For a flicker of an eyelid, he was stunned. This gave Wolff enough time to pull the stinking, hairy, bumpy creature hard against him and pull with all his strength against the gworl’s spine. Too heavily muscled and too heavily boned, the gworl resisted the spine-snapping. By then, the other two men were upon him with their knives. They thrust several times and would have continued to try for a fatal spot in the tough cartilage-roughened hide had Wolff not told them to stop.
Stepping back, he released the gworl, who fell bleeding and glaze-eyed to the floor. Wolff ignored him for a moment to look out the window after the gworl who had escaped with the horn. A party of horsemen, holding torches, was thundering over the drawbridge and out into the country. The light showed only the smooth black waters of the moat; there was no gworl climbing down the wall. Wolff turned back to the gworl who had remained behind.
“His name is Diskibibol, and the other is Smeel,” Kickaha said.
“Smeel must have drowned,” Wolff said. “Even if he could swim, the water-dragons might have gotten him. But he can’t swim.”
Wolff thought of the horn lying in the muck at the bottom of the moat. “Apparently no one saw Smeel fall. So the horn’s safe there, for the time being.”
The gworl spoke. Although he used German, he could not master the sounds accurately. His words grated deep in the back of his throat. “You will die, humans. The Lord will win; Arwoor is the Lord; he cannot be defeated by filth such as you. But before you die, you will suffer the most … the . . . the most . . .”
He began coughing, threw up blood, and continued to do so until he was dead.
“We’d better get rid of his body,” Wolff said. “We might have a hard time explaining what he was doing here. And von Elgers might connect the missing horn with their presence here.”
A look out of the window showed him that the search party was far down the trail road leading to the town. For the moment, at least, no one was on the bridge. He lifted the heavy corpse up and shoved it out the window. After Kickaha’s wound was bandaged, Wolff and the Yidshe wiped up the evidences of the struggle.
Only after they were through did funem Laksfalk speak. His face pale and grim. “That was the horn of the Lord. I insist that you tell me how it got here and what your part is in this . . . this seeming blasphemy.”
“Now’s the time for the whole truth,” Kickaha said. “You tell him, Bob. For once, I don’t feel like hogging the conversation.”
Wolff was concerned for Kickaha, for his face, too, was pale, and the blood was oozing out through the thick bandages. Nevertheless, he told the Yidshe what he could as swiftly as possible.
The knight listened well, although he could not help interjecting questions frequently or swearing when Wolff told him something particularly amazing.
“By God,” he said when Wolff seemed to be finished, “this tale of another world would make me call you a liar if the rabbis had not already told me that my ancestors, and those of the Teutons, had come from
just such a place. Then there is the Book of the Second Exodus, which says the same thing and also claims that the Lord came from a different world.
“Still, I had always thought these tales the stuff that holy men, who are a trifle mad, dream up. I would never have dreamed of saying so aloud, of course, for I did not want to be stoned for heresy. Also, there’s always the doubt that these could be true. And the Lord punishes those who deny him; there’s no doubt of that.
“Now, you put me in a situation no man could envy. I know you two for the most redoubtable knights it has ever been my fortune to encounter. You are such men as would not lie; I would stake my life on that. And your story rings true as the armor of the great dragon-slayer, fun Zilberbergl. Yet, I do not know.”