Oath and the Measure

by Michael Williams

  It was all Sturm could do to raise his shield.

  The impact of the club sent the lad to his knees, and for a moment, his senses wobbled as well. He fancied himself in the Inn of the Last Home, and the eyes of Caramon and Raistlin and his mother sparkled in the green recesses of the leaves around him. Dazed, Sturm shook his head. The eyes winked out, and the lad lifted his shield again as the second blow plummeted home.

  Sliding in mud, his armor creaking and rattling, Sturm backed unsteadily toward the water, his enemy anchored firmly before him, speaking in a strange and gibbering language that was not words so much as the sighing of wind through the branches, the crackle and whisper of dried leaves.

  “Failed,” the giant seemed to be saying. “These miles and these years and these ventures into the hollow and poisonous dark, and you have failed, yes, beyond your worst fears and because of those fears.”

  The visor of its helmet fell back in its sudden movement, and beneath that visor was no face but instead a deep, featureless plane of wood and oak bark. Then, out of the gorget, the elbows and greaves snaked a dozen, then two dozen branches, twining and tangling and lashing Sturm with their switching movements in the sudden rush of growth. The crown of the tree burst forth from the crest of the helmet, which shattered with the shrill, rending sound of torn metal. Sturm leapt backward, gasping, catching his balance in ankle-deep water. The tree began to move.

  “You will never defeat me,” its voice said, clearly now as the warrior rose and stretched, his feet rooted fast in the soil but his forty limbs stretching and moving. “You will never defeat me because I am what the sword comes to in the last battle.”

  Cruelly, almost gleefully, the thing poked its club into the center of Sturm’s shield, forcing him back on his heels. Its limbs creaked as it pushed and pushed again, and staggering backward, Sturm felt the water lap at his knees. The thing continued to speak, to gibber at him, but the words and finally the sounds were lost in the rush of water and his own thunderous fear.

  Nervously Sturm lunged with his sword, his movements tentative and short. The first thrust struck the armor of the monster and turned aside, and with a casual flick of its club, the thing parried the next blow, and the next.

  “Is it always the sword and the lance that settles things for you?” the oak creature taunted, waving the club above its head. Sturm watched, groggy with fear, as the enormous weapon blurred in the forest light, whipping through the air with the whirring of a thousand cicadas, of a hundred thousand bees.

  Desperately Sturm scrambled from the water and lunged again, his movements more reckless, more unschooled. Under the flickering movement of the club his blade passed, beneath the breastplate and into the heart of the wood. Quickly, as though it had been stung, the creature cried out, its shriek like the tearing of branches, and the club flashed blindingly into the armhole of the breastplate, sharp upon flesh and muscle and bone, sending Sturm’s sword end over end into the undergrowth.

  White pain danced through Sturm’s left hand as the black thorn lodged in his shoulder, directly in the spot where Vertumnus had wounded him at Yuletide. Stifling a cry, he dropped his shield, spun and scrambled after the blade, the oak creature’s club crashing on the ground behind him, sending loud tremors through the earth. Jarred into fearful waking, the forest around them erupted with the deafening quarrels of squirrels, the loud insistent shrieks of hawk and jay.

  With his right hand, Sturm clutched the handle of the weapon and turned to face his adversary. In the shadowy clearing the creature looked distant, veiled, as though it had summoned the forest to surround it. Weaving on his feet, his left hand throbbing and useless, his shoulder impaled by a broken black thorn, Sturm leveled his sword and awaited the onslaught of his enemy.

  But the oak creature stood still, its weapon motionless and lifted. In the shadows, it looked like an enormous, many-armed spider, its bristling limbs unmoving now in the windless clearing. Puzzled, Sturm stepped once toward the thing as the noise of the forest around him settled and subsided. Slowly he raised the sword, his eyes on the crown and leaves of the tree. Another step he took, and then another …

  And up through the ground surged the roots, whipping about his ankles, binding him to the spot. Then slowly the limbs approached and descended, the dry leaves shaking like a death rattle.

  Sturm slashed at the roots with his sword, but right-handed, he was awkward and scarcely as strong. As one root snapped, another shot up to take its place, and Sturm’s blows became more hurried, more frantic and dangerous. Panic-stricken, he raised his sword yet again and tangled it in the web of branches that had covered him. He pulled his hand away, leaving the sword in the thick, coiling branches and, pushed beyond himself by fear, tore at the enveloping roots with his bare hands.

  Just as the branches and roots were about to cover him, as one green branch wrapped itself around his neck and tightened, Sturm reached desperately for the blade above him. As he felt the air and the life leaving him, his hand clutched the pommel of the sword, and with the strength that propels a drowning man, Sturm wrenched the weapon from the branches and, gasping, shouting, plunged it to the hilt in the dark heart of the treant.

  The creature let forth a dry, rasping shriek, and the limbs that held and tangled Sturm shuddered for an instant. But the heart of the monster was rotten and hollow, and the branches began to tighten again, encircling Sturm’s neck and chest with renewed and redoubled energy. The wound in his shoulder throbbed, his will dissolved, and his thoughts passed from fear through a great and drowning weariness and into a black and dreamless sleep.

  Before he lost all consciousness, he smiled at the foolishness of it all. It is like some old wooden myth, he thought. I have come this far to be undone by a thorn in the flesh.

  Then suddenly the world exploded and crackled around him, incandescent and charged with silver and green light, and he saw and felt no more. They would find him lying at the foot of the blasted tree like an ancient and unexplainable sacrifice.

  Mara rushed blindly through the thickening forest, heedless of obstacle or danger. Three times she saw a flash of brilliant black amid the trees ahead of her, heard the clear and familiar whistle and chatter, its accents dire and urgent. Each time she turned toward the source of the sound and rushed toward it, only to find that the spider, made frantic by pain, had scurried elsewhere, leaving her alone with her deepest fears.

  On she raced, her thoughts darkening as the foliage closed around her. Ahead, the cry arose again, this time shrill and different. She saw him finally, thrashing in the leaves of a sunlit clearing, a deep, tattered wound on his back. Two legs held at a grotesque, broken angle, he was screeching in pain and trying to burrow at the base of a blasted oak. Mara raced to the spider and touched him. Frantically Cyren spun about, arching his shattered back in desperate, witless self-defense.

  When he saw it was Mara, something in the spider surrendered to the darker thing that had chased him for a mile through the midday forest. Slowly, as though he were trying to remember something deep in the years of a memory as old as his species, Cyren folded quietly, the leaves around them stirring as he trembled and twitched.

  “Cyren,” Mara said vaguely, again extending her hand toward the creature. She was no healer, no scholar, but she was woodwise and acquainted with winter, and she knew the seasons of death. Bravely fighting back tears, she draped her cloak about the thorax of the spider, unsure if such was even a comfort to his kind.

  The creature looked at her in its ugly innocence, and for a moment, she almost thought she saw a more soothing face amid the fangs, pedipalpi, and the multiple eyes—the vanished face of Cyren the elf, stolen by magic from her eyes these three years and soon to be lost forever, as death approached with its cold forgetfulness.

  “All will be well,” Mara soothed desperately, wrapping her thin arms about the creature’s savaged midsection. “Sturm will destroy that … that thing back there, and we will finish our business in the Southern Darkwoods.
All will be well, Cyren Calamon, and to us the night of the moons will come.”

  She didn’t know what else to say. She sat beneath the oak in a daze, and it was a goodly while before she noticed that the body she held was not that of a spider but of a mortally wounded elf.

  “Mara,” Cyren breathed, in his voice still the dry, clicking sound of the spider’s call. She turned to him, her eyes widened, and a brief, momentary joy flickered in the depths of her heartbreak.

  “Oh, Cyren,” she marveled. “You have … you have returned. Even if—”

  She stopped herself at once, deploring her grief-loosened words. But Cyren smiled and touched her face gently with his damaged hand.

  “Even if only for a while? Yes, Mara. There is a certain … Tightness in this form. There is naught I would rather be but Cyren the elf, though he lies indeed at the threshold of death.”

  Weeping, Mara cradled his head.

  “The last cruelty,” she said, “is that you are yourself again, only to die.”

  Cyren chuckled bitterly, his breathing wet and strained.

  “Not the last cruelty, dear Mara, but the last save one. For you see, I am not myself but an enchantment cast over the creature who traveled with you these three years in its natural, accustomed form.

  “I was a spider by nature, Mara, a spider at my birth and destined to die a spider, I suppose. But there have been … two brief times of otherness: one in Qualinost, three years back, and the other …

  “The other is now.”

  Dumbstruck, Mara rested her head against the bole of the tree. The clearing reeled about her, and she struggled for her senses. Meanwhile, the elf—the spider—in her arms continued, a pitiful account of how the sorcerer Calotte had drawn him from his web in the height of a thick, black-leaved oak and imprisoned him until a time when he could work his terrible magic.

  “For you see,” Cyren explained, his breathing more shallow, his hair matted and dull, “the enchanter gave me this form to draw you to him. He thought that you would … surrender to him to free me, and then … well, then I should be a spider, and you …”

  “Left with the sorcerer Calotte as husband, or cast from the people forever, to make my way alone and unfriended in wilderness and desolation,” Mara concluded weakly, recalling the rigid words of Qualinesti law that enforced the proper behavior of maidens. “But why enchant a spider into you? Why not … make himself handsome, so that despite his rotten heart, a maiden’s eye might … incline his way?”

  “He wanted you, Mara. And he wanted you to come to the ancient, ugly Calotte, knowing full well the creature who stood before you.”

  “It was a plan spawned in the Abyss!” Mara muttered, her grief turning slowly to anger.

  “And yet … it brought me a world of light and connection, no longer ending at the edge of the web, and for a while, days and time and seasons and words sprang into being.”

  Cyren smiled to think of it, but his eyes seemed to focus on a distant point. His voice grew faint and the words faltered.

  Cyren looked at her with surpassing tenderness, and for a moment, the elf maiden recalled the green boats and messages along the River Thon-Thalas.

  “Does … does it hurt very much, Cyren?” she asked, meeting his golden gaze. And she held him there as that gaze became glassy and distant, as his almond eyes became round, lidless, and segmented, as he died into the shape he knew best, and she was left in the shadowy clearing holding a crumpled spider, her thoughts halfway between wonderment and sorrow.

  Chapter 18

  Of Shadow and Light

  ———

  The two of them sat on horseback overlooking the Vingaard Ford.

  Eight miles south of Vingaard Keep, the ford was the most common passage from the west of Solamnia to the east. The old caravan routes crossed the river at these rocky shallows, and in the oldest Solamnic instructions of geography and survival, it was said that all paths to the mountains, to the castles and towers that guarded the ancient region, passed over the river at this time-honored point.

  It was a dated teaching. There were a dozen fords along the Vingaard, some of them veiled, some forbidden by the Measure for reasons lost deep in the Age of Might. Nonetheless, commerce from Kalaman, Nordmaar, and Sanction still crossed the river at the Vingaard Ford, where sharp eyes at the keep stood vigil against bandits and darker things.

  They must have blinked, those sharp eyes, or the climbing fog off the river and the special darkness of this moonless night must have obscured all view from the towers of the keep, for the two rode unnoticed down to the banks of the ford, the hooves of their horses wrapped in cloth and muffled.

  The smaller of the men leaned forward in the saddle and sneezed, unaccustomed to the long riding and the moist night air.

  “Hist!” the taller one warned, reaching for the reins of his companion’s horse. “You’ll call down a rain of arrows with that racket, Derek Crownguard!”

  “I don’t understand this, sir,” Derek whispered. “Veiled missions far to the east in the middle of a cold night, the servants sworn to silence at our departure, and you’ve threatened me from the Wings of Habbakuk to this very spot as if we were bound for battle.”

  “Which we may be,” Boniface replied, pushing back his hood. “Which we may be, beyond what you have reckoned.”

  He was more pale, more furtive than Derek had seen him before, his small eyes haunted and calculating.

  It will serve me better not to argue with him, the boy thought, but he kept at it nonetheless.

  “You said yourself that he was in the Darkwoods, Uncle. Rotting in a druid prison, you said. That when they tired of keeping him—”

  “I know what I said!” Boniface snapped. He rose in the saddle and leaned forward, his breath hot with wine and something animal and fearful.

  “But that is not enough, Derek!” he whispered. “We must be safe beyond my imagining. If he were to escape, by wildest circumstance or through some hidden skill it has taken him years and terrible danger to show … why, the roads must be ready for him.”

  “This road was made ready a fortnight back,” Derek protested, knowing his words went unheard.

  Boniface pushed back his hair nervously.

  “But a fortnight is a year in the memories of … of those we employ,” Boniface explained, his voice high, a little too loud.

  Derek frowned and leaned away from him, combing the mist for signs of the mercenaries. It had been like this since midmorning, when Boniface had cornered him in the stables.

  “Ready two horses,” the Knight had growled, his eyes cold and haunted, his grip tightening on the lad’s shoulder.

  “As … as you wish, sir,” Derek had replied, fumbling at once with the tack. He saddled the horses in silence, knowing by instinct that none of his questions would be answered until they were well on the road to whatever destination figured in Boniface’s fevered strategies.

  The gates of the tower had closed behind them and they were well into the Virkhus Hills before Lord Boniface revealed that destination. Even then, only “Vingaard Ford” had passed his lips. The rest were calls and urgings and cursings as they rode the horses briskly over the plains, through the drowned grass and the unseasonably cold air as mist rose off the flanks of the horses and the tower dipped from sight among the mountains.

  Derek shivered. Spring was indeed a long way off, regardless of the calendar and the appointed turn of the season. He would have passed from unkind thoughts to grumbling had he not seen movement by the riverbank, a slight shifting of the shadows.

  “Over there, sir!” he whispered, pointing to where the shadows parted from the deep fog about the river. Three squat forms approached them, hooded and crouched, gliding up the banks quickly like gnarled, stunted wraiths.

  Boniface breathed deeply. By instinct, his hand moved to the hilt of his sword as the horse twitched nervously under him.

  I don’t like this, Derek thought, alert for more of them in the tangling mist. />
  Boniface raised his hand, and one of those approaching—the tallest one, the one in the middle—raised his in response. The other two hung back a moment, half lost in the thickest part of the river fog.

  “Lord Grimbane, is it?” the approaching one asked. There was something dry in the voice that hinted at centuries of stone and heat. It seemed out of place in these surroundings, and Derek recoiled from it by instinct, wrestling with the reins to keep his panicking horse from galloping madly away.

  Only Boniface held steady. “Grimbane” evidently was the name he had chosen.

  “Not so loudly,” he whispered. “You are in hostile country.”

  The assassin—for assassin he was, despite Boniface’s softer words for the arrangement—chuckled low and cruelly.

  “Is this not Solamnia?” he asked. “And are you not … my friend?”

  “Do you know what to do?” Boniface asked curtly, raising his hood once more.

  “Trust me,” the assassin hissed. His hand snaked to the dagger at his belt, and to Derek that hand seemed … seemed scaled, of all things, like the back of a reptile. Behind the assassin, a cape switched and billowed unnaturally.

  Surely not, Derek thought, his hand on the withers of his horse, calming the frantic animal. Surely it is some trick of the mist.

  “Trust you?” Boniface asked. “Tell me what you are to do, and in the order you are to do it. Then we shall talk of trust. We shall talk of payment then, too—of the gold that comes to the trustworthy and the silent.”

  “Dam the waters upstream,” the assassin began, the monotone of his voice signaling that he repeated memorized instruction. “Post the lookouts. If the occasion comes, it will be one lad—on foot or on horse, no matter—the sign on his shield a red sword against a yellow sun.”