Sword of Ice and Other Tales of Valdemar

you from this day forward, not while I'm around . .. it's all right, shhh, there, there, go on, go on and cry, that's right, let it go, let it go ...'

He leaned down and kissed L'lewythi's sweat-soaked forehead, then brushed back his hair and held him even tighter, rocking back and forth, feeling strong—and it was good to feel this way for someone after so long. The sudden rush of affection was dizzying, almost overpowering, but he didn't care. He could protect this boy, this sad, gentle boy who wanted nothing more than acceptance, something Olias himself had secretly wished for since the day he buried his mother—but instead of trusting others he had foolishly chosen to hide his loneliness behind a scrim of anger and bitterness.

It was then that Olias looked behind them and saw the wall of stone, an ancient ruin nearly overgrown with moist red vines. Sculpted into the wall was a woman's face. Her eye sockets were empty, raven-black ovals, and her mouth, opened as if calling out for some long-lost love, was the entrance to a cave. It was a face which held so much unspoken pain and grief that her expression alone would have been enough to move even the hardest of hearts, but that is not why Olias' eyes began to fill with tears.

The face was that of his mother.

Turning away, he stared into the distance and realized that they had walked a straight path since leaving the Barrens. He knew this because he could still see the Keeningwoods from here. As he stared at them, they seemed so much closer—at least in his mind's eye—and his troubled heart grew even heavier, for now all of them wore his father's face—and not the face he'd known as a child, not the robust, labor-reddened, strong face of a hearty man. No, this face was the same one he'd put on the day of his defeat by Gwanwyn and never taken off, even in death. This was the face of a broken-hearted, disgraced man whose value had been diminished even in his own eyes.

Why, dear gods; can you tell me why even here our grief haunts us? Can you make me understand why our souls cannot find a measure of peace?

As if in answer, a great rumbling came from the depths of the dark cave.

Then the echo of even darker laughter.

'... Gash . . .' whispered L'lewythi, clutching Olias' arm.

There was no time to run. Already Olias could see the thing's shape shifting forward from the depths of the earth, moving toward the light, and bringing with it a smell that was at first musty and stale like the odor from a long-closed chest whose lid has suddenly been forced open. The odor grew ever stronger, rancid and sickening, the stench of bloated carcasses rotting under a blazing sun.

Its step shook the ground, and when it at last emerged from the cave, it had to bend over, it was so tall, thrice the size of the tallest tower.

It was worse than any nightmare.

Gash was not one, but two soldier-creatures fused together. The first walked on reed-thin legs while the other grew out of its back, a torso whose head sat far above that of its carrier, with one twisted, grotesquely long arm that reached nearly to the ground, its misshapen bulk held upright by a pulsing black sack growing from between the carrier's shoulders. The shimmering gray skin had the jagged texture of rough stone, though not as dark. Its legs scraped together as it walked, loosing small clouds of chalk dust. The weight of the thing growing from its back forced the carrier to walk hunched over and in obvious pain. The bodies looked to have been once covered in armor that some terrible conflagration had melted to their skin.

The carrier looked at Olias and smiled, its pulverized lips squirming over rotted needlelike teeth. Its face was an abomination of all nature. Countless boils and leaking, diseased wounds covered its cheeks, and the sunlight reflected against the stone-sized tumors that buried its left eye. Its entire face was covered in a maze of something that looked like a spiderweb of hairless flesh.

When it spoke, it was in a voice filled with phlegm and corruption.

'Ah, a brave one,' it spat. 'I do so like brave ones. They die so well.'

Olias couldn't move. L'lewythi had gone into some form of seizure, his body stone-rigid and still, his eyes rolled back into his head, exposing only the whites.

Olias thrust out his dagger, the only weapon he had. Against Gash's colossal form, it looked pathetic, a sad joke.

'You'll not need that if you can tell me what I am.'

Olias gently set L'lewythi aside, then stood. 'And if I cannot?'

Gash tossed back both its heads and released a mad, high-pitched, cackling laugh, then balled one of its hands into a fist and threw forth a fireball that slammed into the sea, hissing. 'Then the next one will be for you. Now, look me in the face, boy, and tell me what I am.'

Olias stared, long and hard and unblinkingly.

It seemed to him that both parts of Gash were as

familiar as everything else he'd encountered thus far. The carrier—brutal, cold-hearted—could well have been a perverted form of himself, of his soul, of what it might some day become; the other—so blank-eyed and vacant— very easily might be another form of L'lewythi.

But not one of his choosing, came the thought. No; that is how others have seen him, how they have made him feel inside; hideous and freakish. The boy is Gifted, after all; those Gifts are raw and undisciplined, so he would be susceptible to others' unspoken perceptions. Is it so hard to imagine that some secret part of himself has come to view himself as other have—and not only that, but has done so without his even being consciously aware of it?

If that is so, then why do you see yourself in the carrier? What is it about that thing, this place, the faces of Mother and Father that—

—he lowered the dagger to his side—

—as around him he heard the distant echoes of L'lew-ythi's song, plaintive and sorrowful and simmering with ethereal beauty—

—and like a seed becoming a root becoming a sprout becoming a blossom, the answer came to him as, one by one, the pieces of L'lewythi's painful puzzle fell into place.

'I know what you are,' said Olias through clenched teeth. 'You are loneliness, and grief, and the death of dreams. You are the sickness which taints the spirit, and the helplessness which breaks the heart. You are fear and cold darkness, doubt and regret. You are envy and avarice and the lies we tell ourselves to excuse our cowardice or selfishness. You are every cruel word, every unkind thought and act of violence ever brought into the world. You are the weeping of mothers over the bodies of their children, the blood of soldiers spilled in battle, the last gasp of the starving in the streets. You are this boy's misplaced anger and confusion, and you feed on his sadness. You are my father's disgrace and the thing which swallowed my mother's laughter. You are the blackness of my soul, all of my hate and lust for vengeance come to life, and in your diseased gaze I can see what my spirit might one day become. You are my weakness and failures—all weakness and failure . . . but most of all, you are jealous.'

Gash snarled. 'Jealous? Of whom? And why?'

'You are Pain, and you are jealous of us—not just the boy and me, but any human being who can forget for a while that you are real. You might be a part of our lives, but we can sometimes forget you exist. We can listen to music, or tell our tales, or dance hi the waters as they lap the shoreline, or we can steal from the wealthy, or flee into the night where we meet a new friend. We can drink wine and eat fine food and sleep with chambermaids who pleasure us beyond imagining ... or we can simply lie back and stare into the flames of a campfire and revel in the unadorned glory of the night stars. Ah, yes, we can forget about you and still go on living, but you, Gash, who are Pain and Grief and Loneliness, you can never, for one moment, forget about us! You wish you could, but you can't, no matter how much you try.

'And that is why you hate us so, and why you are jealous!

'Go away,' said Olias, dismissing the monstrosity with a wave of his hand. 'You no longer have any hold over this boy or me.'

'Damn you, thief!'

'But a thief no more. From this day, I will protect this boy, and I will provide for him as best I can with what meager Bardic and Herald Gifts I possess, with honor and honesty, hurting no one. And if I can somehow make myself worthy, I will travel to Haven and ask the Herald-Mage Savil to teach me discipline so that I in turn might teach it to my friend.

'And you can be certain, Gash, that neither I nor L'lewythi will think of you very much at all.'