Which was now erupting around my friends.
Through the mist and the rocks and the floor, a battalion was rising, breaking through stone and tile. Some wore minotaur helmets, the sign of the Nerakan soldier then and now. All were armed with the feared scimitars and the half-moon shield of the Western Corps, the branch of the army that had fallen to Enric Stormhold—and to my father—thirty years back at the Battle of Chaktamir.
As the Scorpion watched calmly from his seat in the hall, his soldiers climbed out of the ground and onto their feet, trudging toward Bayard and Robert and Alfric. Moss and earth and ordure dripped from their hair, and the ivory of the bones lay bare through the yellowed, mottled flesh. The smell was that of a slaughterhouse long abandoned.
Alfric wrenched away from Sir Robert, leaving a handful of red hair behind him, and sprang out the door in an instant, only to come back shamefacedly when other noises arose from the hall—the smothered, almost bleating battle-cry of more undead soldiers.
I started my ascent of the curtain, checked for purchase on the balcony, and found a solid spot after an endless minute of pawing the air with my foot. But from that height I was powerless to help as the numbers grew against us.
Bayard and Sir Robert stood back to back so that between the two of them, they could see the entire hall and the outlying corridor. Alfric tried vainly to sandwich himself between them, but was elbowed away with the warning from Sir Robert, “Stand your own ground, boy! We need even the sorriest of swords at this pass!”
Alfric whimpered and drew his sword. Steadily the Nerakan soldiers closed in on my companions.
Meanwhile, the Scorpion rose from his throne, walked to Enid’s chair, and very calmly began to untie her wrists from the armrests. Though she was obviously unnerved by the creatures the Scorpion had called from out of the ground, she was not about to swoon or scream. Instead, she fetched a blow to her captor’s chest that sent him staggering backward, and only a viper-quick grab at the girl kept her from escaping.
“Come with me,” the Scorpion said, as he dragged the struggling Enid back toward his pedestal, where the dagger sat waiting on the arm of his throne. A murmuring sea of black scorpions converged upon them, parting to form a pathway from one chair to the other.
“Up on the pedestal, my dear,” he urged.
It was then—too late, I feared, but nonetheless swiftly—that Bayard Brightblade began to cut his own path through the men of Neraka. Often urgency shackles the hand of the swordsman, but it brought Bayard to life, to a blinding swiftness. Five Nerakans fell to his sword in an instant, and it was all that Sir Robert could do to follow in the wake of the younger Knight. Alfric in turn followed Sir Robert, his face blanched, his own blade shaking in his extended hand.
All outcry, all the moans and bellows ceased. The hall was silent except for the shuffling of long-dead feet, the skittering of scorpions, and the sound of Bayard’s sword striking continually, wetly home.
It was as though the Nerakans were lining up for execution. But halfway through the undead soldiers, Bayards path slowed, as bodies heaped upon and against bodies, as the Nerakans began to mill in front of him, as they fell back into one another and were buoyed and carried by those who approached the battle from behind them. They shrank back from him as though even having passed through death, they were still daunted by this harrowing, bright champion in front of them.
Walled off from Bayard by his legion of moving, decaying flesh, the Scorpion raised his knife.
“Wait!” I shouted, and my voice piped embarrassingly thin and shrill in the large hall. Bayard’s sword stilled, and Sir Robert stood stiffly behind him, his hand stretched toward the Scorpion in silent anguish. The Nerakan soldiers lowered their weapons and stared stupidly, lifelessly at their leader standing on the platform.
For a moment the Scorpion paused. The red light of his eyes flickered as he glanced up to me.
I began once again to burrow in words, to bargain for time, hoping devoutly that Bayard would think of something violent and heroic before I ran out of breath and argument.
“You think you have that prophecy figured as neat as a recipe, with no line left unexplained and unmanaged?”
I glanced at Bayard, who was looking at me, sword raised overhead.
Move, Bayard. Move quickly, like a striking snake. Let’s see a little Solamnic velocity in this nest of scorpions!
So I thought and hoped, but Bayard did not move. And the Scorpion’s dagger stayed poised above Enid as I spoke.
“What if you’re wrong, Benedict? After all, you’ve proven that Bayard misread the prophecy entirely. As did Sir Robert, evidently. So what if you did, too? What if that little piece of doggerel has squirmed away from all three of you—Bayard, Robert, and Benedict—and there’s another solution to all this rhyme and foreboding?
“After all, you kill the bride but the line doesn’t end. Sir Robert can father more children, more di Caelas to wrestle you down each time you trundle back to claim your inheritance.”
“Which is why I brought her here, fool!” the Scorpion proclaimed. “Now all the di Caelas are under my roof, and the line ends where they do!”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps not,” I answered triumphantly. Another invention had occured to me, and for all I knew it stood just as good a chance of being true as any story, poem, or prophecy I had heard so far. For as my thoughts raced, they had settled on lamplight in a window, on a pale arm waving.
“Have you heard of Dannelle di Caela, sir?”
The hand holding the dagger wavered. Bayard started for the platform, but the Scorpion wheeled and, clutching Enid to him, brought the dagger to her throat. Again the creatures at his feet began to chitter and mill.
“Stand back, Solamnic! Prophecy or no, if you come any nearer, I’ll send this girl to Hiddukel!”
“Regardless, ‘a girl succeeds to all,’ Benedict,” I urged. “For if you kill Enid, who will be Sir Robert’s heir but Dannelle di Caela?”
“No,” the Scorpion said quietly. He grasped Enid so tightly that she cried out, startling him. For a moment he lost his grip on the girl, and she wriggled free of his encircling arm.
Now, Enid di Caela was her father’s daughter—no helpless damsel in distress. She fetched the Scorpion a sound kick in the leg that sent him stumbling to the center of the platform, where he clutched the arm of his throne to regain his balance.
A moment’s stumble was all she needed. Enid slipped through the milling Nerakans and into her father’s arms, as Bayard stepped quickly between her and the Scorpion’s ghastly army.
“Kill her!” the Scorpion shrieked, pointing a bony finger at the escaping Enid, but it was too late. The girl had returned to the protection of Bayard Brightblade, who put four Nerakans to the sword with movements so quick that the blade even ceased to blur and became invisible, and only the swarm of bodies between him and the Scorpion allowed the scoundrel to rush toward the far door of the great hall, surrounded by his clattering black attendants.
I whooped and started down the curtain again, still slowly, testing the cloth for strength and for vermin in the folds.
For a moment it looked as though the Scorpion would escape. Bayard pushed one more Nerakan to the floor, ducked the slash of another’s scimitar, and beheaded a third with a quick, flashing movement of his sword arm. Sir Robert, after parrying a slow thrust from a Nerakan scimitar, severed the hand that held it. The undead soldier dropped to his knees and Alfric, who had been hiding behind Enid when the battle resumed, slipped in behind the half-fallen Nerakan and stabbed him in the back.
But even more quickly than the Knights moved through his undead protectors, the Scorpion made his way toward the door and freedom. His cloak wrapped around him, he moved with the silent grace of an enormous nocturnal bird, the door not ten feet in front of him now.
Then as though he had conjured them with a wave of that mysterious crystal, in that very doorway stood Ramiro and Brithelm.
Both were bedraggled and
tattered—a little worse for wear from their struggle in the pass—but neither was about to give way to the thing they had come so far to hunt down. Sword drawn, Ramiro stepped through the door and approached old Benedict from one side, while Bayard cut a path toward him from another.
The Scorpion raised his pendulum, and hundreds of small beasts, their sharp tails poised for the fatal sting, scurried toward Sir Ramiro.
A red light tumbled from Brithelm’s hands, and the floor of the room was awash with an unearthly fire that bathed the creatures and set them burning. There on the floor between my brother and their dark-hooded commander the scorpions twisted, contorted, and crackled.
Then they began to sting each other.
Slowly the red fire faded from about the charred, spidery remains of the scorpions. And I heard my brother speaking in quiet mourning.
“I am sorry. Even to such as you, I am sorry.”
The Scorpion backed away. Still, he remained undaunted. Cautiously he backed to a corner, his red eyes taking in the hall. Once again he raised his hands, and again the ground began to tremble and boil.
“Oh, but it is not over, fools and Solamnics and more fools,” he crowed. “We are gathered together—all of us beneath this roof of rock and cloud and fable—to bring an end to this prophecy, this wondering. No Dannelle di Caelas! The fate of the house is decided here! For remember the prophecy says that: ‘Generations from the grass/will rise and lay the curse aside.’ You have seen but the first generation. Now suffer the second!”
Slowly, more armed men clambered out of the swirling ground, leaving churned earth and moss and yellowed, tattered cloth behind them. The first arm bursting through the floor carried with it the shield of the House of Stormhold.
I stayed where I was, halfway down the dangling curtain.
“Yes, Bayard Brightblade!” Benedict shouted, his voice shrilling as the long-dead Solamnic Knights staggered to their feet, reaching into the swirl of cloud and earth below them to draw forth their weapons. “The men of Neraka join hands with these from your ancient order! Death is the leveler, all faction and race and country put aside in the long and abiding hatred for the living!”
The dead Solamnics righted themselves, more than a hundred strong. Clumsily, listlessly, they proffered their swords in the time-honored salute of the Order. By their gray and decaying hands it was scarcely recognizable—almost a mockery.
Bayard lowered his sword in dismay. All of the rest, even Sir Ramiro and Sir Robert, shrank from the earth-covered Knights, from the bandages and the smell.
Death may well be the leveler, but what was it that Brithelm said? Some things are stronger than death?
With a cry almost in unison, a dry, papery yell that despite its dryness, despite its fragility, shook the things in the Scorpion’s hall, the Solamnic dead raised their swords and charged.
Straight at the waiting men of Neraka.
Through all these decades of death and oblivion, they had awakened to defend against a Nerakan assault. Some things, indeed, were stronger than death, among them the ancient oath, Est Sularus oth Mithas—my honor is my life—in the breathless breathing of each dry-voiced Knight.
It was as though time, too, had held its breath for a generation, and with a sudden, terrible gasp breathed again.
“No!” cried the Scorpion as, despite his best plans and orders, the ancient armies again locked weapons. “You are commanded—”
But there was no time to speak, for Bayard Brightblade was hurtling toward him through the dozens of skirmishes that had erupted in the hall. From his black robe the Scorpion drew a sword whose blade was a dark blue steel. It glittered as black as onyx in the yellowed light of the room, and no sooner had he raised it than Bayard’s great blade came crashing down upon it, driving Benedict to his knees.
They locked blades there for a moment, Bayard resting all his muscle and weight on the sword beneath him, the Scorpion pushing up with the bristling strength of a dozen men, the pendulum swinging wildly from his left hand as he brought it, too, to the pommel of the sword in a frantic attempt to stop Bayard’s unyielding push downward. They poised at the far corner of the room in a violent balance, and for a moment the bright blade forced the dark one back, the silvery glint of Bayard’s hundred-year-old sword inching closer and closer to the face of the enemy.
With a cry and a sudden, powerful movement, the Scorpion pushed Bayard away. Bayard tumbled backward toward the Scorpion’s throne, and the dark-robed villain followed, his eyes glowing with a blue-white light, the pendulum bright in his lowered left hand, his black-edged weapon raised triumphantly in his right. Around him from the dark recesses of the room came the scratching sound of more of his little monsters scrambling to join him.
Feeling like a child’s toy on a string, I shinnied a little farther up the curtain and called to Bayard, “The pendulum!”
He showed no sign of hearing me, struggling as he was to get to his feet in his extremely heavy armor. But he had heard, evidently.
In dodging the downward stroke of the Scorpion’s sword, Bayard brought his own blade up and, flashing through the air, cleanly through the Scorpion’s left wrist.
The hand skittered across the floor, writhing like a scorpion or spider, the chain of the pendulum tangled about its fingers. The Scorpion shrieked and held up the stump of his left arm, then toppled backward onto the hundreds of verminous creatures he had summoned from the darkness.
With the pendulum now gone, they descended on him blindly and hungrily. Benedict screamed, shuddered, and was lost in the clicking, rattling convergence of scorpions, in the plunging of hundreds and hundreds of venomous stingers.
Light then shot through the walls of the room, as the gray swirls of cloud dissolved in sunlight, evaporating to brisk air and a bare mountain pass that then began to shake and crumble.
The Scorpion’s Nest was a ruin. What little remained of the stones in the castle—the skeleton of an ancient foundation, of a wall or two, of flights of stairs that led to nowhere—tottered and began to fall.
An old wall collapsed toward Enid and Sir Robert, and would have no doubt crushed the life from both of them had not Sir Robert raised his great Solamnic shield. Stone and mortar tumbled against ancient metal …
And the metal held.
All around us and below us the ground was opening, roiling, heaving, as though we had walked into the focus of an earthquake so violent, so widespread that it might well be the Cataclysm come again, transforming the surface of Krynn in its wreckage. Bayard stepped to the platform where the Scorpion’s throne, once bone white and tall and menacing, had burst into pieces.
Bayard whistled, and Valorous, true to his name, came galloping out of a notch in the rocks, followed by the other horses. The big stallion was calm, obedient, but those who followed him were balanced at the edge of panic, frothing and snorting and rolling their eyes. When the ground had begun to shake and the rocks to fall, they reverted to instinct and followed the herd master—the lead stallion who, thankfully, had remained impressively composed. Only one horse and the mules, willful to the end, were left to the earthquake.
Into that turning earth the dead men walked or tumbled. Back to the quiet they went, into the peace that each of them, Nerakan or Solamnic, had earned for himself at dreadful cost a generation before. The land closed over them and continued to churn and boil as my companions did what they could to calm their horses, mount, and begin to ride.
“Bayard!” I shouted as he swept Enid up onto Valorous. The lady safe beside him, he was arranging the safety of the others. No room, then, on Valorous.
My brothers were doubled up on Brithelm’s horse, Alfric’s mule having vanished somewhere. With a flick of his glove to the horse’s rump, Bayard set the two older Pathwardens west at a full gallop, over the shifting gravel and rock toward safety, followed closely by Sir Ramiro, burden enough for my little pack mare, which was bearing up beneath him.
“Jump, boy!” Sir Robert called up to me, ri
sing in his stirrups atop a skittish Estrella, as the balcony from which I dangled like a crystal in a pendulum began to sway, snap, and teeter dangerously.
“Not too close, Sir Robert!” shouted Bayard. “It’s likely to fall at any moment! Swing out on the curtain, Galen! Swing out to Sir Robert!” The tough old Knight opened his arms and nodded urgently. I began to swing on the curtain, going higher and higher as the balcony above me began to weave.
Back and forth, back and forth I flew, until at the sound of something falling behind me, I let go and tumbled through the air, a flying weasel on an aerial route to Sir Robert di Caela, whom I trusted to catch me and carry me out of the chaos, safely into the lowlands.
I had not figured on Estrella, who, spooked by yet another tremor beneath her hooves, skipped nervously forward at the worst of all possible moments. Sir Robert reached back desperately, but his mare had moved too far.
The ground surged rockily up to meet me. So did the darkness.
EPILOGUE
Head injuries are strange things, as Bayard could have told me from his time in the Vingaard Mountains. So my memories are spotty as to what happened after the fall of the Scorpion’s Nest. Indeed, by the time my memory became certain, we were back in Castle di Caela and preparations were underway for the betrothal banquet.
But here is what happened, as best I can put it together from Bayard’s accounts, from what Alfric told me grudgingly, from what is reliable in Brithelm’s account, and from my scattered memories.
When the Scorpion fell to the floor of the hall and was covered by his mindlessly stinging creatures, when the castle began to collapse, we rushed to do what we had set out to do back at Castle di Caela—to escape the destruction of the Scorpion and return to safety the girl on whom all prophecy hinged.
The rocks of Chaktamir tumbled into the gap, covering Scorpion and scorpions, the Nest, and all of the dead—Nerakans and Solamnics, all at peace again. It was there that we rested, and Sir Robert, who had tucked me under his arm like a rolled-up carpet, lowered me, unconscious, into the waiting arms of Brithelm and Enid.
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