He dropped to his knees He was Render.
He wanted to cry.
A red moon appeared above the plain, casting a ghastly light over the entire expanse. There was a wall of mountains to the left of him, another to his right.
He raised his right arm. He helped it with his left hand. He clutched his wrist, extended his index finger. He reached for the moon.
Then there came a howl from high in the mountains, a great wailing cry—half-human, all challenge, all loneliness and all remorse. He saw it then, treading upon the mountains, its tail brushing the snow from their highest peaks, the ultimate loupgarou of the North—Fenris, son of Loki—raging at the heavens.
It leapt into the air. It swallowed the moon.
It landed near him, and its great eyes blazed yellow. It stalked him on soundless pads, across the cold white fields that lay between the mountains; and he backed away from it, up hills and down slopes, over crevasses and rifts, through
valleys, past stalagmites and pinnacles—under the edges of glaciers, beside frozen riverbeds, and always downwards— until its hot breath bathed him and its laughing mouth was opened above him.
He turned then and his feet became two gleaming rivers carrying him away.
The world jumped backwards. He glided over the slopes. Downward. Speeding—
Away .. .
He looked back over his shoulder.
In the distance, the gray shape loped after him.
He felt that it could narrow the gap if it chose. He had to move faster.
The world reeled about him. Snow began to fall.
He raced on. Ahead, a blur, a broken outline.
He tore through the veils of snow which now seemed to be falling upward from off the ground—like strings of bubbles.
He approached the shattered form.
Like a swimmer he approached—unable to open his mouth to speak, for fear of drowning—of drowning and not knowing, of never knowing.
He could not check his forward motion; he was swept tidelike toward the wreck. He came to a stop, at last, before it.
Some things never change. They are things which have long ceased to exist as objects and stand solely as never-to-be-calendared occasions outside that sequence of elements called Time.
Render stood there and did not care if Fenris leapt upon his back and ate his brains. He had covered his eyes, but he could not stop the seeing. Not this time. He did not care about anything. Most of himself lay dead at his feet.
There was a howl. A gray shape swept past him.
The baleful eyes and bloody muzzle rooted within the wrecked car, champing through the steel, the glass, groping inside for ...
"No! Brute! Chewer of corpses!" he cried. "The dead are sacred! My dead are sacred!"
He had a scalpel in his hand then, and he slashed expertly at the tendons, the bunches of muscle on the straining shoulders, the soft belly, the ropes of the arteries.
Weeping, he dismembered the monster, limb by limb, and it bled and it bled, fouling the vehicle and remains within it with its infernal animal juices, dripping and running until the whole plain was reddened and writhing about them.
Render fell across the pulverized hood, and it was soft and warm and dry. He wept upon it.
"Don't cry," she said.
He was hanging onto her shoulder then, holding her tightly, there beside the black lake beneath the moon that was Wedgewood. A single candle flickered upon their table. She held the glass to his lips.
"Please drink it."
"Yes, give it to me!"
He gulped the wine that was all softness and lightness. It burned within him. He felt his strength returning.
"I am..."
" —Render, the Shaper," splashed the lake.
"No!"
He turned and ran again, looking for the wreck. He had to go back, to return ...
"You can't."
"I can!" he cried. "I can, if I try ..."
Yellow flames coiled through the thick air. Yellow serpents. They coiled, glowing, about his ankles. Then through the murk, two-headed and towering, approached his Adversary.
Small stones rattled past him. An overpowering odor corkscrewed up his nose and into his head.
"Shaper!" came the bellow from one head.
"You have returned for the reckoning!" called the other.
Render stared, remembering.
"No reckoning, Thaumiel," he said. "I beat you and I
chained you for—Rothman, yes it was Rothman—the cabalist." He traced a pentagram in the air. "Return to Qliphoth. I banish you."
"This place be Qliphoth."
"... By Khamael, the angel of blood, by the hosts of Seraphim, in the Name of Elohim Gebor, I bid you vanish!"
"Not this time." Both heads laughed.
It advanced.
Render backed slowly away, his feet bound by the yellow serpents. He could feel the chasm opening behind him. The world was a jigsaw puzzle coming apart. He could see the pieces separating.
"Vanish!"
The giant roared out its double-laugh.
Render stumbled.
"This way, love!"
She stood within a small cave to his right.
He shook his head and backed toward the chasm.
Thaumiel reached out toward him.
Render toppled back over the edge.
"Charles!" she screamed, and the world shook itself apart with her wailing.
"Then Vernichtung," he answered as he fell. "I join you in darkness."
Everything came to an end.
"I want to see Dr. Charles Render."
"I'm sorry, that is impossible."
"But I skip-jetted all the way here, just to thank him. I'm a new man! He changed my life!"
"I'm sorry, Mister Erikson. When you called this morning, I told you it was impossible."
"Sir, I'm Representative Erikson—and Render once did me a great service."
"Then you can do him one now. Go home."
"You can't talk to me that way!"
"I just did. Please leave. Maybe next year sometime..."
"But a few words can do wonders ..." "Save them!" "I—I'm sorry ..."
Lovely as it was, pinked over with the morning—the slopping, steaming bowl of the sea—he knew that it had to end. Therefore...
He descended the high tower stairway and he entered the courtyard. He crossed to the bower of roses and he looked down upon the pallet set in its midst. "Good morrow, m'lord," he said.
"To you the same," said the knight, his blood mingling with the earth, the flowers, the grasses, flowing from his wound, sparkling over his armor, dripping from his fingertips. "Naught hath healed?" The knight shook his head. "I empty. I wait." "Your waiting is near ended." "What mean you?" He sat upright. "The ship. It approacheth harbor."
The knight stood. He leaned his back against a mossy treetrunk. He stared at the huge, bearded servitor who continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents:
"It cometh like a dark swan before the wind—returning." "Dark, say you? Dark?" "The sails be black, Lord Tristram." "You lie!"
"Do you wish to see? To see for yourself?—Look then!" He gestured.
The earth quaked, the wall toppled. The dust swirled and settled. From where they stood they could see the ship moving into the harbor on the wings of the night. "No! You lied!—See! They are white!"
The dawn danced upon the waters. The shadows fled from the ship's sails.
"No, you fool! Black! They must be!"
"White! White!—Isolde! You have keep faith! You have returned!"
He began running toward the harbor. "Come back!—Your wound! You are ill!—Stop..." The sails were white beneath a sun that was a red button which the servitor reached quickly to touch. Night fell.