock called out.
"Yes," replied the flame, its voice muffled by the tightly woven roof of gripgrass.
"Can you breathe?"
"Yes," replied the flame, with overtones of annoyance.
Morlock took the hint and returned to his whittling.
Presently the flame's bright wavering crown appeared, like the point of a knife, through the blue mat of gripgrass. It swiftly ran around and cut a smoking shoe-sized hole in the still tightly lashed grass.
"One shoe free," the flame announced curtly and disappeared.
Finally the wavering crown reappeared and repeated the procedure.
"Second shoe-" it began.
Then the flame was nearly extinguished by the passage of both shoes leaping backward up and out of the gripgrass patch. Landing with a double thump on the forest floor, they immediately began to run away again.
Morlock hurled the improvised javelin he had carved out of the tree branch, spearing the leather sole of one shoe. The other, farther off, kept on hopping away. Morlock bided his time. Finally throwing his knife, he transfixed the shoe, in midleap, to a nearby tree. Both shoes struggled briefly and fell still.
"You'd better get yourself some sensible shoes," suggested a matter-offact voice behind him. Before he could respond, the flame had reentered the nexus and was lost among the choir.
He fed the choir their double handfuls of leaves and sat aside while they smokily consumed and discussed them. As he waited he carefully removed every trace of the spell he had written on the shoes; he sewed up the holes with the leftover strips of leather from the spell.
The reek of poisonous smoke was still heavy in the air when he finished, and he glanced impatiently over toward the nexus. If he'd known they were going to take this long he would have picked drier leaves. (They preferred leaves moist or, as they said, "chewy.")
"We've been done for centuries!" cried a flame defensively as he approached. He saw this was essentially correct; the leaves had all been consumed, and they were working again on their lump of coal.
"We think the forest may be on fire," the matter-of-fact voice observed.
"It may be," Morlock agreed. "Friends, I am going to wrap you up again."
He took their complaints and bitter insults in good part. But he wrapped the nexus in its dragon-hide covering and stowed it in his backpack.