Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  The eyes of Vertumnus flashed and widened. The dance was beginning. The branches no longer obscured the sky but, caught in the music and the light, they seemed to shrink into a netting of scars on the surface of a glorious moon.

  The shimmering surface of the orb turned green as Vertumnus played, clouding with a distant celestial storm. The clouds swirled and boiled silently, and from the midst of their turmoil, images arose, peopling the surface of the moon.

  It was like a mirage, like a scene more vivid than memory but less vivid than sight. Crossing the surface of Solinari as though moving across the face of an orb, a party of a dozen dwarves trudged from rock to insubstantial rock.

  Vertumnus squinted and continued to play.

  Two of the dwarves stopped in their ghostly passage, shadows poised on the lip of the moon. They looked at one another, sniffed, and shook their heads curiously, as though trying to dislodge something from their ears.

  Vertumnus smiled, his lips above the embouchure of the flute. It was like this always: The music reached them as a strange disturbance of thought, an elusive thing they wouldn’t remember a moment after it tumbled away from their hearing. Yet the Solinian mode was the song of changes. Those within hearing would be changed by the music—that is, if they chose to listen. Some changed subtly, some profoundly, but all who had ears to hear would be touched somewhere in their deepest, most inward heart, and afterward the song would never leave them.

  The dwarves vanished as quickly as they had risen from the clouds on the moon, and in their stead, three Knights rode by on horseback, scarves wrapped about their faces against a driving winter wind.

  One of them, bareheaded, his dark hair flecked with gray, reined in his horse beneath a snow-covered stand of juniper. Half hidden in the shadow of evergreens and in the dodging light of the moon, he turned his face heavenward, listening to the music with controlled focus.

  Something about his bearing seemed familiar … familiar indeed.…

  But he was gone before Vertumnus could look more closely, vanished into the green roil of clouds about the moon. At his vanishing, Vertumnus lowered the flute, and suddenly, as though a levelling wind had passed across its surface, Solinari blazed forth with a silver light.…

  Then suddenly, inexplicably, it began to wane.

  Vertumnus shook his head sadly, his long green locks dripping with dew. Now he would locate the lad again, before the moon was a crescent, a sliver, before it was gone entirely into newness and dark. He would find the one who would occupy his time until the first of spring. Briskly, amusingly, he played a simple eighth-mode jig, so simple that it was scarcely magic. The dryads, hearing the song from their bowers deep in the woods, stepped from the trees and approached him, trailing oak leaves and a strange silver light.

  “There are other dancers far more promising, Vertumnus,” Diona urged.

  “One of the Knights,” Evanthe suggested. “Even a brace of dwarves would be more entertaining.”

  Vertumnus played on as though he did not hear them. Indeed Sturm looked like a plodding prospect, a singularly unimaginative young man bound by custom and convention. What the nymphs did not know was how this Brightblade concerned him—how the quarrel at Yule had warred with Vertumnus over the months. It was time for the lad to learn difficult instruction, about blood and forbearance and the shimmering fraud at the heart of his beloved Order. In the absence of a father, Vertumnus had taken it upon himself to provide the lessons.

  Evanthe had been right before. Vertumnus could have killed Sturm Brightblade once, twice, perhaps many times. For the dark thing that followed the lad on the fog-littered plains, a thing that answered to no man and to few gods, danced to the music of Vertumnus. It had neared the boy, had almost overtaken him, but at the last moment, the Green Man had piped it northward toward Kalaman and the bay beyond.

  It was too soon for dark things, too soon to test the boy so strongly. There would be perils enough and eventual death. But not now, for the dance was young. And spring was still a fortnight away.

  Quickly, in mist and the swelling moon, Vertumnus searched for Brightblade. Over the plains the music swept like a wind, circling about Vingaard Keep, down the great river as far as Thelgaard Keep and still searching, searching all of Solamnia until …

  With the last solemn notes of the tune, the fog dissolved before an ancient castle, ruinous and abandoned. Vertumnus’s dark eyes widened.

  The dryads exchanged unreadable glances.

  “He is there, Evanthe,” Vertumnus whispered. The last of the fog fell away, and there sat Brightblade, unsteady on his lathered mare. Shaken by fog and fire and a breakneck ride, he seemed diminished, small inside that absurd Solamnic armor.

  “It almost makes for pity,” Diona said, her dark hand resting on the Green Man’s shoulder.

  “Not mine,” Vertumnus replied, in his voice a last hint of winter. “My branches are bare of pity.”

  So he and the owl and the dryads watched as the lad rode through the dilapidated gates of Castle di Caela.

  “A place that you know, Lord Wilderness?” Evanthe whispered teasingly, her lips at the Green Man’s ear. Vertumnus smiled, but he did not answer.

  Sturm dismounted and walked the mare across the moss-covered stones of the courtyard, past booths and buildings in disrepair to the mahogany gates of the castle keep, weathered but still intact. The lad tried the door, and with some wrestling managed to yank it open.

  “He’s a strong one, your dancer!” taunted Diona. Vertumnus raised a long green finger to her lips, pressing playfully until the dryad winced and turned away.

  Now the boy stepped inside, and the midday light shone briefly, fitfully into the darkness of the keep.

  “He is in the great anteroom now,” Vertumnus murmured, “with its tapestries, and its golden birds, and its marble banisters.”

  “Tell us about it,” Evanthe whispered. “Tell us, Vertumnus.”

  Lord Wilderness closed his eyes and raised the flute to his lips. Something serene, perhaps, in a more magical mode, or something piercing and light …

  “Vertumnus! Look!” hissed Diona. He opened his eyes as a shadowy figure crossed the distant courtyard like an unwelcome specter in a dream. From shadow to shadow flitted the man, caped and hooded and low against the walls. To the great mahogany door of the keep he came, set hand to the door …

  … and closed it, violently and suddenly, wedging it shut with a dagger. As quickly as it had come, the figure slipped away, and from inside the keep came the muffled sound of the lad beating frantically, helplessly against the jammed door.

  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 f
rom 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 boy had 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 Courrain Ocean. 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.