The Knight

“Then you’re gonna die. I’m gonna break your wings and throw you off this thing.”

Garsecg came up behind me, not being the alligator anymore. “They are evil creatures, Sir Able, but I ask you to spare them.”

That was crazy, and I said so.

“Yet I ask it, Sir Able, for the sake of the good I have done you.”

I threw one down and got my foot on its neck, and I bent the other one backwards over my knee. I was still hurting from the fall and still scared silly, and I would have killed it then and there for two cents. I leaned down on it, and heard its back creak like a gate in the wind.

“She cannot renounce Setr,” Garsecg said to my back.

I did not answer, just leaning down some more on the Khimaira.

“Do you owe me nothing?”

I owed him a lot and I knew it, but he was beginning to bug me. I thought about things a little, and then I said, “I owe this whateveryoucallit, too. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d be dead. So I’m going to take him away from Setr so he doesn’t have to look like this anymore.”

After that I bent the Khimaira some more, and it said, “I renounsse him!”

I eased up a little. “That’s good. Say it again.”

“I renounsse him.”

“Say the name. Who are you renouncing?”

“Ssetr. I renounsse Ssetr forever.”

I kind of looked over my shoulder at Garsecg. “What do you think of that?”

He shrugged. “Are you pleased with a breath?”

“You don’t think it means it?”

“I do not know. Nor does it matter—anyone can say anything. She cannot renounce Setr, as I told you. If a prisoner renounces his chains, do they fall from his wrists?”

“What could she swear by that would make it real?”

Garsecg shook his head. “There is nothing.”

So I thought about that, and finally I said, “How does Setr make them do whatever he wants?”

“Who knows?”

“Well, she does.” I put more pressure on the Khimaira and said, “You listen up. Tell me how he’s got you, or I’ll break your back this minute.”

Garsecg said a lot more then, but I am not going to write it down here. He wanted me to let the Khimaira go.

“Sslay me,” she said. “End my life and end my agony.”

I let her off my knee and grabbed her by the neck. “You swore by Setr, didn’t you? Admit it!”

“Yess.”

About twenty were buzzing us by then, and I decided we had better get inside quick. I let the other one up and grabbed her too. I made them fold their wings, tucked one under each arm, and ran for it. They did not weigh a lot, and the sea was surging all through me. Even so, it was tough going, and when we got inside I was ready to quit. I lifted them up and threw them down, and I made them shut up until Garsecg got there and I caught my breath. It was a really big, huge room, pretty dark, that stunk of rotten meat and mold, and it was so quiet you could listen to your heart beat. The throne at the far end must have been twenty-five feet high and fifty feet wide.

“Here Setr plans to judge our world,” Garsecg said when he got there. “Forcing us to live virtuous lives.”

I was still mad. I said it sounded like a tall order to me, that even though there were a lot of things I liked about the Aelf I had met, everybody said you could not trust them and they could lie birds out of the trees. I thought Garsecg was going to climb all over me for that, but he looked kind of sad and nodded.

I said, “Well, we’re not exactly the most honest people in the whole world either.”

Then he said something that surprised the heck out of me. He said, “Yet you are the gods of Aelfrice.”

I had never heard anything like that before. (Okay, really I had, but I did not remember it.) I knew he was serious from the way he said it, and I did not know how to react. I did not want to show it, and I wanted time to think about it, so I grabbed one of the Khimairas and asked again if she renounced Setr, and when she said yes, I told her to go back to being a regular Aelf, because I liked that shape a lot better. She tried, but she could not.

I told Garsecg he had been right. “You probably know Disiri,” I said. “I know her too, and she did some shape changes for me once. It didn’t seem like it was hard at all for her. Was it hard when you turned into the alligator with all the legs?”

He shook his head. “It is a matter of concentration, Sir Able. Observe.” Before he said that last word he had started to melt and flow. I know you do not know what I mean, even if you think you do. But that is the only way I can describe it. You know about Claymation? It was like that, like somebody I could not see was molding him between shots. He started looking like me. (I mean the way I looked after Disiri got through with me.) He looked more and more like me until he would have fooled everybody on the ship. There was no smoke, but I did not think about that.