Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  "These words are power to me," Longwalker said, still crouched and staring into the heart of the fire. "These words are a sign that the stones are in trustworthy hands."

  Flattered, I let my hand uncover the brooch. Longwalker lifted his eyes and regarded the stones from a distance. They seemed to glow under his gaze, as they had in the rainy dark of the woodlands.

  "Yes," the big Plainsman pronounced. "There are six of them. It may be all Firebrand needs."

  I returned to the fireside, glancing once over my shoulder in a vain attempt to catch a glimpse of Ramiro, Dannelle, and Oliver, who waited somewhere in the high foothills. Instead, there was the sun descending, blazing red and obscuring everything westward but the mists of night rising on the nearby lowlands and the play of sun and long shadow. Throughout the bare countryside, the cries of birds rose into the darkening air- birds stunned by the downpour of rain, who took to the wing now, seeking high wind and drier lodging.

  I had not realized how late it was. Suddenly I felt cold, vulnerable. I leaned toward the fire, extended my hands to warm them.

  "I'm sorry, Longwalker. I'm perilously at sea when it comes to the spiritual. I have no idea who this 'Firebrand' is, or how many stones he needs or what he needs them for. I'm not quite sure what worth these opals are to begin with, but I've seen things in the bottom of them, and I know there's more to them than the adorning of a cape."

  The Plainsman nodded. He smiled faintly, picked up a branch, and stirred the fire. The blackened kindling at the heart of the flame broke at his touch, hurling red sparks and ashes harmlessly into the air.

  "You have never seen the bottom of them, Solamnic. For the bottom of them lies with the gods, since the Age of Dreams. So has been the story since that time," Longwalker said as the boy-the lookout-approached us quietly, handing each of us a cup containing a clear, fiery liquid that made Thorbardin spirits taste like weak tea. I sipped once and thought I had made a cultural error-had swallowed a lamp oil or a tanning agent or some exotic explosive. But across the fire from me, Longwalker tilted his cup back and drained it.

  I thanked the gods that Ramiro was not here in my place.

  "Since the Age of Dreams, Solamnic," Longwalker continued. "As everything did in that distant time, the story begins with a god. For the gods had brought us these stones in the time before the Telling-before the tribes assembled in Abanasinia to renew our stories. The stones go by many names-glain opals, godseyes, wishing stones. Whatever men call them, they are magical and rare, and showing us our visions and dreams and words, and the visions and dreams and words of others. Used in wisdom, they helped our scattered brotherhood, the Que-Shu, Que-Teh, Que-Nara, Que-Kiri, and the others, to know each other over miles and years."

  "I'm not sure I follow you," I confessed. Longwalker paused and explained patiently.

  "In our tribes, there were always the Namers-what you might call clerics, but more than clerics. For the Namers remembered the histories of things-the wanderings of our peoples for a hundred generations back, unto a time when the gods walked among us and there were as yet no stories to remember."

  "A weighty calling, that of the Namer," Shardos said.

  "The burden was lighter because of the opals," Longwalker continued. 'Tor placed in the Tribal Crowns- the great circlets forged by Reorx in the Age of Dreams, one for each tribe and one alone-the stones would hold memory. The Namer could look into the godseye and see what had passed and what was passing. Que-Kiri could speak to Que-Shu through the opals, though mountains and waters lay between them. And through them, we spoke to the past."

  "There in the crowns lay the memories of our peoples, the memories we sang of and shared at the Telling."

  "The Telling?" I asked.

  "A Plainsman conclave," Shardos explained. "A great get-together of the tribes that takes place every seven hundred years or so. They tell their tribal histories there, set aright any mistakes in them, so that the lore of the Plainsmen gets passed down correctly and the deeds of the ancestors are remembered."

  Longwalker nodded. "A crown to each of the twelve tribes," he continued. "Each crown with twelve opals. A sign of our unity, but also magic itself, they tell us. Whatever the power of the stones, it is only when they are set in a god-forged crown that they bind and spark a greater power. In the godforged crown only."

  "But what about… those in my brooch?" I asked. "I can see things through them without this crown."

  "The visions that two opals provide are fleeting. They go wherever they wish, like the shape of a face in a cloud, so that they mean one thing to one eye and something else to another. The more stones that are set together, the clearer the vision. The best of all numbers is twelve, and twelve was the number in each of the crowns. It is said that the wisdom of twelve stones abides with the Namer for years-that once he has worn the crown, he is never the same again.

  "I cannot say for sure that is true. Nor can I tell you of the danger, for it is also said that if thirteen opals were set into one of the crowns, then the wearer would have power over life and death."

  I looked at Shardos, who shook his head and frowned.

  "Power over life and death?" I asked. "What does that mean, Longwalker?"

  "I cannot say for sure," the tall Plainsman answered. "Nor could I tell you why anyone would want such a power. For I have heard that the dead come back at the bidding of the thirteenth godseye, and I am told that in each of the Naming Crowns is a thirteenth setting, always left empty, to remind us of that legend-to tell us that it was our choice not to seize what is forbidden. Not until now."

  Longwalker raised the sleeve of his deerskin tunic. Beneath the sleeve lay a rawhide armband, glittering with black eyes in the firelit night. "For someone is about to take that power, Solamnic. Indeed, someone has waited for you to bring him that power."

  Chapter XII

  "Not so fast!" I warned, the worst of my suspicions returning. For what could someone waiting for the power of the opals possibly mean but that he had been waiting for me all along, had followed us this far and set up camp, knowing that I would fly to his fires and to my destruction like a dim-sighted, dim-witted moth?

  I leapt away from the fire toward the darkness, where I knew my horse was tethered. But Longwalker stayed close to the flame and called out to me, his level voice reaching me suddenly and softly, as though I was thinking his words to myself.

  "Not so quickly, Solamnic. I have been waiting for you, but I am no thief."

  I paused, my back to the fire and the Plainsman.

  "Now," he said, after a silence. "Linger awhile longer and listen to the rest of my story. Your brother, lost amid stones and darkness, would thank you for hearing me out."

  I turned to face him, breathing more slowly, my hand relaxing its grip on the hilt of my sword.

  I could not have left anyway-not without Shardos, who had not stirred from his place, intent on Longwalker's tale. I muttered an oath at the circumstances: Everywhere I looked, I was responsible for someone, it seemed, and though I had known the man scarcely more than a day, I could no more abandon him than I could Dannelle or Ramiro. Or Brithelm, for that matter.

  The sudden flight toward the horses, away from all of this history and magic, was simply the ridiculous first of my options. I sighed and returned cautiously to the fire. When the Measure orders you to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed and the helpless, it never says how large and powerful and downright frightening the oppressing forces can be.

  "I was speaking of the crowns," Longwalker said. "Of the crowns and their powers, and a time in which the people held them and used them wisely."

  I nodded and sat beside Shardos, who still had not moved.

  "The Ogre Wars," Longwalker continued, "back in the Age of Might, made that happier time but a memory. All of the crowns were either destroyed or damaged or vanished, suffering the loss of most or all of their stones. The last Telling, four hundred years before the Rending-what you call the Cataclysm-was a time of grea
t sorrow. Terrible gaps lay in the years, for even the wisest of Namers could not remember the stories without the crowns and stones to guide them. So the People were cut off from their fathers, from the memories."

  "It could not end that way," Shardos whispered quietly and urgently. The firelight played over his dark, grizzled face, his vacant eyes. "Your people could not let the wars steal their memory."

  "And, of course, the duty fell to the Que-Nara," Longwalker said.

  "I have heard little of the Que-Nara," I said, "except that yours are the most priestly and visionary of the Plainsmen."

  "Or the luckiest, perhaps," Longwalker added, his face breaking into an enormous, jagged grin. "Ours was the only crown that survived undamaged, so ours was the task of rescuing memory.

  "Half of us went below the earth, into the dark of many voices, there among the swimming lights and the great snake that bears all Solamnia upon its back…"

  I hid a smile at the creaking poetry of the old legends, but Longwalker was watching nothing but the flames.

  "They wandered under the earth through a passage known only to the Namer and passed down from one to the next, as the young Namer adorned his hair and put on the crown, and the old one passed into silence. Once the Que-Nara were there in the darkness, they hunted the stones in the veins of the ground."

  "To replace the ones that were missing?" I asked. But Longwalker kept at the telling.

  "The rest of us stayed above, as guardians, and to assure that the Que-Nara would survive rockfall and tremor and flood and the changes of the earth. And for the lives of six chieftains, the Que-Nara below spoke to the Que-Nara above, for six of the stones were in the keeping of the Que-Nara below, and six of them we kept with us."

  Longwalker paused. He looked up at me and extended his hand, his fingers as long and knotted as branches. I knew without words that he wanted to hold the opals. Silently, with only the slightest doubt and reluctance, I handed him the brooch.

  He stared into it deeply, as though he looked beyond it into something murky and imponderable. As though he had found the bottom of the stones.

  "Now is the time to tell of the one who awaits you," he said, handing the brooch back to me. 'Tell me what you see in the godseyes, Solamnic."

  Instantly my suspicions returned.

  "You're not… up to some Plainsman hypnosis, are you? I mean, is there some kind of trick your tribe has to lull enemies to sleep?"

  "Most certainly there is," Longwalker admitted, "but this is not that trick. Look into the opals, Solamnic."

  I did so reluctantly. Like black pools they were, reflecting the light of the fire, of the rising red moon, and yet underneath the reflection, something was moving. I leaned forward, squinting against the firelight. The stones began to glow as they had last night in the clearing, and I shuddered, remembering where the glow had led me and where I had led Alfric in turn.

  Suddenly I saw figures shimmering and moving in the depths of the stones. It was as though I watched them through a crystal, as though in a core of fire there was a window or door through which they walked, faint shapes in the rippling blackness. The world inside the stones was a world long vanished, and I watched the vision and knew I was looking back through the years, into the depths of the past.

  There were twenty of them easily, perhaps two dozen. The cloud in the stones obscured the shapes, made counting difficult. But the feathers and the symbols they wore were Que-Nara.

  The country around them was forest-an unbearably bright forest that shimmered sea-blue. Perhaps it was the woods or southern Hylo, doomed by the Cataclysm that would follow in the years to come. For I knew without being told that this was an older time, before the Kingpriest's decrees and the Rending, though for the life of me, I cannot tell you how I knew such a thing.

  As I watched, the Que-Nara established camp in a woodland clearing. Quickly and with great skill, the old ones and the children gathered the wood, kindled a slow, smokeless fire that shone gold on green, and the stones in which I watched this scene glimmered at the edges with a borrowed light.

  One of them, a young man, leather diamonds and bone stars woven into the thick web of his hair, crouched some distance from the fire, his attentions on something cupped in his hands. For a moment, I disregarded him, my thoughts on the campfires and the families huddled about them, but the stones would not show me those fires and families, fixing my sight instead on the young man at the edge of the light.

  I did not know his name. Why I should expect to know it, I could not tell you, but the stones were firm in this, and the first thought that rose to my mind as I watched him about his obscure business was that I did not know his name.

  The second thought was that the young man was the one who spoke to me in the vision-the one who claimed to have kidnapped my brother Brithelm.

  I had spoken to this one not four nights ago, and yet this scene was two centuries, three centuries old. It was like the light from distant Chemosh, which the astronomers say reaches the eye decades after it rises from the surface of the star.

  I felt Longwalker watching me as 1 thought this. His presence was of little concern: My thoughts were fixed on the young man I saw in the stone, on the past unfolding, as though a mural in the halls of Castle di Caela sprang suddenly to life, and history moved in my marveling sight.

  The nameless youth held a crown in his hands-a crown of woven silver, into which four, five, six opals were set. It was difficult to tell how many.

  I shook my head, and the stones I was watching directed my eyes to the stones in the crown. Stones within stones within stones, like mirrors facing each other at the ends of a long hall, in which the eye is swallowed forever into something like eternity.

  My eye plunged downward into the dark of the opals, and the scene before me was swallowed up in darkness, and darkness was all around me…

  "Wait," Longwalker said, and I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. "Follow no further. That is how Firebrand lost himself, in sounding the bottom of the stones."

  Sounding the bottom of the stones? It was all mystery, all Plainsman hocus-pocus. And yet there was something in those depths that called me further, so that it took everything I had to resist it, and yet I was not sure I had resisted it, not sure…

  The pressure at my shoulder increased.

  "Good," Longwalker said. "Now you will see what happened."

  Again the young man was in view, the crown on his head and a faint, fanatical smile on his lips. The children of the Plainsmen shied from him, adults turned from him in the councils, until his only companion, his only confidant, was the crown he talked to by the fire's edge.

  His people looked on in suspicion, drawing signs of warding on the ground before they lay down to sleep.

  Soon he traveled a mile behind them. They would not permit him to venture any closer. A voice traveled with him, cold and obscure and insinuating. I could hear it talking to him, could hear it saying…

  So it always is with the gifted, with the god-ordained. For your eyes see into the time to come, and if you look long enough, my friend, you will see a time in which all the Que-Nara understand your gifts and hearken to the words of your prophecies.

  Then, the voice said, and the ground over which the young man walked was suddenly covered with glittering blades of ice, then I shall tell you what to say to them; they shall hear the words of your mouth as prophecy, and in the time that follows, we shall be among you.

  "According to your will, Sargonnas," the young man said.

  "Sargonnas!" I exclaimed, tearing my gaze from the stones.

  "Sargonnas the Consort," Shardos said quietly. "Prince in the Dark Pantheon."

  "I know where you are in the story, Solamnic," Longwalker said, "because I have seen it so many times. What they transacted in that ill hour, Namer and god, only the gods themselves know."

  We looked at one another uneasily. At last the big Plainsman smiled faintly.

  "Tarry but a while longer, Sir Galen, for the story
has a middle and an end."

  And in the stones were the rocky foothills, a circle of boulders in a bleak country.

  The Plainsmen surrounded the Namer, and a chieftain pronounced the charges and the crimes.

  "False prophecy," they said, and "corrupting the young." "Conjury," and "rending the earth."

  "'Rending the earth'?" I asked.

  "Who is to say that the tremors in the mountains are not his doing still?" Longwalker asked. "His, and that of the evil prince he serves."

  I started to return my eyes to the stones, but the Plainsman waved his big hand.

  "You have seen enough," he said. "Do not look into what follows, for the ceremony is private when a man is cast from the tribe.

  'The stones in the Namer's Crown were divided among the elders, his eye was taken according to the Old Ways, and the wound seared by the white-hot blade of the spear."

  I gasped and swallowed hard. It was all a bit fierce and nomadic for my tastes.

  "Wh-Why the eye, Longwalker? Why not just… muster the poor lad out? It seems a little harsh, this ceremony of exile and the cutting that goes with it."

  "It's actually kind, Galen," the juggler added, stirring from his place by the fire and stretching his spindly old legs. Not for the first time, I wondered how Shardos had learned all of these tales.

  "Kind in a rather stark, Plainsman way, that is," the old man continued. "For though it maims the outcast, it also protects him, in an odd fashion. It is an outward sign to the other Plainsmen among whom he wanders that, though he is an exile and cannot be taken in, he is not to be harmed, for perpetually he suffers for his wrongdoings."

  "It still sounds harsh to me," I insisted, and Longwalker frowned.

  "What," he asked, "would Solamnics do to one who betrayed their Order?"

  I was not sure, but I admitted that the Measure would call for something drastic, something with a taste of high drama, no doubt.

  "As I thought," Longwalker replied with satisfaction, and he told me the rest of the story: how the outcast left the Que-Nara, but not without stealing the crown and one of the opals. How he wandered for months, guided alone over the desolate landscape by hints and suggestions from the voice that had taken up residence in the cold silver of the crown on his head, which spoke to him somehow through the single, unnaturally glimmering opal.