The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) by John C. Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

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