Though he could not move feet or legs or arms, Sir Paramore found his tongue. "Out of here! Just as my young knights slew your assassin, I will slay you!"
"Do not toy with me," said the black-bearded mage. "Your sword dispels magic only when in your grip; without it, you can do nothing against me. Besides, neither Ferris nor I am the true assassin. You are."
"Guards! Save me!" cried Paramore toward the yet-bolted door.
"I know how you arranged the kidnappings. I know how you hired those five men to abduct the noblemen's children," said the mage.
"What?" roared the knight, struggling to possess his own body but bringing only impotent tremors to his legs.
The guards outside were pounding now and calling for assurances.
"I know how you met with your five kidnappers to pay them for their duties," continued the mage. "But they received only your axe as their payment."
"Guards! Break down the door!"
"I know how you took the clothes of one of the kidnappers you had slain, dressed in them, masqueraded in front of the children as him, and in cold blood slew Jeremy for all their eyes to see. I know how later, in guise of the noble knight you never were, you rushed in to feign saving the rest of the children," said the mage, heat entering his tone for the first time.
The guards battered the bolted door, which had begun to splinter.
Paramore shouted in anguish, "In the name of all that is holy-!"
"You did it all for the hand of the princess; you have killed even children to have her hand. You orchestrated the kidnapping, played both villain and hero, that you might extort a pledge of marriage in exchange for rescuing them."
The tremors in Sir Paramore legs had grown violent; by the mere contact of his toe against the bedpost, his whole pallet shook, as did the scabbarded sword slung on the bed knob.
"I know how you sent this note," the mage produced a crumpled slip of paper from his pocket and held it up before him, "to Lord Ferris, asking him to come up tonight to see you, and knowing that your 'knights' would waylay him."
"It's not even my handwriting," shouted Paramore. He shook violently, and the rattling blade tilted down toward his stony leg.
Louder came the boot thuds on the door. The crackle of splintering wood grew. With a gesture, though, Dorsoom cast a blue glow about the door, magic that made it solid as steel.
"And in that bag," cawed the mage, knowing he now had all the time in heaven, "in the bag that late held the five heads of the five abductors lies the head of Jeremy-the head you carved out to form a puppet to appear at the foot of Petra's bed!"
The mage swooped down to the sack of heads, but his hand never clasped it. In that precise moment, the mighty sword Kneuma jiggled free and struck Paramore's stony flesh, dispelling the enchantment on him. A mouse's breath later, that same blade whistled from its scabbard to descend on the bended neck of the sorcerer.
As the razor steel of Paramore sliced the head from the court magician, so too, it sundered the spell from the door. The guards who burst then into the room saw naught but a shower of blood, then the disjoined head propelled by its spray onto the bed and Dorsoom's body falling in a heap across the red-stained sack, soaked anew.
Seeing it all awrong, the guards rushed in to restrain Paramore. Whether from the late hour or the outrageous claims of the wizard or the threat of two warriors on one, Sir Paramore's attempt to parry the blades of the guards resulted in the goring of one of them through the eye. The wounded man's cowardly partner fell back and shouted an alarm at the head of the stair. Meantime Paramore, pitying the man whose bloodied socket his sword-tip was lodged in, drove the blade the rest of the way into the brain to grant the man his peace.
An alarm went up throughout the castle: "Paramore the murderer! Stop him! Slay him!"
Sir Paramore watched the other guard flee, then knelt beside the fallen body at his feet. A tear streaked down his noble cheek, and he stared with unseeing eyes upon the sanguine ruin of his life. Determined to remember the man who destroyed it all, he palmed the head of Dorsoom and thrust it angrily into his sack, where it made a clottering sound. Then he stood solemnly, breathed the blood- and sweat-salted air, and strode from the room, knowing that even if he escaped with his life, he would be unrighteously banished.
And he was.
"And that, dear friends," rasped the robed stranger, his left hand stroking his black beard, "is the tragic tale of the greatest hero who ever lived."
The room, aside from the crackle of the hearth fire and the howl of the defiant wind, was dead silent. The people who had once scorned this broken hovel of a man now stared toward him with reverence and awe. It wasn't his words. It wasn't his story, but something more fundamental about him, more mystic and essential to his being. Magic. Those who once would have denied him a thimble of water would now happily feast him to the best of their farms, would gladly give their husbands and sons to him to be soldiers, their wives and daughters to him to be playthings. And this ensorcelled reverence was only heightened by his next words.
"And that, dear friends, is the tragic tale of how / came to be among you." Even the wind and the fire stilled to hear what had to follow. "For, you see, / am Sir Paramore."
With that, he threw back the yet-sodden rags that had draped him, and from the huge bundle that had been the body of the stranger emerged a young and elegant and powerful and platinum-eyed warrior. His face was very different from the wizened and sepulchral one that had spoken to them. The latter-the dismembered head of Dorsoom-was jammed down puppetlike past the wrist on the warrior's right hand. The dead mouth of the dead wizard moved even now by the device of the warrior's fingers, positioned on the bony palate and in the dry, rasping tongue. Throughout the night, throughout the long telling, the gathered villagers had all listened to the puppet head of a dead man.
The old man's voice now came from the young man's mouth as his fingers moved the jaw and tongue. "Believe him, ye people! Here is the greatest hero who ever lived." A brown-black ooze clung in dribbles to Paramore's forearm.
Only Horace, stumbling now into the taproom, was horrified by this; the depravity did not strike the others in the slightest. The simple folk of Capel Curig left their chairs and moved wonderingly up toward the towering knight and his grisly puppet. They crowded him just as the children had done in the story. Cries of "Teach us, 0 knight! Lead us, Paramore! Guard us and save us from our enemies!" mingled with groans and tongues too ecstatic for human words.
In their center, the beaming sun of their adoration stretched out his bloodied hand and enwrapped them. "Of course I will save you. Only follow me and be my warriors, my knights!"
"We would die for you!"
"Let us die for you!"
"Paramore! Paramore!"
The praises rose up above the rumble of the wind and the growl of the fire, and the uplifted hands of the people could have thrust the roof entire from the inn had Paramore only commanded it.
The adulation was so intense that none-not even the god-man Paramore himself-saw Horace's flashing axe blade until it emerged red from the knight's gurgling throat.
Twilight
The world was young.
And on the shores of Cold Ocean sat the woman, and she had the size of a mountain and the shape as well. She had great hips as large as hillocks and she had a bosom of craggy buttresses. The woman had also a sharp chin and a crooked nose, and cheeks as flat as cliffs. She had eyes round and black, as are caves, and white billowing hair, like snow blowing off the lofty peaks.