Wyrms

Chapter 19. CRYSTALS

THE FIRES ROARED IN THE HOUSE OF THE WISE. It was afternoon, but outside it was dark with clouds and falling snow. The cold seeped in through the shutters and under the door, but the fires in the two hearths fought it back to the edges of the room.

Sken, stark naked, was up to her neck in a huge and steaming tub, occasionally bellowing curses at Strings, who was scrubbing her back. Strings endured it calmly enough; Patience, listening, knew that he only served Sken because Reck and Patience wanted him to. Sken cursed again, but then began to tell him-for the third time-how she had killed Tinker's men in the battle in the woods, months before. Strings listened, the perfect audience, responding exactly when she needed to hear him say, "Yes," or "Bravely done," or "Remarkable."

Patience knew that Sken was telling of the battle with Tinker because she could bear to think of it; she had little to say of the battle in Unwyrm's cave, and did not tell the tale of the baby who died only moments before Sken would have murdered it. We'll all choose the stories we can live with, and forget the rest, thought Patience. I hope so, anyway.

She walked to the east fireplace. Many of the old men were watching as several geblings carefully worked on Unwyrm's huge mindstone. Reck was directing the work of separating the hundreds of mindstones that had grown together. The geblings poured a solution over the crystal, then carefully pried the surface crystals away. Many small mindstones, the size of the one that Patience bore within her brain, lay in a tray before the fire, drying.

"What are you looking for?" asked Patience.

"These are all the crystals of the Wise, which he took from them and ate," said Reck. "But in the center there'll be the crystal that was his own. Himself. That's the one I want."

"What can you do with it?" asked Patience.

"We'll know what to do when we find it." Reck led her away from the fire. "See how the old men watch?

They know where those mindstones came from, and they want them back."

"Can't you do it? Give the mindstones back? They came from their brains in the first place."

"Which one do we give to each of these men? They have so little memory left-just their memory of life in this house, with vague shadows of the past-that whatever stone we give them will take them over and become them. It would be no favor. And besides, these stones have lived as long in Unwyrm's head as they ever lived in their original human hosts'. Do these men look strong enough to endure Unwyrm's memories?"

Patience shook her head. "But it's tragic. This great treasure of learning, useless."

"This?" asked Reck. "These stones are the way that wyrms passed their wisdom from one generation to the next. You humans brought another way. And that way still lives."

"Heffiji's house," said Patience.

"What was learned once can be learned again," said Reck. "Ruin is already babbling about a university there, administered by geblings whose whole purpose is to protect Heffiji and catalogue her house. I think nothing will be lost."

"Except these old men."

"What's the tragedy there, Heptarch?" asked Reck.

"How is what happened to them any worse than death?

And that's how all lives end. Their works live on at Heffiji's house-it's more immortality than most people get. And these old men live. No matter what you might think of it right now, life is good and sweet, even with the memory of great loss and terrible grief."

"I have lost both my fathers," Patience whispered, "and I killed them both with my own hands."

"You were Unwyrm's hands when Angel died."

Patience shook her head, then walked toward the other hearth.

Will lay on a pallet stretched before the fire. Kristiano knelt by the giant man, wiping his naked, sweating torso with a wet cloth. Patience knelt beside the boy ok.

"He likes this," said Kristiano. "But he's afraid."

Patience took the gauntling's hand in hers. "May I?"

Kristiano relinquished the cloth with a sweet but enigmatic smile. Patience saw herself, for a moment, as the gauntling saw her-this human woman would come and serve Will for a moment, but the gaunt would serve him hour after hour, unfailing. If love was giving the gift most desired, then only gaunts in all the world truly loved. But Patience shrugged off the silent criticism of the beautiful child. You are what you are; I have other work to do, and I can only give a few gifts to anyone.

Maybe none at all.

Will's eyes were open, but he said nothing. Patience had no smile for him, nor he for her. They were alive, weren't they? And Unwyrm was dead. That was victory.

But it had been Patience's hand that threw the loop that nearly cut off Will's. And it had been Patience also who killed Unwyrm and held Unwyrm's only child as it died.

There was much murder and pain in Patience's memory, and she had not yet discovered whether any love remained.

Ruin sat nearby, his broken leg heavily splinted, his face glum as he stared into the fire. Reck soon came with a carafe of water and gave Ruin a draught of it. He drank long and deep, then touched her arm in silent thanks.

Reck gave the carafe to Patience, who took it, lifted Will's head, and let water into his mouth. Will lapped it gratefully. Gently she lowered him to the pallet again.

Finally, now, Will spoke. "How did you find strength to do it?" he whispered.

"It wasn't my strength," said Patience. "It was lent to me. The geblings called me. Together, with one voice. It gave me just enough freedom within myself to find myself.

So I did what I was born for."

"Saved the world."

"Murdered an enemy who trusted me. I remained the consummate assassin to the end."

"You did what God wanted," whispered Will. Then he closed his eyes.

Ruin spoke. "He's right, you know. About what God wanted. The kind of god I believe in, anyway. Humans and geblings and gaunts and dwelfs, we all wanted to live more than Unwyrm wanted us to die. It all worked together. You couldn't kill Angel, and he lived to bring into the birthing place the knives you killed Unwyrm with, after he thought he had left you weaponless. Reek's arrow saved you; Will broke my leg to save me; Sken, useless and stupid and foul, kept Reck from killing herself under Unwyrm's control. Every bit and piece of it, an intricate and impossible network, a web that could have failed at any point." Ruin nodded, almost angry in his insistence. "We are god, if there is a god, and Unwyrm fell before us."

Patience remembered again the unbearable joy she had felt under Unwyrm's body. And felt again the way his ichor spilled over her, the way her knife tore through his tender organs. It was not what she had felt with her body that most affected her now. It was what she had felt with her mind. For as the death agony came, he cried out to her with his silent voice, the one that had ruled her for so long; he cried out: I live. I want to live. I must live. It was the desperate cry of her own heart, too. He had wanted nothing more than any human wanted. To live, to pass on his genes to his children, to keep death at bay for as long as he could. His people-for such the wyrms were, to each other-his people had lived for centuries, but he had lived longest of all, waiting to be the salvation of all his race. And his death was the death of ten thousand generations of wyrms.

His death was the death of the miraculous child she had held in her arms, the new shape a dying species had tried to adopt in order to save themselves. They saw us coming, and they knew we would be the disease for which there was no cure. They did all that they could do.

The last breath of their struggle grew in my womb, shaped like a human in tribute to the human gods who had come to destroy them. But we did not accept the offering, no; I killed Unwyrm before the child's yolk was complete, and when the child was born I let it die in my arms.

What is so much better about my kind of life, that we should survive, and they should die? She could think of no standard of judgment that made sense, except this one: I am human, and so humans must live. It was not a struggle for justice. It was a battle of savages. The cruelest won. I was the perfect savior for mankind.

"Unwyrm held in his mindstone the memory of this planet," said Reck. It was as if she had read Patience's thoughts. "His root was back to the first wyrm that had a thought. And in his mindstone, the stories of his kind, forever. Of our kind. We have as much wyrm ancestry as he had."

"You favor the human side," murmured Will.

"See how beautiful it makes us," said Ruin.

"You are beautiful," said Patience, looking at Reck.

"I remember being a gebling myself. I remember the way it felt, inside my body; I remember the voice of my siblings in the othermind. And something else, too. The loneliness of never knowing my father, and then, when the scepter came to me, finally remembering his life as he knew it."

"It nearly drove you to insanity," Ruin reminded her.

"I wish that every human could have such madness.

Or a taste of it, just for a moment, to know their mother or father. It would be a great gift."

"To know them, but not to be them," said Will.

"You are very strong. Lady Patience. Few can endure having other people's memories live in their minds. I couldn't."

"You?" said Patience. "You're the strongest of all."

His eyes went distant, rejecting the praise. "Will I keep my hand?" he asked.

"It will dangle as beautifully as ever at the end of your arm," said Ruin. "As for using it-I've done all I can to encourage the nerves to grow."

"I won't be much use to anyone without my right arm," he said.

Patience touched his forehead, drew her finger along his cheek, and finally let her fingertips rest on his lips.

"We're all looking for new careers," said Patience.

"There aren't any prophecies about what I'll do after Unwyrm is dead. I'm not seventeen yet, and everything I was born to do is done. Does this mean that I'll have to learn a trade?"

Reck laughed softly, and Will smiled.

"You're Heptarch," said Ruin.

"There's a man in King's Hill who would disagree," said Patience. "And he's not a bad man, and not a bad Heptarch."

"He's a caretaker," said Will. "Ruling only until your work here is done."

"When an army of a million geblings stands at his border, he might give thought to abdication," said Ruin.

"No," said Patience.

"What, do you think we'd do it for you out of altruism?

The geblings are best served by having a Heptarch who remembers being a gebling. We aren't subhumans to you, now."

"Not a drop of my people's blood will be shed in my name," said Patience.

"There you are," said Ruin. "You're right. Your life work is over."

"Shut up, Ruin," said Reck.

Sken walked up to them, buttoning a clean gown that fit her like the draping of a warhorse. Her ruddy face gleamed in the firelight. "Heptarch, the geblings have brought the body of your former slave out of the birthing place. They want to know what you want done with it."

"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 planning?" said Ruin. "And I understand it, Reck. I understand, I agree, and I know you're strong enough to bear it, and to pass it whole to your children. But what will I be then? The feeble gebling king, a pale shadow of the human Heptarch who can hold both races in her mind, an even weaker shadow of you? What will they call you, Mother Wyrm? There'll be no name for me, if I'm too weak to do as you do, as she did."

"What are you planning?" asked Patience.

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 beginning to work its influence on her.

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.

She was not lost. The songless wyrms had not stolen her utterly away.

Late in the winter, when the snow was grey from coal fires. Will regained some feeble use of his right hand. He could curl the fingers into a grip-not enough to wield a sword, but enough to help his left hand. It was enough of a triumph for him to be willing to do what Patience had asked him to do; as Heptarch, she proclaimed him her consort, and they loved each other in the cold sunlight through the upstairs window.

Not long after, Kristiano called to them to come; Ruin was awake. When they came into the room, he was kneeling beside his sister's bed, his face grave. He saw them, and held out his arms, embracing Will, then Patience, and looking at them with new respect. "You bear it all your lives," he said. "Alone."

But Will's hand was touching her shoulder, where Ruin did not see-Patience knew that the solitude was not as complete, not as unbridgeable as Ruin thought. He knew only Angel, good and grief-stricken Angel, whose isolation from humankind had been more complete than any other man she could think of. But it was not inappropriate, Patience decided, for the gebling king to have the memory of human life at its most tragic; she did not tell him that not all humans were so utterly alone.

And then, when the wind turned southerly and warm, and the snow melted, and the first shoots brought green back to the forest below, Reck awoke. Her eyes were distant, her thoughts remote, and often she would startle, as if she had only just come awake. She had thoughts she could not put into words; she could not tell them stories of her lives among the wyrms, because there was no language for it. But as they made their plans for the future government of the world, she listened, and from time to time spoke quietly and unknotted the tangled threads of the future.

They did not call her Reck anymore; she did not remember the name, for wyrms had no names, and had never needed them. Yet even though she had lost her name in the labyrinth of her mind, she had not forgotten them, and loved gaunt and gebling, dwelt and human, with the compassion of mother for child. They began to call her Mother Wyrm, and though Ruin had some hours of grief, longing for his sister, he also loved this new soul that dwelt in his sister's body; she comforted him for his loss, as she comforted them all.

They all soon realized that Mother Wyrm had grown stronger, with Unwyrm's memory within her; Strings and Kristiano reported that she was always with them, and they could do nothing without her consent. Oddly, though, she wanted nothing from them; the result was a freedom ' they had never known before. They still felt the needs of ' the others there in the House of the Wise, but they were ' not compelled to obey. Instead, there was Mother Wyrm within them, awakening their own will, strengthening it. "We're free," said Strings, "in bondage to her."

Hearing that, Ruin spread the word through Cranning that gaunts should be brought to the House of the Wise.

The warm weather brought them like petals on the southern wind, coming into the house in slavery, and leaving it in freedom. And not just gaunts; soon geblings, dwelfs, and humans also came. Mother Wyrm no longer belonged to the little group that had come with her to Skyfoot, and they knew that when they left Cranning to begin their work in earnest. Mother Wyrm would stay behind, for her work was already begun, and would never take her away from this house.

The cherries were in full blossom in the orchards of Skyfoot when the Gebling King, the Heptarch, and Will, her consort and captain, came down out of the mountains.