"We have passed through the Veins of Sargonnas," he told her finally, the darkest part of their journey behind them. "The Veins of the Red Fist." "The Veins of the Red Fist?" she asked, knowing she would be drawn into yet another story as readily and completely as she had been drawn down the tunnel ahead of her. "It is a dark name," the juggler began, "and one of mystery, for the bards and the Namers and even the priests themselves have come near forgetting the god. Vengeance he governs, and fire, but beyond that, little is known of him. It is like those gaps in manuscripts where pages are illegible, or blotted out, or torn and destroyed…"
"Lacunae," Dannelle said, taking the old man's hand again as the passage narrowed and darkened. "They call those gaps 'lacunae.' "
"Gaps or lacunae or mysteries, the ways of Sargonnas are more unknown than known. The Plainsmen pair him with the great snake Tellus, who is said to lie in timeless slumber beneath the continent of Ansalon, only to stir at the end of all things. Others see him as a scavenging red bird-a vulture, perhaps, or an enormous condor who dines on the entrails of those who offend his consort, Takhisis."
"This is not pleasant fare for a dark road, Shardos," Dannelle protested. And yet she marveled at Shardos's steadiness, the occasional "Step over, miss," and "Lower the head here, miss."
Around them, small creatures cried out in the darkness, surprised by the strange noises and speed of the two rushing by them, the big dog at their heels. Once Dannelle heard a flutter of wings, once a terrified whirring sound directly under her feet.
So by a dark sense the juggler steered, a sense born of sad years wandering blind over the face of Krynn, Dannelle figured. It was one of those times, rare though they may be, when loss becomes advantage, and weakness strength.
She was surprised to think of Galen in the same thought, surprised to find herself smiling in the darkness.
Years ago, Dannelle di Caela had taken on the betterment of Galen Pathwarden as a kind of quest, for he had come to Castle di Caela in need of every imaginable improvement. When he seated himself on the mahogany chairs in the Great Hall, he would fling his leg over an armrest, and formal dining was a complete embarrassment, for it seemed that up in Coastlund, they had never heard of the fork, thinking it was placed on the table as aesthetic balance to the very real and useful knife and spoon on the other side of the plate.
Like a gully dwarf he ate, or how she had imagined a gully dwarf would eat. In the first months of Galen's stay at the castle, before he looked around him and began to catch on to the etiquette, Dannelle di Caela would shudder when the lad shoveled gristles of pork beneath the table for the benefit of his most recently befriended dog.
Indeed, befriending was one of Galen Pathwarden's greatest skills. Marigold, Dannelle di Caela's most distant cousin, had befriended the lad when she had grown tired of befriending two of the younger and more handsome palace guards. Galen had been next in line, for some unknown reason, but Dannelle suspected it had something to do with his knightly prospects. Marigold did love a man in armor.
For months, Dannelle had stewed while the two of them simmered in the chambers of the other tower. Galen, it seems, had found the whole arrangement entirely new and altogether fascinating, and Dannelle would watch with rising irritation as lights went on and off in various windows across the courtyard.
And yet that dalliance, too, had gradually stopped, like the sport with the dogs and gristles. Nonetheless, Dannelle had thought to herself not a month ago that the young man's Night ‹file:///ight› of Reflections was coming right on time, that the knighthood within him was growing and blossoming. A knighthood of the new generation, which would not recoil at a girl's desire to hawk and hunt and ride and be something beyond a bauble in the castle like old Sir Robert's tuneless mechanical birds.
She had continued to dream of that knighthood, through the stumbling in battle and the uncertain command, through the misguided visions in the opals and the disasters that seemed to follow when the boy was guided by stone and brooch and omen.
It had been a world of the possible, even when faced with monsters and the dark Que-Tana. That was why it could not end the way it was preparing to end.
In Shardos's stories, the promise of a boy was always realfeed, the magical sword was eventually unsheathed and its power displayed, and the talking bird had something magnificent and important to say. The lost book was found, the wandering ship came home, and the third son prospered despite his unlikely inheritance.
Dannelle di Caela would see Galen again. It was the way that stories ended.
The trail turned sharply upward, and the three of them, dog and juggler and lady of the court, embarked on the last half-mile or so that would bring them to the surface and to as much safety as they could expect here at the borders of imperiled Solamnia.
Dannelle could discern the outline of stone and corridor in a deep, settled grayness. Now she could follow the juggler without being led like a child or a donkey.
"We are nearing the surface, my dear," Shardos said. "Can you smell it?"
Dannelle breathed more easily, taking in the sweet, metallic smell of rain, and beyond it the green of juniper and aeterna.
It was midnight there in the upper mountains, but even the light of the moon seemed unbearably brilliant. Dannelle shielded her face for a moment, covered her head with her cloak. Beside her, Birgis sneezed, no doubt bewildered by the brightness himself.
Shardos took the girl's hand once more and whispered to her kindly.
"Rest, my dear. But only a while. Though the odds seem longer than the distances, I'll wager you have a part to play before the story has ended. But you'll not do it alone, that's for certain. Rest awhile, and aid will come to you."
Her head still covered, her eyes still closed against the moonlight, Dannelle heard the old man turn and descend. He was going back down into the darkness.
"Shardos!" she cried turning around to follow him. He was already at the mouth of the cavern, once again half-hidden by shadow.
"Did you think I would walk you home, m'lady?" he asked, pausing at the edge of the entrance. 'Though the prospect is charming, more charming by far than returning to Firebrand and his pasty underlings, it is nonetheless a walk I cannot make. I am afraid I am needed more below than above."
She took one step toward him, but with a broad wave of his hand, he motioned her back.
"Be of good heart!" he urged. "The time is fast approaching when all of us are called upon to do the hard things. You have a breathing space, Dannelle di Caela, before your hardest travels are at hand. As I said to you but a moment ago, rest awhile and aid will come to you."
Dannelle sat with her face in her hands for a long while. Birgis looked up at her with a strange, wise look of concern, cocking his big head and resting his long, badger-killing snout on her lap. Finally she rubbed the animal's ear in an idle, circular motion, as heedlessly as if this journey, this adventure, were all a daydream over the laundry tubs in Castle di Caela.
Longwalker found Dannelle rubbing the ears of the dog, her eyes staring off into high country. He smiled and led her into the clearing to the little mare-the one who had stayed behind when the other Solamnic horses scattered.
Dreaming girls, he realized, are not the most durable of riders. And the road to Castle di Caela was a long, rough one for a cavalryman, not to mention a sheltered girl used to the attentions of servants and finaglings of courtiers.
But then, he told himself, he must trust on all counts to the most unlikely of heroes: a blind juggler, a bedazzled cleric, and a long-nosed dog. An unlikely trio, who trust their safety to even more unlikely Solamnic Knights: a four-hundred-pound epicure more bent on sirloin and sherry than sword and shield, and the leader, who seemed anything but skilled and experienced and resourceful.
Trust in the likes of these, Longwalker thought, is the beginnings of the strongest faith. The girl started as he laid his hand softly on her shoulder.
Sargonnas saw them all as he looked up from the bottom o
f the Abyss, in his eyes the fire of black opals. Saw them all and laughed, his laughter the croaking of scavenging birds.
Below tenebral and Que-Tana and vespertile he waited.
Below Firebrand, and below the depths of the opals.
Below darkness itself, below vision and imagining and somewhere even below belief.
And the tunnels under the Vingaards were known as his Veins.
Let Firebrand gather his stones, the dark god thought. Let there be ten, eleven, twelve, but let there be thirteen finally.
Firebrand is fodder, is kindling. But his one eye is my light upon history.
He is like all mortals, all of them caught in their cravings for power or vengeance, or love or recognition or simple respect or something-anything-to lull the pain of their serious wounds.
It does not matter what they want, for it all amounts to the same thing.
Sargonnas reclined on a swirl of dark air in the center of the Abyss. He laughed again, the smell of ordure and smoke and blood rising from deep within the laughter and mingling smell with sight and sound, until even the things that fluttered about him in the Abyss recoiled mindlessly from the stench and the noise.
Their desires change from day to day, Sargonnas thought, and often grow larger and darker.
Why, now Firebrand imagines that godhood lies in the heart of a simple stone. He even believes there is space in the heavens for his stars.
Sargonnas's laughter faded to a glittering red smile. Firebrand, he concluded, is no more than a spyglass. For years, I have watched the world through his eye, known the history he knows. And indeed, it is valuable. But it is not yet enough.
Out of a whirlpool of blackness, Sargonnas sighed. Three thousand years was a long time, even for a god. Three thousand years, in which the only mortal voices he had heard were those like that of Firebrand- those with the foolhardiness or the greed or the anger to call upon him. There had been a dozen or so, perhaps. A mad mage from Neraka, who fancied himself to be the god Chemosh, wearing the skull mask and the hood that hid his terribly mortal anger that he would have to die.
A traitorous Solamnic Knight, who had slain both his children and still found no harbor for his anger.
A cleric or two, or perhaps even more than that.
Between them, the times were fitful, fragmented.
Sargonnas had forgotten most of the visitants, for they were inconsequential-little men who trusted in nothing until it became unbearable, then trusted in Sargonnas.
Who betrayed them as quickly, as readily as he could, according to their weaknesses. Who reopened the wounds that had brought them to call on him in the first place, and let them watch as the old wound festered and spread and devoured them like fire or acid or vengeance.
Firebrand was the most recent, though not the most distinguished. Nonetheless, if things came to pass as Sargonnas had foreseen and planned, the Namer of the Que-Tana would be the last of the visitants. Any day now the dark gods would return to Krynn.
For along with the self-styled king of the Que-Tana…
There was the worm.
Under the surface of Ansalon the dale worm Tellus slept, dreaming of light and movement and terrible arousal.
Back in the Age of Dreams, when the dark gods fell into the deepest of banishments, the door to the bright world was sealed after them. All of them-Morgion and Hiddukel and Sargonnas and the Dark Queen Takhisis-spun and tumbled in confusion down into the depths of the Abyss, where falling ceased to be falling, because like everything else around them, it, too, had become nothing. They rested on nothing, there in the center of nothing, and they thought long thoughts of exile.
At their banishment, Tellus, who had hovered at the edge of awakening, had trembled once beneath the surface of the world and settled back into a sleep of nearly three millennia.
A sleep that was about to end. And when the dark gods flooded the world, only one of them would know its peoples. Only one would have… a history with him. And to him all worshipers would flock. For the dale worm was power, but the eyes in the crown were knowledge.
Consort of Darkness no longer, he would be Darkness itself.
Sargonnas closed his predator's eye, a rumble of contentment rising from his throat as the ground above him trembled. Slowly he remembered once again his triumph, for exile in the Abyss led even a god to repeat his thoughts.
The device, he thought, was set millennia ago… by Huma himself. How sweet and ingenious! But its intricacy hides a simple magic.
When its time comes, it will rouse the worm. Nothing more than that.
And the worm, awakened, will rush toward the surface beneath which it has slept since the Age of Dreams, tearing open the continent from Palanthas to Port Balifor.
The Cataclysm come again, it will be, and it will be our portal into the world.
Quickly Sargonnas rose in the Abyss like a vulture on a thermal wind, wheeling slowly over a battlefield as a wounded bird for water.
He wheeled over history, circling and remembering. I thank my fortune for that fool the Scorpion, he thought. Just one more visitant who thought-as every visitant thinks-that he could make the gods do his bidding.
When his thoughts first reached in my direction, I returned with them as a small voice in the recesses of his imaginings, as I do, sooner or later, to all of them.
It took me years to convince him that my voice was a part of his thinking.
And when I did, the rest was easy. Again Sargonnas laughed, and the earth trembled in grim accordance.
"What was that?" Gileandos asked nervously, leaping away from the wall as though it were molten metal.
"Perhaps," Bayard replied apprehensively, "it is the promised Rending."
"Well," Gileandos announced, turning quickly and striding back into the shadows, toward the way up and the castle and the light. His footsteps echoed down the corridor and stopped.
Nobody was following.
Instead, the rest of them-Andrew and Robert, Bayard and Enid, Marigold, Raphael, and Brandon-stood in a circle, pondering the creature beside them, the quake above and below and around them.
Whatever the creature was, it was as black and impenetrable as onyx.
"It's like… the thing is as big as the castle," Enid whispered, slipping her arm around Bayard. "Or even the Vingaard River."
At Bayard's other side, Sir Brandon nodded.
"Right you are, m'lady," he said, "and I for one would rather not chance a tangle with it."
"How about… a stroll around it, Brandon?" Bayard asked, his face unreadable, turned away from the torchlight.
Behind them, Gileandos whimpered in the darkness.
Brandon stood there silently for some time. His face, too, was obscured, but from the tilt of his shoulders, you could tell he was reluctant, that Solamnic honor wrestled with good sense in his faculties. Finally he nodded.
"Around it, it is, if you say so, Sir Bayard. Though I find it hard to think of it as a stroll."
He took a tentative step forward into the corridor beyond them.
"Not so quickly, Brandon," Sir Robert protested, chivalrously hoisting Marigold's bag of food to his shoulders, where he tied the cords securely in a knapsack of sorts. "Whatever the creature is beside us, the way in front of us bears closer inspection before you wade blithely into it."
"Sir Robert is right, Brandon," Bayard admitted. "What is more, we shall need your stout back to carry me along. After all, it will just be the two of us from this point on."
After Bayard's words sank in, it was Enid di Caela's turn to protest.
"I know there's something all knightly and manly in this, Bayard Brightblade," she said. "I also know that I'm not supposed to understand. You'll say I don't understand, and you'll leave it at that. But I cannot stand here and let you get yourself killed for a posture."
"You don't understand, Enid," Bayard replied with a crooked, brief smile. He gestured to Raphael, and the boy drew from his pack a strong, light cord-a Plainsman twist, go
od in a traveler's hands. Bayard tied the cord once, twice about his waist.
"You have heard the stories about the mazes of the minotaurs?" he asked his dumbstruck companions. "How a light cord taken in to the labyrinth can be followed out to safety?"
"I am not about to be widowed by my husband's damned recklessness," Enid insisted.
"Nor does he intend to widow you thus," Bayard replied formally, absently, tightening the third knot. "Now, Brandon, if you'd be so kind as to help me along, we'll find where the worm ends, or where the device lies of which the chronicles speak. And I'll wager from the shaking of the earth about us that we aren't far-that indeed, we will not need all of the rope we carry.
Brandon took the rope in hand. He stared at it long and intently, as though it were a thousand years old, a relic the use of which had been forgotten. Bayard gave the cord a short, playful tug, and it slid from the young man's hands. "I hope you plan to maintain that thing a little more ardently, Brandon," Sir Robert muttered, and the young man muttered something back-inaudible and fierce. He picked up the rope, tied it tightly around his own waist, and nodded brusquely to Bayard.
Suddenly, Sir Andrew stepped forward, grabbed onto the far end of the rope, and bound it tightly around his own hand. The stocky old fellow tested the strength of the cord, then nodded to his young companions.
"Well, boys, I can't say enough about how foolish this idea of Bayard's strikes me," he said. "But he's going through that corridor come Cataclysm again. Such places are known for the worst of footing-the ground can fall away from under you with a single false step in the shadows. I cannot speak for any of you, but I'll be damned if I'll see Solamnic knights let one of their own take a tumble."
Andrew braced himself and gave the rope a brisk yank.
"I suppose," he concluded, "it's as the deer hunters say up in Coastlund, where I come from. Them not skinning can at least hold a leg.' "
Reluctantly, straining beneath armor and cheese and sausage, Robert di Caela clutched the rope as well.
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