we pressed on, against the black wind, against the impenetrable night which would have devoured us. We leaned into our shields, while the Deathlands, alarm or no, threw up against us every terror, every danger and pain and dread we had ever known. All our slain foes fought us once again, and yet my great and perfect Master did not waver, and when once I stumbled, he bore me up.
“I worshipped him then. He, truly, more than any other, deserved to be celebrated in epic and song, my own humble efforts at first, then those of the great bards to come after.
“Yet I cannot speak his name.”
* * * * * * *
The teller stopped telling the tale, holding his tear-streaked face in his hands, perhaps to add verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing pack of lies, for heroes do not weep, but liars often do.
Idly, I picked up his helmet out of his lap to examine it. I even made to try it on.
But he screamed, and snatched it back, leaping to his feet and drawing his battered sword. I myself did not rise. I saw only madness in his eyes, gleaming there in the firelight. I think he would have cut my head off in another second, but I bade, him, in a soothing voice, to sit down again and continue telling lies, and I promised not to believe a word of it.
* * * * * * *
“It’s all a muddle,” he said. “It makes no sense. How then was I ever supposed to tell the story, and why did my Master command me to rehearse the tale of our deeds? Why did I struggle toward the composition of heroic lines, if I was never supposed to return from the mission, if he intended to betray me? Heroes do not commit treachery. It is impossible. I can’t go on—”
“I believe you can,” I said, “though I believe nothing else.”
* * * * * * *
“This, then, is untrue:
“We came at last to that great palace of bone, which rises like a mountain into the black sky, where dwells the King of Death with all his secret treasures. We stood before the massive gates whereon are carven a record of all the sins and folly of mankind. The lights in the windows far above us glowed a pale green, like baleful eyes, when we pounded on that gate with the pommels of our swords.
“All, thus far, according to plan.
“But the gate would not open, and I stood there, looking at my Master, and he at me, and I thought, for the very first time, that my Master was at a loss as to what to do, that he had no further stratagem.
“He put his hand gently on my shoulder, and rehearsed again, in synoptic form yet more eloquently than I ever could—words made golden by the mere fact that he, the inestimable Hero, was speaking thus—the tale our deeds, praising as he did my own role in the consummation of things, the unravellings of Fate or the doom of the gods or whatever one should call it.
“‘That is for a poet to decide,’ he said.
“‘Shall not I, then?’
“He shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not.’
“He explained to me, solemnly, but with deliberation, that it was, alas, the inherent nature of our mission that only one of us was to return from it, either the Hero was to accomplish the thing or the Companion who would witness it, but not both, because someone’s blood, living blood, must be shed before these gates if ever they were to open, so that someone might storm the very citadel of King Death and learn his secrets, to demand an explanation and remedy for the world’s pain, for the benefit of mankind.
“‘It’s very important,’ he said.
“‘What about the song of your praise, which I am supposed to compose?’ I asked.
“‘Merely a ruse,’ he said, ‘to get you to come along. I’ll try to remember some of it. I regret this. It is truly regrettable.’
* * * * * * *
“I can’t—!” The teller broke off his narration once again. He wept like a child who has been beaten, just then, though he had the form of a man, and, wearing his crested helmet now, had assumed the aspect of an avenger of the gods.
“Say on—”
“In the lie of the man who was lying, the liar told untruths, that my Master might resort to such tactics. Since he could not, he could not be my Master, therefore this is not the tale of him, and I, who went into the Land of the Dead at his side, cannot be telling it. There can only be silence now.”
“How did it all turn out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Make something up.”
* * * * * * *
“Truly regrettable, I agreed, and I wept for my Master as I drew my sword stealthily in the dark and ran him through, slipping the sword up past his groin, under his breastplate. With a hard, upward jerk I gutted him like a fish.
“He looked down at me in amazement, and sputtered something, but only blood and foam poured out of his mouth and out of the immense wound beneath his breastplate.
“His blood splashed upon the ground before the Bone Gates. I touched the carvings and smeared blood on them, and the carven figures wriggled beneath my hands like a netful of fish, reconfiguring themselves to record even this latest folly of mankind.
“Yet it wasn’t a folly.
“I tell you I slew him because I loved him, because only by this means could he die with his soul entirely pure, the tale his deeds untainted by treachery.
“And the gates of the Palace of the King of Death swung wide, and it was I who stormed in, leaning into my shield against the black wind, against all the terrors the place might hold.
“It was I who burst into the inner hall, to confront the Dark Lord on his dark throne, only to discover that throne empty.
“Nothing there. Only dust and the echoes of my footsteps, as I climbed the steps before the great seat and took into my hands the very bronze, plumed helmet into which my Master’s face had vanished entirely when I left his corpse crumpled by the gate.
“Yet. There. The helmet, in my hand.
“It was the final step that completes a dance. I sat upon the throne. I put the bronze helmet on my own head. I receded into it, so that whoever I had been faded away.
“Before my eyes, the walls of the bone palace thinned into mist, and I saw the stars beyond, and beyond the stars the wild, mad faces of the gods of war and of pain and of nightmares rising out of the universal darkness like an inevitable tide.
“And I gained the secret my Master and I had come for. It was mine now, for I was the Hero. I had stolen his name. I felt the terror and despair of all those he had slain in the course of his wars, for how can there be a Hero without violence, and what is the Hero but Death, an ender of lives?
“This palace was my own.”
* * * * * * *
“Or it would
