The Knight

I stopped thinking about all that stuff because I had seen the stair. On that skyscraper it looked like a cobweb, stretching up and up to a sort of crevice way up high. The sun on that stair and the wall made them look like they were on fire. You wished you had really dark sunglasses or maybe welding glasses. I squinted and shielded my eyes and all the rest, but it did not bother Garsecg.

“Here Setr gathered all the greatest weapons of our world, in order that we might not resist him. He who could sunder mountains would not permit us so much as a dagger. Yet in the end we drove him out.”

I wanted to know if Garsecg thought he would come back.

“He does return at times, then flies again before we can muster our forces. Would you drive us from your Middle World if you could, Sir Able?”

I thought of Disiri, and I made my no as strong as I could get it.

“Many would. Many strive against us even now. Yet we would return someday. It is the same for Setr.”

“All those weapons you were talking about, are they still there?”

Garsecg nodded. “We have been pillaging his trove a thousand years, and the weapons we have taken from it are scattered throughout the worlds.”

“Then they’re gone.”

The next time Garsecg said something, his voice was so low I could barely hear him. He said, “The trove is hardly diminished.”

Chapter 23. On The Stair

You will recall,” Garsecg said when we got to the base of the stair, “that I told you truly that I could not heal your wound, but that the sea would heal it if only you would come to Aelfrice with me.”

I nodded, feeling my wound again to see if it was still gone.

“I promised also that you would be the strongest of all your kind. You are, but it was not my doing but yours, and the sea’s.”

I said, “Are you trying to get me to bitch about all this? I won’t. I owe you. I’ll owe you for the rest of my life.”

He shook his head. “Am I not an honorable man? You owe me nothing whatsoever. I want to make that entirely clear.”

It was not easy to grin at Garsecg, and that may have been the only time I pulled it off. I said, “Okay, I don’t owe you a thing. Only I’d like for you to owe me, because I might want another favor from you sometime. What would you like me to do?”

“Put your foot on the first step.”

I did. “There you go. Now watch this.” I ran up the next hundred or so, then stopped and turned around to look down at him. “Aren’t you coming with?”

“I am,” he called, “but you must go first, and I must warn you that we go into danger.”

I said sure, and climbed some more. And right here I had better stop and make a lot of things a lot clearer.

First off, a couple of hundred steps was nothing on that stair. It went right straight at the skyscraper until it hit it about a quarter of the way up, and it just got steeper and steeper all the time. It was curved about the way a string with a little slack in it would be. There were thousands and thousands of steps.

Second, nobody had to tell me it was dangerous. The steps were hard fire opal, polished like a jeweler would have polished them and so slick you could see your reflection in them. They were about two and half feet end-to-end, and there was no rail.

The third one is really tough for me to get out, but here it is. I kept thinking that Garsecg had really done me three big favors. I had promised Gylf I would never try to ditch him again. I had meant it, and I never did. But he still scared me. Pretty soon I will tell about Mani. He could be scary, too. But no matter how scary he was, he was still a cat. A big cat and a tough cat, but just a cat that could talk. Gylf was plenty big enough to scare people the way he was regular, and I had already guessed that regular was just the way he looked so he would not scare us. The black thing with fangs like daggers, the thing as big as Blackmane, was the real Gylf. Okay, I had not tried to ditch him. But he had stayed on the boat (this was what I thought) when I went off with the Kelpies, and that was fine with me.

Garsecg caught up to me. “I carried you to this isle in order that you might choose some storied weapon for your own, before we asked service of you. You are still young, thus I hoped your eagerness to blood your treasure would lead you to accept the challenge.”

I said sure. I would do it, whatever it was.

“I feared you might consider that trickery, and so I make haste to explain myself. I am glad you do not. Even so, you speak too quickly.”

“No way,” I said. “Those Kelpies told me you wanted me to fight somebody called Kulili. I knew what I was getting myself into.” I had tried looking over the side a while back and I had not liked it. I was keeping my eyes straight to the front. Sort of under my breath I said, “Going down is going to be a lot worse.”

Garsecg said, “Going down may be infinitely easier, Sir Able. Look above you.”

I did. “The black birds?”

“They are not birds. They are Fire Aelf—or they were. These Fire Aelf are Khimairae now.”

“Bad news?”