Orson Card - Wyrms

"It's probably just the innkeeper," said Reck.

"It's death," said Patience. "Unwyrm will see to it that we meet nothing but death on our way up the mountain."

Ruin thrust open the window. Patience climbed out.

The window hung over a thirty-meter drop. It was too much even for her. But she had always been a good climber, and she saw it would be easy enough to get to the roof. "Trust your human half," she said. "You'll need all your ape ancestry for this." She stood on the sill, reached up to the rain gutter, and pulled herself up.

Reck followed right behind her. Ruin had barely joined them on the roof when they heard a roaring sound.

Flames leaped out of the window of the room they had just left.

"We'll have to be quick about this, won't we?" said Ruin.

"Up," said Patience. They ran along the rooftop to where a ladder connected it to the walkway of the next level. How many kilometers to the glacier at the top of Skyfoot? Patience didn't want to remember. She just set her hands and feet to the ladder and climbed.

SKEN STRUGGLED TO UNTIE WILL, UNTIL HE SAID TO HER, "Wouldn't it be faster to cut it?"

"Oh, now he can talk. Why didn't you say anything before?" She sawed with her dull eating knife. "When I was tying you, why not a word about how you were innocent?"

"Because somebody wasn't innocent, and I didn't know who."

A cord finally separated. "It was Angel."

"I gathered that." His hands and feet came free, once the central knot was cut. He got to his feet quickly-he hadn't been tied long enough to become stiff.

Just as he reached the door, the boxmaster ran by, waving a cudgel and leading a group of highly irregular soldiers. Certainly not the official guard, just a spur-of-the-moment mob gathered to serve Unwyrm's purpose.

Real soldiers would be summoned soon enough. Will decided to make no effort to follow them. He knew Patience and the geblings well enough not to fear for their safety yet. And he had another matter to attend to.

"Is there enough of that cord left. Lady Sken, to bind this fellow before he wakes up?"

Sken stepped into the corridor and joined him beside Angel's unconscious body. "They left him?"

"Unwyrm was urging them on. He doesn't let his people have many distractions."

She prodded Angel with her toe. "Are you sure nobody's home? He's a crafty one."

"Poke him long enough and he's bound to wake up. I don't want his hands free when he does."

Sken tied him-Will knew from experience what an admirable job she could do-and together they carried the old man back into the box. Only then did Will pay any attention to Kristiano and Strings. The old gaunt was awake again.

"What happened to me?" asked Strings.

"Angel thought your story was getting too personal."

"Story? Oh, yes. Yes, my story. I tried to lie. I could feel how much Angel wanted me to lie."

"But you told the truth anyway?"

"The girl. She wanted the truth more than he wanted the lie. It was very distressing. I think I fainted."

"You were helped along."

"I knew him," said Strings. "I knew them all. But Angel-he was a good one, a bright one. When I took him up the mountain, there wasn't a trace of evil desire in him."

"I couldn't even guess what a gaunt thinks is evil," said Sken.

"We think the same as everyone else thinks," said the gaunt. "And like everyone else, our actions have no relation to our opinions of good and evil. I wasn't chosen accidentally as the guide for the Wise. I'm very clever."

"Your dance was beautiful."

"Clever. Merely clever. It's the best a gaunt can hope to achieve. Yes, Krisfiano?" He tousled the hair of the beautiful gauntling beside him. "I am the peak of gauntish ambition. But don't grieve; we are the ultimate innocents.

We are never the cause of our own actions. It allows us to reach a ripe old age untroubled by guilt."

Will thought he heard irony in the old gaunt's tone.

"You knew what you were leading them to?"

He shrugged eloquently. "They all wanted to go."

"I also want to go," said Will. "Will you take me?"

"He doesn't want me to take you," said Strings.

"And he makes the most urgent requests of me. I have never denied him."

"He isn't paying attention to us right now."

Strings looked thoughtful for a moment. "You're right.

It doesn't mean anything, though. He left me alone for ten years. And then three days ago he came to me again.

I've never hurried so fast. I was on the other side of Cranning, playing in a decent place, a palace filled with people of breeding and discernment. Then he made me leave everything and come here, to take a booking like this-I don't like working in this kind of place. The crowd has deplorable tastes. Why do you want me to keep talking?"

"I like the sound of your voice."

"No, you want more than that from me. You want to know-ah. Yes. Well, how can anyone know who a gaunt really is? Am I good or evil? Can you trust me or not? Can you tell him, Kristiano?"

Kristiano smiled. His face had the peaceful sweetness of a saint. Or an idiot.

"How strong are your passions, man? You have the size and strength of a horse, but that's nothing to me. It's the dimension of your lust, your gluttony, your ambition.

You can trust me if your desires are strong and never waver."

"In your list of desires, you mention only evil ones."

"In my experience, they're the ones with vigor. Except the fanatics. I once fell in with a Vigilant, when I was a child. He made me whip him until he bled. And one day such a religious fervor came over him that he died of it. Give me the lust of the sinners before the austerity of the holy men."

"What about your own desires?" asked Will. "You said you have them."

"Oh, I'm a man of passion, all passion, and no achievement.

I have done shameful things. I have led my brothers to the wyrm's maw. Unwyrm isn't kind to his servants.

He doesn't stop us from regretting what we do."

"Until regret is the taste in your mouth in the morning, and the last painful noise in your ears at night."

Will and Strings looked at Angel, who was awake now.

"I know what it is to be a gaunt," said Angel.

"Unwyrm makes gaunts of us all."

"You shut up," said Sken. "That little girl believed in you."

Will looked at her, and at the look on his face she fell silent.

"Except you," said Angel. "Except Will. Strings, can you believe it? Will is one of the Wise. Only he never came to Unwyrm. He was even here in Cranning once, and he never came to Unwyrm."

Will shook his head. "I never felt the Cranning call when I was here. It was only later. When I learned enough to be worth calling."

"I can't untie you," said Strings, regretfully. "This one is so much stronger."

Angel sighed. "Yes, very strong. I tried, you know.

All the way from Cranning to Lord Peace, I tried to disobey. I even tried to kill myself. And later, many times, I wanted to warn Peace, to tell him about the snake that he kept in his own house. But above all that came the desire to stay with Patience, to protect her, to bring her safely to him. I would have killed you if you had tried to sleep with her."

"And now? When he no longer pulls you?"

"Is he truly gone? No wonder I feel so empty. Like a head with an empty air bladder, nothing to say and no breath to say it. I can hardly remember who I was before.

But is he gone? I still love her."

"You tell me."

Angel smiled. "I'm an excellent liar. You can't believe me, especially when I'm most believable. I warn you. Kill me now. It's the only way you can trust me not to stab you in the back."

"There's another way," said Will. "I can keep you in front of me."

"He's gone from me," said Angel. "And I still love Patience. I was so afraid that I wouldn't, that-she's been my life. All I cared about. She's my child-as surely as her father or her mother, I caused her to be alive. I did. Unwyrm can't put knowledge in a human brain-I had to learn it, with my own mind, to understand it. What the Wise before me said could never be undone, I undid. And if I discovered that I had never cared for her, that it was all from Unwyrn, then what was my life, who was I?" Then, to Will's surprise, Angel began to weep. "And all the time, I hoped that I would hate her, that when he-took her from me, when he finally left my mind, I'd find that she was loathsome, and I hated her, and she deserved to be betrayed."