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.The demon screamed and thrashed amid the coastal rocks.Gilles, drifting now,had eluded him.Gilles felt emptiness within, hunger like the wind's and the sea's.Gilles,the empty man, devoid of fear orhope, had set his course to the rocks.God himself, he decided, had providedleeway to carry him past them.God had saved him but why? He was a sinner ofthe worst sort: lazy, weak sins of omission.He had grasped sin no more firmlythan virtue.His self-disgust was a shapeless puddle of reeking seaside mud.Had there been genuine Evil in his sin that thought shot into his brain withshafts of piercing sunlight as the clouds broke overhead he might at leasthave been a manly sinner.As his small vessel rolled and plunged outward from the shore and the wrackingwaves, he understood his emptiness.As he would put it years hence, "a bit ofPage 199 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlEvil is not a bad thing." He looked down at the bailing bucket half full offroth the product of miscible wind and sea, the demon's substance.He nowowned that small portion of Evil he had to have.Then waves and seafaded, and Gilles was once more within the church.Pierrette saw her father turn his back on formless blackness, and push throughthe shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, his head high.Swinging heavily from one handwas his bucket.Salt water within it sloshed with darkness."This is myportion of you!" Gilles called out."And I'll sip it with my evening wineuntil I have consumed it all."Gilles had done what he needed to do, and Pierrette did not wish him to stay.She, too, had set her course, and could not change it without dooming herself.As she looked around at friends, acquaintances, and strangers, she saw themnodding their heads, and knew they had understood what Gilles had done andthat it was the only way to rid the world of that demon.They saw, and shehoped each would be able to do what he had to, because she could not do it byherself.* * *The black shapelessness that had been rock and sea a moment ago loomed toengulf the slight girl, but someone large and rusty stepped between them."Traitor! Betrayer!" squalled the fiend, red eyes coalescing in the darkness,reflecting crimson fromCernunnos's antler-tines, mounted on Reikhard's casque.The knight was not thehideous, priapic god who had cavorted at the mass, but the spirit of theforest, the deer god as generations before had known him, with warm, browneyes yet also a man wearing an antlered helm."You cannot shed a hundred generations of sacrifices," shrieked the demon."You are mine still.""A hundred generations of druids' sacrifices, not mine," growled the deer god,whose visage looked much like the castellan Jerome's."The last druids whoremembered the sacred texts are gone, and I'm not bound by their acts or byyou." Christian priests had named the druids evil, because of deaths done intheir gods' names."No lives have been taken in my name," bellowed Jerome orReikhard, orCernunnos in the voice of a rutting stag."You have no claim on me."Pierrette's eyes betrayed her; deer, god, and armored man appeared anddisappeared between one blink and the next, images fleeting as firelightshadows.The knight's opponent lashed out with red claws, a shapeless,inchoate beast, yet more fearsome for that.Cernunnos, again wholly stag,lowered his spreading antlers, and the creature backed away.It changed.Sooty blackness stretched out and coalesced into a long warrior's sword.Darkness swelled and split, forming legs and arms, solidifying.Circlets and eddies of smoke shaped themselves into a sculpted bronze cuirass.Fully armored in blackened bronze, the demonic warrior raised his long swordand charged the stag.He met Reikhard's iron blade, not soft horn: Cernunnoswas illusory, the armed knight real.The two crashedtogether, plate against rusty mail, bronze against iron."I am free of you," shouted the Burgundian, dancing back, swinging his weapon.The demon warrior met his arcing blade, and twisted it aside."I will have youagain," he boomed, thrusting with a dagger hitherto concealed in his otherhand.The short blade grated against mail.and it snapped.Reikhardstepped back, catching his opponent off balance.He spun, pivoting on onefoot.His sword came around from an unexpected quarter and struck his foe'sunarmored neck.The fiend's head teetered long enough for Reikhard to snatchits helmet."This is mine!" the Burgundian bellowed, backing away from the headless body,already dissolving into foul smoke."This trophy will hang from my rooftree."Reikhard swaggered away with a rattle of linked iron rings and scabbardchains, his portion of Evil swinging against his thigh: the demonic warrior'sPage 200 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlgrimacing head, already shrinking but still helmeted, like a melon thumpingand rolling around in a pot.The watching Gypsies, villagers, priests and strangers parted to let him pass,carrying the head of the demon.* * *Old Anselm then stepped forward, spreading his arms like a hawk's wings, andcame at the greasy apparition.Though diminished by a head and a bucket of seawater, the fiend still swelled to great bulk, and seemed unweakened.Likeblack, oily waters, it roiled and rippled, and above the waters an ospreycircled on wings held at a high angle, watching the surface of the sea to seewhat swam below.The grudging ocean danced with obscuring ripples, but the osprey plungedanyway, its eyes locked on a shadow shape seen a moment before.Down it shotin a flurry of black and white, into the sea, downward into the echoingsilence of the deep.Talons stretched out two by two, backward and forward,and snatched its shiny, wriggling prize, a fat red mullet.The fish hawk shot upward then, borne by air in its swollen lungs and trappedin its feathers, rising toward the shimmery hammered-tin ceiling of theforeign sea.It popped into the air.With great thrusts of its wet wings, theosprey lifted the plump mullet above gathering waves that came too late tofoil it.Its wings folded and drew upward, then spread and beat down againstthe air, tips touching the water with each stroke.The bird turned its prey inits grasp until the hapless fish faced forward as if swimming willingly wherethe osprey took it.Above, a gray-headed eagle, more thief than hunter, stooped to the attack."Mine!" the osprey squalled, warned by a stray reflection on the water [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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