by Gene Wolfe
He shook his head. “Not exactly. First of all, they are spells, not enchantments. That is to say, they’re words of magical import. One merely speaks them, and no chanting is required, although I would think that many chants were required for the sword that was to bear so much magic.”
Dinah giggled.
“Of course I have asked myself many times why such a sword should be given to me.”
Dr. Grimes said, “It was your dream, Bill. You don’t think that’s reason aplenty?”
“That’s like saying that all islands are inhabited because all the islands from which we’ve received reports are.” He shrugged. “I’ve had many dreams in which I wasn’t given an enchanted sword, or a sword of any kind. If—”
Dr. Hayes interrupted him. “Do you feel a connection between this sword and your penis, Bill?”
He laughed, and so did Dinah.
Dr. Grimes said, “What do you think that sword might be connected to, Bill, ‘sides this dwarf? Comin’ from a dwarf, I know why Doctor Hayes said what he did, and lots of people think like that. How do you think? What does this sword you got in your dream make you think about?”
“Biltis,” he said. As he spoke, Dinah slipped her hand into his.
“Is that the girl in your dream that rides that bird? I told Dr. Hayes about her, and maybe he’d like to read about her too, by and by.”
Dr. Hayes said, “Perhaps I would, Tacey. Perhaps I should.”
“I think so. Why does this sword make you think’bout her, Bill?”
He looked from Dr. Grimes to Dinah, and back again. “I think that Biltis must be a princess or a queen. Something of that kind, in any case—a woman with a lot of power. I told you about the fire wand.”
Dr. Grimes nodded.
“The wand proves that she has magical possessions, and can afford to give them away almost casually. When Sue and Shep and I went into the cave—she had told us not to, but we went anyway, because Sue wanted to get out of the wind—we were attacked, and Sue’s wand was at least as important as my sword and Shep’s teeth in beating our attackers back and getting the three of us out alive.”
Dr. Grimes nodded again, encouragingly. “It was a good thing you got it, Bill.”
“It was a good thing Sue did, or we would probably have been killed. And Biltis gave it to her. Sue is jealous of Biltis, but I don’t think Biltis is jealous of Sue.”
Dinah said, “Neither do I.”
“Sue wants to keep me,” he continued, “but Biltis feels she already has me, and I think she may be right. When I made the thing that had her by the foot release her, she told me very seriously that I must beware of underground places. I didn’t trust her warning then, not wholly. I should have.”
Dr. Grimes leaned toward him. “You think that tells why you’re here now, Bill?”
“Indirectly. Why did the dwarf give me the sword?”
Dr. Hayes said, “It’s your dream, Bill, not ours. Why did he?”
“I don’t know, of course. I can only guess. But my guess is that he did it because he had been ordered to—ordered by Biltis. When people talk of kings and queens, princes and princesses, these days, it’s as stock figures in marchen—pictures in a nineteenth-century book that everyone is too busy to read. But I think that Biltis is a real queen, and real queens have subjects, hundreds of thousands of them, even in a small kingdom. Tens of millions in one the size of England. If a queen with real power had a sword written over with spells she couldn’t read, she would look for someone who could, wouldn’t she? And get him to read them for her?”
“Right, Chief,” Shep said.
“It’s your dream, Bill,” Dr. Hayes repeated.
He nodded. “I’m not supposed to be explaining my dream, though, am I? I’m supposed to be explaining this—why you got me here. Very well. Suppose you got me here to tell you about the spells on the sword?”
Dinah said, “You’ve left something out. Perhaps you didn’t think of it. Why didn’t Biltis simply bring you the sword and ask you to read it?”
He shrugged. “You should know better than I. Possibly because I couldn’t. I can read it only very slowly, and when I try, it’s usually when we’re going to camp, or rest for a while. To read it, I have to be able to see it, and we didn’t have anyway to make a fire until you gave Sue the wand. Now we’ll have a fire and I may be able to puzzle out the writing by firelight.”
He turned to speak to Dr. Hayes and Dr. Grimes. “Tell me something, please, and be just as honest as you can. It will mean nothing to you, but it’s important to me. Haven’t either of you noticed that Ms. Biltis here and the woman in my dream have the same name?”
“What are you talking about?” Dr. Hayes asked.
Dr. Grimes said gently, “They’re not the same, Bill. This lady here’s Ms. Biltis from the school board, and the one in your dreams is,” she referred to her notes, “Biltis.”
Bill turned back to Dinah. “So that’s the way it is.”
“Yes.” She gave him her impish smile. “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt them.”
“I wasn’t worried,” he said.
“Careful,” Shep muttered.
“I have a sword,” Dinah told Dr. Grimes. “It’s out in my car. I’d like to bring it in and show it to Bill, if no one objects.”
Dr. Grimes looked to Dr. Hayes, who said, “What do you think, Tacey? Is he apt to become violent?”
Dr. Grimes shook her head. “He’s always been just as nice as pie, ‘cept playin’ that football, and he’s generally just catchin’ passes and runnin’ then. You want to cut anybody, Bill?”
“No,” he said. “Certainly not.”
Dinah had already gone, seeming almost to have melted away.
“Somebody goin’ to ask you to read that sword, you think, Bill?”
He nodded.
“Me, too. You goin’ to do it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Dr. Hayes said, “Do you really think that there may be writing on it, Tacey? An engraved blade? Something of that sort?”
“I guess we’ll see. Bill thinks she’s the same as the lady in his dream, and I see why. She does act sort of like it. You think she got that mark on her foot, Bill?”
He nodded.
“I been wantin’ to ask you’bout that. The first time you seen her, she had her foot down in that hole?”
“Correct.”
“She do that on purpose?”
Shep said, “Yep.”
“Bill?”
“I don’t know. Shep thinks so. If it was intentional, it may have been to explain a preexisting mark on her ankle.”
“A birthmark, like,” Dr. Grimes told Dr. Hayes. “You can see it through her nylons if you look close.”
He shook his head. “You’re being drawn into the patients’ delusional system, Tacey.”
“Okay, maybe I wasn’t seein’ nothin’. Maybe it was just a shadow. What you think, Bill? You’gree with Doctor Hayes?”
Shep said, “Nope.”
Dr. Hayes murmured, “You must know, deep inside, that there is no such mark, Bill.”
“‘I am Sir Oracle. When I ope my mouth, let no dog bark.’” He smiled. “Another possibility is that she wanted to warn me about the underground creatures—the cavern folk, or demons, or whatever we choose to call them. If she wanted to show me—not merely tell me—that they are real and dangerous, she chose a good way to do it.”
“Only you went in that cave anyhow,” Dr. Grimes said. “Can I see your book?”
He passed it to her, and she flipped it open.
Dr. Hayes said, “Some of the teachers here don’t think your dreams are real dreams, Bill. They don’t believe that they are dreams and not daydreams, in other words. Does that surprise you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I didn’t know they knew about them. Mrs. Durkin has been talking in the teachers’ lounge, I suppose.”
“Are they real dreams, Bill?”
“I don’t believe so. I don’
t believe they’re daydreams either.”
Dinah returned, shutting the door behind her. “Here it is.” She held up a package loosely wrapped in brown paper. “I got it from a company in Georgia.” She unwrapped it, ripping the paper. “I had them send it UPS Overnight. It cost a little more, but it was worth it.”
A glittering hilt protruded from a sheath of unadorned black leather.
“Here, Bill. I’ll hold this part, and you can pull it out.”
He looked to Dr. Grimes for permission. She. nodded, and he drew the gleaming double-edged blade clear of the sheath.
Dr. Hayes said, “Is that the sword you’ve been telling us about, Bill?”
He rose, weighing the sword in his hand.
Dr. Grimes said, “That isn’t a magic sword at all, is it, Bill?”
He moved the sword, not thrusting or slashing with it, only testing its weight and balance.
“There’s writin’ on the blade up close to that handle,” Dr. Grimes continued. “I been tryin’ to read it, only I can’t. Not from here.”
“‘Made in India,’” Bill said absently.
Dr. Grimes laughed. “It can’t be no magic sword if it’s made there, can it, Bill?”
Dinah sniffed. “It’s my sword, and I think it’s a very nice sword.”
“It feels well in the hand,” Bill said, “and I can’t believe that anyone would waste so much good workmanship on poor steel.” He seemed to be talking to himself.
Dr. Hayes said, “But not a magic sword. I hope you agree, Bill?”
“I do.” He looked up. “It is becoming a magic sword, however.”
Shep said, “Good!”
“Because I’m holding it. Magic is flowing from me into the sword. I didn’t know that could happen, but it can.”
Dr. Hayes looked at Dr. Grimes, who said, “Bill, I know you’re just havin’ fun, but you’re makin’ Dr. Hayes here think you got something really wrong with you. It’s not nice to fool people that way, and you could get in a lot of trouble just doin’ it.”
“Because I said that?” He smiled. “Why is the Holy Grail holy, Dr. Hayes? Why does it perform miracles? It is the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.”
“Perhaps you can tell me, Bill.”
“You don’t know, Dr. Grimes?”
She shook her head.
“Because something—not magic, let’s call it divinity—flowed from Him into the cup. We know that sort of thing happened, because once, when a sick woman touched Him, He said He had felt the power leave Him. Dynamin is the word employed in the Greek gospel—power, might. I might guess at the Aramaic word Christ actually employed, but I won’t. Such things should not be guessed at. For me the word is lygros.”
A glow like the light from blazing wood wrapped the blade of the sword as he pronounced lygros.
“The magical power of death, the power to kill,” he whispered.
There was a knock at the door.
“You put that away, Bill,” Dr. Grimes told him sharply.
He ignored her.
Dinah called, “Come in!”
The door opened, and Ms. Fournier looked in with a worried smile. “Sue Sumner isn’t in here, is she, Dr. Grimes?”
Shep said, “Nope.”
“One of the students told me she wanted to talk to you, and I thought—I hoped …”
Dr. Grimes said, “I haven’t seen her, Ms. Fournier. She’s in my book for tomorrow.”
“The chem lab supplies are stored in the basement,” Ms. Fournier continued, “I suppose you know that. Mr. Boggs sent her for some—oh!”
Shep had bounded past her, closely followed by Bill, sword in hand. With a murmured “Excuse me,” Dinah followed him, kicking off her high heels to run before she was three steps down the corridor.
“Me, too, honey.” Heavier as well as older, Dr. Grimes required most of the doorway.
“Pardon me,” Dr. Hayes said. He was holding his pipe; although it contained no tobacco, he thrust it resolutely into his mouth and clamped it with his jaw before striding away.
“I looked!” Ms. Fournier called after him.“So did Mr. Boggs ! She’s not there!”
They caught up with Bill and Shep in the furnace room, where Hector Fuente turned from his unsuccessful argument with Bill to demand, “What’re you doing here, lady?”
“I’m Dinah Biltis from the school board,” Dinah explained. “We’re here to rescue Sue Sumner, if there’s enough of her left to rescue.”
“You got to have a pass.”
“And I do. I’ll show it to you in a moment. Have you looked in there, Bill? That iron door?”
He had not seen it. He lifted the steel bar and threw it aside.
It burst open, nearly knocking him down. The first hideous thing that rushed past him was not quite a corpse or a bear. The next had four legs and a multitude of arms, with an eye at the end of each. His first cut severed two, and they writhed on the floor like snakes. Others seized him; he broke their grip and drove his blade into the bulky, faintly human body. For perhaps five seconds, its death throes made it more dangerous than it had been in life.
Someone was shooting, the shots loud and fast in the enclosed space of the furnace room. He scrambled to his feet, reclaimed his sword, and saw Shep writhing and snapping in the jaws of a nightmare cat with foot-long fangs. With her back to the furnace, Dinah was firing a small automatic. Her last shot came as he took his first step, and the slide locked back. His blade bit the big cat’s neck as though it had rushed into battle of itself, dragging him behind it. He felt it grate on vertebrae and cut free, severing the throat and the jugular veins, saw the great cat’s jaws relax and the pitiful thing that dragged itself free of them and was so soon soaked by its own spurting blood.
Laying aside his sword, he embraced the dying dog. “Shep! Oh, my God, Shep!”
Dinah bent over them both, her empty gun still in her hand.
“Can’t we heal him somehow, Biltis?”
She said, “You can, if you want to,” and he repeated the words he had spoken once before, when he and Sue had walked past a certain house, whispering them into Shep’s ear. The light of his blade shone through the clotting blood at that moment, purer than sunshine.
The three of them found Sue two miles underground and killed the things that had been guarding her. He wanted to carry her, but she insisted (her voice shaking and sharp with fear) that she could walk. Walk she did, though she leaned heavily on his arm.
Shep scouted ahead, sniffing the air and whining in his eagerness to be gone. After the first quarter mile, Dinah said, “This little flashlight’s just about gone, Bill. See how yellow it is?”
“Yes. Out brief candle, and all that. Can we get back without it?”
“I think so. Remember the light from your sword? Do that again.”
“I didn’t think you saw that,” he said.
“I see a lot. Do it again.”
He muttered to himself, and when Sue released his arm, he fingered the blade; and a sapphire light crept up and down that deep central groove some call the blood gutter, and spread to the edges after a minute or two, and trailed, by the time they had gone another quarter mile, from the point. He relaxed a little then, and hugged Sue, and tried to make the hug say that they would make it—that she would see the sky again.
“Don’t let them get me, Bill.” It was a whisper from her mind, yet clear as speech. “Oh, please! Don’t let them get me.”
“I won’t,” he said, and prayed that he could keep the promise. “Are you on our side, Biltis? Really, really on our side?”
“Certainly,” she said, and grinned.
Sue said, “You shot them. You wouldn’t have, if you weren’t on our side, would you?”
Dinah did not bother to reply.
“She wouldn’t, would she, Bill?”
“Of course not,” he said, “but I don’t understand how she did it. Her gun was empty before we came in here.”
“I had a spare magazine in
my purse, that’s all.”
“One magazine?”
Dinah nodded. “Just one.”
As they walked on (he with an arm about Sue’s waist, she weeping and stumbling), he wondered whether Dinah had been telling the truth. She had sounded as though she might be lying, and it inclined him to trust her; she had been careful with her voice when she said she was from the school board.
The iron door was closed and latched. He lifted the latch, but the door would not open. He pounded on it with the hilt of his sword, which did no good at all, and the four of them threw their combined weight against it, which did no good either.
When the rest were exhausted he went back down the long tunnel, leaving Shep to protect the two women—or perhaps, Dinah and her little gun to protect Sue and Shep. By the fiery light of his blade he found something huge cowering in a crevice; he persuaded it to come out by telling it (entirely truthfully) that he would kill it if it did not.
When the two of them returned to the door, he called out to Dinah not to shoot, saying that the thing came as a friend. “If you will break this down for us,” he told it, “we will leave the underground realm forever and trouble it no more. If you will not—or cannot—I will kill you. You’ve got my word on our departure, and on that too. Will you try? Or would you rather die here and now?”
The thing lifted the latch as he had, but the door would not open. It threw its weight against it, and it was bigger than any bull.
A crevice of light appeared. He put down his sword and got his fingers into it, and spread it as he might have opened the jaws of a crocodile, with veins bulging in his forehead and sweat dripping from his face, and the huge thing he had found throwing its terrible strength against the door again and again until the steel bar bent, and the boxes and barrels, the desks and chairs and tables that had been piled against it gave way.
They rushed out—Shep, Sue, Dinah, and he, climbing and stumbling over the fallen barricade. And the thing came after them, with Bill’s sword in its hand; but Shep severed its wrist, Dinah put a bullet into its single eye, and he drove his reclaimed sword between its ribs until the quillons gouged its scales.
They found Drs. Grimes and Hayes dismembering the catlike monster that had seized Shep, and feeding the parts to a hulking old coal furnace, assisted by Hector Fuente and his machete. “They lef’ this ol’ furnace here for standby when they went to gas,” Dr. Grimes explained. “They lef’ coal, too. Hector here, he tol’ us all’bout it. This ol’ coal furnace, it don’t need’lectricity, so when the’lectric goes off, like in a ice storm, he can run it to keep the pipes from freezin’.”