Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  Galen Beknighted

  ( Heroes 2 - 3 )

  Michael Williams

  Michael Williams

  Galen Beknighted

  Prologue

  "There were six of them," the Namer began, leaning to scratch the sleeping dog at his feet. Seated around him beside a hundred campfires, the People looked up expectantly. His voice floated over them, clear at even the farthest fires, drawing the listeners deep into his story.

  There were six of them, moving silently amid the wind-tilted shades of the vallenwoods.

  Even the most vigilant and experienced scouts would have been surprised to find a band of Plainsmen this far north. They were wanderers, capable of great endurance and greater journeys, but Abanasinia was their home, months south of Solamnia and the Vingaard Mountains.

  In the rising night, their shoulders were slumped and their steps shuffling and slow. Above them, high to the west amid the Vingaard Mountains, dark clouds settled like ravens and lightning flickered between the peaks. Wearily the Plainsmen wrapped blankets and furs more tightly about their shoulders, as if in their bones and memories they already felt the approaching rain.

  One of them, a man almost unnaturally tall, his black hair braided and dappled in shadows, motioned silently at a clearing among the trees. In unison, with a sigh scarcely audible above the rustle of wind through the leaves, the rest of the Plainsmen sat, knelt, fell over-most of them in the very spot over which they had been walking or standing.

  With his comrades lying still and silent around him, the big man crouched in the center of the clearing, his hands busy at some hidden task. Suddenly light burst from between his long, slender fingers, and, setting his hands to the ground in front of him, he sat back on his heels and watched the fire, smokeless and fueled by nothing more than the air. Its red flames rose higher, and the light spread to illumine the faces of all the company. In unison, as though they had practiced it for years, they rose with the creak of leather and rattle of beads, arranging themselves in a semicircle behind their leader, their eyes on the scarlet fire.

  They inhaled, and the light rose. Exhaled, and it sank. Attuned to their breathing, the firelight pulsed and wavered, and the leader reached high upon his left arm, upon the arm that steadies the bow, where a leather band that was adorned with five black stones rested.

  "Now," the big man proclaimed expectantly as the red light bathed the crags and wrinkles of his face, glittered on the beads knotted into his hair, and glowed on the dark paint encircling his eyes.

  Those eyes were green. They were odd, sometimes even ominous to a brown-eyed people, but no accident of nature. To a Plainsman, there are no accidents. Those eyes had marked him from birth as a vision catcher.

  "Now is the time for the going inward, for the weaving of water and wind," he continued, drawing the leather band from his arm. His company breathed a measured breath, and the red fire pulsed like a heart beating. "For the wind and the water have risen, here in these mountains, and soon the Sundered Peoples will be joined once again, as legend and prophecy swore to their joining."

  "Then this is the time, Longwalker? The time we have looked for?" piped a voice from the encircling tribesmen. It was the voice of a young girl, quickly stifled by a hiss from an older man beside her. About her, the others stared at the fire, breathing in and out together.

  The leader, the one they called Longwalker, nodded, the faintest hint of a smile passing over his weathered, ugly face. "This is the time, Marmot," he answered, for the girl's naming night was yet to come, and the company called her by pet names and endearments. "Or the next, or the time after that. Until the time that we look for. The Telling is nigh, scarcely a year away. The old gods will not allow the sorrow of the last Telling, when the stories were broken and the tribes unhoused."

  He spread the armband on the ground in front of him, its black stones staring up into the cloudy Solamnic night. Something glimmered in the centermost stone, faint like a watchfire at a distance on a pitch-black night. Steadily, calmly, the breathing of his companions as regular as a steady, single heartbeat behind him, Longwalker looked deep into the stone, his green eyes searching.

  For a moment, he saw nothing-nothing but light and dark interwoven. Then the light resolved itself into shapes, into movement…

  Into three pale men, moving through a rocky landscape, bearing a heavy sack.

  Longwalker squinted intently into the stone for some bend in a tree branch, an odd formation of rock-for landmarks, anything to tell him where the men were headed. He knew, however, that nothing-not even the stones in the belt in front of him-would show the dark opening into which they would pass and 'go under. The vision of the Namer's Passage would be denied him: He had known that much for years.

  The sack turned and coiled in the hands of its porters.

  Something was alive in there, was wrestling against canvas and rope and the burly arms that carried it.

  It was as Longwalker expected. He looked up and turned toward his companions, his eyes glittering exultantly like flames in their paint-blackened sockets.

  "Yes, Marmot. This is the time."

  The Plainsmen stared at their leader hopefully, intently. In an instinct as old as their wanderings, the hands of the men went toward the knives at their belts, those of the women toward their amulets and talismans.

  "But there is more," Longwalker added, shifting his weight, turning back to the stones and the fire. "More we need to know."

  Again the stones shimmered and deepened, until it seemed to Longwalker that they had opened and swallowed the sky. The stars and the scudding clouds raced over the smooth black surface of the gems until one of them-the smallest, at the leftmost fringe of the setting, took on fire and form as another vision rose from the heart of the stone.

  A room. Neither tent nor winter lodge-no, these walls were stone, and the fire in the stone was from a fireplace.

  A castle, it was. A mountainous northern building.

  Longwalker thought of the walls of that room. He waited for the vision to move, to show him more.

  Shields. Three of them.

  The Plainsman squinted, concentrating on what the stone showed him.

  Shields. On one, a red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field. On another, a red sword against a burning yellow sun. The third was… unclear, the standard lost in the shadows of the room and the shadows of the stones.

  Longwalker nodded in resignation. Such was the nature of the scattered stones. This time they would show him no faces. He knew that the one he looked for was male, was young, was on the brink of what the northerners called the Order.

  That something in that young warrior had nothing to do with order. He was still stirring, was deeply unsettled. The big Plainsman lowered himself from his crouch to a seat on the hard, rocky ground. The rain around him began as a fine mist, falling more heavily as he closed his eyes and thought of the hot sun on the Plains of Dust, dry memories balancing the cold and the wetness around him.

  He had yet to see the one he looked for. But now he knew that the looking had not been fruitless. He smiled and opened his eyes, watching the rain as it picked up intensity and rushed out of the foothills on the back of the wind, gathering speed as it swept west over the light-spangled plains of Solamnia, its destination as unsure as prophecy.

  Chapter I

  It was an evening of torches and gems in Castle di Caela.

  Outside, the sentries bundled against the night wind. They stood at the walls, looking north and west toward the Vingaard Mountains, where the brush fires had started in the foothills again, as they had last night and the night before.

  The fires were burning brightly, like signals of a deep unrest.

  The se
ntries clutched the top of the walls tightly in their vigils, for the wind was rising. The maples at the foot of the walls turned silver, then dark green, then silver again as the wind rushed through them, capsizing their leaves.

  But it was no ordinary summer wind, blowing balmy and warm in the sunlight, rising cool at dusk, and settling for good as the night drew on. For the day before, in the dark of the morning, a powerful storm rushed down and east from the foothills, billowing dust and dried grass and the faint smell of night in its path, gathering speed until it reached the castle, where it lifted a guardsman neatly from his post on the battlements and hurled him into the courtyard below.

  A castle charwoman, by chance looking up to the battlements, had seen the man tumble, his cloak rippling through the air like an enormous black streamer. She said that for a moment when he passed overhead, he blocked out the moonlight, and she believed that her eyes had deceived her-that he was a passing cloud and nothing more.

  They found him sprawled in the red light of the moon, his open eyes as vacant as the sky above him.

  None of the men there, not even the oldest, had ever seen the likes of it.

  So the sentries on the battlements clutched the crenels, carried stones for ballast in the lacings of their armor, tied themselves one to another, like rock climbers.

  Behind and below them, sheltered by the walls, the courtyard and the Great Hall of di Caela glittered with a safer light. Pennants and canopies rippled softly, wagons and booths lay empty until the next morning, when trade would begin again on the grounds of the bailey. Tonight was set aside for ceremony, and from the heart of the light, the music of horn and drum was rising. The closest of the sentries, at the safest posts in the shadowy courtyard of the castle, no doubt caught the sweet attar of roses on the wind as it mingled with summer spices and the deep, inviting scent of wood smoke.

  All of this-spice and attar, music and light-was unusual in Castle di Caela. The new master, Sir Bayard Bright-blade, Solamnic Knight of the Sword, was strict to the Measure and a former knight-errant, used to the hardships of the road. He had little love of luxury.

  Nonetheless, this evening was bright, festive, and ornate, despite the dangers of the morning, the high winds, and the austere lord of the castle.

  Bayard permitted these ceremonies, because not often did a new Knight join the Order.

  A cause for celebration. Expensive though it may be, Sir Bayard Brightblade thought, as he descended by candlelight from the master chambers of the castle. Around him, a hundred metal birds sat silently on their metal perches as if they awaited a signal-an outcry, perhaps, or a change of weather-to arise into the air and migrate.

  Bayard scarcely noticed them, scarcely noticed where he stepped. The young page, Raphael Juventus, a lad of singular promise and talent, slipped gracefully in front of the master, scooting aside a chair that threatened to entangle him. Bayard's mind was on the ceremony about to begin.

  From below, a trumpet swelled. Bayard leaned against the marble banister, stirring dust with his gloved hand. Raphael sneezed, and a dog lying asleep on the landing below started awake at the sound. It rumbled, the fur on its back rising, and slinked back into the dusty darkness of a doorway off the landing.

  Distracting, this ceremony, Bayard thought. More home foolishness, when there's mayhem abroad. There's no telling what those fires bode up in the Vingaards, much less this terrible wind. Enough of wind and fire-it's rain we need now, more than music and spices.

  Drought in the second year of my governance, he thought, fitting the ceremonial gauntlets on his large hands. He resumed his descent, passing still another silenced mechanical bird, staring stupidly at him from its perch on the landing, a spring dangling from beneath its left wing.

  Now Bayard stood for a moment on the white marble platform overlooking the corridor, where the last of the knights straggled into the loud and fragrant room. Raphael, elegant despite his allergies, leaned against an empty bronze perch, sniffling from his vigilance against obstacles.

  Unrest on top of the drought, Bayard mused, these fires and winds at sunset. And now a change of squires. I suppose that's what I get for saving the damsel and lifting the curse.

  This and nothing to do.

  He continued toward the doorway, smiling. The sentries at the great double doors noticed him on the stairway and snapped to attention. One of them lost a helmet in the process. It clattered to the floor, and from its crown toppled a pair of twelve-sided Calantine dice that fell to the floor and rolled to "King's Ransom," the charmed double nines that were the winning toss in the palace's most popular game of chance.

  The guard stooped, dropped his pike, and picked up the dice. Then, reaching for his weapon, he dropped the dice again.

  King's Ransom once more.

  The other guard, the one with the helmet and scruples, eyed his fumbling companion suspiciously as Bayard and Raphael passed.

  The doors to the dining room opened. Bayard saw the glimmer of candles on the dark mahogany in the great hall. An elvish cello began an intricate southern melody, laced with ice and elegance and mourning.

  Nonetheless, Sir Bayard whispered, almost aloud, it is a gaudy night. No matter the wind or the fire, the danger or the rumors of chaos in the mountains. No matter the dust and disorder and the loaded dice of sentries. Whatever happens, this night is set aside. The Lady Enid will see to the festivity.

  Despite the rising wind at sunset and the cold wet air that rustled through the windows into the Great Hall, lifting tapestries and occasionally gutting candles, the ceremonies began as Bayard knew they would: without incident, delay, or error.

  It was the better judgment of the Lady Enid, seated at the head of the table, that despite the fire and the grumbling in the countryside, there should be a time to celebrate traditions.

  As her husband Bayard fretted over things he could not control, stewed over far-flung mysteries and nearby little chaoses, Enid had arranged the banquet at hand and its invitations, arranged the comfort of guests, the lighting of rooms, the polishing of the mahogany tables in the Great Hall.

  Finally she had arranged herself, her long blonde hair tumbling onto her shoulders, her great-grandmother's century-old gown shimmering with unimaginable jewels-a gown the Lady Enid thought was far too showy for everyday use and, to be honest, even for ceremonial nights.

  Great-Grandmother Evania's taste, she reflected, had always been atrocious.

  Nonetheless, Enid was expected to wear the dress.

  And the pendant. Always the pendant, because people wanted to see it.

  Pleasing the people who wanted to see her finery had not come easily to Enid. Nor, for that matter, had her delight in hospitality. Bayard, unaccustomed to his role as lord of the castle, continued to behave like a knight-errant. He surrounded himself with the exotic and slightly notorious characters he had met in his traveling years. Already Enid had played hostess to three bands of dwarves, a flock of kender, who departed merrily with the di Caela family silver, and close-mouthed Que-Shu Plainsmen, who sat on the floor instead of in the chairs.

  She had even hosted a centaur or two-a gray-bearded character named Archala who drank too much, somehow found his way upstairs, and, owing to a hangover and the structure of his knees, could not descend the steps in the morning. They had to lower him from the landing by ropes and pulleys, or, she feared, he might have been there forever.

  Then again, even the boy to be knighted this very evening had been no model of good manners, Enid thought. Despite his somber front and his protests, his "by the gods, Bayard, I'll do better," the lad's past behavior flirted with felony, and Lady Enid believed that the straight face she saw in the halls of Castle di Caela knew far more than it was telling.

  The boy's guest list was a checkered one-interesting, to be sure, but not entirely respectable. Some of them Enid knew only by legend. Most, however, she knew firsthand and well. In some cases, all too well.

  There was Sir Andrew Pathwarden, the boy's father,
for starters, drowsing over there at the table, long red beard spread like a fan across the mahogany. The old fellow was fatigued and well wined after his long ride from Coastlund, still in his muddy traveling armor. A mastiff curled and snored at his feet, and though Enid did not believe that such loud and canine presence was necessary, she said nothing, unsure of how etiquette up in Coastlund might be disposed to dogs. She believed, however, that the old man, though famous for his courage, was not all that used to delicate behavior.

  Alfric Pathwarden, Sir Andrew's eldest son, slouched in an equally muddy heap beside his father, red and lumpish in the candlelight. The boy scowled and rubbed his sleeve. Though by now he should be well into a knighthood of his own, Alfric had only this month become his father's squire.

  It was a situation, Enid noted, very much like having your brother escort you to a dance for the simple reason that nobody else has asked you.

  How old was Alfric now? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? She could not remember, but it was far beyond graceful age for squirehood. To look at the way he kept his father's armor, it would yet be a while before someone arranged a ceremony like this for the oldest Pathwarden boy.

  All the more reason to send a page to Sir Andrew's quarters. Best make sure the old man was comfortable, since he had been left to his eldest son's sorry devices.

  Enid's own father, Sir Robert di Caela, sat to her left. Impeccably dressed, placed tactfully away from the other guests, he swirled his wine idly in the bottom of his pewter cup. Since he had handed the governance of Castle di Caela to his son-in-law in order to "free himself for the manly pursuits" of hunting and writing his memoirs, Sir Robert no longer paid attention to much of anything that went on about him. His mornings were slept away, his afternoons were taken with grooming himself, insulting the guests, and the practice of falconry. Of an evening, most embarrassingly, he ranged forth in full dress armor, pursuing the younger and prettier of the castle maids until he would drop over from exhaustion in the hall and be carried to bed by stout courtiers who had lost at the evening's gaming.