Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  Now came the hard part. Though the halls were mapped in the back of my mind, I had no earthly notion as to what lay behind most of the doors. Behind one of them was the Scorpion’s room, of course, wherein might lie some clue as to who he was and what he really wanted.

  The curse was overdue at Castle di Caela, and from Bayard’s story back in the mountains, I was sure that old Benedict—the Scorpion himself—was at it again.

  I waited and fiddled inconclusively with the Calantina. I ran through my options. Outside the window, the darkness began to settle on the courtyard, the walls and towers, and the far-flung holdings of Castle di Caela. Somewhere above me—perhaps at the very top of this tower, where the di Caela banner fluttered red and blue and white in the last hour before some steeplejack of a servant clambered up to lower it for the evening—a nightingale began its dark serenade of stars and moons.

  There were only three candles in the room, and I lit them all against the approaching night. Then I walked to the chamber window and looked down.

  Already the bailey below me was in shadows, and within it the shadowy servants moved, each with a horse prepared for a departing Knight. Soon the banquet would be over: indeed, I heard uproarious singing from somewhere toward the great hall, a sure sign that the celebration had passed from venison to brandy.

  Still no strategy. The weasel stuck in his tunnel. I stewed, tried the dice again.

  Sign of the Dragon? Something I recalled from the verses—something about “destruction a mask for innocence.” I could remember no more of it, so I let it go for the time being, walked back to the bed and sat down, looking toward the hearth and the glowing fire one of my brothers must have started before I arrived at the castle.

  It was low, now, the fire was, and as it guttered even further it let the dark into the room.

  I was reaching for a candle when I heard the noises at the window—the scratching and the heartbeat sound of wing and beak against the thick glass.

  I walked to the window and opened it wide, full knowing—as you know something by insight or by instinct—what awaited me outside.

  I still ask myself why I let the raven into the room. I knew where it had come from, and I knew about the one who sent it—had sent it or had transformed himself into it or had entered it like water into a pitcher. I never figured out the mechanics. Though all I knew of the Scorpion was brutal and often bloody, I opened the window.

  Every possible fear arose in front of me as I walked to the window. I thought of the threats at the moat house and in ’Warden Swamp, of the goats mysteriously transformed and Agion dead in the Vingaard Mountains, the sharp tines of a trident mournfully deep in his chest. In fact, I had thought about it so much on that short walk from bedpost to shutter that when the living, breathing raven flew into the room, for a second I was relieved and even a little disappointed, having worked myself up for a monster.

  It stared at me straight on, like a man or a horse would stare, instead of turning its head to the side and catching me with one glittering eye, like a natural bird would do. And the voice was not natural at all, yet frighteningly familiar.

  “It is the Weasel again. Your foolish brothers were gossiping your arrival throughout the great hall tonight, and you’ve certainly aroused the curiosity of old di Caela. He has many questions for you.”

  “Me? I’m just a lowly squire. Ex-squire actually,” I said, my mind racing.

  “Well,” the raven hissed, “he can’t help feeling a little … sad for Bayard—coming all that way with a prophecy in hand only to be cast aside by plain bad luck and delay.” The raven chuckled here, I swear. “Only you and I know you were the luck, my little friend. You caused the delay. Sir Robert suspects as much, but only you and I know.”

  “And yet …” I was trying to put together a strategy. “I do feel sorry for Bayard,” I replied, trying my best to sound casual, light-hearted. “Just because he could not win the hand of Enid di Caela shouldn’t mean that he goes away entirely bereft. Surely you, in all your good fortune, have a glimmer of compassion for him.”

  “My good fortune?” the voice began in outrage and in anger, rising to a shriek in the frail throat of the bird as the raven fluttered from mantle to bedpost in an increasingly frantic circle around the room. “You call four hundred years of fruitless striving, of fruitless planning ‘good fortune’?”

  The raven fluttered to the windowsill, motioning with its yellowed claw toward the heavens above the high tower of the castle. Beyond the conical roof, the flagpole now bare, above the thin strands of cloud, I could see where the warring constellations met, where the jaw of Paladine snapped at the tail of Takhisis there in the easternmost notch of the sky. Around that immortal, perpetual conflict, the lesser stars glimmered like thousands of inlaid jewels.

  “No, my little friend,” the voice continued, the raven raising a yellowed and bony claw from the folds of his feathers, his eyes glittering red, then orange, then yellow.

  “Bayard rushes to fulfill prophecies written centuries ago. Prophecies assuring the downfall of Benedict di Caela and of his descendants.”

  I nodded stupidly, like a boy agreeing with the schoolmaster even when the lesson has lost him entirely.

  “Prophecies recorded by men who received … a vision, perhaps. A vision received in a blinding moment of light and of insight. But afterwards, when the vision had passed and they were asked to make sense of it—of its chaos of words and names and reported events that had not happened but were to come—who is to say that they understood what they recorded?

  “Who is to say Bayard has understood? For let me tell you, there is more than one way to read that prophecy of his.”

  The bird perched on the windowsill, regarded me brightly, cruelly. It was then I first noticed that its feathers were matted and dull, the down on its head thinning, as though the creature were in the grip of some strange and lingering disease.

  I heard a soft spattering against the glass of the window. I turned to this new sound, keeping my eyes cautiously on the bird.

  Snow was falling in the courtyard. A snow of early autumn—unnatural and weird, and as the snow fell, the raven spoke.

  “You know the story of Enric Stormhold?”

  I did not know the tale and mutely shook my head.

  “Enric Stormhold—once a Knight of the Sword such as Bayard Brightblade, then a Knight of the Crown. Seeking to be a Knight of the Rose he was, and seeking that Knighthood not as much for the good he might perform through the offices of that order, oh, no, but for the trappings of honor and of glory that order might bring.

  “Oh, yes, I know that a Knight can strive for both, can desire equally and richly the glory of Knighthood and the common good. I know that nothing is wrong with such a balance of desires.

  “Nothing … necessarily.

  “It was Enric Stormhold who led the Knights against the men of Neraka, down in the passes where your ancestor”—he gestured at me—“distinguished himself for bravery, if you can imagine, won the family name that you have rubbed into the dirt and stomped upon in the last few miserable months …”

  “At your insistence!” I cried, and the raven laughed.

  “That’s neither here nor there, little Weasel. But back to Enric Stormhold. The story goes that he consulted a Calantine. Perhaps you have heard of them. They are the priests of the false god Gilean, or at least the false version of that false worship as found in Estwilde. They read the red dice and recite verses about animals. And call it prophecy.”

  His little black eyes glittered with malice. They were alert, the cold eyes of a viper.

  “I know of the Calantina. But what of Enric?”

  “Well, upon Enric’s shoulders was the defense of Solamnia itself. Though he was a brave and worthy Knight, the burden was a heavy one. He was none too sure of the wisdom of his strategies or the strength of his heart, so he asked the Calantine the fate of the campaign. Had he not asked, had he relied on the prompting of his large spirit and tru
sted in the ways and will of the gods, would we not trust him and believe in him more?”

  “The Calantine, sir. The prophecy.”

  “The Calantine cast the two and the ten,” the bird proclaimed, then threw back its head and laughed harshly.

  Two and Ten. Sign of the Raven.

  “The oracle itself was right, of course. The Sign of the Raven is that of illusion, of false assurance in a dangerous country. Is that not right, Galen Pathwarden?”

  I stammered for a moment.

  “That’s one interpretation, sir.”

  “Spoken like a Calantine,” the Raven chuckled dreadfully. “Of course the Calantines who read the dice for Enric nodded and nodded and said, The oracle tells us, sir, that your defense of Solamnia against the forces of Neraka will be the last defense you will make, that afterward peace will come to you and to Solamnia again.’

  “And Enric rejoiced at the oracle, at its promise of success to him and to his armies. In one interpretation.

  “But other things came to pass—things unimagined by Enric and unspoken by the Calantines who may or may not have foreseen them—what, after all, does it matter? The peace that came to Solamnia was indeed the peace that comes from a victorious campaign, engineered by Enric Stormhold, who left a handful of men in the pass at Chaktamir, where they held off the Nerakan army from sunrise to sundown, buying valuable time for the Solamnics at a staggering cost.

  “Two hundred Knights, it is said, defended that pass. Fifteen lived to tell of that heroism.

  “Your father was among them, Galen.”

  “Nor does he talk of it all that much. But what of Enric?”

  “Enric. Peace came to him, too, just as the Calantine said it would. While the brave men held Chaktamir, Enric led his host to another passage, little known and not surprisingly open. They circled south around the Nerakans and came in behind them, bringing death from the east. Of the thousand Nerakans who filled the pass, not a man was left.

  “But the peace that came to Enric was the sleep of death, brought about by a Nerakan arrow in the last hour of the battle. As he raised the victorious flag of the Solamnic armies, a wounded archer, lying as though dead in the center of the pass, scrambled quickly to his feet and fired a black arrow into Enric Stormhold’s throat.”

  “A black arrow?”

  “Raven feathers, Galen Pathwarden. So the Calantines were right, and the Sign of the Raven flourished in a manner that no man—not even the Calantines themselves—had foreseen.”

  “This is all very interesting, sir, but I confess that I’m at a loss as to the meaning of this whole Enric Stormhold business. How does it tie in with your being here in Castle di Caela? Is it just that prophecies may mean something entirely different than we think they mean? If that’s the case, I assure you I’ll take the advice to heart. There’s no need to haunt and bode.”

  “Oh … prophecies may mean different things to different eyes. Even places do that,” the raven croaked.

  “What does Chaktamir mean to you?”

  The bird cocked its head curiously, wickedly.

  “Why … it’s history, sir. Where the Solamnics held off the Nerakans. Where Father fought.”

  “Oh, but it’s so much more,” the raven croaked dryly. “Places mean different things to different eyes. And so does history, little man.”

  “History?”

  “The history, for example, of Benedict di Caela.”

  When the name was mentioned, the three thin candles sputtered and went out, plunging the room into a deeper darkness. Then I felt a pricking at my shoulders, the skittering of little claws, like a rat had boarded me. I struggled to shrug off the creature, but I found that I could not move.

  Then the brush of a feather at my chest, and a smell of cologne, underlying it another smell of something old and beginning to rot.

  And then the voice resumed.

  “You have heard the story of Benedict di Caela? Hear it again, little Galen, this time the way it really happened. For history is a web, a labyrinth, and those who remember it remember only their own paths out.”

  “I knew it,” I muttered, and the bird at my shoulder chuckled dryly, viciously.

  “Knew … what?” it asked with a cruel playfulness.

  “That you were Benedict di Caela! That the Scorpion and Sir Gabriel Androctus, that both of them—both of you—were Benedict di Caela!”

  “Are Benedict di Caela,” the raven hissed. “It’s no great deduction, Weasel. I come back here rather often, you know. But I do that because this castle is mine. And the holdings. And the title itself.

  “Four centuries ago I died twice. Once to the east here, at Chaktamir, which is more than a monument to Solamnic saber-rattling. More than a pass where Enric Stormhold fell.”

  “I thought you were defeated at the Throtyl Gap near Estwilde.”

  “Yes, and the family version has it that I fell there. That I had traveled only that far to the East, gathering an army of rebels as I went. But the truth, little Weasel, is that I was hunted down like the common criminal they had decided was. As I retreated eastward to Neraka, alone and disconsolate but bound for what I imagined was safety at last, a party of seven closed upon me. My brother Gabriel murdered me there, and my head tumbled from my shoulders.

  “But I was dead by then, anyhow. That is, in a matter of speaking. For my father Gabriel had pronounced me dead in the great hall where I dined only this evening, pronounced me dead so he could smuggle his title and lands to my younger brother, my murderer. Whom Father always favored.”

  “Sir, I hate to keep being a … precisionist, but there is the small matter of your elder brother Duncan’s mysterious death, how it seemed to be wedded to your mixing potions in the tower of the castle. After all, fathers don’t usually pronounce sons dead for no reason.”

  “But it was for no reason, Galen. You know the Gabriels of this story by now, know that they are merciless against all adversaries, all rivals.

  “That is all I was to them. Adversary. Rival. My poisons were for rats, no matter what monstrosities they imagined.”

  “I find it hard to give that credence, sir.”

  The claws dug sharply into my shoulder. I flinched and stifled a cry, as the warm, unhealthy smell coursed by me again.

  “What you find hard to believe is no concern to me,” the raven rasped. “Brother Duncan died of something. Who knows what it was? But whatever it was, it was not my doing.”

  “And the fire?”

  “Was mine, admittedly. I burned my brother’s body, yes, and in one of the tower rooms you can see from this window. It was a pyre most … Solamnic, for Duncan burned with his weaponry about him, his hands folded upon his chest, clutching a volume of the Measure.

  “Of course they do not tell you how I sent him off heroically, content as they are in breathing the air of conspiracy and plot. Di Caelas are bad for that, I know—too intricate for their own good.”

  “But why burn Duncan’s body? The clerics of Mishakal, who studied the dead for signs of poison—”

  “Would have found what father told them to find. And he would have had his proof then—the testimonies of those sanctimonious men of the goddess would say, ‘Yes, Sir Gabriel, your youngest son—the one named for you—is now your most capable heir, while the middle son is an abject villain, as you have always dreamed and imagined.’

  “But I never harmed my brother. Indeed, I followed all the rules, the respectable second son unto the time that Father pronounced me dead.

  “Then, over four centuries, I’ve tried to take by force what was rightfully mine, what was seized from me by inveiglement and ambush. You have heard, no doubt, of the rats, the floods, the fires, and the ogres. Each generation I would launch another natural disaster, and each generation some capable di Caela would find a way to steal my inheritance from my grasp once more.”

  “What’s it like, sir? This being dead? And why wait a generation between attempts?”

  A long pause,
as the dark about me was awash in silence, with the too-sweet attar of flowers, with the flutter of wings.

  The bird began to whisper.

  “I can remember … or think I can remember … burning in the tower along with the rats I had unleashed on this castle. I remember drowning in the flood, remember all kinds of undoings in all kinds of disastrous circumstances. And when I remember clearly again, it is twenty years later, or thirty.

  “Between those times is a hot, red darkness. I sleep through most of it. Sometimes I recall something of lights—scarlet lights, as though smoke itself were burning. And voices, though I can never quite discover words in the swirl of sounds around me.

  “Once, the darkness resolved into a cavernous room, its floor a mirror of polished onyx, And about that mirror sat a score of Knights, their weapons broken, their heads bent as they stared into the mirror, which reflected nothing but stars.

  “I do not know but that I dreamed those men, that mirror.

  “Once the darkness became a landscape bare and cratered, and the moon that rose above it was as black as the onyx mirror, yet radiant somehow. Nothing lived in that forsaken country, but somewhere in the shadow of the rocks a creature was gibbering and whining—whether wounded or lying in wait, I could not tell.

  “That was early on. Nor am I sure whether I dreamed that country, either.”

  He paused. A faint light crept to the edge of the window. Solinari was on the rise, and some things—larger things—in the room took on line and form. I could see the outline of the bed, the dresser.

  “But regardless of the dream,” the raven continued, “regardless of the cries and the torment and the long sleep, I have always awakened in sunlight, dazed but afoot upon Krynn once more. And once more I would set myself to the task of recovering what should be mine.

  “This time, however, is different. For the first time in these four hundred years—for the very first time, mind you—the inheritance of the di Caela family descends to a woman. Descends to Lady Enid. And this time I have chosen to follow the rules once again. This time no rats, no goblins, no … scorpions. I shall murder nobody, steal from no one.