Free A Stark And Wormy Knight by Tad Williams

blazeful) before voiding himself down the chimbley hole into the great fireplace.”
    “He couped the flue!”
    “He did, my boy, he did. The whole of Libogran’s household came staggering out into the cold night waving and weeping and coughing out the stinking smoke as your Grand’s Grandpap flew chortling away into the night, unseen. Libogran’s castle had to be emptied and aired for weeks during the most freezingly worstful weather of the year, and on this account the knight spent the rest of his life at war with the castle pigeons, on whom he blamed your Great-Grandpap’s secret chimbley-discharge – he thought the birds had united for a concerted, guanotated attempt on his life. Thus, stalking a dove across the roof with his bird-net and boarspear a few years later, Sir Libogran slipped and fell to his death in the castle garden, spiking himself on his own great sticker and dangling thereby for several days, mistaked by his kin and servants as a new scarecrow.”
    “Halloo and hooray, Mam! Was he the last of the dragon-hunters, then? Was him skewerting on his own sharpitude the reason we no longer fear them?”
    “No, dearest honey-sonny, we no longer fear them because they no longer see us. During the hunders of yearses since your Greatest Grandpap’s day, a plague called Civilization came over them, a diseaseful misery that blinded them to half the creatures of the world and dumbfounded their memories of much that is true and ancient. Let me tell you a dreadsome secret.” She leaned close to whisper in his tender earhole. “Even when we snatch a plump merchant or a lean yet flavorful spinster from their midst these days, the humans never know that one of us dragons has doomfully done for the disappeared. They blame it instead on a monster they fear even more.”
    “What is that, Mam?” Alexandrax whimpspered. “It fears me to hear, but I want to know. What do they think slaughters them? An odious ogre? A man-munching manticore?
    “Some even more frightfulling creature. No dragon has ever seen it, but they call it…Statistics.”
    “Clawed Hitself save us from such a horridly horror!” squeeped the small one in fright.
    “It is only a man-fancy, like all the rest of their nonned sense,” murmed his Mam. “Empty as the armor of a cracked and slurped knight – so fear it not. Now, my tale is coiled, so sleepish for you, my tender-winged bundle.”
    “I will,” he said, curling up like a sleepy hoop, most yawnful. “I s’pose no knights is good nights, huh, Mam?”
    “Examply, my brooded boy. Fear not clanking men nor else. Sleep. All is safe and I am watching all over you.”
    And indeed, as she gazed yellow-eyed and loving on her eggling, the cave soon grew fulfilled with the thumberous rundle of wormsnore.

The Storm Door
    N IGHTINGALE DID NOT TAKE THE FIRST cab he saw when he stepped out into the rainy San Francisco streets. He never did. Some might call it superstition, but in his profession the line between “superstitions” and “rules of survival” was rather slender. He stepped back onto the curb to avoid the spray of water as the second cab pulled up in response to his wave. Paranormal investigators didn’t make enough money to ruin a pair of good shoes for no reason.
    Somebody should have warned me that saving the world from unspeakable horrors is like being a teacher – lots of job satisfaction, but the money’s crap.
    “Thirty-three Gilman Street,” he told the driver, an ex-hippie on the edge of retirement age, shoulder-length gray hair draggling out from under his Kangol hat and several silver rings on the fingers holding the wheel. “It’s off Jones.”
    “You got it.” The driver pulled back into traffic, wipers squeaking as city lights smeared and dribbled across the glass beside Nightingale’s head. “Helluva night,” he said. “I know we need the rain and everything, but…shit, man.”
    Nathan Nightingale had spent so much of the past week in a small,