Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  "It is the device, sir," Brandon stated matter-of-factly, shielding his eyes against the lantern light and peering across the breadth of the chamber. "By the gods, it could be nothing other."

  "I… I am afraid that the light in Raphael's hand has blinded me momentarily, Brandon," Bayard said, flushing. "Would you be so kind as to describe the device in question? I mean, for the benefit of those behind us."

  "It's… it's… glittering, shining, crafted of metal, I believe," the young man ventured, "though it is impossible to tell at this distance. No doubt of dwarven make, to have survived this long in the dampness of these caverns."

  "Of dwarven make, you say?" Sir Andrew huffed, joining the other Knights at the lip of the mysterious chasm. "How can you tell from fifty yards?"

  "A hundred yards," Brandon corrected. "And 1 cannot tell. My eyes aren't as good as they were when I was a boy."

  Andrew and Bayard glanced at one another, hiding embarrassed smiles.

  Brandon smiled himself, shook his head.

  "Then again, I'm quite the one for 'dwarven make' and 'cunningly wrought,' aren't I, gentlemen? As if the blasted thing is not fabulous enough just being down here."

  "Go on, Brandon," Sir Robert urged. "Describe the apparatus. This is no time to come down with a case of self-knowledge."

  Brandon Rus snorted in amusement.

  "Well…" he began again, his eyes intent on the veiled shadows as the older men hung on his arm and words. "There are concentric circles on the thing. Not unlike an archer's butt."

  For the first time, Marigold showed an interest in the conversation. Facedown in a bag of silks and cosmetics, her hair newly fashioned into the shape of a sailing ship, she looked up in passionate curiosity. "Whose butt?" she asked innocently.

  "'Tis only an archer's term for a target, Cousin Marigold," Enid explained curtly, never lifting her eyes from the murk beyond the huddled party.

  "Oh." Somewhat disappointed, the big woman sank back into contemplating her sundries.

  "Or like an eye," Brandon continued. "Indeed, quite like an eye. About the target is an old stone painting, that of the scorpion who swallows his tail, the circle and cycle of life, as the old legends have it." His voice rose in excitement at the mythology. "It is the center of the thing that draws your attention, though. Within those concentric circles there is a dark, immoveable center, a darkness next to which the surrounding blackness is gray, almost light."

  "As if it led into absolute nothing," Bayard murmured. Brandon nodded. "As it well may, sir, what little I can make out."

  He turned, regarding Bayard directly.

  "Whatever it is," Bayard observed, "it becomes more dangerous by the hour. It is set here to waken the worm, on that I'd wager. But as to how it will do so I can only guess."

  Enid took her husband's hand, as though she was about to guide him through unfathomable dark.

  "Well, why in the name of the twenty-seven gods are we prissing here at the edge of this inch-deep chasm like a flock of embroiderers," thundered Sir Robert, "when we could see to our liking if one of us had the simple fortitude to take a closer look?"

  And holding high a brightly glowing lantern, he stepped forward onto the footbridge, marching securely toward the sound ahead of him.

  "Wait!" Bayard cried, reaching for the rash old man. But his leg gave beneath him and he started to fall, pulling Brandon with him. Sir Robert took ten steps, and fell suddenly from view as the rock gave way beneath him. Clutching the lantern, he tumbled in the dark like a small subterranean shooting star.

  "Father!" Enid shouted and stepped to the rippling edge of the chasm.

  "Be still, all of you!" Bayard cried out and, steadying himself against Brandon, grabbed for his wife and held her.

  Behind them, Marigold trumpeted in dismay.

  "Uncle Robert has vanished with my sausages!" she exclaimed. "If we are trapped, I'll starve!"

  Icily Enid stared at her most distant cousin as all about them, the men flinched involuntarily.

  'Then I can only suggest you lower yourself into whatever lies in front of us, Marigold," Enid said through teeth impossibly clenched, "and retrieve them, casings and gristle and all. And do try to rescue my father if you can find the time."

  But Marigold had anticipated her. Already she was waist-deep in the chasm, lowering herself into the whirling darkness with the ungainly grace of a manatee. Soon the big girl had nearly vanished, complete with bag of cosmetics, as the lacquered ship of her hair sank into the murky country below them.

  Sir Robert di Caela lay spread-eagled on a stone table, wondering how by all the gods it had managed to cushion his fall.

  Even the light in the lantern was intact.

  It was welcome to Robert, this sense of his life being spared. Instantly he felt younger-thirty or forty years younger, at least as young as he felt when, as a lean and dangerous swordsman, he traveled east from Solamnia, joining a band of Knights in the Khalkist Mountains, at a little pass called Chaktamir.

  It was a feeling he had almost forgotten in the habits of his old age.

  Robert breathed the gray mist eagerly. It was cool, harboring the clear blue smell of ozone and imminent water, as though, beyond all possibility, this chasm lay somewhere under the sea.

  Was it a shipwreck around him? Robert squinted, struggled to his feet for a better view.

  Above him there were shouts, as though all of his companions were speaking to him through blankets. Someone was descending. No doubt they were concerned for his well-being.

  Which is better than it has been in decades, he thought with a smile.

  About him, the landscape was littered with glass and barrel staves. A sour smell rose on the charged air, reminding him of centaurs, of singing.

  What were the words of the song?

  As hungry as a dwarf for gold, As centaurs for cheap wine.

  It was a wine cellar, or the remnants of one. Robert waded slowly through the rubble. At first, he leaned against a broken-down wine rack. Slowly he examined himself for bruises or breakage. Shadows swirled above him, and a form descended through the tumbling dark until he could make out its girth and its shape and its absurd hair.

  "Marigold!" he breathed in exasperation.

  Robert felt his own ancient limbs. He was surprisingly intact. For a moment, he thought there might be some restoring magic to this cellar.

  What seemed to have happened was that the cellar had dropped. From its previous site at the base of the Cat Tower, where a single flight of stairs had led from the light of the surface down no more than twenty feet to the finest wines in southern Solamnia, the cellar had tumbled, wine racks and barrels and all, into these depths.

  Fragments of glass, covered with old wine, stuck to the soles of his boots. Nothing was intact here.

  It must have fallen hundreds of feet, he thought. Almost by reflex, he looked above him, as if from this depth and this darkness, not to mention through the mist, he could see the walls of the cellar, left hanging when the floor dropped into the earth.

  A clay pipe jutted from the floor beside him, rising out of sight into the darkness. But there, where pipe met floor and seemed to disappear into the rock, lay an enormous clay shield, gnomish letters inscribed on its circumference.

  The well cap!" Robert exclaimed in delight. "The cellar must have fallen through onto the damned thing!"

  The well cap was cracked and moldy. Water seeped from the crack, and beneath its strained surface, Robert could hear the rumble of the mighty well.

  This is a chamber of miracles, he thought triumphantly. Now losing the castle papers rests more easily on these poor old shoulders.

  He looked up toward Marigold-still descending- toward his other companions, prepared to trumpet his discovery.

  Someone-Brandon? Bayard? — signaled frantically. There was something dreadfully wrong up there.

  Then Robert heard the yowling issue from the fissure walls. He looked about him and saw over a dozen slick white thing
s as they crawled, orange-eyed and hissing, from the rubble and the dust and from notches and holes in the stone.

  "Mariel's cats!" he marveled. "By the gods, I was right!"

  But this was no time for congratulating himself. Quickly he drew his sword and crouched, lantern held high in his left hand, his seasoned blade low in his other, but far too light to an experienced hand.

  He looked down. His sword was broken.

  Enid watched from above as the white forms crept closer to her father, wavering and wailing.

  "What in the name of Hiddukel-" Andrew began.

  "Enough speculation," Brandon announced flatly. "I'm going to kill them."

  The first bolt from the bow sailed through the rippling mist and pinned one of the things to an overturned barrel. It screamed like a child, that shrill, rending sound of something skidding across glass. Two of the others lunged toward it, reducing it to bone with quick, ravenous tearing and chewing.

  Brandon started. He moved away from the edge of the fissure, as though the ground he stood upon had become suddenly too hot.

  "Get back here, damn you!" Enid said through clenched teeth, clutching the young Knight's arm. "Killing one doesn't stop the rest of them!"

  Robert straddled the well cap, crouched in an old Solamnic battle stance. The cats flitted about him, between barrel and table and crate. He could not keep track of them, but the two that were feeding he could see quite clearly.

  They were pale, hairless, with the skin of a grub or a rat's tail. Their ears were large, cupped, batlike, their orange eyes bulbous, too large.

  Also too large were the fangs, as though lost in the subterranean darkness, the creatures had reverted to old generations, to the saber-toothed cats whose skulls miners and gravediggers found on occasion.

  One of the creatures burst from a hole in the crevasse wall and hit the floor in stride, rushing at Robert, who raised the lantern in front of it.

  The cat thing slowed, bent its path around the old Knight, and ran full tilt into the stone wall with a wet, crackling sound.

  Robert looked once, looked away, then looked back. It had killed itself through its own momentum.

  At once one of the cats was on the old man's left arm, biting, rending, burning in the white light of the lantern. With a quick, painful move, Robert broke the grip of the thing, hurling it across the room. It tumbled into a wine rack, then, dazed, scooted off into the dark.

  Unfortunately, the lantern, too, went flying from Robert's hand as he fell. It clattered onto a shelf, rocked there for a moment, its wick sputtering, and then- miraculously-remained lit.

  "Thanks be to Huma," Robert breathed, then looked to his damaged hand as the cats circled slowly.

  And unaware of the danger below her, Marigold set foot on the floor of the chamber.

  They looked like ghosts from her vantage of height. Like phosfire or moonlight rippling on gray water.

  And yet they are substantial, Enid thought. Brandon's bow had shown us that.

  Substantial and fierce, for the one who latched itself to her father's arm had emerged from the shadows and weaved about him with the rest of its kind.

  There were more of the things every time Enid looked. Though Brandon had fired again and again, dropping creature after creature with his flawless aim, it seemed that at least one more came to take the place of each one that fell.

  She shook her head as Brandon fired again, the bolt passing through two of the screeching things below him. As for Robert…

  Robert di Caela had stretched his injured hand toward the boiling rock beneath him, felt warmth, uncomfortable warmth and wetness, and drew his hand back.

  Now up with the sword hand he reached, touching the hilt of the broken sword to the swimming surface of the rock. Across the floor, Marigold approached him, her skirts lifted, the square-sailed vessel nodding atop her head. One of the cats broke out of the darkness, rushed at her madly, then balked at her heft and her withering stare. It seemed that even starvation and generations of inbreeding had not deprived the animal of its most basic instincts of survival.

  Robert snorted in amusement, scooted himself against the cap, which was warm but not uncomfortable against his back. The way up the rock face lay ironically at a distance over Marigold's shoulder, the cat-things milling behind her.

  Soon they would have the numbers.

  Wearily Robert drew up his gauntlets from where they dangled by a rawhide cord at his belt. He put on the iron-studded gloves, wincing painfully as the leather pressed against cut and blister.

  I am beyond rescue, he thought. Even if Brandon and Bayard rise to their highest heroics, they cannot possibly get to me in time. And so these gauntlets, which will be better than bare hands when Mariel's cats close in.

  He smiled and braced himself, and as the lantern dimmed, he silently prepared himself for Huma's breast.

  Above Sir Robert di Caela, things unraveled steadily. His friends looked on as the floor of the chasm milled with white, larval creatures.

  "What is going on down there?" Bayard muttered with a rising fury. He had been picking up stones, heavier and heavier, and dropping them upon the flitting pale things below him. Now, winded and clutching at his leg, he leaned against Sir Andrew, his eyesight spangling with pain.

  Turning from Bayard and Andrew, Enid looked desperately to her father. He leaned against the well cap, smiling grimly, resolutely, as Marigold approached him and stood beside him bravely, giving but one sidelong glance to the possibly fatal sausages she had come to retrieve. Meanwhile, the white hissing things crawled nearer.

  As Enid watched, the air seemed to go white about her, and for a moment, she reeled unsteadily at the edge of the chasm.

  It was Raphael who reached her first, but he lacked the weight to pull her back from the ledge. Together, locked by the arms, the two of them hovered over the gray and pooling darkness. An eager chittering rose from the swarming things below them.

  And Brandon Rus's strong arm closed about the boy, dragging the two of them to safety.

  For a moment, the three of them, Brandon and Raphael, with Enid atop them both, lay in a shivering heap on the solid stone of the ledge. Bayard and Andrew rushed to them, lifting the woman to her feet as Brandon scrambled up.

  "Where… Father!" Enid shouted at once, broke from Sir Andrew's grip, and rushed back to the edge of the fissure. For a moment, Raphael, lying on his stomach, looked up and became furious as he saw her totter again, saw all his courage and risk about to amount to nothing.

  Then she gained balance, squinted, and looked to the far edge of the cellar.

  A light was spreading across Robert's face.

  Four days ago, when he had sat half-dozing in the castle infirmary, watching as the servants danced attendance about his son-in-law and the engineers fretted in their oily sobriety, there was something… something…

  "For the great well," they had said, "that lies under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, is no doubt brimming and bubbling in deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave us awash in our own cistern."

  And what, indeed, might this humming crack in the well cap beside him be but deliverance?

  Robert laughed as Marigold swatted away one of the cats who hurtled at her and at Sir Robert's knapsack.

  Well, then, Sir Robert thought. This might be a chamber of miracles, after all! And mustering his strength, he drove the hilt of his sword solidly against the crack in the casement.

  Not even old Sir Andrew had seen its like. Water surged forth into the fissure like a deluge, and before he could even begin to strip off his armor, Sir Robert found himself knee-deep in a warm sulfurous tide from the artesian well.

  He caught himself, rose suddenly from idleness, and slipped off Marigold's knapsack and his breastplate.

  Around him, white spectral forms scurried into the cracks of the rocks, screeching and yowling. W
hatever they had become through the years and the permanent darkness, Mariel's cats were still cat enough to harbor a healthy fear of water.

  Now, stripped to a linen tunic, Sir Robert rose with the water, looking once beneath him to see if Marigold was following. The lantern went out as the water reached its shelf, but in his last glimpse of the girl, he saw her neck-deep, straining to remove her knapsack of cosmetics, wedged between two solid rocks.

  Robert caught his breath and tried to swim for her, but the light was gone and he could no longer locate her. Instead, his lungs burning and his muscles cramping, he treaded water, floating toward the faint light above him until, as bereft of worldly goods as a man can be without being completely naked, Sir Robert di Caela rose to the surface of the fissure, where Brandon's strong arms reached out and dragged him onto the stone.

  "Marigold?" he gasped as the waters continued to rise, reaching the edge of the crevasse and brimming over. Painfully Robert gained his footing and stood beside his friends and family. Enid embraced her bedraggled father, and Bayard lifted high the lantern he was holding, its light fracturing on the surface of the rising water.

  Five minutes they waited. Then ten.

  Then, in the middle of the newly formed underground lake, a yellow lacquered schooner broke the surface of the water, floating absurdly at a middle distance atop the drowned, mountainous girl, who clutched her bag of cosmetics in a terrible grip that would no doubt last forever.

  "The device, sir!" Brandon muttered, his voice uneasy and puzzled.

  "What of it?" Bayard asked impatiently, staring across the rocking surface of the pool. The darkness swirled and congealed, permitting no vision.

  "The device, sir. It remains unchecked for all this water and commotion."

  Slowly, Bayard slid from the young Knight's grip and knelt on the pooling floor of the cavern.

  They had lost Marigold and gained in return less time in which to figure out the workings of whatever machinery lay across the fissure in the blackness. Disconsolately, Bayard lifted his eyes and stared into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thing he needed to see.