The Last Guardian of Everness Page 5

  Galen watched with wide eyes as drops of falling blood flew down out of sight into the wide darkness underfoot, perhaps turning to ice, perhaps to fall forever.

  Cold dread was in Galen. He knew what he did next could not be undone.

  4

  Death

  and

  Deathlessness

  I

  “Walk before me, Raven, son of Raven,” commanded the icy voice. “No one in the chamber will behold you. My robe of many mists blinds them.”

  Raven walked out of the closet and between several of the interns, who neither turned nor spoke to him.

  He stepped out into the hallway. He heard a quiet footstep scrape the floor tiles behind him.

  Once, when he was a boy in northern Greece, after his and his father’s escape from the Soviet Union, Raven was playing in a graveyard at night, behind the local Greek Orthodox church, which had been a temple to pagan gods in its youth. He came suddenly upon a wolf tearing up a corpse from the soft earth between the gravestones. The lean and famished wolf had looked up, growling, a shadow with eyes like green flame. For a moment, Raven could smell the hot breath of the beast, thick with the stench of its grisly feast. Then the wolf turned and fled.

  Raven never forgot that smell as it touched his face. Now, in the hospital, from behind him, he smelled that same smell again, the odor of a carrion beast.

  Raven turned.

  Behind him, taller and thinner than a man, the black shape rose up so that the bones of his crown brushed the ceiling. Above flowing robes of smoke and darkness, the kingly phantom wore armor made of knitted bones.

  Up from his crown jutted a circle of skeletal hands, their fingers pointing upwards, with long gray nails still growing from their pointed ends. The cheek plates of his helmet were made of dead men’s opened jawbones; overlapping shoulderbones fanned out from his crown to protect his neck; his epaulettes were made of severed kneecaps; the chain-mail at the armor joints was made of layered yellow teeth; greaves and gauntlets were made of tibia and ulna; interlocking rib cages covered his breastplate. His sleeves and skirts and wide black cloak were made of tattered shadows.

  The creature’s face was thin and famished, with sunken gray cheeks drawn tight over high cheekbones. Under the shadow of his heavy brows could be seen no eyes at all, but only two pale glints like stars hovering in the eyesockets. When he opened his mouth to speak, there were neither teeth nor tongue visible, only an empty darkness.

  “Choose,” the creature intoned.

  “What? Choose what?” said Raven slowly.

  The creature raised one hand and gestured widely up and down the corridor of the terminally ill ward, pointing at the doors.

  “You mean to choose who should die in my wife’s place?” said Raven. “No. This was not our bargain. You said it would be a stranger. No one I knew!”

  “Very well,” the cold voice breathed. “The Law allows, when men forbear to choose, the choice will fall to my kind. Come.”

  With a slither of smoky robes, the creature began to drift down the corridor. Raven took a few steps to follow, then halted.

  “Stop!” he called.

  The creature paused, looking over its bone-encrusted shoulder with eyes like flickers of marsh gas.

  Raven said, “What are you?! You must tell.”

  “Walk in my footsteps, and you will know me,” intoned the creature, and began once more to glide away down the corridor, the bones of its crowned helmet scratching against the panels of the ceiling.

  “Why can’t the other people see you?” asked Raven. They walked into a corridor outside the intensive care ward, and even though it was crowded with rushing nurses and shouting people, the men all stepped or stood aside for the passage of the tall, lean entity, their eyes momentarily blank.

  The creature sighed, “Men oft forget their nightmares when they wake.”

  “But I can see you?”

  “You are not afraid.”

  “What are you? Why does no one know of things like you? Surely someone nowadays, in America, someone must know there are things like you! They are advanced people! Scientific people!”

  “Even the wise are silenced by the endless mystery of night; starlight cannot be brought into the cold and open glare of day for their inspection.”

  “Tell me your name!”

  At the door to the intensive care room, the creature paused, looking backward, looming in Raven’s vision. “You know me.”

  Raven remembered a name from old Russian fairytales. “You are Koschei the Deathless.”

  “That is one of my names.”

  “In the fable, they found where you had hid your heart and killed you.”

  “What does not live cannot die, but only be banished for a time,” Koschei said. He spoke with his hand touching the glass windows of the intensive care room doorway. “I am the first herald of the Emperor of Dreams, who soon will rule your world as well. For me, the sea-bell tolls but once, as my power, in this world, is small.”

  “What is your power?”

  “I know in what part of them men carry their deaths. I have taken that part out of me and shed my humanity as a snake sheds its skin. No one can drive me off except that they understand what is at my heart.”

  Raven spoke like a man in a daze, who can only focus on one thought: “Then you can save my wife?”

  “I will take her death from where it hides and give it to another.”

  Raven realized that Koschei meant to kill whoever lay behind this door; the patient upon whom, he guessed, the doctors and nurses beyond were so frantically working. He could hear them hurrying, calling out in tense, flat voices, sudden curses of triumph or despair.

  “Take the sword from my baldric, Raven, son of Raven. It is bound in its scabbard with a knot I may not untie. Holding the sword before you, step into the chamber here. Then you must drop to your knees and recite all those things you most love about your wife, whom you are so soon to lose. An invisible power will undo the knot. When this happens, draw the sword and hand it to me. No more will be asked of you.”

  Raven took the scabbard from where it hung off the figure’s long sash. His fingers were numbed with terrible cold when he touched it.

  Raven opened the door. A putrid smell, mingled with disinfectants, greeted him. Inside, he could see a cluster of doctors and nurses bent over a half-naked young man on a table. One medic pumped oxygen into the young man’s mouth. Another had electrodes in his hands, which he was rubbing together. This second nurse shouted, “Clear!” and touched the electrode paddles to the body.

  The young man jumped and thrashed on the table for a moment. “We have the pulse again!” shouted a voice, and a steady beeping came from one of the machines in the room.

  “No!” said Raven. “This was not our bargain! I did not say I would help you kill a man!”

  “Yes. Yes, you did.”

  Raven stood still, holding the scabbard. The icy numbness in his hand throbbed like fire, creeping toward his elbow.

  Koschei said, “Choose. Shall it be this man, who is nothing to you? Or shall it be your wife, whom you claim to love?”

  Raven squinted. “There is someone else in this room. Some power which keeps you away from the young boy, eh? You devils do not need mortal men to do your work unless there is trick involved.”

  “Go to your knees. Pray for the salvation of your wife. Your prayer will be answered.”

  “What is in this room?”

  “Though you cannot see her, clever mortal, there is a unicorn in this room, standing guard over Galen Waylock. Each time my poisons reach the boy’s heart, she touches him lightly with her silver horn and works his cure. I cannot wound or drive her away, except with this, the one weapon to which she is vulnerable. It is a terrible weapon, and she must unknot the bindings herself to let it be drawn against her.”

  Raven looked at the scabbard. The swordhilt was plain and black, and the scabbard itself was all of white leather. The scabbard was fitte
d and bound in rings of bone, which looked like spinal vertebrae. Through these rings ran white cords, which tied the hilt into the scabbard with a complex knot, all bows and loops and dangling tassels.

  “What is the name of this sword?”

  Koschei said softly, “My weapon is called Pity.”

  Then Koschei said, “Step forward, Raven. If you keep Pity hidden in its sheath, no pity will be shown your dying wife.”

  Raven stepped forward woodenly, his eyes wide and staring, his face slack with pain and indecision.

  He was in the room. The doctors were ignoring him. By the faint breath of movement before his face, the sudden sweet smell like the breath of a spring wind, he knew that the unicorn was nearby, invisible, watching him with wide eyes. Sadly, Raven sank to his knees.

  II

  “I am not a good man with words. And the woman I love, she should have poetry and songs, the most beautiful of words, to speak of her. Words without equal.

  “I do not know how to say how deep I have love for her. Her eyes are bright, she smiles like the springtime. And how she laughs! I think angels must laugh like that. Most people laugh at what is ridiculous and mean, laughing what they see as silly, stupid things. You know? But her laughter is laughter made in joy. Like those soda cans filled with bubbles, and you shake them, and it all come bubbling out. . .

  “Once I was lost at sea in a lifeboat. The freighter I served on, the Pavopodopolus, out of Athens, went down when an engine explosion broke the hullplate loose below deck. It was many hot days in that lifeboat, and we did not know if the radioman had told our position to anyone in time. When we ran low on water, we cast lots to see who would drink that day and who would go thirsty.

  “One man went mad because he drank sea water, and he tried to break our water bottles. We clubbed him and put him over the side. It was the worst thing I had ever done. I thought I should die before I could do such a thing.”

  Raven shuddered, grimacing. He remembered his wife had just said something to Koschei about how she would behave on a lifeboat. Raven told himself Wendy had never been in a lifeboat, that she did not know the cruelty of the world. But he frowned because he knew that she did know but had the type of soul that never let that cruelty touch her . . .

  Raven closed his eyes and continued to speak. “When we were rescued, and we came to safe harbor, I knelt down and kissed the firm ground. It was so steady, so safe. I had come out of the empty and dead waste of the sea, to what was like home again. I was rescued beyond all hope. And that, that is what my wife is to me. That and more.”

  With his eyes shut, he could feel a warmth, a motion in the air before him. He felt the pressure of wise and ancient eyes, watching him, a supernatural being like a living beam of light. He wondered if he reached out his hand if he would touch her delicate and deerlike muzzle. Raven’s body was trembling.

  “I must tell you, spirit, how we met. There were no friends in New York. I worked as a longshoreman. But I was not in the union, not legal to be allowed to work. The only thing it was legal for me to do in America was starve. So when I was cheated, or when they did not pay my wage, I could not go to anyone to complain. I was strong and quick. I could make men afraid of me. But every man’s hand was against me. Without my wife, the world would be that way again for me. Filled with hate.

  “After the Amnesty Act let me have a green card, I went to find a dream I had. The city was so ugly to me; I wanted to be surrounded by trees. It was like the thirst of a thirsty man. My eye was hungry for beautiful things. Without my wife, I would hunger and thirst like that again, and never be satisfied. Not ever. For there would be no beauty for me in all the world.

  “I took the test to be hired as a park ranger, in the National Forestry Service Police Force. They are a federal body.

  “They gave me a uniform and a gun, and a splendid place to live, way deep in the green. My duties were as nothing. I had to count the trees the loggers took and count the deer the hunters shot, and fill out stack after stack of colored paper forms. Stacks of paper up to your chin, I had to fill out. In triplicate.

  “That is where I met her, you know. I thought she was a Rusalka, at first, a swan-maiden or a spirit-woman. Because she was running naked through the woods. She was so young! So full of life! The young, they want so much to be alive . . .”

  Raven opened his eyes and looked at the half-naked young man draped across the table across the room from him.

  He squinted, face troubled, uncertain. Eyes open, he continued to speak:

  “Once and twice I saw her like this. I fill out a form on it, in triplicate. Headquarters say, arrest this woman; she is streaking; she is trespassing. So I hunt her through the forest, where her light footstep has bent the grass, turned over a leaf. I have a keen eye; great patience. I do not like to lose what I am hunting. I did not want to lose her . . .

  “So I hunt her; I catch her. But she is not shy even when she is naked like a bird. She stands with her hands on her hips and tosses her head and makes fun of me and will not come along. She dares me to put the handcuffs on her; even after she is chained up, she makes me wrestle with her. So I am carrying her over my shoulder, and she is trying to kick me. And she is laughing, and she pretends I am a romance-book villain come to ravish her in chains, that she must do as I bid, or she will be taken away. You know, I do not think she was pretending so much. And the paperwork for arrests, all that writing. In triplicate! After the second day she was staying in my cabin, I am thinking, such a bad idea to arrest her after all, you know? Such a bad idea! Maybe I marry her instead.

  “Her father, I have never met, very rich, very powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. She says he does not like her to wed me. And we must elope, and she must lie about her age to get married because she is young. But she is so good. She can make the deer come and eat out of her hand, because of her goodness. They know she would not hurt any thing alive. She would not help kill any thing . . .”

  Raven stood up, frowning terribly. “Because she is so good, she has no drop of pity. She has a sense of justice like a sharp knife. My wife would never forgive anyone who had done wrong. She would never allow anyone who had done such an evil as this to come near to her again.”

  Raven turned. “Koschei! I cannot do what you have asked. . .” Koschei had to bow his head to step into the room, and his robes billowed through the open door like smoke. Entering, his body seemed to swell and fill the Emergency room, his eyes burning like malignant stars. “It is too late, son of Prometheus. Your second thoughts come too tardily. Behold.”

  And he pointed to the sword still in Raven’s grasp. The knots were stirring and swaying of their own accord, unwinding, untwirling, a slow and weightless dance of rope. The cords unknotted themselves, rippling free. The knots spread and fell open.

  Koschei’s hands were thin and gray, and his finger nails were yellow, longer than his fingers. With a slow sweep of his black sleeves, with a crackling rustle of his vambraces and paudrons, the deathless creature raised his arm, palm out, fingers spread.

  “Hand me now my weapon, mortal man.”

  Cold dread was in Raven. He knew what he did next could not be undone.

  III

  Raven, son of Raven, was abnormally aware of the Emergency room in which he stood, as if each tiny detail were viewed through a small, clear lens. It was a bright, modern, well-lit place, surrounded by doctors and nurses, men of learning and science whom Raven respected. Filling the doorway was a dark, ancient, evil spirit, a creature of whom Raven knew nothing; of whom, he feared, men, for all their wisdom, would never know more than nothing. The spirit, Koschei the Deathless, held out his hand for the sword Raven carried.

  “Yield to me my weapon,” Koschei’s voice, surrounded with echoes, rang out, “that I may take the life from this boy here and give it to your wife.”

  Raven’s thoughts were an aching pressure in his brain. He saw his hand rise up and proffer the sword to Koschei, extending it hilt first.

 
; “Hands! What are you doing?” he thought to himself. “Why are you giving this terrible creature this sword? Do you want to be the hands of a murderer? Do you want to have blood on you?”

  Koschei drifted forward, his narrow face floating near the ceiling, cold and without expression; the two dots of light in the shadows of his eye sockets shone brightly.

  “It is not too late,” thought Raven. “Take back the sword before Koschei touches it! I will be innocent of wrong. I will not be a murderer. Wendy would be so proud of me . . .

  “And then Wendy will be gone. Gone, and my life goes with her.

  “Where is goodness? Shouldn’t goodness come to stop me? Some people say God in his high heaven is the source of goodness. But heaven is so far away. God should strike me dead with lightning before my hand gives this sword to Koschei! But God will not stop my hand. Some people say the source of goodness is the heart, that mercy and kindness prevent us from murdering each other. If my heart were to stop pumping blood this instant, my hand would turn all pale and fall off. Others say goodness is in the brain, and philosophers show how it is not ‘in our long-term best interest,’ (such a fine-sounding phrase!) not in our ‘enlightened self-interest,’ to murder. If my brain were to explode this second, the nerves in my hand would go limp, and I would avoid this guilt.

  “But there is no goodness to stop me. Not in my conscience, not in my feelings, not in my thoughts. My conscience is no more than a stinging fly; it irks me, it stings me, but it cannot turn my hand aside.

  “Now I curse my soul, my heart, my brain. For they were all too weak to make me good when the test came.”