[Meetings 04] - The Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams - (ebook by Undead)

  Finally, suspecting that he might even be headed back toward the Tower, Sturm decided to stop and wait out the fog. "For wouldn't it please Derek Crownguard," he asked Luin, "if I were simply to walk out of the mist in front of the great southern gate, having turned myself entirely about in a terror?"

  He gritted his teeth. "By Huma!" he swore, "I'd rather die than give that scoundrel a moment's triumph!"

  Luin rolled her long nose over the lad's shoulder and nibbled his hair thoughtfully.

  Together the two of them waited, old mare and young rider. They dozed, startling awake now and then at the wingbeat of quails, at the chittering sound of squirrels in the distant trees. Finally the evening approached, and the country fell hushed and settled around them.

  * * * * *

  Sturm awoke with a start. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Clerist's Tower, safe in the squires' barracks. But he was armed and cloaked, and his bed was open ground. He turned over and blinked stupidly, remembering at once where he was.

  "Luin!" he whispered. The mare had wandered off, but she was somewhere nearby. Through the early morning darkness, he heard her, sniffing and pawing the earth. Sturm struggled to his feet, his father's breastplate unwieldy and too heavy to balance. Reeling one last time, the lad righted himself and stalked off in the direction of the sound.

  Suddenly there was a gentle rustling on the breeze, a sound he would remember at once when he heard it years later in the ruins of Xak Tsaroth. At first he thought it was a storm wind coursing through the leaves, but the air was still. Sturm thought of Vertumnus, of the unnatural change of the seasons. . . .

  He stumbled forward as a hot breeze passed over him, carrying upon it a smell of sulfur and ash and anger. At first it seemed as if the plains were burning, that the mist was igniting around him. He was choking.

  Sturm spun about, whistling frantically for Luin. The mare emerged calmly out of the mist and the curling smoke, stopping only to browse lazily at a low clump of clover. He scrambled to her side, hoisted himself onto her back . . .

  And held on for dear life as Luin caught wind of something beneath the sharp smell of the air, a greater, more sinister terror. She kicked out instantly, hysterically, and galloped into the mist.

  Sturm clung to the reins, his ankle tangled in a stirrup. Vainly he tried to wrestle up into the saddle, but Luin's wild and headlong path through the fog carried both of them over rough terrain, and it was all he could do to hold on. Behind him, the rustling sound faded, then resurged, this time far louder. It sounded like nothing the lad had heard before. He thought of cyclones, of the fierce Aferian wind that rides through mountain passes, leveling tree and house as it rushes onto the plains. Faster Luin galloped, her chestnut coat slick and flecked with foam now, and still the great noise closed on them, louder and swifter and more urgent.

  Sturm thought of reaching for his sword, of turning to face whatever it was that Vertumnus had sent after him. But Luin kept galloping like a wind herself over the Solamnic Plains. To remove one hand from the reins would risk a broken neck or back, a fatal dragging over the hard ground. He hung on, then, slinging his leg over the saddle once, twice, a third time, but the speed of the horse and the weight of his armor kept him dangling and struggling, unable to recover his balance. The mist behind him began to glow with a menacing, blood-red light, and in the heart of the light, a huge dark shape swooped toward him on leathery batwings, and the air was hot and hotter still until the heat was intolerable.

  And suddenly, unexpectedly, the music returned, the fog closed around them, and the light bent away from him, taking with it the sound and the heat. Coughing, gasping, halfway atop the mare, Sturm watched the mist open up and swallow the hulking, leathery form of the pursuer. The heat and the roaring subsided.

  And the music echoed in the rocks around them. A different tune this time—a quickstep filled with deception and comedy, so contagious that the nightingales perched in the darkened boughs of oak and vallenwood began to trill and mimic in answer. Luin slowed to a canter, to a walk, and Sturm, winded and baffled, finally settled himself on her back.

  "By Branchala, that was a strange thing!" the young man muttered. He looked around him as the mist scattered, falling like rain back into the hard, spare ground. Above him, the stars appeared in the Solamnic night sky—first the moons, then bright Sirion and Reorx. By their reckoning, he was miles south of where he had been.

  "What . . . what was it, Luin?" he asked. "And . . . where are we?"

  The mist had subsided now, and from horseback, Sturm could see some distance across the level plains. A village lay in the distance to the west, its faint lights twinkling in the clear winter night. It was an inviting prospect—warmth and shelter for whatever time remained before sunrise.

  But Sturm knew peasants, knew the abiding hatred they nurtured for the Order. Whatever the village, however kindly its lights, the Kingfisher, Crown, and Rose were unlikely to be welcomed in its dwellings.

  Sighing, the lad turned his gaze east, to where, faint in the sunrise and the fading white light of Solinari, the two towers of a large castle jutted on the horizon. It was notCastle Brightblade, that was certain, but it was a castle, and castles in these parts spelled refuge to those of the Oath and Measure.

  Slowly, leisurely, Sturm guided his mount eastward toward the towers, which seemed to rise like mist from the ground in front of him. It was nearly dawn when the battlements heaved into view, and in the faint gray of earliest sunlight, he made out the faded standard of the castle, emblazoned on an enormous shield above the western gates.

  The standard was weathered, the paint chipping and peeling, but Sturm knew enough of his own family history to make out its lineaments—a red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field.

  "Di Caela!" Sturm breathed. "The ancient house of my grandmothers! We are far south of where we should be, good Luin. But in a way, I suppose, we are home."

  The mare snorted again at the prospect of approaching shelter. Slowly her walk became a trot, then a canter, and with redoubled energy, she carried Sturm Brightblade toward the worn gates of his ancestors.

  Chapter 6

  The Darkwoods

  Deep in the Southern Darkwoods, lying in a hammock of vine and leaves, Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and set down his flute. Around him, the light was distorted, green and amber, as though the woods themselves were a dark and curving glass.

  The hammock was suspended between two ancient oaks above the foundation of a ruin even more ancient. Moss-covered stones dotted the clearing like worn teeth, outlining faintly the foundation of a small building, perhaps a moat house or monastery, no doubt abandoned and left to fall apart some time back in the Age of Might.

  Vertumnus's eyes flickered open suddenly. Perched above him in the branches of an ancient oak, two dryads stared down at him in perplexity.

  "You could have killed him!" hissed the smaller of the pair, her black hair knotted in a long coil. Her voice was rich and sinister, like the rush of wind over dried leaves.

  Vertumnus did not answer. Slowly he folded his hands on his chest, and for a moment, he looked like the statue of an entombed king, still and regal and unfathomable. The dryads stirred uneasily above him, the tall one scrambling down the side of the hammock as nimbly as a spider down a web until she came to rest by the side of the Green Man and nestled against him, her face buried in the green thicket of his beard.

  "I know ye're not for killing him," she whispered seductively, her voice flute music and her touch the light flutter of a bird's wing. "And it makes no difference to us. But daunt him and confuse him and send him addled back to his creed-bound brothers. Do it! Do it now!"

  Vertumnus chuckled, and the wind whistled through his laughter.

  "You're as bloodthirsty as stirges, the whole oak-dwelling lot of you," he rumbled. "And as foolish and insistent as magpies."

  The leaves rustled as he waved away the dryads.

  "Begone with the both of you! 'Tis
morning and time for me to sleep."

  He stretched, and the dryad at his side scrambled out of the hammock and onto the dried leaves of the forest floor. Pouting, she stared at the green prodigy half-drowsing in the branches above her, his voice filled with alien wonder and magic.

  "Not one of us, are ye," she accused. "Not yet. And no longer one of them, though ye may yearn for the days gone by."

  Vertumnus only laughed and turned in the hammock. He shook his head, and acorns rained through the netted vines, and for a moment, the air shimmered with a thousand swirling samaras. With glittering black eyes, he regarded the dryad, his gaze warm and amused but unreadable.

  "Who are you to say, little Evanthe, whither I yearn or aspire?"

  From somewhere amid the thick, spreading branches of juniper, a great owl descended, alighting on the clews of the hammock, a sprig of sharp blue berries in its beak. Vertumnus winked at the owl, ironically regarding the sulking nymphs below him.

  "As for now," he yawned, "get ye to an oak tree, and my companion and I will drowse and dream the dreams of the nocturnal and wise." Vertumnus arched an eyebrow, turned to the owl, and waved away the nymphs once again—this time more impatiently.

  Angrily the dryads glided toward the center of the woods, looking back over their shoulders once, then a second time, at this unmanageable green mystery in their midst.

  "Ye'll never be one of us!" the little one shouted tauntingly. "Though ye're green as a sapling, as a summer leek, ye'll never be like us, Lord Wilderness!" Then both of them vanished into the dappled light of the forest depths.

  Vertumnus smiled and closed his eyes.

  "Diona," he whispered, raising the flute to his lips, "you will never imagine how little that troubles me."

  Serenely the Green Man looked into the dark vault of the forest. He touched his lips to the flute, then lowered it, spoke a few soothing words to the owl in a language of whistles and cops and of wind through the high branches, and the great bird nestled in the spreading thicket of his hair. Vertumnus raised the flute again, and the rest of them came from the shadows—nightingale and tiercel, elk and squirrel and bat, and a single amber-eyed lynx.

  Slowly Lord Wilderness began to play, in the stately ninth mode that the bards call Branchalan. The startled owl took to wing as the hammock in which the man lay bristled with a fresh growth of leaves. Though the world and the weather around him was still in the tag end of winter, it was suddenly high summer.

  Vertumnus played, and flowers budded and blossomed about him, entwining their thin, hollow stems in his beard and hair. Quickly he shifted to the tenth mode, the serene and lilting Matherian, and the air about him wafted with sweet fragrances. On the branches above him, the songbirds nodded, lulled by the lovely smells, and gradually they began to sing along, as they had in the fog on the Plains of Solamnia.

  The Green Man's eyes twinkled with delight. For the eleventh mode was next—the Solinian, the Song of the White Moon, the Granter of Visions. Throughout Ansalon, ears were turning, lifting to the air where,' soft and almost undetectable, the melody arising from the Southern Darkwoods would fall upon them.

  Swiftly the green fingers danced over the body of the flute, flashing and blurring as the music quickened. Vertumnus looked to the gray patch of morning sky above him, visible through the opaque net of branches, and slowly watched it fill with the white face of Solinari.

  The eyes of Vertumnus flashed and widened. The dance was beginning. The branches no longer obscured the sky but, caught in the music and the light, they seemed to shrink into a netting of scars on the surface of a glorious moon.

  The shimmering surface of the orb turned green as Vertumnus played, clouding with a distant celestial storm. The clouds swirled and boiled silently, and from the midst of their turmoil, images arose, peopling the surface of the moon.

  It was like a mirage, like a scene more vivid than memory but less vivid than sight. Crossing the surface of Solinari as though moving across the face of an orb, a party of a dozen dwarves trudged from rock to insubstantial rock.

  Vertumnus squinted and continued to play.

  Two of the dwarves stopped in their ghostly passage, shadows poised on the lip of the moon. They looked at one another, sniffed, and shook their heads curiously, as though trying to dislodge something from their ears.

  Vertumnus smiled, his lips above the embouchure of the flute. It was like this always: The music reached them as a strange disturbance of thought, an elusive thing they wouldn't remember a moment after it tumbled away from their hearing. Yet the Solinian mode was the song of changes. Those within hearing would be changed by the music—that is, if they chose to listen. Some changed subtly, some profoundly, but all who had ears to hear would be touched somewhere in their deepest, most inward heart, and afterward the song would never leave them.

  The dwarves vanished as quickly as they had risen from the clouds on the moon, and in their stead, three Knights rode by on horseback, scarves wrapped about their faces against a driving winter wind.

  One of them, bareheaded, his dark hair flecked with gray, reined in his horse beneath a snow-covered stand of juniper. Half hidden in the shadow of evergreens and in the dodging light of the moon, he turned his face heavenward, listening to the music with controlled focus.

  Something about his bearing seemed familiar . . . familiar indeed. . . .

  But he was gone before Vertumnus could look more closely, vanished into the green roil of clouds about the moon. At his vanishing, Vertumnus lowered the flute, and suddenly, as though a levelling wind had passed across its surface, Solinari blazed forth with a silver light. . . .

  Then suddenly, inexplicably, it began to wane.

  Vertumnus shook his head sadly, his long green locks dripping with dew. Now he would locate the lad again, before the moon was a crescent, a sliver, before it was gone entirely into newness and dark. He would find the one who would occupy his time until the first of spring. Briskly, amusingly, he played a simple eighth-mode jig, so simple that it was scarcely magic. The dryads, hearing the song from their bowers deep in the woods, stepped from the trees and approached him, trailing oak leaves and a strange silver light.

  "There are other dancers far more promising, Vertumnus," Diona urged.

  "One of the Knights," Evanthe suggested. "Even a brace of dwarves would be more entertaining."

  Vertumnus played on as though he did not hear them. Indeed Sturm looked like a plodding prospect, a singularly unimaginative young man bound by custom and convention. What the nymphs did not know was how this Bright-blade concerned him—how the quarrel at Yule had warred with Vertumnus over the months. It was time for the lad to learn difficult instruction, about blood and forbearance and the shimmering fraud at the heart of his beloved Order. In the absence of a father, Vertumnus had taken it upon himself to provide the lessons.

  Evanthe had been right before. Vertumnus could have killed Sturm Brightblade once, twice, perhaps many times. For the dark thing that followed the lad on the fog-littered plains, a thing that answered to no man and to few gods, danced to the music of Vertumnus. It had neared the boy, had almost overtaken him, but at the last moment, the Green Man had piped it northward toward Kalaman and the bay beyond.

  It was too soon for dark things, too soon to test the boy so strongly. There would be perils enough and eventual death. But not now, for the dance was young. And spring was still a fortnight away.

  Quickly, in mist and the swelling moon, Vertumnus searched for Brightblade. Over the plains the music swept like a wind, circling about Vingaard Keep, down the great river as far as Thelgaard Keep and still searching, searching all of Solamnia until . . .

  With the last solemn notes of the tune, the fog dissolved before an ancient castle, ruinous and abandoned. Vertumnus's dark eyes widened.

  The dryads exchanged unreadable glances.

  "He is there, Evanthe," Vertumnus whispered. The last of the fog fell away, and there sat Brightblade, unsteady on his lathered mare. Shake
n by fog and fire and a breakneck ride, he seemed diminished, small inside that absurd Solamnic armor.

  "It almost makes for pity," Diona said, her dark hand resting on the Green Man's shoulder.

  "Not mine," Vertumnus replied, in his voice a last hint of winter. "My branches are bare of pity."

  So he and the owl and the dryads watched as the lad rode through the dilapidated gates of Castle di Caela.

  "A place that you know, Lord Wilderness?" Evanthe whispered teasingly, her lips at the Green Man's ear. Vertumnus smiled, but he did not answer.

  Sturm dismounted and walked the mare across the moss-covered stones of the courtyard, past booths and buildings in disrepair to the mahogany gates of the castle keep, weathered but still intact. The lad tried the door, and with some wrestling managed to yank it open.

  "He's a strong one, your dancer!" taunted Diona. Vertumnus raised a long green finger to her lips, pressing playfully until the dryad winced and turned away.

  Now the boy stepped inside, and the midday light shone briefly, fitfully into the darkness of the keep.

  "He is in the great anteroom now," Vertumnus murmured, "with its tapestries, and its golden birds, and its marble banisters."

  "Tell us about it," Evanthe whispered. "Tell us, Vertumnus."

  Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and raised the flute to his lips. Something serene, perhaps, in a more magical mode, or something piercing and light . . .

  "Vertumnus! Look!" hissed Diona. He opened his eyes as a shadowy figure crossed the distant courtyard like an unwelcome specter in a dream. From shadow to shadow flitted the man, caped and hooded and low against the walls. To the great mahogany door of the keep he came, set hand to the door . . .

  . . . and closed it, violently and suddenly, wedging it shut with a dagger. As quickly as it had come, the figure slipped away, and from inside the keep came the muffled sound of the lad beating frantically, helplessly against the jammed door.