Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

"I can't make hide nor hair of that;

  You should expect the worst,

  There is a legend tied to this

  I'll save for the final verse."

  He smirked, painfully aware that his rhymes were straining. But we were after directions, not aesthetics. All three of us laughed, and the dark-eyed Que-Tana nodded and smiled among themselves, sure that some naughtiness lay in the Old Solamnic.

  With a flourish, Shardos pocketed the paper, then the ink bottle, as he sang yet one more verse in common.

  "For all the sailors love her

  And flock to where she's moored,

  Each man hoping that he might

  Go down, all hands on board."

  The adult Plainsmen chuckled at the suggestions of the verse, as did three of our guards. The fourth one, the dense enormity at Ramiro's side, stared in wonder at the book and knife, which continued to circle one another in the air.

  Shardos smiled, stamped his foot, and pocketed the book as he began a final verse in Solamnic.

  "No matter what you see or hear

  Avoid the thirteenth stone,

  And no matter what you think

  Leave the crown alone."

  As the last Solamnic "alone" crossed his lips, the juggler plucked the knife from the air. But instead of hiding it away, as he had all the other objects, Shardos wheeled toward us suddenly and hurled the blade end over end through the cavern.

  It glittered in torchlight as it tumbled through the air and lodged in the chest of the big bodyguard.

  For a moment, everyone was stunned. The enormous Plainsman looked stupidly down at his chest, then, as though his wound was only then dawning on him, tumbled to his knees and, with a wordless outcry, onto his face.

  There was a brief, familiar pause, as there often is when first blood is drawn in a skirmish between inexperienced fighters, when both sides stop, see what has been wrought, and take in the knowledge that this is real, that the fighting is for keeps and is only beginning.

  Then, like some enormous fluked monster rising from the depths of the Blood Sea, Ramiro lurched free of the guards, grabbed the nearest Plainsman by his long, braided hair, and sent the man hurtling into the nearest wall, rattling a torch from its sconce in the process.

  Throughout the large stone room, lights were extinguished and things hurled, and the dry curses and calls of the Que-Tana bounced off the tricky walls. I threw my first stone-at the nearest of my foes, of course, for I figured there was no point to any jugglery of my own.

  The rock clattered harmlessly past the dried grass stool on which Firebrand had sat, and my target crouched and loaded a sling.

  With a deft move of his hand, now glowing with a simple but surprisingly powerful clerical magic, Brithelm seized the wrist of a large Plainsman who was choking Shardos. In my brother's grip, the Que-Tana passed at once into deep, snoring sleep on the cavern floor as Brithelm turned to face further onslaught and Shardos caught his breath again.

  Something blurred in the air in front of me, a dark thing flying out of the dappled torchlight, and I had no time to move or fear or even reflect…

  And a dark, deft hand plucked the stone from the air, as neatly as it had once caught crockery in the wealthy halls of Palanthas and in floating palaces on the Blood Sea.

  Quickly Shardos hurled the rock back into the milling Plainsmen, end over end into the rising shadow. In the vanguard of that mass of robes and pale skin, one shadow fell, clutching at its side.

  Then Ramiro rushed in the wake of the stone, scattering Plainsmen as he waded in among our adversaries. His meaty fist found the face of a Plainsman warrior. Blood spouted from the pale man's septum, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he fell to the stone floor, scattering beads and teeth.

  Bellowing with delight, Ramiro dodged the downward arc of a Que-Tana club, and as the wielder staggered, the big Knight planted his wide, hobnailed boot squarely on the backside of the Plainsman and propelled him headfirst into three of his approaching comrades, who toppled like drunks at a country fair. Caught up in the rampage, the big man hurdled a downed stalagmite, felling two stalactites when he leapt too high in his enthusiasm. Staggering, he caught one of the stone icicles before it hit the ground and brought the heavy thing whistling up into the groin of yet another approaching enemy. Another he struck, and then another, until his dangerous path brought him to a dropped sword. Puffing, he crouched over, picked it up, and came up in the stance that the ogres call "the Feminator."

  Twenty Plainsmen crouched involuntarily and took a step back, which gave Brithelm a chance to reach Ramiro's side. Together the two of them, a most unlikely tandem, backed toward the shelves at the far end of the chamber, forming as they did a narrow passage through the windmilling confusion of robe and armor and weapon.

  "Go on, lad!" Shardos shouted in my ear above the cries of the Plainsmen. I resisted his push, for since the Solamnic Order was closing with the Que-Tana at last, it seemed that the only fitting action was to answer their blows.

  Shardos restrained me.

  "We can hold them back only a little while," he said merrily, a curious smile spreading over his face. "And after all, who better to send burrowing after vermin than a weasel?"

  He pushed me again, and this time I was on my way, straight toward the ponderous shelves at the end of the chamber.

  I slipped behind Brithelm and Ramiro, the bluish arms of the Plainsmen reaching for me, clutching, grabbing. Brithelm had spread a green, unnatural spellfire through the chamber, and for a minute, our adversaries recoiled, overwhelmed by light.

  Blinded a little myself by the brilliant glow, I staggered until my eyes adjusted, until the shadowy outline of the shelves emerged from the dazzlement. Recovering my bearings, I raced toward the far entrance.

  But I had lost valuable time.

  Ahead of me, racing to cut off my escape, a lean, fierce-looking Plainsman half again my size positioned himself and raised a glistening onyx war hammer. I took a long, gathering step and leapt into him, and the two of us crashed to the floor, the hammer skittering harmlessly into the wall in front of me.

  Then, for the first time in a long time, I had my eldest brother Alfric to thank. For in the forgotten arenas of the moathouse, he had sharpened my wrestling well, in a childhood when to be a little brother was to dodge, to scramble, to grapple with things larger than yourself.

  Larger the man was, but also surprisingly fragile. In a moment, I was atop him, his head in my hands. I twisted my arms abruptly, and the snapping sound that followed seemed to echo in a deep and silent chasm far from the shouting and clash of metal around me.

  As I knelt there, the imagined silence gave way to the outcry behind me. Then two strong hands lifted me, and I recognized my brother Brithelm's voice as he coaxed and assured me with words that I could not recognize then nor remember now, and together we rose and raced from a land of chaos and knives into the far shadows and the cold corridor beyond.

  Chapter XXI

  "Steep" and "formidable" were indeed the words for it.

  With Brithelm leading, we took every downward path imaginable, all of which seemed to circle as though we descended through the whorls of a shell. My brother guided us through the torchlit passages that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves, and when a sudden gust of wind from a side corridor extinguished the flames ahead of us, he guided us by an unexpected glow from the tips of his fingers.

  The walls of the corridor were scratched with graffiti in the swirling alphabet of the Plainsmen. Names, Brithelm said they were mostly, as we hastened by them-names and religious slogans in which he said he could find no clear theology.

  As we descended even farther, the letters gave way to pictographs and drawings of bats and tenebrals. There was one disconcertingly deft drawing of an enormous vespertile closing its monstrous, leathery wings around a band of Que-Tana. The drawing was abstract, almost childlike, and it summoned a deep and rousing fear within me, and evidently also in Brithelm, for he clut
ched the front of my tunic when I stopped to stare at the scene, then pulled me onward.

  I thought of Oliver, shuddered, and doubled my pace.

  Those drawings gave way to yet others of surface animals such as horses and leopards and, occasionally, birds. The two moons, red and silver, careened over a herd of pegasi, Finally a city lay toppled to its foundations, surrounded by designs and patterns only, abstract and geometrical, squares and spheres and rhomboids and a strange, geometrical man astride it, his head among the clouds and a swath of soot from a nearby sconce obscuring his face and eyes.

  It was the final drawing; the walls were bare as we descended even farther. We had gone too deep for tenebrals, into the very core of the mountain.

  Deeper still we went, past where vespertile guano caked the walls and floors of the corridor, to a depth where bone and shards of strange pottery were all that kept the tunnels from a sort of smooth sameness of milky brown rock. Then even bone and broken earthenware gave way to clean tunnels that were unnaturally dark and quiet, as if at some point we had crossed a border into a region where living things could not long abide.

  "So this leads us to Firebrand, you say?" I asked my brother, who weaved in and out of the light.

  "Surely it does, Galen," he replied. "I've been in those very quarters, but they blindfolded me on the way there and back. So instead of firsthand experience, I shall rely on a sort of… scholarly pursuit."

  He smiled and looked at me directly.

  "I saw the maps in that library back there, and I have pieced together the directions from the library to Firebrand's quarters with only a little research and common sense. This is the way, I am reasonably certain. It leads not only to Firebrand, but to his quarters and no doubt to the Namer's Tunnel and the secret passage back up to the surface."

  He stopped in the tunnel, pausing in movement and thought until I nearly lost balance trying to keep from running into him. He looked at me wryly and frowned.

  "At least I suppose so," he concluded.

  "At a thousand feet beneath the surface," I snapped, "one does not rest well with supposings, Brother."

  To that he was silent, dodging ahead of me like something frayed and insubstantial.

  Now, Brithelm was never all that reliable in a library.

  To him, a wealth of books was like a mountain range tunneled through by an army of mad dwarves-much like the terrain we found ourselves in at the time. For just when he would get going in his research, would follow a fact or a thought or a phrase from one book to the next, something new and more interesting in that next book would catch him off guard and lure him away as though he had followed an interesting side tunnel, until he would lose himself in the maze of his own interests, having forgotten entirely what had brought him to the library in the first place.

  As a result, my brother believed that the Cataclysm was the result of the "double cellars" popular in Istar almost three centuries ago, and that although legend blamed the Kingpriest of that city for the disaster, true blame resided in the architect who, in a reckless attempt to create space in cramped properties near the center of town, chose to build one basement under another and undermine the foundations of block after block of ancient buildings.

  Brithelm also believed there were walking trees in Estwilde and that the men of Ergoth had eyes in the back of their heads, through which they could see the past. He believed in a third black moon.

  Nor was my brother's research any better on things closer to home: As a boy, growing up in a house where religious observance was rare, he decided that he would celebrate major religious holidays, but he never could figure out or understand the idea of movable feasts. Yes, the feasts moved, but not according to anyone else's calendar. Sometimes we would celebrate Yule in summer, sometimes in spring.

  It turned out that Brithelm began to confuse regular holidays with those movable feasts, until he would wake each of us on odd days with the announcement that "Today is your birthday." And though each of us recognized the mistake full well, none of us ever corrected him, eager as we were for the presents. Brithelm, after all, was the only generous Pathwarden.

  Though I am not quite twenty, by his tally and because of my greed, at last count I have celebrated fifty-seven birthdays.

  All of this is a long way of saying that I was afraid that the research had misfired again. Here we were, a quarter of a mile below light and fresh air, trusting in a common sense that had not displayed itself as all that prominent a Pathwarden quality, and a sense of direction that might well lead us back into the jaws of vespertiles or worse.

  My legs were tired, and the air was fetid. I was feeling my fifty-seven years.

  After a while, our wandering became an issue. There in the bare corridors, I completely abandoned my hope in my brother's judgment.

  "Suppose with me for a second, Brithelm," I suggested as we came puffing to a junction of tunnel and tunnel. "Just suppose. What if… those rooms are no longer a Namer hideaway of sorts? What if they're used for something entirely different? Or used not at all-those rooms you read about?"

  "It will not matter," Brithelm stated flatly, coming to a sudden stop in the corridor so that I nearly ran into him. "It will not matter, because this is not the way to the rooms I read about."

  He turned to me sheepishly.

  I imagined us there in the corridor-lost entirely and completely and no doubt forever, white bones moldering into the history of the caverns and tunnels as our small intrusion into the lives of the Que-Tana faded to a footnote in one of the massive histories we had seen in the Porch of Memory.

  I hadn't the heart to rail at Brithelm, who could not be blamed that his readings had gone awry. Our mission, I am afraid, was further imperiled by the fact that we had no weapons. In our ignited exit from the Porch of Memory, we had left anything fit for menace lying among papers and crumpled Que-Tana.

  "There is, however, another way to find the path to Firebrand," Brithelm said, squinting into the corridor ahead of us.

  I looked at him expectantly.

  "Let us stand here until we can figure out what it is," he suggested. He sat calmly on the floor of the corridor, drew forth his spectacles, and put them on.

  "Brithelm, I really think that-"

  "Hush, Brother. Hush. Sit here and join me."

  I seated myself at his side. I fidgeted as I thought of the Namer somewhere, fixing the stones into his crown, preparing to receive the power of life and death while I joined my brother in wool-gathering.

  "Have you a scarf, Galen?" Brithelm whispered.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "A scarf," Brithelm repeated, graciously but firmly. "Or a bandanna. Or even a sleeve that you do not need."

  "No, I'm afraid I- Stop it!"

  I clutched him by the shoulders and spun him around to face me.

  "Listen to me, Brithelm! We are not in the best of straits here. There are a thousand Que-Tana who would gladly skin us alive, and their leader is somewhere on these premises thinking he's about to translate himself into a deity and is ready to destroy the lot of us in the whole harebrained venture, and we are the only ones who can stop him, and we are seated in the middle of an empty corridor discussing fabric and accessories like a damned pair of ladies-in-waiting!"

  "I want you to blindfold me, Brother," Brithelm replied serenely. "If scholarship alone does not work, I shall have to recreate the circumstances under which I visited the Namer's quarters. It is the best of our hopes."

  In resignation, in fatigue, perhaps in a bit of despair, I lay back on the floor of the corridor, resting my head against cool stone for a moment.

  Then voices arose-a strange echoing in the rock, rising

  from the stone itself, as voices in a closed room will reach you when you set the mouth of a ceramic cup to the door and listen.

  Voices I could not untangle from each other.

  "Nor will we tarry that long before the light returns and the mountains settle…

  "Here the text sp
eaks of fire, of fire and stone and memory…"

  "They are not edible, those tenebrals, and the sooner you…"

  "… and of course it will be the best of hunts, for you are sturdy and strong and of age and a chieftain's son…"

  "It is pretty bad, Weasel…"

  Then, above all of these, a last voice rising shrill and mournful and filled with the music of a cold, impassable desert.

  "… does not lie. But this might be the first. Oh, find them, find them. Together we will learn their language. Together the darkness will take away shame and fire and the hurt, hurt, hurt in your eye and spreading through your veins now, so that you cannot eat. And when you have found the stones, when you have found them, none may return to tell them where you are. At least for the girl and the old blind man, make it painless as the god has taught you…"

  I started to my feet, and the voices stopped.

  There was no waiting this out.

  "Just close your eyes, idiot!" I snapped. "Close your eyes and follow your homing instincts, and if we survive this and you ever breathe a word of it to anyone in the Order or out of it, for that matter, I shall… I shall… fashion something that makes igniting Gileandos look like a purification ritual!"

  "Now," Brithelm whispered, and closed his eyes as he stood up. The faintest green glow arose from his hands, which were clasped behind him as casually as if he were out for a morning stroll.

  Where we were going, and what it had to do with Firebrand, for that matter, I had yet to figure out. But I followed my brother's lead, the luminous green hands stretched out ahead of me, weaving and floating like a tenebral.

  It was no more than a brief span before the outline of my brother-shoulders, shadowy robe, jungle of unkempt hair-rose out of the darkness in complete silhouette. Which meant, of course, that somewhere ahead of us was another source of light.

  It shone from beneath a warped oaken door, marred by stain and rot, by what time and water do to the things we build. The door was barely ajar and probably could never be closed completely anymore.

  Frantically I watched as closely as I could-for details, for signs, for clues as to what we might be up against-and awaited my brother's direction.