The Skrayling Tree Read Online Free PDF

give away information. He brooded for a moment, then gestured towards the round frame. “That
     medicine shield should get you there. You can tell by its size it has no business being here. If you were to give it the opportunity
     to return to where it came from, it might take you with it.”
    “Why do you tell me that? Why do you not use the shield yourself?”
    “Madam, I do not have your skills and talents.” His voice was dry, almost mocking. “I am a mere mortal. Not even a demon,
     madam. Just a creature of the Devil, you know. An indentured soul. I go where I am bid.”
    “I seem to remember that you had turned against Satan. I gather you found him a disappointment?”
    Klosterheim’s face clouded. He rose from the chair. “My spiritual life is my own.” He stared thoughtfully into the barrels
     of my shotgun and shrugged. “You have the power to go where I need to go.”
    “You require a guide? When I have no idea where they have taken Ulric? Less idea than you, apparently.”
    “I lack your grace.” He spoke quietly, though his jaw tightened as if in anger. “Countess, it was your husband’s help I sought.”
     Something struggled in him. “But I think it is time for reconciliation.”
    “With Lucifer?”
    “Possibly. I opposed my master as my master opposed his. I scarcely understand this mania for solipsism or how it came about.
     Once half our lives were spentcontemplating God and the nature of evil. Now Satan’s domain throughout the multiverse shrinks steadily.” He did not sound
     optimistic.
    I thought him completely mad with his weird, twisted pieties. I had made it my business to read old family histories long
     before I decided to marry Ulric. Half the von Beks, it seemed, had had dealings with the supernatural and denied it or were
     disbelieved. A manuscript had only recently been found which claimed to be some sort of ancestral record, written in an idiosyncratic
     hand in old German; but the East German authorities, unfortunately, had claimed it as a state archive, and we had not yet
     been able to read it. There was a suggestion that its contents were too dangerous to publish. We did know, however, that it
     had something to do with the Holy Grail and the Devil.
    Again he gestured towards the medicine shield. “That will take you to your husband, if he still lives. I don’t require a guide.
     I require a key. I do not travel so easily between the worlds as you. Few do. I have given you all the information I can to
     help you find Count Ulric. He does not possess what I want, but what I want is in his power to grant me. I hoped he would
     have the key.”
    I was losing interest in the conversation. I had decided to see what the Kakatanawa medicine shield could do for me. Perhaps
     I should have been more cautious, but I was desperate to follow Ulric, ready to believe almost anything in order to find him.
    “Key?” I asked impatiently.
    “There is another way to reach the world to whichhe’s been taken. A door of some kind. Perhaps on the Isle of Morn.”
    “How did you think Ulric could help you?”
    “I hoped the door through to that world is on Morn and the key to that door would be in your husband’s keeping.” He seemed
     deeply disappointed, as if this was the culmination of a long quest which had proven to be useless.
    “I can assure you we have no mysterious keys.”
    “You have the sword,” he said, without much hope. “You have the black sword.”
    “As far as I know,” I told him, “that, too, is in the hands of the East German authorities.”
    He looked up in some dismay. “It’s in the East?”
    “Unless the Russians now have it.”
    He frowned. ‘Then I have bothered you unnecessarily.”
    “In which case…” I gestured with the shotgun.
    He nodded agreeably and began walking towards the front door. “I’m obliged to you, madam. I wish you well.”
    I was still in an appalling daze as I watched him open the door and leave. I followed him and saw