Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  Except that there was no dreadful smell, no hot stink of terror or panic or lust or simple sleep or stirring or hunger. The smell of the tunnels was the smell of something remote and unearthly.

  If nothing had a smell, Enid thought, it would smell like this.

  Bayard wished he had not given in, Enid knew. He wished he had put down some masculine boot and sent his wife back up the cellar stairs to light and safety. His father-in-law would have supported him. Indeed, none of the Knights would have stood against his decision.

  But he chose to be fair, chose faith in Lady Enid's resources, in the simple rules of justice and reason, in the Measure and Oath the way he had always read them.

  Now she was in for the duration, for any danger. Because of this, the poor man was worried to distraction.

  The lantern dipped in Brandon's hand, and quickly the Knights recovered their fragile, shared balance. Enid and Raphael and Marigold followed, their cloaks wrapped tightly against the cool still air and intrusive damp.

  Behind them, the other three straggled and splashed through roots and rubble and tilting shadow. Already the shallow breathing and the grunting and the occasional brilliant oath leapt like sparks out of the shadows.

  All at once, the party came to a juncture where the tunnel branched. Without hesitation, they took the left branch, which sloped downward past two small eddies of water circling beneath where they had stood but a moment before. Behind them, the old men followed laboriously. Now the tunnel circled back on itself and back yet again, descending in a tight spiral, its earthen walls giving way, surprisingly, to walls of hewn stone as Bayard and Brandon led the party deeper below the castle.

  Sir Robert swore he knew nothing of this lower masonry.

  "It's before my time," he declared. "Before the castle itself, unless I am mistaken."

  Bayard reached across Brandon, took up the lantern, and raised it high, until its light tumbled onto the crumbled bricks.

  Strange letters were scrawled across their surface.

  "The spidery hand of magic," Gileandos whispered reverently, and Sir Andrew rolled his eyes.

  "Gileandos, you say that every time you find something you can't read."

  Bayard looked more closely at the writing. "Plainsman, I'd wager by the shape of the letters. Other than that, I'm lost."

  For a moment, the party collected itself before the wall in question. Each of the Knights squinted, mumbled, and conceded he could not read it either. Gileandos crouched behind his companions, his mind far from magic, listening no doubt for animals and geysers and rockslides. The other lantern, his responsibility, flickered and dimmed because his constant, nervous tumblings with its mechanism had retracted the wick.

  "Look!" Gileandos exclaimed, holding the sputtering lantern aloft. "We are faced with a shortage of air down here!" The Knights looked at one another curiously.

  "The time has come for hard decisions," Gileandos babbled on, pointing frantically to the faint glow in the lantern globe as some kind of mad evidence. "One of us will have to… give his life so the others can breathe." He glanced into each puzzled face around him, looking, no doubt, for a volunteer.

  "Gileandos, are you having trouble breathing?" Sir Andrew asked coldly.

  "Quick, sir. There's little time remaining, if my calculations-"

  "Damn your calculations! I asked you a simple question, man. Are you having trouble breathing?"

  Gileandos coughed, stammered, then shook his head.

  "Then I would suggest we hold off on slaughtering our ranks. Meanwhile, you might see to extending the wick in that contraption we've been foolish enough to put you in charge of."

  Shamefaced, Gileandos slinked into a corner, leaving his companions in an orange half-light, framed by gloom and shadows.

  "Well, now, Bayard," Sir Andrew said, "before Gileandos sacrifices us all to the great god of panic, we should have an idea of where you are taking us."

  "To be honest, Sir Andrew," Bayard said, leaning against the weeping wall of the tunnel and smiling winningly, "I have never really considered it."

  All of his companions-even Brandon Rus-looked at one another in astonishment.

  It was Enid's turn to smile. One would think she approved of such a shot in the dark.

  "You mean," Sir Andrew finally ventured, "that we've been shanghaied into the bowels of the planet on some sort of whim?"

  "On some sort of adventure, Andrew. It's not by accident when the world beneath you opens."

  "It's a curse," Sir Robert pronounced.

  "It is clearly tectonics," said Gileandos.

  "How strange," Sir Andrew observed. "It seems like accident to me. Or the will of the gods, which sometimes looks like accident. Sir Brandon, what is your philosophy?"

  "My philosophy is that the dark is for philosophers," Brandon said curtly, his eyes on the descending spiral in front of him. "I agree with Bayard because we are already down here."

  It seemed that Brandon Rus had hit the mark once more. His companions nodded, puffed, grunted, and shouldered their weapons and burdens for the descent. Here where the runnel corkscrewed down into the blackness, there was time for reflection and for long thought. The stone of the corridor curved leftward, beetling over the Knights as they descended, blocking their view of each other.

  We are below the Southeast Tower by now, Sir Robert thought. He never called it the Cat Tower.

  He thought of Mariel, his mad aunt. Thought of the smothered laughter her story brought to his visitors-the laughter that even the family shared now, the years having spiraled old Mariel into a faint, small form at the edges of memory, someone remembered because of this story only.

  But Robert remembered the door opening onto the room in the top of the tower. Mariel's red door, the silver fleur-de-lis fast in its center. He remembered how they waited outside the door for a moment, how his brother Roderick set booted foot to the door.

  It had been like flies swarming.

  The cats boiled across his aunt's body, covered with dust, cobwebbing, and wet, hot-smelling things that he could not name if he dared. They were feeding hysterically, their tails whipping through the air as if a hostile wind was moving them.

  Years later, when he saw the scorpions settle on Benedict di Caela, there in the Pass at Chaktamir, Robert had remembered his aunt, had felt nausea rise and had told no one.

  Again the image arose, banishing the dark and the torchlight ahead of him, banishing the curve of the rock, the downward incline of the muddy tunnel floor. For a moment, Robert di Caela thought he was climbing steps. He shook his head, saw rock, darkness, and torchlight. Saw the descending tunnel ahead of him, Bayard and Brandon huddled together, moving from shadow to light to shadow. His daughter following them, at her side the young page, Raphael.

  "I am getting old," Sir Robert said to himself and resumed the descent.

  The tunnel curved once again, and Robert lost the Knights ahead of him behind another wall of rock. Moving forward resolutely, with that alert, discouraging feeling that one gets when walking alone at night in an unfamiliar house, Robert turned the corner cautiously.

  The corridor, empty of his companions, ended not five feet in front of him in a red door, a silver fleur-di-lis planted firmly in its center.

  Brandon had seen no door. Indeed, he had passed farther down the corridor, he and Bayard. He heard Sir Robert stop behind him but thought little of it because the old men had stopped repeatedly since they had entered the darkness. Instead, Sir Brandon Rus thought of the sea.

  How the tunnel was like the whirls in a seashell. For a moment, Brandon stopped. He listened for the sound of breakers in the corridor below him.

  Once he had seen the sea as a boy; his mother set her bright blue tents by the waters. It was a story that Brandon did not tell.

  The Solamnics and landholders from here to the Virkhus Hills had heard the stories about his gift for archery. It was said that he missed but once, and in missing, hit the target at which he should have b
een aiming all along. But they had not heard this story.

  The sea was devouring, terribly strange. The Blood Sea of Istar, they called it, though his tutors had told him that its waters are red only at midocean. Still, there was an unfamiliar cast to the waves-a blue that bordered on a deep violet, a disturbing warmth to the tide.

  Nonetheless, his sister Almia chose to swim. Far on the horizon, he could see her, her light hair rising and falling on the violet waves.

  Brandon shook his head. Was there something in this tunnel-some gas, some closeness in the air-that was stealing his wakefulness? Bayard coughed again at his shoulder. Why these thoughts of the sea?

  Yet…

  Yet there, as the sun dropped low on the water, its light settled on his sister's hair, spangling it gold and silver and red and violet. She was out a perilous distance, near the Road of the Dolphins, where the ships catch the strong northern current and sweep up the eastern coast like iceboats.

  Brandon sat on the shore, lulled by sun and the regular sounds of the tide, the ugly and wonderful smell of kelp. Nearby, he watched a pelican hunt, watched the huge bird sail awkwardly over the purple crest of the waves and then, its quarry spotted, wheel over to stall and plunge headfirst into the water, suddenly, limply, as though the bird had been dropped by Brandon's crossbow.

  He looked up then and saw his sister gliding across the face of the water. At first it seemed she was caught in the Road of the Dolphins, drawn northward by the powerful surge of the current, her long hair golden in the wake of her passage.

  Already there was an outcry on the beach. Mother's retainers were stripping off their armor. One, a large man named Venator, was already knee-deep in the water, striding out to sea as though something would lift him onto the surface and he could stride out over the waves to rescue Almia.

  Brandon fumbled with his bow. For some reason, whether youth or fear or the whim of the gods, the arrow was too large for the bow, then too small for his clumsy fingers.

  It was then that Almia went under. Where she had been, the huge red back of the creature twisted angrily above the water for a moment. Finally Brandon fired the weapon, watching in horror as the arrow skipped harmlessly over the purple waters.

  And into the breast of his sister.

  Then the thing dove, its man-sized flukes turning once, high in the air above the Road of the Dolphins, and the sea was smooth once more.

  He had run away then, in rage and sorrow and hatred for himself, marveling at his stupidity and its result. When they found him later, they had tried to console him-the viziers, his mother, the old Knight, Venator.

  It had been too late, they said. There was nothing he could have done to save the girl. The creature had destroyed his sister and then taken her form in the water.

  He had done what any archer, any brother would do, they claimed. The creature would not kill again. To this day Brandon Rus did not believe them.

  By now the pain in Bayard's leg was consuming his thoughts and his strength. Weaving on Sir Brandon's shoulder, he stood hollow-eyed at the front of the party, his stare fixed on nothing in particular as Brandon guided him through the toothed and silent landscape of the cavern.

  Something drove Bayard Brightblade that he could not put words around. It was a journey by night, he thought, with the road marked uncertainly, the signposts old and weathered and wordless.

  It was like the streets of Old Palanthas, where as a boy he wandered, orphaned and cast away.

  The buildings became stone in Palanthas at the point where the great South Road narrowed northward into the city's heart. Oh, there were some brick, some wattle, and some simple wooden lean-tos back in the most forsaken alleys. But mostly it was stone there, and fourteen-year-old Bayard Brightblade, fresh from an overthrown castle and the sight of slaughtered parents and retainers, found a moment of peace in its craggy stillness.

  Though to a lad from the countryside, the city streets were as strange as the face of a moon. As strange as the black moon nobody has ever seen, that legends and odes and metaphysics claim must be there for things to make sense.

  So he had followed the road north, and the buildings crept closer to the curbside. North and ever north he had traveled, the smells of garbage and spice and sweat all fading into the distant breath of salt water as, ahead of him, the moonlight raced across the marble of public buildings and the flickering Bay of Branchala.

  There had been a tower off to the west-whether he passed it or was passing or only approaching when it came into notice he did not remember now. Only that it was a tower, suddenly on fire, white flames coursing up its sides as if it had been doused with oil and ignited. Fresh from the devastation of grounds and manor, the boy stopped, marveled, awaited alarms, the smell of smoke.

  The tower burned yet was not consumed. It burned briefly, then faded until he could barely see it, a black silhouette against a gray darkness.

  Corposant, they had called it. Branchala's fire. But he did not know these things when he saw the light, the strange and wonderful incandescence in the western sky.

  He thought instead that the sun had set in the tower.

  He had taken this as a sign. Though he still did not know what was expected of him, he thought that something had been given to him. That Palanthas was the place where the tower burned made it extraordinary, different from the faceless plains and foothills and mountains he had passed through to get there. It was at least something. And though in the months to come he would question that "something," whether it meant anything at all, it must have had meaning in some mysterious way. For living in Palanthas, under carts and bridges and occasional lean-tos by night, by day in the network of tunnels that made up the Great Library of Palanthas, soon he discovered the book that revealed to him the curse of Castle di Caela and the part he would play in lifting it. All this from a pure accident of weather.

  There is no telling what the others were thinking. What went through the mind of Sir Andrew, of Marigold, of the boy Raphael, was as mysterious as old writing. Within the hour, despite Enid's better judgment and the urgings of the older Knights, Bayard had led the party even farther below the foundations of Castle di Caela. Masonry had given way to earth and igneous rock. Even the taproots of vallenwoods did not go down this far, though the water was here, hissing about them and dripping from crevice and outcropping as though the whole earth was a sodden sponge.

  Gileandos leaned against the cellar wall, which felt cool, mossy, uncomfortably moist. "Indeed," he asserted, eager to support the judgments of his employer. "In my humble opinion as physicist and alchemist, I should have to insist that nothing I have seen or heard or otherwise observed here is necessarily the product of anything more than the altogether natural workings of the elements."

  Bayard, Robert, and Brandon stared at the tutor with contempt. Suddenly Gileandos's eyes wided. His thin, pale-fingered hand slid over the wall behind him and pulled away in disgust.

  "What is it, pedant?" Sir Robert snapped. But the tutor was speechless, staggering to the center of the corridor.

  Brandon steadied Bayard, moved quickly past the old man, and set his hand to the wall.

  He felt a give, a wet leathery surface that pulsed under his fingers. His voice thin and wavering, he turned to the party, struggling for composure.

  "It-it cannot be, Bayard," he said, his words rising scarcely above a shaken whisper. 'The wall… the wall is alive!"

  "And I am the Kingpriest of Istar!" Sir Robert snorted, stepping forward to rid the world of nonsense. But Bayard's hand stayed the old man, and slowly Bayard hobbled toward Brandon, removing his gloves as he approached.

  The wall was pliable and moist. From a distance, it was indistinguishable from stone, and indeed at some time others had made the same mistake, for whatever the thing was that lay in front of the huddled Knights, it was covered with drawings and scratches and fabulous designs. Only at close quarters could one see the pores and the leathery contours of what appeared to be skin.

&nbs
p; "Gileandos!" Bayard hissed. "Quickly! What are the legends, the lore about great creatures under the earth?"

  "Arrrh…" the tutor replied. Then "Arrrh…" again as his wits and resources failed against the prospect of danger. Sir Andrew slapped him with a glove, but the old tutor continued to gargle and stammer.

  "If I might be so bold, sir," Sir Brandon Rus offered, peering intently at the rippling surface in front of him. Bayard turned to the young man and heard the others close ranks behind him.

  "In several collections of lore," Brandon began, "I have seen mention of the daergryn, as the elves call it. The giant worm that bears the surface of Ansalon on its back. 'Tellus,' the creature was called in the times of Huma, and the dale worm is its name in the common speech."

  "You have heard of this, too, Gileandos?" Bayard asked.

  The old man swallowed and nodded. "Mythopoetic way that the less scientific times explained the rumblings and tremors of the earth. 'The dale worm stirring,' they were wont to say. Hence the expression 'the worm has turned' to denote great change and reversals."

  Emboldened by his knowledge, the scholar folded his arms triumphantly, then remembered that the worm in question was neither myth nor poetry and began to stammer again.

  "Gileandos," Bayard said, his great hand calming the scholar with a simple touch on the shoulder. "I suppose we can all say that the worm has turned now. And I fear we're in for a turn or two more. It is time you all learned what I read in the papers of Castle di Caela. Perhaps, with luck and the favor of the gods, we can avert the promises and threats we have inherited."

  There, crouched by the side of the dale worm, Sir Bayard Brightblade revealed what he knew. That "the rending of earth" was part of a dead man's plan, seized upon in vengeance four centuries ago. That somehow a device-some gnomish machinery, no doubt, or an ancient unfathomable mechanism-was set in motion by the anger and hatred of the very Scorpion destroyed by Bayard in the recent past. Now it was set to arouse this creature, to disrupt everything "from the Vingaard Mountains to the Plains of Solamnia, even unto the foundations of this murderous house."