A Stark and Wormy Knight

by Tad Williams

  “Surely someone as clever as yourself will find a solution,” said a young woman named Minka, who had replaced the young woman who had given Lixal the bracelet in the role of the troop’s primary educational dancer. Minka had of late expressed a certain warmness toward Lixal, and though she was clearly disappointed by this latest turn of events, she seemed determined to at least keep her options open. “Then you will find your way back to us.”

  “In any case,” Kwerion said authoritatively, “you must embark on your quest for salvation immediately!”

  “But I think I should prefer to remain with you – the troop is headed back toward Catechumia soon,” Lixal said. “I would appreciate the security of company. I will find some way to incorporate the deodand into our presentation. It will be a sensation! What other troop has ever boasted such a thing?”

  “No other troop has ever performed while infected with the Yellow Death, either,” said Ferlash. “Novelty alone is not enough to promote attendance, especially when it is the novelty of horrid mortal danger, and is accompanied by such a dreadfully noisome and pervasive odor of decomposing flesh.”

  The rest, even Minka, seemed to agree with the false priest’s objections, and despite Lixal’s arguments and pleading he and the deodand were at last forced to set off on their own toward distant Catechumia with nothing more in the way of possessions than what they could carry, since the troop also saw fit to withdraw their gift to Lixal of a private wagon, as being inappropriate for one no longer appearing in their nightly dissemination of knowledge to the deserving public.

  Lixal Laqavee’s first night in the wilderness was an uncomfortable one, and the idea that he was sleeping next to an inhuman creature who would happily murder him if it could did not make Lixal’s slumbers any easier. At last, in the cold hours before dawn, he sat up.

  The deodand, which did not seem to have even tried to sleep, was visible only as a pair of gleaming eyes in the darkness. “You awaken early. Have you reconsidered letting me take your life and now find yourself eager to begin your adventurous journey into That Which Lies Beyond?”

  “Unequivocally, no.” Lixal built the fire back up, blowing until it filled the forest dell with reddish light, although the deodand itself was still scarcely more than a shadow. He had no particular urge to converse with the ghastly thing, but neither did he want to sit beside it in silence until sunrise. At last, Lixal reached into the rucksack that contained most of his remaining possessions and pulled out a box which unfolded into a gaming board of polished wood covered with small holes. He then shook a handful of nail-shaped ivory spikes from a bag that had been inside the box and began to place them in holes along the outer edge of the board.

  “What is that?” asked the deodand. “An altar to your god? Some kind of religious ritual?”

  “No, far more important than that,” Lixal said. “Have you ever played King’s Compass?”

  The glowing eyes blinked slowly – once, twice, three times. “Played King’s Compass? What do these words mean?”

  “It is a contest – a game. In my childhood home in the Misty Isles we play it for amusement, or sometimes as a test of skill. At the latter times money is wagered. Would you like to learn the game?”

  “I have no money. I have no need of money.”

  “Then we will play for the sheer pleasure of the thing.” Lixal extended his arms and set the game down an equal distance between the two of them. “As for the distance that perforce must always separate us, when you wish to reach out and move your pieces I shall lean back a compensatory amount, allowing you to manipulate the spinari.”

  The deodand stared at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What is a spinari?”

  “Not ‘a spinari’ – it is plural. One is called a ‘spinar’. The collective refers to these pale spikes. For every one you move to your right, you must move another to your left. Or you may choose to move two in the same direction. Do you see?”

  The deodand was silent for long moments. “Move one to my right…? What is the point of it?”

  Lixal smiled. “I will show you. You will learn it in no time – in the Isles even the youngest children play!”

  * * *

  By the time they reached Catechumia they had traveled together nearly a month and played several hundred games of King’s Compass, each of which Lixal had won handily. The deodand was somewhat literal in its employment of strategy and had trouble understanding Lixal’s more spontaneous decisions. Also, the concept of bluffing and feinting had not yet impinged on the creature’s consciousness in the least. Still, the deodand had improved to the point where the games were now genuine, if one-sided and for that at least Lixal was grateful. The life of a man tethered to a living deodand was bound to be a lonely one, and so his had proved in these last weeks. Solitary travelers fled them without even stopping to converse on the novelty of Lixal’s situation. Larger groups often tried to kill the deodand, the reputation of whose kind was deservedly dark, and such groups bore scarcely more good will toward Lixal, who they deemed a traitor to his species: more than once he was forced to flee with the creature beneath a hail of fist-sized stones. Twice the barns in which they had taken refuge for the night were set on fire with them inside, and both times escape had been no certain thing.

  “I confess I had not fully understood the unhappiness of your existence,” Lixal told the deodand. “You are hunted by one and all, with no succor to be found anywhere.”

  The creature gave him a look that mingled amusement with scorn. “On the contrary, in the general run of things one and all are hunted by me. In any average meeting, even with three or four of your fellows, the advantage is mine owing to my superior speed and strength. Our current plight is unusual — no sensible deodand would go into the midst of so many of his enemies in broad daylight when his inherent duskiness provides no shield against discovery. It is only being tethered to you by this confluence of spells that puts me in such a vulnerable position. Not to mention how it hampers my diet.”

  This last remark, the most recent of several, pertained to Lixal’s insistence that the creature with whom he was bound up not consume the flesh of human beings while they were in each other’s company — which meant, perforce, all the time. This the deodand had acceded to with bad grace, and only after Lixal pointed out that he could easily warn away all but the most deaf and blind of potential victims. When he accompanied this injunction by employing the Rhinocratic Oath, showing the deodand how Lixal could cause the creature’s nose to grow so large as to block its creature’s sight entirely, the deodand at last submitted.

  They both needed to eat, however, so Lixal had a first hand view of the sharpness and utility of the deodand’s claws and teeth when they were employed catching birds or animals. Because the distance between them had to remain more or less identical at all times, it meant that Lixal himself also needed to learn something of the deodand’s arts of silent hunting and swift attack. However, this level of cooperation between the two distinct species, although interesting and unusual, only made Lixal Laqavee more aware of how desperately he wanted to be out of the creature’s presence.

  Since the Exhalation of Thunderous Banishment had proved worse than useless when employed on deodands – and that, Lixal suspected, had been the exact nature of Eliastre’s deadly ruse – it was only the talismanic bracelet around his wrist which kept the deodand at a distance. He no longer had any illusions that he could resist the creature’s fatal strike in any other way: the Rhinocratic Oath would not deter it for more than a moment, the Pseudo-Philtre was laughably inappropriate, and even the Cantrip of Notional Belittlement, which Lixal had employed early on in their forced companionship, had only slightly reduced the creature’s obsession with the day when it would be free of him (and, the implication was clear, equally free to destroy him.) He might have used the cantrip on himself to reduce his own level of unease but feared becoming oblivious to looming danger.

  One interesting concomitant of the situation was t
hat the cantrip-calmed deodand became more conversational as the weeks rolled on. There were evenings, as they leaned back and forth like rowers to access the King’s Compass gaming board that the creature became almost chatty, telling of his upbringing as an anonymous youngster in a teeming nest, surviving against his fellows only by employing those impressive fangs and talons until he was old enough to escape the nest and begin killing things other than his own siblings.

  “We do not build towns as your kind does,” the deodand explained. “We share territories, but only at a distance except for those times when we are drawn together to mate and settle grievances, the latter of which we effect by contests of strength which inevitably end in exoneration for one party, death for the other. I myself have survived a dozen such disputes. Here, see the deep scar of one such honorably concluded disagreement.” The creature raised its arm to show Lixal, but in the firelight he could make out nothing against the flat darkness of its skin. “It has never been in our nature to cluster together as your kind does or to build as your kind builds. We have always been content to take shelter where it is found. However, as I play this game of yours I begin to see advantages in the way your kind thinks. We deodands seldom plan ahead beyond the successful conclusion of a given hunt, but I see now that one of the advantages your people has over mine is this very quality of forward thinking. Also, I begin to comprehend how misdirection and even outright untruth can be useful for more than simply catching a wary traveler off-guard.” The deodand abruptly moved two spinari in the same direction, revealing a sortie he had prepared, but which had been previously hidden behind them. “As you see,” he pointed out with a baring of fangs which was the deodand equivalent of a self-satisfied smile.

  Despite the creature’s unusual strategem, Lixal won again that night. He had been put on notice, however: the deodand was learning and he would have to increase the effort he put into the games if he wished to maintain his supremacy and his unbroken record. He found himself regretting, as he had many times before, that hundreds of consecutive victories in a game of skill should net him exactly nothing in the way of monetary reward. It was a suffering more poignant than anything Eliastre could have devised for him.

  * * *

  At last they reached the small metropolis of Catechumia, home of Twitterel’s Emporium. Lixal and the deodand paused and waited for nightfall in a glade on the outskirts of town, not far from the place where Lixal’s troop had once camped.

  “Do not trouble yourself with speech when we meet Eliastre,” he warned the deodand. “It will be a tense negotiation and best served by devices I alone can bring to bear. In fact,” he said after a moment’s thought, “It may be best if you remain outside the door while I step just inside it, so that the treacherous onetime mage knows nothing of your presence and can prepare no defense against you, should I find it necessary to call upon you.”

  “You have tried once already to trap me on the other side of a door, Laqavee,” the deodand said sourly. “Not only that, but it was a church door, which you thought might increase the efficacy of the strategem. And what happened?”

  “You wrong me! That was weeks ago and I intend no such trickery here…!”

  “You discovered you could not go forward while I remained on the other side of the door,” the creature reminded him. “Like the golden links of a magister’s cuff, we are bound together, willy-nilly — one cannot proceed without the other.”

  “As far as our current plan, I desired only to keep your presence a secret at the outset,” Lixal said in a sulky voice. “But you will do as you feel you must.”

  “Yes, I shall,” said the deodand. “And you would be wise to remember that.”

  When midnight came they crossed town swiftly and mostly silently, although Lixal was forced to remonstrate severely with the deodand who would have eaten a drunkard he found sleeping in an alcove outside a shuttered tavern.

  “He is of no interest to anyone except me,” the creature argued. “How can you prevent me when you have starved me of proper man-flesh for so long?”

  “Because if we are discovered things will go badly for both of us. If the gnawed bones of even the lowliest of townsfolk come to public attention, will not the presence of such as yourself in Catechumia instantly be inferred?”

  “They might suppose a wolf had snuck into town,” suggested the deodand. “Why do you continually thwart me? You will not even let me eat the flesh of the dead of your species, which your people scorn so much they bury it in the ground, far from their habitations!”

  “I do not let you eat the flesh of corpses because it sickens me,” replied Lixal coldly. “It is proof that, no matter how you aspire to be otherwise, you and your ilk are no better than beasts.”

  “Like those you call beasts, we do not waste perfectly edible tissues. Our own kind, at the end of their days, are perfectly happy to be returned to the communal stomach.”

  Lixal shuddered. “Enough. This is the street.”

  But to his great unhappiness, when Lixal approached the doorway of what had once been Twitterel’s Emporium it gave every sign of being long deserted. “Here,” Lixal cried, “this is wretched in the extreme! The coward has decamped. Let us enter and see if there is any clue to his present whereabouts.”

  The deodand easily, if somewhat noisily, broke the bolt on the door and they went into the large, dark room that had once been densely packed with Twitterel-who-was-Eliastre’s stock in trade. Now nothing lined the shelves but cobwebs, and even these looked long-abandoned. A rat, perhaps disturbed by the deodand’s unusual scent, scurried into a corner hole and disappeared.

  “He seems to have left you a note, Laqavee,” said the deodand, pointing. “It has your name on it.”

  Lixal, who did not have the creature’s sharp vision, had to locate the folded parchment nailed to the wall by touch, then take it outside into the flickering glow of the street-lantern to read it.

  To Lixal Laqavee, extortionist and counterfeit thaumaturge,

  the missive began,

  If you are reading this, one of two things has occurred. If you have come to pay what you owe me, I stand surprised and pleased. In this case you may give thirteen thousand terces to the landlord of this establishment (he lives next door) and I will receive it from him at a time in the future and in a manner known only to myself. In a spirit of forgiveness, I will also warn you that at no time should you attempt the Exhalation of Thunderous Banishment on a deodand.

  If you have not returned to erase your debt, as I think more likely, it is because you have used the Exhalation on one of the dusky creatures, but for some reason my intention of teaching you a lesson has been thwarted and you mean to remonstrate with me. (It is possible that my transposition of two key words, because hurried, was not as damaging to the effect as I hoped. It is even remotely possible that the protective charm you wore on your wrist was more useful than it appeared, in which case I must blame my own overconfidence.) If any combination of these is the case for your return, my various curses upon you remain in force and I inform you also that I have moved my business to another town and chosen another name, so that any attempt by you to stir up trouble for me with the Council of Thaumaturgic Practitioners will be doomed to failure.

  You, sir, may rot in hell with my congenial approval.

  signed, He Who Was Twitterel

  Lixal crumpled the parchment in his fist. “Repay him?” he growled. “His purse will groan indeed with the weight of my repayment. His account shall be paid to bursting!”

  “Your metaphors are inexact,” the deodand said. “I take it we shall not be parting company as quickly as we both had hoped.”

  * * *

  Like two prisoners condemned to share a cell, Lixal and the deodand grew weary of each other’s company in the weeks and months after they left Catechumia. Lixal searched half-heartedly for news of the ex-wizard Eliastre, but he was inhibited by the constant presence of the deodand, who proved a dampening influence on conversation with
most of humankind, and so he all but gave up hope of ever locating the author of his predicament, who could have set up shop anew in any one of hundreds of towns and cities across Almery or even farther countries still.

  While they were everywhere shunned by men, they came occasionally into contact with other deodands, who looked on Lixal not with fear or curiosity, but rather as a potential source of nutrients. When his bracelet proved more than these new deodands could overcome, they settled instead for desultory gossip with their trapped comrade. Lixal was forced to listen to long discussions criticizing what all parties but himself saw as his ridiculous opposition to the eating of human flesh, living or dead. The deodand bound to him by the Exhalation was inevitably buoyed after these discussions with like-minded peers, and would often bring an even greater energy to bear on their nightly games of King’s Compass: at times Lixal was hard-pressed to keep up his unbroken record of victories, but keep it he did, and, stinging from the deodandic imputation of his prudishness, did not hesitate to remind his opponent as often as possible of that creature’s campaign of futility.

  “Yes, it is easy to criticize,” Lixal often said as the board was packed away. “But one has only to review our sporting history to see who has the superior approach to life.” He was even beginning to grow used to this mode of existence, despite the inadequate nature of the deodand as both a conversationalist and competitor.

  Then, almost a year after their initial joining, came the day when the talismanic bracelet, the admirer’s gift that had so long protected Lixal Laqavee’s life, suddenly ceased to function.

  * * *

  Lixal discovered that the spell was no longer efficacious in a sudden and extremely unpleasant manner: one moment he slept, dreaming of a charmed scenario in which he was causing Eliastre’s bony nose to sprout carbuncles that were actually bigger than the ex-wizard himself, and laughing as the old man screeched and pleaded for mercy. Then he awoke to discover the deodand’s stinking breath on his face and the demonic yellow eyes only an inch or two from his own.