He got up slowly and stood there in the dark. “Kill me, then,” he said. “I won’t stop you now.” His own voice sounded dull and artificial to him. After a minute, perhaps two, when nothing had happened, he took out the piece of candle he had been taught to use for diagnosis and lit it. He stared in horror at its flame for a few seconds, then flung it down with a sob. The lair, if it was one at all, was empty.
“I didn’t ask for this,” tegeus-Cromis said. It was something he had often repeated to himself when he was a child. He saw himself reading books, learning these ways to recognise the Beast.
Groping about in the emptiness for his sword, he clasped its blade and cut the palm of his hand. He squirmed backwards through the foundered window and out into the snow, where he took a few uncertain steps, looking for the horses. They were gone. He stared at the blood running down his sword. He ran three times round the tower, crying out. Three of his fingers hung useless. He bound up the wound so he wouldn’t have to see it. Bent forward against the weather, he picked up in the slush two sets of hoofprints leading back towards Sour Pent Lay. If I hurry, he thought, I can still catch up with him. Or he may come back to look for me.
At Cobaltmere he had glimpses through the snow of long vacant mudbanks and reefs. His horse he found lying with its neck stretched out and its head in the water. His cloak was still wrapped round its hindquarters. Its body was swollen; blood oozed from its mouth and anus. The veins in its eyes were yellow.
He was looking down at it puzzledly when he heard a faint cry further along the shore.
There Dissolution Kahn sat on his great horse. She was slow to settle but full of good points-had a shoulder, he often pointed out, like the half side of a house. She arched her neck and shook her big raw head. Her bridle, which was of soft red leather-would he go heavily on her mouth with a pair of hands like his, delicate as a woman’s?-was inlaid with metal filigree; her breath steamed in the cold air. The Kahn had put on his ring mail, which he had had lacquered deep blue for him some weeks before in the Tinmarket; and over that, with care to keep it spotless, a silk surcoat the same acid yellow as the mare’s caparisons. He loved those colours. His hair blew back in the wind like a pennant. High above his head he brandished a sword with silver hilts. To the prince, who had lived for so long in a world of sign, it seemed for a moment that the marsh could not contain them: they were transformed into their own emblem and thus made invincible. But it was an effect of the light, and passed, and he saw that they looked quite small in front of the Beast of the Sixth House.
The Lamia!
It shook its plumage at them irritably. It broke wind. Chitinous scales rattled like dead reeds when it moved. It roared and whistled sardonically, winked a heavy lid over one bulging insectile eye. It did a clumsy sex dance on its hind hooves, and writhed its coils invitingly.
Though it did not want them, it would have them. It was determined to form words.
“Snork.”
It laughed delightedly, lifted a wing, and preened. Lamia the feathered snake: a pleasant musk filled the air. Lamia! With long bent fingers it reached down to pluck the doomed man and his beautiful horse! It said distinctly:
“I am a liar as well as a dwarf.”
It sent a hot stream of urine into the sodden earth. “I piss on you.” It increased its size by a factor of two, staggered, giggled, regained its balance, and fell at the Kahn.
“Run! Run!” warned tegeus-Cromis.
Blood spattered the mare’s caparisons: she stood bravely up to the bit. Dissolution Kahn retched and vomited: he would not run. He clung instead to his saddle, swaying and groaning, while the snow whirled down and the Lamia overshadowed him. He made himself look up. “I’ll have you first,” he said. He swung his big sword desperately and caught the Beast full on. It began to diminish.
“No, you see,” it said.
After that it was plain he didn’t know what to do. He was so tired. The mare still stood quietly up to her bit, careful not to unseat him. He dropped his sword. His mail which he had been so proud of was in shreds; strips of it seemed to be embedded in the flesh of his chest and shoulder. He kept as still as he could, in case he opened some wound, and watched the Sixth Beast shrivel up, shedding wings, scales, everything. Every facet of its eyes went dull. “Please,” it said. “You know.” A smell of burning hair came and went: cinders, dust, vegetable peel. Most of its limbs had withered away, leaving warty stumps which themselves soon disappeared. Iridescent fluids mixed with the water of the marsh. Mouth after mouth clicked feebly and was gone. “Please.” Only when it had repeated all its incarnations would the Kahn look up. His face was pouchy and grey. He slid out of the saddle and stood like someone drunk.
“She’s got ends like a church buttress, that horse,” he said thickly.
He cleared his throat, peering at tegeus-Cromis as if he had never seen him before, then nodded to himself.
“You should have killed it when you had the chance,” he said.
He stumbled backwards. His mouth fell open in surprise. When he looked down and saw the prince’s sword sticking out of his lower belly, he whimpered. A quick violent shudder went through him. Blood plaited on his thighs. He reached down and put his hands on the sword as if he thought he might try to pull it out, then took them carefully away again.
“Why did you do that?”
“I was to be killed killing it. Who am I now?”
Dissolution Kahn sat down gingerly. He coughed and wiped his mouth.
“I never expected this,” he said. ‘Did you see that thing? I got away with it, and now this happens. If you helped me I could still make it out of this marsh. I could tell you what to do if you didn’t know.”
He laughed.
“You and all your ancestors were well fooled. It was easy to kill. Easy. Will you help me out of here?”
“What will I do now?” whispered the prince, who hadn’t heard him.
Dissolution Kahn twisted round until he faced the body of the boy from the inn. He saw how thin and white it looked, how apart from being twisted at an odd angle it was unmarked by its own transfiguration, and how at this moment it looked to him like any other body. Then he leant forward, steadied the pommel of the prince’s sword against its ribs, and pushed himself onto it. He grunted. tegeus-Cromis sat by the lake until late in the afternoon, when the peculiar light began to come up from the water, his pewter snuffbox on his knee. The snow had stopped; not much had settled. Little Johnny Jack, he noted in the margin of one of his books: Though he is small his family is great. After that he could think of nothing to do. He reviewed everything he had ever done; that was nothing too. Eventually he pulled his sword out of Dissolution Kahn’s belly and threw it into the mere. This did not seem to satisfy him, so he took off his rings and threw them in after it. He swung himself up onto the mare; in her saddlebags he had found a big thick cloak in which to wrap himself. Because he had avoided it all afternoon, he made himself look down at the dead boy.
“When I think of you catching moths I want to cry,” he said. “You should have killed me at the inn.”
The prince rode south all night, and when he came out from under the trees he would not look up in case the Name Stars should reflect some immense and unnatural change below.