The Skrayling Tree (36 page)

I gasped with the joy of it even before the gleaming metal took her first little souls. Strong little souls. They were helpless
against me, yet despite their fear they would not run. Not at first. Tough, hardy bodies pressed around my legs, and I had
to force a certain delicacy upon the blade in order to slice away their embracing limbs. They behaved like men who had reached
their limit and now did not care if they died. As I pressed forward against them, cutting them down like vermin, they fell
back around something they were clearly protecting.

I was curious, even as I continued to kill. My sword possessed my will. She would not cease her feasting. She would not stop
drinking until she had drunk every shred of every soul and drawn them shrieking into my eager veins. Half of me was disgusted
with my actions, but that half did not control my bloodlust nor my sword arm. I stabbed and slashed and chopped with slow,
steady strokes, like a man stropping a razor.

They were now entirely fearless, these little men, as if reconciled to their violent deaths. Perhaps even welcoming them.
They came at me with tomahawks and knives and spears and arrows. They even used a kind of sling to fling live snakes at me.
I let them strike if they chose. There is no venom known which can kill a Melnibonéan noble. We are weaned on venom.

The snakes and arrows were brushed aside by the sword I knew as Ravenbrand. Her speed was a bloody blur. Flint clubs and short,
stone swords grazed me but did not cut me. Every pygmy who died wailed in sudden understanding as he gave me fresh life. I
laughed aloud
in my killing. I let the stolen energy fill me with godlike invulnerability. I lusted to murder and celebrated every stolen
soul! Small they might be, but the pygmies were near-immortals and thus rich with supernatural life stuff. After the crude
souls of the Ononos, this fairy blood was a delight. It poured into me until I felt my physical form would contain it no longer,
that it would all burst out of me.

I fought on, carrying the attack. I laughed at their agony and their fear. Even those who tried to surrender, I killed. I
sighed with the sweetness of their slaughter. The majority, however, battled on with enormous courage, preferring to die bravely,
because they knew death was their only future.

Up and down, my sword arm rose and fell as, driven by my old berserk blood-craze, I pursued groups of the warriors and continued
to slaughter even when most of them had finally lost heart for a fight. At last there was only one band left. With their buffalo-hide
shields and quartz-tipped spears, they had formed a ring around a pair of large boulders and clearly intended, like their
fallen comrades, to defend their position to the death.

I slipped the blade of my sword between the legs of the nearest warrior and dragged the razor-sharp blade upward to cut him
neatly in two. He squealed and wriggled like a tortured cat. Most, however, I simply beheaded. It was hard, precise, mechanical
work. The creatures were considerably denser than they looked.

At last all that was left of the pygmies was what they had defended. He lay in a small clearing formed by the boulders. A
wizened old man spread over the primitive
stretcher like a stain. Everywhere around him were piled the corpses of his warriors. Not one was remotely alive. Small, headless
corpses, like so many slaughtered chickens. Spattered with the blood of his people, the man must have been over a hundred
years old. His skin was thin as tissue paper, and his fingers were like picked bones. He was an animated corpse, an unwrapped
mummy, a husk of a creature, yellowed and fading into nothingness with none to mourn him. But his eyes burned with life, and
his lips moved, whispering violently and with considerable pain in a patois I could barely understand. A much corrupted Old
French dialect? I had learned that it was often a mistake in the multiverse to try to identify a language too closely.

“Would you loot the last of our honor, Prince Silver-skin?” He glared angrily at me and tried to lift a hand weakly shaking
a bloody rattle decorated with small animal skulls. All he had left was his mockery. “Your folk have taken everything else
from us. You leave us nothing but our shame, and we deserve to die.” He was neither strong nor unreconciled to death. There
was no need for me to finish him. I had always had a distaste for killing the helpless, which had made me something of a laughingstock
as a boy in Melniboné. The old man was already as good as dead, his raspy breath coming with increasing difficulty and slowness.
In spite of his afflictions he was able to whisper at me from the rough stretcher on which he lay. “I am Ipkaptam, the Two
Tongues.”

He was a grey man. The life had been sucked out of him, but not by the sword I now resheathed.

“Are all my people dead?” he asked me.

“All those whom you sent against me,” I said. “Why should you wish to have me killed?”

“You are our enemy, Pale Crow, and you know it. You have no soul. You keep it in the body of a bird. You use our own iron
against us. You would steal our best-kept treacheries and learn too much about our masters’ whims. Does it matter where we
are or what we face now? All human aspiration is brought low by human greed and human folly. Now we are tainted by the human
curse, and so we fade from this sphere. Is our epic to tell of our self-deception, of our certainty in our own superiority?
It is the end of the Pukawatchi. There are only two important realities in this world: starvation and sudden death…”

This speech exhausted him. I motioned him gently to silence. But he said:

“You are the man the boy became?”

I could not follow this. I thought he was raving. Then he said clearly, “There are only old people, women and children to
weep for the Pukawatchi. Our ancient tribe reconciles itself to the end. We are no more. One day even our name will be forgotten.”

My impulse, now that the blood frenzy had passed, was to comfort him, but I did not know how to do so.

I knelt among the raw, red meat I had made of his men and took his withered hand in my gauntleted one. “I meant you no harm
and would have gone on my way if you had not attacked me.”

“I know,” said the old man, “but we also knew that our death time had come. It was written that the black
blade would destroy us if we let it go. We have failed in all our ventures. Our oaths lie dry and unfulfilled in dying mouths.
It is time for us to die. All our treasures are gone. All our boasts are empty. All our honor has been taken from us. We have
nothing to return with save our shame. So we died with honor, trying to take back our black blade. Is it your son, then, who
stole it?”

The old man’s gaunt features were parchment on bone. His eyes sparked and then faded before I could try to answer.

“Or are you another self altogether?” The shaman rose from his stretcher and reached out, trying to touch me. A soft song
whispered on his lips, and I knew that he spoke not to me but to the spirits he believed in. He looked into a world becoming
far more real to him than the one he was leaving.

He died upright in an attitude of pride and did not fall back until I laid him down and closed his eyes. His people had died,
as they wished, in battle and with honor against an old foe. Their remains looked frail, like children’s corpses, and I knew
a pang of conscience. Yet these people had been trying hard to kill me. They would be stripping my still-warm body even now,
had they won.

In the end I made no attempt to bury them, but rather left them to be cleaned by the carrion-eating birds congregating overhead,
drawn in by the stink of a blood-drenched wind.

Soon I could clearly make out what lay before me, but I was no less mystified. I saw a tall black elephant carrying a huge
open howdah with what appeared to be
a birchbark canoe used as a canopy. Astride the beast was a handsome Indian whose style of costume and decoration resembled
the Kakatanawas and was typical of the Indians who had once inhabited the North American woods. A Mohican, perhaps? I guessed
him to be some sort of chief. His concentration was not upon the arriving buzzards but on what lay immediately in his field
of vision.

The scene was made worse by its absolute silence.

A black, horrible and completely
silent
tornado, thin and vicious at the base, lowering, thick and menacing above, was almost a perfectly reversed pyramid. This
edifice of frozen, filthy air blocked the way from shore to island and, with the city as its background, formed a terrifying
harmony. The silver trail ended suddenly, as if the tornado had somehow eaten it up. The path across the ice to the city ended
as well. I felt I neared the very center of the world. But compared to this, my journey had been easy until now.

All the forces who opposed the Balance were gathering to defend against its saviors. We faced not the opposing philosophies
of Law and Chaos, but the Spirit of Limbo—the mindless yet profound creature which yearns for death, which aches for death,
but not merely for itself. It demands that all creation shall know oblivion, for all creation is the only equal to that monstrous
ego. If other persuasions fail, self-murder and the murder of as many others as possible become the only logical option. I
knew from Nazi Germany that from small, mean dreams such egos grow until their nightmares become the condition of us all.

Against all my usual skepticism I was now in no doubt that this barely frozen force was a supernatural tornado. There was
also no doubt it intended to block the way of those who confronted it. I knew I looked upon a magical event of some magnitude.
From where I had paused, taking what cover I could, I could feel its vibrant evil. A whole world of evil concentrated into
this unmoving whirlwind. Were I still a believer, I would have thought myself in the presence of Satan incarnate. I marveled
at the courage of the single warrior facing it.

All around me now was that awful, oppressive stillness. Progress forward was nearly impossible. I felt as if I waded through
heavy water rather than air.

The great beast was a mammoth, and like the Indian, it was frozen in motion.

Then I saw a woman’s figure in the shadow of the giant pachyderm. An arrow fitted to her bow, she faced the tornado. Over
her slender shoulders was a beautiful white robe, thrown back to allow her the shot.

Time was standing still here. Even my own actions grew more sluggish by the moment.

I forced my way forward, hoping that my eyes were not merely trying to console me that the figure I saw was who I thought
it was.

A little nearer and I was certain. It was Oona! I tried to move in her direction when suddenly I was overwhelmed by a mighty,
deafening noise. It was like the note of a horn, echoing through every dimension of the multiverse. Echoing on and on forever.

The tornado shrieked and sniggered and raged. It had
come fully alive now! I saw fiendish faces within it and limbs of sorts.

My hair and clothes were whipped backward. I felt my body sucked at, clutched at, investigated. The wind became even more
aggressive. The whole scene was alive now.

Through all this wild bluster came the sweet, clear note of a flute. My wife was nocking her arrow to her bow. I feared to
call out and distract her. What did she hope to do? Did she think she could kill a whirlwind—and a supernatural whirlwind
at that—with an arrow? Why was Oona walking so calmly towards her death? Did she not sense the thing’s power? Was she in a
fresh trance? Dreaming within a dream?

And who, or what, had sounded the horn I heard?

Again, instinct took charge of my will, and without a second thought I ran towards the causeway, shouting to Oona to stop,
to wait. But she did not hear me above the terrible shriek of the tornado. She walked slowly, with an odd, unnatural gait.
Was she entranced?

The tall Indian seemed to know me. He tried to stay me with his hand. “Only she can make the Silver Path across the ice. Wherever
she passes, that will give us our way. But she goes against the Winds of the World. They are Winds gone mad. She goes against
Lord Shoashooan.”

I yelled something back at him, but that, too, was snatched from my mouth by the railing currents.

A sudden cut of cold wind slashed across my face, momentarily blinding me. When I could see again, Oona was gone.

Behind me I sensed a presence.

The Indian was climbing onto the back of the mammoth. Behind him, marching down the beach, came a group of warriors who appeared
to have stepped off the set of
Gõtterdàmmerung.
Save for the fact that not all were Scandinavians, I confronted as unwholesome looking a bunch of hardened Vikings as I had
ever seen. Immediately I reached for my sword.

The leader stepped forward out of the press. He wore a silvered mirror helm. I had seen it before. I knew him. And something
in me, however terrified, knew the satisfaction of confirmed instinct. My instincts had been right. Gaynor the Damned was
abroad again.

If I had not recognized him by his helm I would have known him by that low, sardonic laughter.

“Well, well, Cousin. I see our friend heard the sound of my horn. He seems to have inconvenienced you a little.” He held up
the curling bull’s horn, covered in ornate copper and bronze, which hung at his belt. “That was the second blast. The third
will bring the end of everything.”

And then he drew his own blade. It was black. It howled.

I was desperate. I had to help my wife. Yet if I did so now, I would be attacked from behind by Gaynor and his brutish crew.

Then it was as if Ravenbrand had seized my soul, conscience and common sense, and I found that I’d drawn it again without
thought.

I began to advance towards the armored Vikings.

I heard the thin, sweet sound of a bone flute. It
echoed like a symphony around the peaks. Gaynor cursed and turned, flinging his hatred towards the Indian, who sat cross-legged
upon the neck of the mammoth, his eyes closed, his lips pursed, playing his instrument.

Something was happening to Gaynor’s sword. It twisted and shivered in his hand. He screamed at it. He took it in
both
hands and tried to control it, but he could not. Was I right? Did the flute actually control the sword?