Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  Agion, on the other hand, would have been much more comfortable if he could carry back to his centaur friends some satyrs’ heads on pikes. According to him, a grisly trophy was better than peace or than any number of strong promises. And there would be no trophies nor peace offerings from mysteriously vanished satyrs.

  I could understand Agion’s point of view, and by this time I rather liked the big, stupid thing. But as long as he held out for evidence, we were stuck in the swamp—there were no satyr heads for the having simply because there were no satyrs any longer, if there ever were any to begin with.

  Bayard, on the other hand, had not given up the tournament at Castle di Caela. He still had designs on being there in time to enter the lists in the match for the hand of Enid di Caela, for whose unseen smile or unseen approving glance our hero would gladly batter senseless all the unmarried men of Ansalon. That was still eleven days away, he said, and if we left at once we could be in Castle di Caela in plenty of time, and exhaust neither Valorous nor ourselves all that much. All this providing we left at once.

  Leaving at once sounded pretty good to me, too. This was a miserable place, and I had not forgotten the other elder brother, no doubt entombed in my father’s armor somewhere nearby, who could be more than embarrassing for me if, dead or alive, he somehow came unswamped.

  “Agion,” Bayard argued, “we have stood by one another, have fought side by side. If we were to go over the events of last night, I am sure each of us could find a moment, an occasion upon which he might argue that he saved the other’s life. Given that closeness, the bond of trust that has arisen between us, could you still keep me from leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  I had to step in. Things were going absolutely nowhere.

  “Look, Agion,” I began, leaning heavily against the wall of the cabin, then becoming aware of what I was doing and backing off gingerly in mistrust of rot and of bad architecture. “Look, Agion, what is it that keeps you from letting us simply walk out of here, when we’ve shown you our innocence through our actions? Or do you still think we were the ones who stirred up the satyrs?”

  “Oh, thou art truly the most noble of souls, Master Bayard and Master Galen!” Agion exclaimed. “This I cannot—indeed, would not—deny. But by similar token, Archala and my elders are—well, they are Archala and my elders. It is to them that I owe my allegiance, my promises.”

  “Just what was your promise, Agion?”

  The big centaur frowned at my question and scratched his head in a gesture that reminded me, disturbingly, of Alfric.

  “As I recall, Master Galen, ’twas in these words exact. That I should ‘Never let either—the Knight or his squire—stray from your sight until you have returned them to the custody of the elders.’ ”

  Perfect.

  “So you promised simply not to let us from your sight until you returned us?” I called down at the centaur, who had wandered away from the platform to a nearby vallenwood, from which he was stripping leaves.

  “Yes, Master Galen,” he called in reply, stuffing a handful of vallenwood leaves into his mouth.

  “Then come with us.”

  Agion swallowed. “Come with thee?”

  “Come with us?” Bayard clanked to a stop upon the platform.

  “Why not? You’ve heard of leaving the letter intact, haven’t you, Agion?”

  “Yes,” he said hesitantly.

  “For you see,” I continued, “if you come with us, Agion, you haven’t broken your promise. There may well come a time—no, there will come a time, without a doubt—when our innocence is clear, even to the most mistrustful of judges. But until that time, we have business. Which includes a tournament in eleven days’ time, at which,” I nodded masterfully at Bayard, “our presence is expected.”

  It left Agion struggling for purchase. He folded his arms and, lost in meditation, pawed the wet ground of the clearing with his right foreleg. His was a dilemma I could only imagine, and my heart went out to him in his denseness and good intentions.

  Agion bought my argument. He nodded his head vigorously, his dumb face breaking into a dumb grin. He kicked suddenly, startling several of the nearby goats.

  “I see, Master Galen! If I do not return to the elders without thee, I have not broken my promise! So my best choice is to go with thee!”

  Castle di Caela was still some way from us. We would travel south by southeast, cross the Vingaard mountains at a path Bayard remembered, then continue over the southwest shank of the Plains of Solamnia, fording the southernmost branch of the Vingaard River and stopping midway between the ford and Solanthas. It was a week’s journey as the crow flies.

  Unfortunately, none of us were crows, and we would be hard pressed to make up for the time we had lost while mired among centaurs and satyrs and Scorpions. Ten days, Bayard figured it, and that was with good weather and no distractions.

  Astride Valorous, dressed only in a cloak and a muddy tunic for the long road, Bayard led us free of the marshes. Riding uphill into clearer and drier ground, we reached what I thought was a little knoll, but turned out to be a leveling off of land, a rolling countryside stretching east eventlessly except for a patch of woods here and there and except for the road upon which we were riding, still muddy from yesterday’s bout with rain.

  It was a pretty landscape, but dull.

  Looking back upon the swamplands we had just left, I preferred what lay ahead to the tangled and entangling mystery behind us. I had never seen the countryside before me—never been this far from home. Looking back I noticed that the swamp was changing, but not with the rapid growth that had been a source of wonder and irritation during our stay in its midst. For now the swamp was browning, graying at its edges. I knew it had something to do with the Scorpion’s disappearance, but I also felt as though our leaving was bringing autumn to the country.

  Nor was the swamp all we were leaving. I thought of Brithelm standing on the platform, waving goodbye to us as we left the bare central clearing of the swamp. He had decided to stay in his hermitage—there among goats and mosquitoes—to settle in and think upon the grandeur of the gods.

  I wished Brithelm no harm, though I was mightily glad to be rid of him. He was foolish and exasperating, but probably the pure best of a sorry bunch of Pathwardens, myself included. The problem was that the world couldn’t take a pure best. Both my brothers were better off swamped, and in the way fate had swamped them.

  Still, I recalled the farewells, as my visionary middle brother stood dangerously near the edge of the swampy platform, surrounded by goats, watching the three of us ride away.

  “Don’t look at things directly, little brother, for insight dwells in the corner of the eye,” he shouted, a last piece of advice for the road.

  “What does that mean, holy man?” Agion called back, but Brithelm had turned his back on us and entered that ruinous cabin.

  At my last view of Brithelm, before he stepped through the ramshackle door into shadow, he had drawn something silver from his pocket and placed it to his lips.

  Huma’s dog whistle.

  From the surrounding greenery, goats converged on the shack.

  I turned, sentimental and a little sad, on Agion’s back toward the front of my journeys—the east, the future.

  “That’s better, Galen,” Bayard said, and I had no idea what an earbending lay ahead of me. “It’s better to look ahead of you than behind you, for behind you are quagmires and quicksand that may swallow your very best intentions.”

  What was this? Did he know about Alfric? I kept quiet, prayed silently that the honor he so treasured would keep him from guessing—or even believing—that I had bogged my wretch of a brother.

  But no, it was a little philosophy to begin his long and intricate story, filled with usurpers and violence and going without and man’s inhumanity to man. There were times that it bordered on interesting, and times that I wished I had Agion’s talent for shutting things out entirely.

  This is how it w
ent.

  “The third chapter of the Book of Vinas Solamnus, the great text found in its entirety only in the Library of Palanthas, concerns itself with the fortunes of the di Caela family—a history from the time they came mysteriously from the North, through the gates of Paladine, from the time that the founder of the line, old Gerald di Caela, joined with Vinas Solamnus, adding his name to the earliest and proudest list of Knighthood.”

  Along with the Brightblades, who were also early and proud upon that list.

  To which the Pathwardens were latecomers, I knew. Bayard was far too polite to mention that fact, but we had been instructed early and well as to how our not being one of the dozen or so Old Families would influence our lives.

  “So the family thrived in honor and in prominence for a thousand years and more, until some four hundred years ago the title—the di Caela, if you will, the paterfamilias—fell to a Gabriel di Caela. It seems that old Gabriel had three sons. The eldest was named Duncan, if my memory serves, and the youngest son was a Gabriel also. But it is Benedict di Caela, the middle son, who stands at the center of this dark and troubling story—by accident of birth disinherited.”

  Agion leaned forward as he walked, rubbing his knotty hands together and smiling. “In most of the old tales,” he offered, “there is a peculiar blessing that comes to the middle son. He stands to inherit little, and ends up with the best inheritance of all.”

  “But what we are hearing is history, Agion,” I interrupted, “in which the middle son is most likely the passed over, the dumped upon, unless something untimely happens to the Duncan in Sir Bayard’s story. What is more, it’s usually the youngest who is most blessed in the stories, least blessed in the actual workaday world.”

  Bayard sat back in the saddle and raised his hood against the cool wind of the afternoon. “Both of you are wrong,” he stated flatly. “Perhaps you should listen more carefully,” he added, “instead of setting forth your harebrained theories of justice.

  “The story of this Benedict,” he resumed, shifting the reins casually from one hand to the other, “began in envy and, as far as I can tell, ends there. He kept at remove from his brothers, there in old Gabriel’s castle—the Castle di Caela, it came to be called, for obvious reasons.

  “There young Benedict plotted, ‘mixing poison in his thoughts, dreaming of accidents,’ as the old Book of Vinas Solamnus has it. But accidents can be traced, and in those times the clerics of Mishakal had ways of stopping, of entirely reversing the spread of poison. Even if they were too late, if the poisoned wretch lay dead and past their powers of reversal and healing, they could still trace a poison in the bloodstream, determine its ingredients, when it was administered, and who had mixed it.

  “When that failed, they could make the dead talk, uncover the murderer. So for years young Benedict mixed the poison only in dreams, for he was far too timid to murder outright. Instead, he sat alone and brooded, and he thought vengeful thoughts.

  “The greatest poison, of course, is that of envy,” Bayard pronounced, and stared pointedly at me, demanding some sort of response.

  “Well, sir, I should put hemlock above envy in your poisons, for I have seen envious men live for years. But I am no apothecary. I have no talent for chemistry.”

  “Or for metaphor,” Bayard retorted, and picked up the story once more.

  “So in a sense—a metaphorical sense—Benedict poisoned himself there in the castle as his thoughts wandered. And when someone is so envenomed, poisoned in thought and in deed, his every discovery is poisoned as well. His every touch is poison.”

  “Like the Scorpion?” I asked, and instantly wished I could take back those words. For I had given my nemesis a name in that moment, had revealed I knew more of the man in black who haunted the moat house and the swamp—knew more than an honest boy should know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and waited for trouble.

  But I heard Agion add, “Or like the viper,” and looking up, saw Bayard nod in agreement.

  “Or like the poisonous creatures of legend and of history, Agion. Yes, you might say Benedict was one of those creatures, in a sense.

  “For the poison had grown inside him until even the things he found, which might have been used to the benefit of all around him—might indeed have won him an inheritance passing that of his brothers—he turned instead to things monstrous and wicked. As he did with the pendulum.”

  Pendulum? There was something about …

  “Found it he did,” Bayard explained, “in the cellar of the very Castle di Caela he coveted, while he fumbled through the darkness searching for a place to practice at the illusions he was learning, fanciful and increasingly insane. He clutched the pendulum to himself, thinking nothing of it for a while. That is, until he brought it out into the light, taking it to his quarters in the upper chambers of the castle. There, drawing it from the folds of his robe, he saw it for the first time.

  “Gold was its chain, and the ornament upon that chain was crystal.”

  Was crystal. Bayard’s words struck me like the light of a hundred stars in the darkness. I remembered the swamp, the clearing, the goats, the scattered fires …

  “And dangling that pendulum in front of his eyes, Benedict thought his poisonous thoughts, dreamed his dreams of accidents. As he looked through the crystal, a spider in the corner of his chamber grew to unnatural size, took on unnatural shape …”

  Like the goats who changed suddenly, unnaturally, into satyrs.

  “And would have crawled from the web of its own devising and poisoned him for sure … had he not looked once more and seen the creature for what it was all along—the simple spider he had watched in the room’s corner those two days past.”

  Bayard paused and looked up at Agion.

  “This tale of the spider explains the Curse of di Caela—or at least gives it birth in the histories we know.”

  I was taken aback.

  Surely not. Surely this old chestnut from the Book of Vinas Solamnus had nothing to do with what I had witnessed two nights back in a clearing in a swamp. Surely books had nothing …

  But Bayard was taking up the story again.

  “Benedict knew, then, from this accident of vision, that the pendulum was a piece of power. But from whence had it come? Historians disagree.

  “Some claim it had been dropped by a kender, who had found it the gods knew where and in what residence, for there were kender then even as there are kender now. Some claim the pendulum had become dislodged, by accident or by some large and evil design, from the cornerstone of the castle, where it had lain imbedded for generations, awaiting one so envious, so devious, as to use it in the ways that its use was intended. But of course, there are many such legends on the face of Krynn.

  “Does it really matter? For the results were the same, whether Benedict acted on an evil that was born within himself by his own discontent and envy, his own early and dark studies, or whether he acted as the instrument of a larger evil that was reaching its hand into the fabric of the world.

  “Smaller evil or larger, rest assured that the rats in the cellar adopted new and monstrous forms as Benedict dangled the gold and crystal pendulum in front of his eyes. Legend has it that they sought out Duncans room as Benedict instructed, and that when old Gabriel heard the cries of his eldest son and rushed into those chambers intending to rescue the boy, he opened the door onto a scene most unspeakable, which the histories shrink from recording because of its horror.

  “Yet the same historians affirm that Duncan’s body was neither bruised nor scarred, that it lay serene, so unmarred by death that the embalmers paused in their grotesque, unhappy task, fearing coma, catatonia, or the mystic’s sleep. But dead he was, and the clerics of Mishakal could find no wounds upon him, no poison within him.”

  Like the centaurs in Agion’s story.

  “Gabriel the Younger, however, smelled a rat, you might say.” Bayard smiled, raised his gloved hand. “He had been hunting at the foot of the Garnet Mountains on t
he night Benedict discovered the pendulum—on the night henceforth known in Solanthas and surrounding parts of Solamnia as the Night of the Rats.

  “Though the clerics found nothing in Duncan’s chambers that suggested foul play, Gabriel the Younger knew that foul play it was, and sent word to his father that the clerics of Mishakal should make Duncan speak from beyond the darkness.

  “Old Gabriel recoiled at first, as any father would. For there was something of violation, of a fierce and unnatural disturbance in this practice, even when it lay in the hands of the white-robed clerics with their holiest of intentions. But his youngest son urged him most passionately, saying, ‘Far more unnatural it is, Father, that brother should arise and murder brother for his inheritance and holdings.’ Old Gabriel was inclined to agree, ordering the clerics to grant speech unto Duncan that night in the sepulchre.

  “Meanwhile, Gabriel the Younger hid in the mountains.

  “His one surviving brother was there, at Castle di Caela, awaiting the ceremonies on the night of the equinox when the priests assembled. Whether his guilt was that of the murderer, or of a more subtle guilt that none could name, none could say. Nor will we ever know for sure.

  “Whatever the case, the fire that broke out in the sepulchre the night before the sounding was a fierce one, and was set by hand. The robes found in Benedict’s quarters had suffered burns at the hems, and smelled darkly of lamp oil and phosfire and ash.

  “The body, needless to say, was ashes also, and beyond recall. Old Gabriel was now beside himself, sure that the middle son had plotted outrage. So on the night of the equinox, in the chapel of Castle di Caela, in the presence of sixty Solamnic Knights and twenty clerics of Mishakal, the funeral chants arose for Duncan di Caela. But the chants arose for Benedict di Caela, too.”