Galen Beknighted h2-3
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Gileandos whimpered again, then put hands to the cord.
Bayard limped toward the edge of the darkness, left arm over Brandon's shoulder, right hand clutching an unsheathed broadsword. He felt foolish with weapon drawn, for the creatures he had met in the subterranean corridors were either too small to bother with or too large to disturb. And yet somehow to step into the darkness armed and ready seemed just and right and proper… seemed Solamnic and Measured.
"Your leg, Bayard!" Enid protested, but by now she knew that those protests, the urging or argument or even the begging, were useless, except in the small comfort of having set forth a warning.
"I shall be careful, my dear," Bayard tried to reassure her. The words sounded superior and smug.
Those words were drowned out by a small voice in Enid's dark imagining, a voice growing louder and louder, seeming to rush from the walls around her and the rock beneath her and most of all from the oily dark of the fissure.
He is going to die, the voice repeated. He is going to die, and you will be a widow at twenty, alone in this terrible, unsteady castle with memory and misgiving. You are right: You should not have said those words about widowhood. Your words and his foolishness will leave you bereft.
"A little slack there, Robert," Bayard called back out of the shadows. "A man can't venture that far into certain doom when you're holding the rope like there's a tug-of-war in the wings."
The earth rumbled once more about them, this time more loudly. And suddenly, as though the world was collapsing, exploding in upon them, the roof of the corridor caved in behind them.
Sir Andrew released the rope and lunged toward Enid, gathering her into his arms and shielding her with his body against the tumbling rocks and surge of water. Marigold screamed, pulling Sir Robert down on top of her. Raphael tumbled pathetically into a ball oh the floor, while Bayard and Brandon rushed back up the corridor, back into sight of the others. All were shouting and embracing and colliding as everyone huddled together, expecting the worst from the ceilings and walls.
But the awaited collapse never came. The corridor tilted about them, clouding with gravel and debris. Bayard reached his wife and embraced her as Robert and Marigold disentangled and the ill-matched band of adventurers gaped and gasped and choked in the dust-filled air.
"Nothing but rubble in that direction," Robert observed, gesturing at the corridor behind them. He ducked under Marigold's knee and wrestled laboriously to his feet. "Rubble and Gileandos."
There was a yawning moment of silence, in which the horror of what had happened to the tutor descended on the lot of them like a rockslide.
Chapter XIX
While Bayard and his followers huddled in rubble and fear deep beneath the foundations of Castle di Caela, Dannelle was riding south into the highlands, barely atop the game little palfrey that Longwalker had brought her.
She rode homeward, traveling through the night, uncertain of what she would find when she got there and even more uncertain as to what she would do about it.
She was a comical sight. A young woman scarcely out of her teens, scarcely five feet tall, her hood blown back by the brisk wind and the wild ride, her red hair billowing behind her like a banner.
It was like something from a painting, from a legend or romantic myth, if it were not for the dog behind her on the horse. For Birgis rode with Dannelle, tethered to her back like a Plainsman baby, though the creature weighed nearly as much as the girl herself.
His long snout rested on her shoulder. His tongue dangled blissfully as he tasted the air and reveled in the wind passing over his face.
"It's all beyond my understanding," Dannelle said over the sound of wind and hoofbeats, her only listener the dog draped over her shoulder, his short front legs braced on either side of her neck. He closed his dark eyes and grumbled in her ear. "Beyond my understanding why a strapping old veteran like Longwalker can't gather up his charges and descend on the whole bunch of them down in that warren. I'll bet you he could come back with Galen and Brithelm and Ramiro and leave a lot of smoke in his wake."
She paused a moment, blushing because she was talking to a dog. Birgis sniffed her neck serenely, his long, badger-breaking snout poked seriously under her chin.
"All this talk of ban and bane and cannot lift a hand! Why, the Plainsmen out-Solamnic Solamnics with their promises and posturing."
Birgis snorted and whuffed. It seemed to Dannelle di Caela that he was answering her, saying, "You are right, Dannelle. You are right, and there is salt on your ears."
The girl snorted, too, as Birgis licked her. She nodded her head and flicked the reins, and the palfrey quickened to a gallop on a smooth downhill slope extending for miles into the Vingaard foothills, leaving behind the bare and rocky terrain.
Down into greenery the girl rode, past the spot where, days or years ago-things happened so fast and so far underground she was unsure of time-she and Galen and the others had met the troll on the road.
"It's like forever ago, Birgis, no matter how long it has been by calendar or clock," she mused, and they rode quickly past, the dainty hooves of the pony flinging turf and mud behind them now. "And now the clock has begun to move again-now that I have to ride for help and all. And you know, it's like that clock is making up for lost time, because Galen's in danger and so the hours are shorter and shorter still."
She looked into Birgis's muzzle, and he licked her nose solemnly.
"Oh, and the others, too, Birgis!" she corrected, "though I expect that of all of them, your master Shardos can take care of himself. It's just that Galen… he… means too much to me."
They rode together in silence, and the road seemed to be turning east, though it was hard to tell under the moonlight.
"The one thing that troubles me about all of this," Dannelle confessed as they left the highlands and descended onto the still soggy plains of Solamnia, "is that I haven't the first idea what we shall do when we get to the castle "
Birgis yawned colossally at Dannelle's shoulder. Resolutely she clicked her tongue at the pony beneath her. It was galloping gamely now, stretched far beyond its usual duties as a lady's or child's mount.
Nor was Dannelle aware when the gait of the little horse changed, began to waver and tire. The resting and watering and airing of animals had always been the groom's job, or on long trips the job of the man escorting her. It had been Dannelle di Caela's job to order those men about.
The first she noticed of the palfrey's distress was when the animal slowed to a trot, then a walk, then stopped and refused to move.
The three of them were like a tableau, standing there below the blue fragrant branches of a huge aeterna tree: the stubborn, winded palfrey, the angry young woman, and the dog who sniffed the branches above him for squirrels, unconcerned by the conflict between horse and rider.
"Damn!" she shouted, rifling her saddlebags for a whip or crop or spurs, none of which were to be found since, after all, a Plainsman saddled the horse. Finally, disconsolate and immobile, the girl scrambled out of the saddle, staggered under the heavy dog on her back, slipped in the mud, and fell facefirst in a heap, clutching frantically at the reins that dangled above her head.
Birgis licked the mud from her ear, snorted, and nodded off to sleep atop her. No doubt he dreamed of rabbits, of scraps under a table in a great and generous hall.
Propping herself up on her elbows, Dannelle muttered an oath famous among infantrymen regarding cavalry horses and their imagined ancestry. It was not a pretty phrase. Galen would be astonished to know that she even knew such words, much less that she found occasion to use them. Even Birgis stirred at the sound of it, his hackles rising at its venom and anger.
"This is a sorry excuse for a rescue," she confessed and started to rise, but the weight of the relaxed dog held her down.
When the tremors around Castle di Caela had caved in part of the underground labyrinth and trapped Sir Bayard and his followers, there were others who fared better for the disruption.
Then, of course, there was Carnifex, Sir Robert di Caela's celebrated stallion.
In the close confinement of the castle stables, the big animal had been restrained by his own size. Where a smaller beast could turn in its stall and find purchase for bucking or kicking, Carnifex was forced to settle for standing there, shifting his weight, and contemplating the biting of passing grooms.
That is, until the quake rocked the grounds, shaking the door of the stall off its hinges.
It was as though he had planned what followed for years, rehearsed it in his imaginings and refined it to a brutal economy of three swift movements. Smoothly the big horse stepped from the stall, backed toward the door of the stable, and with one resounding kick, the whole damned means of access-lock and bolt and thick board-erupted in splinters across the rain-soaked courtyard.
The grooms outside the stable froze, as though they had been caught in some capital theft. Carnifex turned again and cantered out of the hay-smelling darkness, snorting and nodding, his black eyes glittering.
The four young men assigned to the livery did not look back until they were safely up stairs or ladders and shivering atop the battlements, braving tremor and misstep and rusty or frayed ladder in the process of climbing.
One of the young fools scaled the west wall by the chain of the drawbridge. The boy was clinging to the latticework above the great gate when Carnifex backed up to it and, like some powerful walking siege engine, subjected the thick oaken portal to the same deadly motion with which he had dismantled the entrance to the stables.
"Whoa, 'Fexy boy! Geel Haw! Settle down…" the groom began weakly. Then he gritted his teeth as the great door splintered below him, and Carnifex was through and into the moat, whinnying and breasting the thick water with an almost lunatic calm, stepping out on the far side dripping stagnant water and moss, then striding into the Solamnic distances at a full gallop, erasing the world under his long, effortless strides.
"It's just as well," the boy mused as the big stallion galloped away, a red shape dwindling into a speck on the western horizon. "You was always too fierce for the keeping."
Of course they had to meet. It is the way of adventures and of stories.
Only a few hours passed before the jubilantly free Carnifex, capering across the wet lowlands, came to a stand of blue aeterna where rested a strange, swearing, ten-legged entanglement of girl and pony and dog. He stopped, whether in confusion or curiosity, or simply to catch his breath.
And the muddied girl wobbled out of the puddle and walked toward him, a large, ungainly, and oddly dry dog strapped to her back.
"You are what brought me here," Dannelle said to the stallion. "No. Not you, as much as it was knowing you were there that caused all the problems."
She fumbled with the elaborate network of ties and straps and knots by which Longwalker had bound her and Birgis together.
"For all the times I have said to my Uncle Robert that I was bound and determined to ride you, I suppose I never thought that the chance would come and the options would narrow to the point that I could do nothing else but ride you."
Birgis growled over her shoulder, a lazy, short-lived growl with little or no conviction. Slowly the girl approached Carnifex, lifting her hand.
"You were much less… daunting in the wish world."
She stretched across uncertainties of space, her fingers flexing, extending. Finally she stroked the long, threatening, velvety muzzle.
"They say you run faster in flesh than you run in the legends," she mused. "That words cannot surround the speed of your coming and going."
Her hand was at his withers now.
"You must prove to be faster than words, my Carnifex. You must prove to be faster than time and catastrophe."
With graceful indirection, as though she were approaching a viper, Dannelle sidled to the great horse's flank, and in one strenuous vault, straddled the back of the steed never mounted, never bridled or saddled.
It astonished the both of them. For a moment, Carnifex planted himself solidly in the middle of the muddy road, his ears pricked and his eyes wide in his stiffened, high-borne head.
Then, beyond his own expectation, and certainly beyond that of Dannelle, the big horse turned and galloped toward the castle, the strides lengthening until Dannelle felt as though the two of them hovered above the drowned land itself and a hundred miles had collapsed into one.
"Ride him," muttered a voice at her ear. Or "Ride him" she thought she heard in the hoofbeats and rush of the wind.
But there at her shoulder was Birgis only, his eyes closed and his nose tucked into her hair.
There was neither rest nor movement beneath the cellars of Castle di Caela. Bayard and the Knights picked through rubble in a futile search for the buried Gileandos, coming up instead with a boot and a pair of spectacles and shards of a ceramic flask that carried upon it the faint but unmistakable odor of gin.
They gave up soon, with leaden and downcast faces. The tutor was never a favorite of any of them, especially Andrew, who knew the old man best of all. Nonetheless, there was a real reluctance to their leavetaking-especially to Bayard, who felt that Gileandos was in some way his responsibility.
"'Tis all we can do, Sir Bayard," Sir Robert consoled, laying a bracing hand on the commander's shoulder. "The next order of business is finding us another way out, if there's one to be found."
"Oh, but that's not it at all, Robert," Bayard protested, turning his reddened eyes toward the older man, both of them dappled in shadows by the wavering light from the lantern young Raphael held. "The next order of business is to keep the worm from turning. It is as simple as that. And now that I cannot send the rest of you back, it's all of us down to the heart of these tunnels, if that is where we find the Scorpion's device."
They were all silent at the thought of the dread mechanism. It had lurked in their worst imaginations for a day now-perhaps two days, for the hours bent and broke in the unchanging subterranean darkness. Each of them, no doubt, had an elaborate, monstrous machine in mind, whistling and rumbling and flinging sparks and oil like a gnomish nightmare.
On the other hand, Bayard remembered the Scorpion well and knew that no device he had fashioned would be a loud dramatic thing. Or if it was loud, it was only to call the wrong attentions to the wrong places. The one cog or gear or mechanism that seemed to run all the others could in fact be nonessential-even irrelevant-and to the last the trouble would be where you least expected it.
"Wherever it is to be found," Bayard offered, "the one way we can go is farther down the tunnel. Brandon?"
He extended his arm, and the young Knight slipped beneath it, offering himself once more as a crutch for the older man. Slowly the party began to collect itself.
Enid glided to the other side of her husband, the lamp-carrying Raphael in tow.
Muttering something about mulish nieces, Sir Robert pushed the hefty, reluctant Marigold into the marching order behind the bunched Brightblades and their escort. Only Sir Andrew tarried, sinking into the darkness as the others turned into the corridor and became a fading light in the distance.
"Damn you, Gileandos!" he whispered. "If you hadn't been fool enough to get yourself buried…"
He spun on his heels and strode off to join the party.
"I'd give you the moathouse if you'd only had the sense to come out alive!" he muttered.
Somewhere a million years beneath them, where distances tie themselves together and height and depth are swallowed in darkness, the big god stirred.
He is only a hundred yards from the Scorpion's device, this Brightblade, Sargonnas thought, and a gust of stagna
nt air smelling of stone and carnage buoyed him to a higher level of the darkness. Only a hundred yards.
There was something in the huge raptor's eye of the god that wavered for a moment. If you were to see it in a human eye, you would recognize it as misgiving, but a god is not accustomed to misgive, and the wavering soon subsided, dispersing like smoke into the Abyss around him.
A hundred yards or a hundred miles, Sargonnas mused. It is all the same when one proceeds in the wrong direction.
He hummed contentedly, and a glaze of ice formed at the rim of the Abyss.
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. The tunnel now widened into a huge, vaulted hall littered with stalagmites and stalactites, both upright and broken, glistening yellow in the light of the lanterns.
Brandon gasped under Bayard's arm and stopped suddenly. Sir Robert, plodding along absently behind them, walked straight into their backs before Enid could stop him. All three men jostled, started…
Then stood still, looking down into the crevasse not a yard in front of them. A narrow bridge of rock, scarcely a toot wide, spanned the yawning gap in front of them and led away into the thick and climbing gloom.
They could not see the bottom of the pit in front of them. Sir Robert picked up a small fragment of limestone and tossed it into the darkness.
The sound returned with surprising speed, for the fragment dropped quickly into the bottom chasm. It was not thirty feet deep.
Then why," Bayard asked aloud what they all were asking to themselves. "Why does it seem so bottomless?"
All of them looked into the crevasse, seeing only a short way into its abiding darkness.
The room felt palpably colder. Somewhere in the distance, near the other side of the stone catwalk, there was a faint whirring sound, like a distant chorus of cicadas. Bayard squinted toward the source of the noise but saw nothing.