Orson Card - Wyrms

"These bonds won't hold me," said Angel. "Either take me with you, or kill me now."

Patience shook her head. "You did me no kindness, Will, to bring him here."

"Kindness was never my purpose," said Will.

"What was your purpose?"

"My purpose is God's purpose."

Ruin laughed aloud.

"And what is God's purpose?" asked Angel scornfully.

"We are his purpose," said Will. "Our life, we who create and discover and build and tear down, we who love and hate, who grieve and rejoice, we are his purpose.

His work is for our kind to live forever, human and gebling, dwelf and gaunt, rising up from the womb and lying down in the grave."

"Very lovely," said Ruin. "But right now our job is to lay Unwyrm in his grave, and the only way to have a chance at that is to put Angel there first."

Patience drew the loop from her hair and let it hang, limp, from one hand. "The more of us who go there to face him, the better. He'll be calling to me, and it'll be hard for him to concentrate on destroying you."

"We hope," said Reck.

"He won't let anyone come close but me," said Patience.

"It's the bow that will kill him, if anything does. Reck."

"Of course," she said. "It's what I was born for."

"But no one understands his body, or where he must be shot to be killed. Ruin, you're the one who has lived with the life of this world. Your intuition is all we have to go on, in knowing where to strike him so he'll die."

"I know," said Angel. "I know where to strike-in his eyes, piercing through to-"

"You know nothing now," said Patience. "He could have lied to you a thousand times, and you would have believed him because you wanted to believe." She walked around Angel, stood behind him. "I think that Unwyrm controls best the minds that he knows best. Angel he would control most easily. But scarcely better than Reck and Ruin and me. He has held us in his grasp so many times that he knows all our pathways as surely as the geblings know the tunnels of Cranning. It will take all our strength just to stand against him. But you. Will, and you, Sken-he doesn't know you. Not the way he knows us. Will can resist him, and Sken-forgive me, but he must not hold you in high regard or he would have called you before now. So you must come last, and stand behind us. Keep the geblings from running away, force them to stand against him, so they can concentrate all their strength on killing him. And in the end, if they fail, then you must kill me before Unwyrm's children are born."

"I'm not a hero," said Sken.

"We aren't here for heroics," said Patience. "We're here for murder. Unwyrm's, if we can manage it. Mine, if we can't."

"They'll begin by killing you, if they can," said Angel. "It's the easiest way to stop his children from being born. You'll have Reek's arrow in you before the end. You can't trust them."

"And you, Angel, my teacher, my friend, my father," said Patience. "How can I leave you behind me, when Unwyrm has only to think of you, and you flinch and cower and obey?"

She whipped the loop around his neck and gave it a quick twist, a slight, delicate pull. Blood flowed from all around his neck. Angel's face held a look of surprise, of wonderment, perhaps even of gratitude. Then he toppled forward off the chair. Patience bent over him, carefully unwinding the loop from his neck. The others looked away to give her a moment of grief. She had done what must be done, and had not put the terrible duty on anyone else. She was the stuff Heptarchs were made of, they all saw that.

"I'm so sorry," said Strings. "So sorry. He was so very very good. And he wants to kill Unwyrm, he truly does."

"Enough," said Will. "It's done."

"He's calling me," said Patience. "It's stronger than I can bear."

"You know," said Ruin, "when it comes down to the truth of it, Heptarch, you are the least reliable of us all."

"I'm going now," said Patience.

"He knows his way through your mind better than anyone's but Angel's, and he cares more about you. He can do what he wants with you. And yet you're the one who made our plan for us."

Patience walked to the door. "Now," she said. She opened the door and walked out into the moonlit snow.

The wind whipped a white dust behind her, like a cowardly shadow retreating into the warm room. Will snatched a lamp from the wall and followed right behind her, with Ruin, Reck, and Sken trotting close after.

Sken was enthusiastic. "Now I finally get to see what this Unwyrm looks like."

The others ignored her. Will was holding Patience's arm; she struggled against his grip, trying to run to Unwyrm. "Slowly, calmly," whispered Will. "I'll hold you back for now, Lady Patience. Remember that none of this is you. All of us face him in you. You aren't alone against him."

The mouth of the cave waited for them in the distance.

"I'm coming," whispered Patience.

Back in the House of the Wise, the old men awoke, yawning and stretching. One of them stumbled over to where Angel lay. "Nasty cut there," he said. He busied himself untying the knots that held Angel's arms together.

Angel opened his eyes. Then he sat up and gently touched his neck. "She cut it close, there. Cut it close."

"Why were we asleep?" asked the man who had untied him.

"It's time," said Angel. "And he has her now." He got up and tore open the lining of his cloak. Three throwing knives were hidden there.

"What happens now?" asked the man.

"You'll see," he said. "You'll see." And then he spoke quietly, to someone who could not hear his words. "Call me all you like. I'm coming."

IT WAS EARLIEST DAWN WHEN THEY PASSED INTO THE CAVE, the first light shimmering in the east. They did not wait for sunrise; the lantern was the light they'd live by now.

Patience led the way. Will's hand gripping her arm with the strength of a tree root. Their passage wound upward through the rock, with an icy stream of water coming down the tunnel. The walls were covered with ice, and so was the tunnel floor; they soon found that if they walked on the frozen ground, their feet slipped, and if they walked in the stream, their feet froze. After half an hour they came to the golden door.

It was just a wooden slab that had once been painted yellow. There was no lock. There was no handle. Dozens of names were scratched in it, and in the ice-slick rock beside it. The door could not have been more than a hundred years old. The names in the rock might have been there for millennia.

Patience was calmer now. Headed toward Unwyrm, she could feel the pressure ease, and she gained some control of herself. The door was the last barrier between them. Even as she longed to pass beyond it, she could feel, like a distant memory, a desperate wish for it to stay closed.

"Resist him as much as you can," said Ruin. "Go as slowly as you can."

Patience just nodded. She was gasping with the effort to stay and listen.

"I'll look at him, try to figure out where the arrow has to go. We know almost nothing about his body, and what parts are vital. We know he has no brain, though. Probably no heart. In the end, we may have to pierce him as often as we can, till he loses enough fluid to die. That's why you have to be as slow as possible. To give us time."

Again Patience nodded.

"All of you," said Will. "All of you listen. We don't know how many of us will be left alive at the end of this.

But whoever lives, if we're too late, and he fathers children on Patience-Angel told me that the children will grow quickly. They must be killed. There may be dozens of them, and they must all be killed because if any of them lives, we've lost."

"They'll be my children," whispered Patience. "Mine."

"God help us," said Sken. "Will they look like worms?"