Wyrms

"I want him buried with honor," said Patience. "Here, among the Wise. The graves here are all honorable ones."

"I'm sorry we didn't take his head in time," said Reck. "We know that's how you humans preserve the counsel of your wise ones, since you don't have mindstones to eat."

"We were busy," said Ruin, "and the moment passed."

"But he does have a mindstone," said Sken. "Doesn't he. Will? Isn't that what he said? He had a mindstone, just like these other old coots. Unwyrm just didn't take it from him, that's all. That's why his mind isn't at the low-water mark. Isn't that right, Will?"

Will closed his eyes.

"Angel had a mindstone?" asked Ruin.

"Let it die with him," said Will.

"Bring his body in here. Bring him to me!" shouted Ruin. The rest of the room fell silent. Ruin stood, leaning against the chimney, his face flickeringly lit by the fire below and beside him. "The gebling king will have his mindstone."

"No," said Reck. "You can't."

"When the ancient king of the geblings died, a human Heptarch took his mindstone and had it placed within his brain. Some Heptarchs were so weak that it maddened them, but some were not. Do you think I'm weak, Sister?"

"But you're the gebling king," she said. "You can't take the risk."

"You're also the gebling king," he answered.

She looked away from him.

"Do you think I didn't know what you were pla

"What are you pla

At that moment, the geblings who had been working on Unwyrm's mindstone came toward them. One of them held a single crystal in the palm of his hand. "This is the one," he said. "It was in the center, and it's the oldest of all."

"I've never seen a larger one," said Reck.

"Much larger than your own," Ruin reminded her.

She lifted the stone to her mouth and swallowed.

"You can't!" cried Patience.

"She already has," said Will.

"He was so strong! How can she endure-"

Reck smiled. "It wasn't right for our ancestors to perish utterly from their own world. So I will remember, and my children after me. Not particularly Unwyrm, not above any other-what was he, compared to the thousands of generations before him? They're all in here, all in me. And now I will come to know them, and speak in their voice."

Will spoke from his pallet on the floor, his voice thick with grief. "And what of my friend Reck? Will she have a voice left, when this is done?"

"If she does," said Reck, "it will be a wiser one than before."

Ruin insisted that they make a bed for her. Reck laughed lightly, but then, when it was ready, she lay in it, for the crystal was already begi

Then they brought Angel's body from the snow outside and laid it on a table in the middle of the room.

Patience went to him, and looked down into his stiffened face, forever locked in the same neutral, undecipherable expression he had cultivated in life. "You never had a chance to discover who you were," she murmured to him. "Nor had I."

They carried Ruin to a stool beside the table where the body lay. "He was your slave," said Ruin. "I should have your permission."

"He was Unwyrm's slave, and he won his manumission before he died," she answered. "Still, if you must have a human memory to join with your own, why his?

Why not any of the others-there are five hundred mindstones there."

"They've all been tainted with Unwyrm's mind," said Ruin. "I want no part of him-that's my sister's sacrifice.

I hated him too long; she never did. And Angel-if I'm to understand human beings, why not this one?

Strings says that he was good, before Unwyrm had him.

Wouldn't you rather the gebling king became human through the memories of a good man?"

The geblings rolled the body over on its side, and they brought Ruin a knife, to cut into his brain and retrieve the mindstone that had grown there. Patience did not watch. She returned instead to Will, who lay by the fire.

She reached across him and took his left hand, his whole hand, and held it tightly.

"We have unfinished business," she said.

"I'm not the man for you now," he answered.

"If I'm to be Heptarch in fact, and not in name, I need a man who can lead armies."

"I'll serve you however I can."

"And not just lead them, but create them. Out of whatever rag-tag of volunteers and rebels I can raise, I need a man who can train them into a force that can put me in my place."

"So you want that place now?"

"I can see what Reck and Ruin want to do, and they're right. The time has come for all of humanity to be united in fact under one king, as the geblings are. A king who remembers being a gebling, as the geblings will be ruled by a king who remembers being a human.

And both kings able to speak with a woman who remembers being a wyrm. Being every wyrm that ever lived."

"Then I'll serve you."

"And more," said Patience. "I want more of you."

"What more can I give? All my wisdom is in the ways of war."

"My womb has borne a child, but it was a monster, and it's dead. I need heirs to my kingdom. Unwyrm doesn't watch now, to make sure that the line of the Heptarchs doesn't fail. So I need a consort who can create children who are large and strong, keen of mind and quick of hand. I need a consort who can teach my children what strength and wisdom are."

He said nothing, and his open eyes stared at the ceiling.

"And more," she said. "He's gone from me. The desire that burned in me for so many weeks is gone. On the boat when you touched me, and I wanted you then, I feared that it was my desire for Unwyrm. But now he's gone from me, and still when I see you I love you.

Surely God will let his Vigilant answer the need of a weak and frightened girl."

He smiled. "Weak and frightened."

"Sometimes," she said. "Aren't you?"

"Terrified. Of you. I never thought to marry a woman who could kill me with a little piece of string."

"Then you'll marry me?"

"I'll serve you as I can," he said.

She bent to him and kissed his lips. Behind them, now, Reck and Ruin lay in torment, sweating and tossing and ranting on their beds. Strings and Kristiano bent over them, bound them so they did not scratch out their eyes, wiped their brows to cool the fever, sang softly to them to soothe away the terrible dreams.

Will and Patience watched, and spoke to them in the moments of sanity. Sometimes Ruin became Angel, and Patience could talk to him; a hundred times, it seemed, he begged for her forgiveness, and she for his. I betrayed you, he would say; I killed you, she would answer. Then they forgave each other until the memory returned afresh.

Reck had no words in her madness, except, now and then, the learning of the Wise that had dwelt in Unwyrm's mind. She would lie staring at the ceiling, at the fire, at the wall, whichever way her head happened to face.

Kristiano and Strings sang the ancient geblings songs of mighty deeds in battle, of terrible and forbidden love, of the sins of fathers remembered by their daughters, of the great gebling kings and their battles for the soul of the world. No one knew if Reck even heard the music, or if it helped her follow some thread out of the darkness; until one day in deep winter, when the snow was three meters deep and they brought in food through the second- story doors. Strings turned away from Reck after an hour's song and then, suddenly, turned back. "She wants me to go on," he whispered. Will and Patience came, then, and listened as Kristiano joined in the song; they wept in relief when Reck smiled in her troubled sleep.