Orson Card - Wyrms

When Will and Sken climbed aboard the boat and began unlashing the buoy, Patience spoke her decision.

"Bring the boat ashore."

"At that place!" said Sken. "I will not! We'll pass a dozen better inns before nightfall."

Patience smiled and spoke to River. "The pilot sets the course, the captain rules the life aboard the ship, but the owner says what ports the ship will visit. Am I right?"

River winked at her.

Sken cursed, but instead of raising sail again, she and Will poled the boat to shore.

They touched the ragged-looking pier that ran out into the river and tied the boat fast. Leaving Sken to keep watch over Angel, Patience led Will and the geblings ashore. Angel demanded to be taken along. Patience ignored him. She didn't feel the same need to defer to him that she had felt before he started lying to her.

There wasn't much of a path up the hill. Patience let Ruin lead the way-he could find a trail on bare rock in a rainstorm, or so it seemed. Reck and Will fell into place behind her. It was as though she were truly Heptarch, with an escort before and behind; or a prisoner, with keepers to cut off all escape.

The hilltop house was even shabbier than it had looked from below. The windows were unglazed and unshuttered, and the smell of the yard out back made it plain that the pigs were responsible for washing themselves. "Could it be that no one lives here now?" asked Patience.

Ruin grunted. "Fire's lit."

"And there's fresh water in the kitchen," added Reck.

Patience turned to Will. "Is there anything they can't find out with their noses?"

Will shrugged. Not too bright, thought Patience. But what could you expect of the sort of man who'd live with geblings?

Their knock on the door brought a quick shout from inside. A female voice, and not a young one. "I'm coming!" The cry was in common speech, but the accent told Patience that it was not her native tongue. And sure enough, it was a dwelf, smaller than the geblings, with the half-size head that made them look spectacularly repulsive.

"From a dwelf we're supposed to get answers?" asked Ruin, with his usual tact.

The dwelf frowned at him. "To a goblin I'm supposed to give them?"

"At least she speaks in complete sentences," said Reck.

But it was Patience who reached out her hand for the dwelf to lick her fingers. Custom satisfied, the dwelf invited them in, and immediately led Patience to what was obviously the seat of honor near the fire. Will, as always, hung back to stand by the door. He never seemed to consider himself to be part of what was going on.

Only a watcher, a listener. Or perhaps not even that, perhaps an accessory, like a horse, to be brought forward only when needed.

The dwelt brought them boiling water and let them choose the leaves for the tea. Patience inquired about the possibility of getting rooms with closable windows for the night.

"That depends," said the dwelf.

"On what? Tell us the price."

"Oh, the price, the price. The price is good answers for my questions, and good questions for my answers."

"You can never communicate with a dwelf," said Ruin impatiently. "You get more intelligent conversation from trees."

He spoke in Geblic, but it was obvious that the dwelf had at least caught the gist of what he said. Patience suspected that she actually understood Geblic, which would make her much brighter than usual for her kind.

"Tell us," said Patience, "what sort of question you have in mind?"

"Only the Wise stay here," said the dwelf. "The Wise from all lands, and they leave behind their wisest thoughts before they go."

"Then we've come to the wrong place," said Patience.

"All the Wise left our lands before I was born."

"I know," said the dwelf sadly. "But I make do with what comes along nowadays. You wouldn't happen to be an astronomer, would you?"

Patience shook her head.

"You have an urgent need for one?" asked Reck.

"Oh, not urgent, not urgent. It just seems to be a lost art, which should surprise you, considering that we all came from the stars."

"She did, and the big one at the door," said Ruin. "The rest of us are native born."

Tilt The dwelf smiled a little. "Oh," she said. "You think geblings are natives here?"

Now, for the first time, Patience began to wonder if she shouldn't take this dwelt seriously, not just out of courtesy, but because she might know something of value. Certainly her hint that the geblings were also starborn & I implied that her ideas would at least be interesting. Interesting enough that Angel ought to be here. She might be annoyed with him, might not trust him, but Patience was not such a fool that she would reject the possibility of profiting from what truth he would tell her. She turned to Reck. "Do you think Will would go down and bring Angel up?"

Reck looked annoyed. "I don't own Will," she said.

Since Will acted far more like a slave than Angel did, Patience thought Reek's pretense of not controlling him was ridiculous. Will never did anything unless Reck had given him permission first. Still, Patience offered no retort, but merely turned to Will and asked if he thought he could carry Angel up to the inn. Will said nothing, but left immediately.

"Why are you sending for more of your party," asked the dwelf, "when I haven't said that you could stay?"

"Because Angel is the closest thing to a wise man we have with us. He's a mathematician."

"He's a nothing, then. Numbers and more numbers. Even if you understand enough to ask the questions, the answers mean nothing at all."

This delighted Patience, who had said much the same thing to Angel on more than one occasion. She could have recited Angel's answer, too, since she had memorized it from the sheer repetition. Instead, though, Patience took the dwelf at her word. She offered answers, so why not ask the question that mattered most? "Let me ask you a question. Who and what is Unwyrm, and what does he want?"

The dwelf smiled in delight, jumped to her feet, and ran out of the room.

"If she has the answer to that," said Reck, "then she knows what no other living soul knows."

Soon the dwelf came bounding back into the room.

"Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor," she said. "His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." She beamed with pride.

Ruin cut in, impatiently. "Anybody could make up this kind of mix of truth and speculation-"

"Hush," said Patience. Then, to the dwelt, she said, "I'm sorry, I missed part of that, where you said-"

Before she could finish, the dwelf said it again. "Unwyrm is the brother of geblings, gaunts, and dwelfs, and the son of the Starship Captain's possessor. His mother once had the whole world, and he wants it back." Again she smiled the identical smile. It was as if they had seen the same moment twice. The dwelf was giving an answer that she had memorized.

Ruin looked at Reck, then smiled. "All right, now let us give you a question," said Ruin. "Where is the mindstone of the ancient gebling kings?"

Patience had little trouble guessing the answer to this question herself, but controlled her own misgivings and feigned ignorance. "What's the mindstone?" she began.

But the dwelf was already up and running out of the room. And while she was gone, Reck and Ruin kept touching each other's faces as if each were studiously forming the other's likeness in clay. Patience decided there was more to their question than a mere test. And sure enough, when the dwelf came back into the room, they turned to her and waited intently for her reply, showing more interest than Patience thought their stolid faces could ever show.

"The mindstone of the gebling kings, which became the scepter of the Heptarchs, is imbedded in the shoulder nothing, trying to keep her face a mask of polite bafflement. There was no way this dwelf could possibly have known about her father's secret.