Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  "I do not know what we have been led to," Brithelm cautioned from the murk ahead of me, "but it's as likely the Namer's quarters as anything."

  By the dim light, I saw him drop to his knees and crawl forward until he reached the door. There he stayed for the longest while, his face turned from me.

  From his posture, I assumed he was praying, meditating, or otherwise observing, so I waited the proper and reverent time, though I must confess that I grew impatient.

  "Remember us also in your prayers, Brother," I urged. 'Then remember us here, if you would, for I await your instruction."

  "Firebrand is behind the door," Brithelm whispered without turning to face me. "He is alone and reveling, having affixed most of the stones to his crown."

  "Why, that's… astounding, Brithelm!" I breathed. "How… how can you be so sure? Visions? Augury? Some kind of telepathic trance?"

  He turned to me, smiling, a short beam of light cast across his face as if it rose from the door itself.

  "Keyholes, Galen. The future unfolds through keyholes. I would have thought you remembered that much."

  Outside the door, we readied ourselves. Brithelm crouched again in the keyhole light, while I searched the walls and floors for substantial stones-stones for throwing, in case the circumstances called for such.

  "It has been my experience," Brithelm whispered, "that surprise will succeed on almost any front, in almost any circumstance. And usually weapons are not needed."

  "I do not recall asking you to draw on your considerable battle experience, Brithelm," I hissed.

  We both stood silent outside the door of Firebrand's chambers. From within, the light dipped and altered as someone passed between it and the door-someone moving in directions and paths we could not see, intoning something dreadfully important, no doubt.

  I could swear there were two voices in the room.

  "It's like Father says, Galen," Brithelm offered, moving toward me in a rustle of red robe, placing his hand on my shoulder.

  "I know, I know," I muttered, eyes on the stone floor, which I feared would soon pool with my blood.

  "I know you know, but say it with me," Brithelm urged.

  "I am no doubt going to die with you, Brother. Grant me the dignity of not repeating Father's rural slogans."

  "Now, Galen," Brithelm cautioned merrily, ruffling my tangle of red hair. For a moment, it was as if there was no danger approaching. It was as though we were somewhere back at the moathouse-oh, sixteen or seventeen years ago-and he, the only Pathwarden with a talent for care-taking, was coaxing little Weasel to take his medicine.

  Brithelm and I looked directly at one another and spoke in unison one of Father's most time-honored sayings. " Them not skinning can at least hold a leg.' "

  I opened the door and we burst suddenly into the room, armed with gathered stones and courage and not a small portion of folly. Dazed for a moment by the bewildering array of torches in the chambers, we looked about aimlessly, stumbling over rock and declivity, searching for Firebrand, for anything or anyone.

  Then the light receded, and Firebrand was revealed sitting on a wicker throne in the far corner of the chamber, an unfathomable smile upon his face. Above his head he held the silver Namer's crown of the Que-Nara. And in the midst of that circlet were set thirteen black, gleaming stones.

  "We're too late!" I hissed to Brithelm, who nodded in alarm.

  "Now from these stones will arise my greater power," Firebrand intoned, his voice rising hysterically as he raised his arms. "I am disappointed in you, Brithelm. Disappointed that, when you might have been my first priest in the Bright Lands, you chose to bury your nose in books of physics and history and… and fauna, idling away your hour of greatness."

  "I have been known to dawdle," Brithelm agreed.

  Firebrand's eyes rested keenly on the two of us.

  "But now your high tide recedes, as they say," he announced. "Your little rescue story comes to a close, Solamnic. For my translation awaits me."

  With that, he set the circlet on his head.

  He smiled. "All quiet," he said. "Even the Voice is silent before the power of life and death."

  Something echoed through the caverns around us- something deep and sorrowful and altogether bereft. Above me and below me and somewhere else in the distance, I heard a great wail and outcry, and before me Firebrand's good eye rolled upward in the socket, its iris and dark pupil vanishing into a milky whiteness as though the Namer was in the midst of trance or seizure.

  They tell me that above ground, in the Bright Lands that the Que-Tana had almost forgotten, the namers and chieftains and those with a bent toward wisdom heard wailing, too, but their wisdom was not great enough to understand what had just taken place. As far south as the Eastwall Mountains and the Thar-Thalas River they heard it, mistaking it for the distant cry of birds, and yet at the edge of the Plains of Dust, a group of herb-gathering Que-Teh stopped, bewildered, and stared at the greenery in their hands. The cry faded away somewhere far to the north of them, and they could no longer remember how or why to concoct with the herbs.

  Hunters from the Que-Shu tribe, it is said, lost the ancestral trail into antelope country even as they traveled upon it. The people wandered for weeks. Several of the old ones starved. I have heard also that Longwalker's opals flickered and went dull and dim.

  Almost as quickly as he had lapsed into abstraction, Firebrand recovered, his good eye dark and alert and piercing.

  "Oh, I see it all now," he murmured, as quietly as you would speak if you approached a rare and timid bird in a clearing, where even the slightest disruption and noise would set the discovery to wing. "I see it all…"

  No matter how quietly he spoke, though, the words carried in the echoing chamber, buoyed by the emotion in his voice and the cavernous, reflecting walls.

  "And now from these walls will arise my great people," Firebrand intoned. "Will arise those whom the Rending took, and the years, and the wars and the fires and the floods and the search for the stones themselves."

  "Climbing the Cat Tower," I whispered to Brithelm.

  But Firebrand continued, his voice lower now, and calmer.

  'Those taken and perhaps not taken, but those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong."

  He waved his hand, and through the walls of the cavern it came, passing through smoothly and readily, as though the rock was mist or smoke.

  In front of us was the troll from the rain-soaked highlands. In its eyes was a terrible, surpassing weariness, as if it had been called from something more than sleep or labor. From something we could not know yet.

  Firebrand folded his hands ceremoniously. As he began, I started for him, stone in hand, but Brithelm grabbed me by the shoulders.

  "Whatever it is, it is over, Galen," Brithelm explained. "He called this troll to life hours ago."

  "You are right, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand whispered. "Go to your death knowing you could have shared in this glory."

  Firebrand chanted yet again, something in an old and corrupt version of the Plainsman tongue, and a hot wind passed through the room, carrying on its waves the sound of an ancient wailing.

  The troll came toward us, its yellowed teeth bared.

  "He's conjured this up, Brithelm," I whispered urgently. "All you have to do in circumstances such as this is not put faith in the vision."

  "The eyes can be deceptive, Brother," Brithelm agreed uneasily. "And yet I do not believe-"

  "You taught me this long ago in Warden Swamp," I declared confidently. "You taught me that the way to deal with illusions is simply to disbelieve them, simply to go about your business and let them break like waters around you."

  Brithelm cleared his throat, but I was halfway to the throne and Firebrand before he could speak. Swiftly the troll stepped between me and the Namer, but I looked beyond the formidable image and kept walking straight into the glaring, leering product of my enemy's imagination. And
bumped into tough leathery skin, into muscle and gristle and claw.

  "Galen!" Brithelm called out as I tumbled through the air into the rocks some twenty feet from my enormous and tangible foe. Dazed, I recovered my faculties just in time to see Firebrand climb a rope ladder into a tunnel halfway up the far wall, then pull the ladder up after him.

  Just in time to see the troll turn and lurch toward me, finger-long claws switching and lashing in the dead air of the chamber.

  Chapter XXII

  I came to as Brithelm crouched over me in the Namer's chambers, as Firebrand vanished in the dark of the tunnel above us. It was still possible to get to the villain-my years of pastry and idleness at Castle di Caela had not yet slowed me to the point that I could not catch a one-eyed man in the dark.

  There was, however, the matter of the troll in front of us.

  "I thought you said that thing was an illusion," I whined, rising painfully to my feet.

  Brithelm smiled and shrugged. "You have it mixed up with all those satyrs back in 'Warden Swamp," he said and backed away as the troll approached, smacking his lips, breaking a long stalagmite from the chamber floor, then waving it above his head like a baton.

  I looked about me. Suddenly the rocks I could gather and throw seemed much too small, my brother much too weak an ally, and all that vaunted Solamnic training was like Dannelle's riding instruction-well and good in the thinking about it, but dangerous in the face of the real thing.

  The troll rushed between us, striking the stone floor a shivering blow. The chamber shook, and for a moment, I thought the troll had shaken it. But it shook again, and the monster lost its footing, stringing slobber through the air as it staggered and turned.

  Serenely Brithelm picked up a rock and bounced it harmlessly off the troll's leathery nose. The monster's eyes crossed in consternation, and it looked up in search of its assailant.

  "Over here!" Brithelm warbled. And then "Over here!" echoed in the cavernous chamber from somewhere behind the troll. Stupidly the monster turned toward the sound of the echo.

  Brithelm winked and called out again.

  "Oh, yoo-hoo!"

  The troll pivoted left in a complete circle and staggered a little.

  I crouched and picked up a couple of stones. Then I saw that my brother was spinning the creature again and again, in slow circles, toward the rockface and the tunnel.

  Brithelm sat down, crowed, and flashed green flame from his waving hands, and the troll, who had crouched for a better whack at its target, paused for a moment, dizzy and uncertain at the prospect of this fire.

  In a split second, I understood Brithelm's tactic.

  The troll crouched, and its gray, knotty back formed an incline of sorts, its shoulders no more than a good athletic leap from the mouth of the corridor above us. Before I could consider further, I was running, building up speed across the floor of the cavern, and the monster had only started to turn when I vaulted onto its backside like a kender acrobat, my legs still churning and arms windmilling, the sheer momentum carrying me up the steep incline of the back onto its shoulders and, in a leap sparked more by fear than by strength or dexterity, headfirst into the mouth of the tunnel.

  Firebrand's putting on the crown had done more than muster trolls from the masonry. I have heard that down the hall from us, where Shardos and Ramiro were failing against impossible numbers of Que-Tana, the skirmish stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Blearily, the Plainsmen gaped at one another, thoroughly lost and distracted by a wave of darkness that passed through their hearts. All around the echoing library, staff and sling and spear toppled to the floor as the Que-Tana fighters struggled to recover their bearings.

  Ramiro, of course, was battle-hardened enough to know an advantage when he saw one. Despite fatigue and bruises, at once he grabbed Shardos's wrist and lurched in the direction Brithelm and I had gone, intending to cut a path through the Plainsmen around him on his way to rejoining us.

  Shardos, however, was having none of it. To everyone's surprise, but especially Ramiro's, the old juggler braced himself on the stony floor of the chamber. Ramiro stopped, puffed angrily, turned to berate the blind man… and discovered a chamberful of wide dark eyes, staring at the two of them expectantly.

  The caverns began to tilt then, to shake and rumble ominously.

  'The one-eye," one of the Plainsman said tentatively, looking about him uneasily as dust and gravel tumbled from the dome of the chamber. 'The one-eye. The Namer. He is not…"

  The lean, pale Que-Tana paused, his brow wrinkled.

  "I do not remember a Namer. What is he supposed to be?"

  "Look around you," Shardos said confidently. "Where is the one-eye when the world shakes?"

  "But he is the Namer!" a young woman protested. "He keeps… keeps…" A look of profound uncertainty passed over her face.

  "Keeps what?" Shardos pressed eagerly, freeing his gnarled arm from Ramiro's grasp.

  "I… I do not remember, except the Namer knows," the woman replied. "He also knows the way to the Bright Lands."

  Several of the Que-Tana looked nervously toward the roof of the chamber again.

  "If one…" Shardos began cautiously, ignoring the impatient tugging of Ramiro at his sleeve and the shudder of the earth at his feet, "If one were to show your people the way to the Bright Lands… and know the things that the Namer keeps…"

  All eyes turned to the juggler eagerly.

  "He would be the Namer," a small child piped.

  It was exactly what Shardos wanted to hear.

  "I am not sure such a conclusion follows, my dear," Shardos said with a deep breath. "What I am sure of is that there is more than one version of every story and more than one way out of every cavern. Sometimes even more than two ways, two versions. These caverns are old, worn smooth by water. I know many ways out of them."

  "Shardos!" Ramiro hissed. "What-"

  "Would you like me to show you one of those ways?" Shardos asked, his blank stare still leveled on the Que-Tana.

  "Follow the juggler," the woman said quietly. The lean Plainsman who had spoken first now chimed in, followed by the little girl, an ugly, squat axeman near the lectern burned by Firebrand's angry grip, then two of our guards.

  Shardos turned to Ramiro, smiling.

  "Get ready, my portly companion. We are about to lead an emergence and bridge the abyss between darkness and light."

  Ramiro snorted. "If that involves getting out of this godforsaken place, would that I could be right behind you, Shardos! But there's the Oath to reckon with, and one of the Order is no doubt neck-deep in Firebrand at this very moment."

  "There are some things larger than that blasted Oath of yours, Ramiro!" Shardos replied sternly. "Do what you like, but look around you first and see if the Oath goes deeper than you imagined."

  Ramiro scanned the faces of the Plainsmen in front of him, resting his gaze on the vulnerable pale skin and its terrible fragility. The floor shook again, and a huge cleft opened between him and the passage down which he had seen us go.

  "As for Firebrand," Shardos urged softly, "well… 'tis high time you trusted in the gods and in Galen."

  "Neither of which has been that reliable, as I recollect," the big man grumbled and, taking the hand of a Que-Tana girl in his own meaty paw, followed the juggler from the chamber as the library filled with dust and rubble behind them.

  So together they passed through, juggler and epicure and a hundred befuddled Plainsmen. And that hundred became yet another hundred, and those two hundred a thousand, as the corridors shook and crumbled and threatened to collapse.

  Meanwhile, I lay against the far wall of the passage, my feet still absorbing the shock of landing. Below me, Brithelm whooped merrily. The troll snorted, and the sound moved away as the two of them skirted the Namer's room in their dangerous game of taunt and pursuit.

  The wall behind me trembled once, then stood still. Gravel tumbled into the corridor in front of me, and the sound echoed on down the passage.
I braced myself against the side of the tunnel, started to rise, and felt the leathery wall pulsing beneath my touch, as though deep within it, a great heart was beating.

  The wall was alive! And it was growing restless.

  "Tellus!" I whispered, and thought of the old legend-of Longwalker's tale of the worm beneath the continent of Ansalon, whose great turning wrought the mountains.

  And who would turn again, in the last of times, to undo what he had wrought.

  There is no telling how long I would have stood there, speculating and gawking, were it not for the troll's arm shooting into the mouth of the corridor, its claws clicking and grabbing for me.

  It seems that Brithelm had been able to hold the monster's attention only so long. Something glimmered on the edge of the big thing's memory, and it recalled, though faintly, that another small creature had shot past it only a few minutes ago.

  I was drawn from contemplation when its groping fingers brushed against my ankle.

  Yelping, leaping into the air as though an enormous spider had just crawled over my foot, I was fifty feet down the corridor before the hand had closed on empty air.

  It was dark here, and the footing was treacherous. I swallowed hard and listened ahead of me.

  From somewhere down the passage, borne to me as if it rode on the back of a drafty echo, came the sound of someone falling and an accompanying curse.

  Firebrand. Stumbling in the darkness himself, and not yet out of my reach. Blind, I scurried toward the source of the sound. If Tellus indeed was here, dormant amid the caverns and mountains of the Vingaards, was this rumbling and shaking, this turning of the earth, a sign that he was preparing to waken?

  I resolved not to think about it. At least not yet. Now a faint light glimmered in front of me, and the smell of sulfur reached me. I knew the Namer had touched hand to something dry and flammable.

  Swiftly, silently, my energies renewed, I rushed toward the light, running like a weasel, confident and deep in its own burrow.