Gene Wolfe - The Wizard

“Now you know me,” it said to the Earl Marshal, but his eyes were shut tight and would not look.

“I know you, too,” I told it. “This is the seventh and lowest world, the final world, and you are the most low god.”

“I will tell you, and you will worship me, seeing that it is right and good that you do so. Come nearer.”

I did not, yet the distance between us diminished.

Its voice fell to a whisper, and that whisper was the worst thing I have heard. The voice of Grengarm was as pure as the wind beside it. “Know the great secret, which is that the last world is the first—”

Niflheim shook again. Its frozen earth groaned.

“You stand in Niflheim, and Elysion.”

The tremors became more violent. A pillar of ice fell; and its ruin sent ice shards flying, and a cloud of sparkling crystals, like snow. The thing that spoke looked about it, and I glimpsed its fear.

“You see my face,” it whispered, and seemed to hear my thought. “If you could see my back, you would see the Most High God—”

Niflheim broke as it spoke. A crack opened between the place where it sat and the place where I stood. I helped the Earl Marshal rise; I cannot say why I did, but I did.

Perhaps he could not have said why he rose. “For He is me—”

Ice and stones rained all around the thing that spoke. A stone as big as an ox struck it.

“And I am He!”

Even as it spoke it fled, with the frozen earth rolling under its feet like the sea, and stones, ice, and fire of Muspel nearly burying it. I saw its back then, and the back of its head, and they were covered with lumps and running sores.

When we regained Aelfrice at last, we sat surrounded by its beauty, we two, and Aelf came from the forest and the sea with food and gifts. We ate, and an aged Aelf whose beard was of those fall leaves that remain streaked with green drew me aside and whispered, “Our queen is waiting for you.”

“I know,” I said. “Tell her that I’ll come as soon as I have illustrated her message, as she and the kings wished.”

I returned to the Earl Marshal and sat with him, and ate an apple and a wedge of cheese.

“You’re wise,” he said, “and I, who thought myself wise for so long, am a fool.”

“By no means.”

“I couldn’t attain this world of Aelfrice. Harrumph! Not in thirty years. You did it easily, and followed the worlds to the end.”

I nodded.

“I’ve never heard of anyone’s doing that. No one but you. And I, because I came with you.”

I said that someday I would like to go to Kleos, the world above Skai; but it would be years before I tried.

“I wish I could sit here forever,” he told me solemnly “watching these waves and this sky, and eating this food.”

I paid little heed when he said it; but when we rose to return to Mythgarthr, I chanced to look behind us. There he sat with food before him, staring out over the sea, his face rapturous. I stopped to point, and he whispered, “I know.” There are things in Aelfrice I still do not understand.

Even as time in Aelfice runs more slowly than in Mythgarthr, so time in Muspel runs more slowly than time in Aelfrice, and time in Niflheim slower still. We had been away half a day. When we returned, Kingsdoom lay in ruins, the red rag floated over Thortower, and the season was high summer.

We found a woman begging food. We had none to give her, and our coins were worthless—there was no bread to buy “The king’s dead,” she told us, “and Osterlings rule Celidon, eating those they don’t enslave. I have a hiding place.”

She would not show it to us, saying there was room for one and no more. The Earl Marshal asked about his castle of Sevengates, but she knew nothing of it.

“I’d like to go to Thortower,” he told me. “Payn’s my bastard. Did you guess?” He knew a secret way; and I told him I would go with him, hoping to find Wistan. He said, “I must have a sword. I won’t see sixty again and was never a good swordsman. But I’ll try, because I must.”

I said, “That’s all swordsmen do, My Lord.”

We thanked the beggar woman, promised we would bring food when we had found some, and went to the inn. It was a grim business to walk, that fine summer day, and find cobbled streets choked with rubble, shops burned, and people gone. In a public square, the Osterlings had kindled a fire and dined on human flesh. Bones littered the fine paving blocks, gnawed and half burned. “I know of nothing more horrible than this,” the Earl Marshal said.

“I’d a servant,” I said, “who did the same, though he didn’t cook his meat. Thus I’m inured. Is it worse to kill a child, or to eat it before the worms do?”

The inn was still standing, its windowpanes gone and its doors smashed. I called for Pouk and Uns. My shouts brought Uns to a fourth-floor window, but brought a patrol of Osterlings as well. Uns threw rubble from his window, and the Earl Marshal snatched the leader’s sword as soon as I dispatched him, so we fared well enough.

We went up when the fight was over, meeting Uns on the stair. (It was on that stair that a thought from Cloud reached me. Lonely and wild, joyous at the touch of my mind; but fearful, too.) Uns had my shield, he said, and my bow and quiver; we followed him to the lumber room where he had hidden them. “‘N dis, sar. Dis ol’ hat. Ya fergit dis?”

It was the helm, old, as he said, and rusty again. I put it on, and saw Uns sturdy and straight, the Earl Marshal older, knowing, and because he was knowing, frightened.

“Pouk’s gun hum ta see his wife,” Uns told me. “On’y he’s got some a’ yar dings, ta. ’E’s keepin’

‘um fer ya.”

I asked about Wistan, but Uns knew nothing; nor had he more news of the war than we had heard from the beggar woman. We held a council then, speaking as equals. The upshot was that the Earl Marshal and I would go to Thortower as planned while Uns collected the beggar woman we had promised to help, fed her (for he had some food), and packed such possessions as we could carry. We would meet again at the inn and try to reach Sevengates, which might still be holding out.

That decided, I drilled the Earl Marshal with his new sword. It was a saber whetted on the inner edge; he found it unhandy at first, but soon grew fond of it. I thought it too short and too heavy at the tip; but the blade was stiff and sharp, and those are the most important qualities.

We slept, woke after moonrise, and went into the broken lands east of the city. Bushes hid an iron door in a cliff little taller than a lance; the Earl Marshal produced a key and we went in, I fearing we would find we were in Aelfrice.

So it nearly proved. Hands snatched our clothes from the time we relocked the door behind us, and the thin voices of Aelf mocked and challenged us. When the end of the long, narrow tunnel was in sight, I caught one by the wrist; and when the Earl Marshal unlocked a second door and admitted us to the wine cellar, I dragged her into its lesser darkness and demanded her name.

She trembled. “Your slave is Baki, Lord.”

“Who thought she’d have fun with me in that tunnel.” I drew my sword.

“T-to t-take you to Aelfrice where you w-would be safe.”

“Who abandoned me chained in a cell.” I felt no rage against her, no lust for vengeance, only a cold justice that had pronounced sentence already. She did not speak.

The Earl Marshal asked whether I knew “this Aelf.”

“She’s declared herself my slave a thousand times,” I told him, “and I’ve freed her over and over, and neither of us believed the other. Would you like an Aelfslave?”

“Very much.”