I gasped with the joy of it even before the gleaming metal took her first little souls. Strong little souls. They were helpless against me, yet despite their fear they would not run. Not at first. Tough, hardy bodies pressed around my legs, and I had to force a certain delicacy upon the blade in order to slice away their embracing limbs. They behaved like men who had reached their limit and now did not care if they died. As I pressed forward against them, cutting them down like vermin, they fell back around something they were clearly protecting.
I was curious, even as I continued to kill. My sword possessed my will. She would not cease her feasting. She would not stop drinking until she had drunk every shred of every soul and drawn them shrieking into my eager veins. Half of me was disgusted with my actions, but that half did not control my bloodlust nor my sword arm. I stabbed and slashed and chopped with slow, steady strokes, like a man stropping a razor.
They were now entirely fearless, these little men, as if reconciled to their violent deaths. Perhaps even welcoming them. They came at me with tomahawks and knives and spears and arrows. They even used a kind of sling to fling live snakes at me. I let them strike if they chose. There is no venom known which can kill a Melnibonean noble. We are weaned on venom.
The snakes and arrows were brushed aside by the sword I knew as Ravenbrand. Her speed was a bloody blur. Flint clubs and short, stone swords grazed me but did not cut me. Every pygmy who died wailed in sudden understanding as he gave me fresh life. I laughed aloud in my killing. I let the stolen energy fill me with godlike invulnerability. I lusted to murder and celebrated every stolen soul! Small they might be, but the pygmies were near-immortals and thus rich with supernatural life stuff. After the crude souls of the Ononos, this fairy blood was a delight. It poured into me until I felt my physical form would contain it no longer, that it would all burst out of me.
I fought on, carrying the attack. I laughed at their agony and their fear. Even those who tried to surrender, I killed. I sighed with the sweetness of their slaughter. The majority, however, battled on
with enormous courage, preferring to die bravely, because they knew death was their only future.
Up and down, my sword arm rose and fell as, driven by my old berserk blood-
craze, I pursued groups of the warriors and continued to slaughter even when most of them had finally lost heart for a fight. At last there was only one band left. With their buffalo-hide shields and quartz-tipped spears, they had formed a ring around a pair of large boulders and clearly intended, like their fallen comrades, to defend their position to the death.
I slipped the blade of my sword between the legs of the nearest warrior and dragged the razor-sharp blade upward to cut him neatly in two. He squealed and wriggled like a tortured cat. Most, however, I simply beheaded. It was hard, precise, mechanical work. The creatures were considerably denser than they looked.
At last all that was left of the pygmies was what they had defended. He lay in a small clearing formed by the boulders. A wizened old man spread over the primitive stretcher like a stain. Everywhere around him were piled the corpses of his warriors. Not one was remotely alive. Small, headless corpses, like so many slaughtered chickens. Spattered with the blood of his people, the man must have been over a hundred years old. His skin was thin as tissue paper, and his fingers were like picked bones. He was an animated corpse, an unwrapped mummy, a husk of a creature, yellowed and fading into nothingness with none to mourn him. But his eyes burned with life, and his lips moved, whispering violently and with considerable pain in a patois I could barely understand. A much corrupted Old French dialect? I had learned that it was often a mistake in the multiverse to try to identify a language too closely.
"Would you loot the last of our honor, Prince Silverskin?" He glared angrily at me and tried to lift a hand weakly shaking a bloody rattle decorated with small animal skulls. All he had left was his mockery. "Your folk have taken everything else from us. You leave us nothing but our shame, and we deserve to die." He was neither strong nor unreconciled to death. There was no need for me to finish him. I had always had a distaste for killing the
helpless, which had made me something of a laughingstock as a boy in Melnibone. The old man was already as good as dead, his raspy breath coming with increasing difficulty and slowness. In spite of his afflictions he was able to whisper at me from the rough stretcher on which he lay. "I am Ipkaptam, the Two Tongues."
He was a grey man. The life had been sucked out of him, but not by the sword I now resheathed.
"Are all my people dead?" he asked me.
"All those whom you sent against me," I said. "Why should you wish to have me killed?"
"You are our enemy, Pale Crow, and you know it. You have no soul. You keep it in the body of a bird. You use our own iron against us. You would steal our best-kept treacheries and learn too much about our masters' whims. Does it matter where we are or what we face now? All human aspiration is brought low by human greed and human folly. Now we are tainted by the human curse, and so we fade from this sphere. Is our epic to tell of our self-deception, of our certainty in our own superiority? It is the end of the Pukawatchi. There are only two important realities in this world: starvation and sudden death . . ."
This speech exhausted him. I motioned him gently to silence. But he said:
"You are the man the boy became?"
I could not follow this. I thought he was raving. Then he said clearly, "There are only old people, women and children to weep for the Pukawatchi. Our ancient tribe reconciles itself to the end. We are no more. One day even our name will be forgotten."
My impulse, now that the blood frenzy had passed, was to comfort him, but I did not know how to do so.
I knelt among the raw, red meat I had made of his men and took his withered hand in my gauntleted one. "I meant you no harm and would have gone on my way if you had not attacked me."
"I know," said the old man, "but we also knew that our death time had come. It was written that the black blade would destroy us if we let it go. We have failed in all our ventures. Our oaths lie dry and unfulfilled in dying mouths. It is time for us to die. All our treasures are gone. All our boasts are empty. All our honor has been taken from us. We have nothing to return with save our shame. So we died with honor, trying to take back our black blade. Is it your son, then, who stole it?"
The old man's gaunt features were parchment on bone. His eyes sparked and then faded before I could try to answer.
"Or are you another self altogether?" The shaman rose from his stretcher and reached out, trying to touch me. A soft song whispered on his lips, and I knew that he spoke not to me but to the spirits he believed in. He looked into a world becoming far more real to him than the one he was leaving.
He died upright in an attitude of pride and did not fall back until I laid him down and closed his eyes. His people had died, as they wished, in battle and with honor against an old foe. Their remains looked frail, like children's corpses, and I knew a pang of conscience. Yet these people had been trying hard to kill me. They would be stripping my still-warm body even now, had they won.
In the end I made no attempt to bury them, but rather left them to be cleaned by the carrion-eating birds congregating overhead, drawn in by the stink of a blood-drenched wind.
Soon I could clearly make out what lay before me, but I was no less mystified. I saw a tall black elephant carrying a huge open howdah with what appeared to be a birchbark canoe used as a canopy. Astride the beast was a handsome Indian whose style of costume and decoration resembled the Kakatanawas and was typical of the Indians who had once inhabited the North American woods. A Mohican, perhaps? I guessed him to be some sort of chief. His concentration was not upon the arriving buzzards but on what lay immediately in his field of vision.
The scene was made worse by its absolute silence.
A black, horrible and completely silent tornado, thin and vicious at the base, lowering, thick and menacing above, was almost a perfectly reversed pyr
amid. This edifice of frozen, filthy air blocked the way from shore to island and, with the city as its background, formed a terrifying harmony. The silver trail ended suddenly, as if the tornado had somehow eaten it up. The path across the ice to the city ended as well. I felt I neared the very center of the world. But compared to this, my journey had been easy until now.
All the forces who opposed the Balance were gathering to defend against its saviors. We faced not the opposing philosophies of Law and Chaos, but the Spirit of Limbo-the mindless yet profound creature which yearns for death, which aches for death, but not merely for itself. It demands that all creation shall know oblivion, for all creation is the only equal to that monstrous ego. If other persuasions fail, self-murder and the murder of as many others as possible become the only logical option. I knew from Nazi Germany that from small, mean dreams such egos grow until their nightmares become the condition of us all.
Against all my usual skepticism I was now in no doubt that this barely frozen force was a supernatural tornado. There was also no doubt it intended to block the way of those who confronted it. I knew I looked upon a magical event of some magnitude. From where I had paused, taking what cover I could, I could feel its vibrant evil. A whole world of evil concentrated into this unmoving whirlwind. Were I still a believer, I would have thought myself in the presence of Satan incarnate. I marveled at the courage of the single warrior facing it.
All around me now was that awful, oppressive stillness. Progress forward was nearly impossible. I felt as if I waded through heavy water rather than air.
The great beast was a mammoth, and like the Indian, it was frozen in motion.
Then I saw a woman's figure in the shadow of the giant pachyderm. An arrow fitted to her bow, she faced the tornado. Over her slender shoulders was a beautiful white robe, thrown back to allow her the shot.
Time was standing still here. Even my own actions grew more sluggish by the moment.
I forced my way forward, hoping that my eyes were not merely
trying to console me that the figure I saw was who I thought it was.
A little nearer and I was certain. It was Oona! I tried to move in her direction when suddenly I was overwhelmed by a mighty, deafening noise. It was like the note of a horn, echoing through every dimension of the multiverse. Echoing on and on forever.
The tornado shrieked and sniggered and raged. It had come fully alive now! I saw fiendish faces within it and limbs of sorts.
My hair and clothes were whipped backward. I felt my body sucked at, clutched at, investigated. The wind became even more aggressive. The whole scene was alive now.
Through all this wild bluster came the sweet, clear note of a flute. My wife was nocking her arrow to her bow. I feared to call out and distract her. What did she hope to do? Did she think she could kill a whirlwind-and a supernatural whirlwind at that- with an arrow? Why was Oona walking so calmly towards her death? Did she not sense the thing's power? Was she in a fresh trance? Dreaming within a dream?
And who, or what, had sounded the horn I heard?
Again, instinct took charge of my will, and without a second thought I ran towards the causeway, shouting to Oona to stop, to wait. But she did not hear me above the terrible shriek of the tornado. She walked slowly, with an odd, unnatural gait. Was she entranced?
The tall Indian seemed to know me. He tried to stay me with his hand. "Only she can make the Silver Path across the ice. Wherever she passes, that will give us our way. But she goes against the Winds of the World. They are Winds gone mad. She goes against Lord Shoashooan."
I yelled something back at him, but that, too, was snatched from my mouth by the railing currents.
A sudden cut of cold wind slashed across my face, momentarily blinding me. When I could see again, Oona was gone.
Behind me I sensed a presence.
The Indian was climbing onto the back of the mammoth. Behind him, marching down the beach, came a group of warriors
who appeared to have stepped off the set of Gotterddmmerung. Save for the fact that not all were Scandinavians, I confronted as unwholesome looking a bunch of hardened Vikings as I had ever seen. Immediately I reached for my sword.
The leader stepped forward out of the press. He wore a silvered mirror helm. I had seen it before. I knew him. And something in me, however terrified, knew the satisfaction of confirmed instinct. My instincts had been right. Gaynor the Damned was abroad again.
If I had not recognized him by his helm I would have known him by that low, sardonic laughter.
"Well, well, Cousin. I see our friend heard the sound of my horn. He seems to have inconvenienced you a little." He held up the curling bull's horn, covered in ornate copper and bronze, which hung at his belt. "That was the second blast. The third will bring the end of everything."
And then he drew his own blade. It was black. It howled.
I was desperate. I had to help my wife. Yet if I did so now, I would be attacked from behind by Gaynor and his brutish crew.
Then it was as if Ravenbrand had seized my soul, conscience and common sense, and I found that I'd drawn it again without thought.
I began to advance towards the armored Vikings.
I heard the thin, sweet sound of a bone flute. It echoed like a symphony around the peaks. Gaynor cursed and turned, flinging his hatred towards the Indian, who sat cross-legged upon the neck of the mammoth, his eyes closed, his lips pursed, playing his instrument.
Something was happening to Gaynor's sword. It twisted and shivered in his hand. He screamed at it. He took it in both hands and tried to control it, but he could not. Was I right? Did the flute actually control the sword?
Then my own sword almost dragged me towards the causeway and my wife. Behind me I heard the shouts of Gaynor and his men. I prayed they were diverted by the Indian. I had to help my wife, my dearest love, my only sanity.
"Oona!"
My voice was turned to nothing by mocking breezes. Every time I tried to call out, the wind stole my every sound. All I could feel and hear were the vibrations in the sword which had somehow found a common harmony with the whirlwind. Did I carry a traitor weapon? Did this sword bear some loyalty to the howling black tornado in whose depths I now made out a glaring, gleeful face, delighting in what it would do to the lone woman still walking towards it, arrow nocked to bowstring, stance resolute, as if she were about to take a shot at a stag?
Black fog jetted out of the tornado. Long tendrils swam to surround and engulf Oona, who stepped in and out of the tangle like a girl playing hopscotch, her arrow still aimed.
And then she loosed the arrow.
The gigantic, inverted pyramid of air and dust began to shout. Something very much like laughter issued from it, a sound which turned my stomach. I ran all the faster until I was standing on the causeway which now moved like mercury under my feet. It took me several moments to regain my balance and discover that I did not need to sink into it. With an effort of will I could walk along it. With even more effort, I could run.
And run I did as Oona let fly a second arrow and a third, all in a space of seconds. Each arrow formed the points of a V in the thing's face. It raged and foamed, seeking to shake the arrows loose. Its eyes were full of a knowing intelligence, yet one which had lost all control of itself. Lord Shoashooan was still grinning, still laughing, and again his tendrils were curling, tightening, drawing my wife into the depths of his body.
The flute's note rose for a third time.
Oona was violently ejected from the body of the tornado. Clearly the arrows had worked some mysterious magic in conjunction with the flute. She was flung back to the Shining Path and lay, a tiny heap of bones, covered by that bright, white buffalo robe, on the shifting quicksilver.
I yelled to her as I ran past with no time to see if she still lived,
so determined was I to take revenge and stop the creature from attacking her again.
I was swallowed by an ear-piercing shriek, inhaling foul air and confronting an e
ven fouler face which leered at me from the depths of the wind. It licked dark blue lips and opened a yellow maw and extended its tongue to receive me.
Instead, the green-brown tongue was cut in two by my Raven-brand, which yelped its glee like a hound in chase. Another movement of the blade and the tongue was quartered. Intelligence again bloomed in those hideous eyes as it realized it was not dealing with an ordinary mortal but with a demigod, for with that sword bonded to my flesh I knew that I was nothing less. A mortal able to wield the powers of gods and to destroy gods.
Nothing less.
I began to laugh at those widening eyes. I grinned in imitation of its bloody mouth as it swallowed its parts back into its core and re-formed them. And while it used its own energy to restore itself, I struck again, this time at one of the glaring eyes, cutting a slender thread of blood across the pupil. The monster moaned and cursed in painful anger. Oona's arrows had weakened him.
I struck at the smoky tendrils as if they were flesh, and the sword cut through them. But Lord Shoashooan was constantly forming and re-forming himself, constantly spinning himself into new guises within his inverted cone as if he tried to find the best way of destroying me.
But he could not destroy me. I fed off the stolen souls of scores of the recently dead. Fresh souls and, moreover, no demon duke to share them with. I knew that familiar, horrible ecstasy. Once tasted it was always feared, never forgotten, always desired. The vital stuff of all those I had killed filled my human body and turned it into something at once unnatural and supernatural, the conduit of the sword's dark energy. Oona was a forgotten rival. Now I belonged to the sword.
Deep into the being's vitals the sword plunged. Only Raven-brand knew where to stab, for only she was completely on the same plane as the demon lord whose powers I had once sought to
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