Again, Thybault advanced, this time more deliberately, as if confident he could finish the duel at will. Someone behind Toler helped him to his feet. As he regained his stance, he felt something smooth slip into his free hand. It could have been a stone by its size but it lacked the weight. He cantered to the left and began circling Thybault. The red man swung, every time just a second behind the moving target. When Toler stopped abruptly, Thybault kept turning and swinging, and this gave the Coral Heart a chance to look down at the object he held; the crone’s goose egg.
He got in two good slashes to the red man’s neck, but his blade had little effect upon the coral. Tiny slivers chipped away, leaving barely visible creases. One thing he was sure of was that the longer he could stay alive the better his chances were.
The red man, carrying and swinging the crushing weight of red coral arms, was growing winded. He redoubled his efforts to finish off Toler and came with a barrage of lunges and half fades that pressed the youth back nearly to the wall of the inn. Thybault then executed an empty fade and instead of retreating, lunged with his foot drawn up. He caught Toler in the chest with a kick and slammed him against the wall, knocking the air out of him. He slid down to a sitting position. The Coral Heart had sprung free from Toler’s grasp, and the crystal sword advanced, slashing the air.
Thybault stood now above his prey, leering down. The crowd cheered, shifting allegiance upon seeing that Toler was doomed and fearing reprisals from the apparent victor for having initially cheered against him. The red man lifted the gleaming blade into the air for the final blow, and it was here that Toler threw the egg that was still in his hand. It hit his opponent in the face and cracked. Something wet inside spilled across the coral man’s visage. He laughed at Toler’s desperate attempt at defense, and the crowd joined him.
Then Thybault’s face began to smoke and fizz and a chunk of his chin slid off. The coral man’s laughter turned to screams, and the crowd, not knowing how to react, screamed as well. Toler gathered his wits and rolled to where the Coral Heart lay. As he sprang up with his weapon in his grip, Thybault dropped the crystal sword and clawed at his face, more slivers and chunks bubbling pink and fizzing away, coming loose. The Coral Heart didn’t rely on the magical properties of his sword but just its strong steel blade, and with a mighty arcing swing, the air singing against the blood groove, he took off his opponents already rotted head. It fell on the ground smoking. A moment later the massive weight of the coral body tipped over and smashed to pieces in the frozen street. The crowd cheered for Toler.
Toler stared at the smoldering face and, in awe, noticed the lips moving. He got down on his knees and put his ear to them. To his astonishment, the sound that came forth was his mother’s, -I-’s, voice. “You have now ascended to the second level,” she said. “I thought I was to renounce the sword,” whispered Toler. “Don’t be a fool,” were her last words. Then the crowd swarmed him and took him on their shoulders into the inn to celebrate his victory.
Late that night, when he returned to the barn to prepare his things for a journey back to Camiar in the morning, the crone of Aer was waiting for him. She stepped out of the shadows and her sudden presence made him draw the Coral Heart.
“I noticed Thybault’s crystal sword disappeared soon after the duel,” he said to her.
“I took it and hid it away. No one will find it. You now have no equal.”
“I don’t understand my mother’s creation.”
“She was testing you. She may live in a cave in the mountains, but in her heart she’ll always be an assassin.”
“But didn’t you put a spell on her and change her?”
“That was all just a dream she had, twice deluding herself. You can create incredible, deadly, thought form servants and raise a child while surviving in the mountains, but you can’t change what’s in your heart.”
“So you helped me because she once intended to kill you?”
“From what I saw today,” said the crone, “it looks like she intended to kill you as well.”
“You said no one else knows where the crystal sword is?” asked Toler.
It was only hours after he’d left the village, riding on a main trail through the Forest of Sans, that the owner of the barn Toler had stayed in found the red coral statue of a young woman with long hair. The man was surprised and perplexed by it for a few years until news of the hard red slaughter reached even Twyse. Upon learning of the Coral Heart, he told his daughter how the ancients once believed that the planet Mars was made of red coral.
FOREVER PEOPLE
ROBERT V S REDICK
WHEN MAJKA STEPPED out through the kitchen door at dusk she found a huge white weasel in the garden. Brazen, it locked eyes with her: a rare chelu, a ghost weasel, halfway between the garden wall and the little ramp by which the chickens entered the barn. Majka hissed. The chelu answered with a growl. The animal was nearly the size of a wolverine.
The door stood open behind her. From within came the eager thok thok of her mother-in-law’s knife as she battled a turnip, then a chord from the mandolin her son was learning to play. They had borrowed the instrument from a neighbor; it was scratched and worn, and the neck felt slightly loose, but the family treated it like the relic of a saint. It had changed their evenings, brought life to those shadow-swamped rooms.
Majka closed the door. She would face the chelu with the axe from the wood-splitting stump. Never taking her eyes from the creature, she backed along the side of the whitewashed house. A fierce wind was rising. The warmth of the day was ebbing fast.
She had guessed that a predator was about. The chickens had gone early to roost, and Bishkin, the family’s smoke-gray cat, had slipped upstairs after his plate of buttermilk instead of rambling through the village or the ravine. Of course what they needed was a dog. Just days ago she had worked the village, opening her lean little purse. Sell me that mongrel, that runt in the corner, that toothless bitch. Any goddamned dog. She’d come back with nothing. They’d wanted twice what she could pay.
And now the axe was gone. Beside the stump lay only the small spade they used to bury ashes from the stove. Majka snatched it up and advanced on the chelu. The weasel only narrowed its eyes.
Suddenly furious, Majka charged, brandishing the spade like a madwoman.
“You want this, thief? You want me to split you in half?”
The creature bared its perfect fangs—and then thought better of the confrontation, and dashed away across the yard. In a white blur it flowed to the top of the garden wall. Looking back over its shoulder, it favored her with a different sort of noise: an odd, almost sympathetic keening. Then it sprang away towards the ravine.
Majka glanced quickly over her shoulder: the kitchen door remained closed. That was something. No one else knew the animal had appeared.
A gust of wind blasted the garden; the leaves of the withered sunflowers rasped together, gossiping women in a bread line. Feel that cold, now. Look at that sky full of bruises and rage. She knew this sort of weather: it had roared in from the northeast every autumn of her thirty-three years, scouring the last whiff of summer from the high country, sealing the villagers in their shacks.
Majka stomped into the barn. Chelus were horribly unlucky. Even to glimpse one in the forest could prompt certain old hunters to call it a day. She couldn’t imagine what they’d make of a chelu in the garden. There were stories—