Terminus Est
There are pictures in the brown book of angels
swooping down upon Urth in just that posture, the head thrown back,
the body inclined so that the face and the upper part of the chest
are at the same level. I can imagine the wonder and horror of
beholding that great being I glimpsed in the book in the Second
House descending in that way; yet I do not think it could be more
frightful. When I recall Baldanders now, it is thus that I think of
him first. His face was set, and he held upraised a mace tipped
with a phosphorescent sphere.
We scattered as the sparrows do when an
owl drops among them at twilight. I felt the wind of his blow at my
back and turned in time to see him alight, catching himself with
his free hand and bounding from it upright as I have watched street
acrobats do; he wore a belt I had not noticed before, a thick
affair of linked metal prisms. I never found out, however, how he
had contrived to reenter his tower to get the mace and the belt
while I thought him descending the wall; perhaps there was a window
somewhere larger than those I saw, or even a door that had provided
access to some structure that the burning of the castle by the
shore people had destroyed. It is even possible that he only
reached through some window with one arm.
But, oh, the silence as he came
floating down, the grace as he, who was large as the huts of so
many poor folk, caught himself on that hand and turned upright. The
best way to describe silence is to say nothing—but what
grace!
I whirled then with my cloak
wind-whipped behind me and my sword, as I had so often held it,
lifted for the stroke; and I knew then what I had never troubled to
think upon before—why my destiny had sent me wandering half across
the continent, facing dangers from fire and the depths of Urth,
from water and now from air, armed with this weapon, so huge, so
heavy that fighting any ordinary man with it was like cutting
lilies with an ax. Baldanders saw me and raised his mace, its head
shining yellow-white; I think it was a kind of salute.
Five or six of the lake men hedged him
about with spears and toothed clubs, but they did not close with
him. It was as though he were the center of some hermetic circle.
As we came together, we two, I discovered the
reason: a terror I could neither understand nor control gripped me.
It was not that I was afraid of him or of death, but simply that I
was afraid. I felt the hair of my head
moving as if beneath the hand of a ghost, a thing I had heard of
but always dismissed as an exaggeration, a figure of speech grown
into a lie. My knees were weak and trembled—so much so that I was
glad of the dark because they could not be seen. But we
closed.
I knew very well from the size of that
mace and the size of the arm behind it that I would never survive a
blow from it; I could only dodge and jump back. Baldanders,
equally, could not endure a stroke from Terminus
Est, for though he was large and strong enough to wear armor
as thick as a destrier’s bardings, he had none, and so heavy a
blade, with so fine an edge, easily capable of cleaving an ordinary
man to the waist, could deal him his death wound with a single
cut.
This he knew, and so we fenced much as
players do upon a stage, with sweeping blows but without actually
coming to grips. All that time the terror held me, so that it
seemed that if I did not run my heart would burst. There was a
singing in my ears, and as I watched the mace-head, whose pale
nimbus made it, indeed, too easy to watch, I became aware that it
was from there that the singing came. The weapon itself hummed with
that high, unchanging note, like a wineglass struck with a knife
and immobilized in crystalline time.
No doubt the discovery distracted me,
even though it was only for a moment. Instead of a quartering
stroke, the mace drove downward like a mallet hammering a tent peg.
I moved to one side just in time, and the singing, shimmering head
flashed past my face and crashed into the stone at my feet, which
cracked and flew to pieces like a clay pot. One of its shards laid
open a corner of my forehead, and I felt my blood streaming
down.
Baldanders saw it, and his dull eyes
lit with triumph. From that time forward he struck a stone at every
stroke, and at every stroke stone shattered. I had to back away,
and back away again, and soon I found myself with the curtain wall
at my back. As I retreated along it, the giant used his weapon to
greater advantage than ever, swinging it horizontally and striking
the wall again and again. Often the stone shards, as sharp as
flints, missed me; but often too they did not, and soon blood was
running into my eyes, and my chest and arms were
crimson.
As I leaped away from the mace for
perhaps the hundredth time, something struck my heel and I nearly
fell. It was the lowest step of a flight that climbed the wall. I
went up, gaining a bit of advantage from the height but not enough
to let me halt my retreat. There was a narrow walkway along the top
of the wall. I was driven backward along it step by step. Now
indeed I would have turned to run if I had dared, but I recalled
how quickly the giant had moved when I surprised him in the chamber
of clouds, and I knew that he would be upon me in a leap, just as I
had, as a boy, overtaken the rats in the oubliette below our tower,
breaking their spines with a stick.
But not every circumstance favored
Baldanders. Something white flashed between us, then there was a
bone-tipped spear thrust into one huge
arm, like an ylespil’s quill in the neck of a bull. The lake men
were now far enough from the singing mace that the terror it waked
no longer prevented them from throwing their weapons. Baldanders
hesitated for a moment, stepping back to pull the spear out.
Another struck him, grazing his face.
Then I knew hope and leaped forward,
and in leaping lost my footing on a broken, rain-slick stone. I
nearly went over the edge, but at the last instant caught hold of
the parapet—in time to see the luminous head of the giant’s mace
descending. Instinctively I raised Terminus
Est to ward off the blow.
There was such a scream as might have
been made if all the specters of all the men and women she had
slain were gathered on the wall—then a deafening
explosion.
I lay stunned for a moment. But
Baldanders was stunned as well, and the lake men, with the spell of
the mace broken, were swarming along the walkway toward him from
either side. Perhaps the steel of her blade, which had its own
natural frequency and, as I had often observed, chimed with
miraculous sweetness if tapped with a finger, was too much for
whatever mechanism lent its strange powers to the giant’s mace.
Perhaps it was only that her edge, sharper than a surgeon’s knife
and as hard as obsidian, had penetrated the mace-head. Whatever had
occurred, the mace was gone, and I held in my hands only the
sword’s hilt, from which protruded less than a cubit of shattered
metal. The hydrargyrum that had labored so long in the darkness
there ran from it now in silver tears.
Before I could rise, the lake men were
springing over me. A spear plunged into the giant’s chest, and a
thrown club struck him in the face. At a sweep of his arm, two of
the lake warriors tumbled screaming from the wall. Others were upon
him at once, but he shook them off. I struggled to my feet, still
only half comprehending what had taken place.
For an instant, Baldanders stood poised
upon the parapet; then he leaped. No doubt he received great aid
from the belt he wore, but the strength of his legs must have been
enormous. Slowly, heavily, he arched out and out, down and down.
Three who had clung to him too long fell to their deaths on the
rocks of the promontory.
At last he fell too, hugely, as if he
were—alone and in himself—some species of flying ship out of
control. White as milk, the lake erupted, then closed over him.
Something that writhed like a serpent and sometimes caught the
light rose from the water and into the sky, until at last it
vanished among the sullen clouds; no doubt it was the belt. But
though the islanders stood with spears poised, his head never
showed above the waves.