We learned what had occurred only after the di Caela castle guard burst into the chambers of the Lady Enid to find the very lovely and very unconscious Dannelle di Caela, who on awakening told of the mysterious abduction.
The two of them, she and Enid, had been seated by the Lady Enid’s antique dresser, ridiculing the failed suit of Gabriel Androctus, whom Enid had described as having “all the glamor of an undertaker.” It was then that a cloud—a darkness of some sort—settled on the hearthstones and blotted out the light of the fire.
“At first we thought there was damage in the fireplace,” Dannelle explained weakly, propped up by maids and pillows. “Something perhaps to do with the flue, I suggested, since the flue is the only part of the fireplace I can name for you. And Cousin Enid approached the hearth, drawing up her skirts and listening absolutely not at all to my warnings that she should stop there—that she would soon find herself in smoke and ash that would ruin her dress, not to mention her complexion. But you know Cousin Enid.
“She stepped toward the hearth and, all of a sudden, vanished entirely. I could hear her scuffling and shouting from somewhere within the darkness, and immediately I rushed to her aid … but found myself here, bound and gagged in this bed. I had no idea how much time had passed, but then I heard the scuffling and shouting just outside the window. It could not have been long.
“I struggled to break free of the ropes, to loosen the gag so I could shout for help. But for the life of me I could not move and … I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
Standing by the antique dresser, as far away as possible from where Dannelle lay, I listened to the distraught story. I felt ashamed at the point where Dannelle rushed to her cousin’s aid, remembering how I had drawn back into the shrubbery when the shadow descended the wall.
As Dannelle told what had happened, Robert di Caela and Bayard sat attentive—and worried, obviously—in straight-backed chairs by the bedside. Brithelm stood at the notorious window with Sir Ramiro of the Maw and Sir Ledyard.
Alfric was somewhere slinking.
When the story was over, the men stared at one another—stared long and hard. Emotions rushed to Robert di Caela’s face. Fears and angers raced over that noble countenance like scorpions over a white throne, or like a dark cloud over the moonlit wall of a keep. But the time for flocking emotions passed quickly. He was the first to speak.
“So my daughter has been taken Huma knows where. Then the problem that lies before us is a simple one: how do we recover her?”
Brithelm turned from the window. Bayard leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. Neither of them spoke at first, both a little nervous in the presence of the di Caela patriarch. I was no better, watching them from my position of safety behind the mantle.
“Would that it had not come to this” Sir Robert began, “especially in a time when we are so uncertain.
“Scarcely a month ago I received the news that Bayard Brightblade would attend this tournament. I received that news with joy, certain he was the prophecy’s choice for my heir, and glad of it.
“And now the claims of that heir have been challenged by one whose claim to these holdings has … authority. One who wins the tournament, whose prize is my daughter Enid and all the di Caela holdings, and yet who turns out to bear a name that also figures in the fate of my family, though in ways more dark and terrible than I would wish or even imagine.”
Bayard sat back, sighed, and waited for Sir Robert to finish.
“At least this poor girl has not been harmed,” I interrupted weakly, gesturing at Dannelle.
She smiled, though wanly.
“Thank you, Galen Pathwarden,” she breathed. “You’re very … chivalrous. I shall not forget,” the Lady Danelle went on disarmingly, “that you were the first to my side in my distress.”
I’d surprised myself on that one, too.
“My pleasure,” I muttered, and Sir Ramiro snickered by the window. I shot him a glance of white-hot hatred. Sensing my discomfort, Bayard spoke.
“Still, gentlemen, there is so much to piece together in this story. Perhaps we could convene elsewhere, where time and quiet are our allies and where we can think clearly about the situation in front of us, having left in the capable hands of maids and surgeons the welfare of those dear to us. Let us convene and reason together, gentlemen. We have tactics to ponder.”
And ponder they did, in the main hall of the keep, where we had arrived after wandering down half a dozen corridors; across a huge stone bridge that spanned an indoor garden where Sir Robert kept exotic plants that smelled much too sweet for my liking; through familiar territory, where the di Caela statues and the sound of mechanical birds lay ahead of us; and eventually down the stairs to the main floor and the great hall itself.
It was here we debated where the Scorpion could have taken Enid. We stood there among the tables which had glittered with candlelight and polished armor only a few nights ago, and it seemed as though every place imaginable on the wide surface of Krynn was mentioned in the hour we talked. No suggestion was encouraging, and I found it hard to be attentive to what the Knights were saying.
Because all the while, something kept telling me that I should remember something about the raven in my quarters the night before …
Sir Ledyard suggested we might well find the Scorpion and his captive somewhere upon the Sirrion Sea to the southwest. Nobody paid any attention to him; everyone had known his answer would have something to do with the sea, and besides, the Sirrion was much too far away.
Sir Robert was all for looking in Estwilde because of the glain opals he had seen earlier that afternoon. After he made this pronouncement, he considered the matter settled.
Sir Ramiro thought that solution was too obvious, that someone as subtle as the Scorpion would not betray his hand so readily. He suggested we search first in the Garnet Mountains south of the castle, if for no other reason than it was cold and high and thin-aired—the most unpleasant place around and therefore, according to Sir Ramiro’s reasoning, the ideal haunt for the Scorpion. The two old men began to bicker, and I wouldn’t doubt they’d have come to blows had not Bayard stepped between them.
Bayard argued for the Vingaard Mountains. He felt he had seen the Scorpion’s power at its strongest there, and wasn’t there something about magic’s being stronger the closer one got to its source?
None of the Knights were experts on the subject of magic. All eyes turned to Brithelm, who smiled inanely and shrugged.
“I don’t know enough about the Scorpion’s kind of magic, gentlemen,” he explained apologetically. “After all, clouds and talking birds are beyond my powers.”
“So what do we do?” Sir Ramiro asked impatiently. “Spread out and comb the whole continent? It would take years.”
“And the Scorpion, as you call him, doesn’t strike me as all that patient,” Sir Ledyard agreed, his broad eastern accent ringing in the great hall.
Had things continued in that fashion, we might never have stumbled across the answer. The Knights would have blustered and pronounced until all hours, and I would have sat there trying to remember what it was I should remember—what the Scorpion had disclosed the night before, in the darkness before Brithelm had walked into the room.
But immediately after Sir Ledyard had spoken, we heard a tearing sound and a cry above us. The Knights turned, drawing their swords, and I, sure it was the Scorpion come back, was under the chair like a whippet in Father’s great hall.
Alfric was dangling by a curtain from the balcony, cursing loudly and windmilling his stubby Pathwarden legs.
Evidently I had not been the only one to discover that particular hiding place and its advantages. Alfric, it turned out, had been up there while routes were suggested and questions were asked, and while leaning forward to hear just what was being said and how it might pertain to him, he stepped onto what he thought was a narrow extension of the balcony, a catwalk beyond its carved railing, but which was in fact nothing at al
l but thin air, a catwalk not even a cat could walk.
So there he was, suspended by a curtain he had managed to grasp when his fall began, beneath him several formidable Knights who were not overly concerned with his plight at the moment, and a brother who was whispering “drop him on his neck, please, Paladine!” Not an enviable place to be. As the curtain gave way and slowly lowered my brother to the floor of the hall, you could see him frantically scan the room for exits.
Sir Robert had Alfric by the arm and had thrown him into a table before my eldest brother’s churning feet had touched the ground or Bayard could intervene.
“A fine array of guests I’ve entertained these last several days! One steals my daughter and another spies on me from my own balcony! I shall trust old Benedict before I offer hospitality again!”
Alfric cowered among the shattered plates, tangled in a fine linen tablecloth. Bayard stepped between Sir Robert and my cornered brother, who turned to me accusingly.
“Once again there is a council of the valiant, and everyone invited but old Alfric. You told them to leave me out, Weasel, so’s I wouldn’t have no chance to rescue Enid and win her hand in marriage.”
“For Huma’s sake, lad,” Sir Robert began, “shelve your courtship for a while!”
It was just like Alfric to throw a fit of persecution and blame me for somehow organizing a conclave of Knights whose specific purpose on this planet was to exclude him from any adventure.
I thought back to his strange, almost psychotic version of what had gone on in the moat house as we were growing up—of the kind older brother he imagined himself, continually beleaguered by intolerable younger brothers.
It was incredible how someone could misread the past.
A banner in the hall swayed with a draft of wind. A single metallic cuckoo squawked above, from somewhere near the now-uncovered entrance to the balcony.
Misread the past.
I felt the memory of the dark, the brush of a wing. I smelled perfume and decay. For a moment the room around me blurred. Then it returned. The lights were even brighter, the colors more intense.
It had fallen into place, that memory.
“Bayard, quickly! What was that prophecy of yours?”
“This is no time for mysticism!” Sir Robert stormed. “By the horns of Kiri-Jolith, I shall hang myself before I let another Pathwarden clear the threshold of my house!” Sir Ramiro grabbed his old friend and wrestled him away from me.
“Please, Bayard! I’m sure it’s important!”
Bayard spoke after a silence in which the big, torch-lit room seemed even more vast, even more desolate.
“As I have learned it from my young days of exploring the library at Palanthas, the prophecy went so:
For generations down, the curse
Arises in di Caela’s hall
And things descend from bad to worse,
Until a girl succeeds to all.
When things have reached their darkest pass
The Bright Blade joins unto the bride,
And generations from the grass
Arise and lay the curse aside.”
With that, he paused, having aired the future and found it confusing. We all faced each other, standing at the sides of one of Sir Robert’s long and elegant tables. Somewhere in the depths of the keep a mechanical whir and a whistle burst forth, then silence.
A strange look of puzzlement took residence in the face of each Knight.
Then, of course, they looked at me, as if I were a disinterested observer, or someone capable of telling true prophecy from false.
“Honestly, sirs. It’s in there somewhere. I’m sure.”
“Listen again, Galen.” Bayard insisted. “Maybe there’s something I’ve missed all along, something so obvious it would take a child to notice.”
Not a very flattering reason to ask my opinion, but I listened nonetheless, as the same tired old verses rushed over me, filled with their puzzles and wooden rhymes. I sat in Sir Robert’s enormous ceremonial chair, dangled my feet over the edge, jostled the dice in the pouch of my tunic.
The Knights stood attentively after the recital, waiting for my judgment, my answer. I squirmed and huddled at the back of the chair.
“For Huma’s sake, boy,” Sir Robert began testily, “your protector is not in a bardic contest here! We’re trying to recover my daughter, and we’re looking for clues, not reveling in bad rhymes!”
“If you please, sir, I am just over a near-fatal fever,” I began, but Bayard interrupted.
“Begging your pardon, Sir Robert, but I don’t think the boy is playing literary games.”
He turned to me and continued, kindly but urgently.
“Go on, Galen.”
“It’s what the Scorpion said. Or didn’t say. I don’t think he ever said that the prophecy was wrong, just that you were wrong about it, Bayard. Indeed, now that I think on it, I believe … no, I am absolutely certain, he said that there was more than one way to read it!
“So the question becomes not how you’ve been reading it all these years, Bayard, but how the Scorpion’s been reading it.”
I had always wondered if anything Gileandos had taught me would come in handy. Taking a deep breath and rising from the chair, I launched myself onto the dreadful paths of conjecture, pacing back and forth in front of the assembled Knights.
“Look, it all comes from something he said to me about his ‘own bright blade.’ Apparently, he thinks that if Bayard isn’t the bright blade of the prophecy, then it’s a real blade indeed.”
I turned again to Sir Robert.
“As I told you, sir, he said that before he threatened to kill your daughter.”
“So?”
“So he’s trying to lift a curse, too. Look, he certainly doesn’t like returning from the dead to gnaw at your family tree once every generation. I don’t think he has much of a choice.”
“I don’t follow,” said Sir Robert, walking toward his chair and sitting down. “We don’t invite him back. He is, after all, our curse.”
“And you are his!” Brithelm exclaimed, and I could see from his expression that he was catching on to what I was after. “After all, the two Gabriels deep in the di Caela past didn’t play fairly with old Benedict. One disinherited him, the other—regardless of what the di Caelas say about slaying him in battle and all—defeated him at the Throtyl Gap, then pursued him east to the pass at Chaktamir and killed him.”
Sir Robert nodded.
“Very well. The Pathwardens are right about the family … mishap four centuries back. It’s embarrassing—indeed, almost dishonorable—what Gabriel the Elder and Gabriel the Younger did, but I don’t see why we need to haul that skeleton from the family closet.”
“Because the skeleton has hauled itself out and is visiting the family once every generation, Robert!” Sir Ramiro replied with a low chuckle.
“Very well! Very well! What does it have to do with the prophecy, damn it!” Sir Robert snapped.
“The di Caelas are Benedict’s curse just as much as he is theirs,” Brithelm responded. “And he thinks that what he’s doing will free him and destroy the family who has wounded him.”
Sir Robert leaned back in the chair and fell silent. Again a cuckoo whirred somewhere on the ground floor of the castle. Outside, thunder rolled, and I could feel a closeness, a prospect of rain, gather in the air.
“Could the Scorpion be right?” Sir Robert asked evenly, locking his hands behind his head and staring up at the balcony. “Are we, not the Scorpion, the curse?”
“We’ll have to go to Chaktamir to find out, sir,” I replied.
“Chaktamir?”
“Remember what the prophecy says?” I asked. “ ‘When things have reached their darkest pass’?”
Sir Robert nodded distantly, his mind still on the prospect of prophecy turned around, of the foretold end of the di Caelas. Wearily he shook himself from his musings, rose to his full patrician height, and paced across the room.
&nb
sp; “I can’t imagine things any darker than this,” he declared.
“But maybe it doesn’t just mean ‘things have reached their worst state,’ Sir Robert. Maybe whoever wrote the prophecy had in mind a real pass through real mountains.”
Sir Robert paused and took that in. Distant thunder rumbled once again.
“Perhaps. But how do you know it’s Chaktamir, Galen? Why not somewhere in the Garnet Mountains, or the Throtyl Gap?”
“I don’t know, sir. At least not for sure. But it adds up, doesn’t it? The pass at Chaktamir is dark to begin with because folks seldom use it any more, after Enric’s battle with the men of Neraka. It’s dark with Solamnic and Nerakan blood.
“Dark with Benedict’s blood, for that matter. After all, Gabriel the Younger caught up with him in the pass at Chaktamir.
“Finally, it’s dark because your history has made it dark. If the story is spread that Benedict died in the Throtyl Gap, then it’s easy to believe he died in battle, rather than in some shabby and questionable di Caela hunt.
“I’d say the darkest pass by any reading is Chaktamir, Sir Robert. And I believe that’s where you’ll find the Scorpion. And find your daughter.”
I looked about me. Brithelm was smiling, seated in a hard, high-backed chair, feet propped up on a table. Sir Ledyard and Sir Ramiro stood at either side of Sir Robert di Caela. Both these strange new Knights were nodding—agreeing with me. Bayard stared at me, his face impassive.
Alfric toyed with a tablecloth folded on a nearby chair, his mind scarcely on anything.
Sir Robert folded his arms and looked at me curiously.
“What about the ‘generations from the grass,’ Galen?” he asked.
“I don’t have any idea, sir. Clever will only get you so far in a prophecy, I imagine.
“Most of all, I don’t know whom the prophecy’s for—Bayard or you or the Scorpion—but it’s at Chaktamir where the whole thing is resolved, for good or ill or both.
“Of that, I’m certain. I guess.”
Bayard smiled faintly and steepled his fingers. I remembered the pose—one I had seen back at the moat house on a morning that seemed like years ago.
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