Vertumnus lay back in his hammock, the flute silent as his fingers danced across it aimlessly.
"That one," he mused. "That . . . hooded one."
With a delighted smile, he turned to Evanthe.
"I know him! I know him by his gait, his every movement."
With a laugh, he rumpled the hair of the dryads, pushing them playfully from the hammock.
"Go to the lady, Evanthe! Diona! Tell her the dance has become more interesting by far!"
And as the nymphs rushed off through the thick evergreens, Vertumnus leapt from the hammock and shook the mist from his long green locks. He slipped the flute into his belt and scrambled from the tree. A long journey lay ahead of him, but it was short compared to the road he had traveled for six years.
"Boniface!" he breathed. "By all the stars unfortunate and fortunate, Lord Boniface Crownguard of Foghaven! He's onto something. Now the music moves more quickly."
* * * * *
Boniface turned from the door of the keep, shaking his head to banish the strange humming noise in his ears.
He was content now. Surpassingly content. For now, the inquisitive lad was locked within the fastness of the tower.
It had taken all his riding and knowledge of geography to arrive at the castle before Sturm Brightblade. He had dismounted in the dark of the stables and slipped across the bailey, having barely the time to secure all the doors from the keep so that once the lad entered, it would be impossible for him to leave. All along the ground floor of the thousand-year-old tower, the doors were wedged impossibly shut. The sheer drop from the upper window was further assurance.
Boniface sighed, leading Luin to a rain-filled trough, from which the little mare drank loudly, the noise drowning out the hammering and shouting at the thick door, the unnatural gnat song in the winter air.
It was not the most pleasant of tasks, this locking of boys in towers. Sturm would most likely starve, and even if great good fortune let him escape, he would be delayed long enough from his forest appointment that his honor would be . . .
What was the Green Man's phrase? "Forever forfeit."
It had to be done, though, Boniface told himself as he led Luin toward the shadowy stable. It had to be done, because in asking after his father, Sturm might uncover the truth about the siege of Castle Brightblade.
He was too young to understand that truth, or how Angriff had threatened the very life of the Order.
Boniface rested his forehead against the warm flank of the mare, remembering. He remembered how Angriff Brightblade had returned from Neraka with visions, with extraordinary danger in his soul. At once they all had noticed the change in the man, how his swordsmanship flowered, how he had become more skilled and reckless and inventive.
Somehow it was a little . . . disturbing. After all, Angriff was newly wed at the time, and his father, Lord Emelin, had only recently passed into Huma's breast, leaving Castle Brightblade to the care of his son. It just seemed that Angriff would have been more . . . conservative.
Boniface shrugged and leaned against the trough.
Angriff had been a puzzle. Always a puzzle. Like that time in the garden, shortly after he returned, when the two of them had walked a narrow path lined with flowers, Boniface a dozen steps behind him and the air loud with finches and sparrows.
Boniface had come around a stand of larick and found his friend bent on the path, gloved hand lightly touching the petals of a green and silver rose. It was as if Angriff was . . . absent for a moment, that the flower held something he was desperately trying to remember or recover.
Boniface stood there, with his friend lost in thoughts of rare gentleness, with the sunlight of May slanting through the leaves of the Calvian oak so that all of them—Knight, trail, and silver flower—were cast in a curious green. Hardly the place for ill musings, it was.
But Boniface had thought, although idly and no more than tactically, that here would be a fitting place for ambush, if evil intent were to meet with a secluded spot in a garden and a great swordsman for once unwary.
He shuddered and dismissed such a dark musing.
Boniface smiled to recall it now. He had indeed been young that day in the garden.
Nonetheless, his thoughts had moved elsewhere, to the rose that Lord Angriff cupped in his hand and to other, tamer thoughts beyond that. But Angriff suddenly drew sword and rose quickly. He looked down a bend in the garden pathway, under an aeterna bush, then whirled about and made for the delicate wrought iron gazebo in the terraced center of the garden. He acted unsettled, distracted. He leaned against the scrolled gateway of the little building, as if he had been overtaken by some strange and sudden malady.
It was then that Boniface called the servants, thinking he would need help in carrying Angriff to the infirmary.
The servants arrived, flushed and breathless, but by that time Angriff was composed, thoroughly alert. He brushed aside Boniface's bracing hand and ordered the men to search the garden. They came back soon, assuring the Knights that the premises were secure.
Then Angriff had turned to him wearily.
"I am sorry for this immoderate display, Bonano," he said, using the childhood name Boniface hated but endured from his capable friend. "But when I stooped to admire this silver rose, there suddenly came upon me a change in the . . . energies of the garden. It is what you learn in Neraka, in the face of bandit swordsmen, when your heart and sword hand must learn to sense the intention and impulse of your enemy.
"I felt it just now, here in the garden," he said. "And I saw no one except you. Not even a squirrel or dog."
Angriff grinned and brushed back his dark hair wearily. "I must be more tired than I had imagined," he confessed, and it was hours before Boniface could set aside his own astonishment long enough to tell him that the "change in energy" was his own.
Even more than insubordination, more than irreverence at tournament and in the councils of the mighty, it had been that moment, remembered and magnified over the passage of years, that sealed Angriff's future for Boniface. It was why the Brightblades had to vanish forever.
And why, by simple logic, the boyhad to vanish, too.
Chapter 7
Castle di Caela
Sturm sat in the half-dark, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
He was living the bad fable told to frighten children, to steer them away from ruins and ill-kept cellars. Sturm had ventured inside, and someone—Vertumnus, he figured, for lack of a better explanation—had closed the door solidly behind him. He heard the footsteps walking away. And then, of course, the door had refused to open, whether by force or wit.
Sturm looked around. A faint light from a single high clerestory window kept the great di Caela anteroom from sinking into total darkness. And yet the hall was oppressively gloomy, paneled in mahogany or some other dark wood, its polish and glow surrendered to six years of neglect.
For Castle di Caela had fallen to the peasants in the very year that Castle Brightblade fell and Lord Angriff vanished. Agion Pathwarden was a blustery but capable steward who had kept the holdings well, but when he met betrayal and death on the Wings of Habbakuk, he left behind him a thin larder and a scant garrison of a dozen men. The garrison was starved out by the peasants in the late summer of 326, around the time of Sturm's twelfth birthday.
"Starved out," Sturm said to himself disconsolately.
Slowly and a little painfully, the lad stood and made his way toward the unhinged double doors of the great dining hall. The mahogany tables, once the pride of generations of di Caelas and then of the Brightblades that followed them, lay shattered and strewn throughout the dusty room.
Grandfather Emelin was born here, Sturm thought. Father was but a month shy of being born here himself, for when Grandmother was heavy with child, old Emelin took her north, to Castle Brightblade, where Bayard his father . . .
On the lad mused, seating himself in a high-backed chair, tracing his history amid dust and cobweb and wreckage. There was more light in
here, the clerestory bright with a dozen windows, through which the wind plunged, stirring the dust and the rotting curtains. A marble frieze, chipped and defaced by peasant hands, spanned the balcony above the hall. Upon it, scarcely recognizable from the vandalism and neglect, the story of Huma played itself out in seven sculpted scenes from the life of the great Solamnic hero.
Sturm sat upright, carefully regarding the frieze. He had a penchant for things old and marbled and historical, and after all, these carvings had been in the family nearly a thousand years. He admired the vine scroll, the magnificently carved mountains, the terrible likeness of Takhisis, the Mother of Night.
" 'Out of the heart of nothing,' " Sturm recited. " 'Aswirl in a blankness of color.' "
Then he looked at Huma himself, whose face seemed to be his own face.
"By Paladine!" the lad whispered. "My face on the face of Huma?" He walked closer through the splinters and rubble, eyes intent on the damaged frieze.
No. He was mistaken. The head of Huma had been chiseled away, no doubt when the castle was taken. What he had seen was but a trick of light, a sudden and unexplainable bedazzlement.
"Light will be dear soon," he told himself. "It's on into the rest of the castle while the sun through the windows can still guide me about and out." With a deep, courageous breath, he climbed the great stairs into the upper chambers of Castle di Caela.
* * * * *
The halls were lined with statuary and rusting mechanical birds.
Sturm had heard of the cuckoos of Castle di Caela—that his great-great-grandfather, Sir Robert, had collected all manner of chiming and whirring machinery, none of which worked, at least as it was intended to work, and all of which annoyed and menaced the visitors. Great-grandmother Enid had stored all of these novelties in the Cat Tower, the smaller of the two castle turrets, but Sir Robert and Sir Galen Pathwarden, an erratic friend of great-grandfather Bayard's, had restored the aviary in all of its irritating glory, sure that the whistling "would soothe baby Emelin."
They were gone now, the lot of them. Robert had drowned when his wheeled contraption of gnomish make, designed to render the horse obsolete, had careened off the drawbridge into the brimming di Caela moat. Great-grandmother Enid had passed away peacefully, quietly, at the age of one hundred and twelve, having lived long enough to see the infant Sturm in his cradle. As for Sir Bayard and Sir Galen, nobody knew. Some time before the century turned, when both men were white-haired and a bit gone in the faculties and were happy grandfathers of their respective broods, the eccentric pair took off on yet another quest, bound for Karthay in the farthest regions of the CourrainOcean. They were accompanied only by Sir Galen's brother, a mad hermit who talked with birds and vegetables, and none of them had returned.
Sturm fingered the brass bill of one of the comical birds. The bronze head came off in his hand, chirping one last, demented time.
So much for the di Caelas and those who consorted with them. It was a side of the family that was overgrown and wild: Sturm's mother had cautioned against their inheritance, telling the lad he must continually marshall his best Brightblade demeanor or he would be like the whole lot of them, climbing towers and living with lizards and cats.
Sturm drew his sword from its sheath as he ascended to the still brighter second floor, past servants' markers where the great geysers of Two Thirty One had shot through the floors and drenched even the upper stories. Dozens of statues lined the room, stretching back to times before the Cataclysm itself, when both Brightblade and di Caela had walked in uncommon heroism, among the first Knights at the side of Vinas Solamnus. They were all here, forever valiant if somewhat dusty.
Sturm moved by them, inspecting and exploring, his surprise and dismay growing. For here was a statue of Lucero di Caela, Wing Commander in the Great Ogre Wars, his sword drawn, stepping forth into battle. And there the statue of Bedal Brightblade, who singlehandedly fought the desert nomads, holding a pass into Solamnia until help came. There, indeed, was Roderick di Caela, who put down a hobgoblin invasion from Throt at the cost of his own life.
And the last of the statues was of Bayard Brightblade, erected, no doubt, by the Lady Enid in memory of her vanished husband. He, too, was drawing his sword and stepping forth.
Sturm rubbed at his eyes, not believing what he suddenly saw. For what had seemed a fanciful mistake down in the great hall was unsettling and real here in the upper reaches of the keep.
Each hero now had Sturm's face, down to the boyhood scar upon the chin. From one to another he quickly moved, looking, looking again, looking away. This time there was no trick of light. Vertumnus again?
For a while, he sat by the statue of Sir Robert di Caela, his thoughts wandering. It was some time before he came to himself, and at once he scrambled to his feet, intent that night not overtake him in an abandoned castle. Swiftly he ranged from room to room, chamber to chamber, the sunlight as low as his hopes. All of the windows overlooked sheer and no doubt lethal plunges onto the stone pavement of the bailey.
Desperately looking for trellis or vine or mysterious stairwell, Sturm took the steps three at a time, finding himself in the solar on the topmost floor of the keep. The solar was the spacious chamber in which innumerable di Caela lords and ladies had slept away thousands of nights, and after them, two generations of Brightblades. Heir to much of that tradition, Sturm felt a little drowsy the moment he entered the room.
If anything, things looked even more hopeless from here. Above the solar were the battlements, but the lone ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling lay in pieces no larger than his forearm. True, there were windows aplenty—stained glass, for that matter, in rich and various greens—but they were set high in yet another clerestory, to which not even a squirrel could climb.
Sturm seated himself dejectedly on the huge canopied bed, wrapping himself in what remained of the tattered curtains.
"Tomorrow," he told himself, his eyelids heavy, the curtains musty but warm. "There are cellars in this place, no doubt, out of which . . . I surely . . . can . . ."
He ran out of words and wakefulness, there amid the evening's green light and floating dust. Twice, maybe three times, he sneezed in his sleep, but he did not awaken.
And so on his very first night on the road, Sturm Bright-blade slept like a seedy lord in the ruins of the castle. He was trapped, with no prospect of escape, and a weariness so great that he slept undisturbed until the morning sun was visible through the trapdoor to the battlements.
* * * * *
The new day, however, was no better. The locks to the cellar broke easily enough, but whatever passages or tunnels once led from the cellars were now blocked. The same earthquake that had unleashed the water on the upper regions of the house had sealed off its lower regions, Sturm concluded. Sadly he rummaged amid empty barrels, bottles, and wine racks, looking for secret doors, hidden corridors, and anything edible. He leaned against the moist wall, flushed with exertion and anger.
"If I ever find Lord Wilderness, or whoever locked me in this place," he swore, beating his fists against the hard-packed earth of the cellar floor, "I shall make him pay dearly! I shall . . . I shall . . . well, I shall do something, and it will be terrible!"
He closed his eyes and seethed. He felt silly and helpless, unworthy of his knightly inheritance. Before dire vengeance could be visited, before he cornered the scoundrel and exacted fierce, Solamnic justice, he would have to find his way out of his father's father's house.
* * * * *
It looked no better by afternoon. Sturm wandered the halls of the castle, growing more and more familiar with each turn and alcove.
Slowly his anger gave way to rising hunger and fear. The well in the keep and the cistern in the solar provided a trickle of water, but one could starve as easily in a castle, it seemed, as in the wilderness or the desert. That night hunger kept him awake, and he slept fitfully, awakening no more rested than when he had first closed his eyes.
Sluggish and weary, he fo
und himself in midmorning back in the statuary room, drawn to the place and its history. He paced from one end of the hall to the other, passing from one marbled generation to the next with an increasing grogginess, until he reached the statue of Robert di Caela, fixed in the same martial pose as his ancestors and descendants, head strangely askew, as though the long-dead sculptor had sought to preserve his subject's eccentricity through an oddness in the carving.
With a sigh, the lad settled back against the dusty marble of the statue, only to slip from the pedestal onto the floor. In the statuary room, where a score of his ancestors stood enshrined, Sturm Brightblade sat and laughed alone—laughed at his own clumsiness, his unreadiness for all that lay ahead of him. Whimsically he stood, leapt onto the pedestal, and twisted the statue's head in his hands, seeking to right Sir Robert for once in the old man's spotty history.
Sturm laughed and tugged at the marble head, laughed and tugged again, his laughter ringing through the cavernous hall and the sunlight swimming around him. So dizzy he was, so faint and famished, that he never even noticed as the statue tilted, reeled, and tumbled on top of him. His head hit the floor and his breath escaped him.
Sturm awoke to music—the plaintive, solitary sound of the flute and a curious, elusive light among the statues. At first he thought it was a reflection in one of the numerous di Caela mirrors, a flash of moonlight from the window, his own movement caught in burnished bronze. But there was the music he could not explain, and it lent to the light a further, compelling mystery.
He followed the light from the room into the corridor, and the music accompanied him, echoing in the dusty corridors. Standing absolutely still on the landing of the stairwell leading down to the anteroom, Sturm saw the light shift and alter, drifting like mist toward the double doors of the lower great hall. Slowly, his sword drawn, he followed as the light drifted to the center of the large vaulted hall and vanished.
[Meetings 04] - The Oath and the Measure Page 8
