The Knight

“Do they call it Glas because it’s made of glass?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “It is not, but of fire opal.”

“The dragon stone.”

He would not look at me. “Who told you that?”

It had been Bold Berthold, and I called him my brother. “He’s dead now, I think.”

“Wise Berthold. If you do not know him dead, let us hope that he lives.”

I told Garsecg how I had searched for Bold Berthold’s body without finding it.

“Many have searched for this isle, but those who search for it never find it. More than a few have sighted it by chance, however, and a handful of mariners have landed here.”

I had the feeling Garsecg knew more about that than he was telling, so I asked what happened to them.

“Various things. Some returned safely to their ships. Some perished. Some remain with us, and some went to other places. Do you see the tower?”

I did, and it was huge. Somebody had built a skyscraper all by itself way out on that little island, and at first I thought why did they have to make it so high? Because there was nothing else out there to crowd it. Only there was. It was the sea. The island was not really very big, so if you wanted to put a big building on it, it had to go straight up.

It did. It was round, and only a little wider at the bottom, and it went up and up like a needle, taller than the tallest mountain.

“The builder was of the sixth world, which is Muspel,” Garsecg said. “My people build nothing like it unless they must. Would that they did! From this tower Setr sought to overawe this sphere, which you call the World Below.”

I said we called it Aelfrice mostly.

Garsecg nodded. “He built smaller towers as well, his strongholds on many coasts. My sister dwells in one when she chooses.”

“But you don’t?”

“I could if I wished.” Garsecg stood up on what I had thought was just another slick rock, and walked away. When I could not see him, I heard him say, “How is your wound?”

I felt for it, but I couldn’t find it.

“Healed?”

When I caught up with him, I said, “There’s a scar, but it’s closed and it’s not sore.”

“The scar will fade. For a time, a gull might have seen rocks below the water.”

“I get it. Am I really the strongest knight in the whole world now?”

“That is for you to say.”

“Then I am.” I did not feel any stronger when I said it, but I knew I was very, very strong and very, very fast. Exactly how strong and how fast I did not know. I also knew that some of that was what Disiri had done, and some came from the sea—from learning how it was, and that it was in me, tides of blood pounding the beaches of my ears. But some was just me, and in fact the part about the sea was just me, too; that had been there all the time, although I had not known it.

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.”