"He does return at times, then flies again before we can muster our forces. Would you drive us from your Middle World if you could, Sir Able?" I thought of Disiri, and I made my no as strong as I could get it.
"Many would. Many strive against us even now. Yet we would return someday. It is the same for Setr."
"All those weapons you were talking about, are they still there?" Ga.r.s.ecg nodded. "We have been pillaging his trove a thousand years, and 157.
the weapons we have taken from it are scattered throughout the worlds."
"Then they"re gone."
The next time Ga.r.s.ecg said something, his voice was so low I could barely hear him. He said, "The trove is hardly diminished."
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CHAPTER 23.
ON THE STAIR.
Y ou will recall," Ga.r.s.ecg said when we got to the base of the stair, "that I told you truly that I could not heal your wound, but that the sea would heal it if only you would come to Aelfrice with me."
I nodded, feeling my wound again to see if it was still gone.
"I promised also that you would be the strongest of all your kind. You are, but it was not my doing but yours, and the sea"s."
I said, "Are you trying to get me to b.i.t.c.h about all this? I won"t. I owe you. I"ll owe you for the rest of my life."
He shook his head. "Am I not an honorable man? You owe me nothing whatsoever. I want to make that entirely clear."
It was not easy to grin at Ga.r.s.ecg, and that may have been the only time I pulled it off. I said, "Okay, I don"t owe you a thing. Only I"d like for you to owe me, because I might want another favor from you sometime. What would you 159.
like me to do?"
"Put your foot on the first step."
I did. "There you go. Now watch this." I ran up the next hundred or so, then stopped and turned around to look down at him. "Aren"t you coming with?"
"I am," he called, "but you must go first, and I must warn you that we go i nto danger." I said sure, and climbed some more. And right here I had better stop and make a lot of things a lot clearer.
First off, a couple of hundred steps was nothing on that stair. It went right straight at the skysc.r.a.per until it hit it about a quarter of the way up, and it just got steeper and steeper all the time. It was curved about the way a string with a little slack in it would be. There were thousands and thousands of steps. Second, n.o.body had to tell me it was dangerous. The steps were hard fire opal, polished like a jeweler would have polished them and so slick you could see your reflection in them. They were about two and half feet end-to-end, and there was no rail.
The third one is really tough for me to get out, but here it is. I kept thinking that Ga.r.s.ecg had really done me three big favors. I had promised Gylf I would never try to ditch him again. I had meant it, and I never did. But he still scared me. Pretty soon I will tell about Mani. He could be scary, too. But no matter how scary he was, he was still a cat. A big cat and a tough cat, but just a cat that could talk. Gylf was plenty big enough to scare people the way he was regular, and I had already guessed that regular was just the way he looked so he would not scare us. The black thing with fangs like daggers, the thing as big as Blac kmane, was the real Gylf. Okay, I had not tried to ditch him. But he had stayed on the boat (this was what I thought) when I went off with the Kelpies, and that was fine with me.
Ga.r.s.ecg caught up to me. "I carried you to this isle in order that you might choose some storied weapon for your own, before we asked service of you. You are still young, thus I hoped your eagerness to blood your treasure would lead you to accept the challenge."
I said sure. I would do it, whatever it was.
"I feared you might consider that trickery, and so I make haste to explain myself. I am glad you do not. Even so, you speak too quickly." 160.
"No way," I said. "Those Kelpies told me you wanted me to fight somebody called Kulili. I knew what I was getting myself into." I had tried looking over the side a while back and I had not liked it. I was keeping my eyes straight to the front. Sort of under my breath I said, "Going down is going to be a lot worse." Ga.r.s.ecg said, "Going down may be infinitely easier, Sir Able. Look above you."
I did. "The black birds?"
"They are not birds. They are Fire Aelf--or they were. These Fire Aelf are Khimairae now."
"Bad news?"
"They serve Setr. We are shapechangers, we Aelf."
I remembered Disiri and how she had been a bunch of different girls for me, and I said, "Yeah, I know."
"Setr cast those into the shape you see. He is a shapechanger himself, so potent that he can lend great strength to others. As they are, he made them. They cannot break his spell."
High above a shrill voice screamed, " Will not!"
"They guard his tower still,". Ga.r.s.ecg told me, "or try to." I was thinking it was like a big video game, except I was on the screen. Or virtual reality maybe. I sort of felt my head for the gear, but there was not any and just then a Khimaira swooped down at me, pulling up just before I could grab it, a little starved body, mostly black but red at the cracks, with claws and jaws and black bat wings.
"They hope to convince you that they pose no serious threat," Ga.r.s.ecg muttered. "Now that you have seen them, they fear you will turn back."
"I don"t think so."
"When we have climbed higher, they will cast us from the stair. If we fight, we will surely fall. Shun them, and climb as fast as you can. In the tower we will not be safe from them, yet the tower is to be preferred." I stopped and looked back at him, thinking about how old he was. "Aren"t they going to try to kill you too?"
"These Khimairae have sought my life before," he said. I went up about a hundred more steps, and one whished past so close I could smell it. Another went in back of me, and its wing brushed my head. 161.
"Look about you," Ga.r.s.ecg warned me. "Heeeeaaaar!"
I looked back at him instead. Only he was gone, and where he had been there was a kind of alligator with horns, as big as a cow, and ten or twelve legs. The legs had suckers, and all the suckers were grabbing on to the steps. It lashed its tail and raised its head and roared at the Khimairas, snapping at any that came close. Just then one blindsided me. I fell and barely caught the edge of the stair with the fingers of one hand. They were slipping, and I knew I was going to die when a sucker closed around my wrist and heaved me back up onto the steps.
I was still grabbing and shaking when the alligator"s mouth opened and I saw Ga.r.s.ecg"s face inside it. He said, "Recall the sea. And run!" I was so scared I could hardly stand up, but as soon as I did, a big wave caught me from behind. Do you know what I mean? My legs ached too, but that did not matter. I went up those stairs like I was flying, three steps at a time. They kept hitting me, or trying to, and once I stumbled. But I never stopped until one dropped down on the step ahead of me with a sword in each hand. It was black and all bones and wings, and its lips would not quite cover its teeth. But the eyes seemed wrong. They were those yellow-fire eyes all the Aelf have, even the Kelpies and the ones who gave me Gylf, the same kind of eyes Disiri used to have even when the rest looked just like a human girl. When I looked at them all I could think of was her.
It opened out its wings when it saw I had stopped. With those big black wings open it looked as big as a house. "You musst fight usss." Its voice was mostly hiss, but you could understand. "Ssee? I have sswordss for uss both." It held one out hilt first, but I did not take it. I hit the pommel with the flat of my hand instead and drove the sword backward into the Khimaira"s chest. Its eyes got big and scared then, and stuff that was not quite blood spurted out of the wound, and it fell off the stair. I thought that had been pretty easy, but b efore I could take another step, five hit me all at once, not to knock me off but grabbing me and lifting. I had one on each leg and one on each arm, and one had its claws in my hair. They flew with me so fast it was like falling up in a hurricane. I saw there were windows and balconies and arches and torn places in the sides of the skysc.r.a.per, and way up above us but getting closer and closer was Mythgarthr: trees and people, animals and mountains.
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About then the one that had my left ankle yelled like it was scared and let go and peeled off, and I figured they were going to drop me, so I wrenched around and grabbed the wrists of the ones holding my arms. After that I kicked off the one that had my other leg. Their wings went even faster, but we started losing alt.i.tude. The one who had my hair said, "We fall!" and I told him to land me on the steps, but he let go instead.
After that, the one that had been holding on to my left arm screamed we were going to die. I kept yelling land on the steps, and we did, coming down too fast and crashing on them. It was not easy to keep hold of the Khimairas the way I did, but I did it, and as soon as I got my breath I banged the two of them together until they begged.
I stopped. "You guys work for Setr?"
"Ssetr iss henss."
I banged them together some more. "That"s not what I asked you. Do you work for him?"
"Yess!"
"Okay. Quit. From now on you"re going to work of me."
"We cannot renounsse Ssetr!" They both said that.
"Then you"re gonna die. I"m gonna break your wings and throw you off this thing."
Ga.r.s.ecg came up behind me, not being the alligator anymore. "They are evil creatures, Sir Able, but I ask you to spare them."
That was crazy, and I said so.
"Yet I ask it, Sir Able, for the sake of the good I have done you." I threw one down and got my foot on its neck, and I bent the other one backwards over my knee. I was still hurting from the fall and still scared silly, and I would have killed it then and there for two cents. I leaned down on it, and heard its back creak like a gate in the wind.
"She cannot renounce Setr," Ga.r.s.ecg said to my back. I did not answer, just leaning down some more on the Khimaira.
"Do you owe me nothing?"
I owed him a lot and I knew it, but he was beginning to bug me. I thought about things a little, and then I said, "I owe this whateveryoucallit, too. If it hadn"t been for him, I"d be dead. So I"m going to take him away from Setr so he 163.
doesn"t have to look like this anymore."
After that I bent the Khimaira some more, and it said, "I renounsse him!" I eased up a little. "That"s good. Say it again."
"I renounsse him."
"Say the name. Who are you renouncing?"
"Ssetr. I renounsse Ssetr forever."
I kind of looked over my shoulder at Ga.r.s.ecg. "What do you think of that?" He shrugged. "Are you pleased with a breath?"
"You don"t think it means it?"
"I do not know. Nor does it matter--anyone can say anything. She cannot renounce Setr, as I told you. If a prisoner renounces his chains, do they fall from his wrists?"
"What could she swear by that would make it real?" Ga.r.s.ecg shook his head. "There is nothing."
So I thought about that, and finally I said, "How does Setr make them do whatever he wants?"
"Who knows?"
"Well, she does." I put more pressure on the Khimaira and said, "You listen up. Tell me how he"s got you, or I"ll break your back this minute." Ga.r.s.ecg said a lot more then, but I am not going to write it down here. He wanted me to let the Khimaira go.
"Sslay me," she said. "End my life and end my agony." I let her off my knee and grabbed her by the neck. "You swore by Setr, didn"t you? Admit it!"
"Yess."
About twenty were buzzing us by then, and I decided we had better get i nside quick. I let the other one up and grabbed her too. I made them fold their wings, tucked one under each arm, and ran for it. They did not weigh a lot, and the sea was surging all through me. Even so, it was tough going, and when we got inside I was ready to quit. I lifted them up and threw them down, and I made them shut up until Ga.r.s.ecg got there and I caught my breath. It was a really big, huge room, pretty dark, that stunk of rotten meat and mold, and it was so quiet you could listen to your heart beat. The throne at the far end must have been twenty-five feet high and fifty feet wide.
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"Here Setr plans to judge our world," Ga.r.s.ecg said when he got there. "Forcing us to live virtuous lives." I was still mad. I said it sounded like a tall order to me, that even though there were a lot of things I liked about the Aelf I had met, everybody said you could not trust them and they could lie birds out of the trees. I thought Ga.r.s.ecg was going to climb all over me for that, but he looked kind of sad and nodded. I said, "Well, we"re not exactly the most honest people in the whole world either."
Then he said something that surprised the heck out of me. He said, "Yet you are the G.o.ds of Aelfrice."
I had never heard anything like that before. (Okay, really I had, but I did not remember it.) I knew he was serious from the way he said it, and I did not know how to react. I did not want to show it, and I wanted time to think about it, so I grabbed one of the Khimairas and asked again if she renounced Setr, and when she said yes, I told her to go back to being a regular Aelf, because I liked that shape a lot better. She tried, but she could not.
I told Ga.r.s.ecg he had been right. "You probably know Disiri," I said. "I know her too, and she did some shape changes for me once. It didn"t seem like it was hard at all for her. Was it hard when you turned into the alligator with all the legs?"
He shook his head. "It is a matter of concentration, Sir Able. Observe." Before he said that last word he had started to melt and flow. I know you do not know what I mean, even if you think you do. But that is the only way I can describe it. You know about Claymation? It was like that, like somebody I could not see was molding him between shots. He started looking like me. (I mean the way I looked after Disiri got through with me.) He looked more and more like me until he would have fooled everybody on the ship. There was no smoke, but I did not think about that.
That was when I first noticed his eyes. I have probably said a couple dozen times that all the Aelf had those yellow fire eyes. Up until then it had not b othered me that Ga.r.s.ecg did not. Before, he had bushy blue eyebrows, and the eyes deep in. The alligator"s eyes had been really small, and I guess I had not paid a lot of attention. When he looked like me, his eyes were easier to see and I looked at him harder. And he did not have Aelf eyes at all. He did not have hu-Gene Wolfe - The Knight 165 man eyes, either. Or cat eyes or dog eyes or anything like that. His eyes were a high wind on a dark night.
I had been scared plenty already, and that scared me a lot more. I pretended I had not noticed, but I was shaking inside. To cover up, I told the other Kh imaira to renounce Setr. She would not, and I said, "Even if he made you look ugly and stay there?
What did he ever do for you?"
"We ressieved nothing," the first one said, "ssave thesse sshapes. We were promissed great benefitss, alwayss to be paid when the nexst ta.s.sk wa.s.s done." The one I had been talking to nodded. "Alwayss another ta.s.sk." Ga.r.s.ecg stepped between them and me. "That being so, as I know it is, why will you not renounce Setr as your fellow did?"
That one stepped around him and knelt to me. "Lord, I will sserve you in all thingss whatssoever. Iss that not enough? I ssaved you jusst as Baki did. a.s.sk what sservice you wissh, and you sshall resseive it."
I needed thinking time, so I said, "What"s your name?"
"Your sslave iss Uri, Lord."
Ga.r.s.ecg was changing again, going back to the way he had usually looked.
"You must not suppose, Sir Able, that those are their true names, of use in weaving spells."
"Yess, yess!" they said. "They are!"
Well, I had wanted to think. And sometimes I really do. I had been wondering about certain things, like why Ga.r.s.ecg"s eyes did not look right and why he wanted me to let those two khimairas go. So I said, "It"s not always a real good thing to throw around real names, is it? Like, Abie"s just what everybody calls me here. Is it all right if I use your real name? Or should I just keep on saying Ga.r.s.ecg?"
Ga.r.s.ecg said, "You are correct. Do not speak my true name, even when we are alone."
"Fine. I guess you know these two whateveryoucall "ems just about killed me."
He shook his head. "I would have saved you." If he was lying, he was a good liar. Which he was.
I said I would not argue, but I felt like he owed me.
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"I will repay you by letting you claim a storied weapon all the world will envy."
"Are you talking about Eterne?"
"No. It is not here, and I am surprised you know of it." I sort of shrugged. "That"s the only one I want, and you were going to let me take something anyhow, so I could fight Kulili for you. I think I"ll take these two instead. They"re quitting Setr, so they ought to take off his uniform. That"s how it seems to me."