Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  The floor of the tunnel shifted beneath me, and I came down hard on one knee. I resolved not to think about it yet. He had not made good time. When the darkness engulfed him and he became unsure of his footing, he had reached toward the walls and found the remnants of torches, dried by the years in ancient, rusty sconces.

  The torches went up like thatch in a village fire. He must have watched them in fascination, no doubt sure that the creature he had unleashed on his pursuers was back in the Namer's chamber, finishing a grisly business.

  No doubt Firebrand thought he had all the time in the world.

  I followed the guttering lights, the smell of smoke, and turned a corner in the passage just in time to see him sixty feet or so ahead of me, his hands encircling a torch just beginning to flare strangely.

  He looked over at me, his eye flaming like an opal, like a torch of anger and rage.

  "Persistent, are you?" he asked in a level voice. "Most vermin are."

  I took an angry step toward him, then remembered I was unarmed. I crouched and fumbled around me in the corridor for something hard and edged that might pass for weaponry, but my hands raced over smooth, weeping stone.

  "Weasels and stoats and little toothed things are practiced grovelers, too." Firebrand spat, and I started.

  "How did you-"

  "Know to call you 'weasel'?" he asked. Though the torch made shadows thick and mottled, I thought I could sense a smile in his voice.

  "Oh, I know many things, Weasel. The stones tell me, and the eye in the stones tells me more." He folded his hands in a graceful, almost saintly manner-even more frightening a gesture because it appeared so tender.

  "The past is inescapable, Weasel," he intoned, and the godseyes at his brow began to glow, as they had in the Namer's room. "You cannot salvage or cleanse it or even forget it, much less make it right. It is always there, and when you add up your little heroics and measure them against the worst you were, you will be hung on your words, on your own conceiving, as you move from night…"

  He paused. In the shadowy distance, I saw his hands rise.

  "…to awareness of night" he intoned.

  And Marigold walked out of the corridor wall, her hair angular and drenched like a wrecked ship, her white gown muddy and dripping. From behind her-indeed, through her, for she was glowing and strangely translucent-I saw Firebrand turn and rush down the passage until he was lost in the darkness.

  "Robert!" she cried. "Where is Sir Robert?"

  She looked around her stupidly, water flowing down her in rivulets onto the floor of the tunnel, which remained completely and remarkably dry.

  "My combs?" she asked uncertainly, painfully, turning toward me slowly. "My face paint?"

  Our eyes met.

  "Lacquer?" she murmured, and we stared a long while at each other.

  Despite myself, I started to laugh.

  Somewhere within me, I had added up the evidence-the translucency, the walking through walls, the simple fact that Marigold of Kayolin was supposed to be miles above me and miles away-but it had not sunk in yet. The only thing sunken, indeed, was the horrid little schooner atop the woman's head, run aground on what rocks or reef I could only imagine.

  "Paaastriiiieeees!" she shrieked, and her eyes began to glow, to pinwheel in red fire.

  "I'm dead! I'm dead!" she shouted, her hands rushing ineffectually to straighten her shipwrecked hair. "And it's all your fault!"

  I raised my hands, shook my head, and looked frantically for side tunnels.

  "But this is better," Marigold said, suddenly calm. "This is better, Weasel. Mm-hum. Yes, oh, yes." She stepped toward me, her white robes gliding inches above the floor of the passage. Menacingly she extended her arms.

  "This way," she said, her voice almost musical, "we can be together forever!"

  Her mouth opened, and yellow troll-like fangs protruded, dripping water and lacquer and blood. I backed down the corridor, with Marigold floating after me, as close as fog, a hint of cheap cologne borne somehow on the stagnant air. Then the Weasel of my beginnings resurged in my here and now, and I panicked and turned to run…

  And collided with Alfric.

  It is lucky I have a sound heart. Not good or compassionate, I fear, though in my last several years, I have tried to render it so. Nonetheless, it is sound and able to bear a shock or two. Shock one: Marigold. Shock two: my dear, dead brother.

  There, sandwiched between the departed brother and the evidently departed other, I was speechless, unarmed, and tracked down, as Firebrand had prophesied, by the ghost of my ruinous past.

  "Well," I said, my fears giving way to despair, to a bleak bravado of sorts, "I expect there is nothing in the world that you can ever live down. Once you do it, it more or less runs at you till it has you at bay, then guts you and skins you and hangs you on a wall…"

  But neither of them was interested in my gibbering philosophy. Impassively Alfric stared over me and met Marigold's gaze.

  "Why bother with him," he asked her unexpectedly, "when you could have me?"

  Marigold's face softened. The burning whirl of her eyes slowed and faded, the fangs receded-all but one, anyway, which she pulled her lips over daintily. For a moment, she looked as she always looked in life: burly and selfish and a bit overdone, but strangely compelling in a tarty sort of way.

  She snorted and vanished into nothingness, and I turned to my spectral brother with something approaching gratitude. For Alfric had called her off, it seemed-had saved me from an eternity of badgering and ethereal pastry.

  'Thank you, Brother," I began in all sincerity.

  "We will see if you're inclined to thank me, Galen," he said, "after you have reckoned with me. For you and me have got scores to settle."

  I stepped back one stride, then another. My heel touched stone behind me.

  "We have odds to even, Galen." My ghostly brother came closer. "And the reckoning begins now."

  With the flat of his broadsword blade, Alfric struck my head. Then again and harder he struck, as my vision burst into a hundred glittering flames and I reeled up the corridor.

  "You done this to me, too, Weasel!" he shouted, the shrill rise of his voice blending with the rumbling around me and above me.

  The dale worm was stirring. Old Tellus, foster son of Chaos and Night, was lifting his lidless eye.

  Alfric raised the sword again and stepped forward.

  All my weaseling could not avail in this cramped, narrow passage. I was cornered, brought to bay as I had been so many times in the nooks of the moathouse and beneath the beds of unswept guest chambers. But here there was no place to hide or dodge.

  There was not enough room to grovel.

  So I stood to my full height, and my older brother seemed to shrink a little before me. Perhaps death had diminished his stature-I cannot be sure. For instead of the Weasel who cowered before a formidable larger brother, I was every bit as big as the oaf in front of me.

  The punch surprised me, even though I threw it. My right fist hurtled through the dark air of the corridor and caught my brother squarely on the left side of his prominent nose. He reeled, shook his head, almost regained his footing…

  And then my left fist came calling, surging out of the shadows below him as it hooked up into the underside of Alfric's chin.

  "Whaaa-" he began, but he was falling backward, his arms spread out like the useless wings of a vespertile. Into the wall he tumbled, growing suddenly transparent, almost liquid, as he passed into mud and rock, his sword clattering to the corridor floor behind him.

  He looked back at me as he faded, once and for all, into the stone of the tunnel. He smiled-not the wicked grin that had harried me over the past two decades of brotherly abuse, but a smile considerably warmer, perhaps even apologetic, carrying with it the faintest hint of respect.

  The most generous moment of his life, it seemed, had come when that life was over.

  "I'm sorry, Alfric," I breathed. "But I will avenge you."

  I
hadn't the time for good-byes. Around me, the corridor was collapsing, filling with palpable dust and fist-sized boulders, while before me somewhere was daylight and air and Firebrand with the opals.

  The options were clear. I picked up the sword and began to run with new strength toward the last wavering lights in the burrowing distance.

  Chapter XXIII

  A seventh, an eighth, and a ninth stone followed into the twining silver, until the twelfth was in place. With confident fingers, the Namer tested each setting, shifting the stone once, twice, until it held fast.

  "Now they are all together," he announced. "Each fixed in a holy permanence, bound to each other always in memory."

  As she slept in the saddle, Dannelle di Caela dreamed she was riding with Sir Galen.

  The two of them, astride the enormous Carnifex, galloped into a clearing of towering pine and aeterna; the light was blue and white about them.

  She was proud to ride with him, behind him on the back of this formidable horse they had broken together. Carnifex snorted and steamed, but he was bested and knew it, his wild strength bridled in obedience to the combined will of man and woman.

  In the dream, the horse reared up, its forelegs pawing the misted air. Galen twisted in the saddle and reached for Dannelle…

  But she was falling… falling…

  As she jerked awake, riding with Birgis atop the racing Carnifex, it seemed to Dannelle that the trees she passed were blurring, transforming themselves into huge swaths of blue and green. It seemed that the landscape around her was dissolving, that only she and the dog-who sniffed and rumbled amiably at her shoulder-remained from the world she remembered.

  She was relieved to see the Cat Tower pierce the horizon. As the walls of the castle and the fluttering pennants atop it became clear in front of her, she lowered her head and pressed the strong flanks of the horse with her knees. Birgis stirred a bit in the harness on her back.

  "Sit back, damn it!" she started to exclaim, but the wind rushed into her face, choking her and drowning the words. Her thoughts moved quickly over the ground ahead of her, outrunning Carnifex and the wind and even the reddening sunlight breaking across the pennantry.

  Now the walls loomed before her, the crenellation and windows sharply defined. Now she made out the arms of di Caela, of Brightblade and Pathwarden and Rus on the fluttering pennants.

  Good, she thought. They all are here. And fifty miles of riding has come down to the next half hour.

  For Dannelle di Caela intended an arrival that was showy and brilliant, nothing short of completely spectacular.

  Riding Carnifex over the drawbridge she came, full speed across the courtyards, amid a flurry of hoofbeat and color and the shouting of heralds, straight to Sir Robert di Caela, who in her dreams of this moment stood agape before the double oaken doors of the Great Tower, scarcely believing his eyes.

  For this red-haired slip of a girl he so often disparaged had not only arrived in time to save her companions beneath the Vingaards, but also arrived on the back of Carnifex, the horse Sir Robert had claimed she could not ride.

  There were two problems with this just and wonderful vision: First of all, the Lady Dannelle di Caela was uncertain as to how she would dismount from her horse.

  And secondly, the drawbridge in question was boarded up by makeshift carpentry. Behind it stood engineers with little better to do than weathering hangovers and speculating as to how to repair the mechanism kicked asunder by a big stallion not two days before.

  For several years, everyone in Castle di Caela had marveled at the lack of foresight or intelligence shown by the fabled nomad chief who had given Carnifex to Sir Robert.

  "Such a fine piece of horseflesh," they marveled. "As a gift outright."

  And they shook their heads at nomadic stupidity.

  All but the grooms in the stable, who had known for several years that Sir Robert had the worst of the deal-that the real stupidity lay in part with the old lord of the castle, but chiefly with the big horse itself.

  Carnifex did not shorten his stride. Ignoring the cries of the woman atop him, her frantic tugging at his long silver mane, the animal lowered its head and whickered, its speed increasing until a panic-stricken Dannelle scarcely noticed they were airborne.

  The horse and his two passengers leapt from the far bank of the brimming moat and splashed into the mud on the other side. Birgis, by far the most practical of the three, untangled himself and plunged into the water, as with a short, powerful surge, Carnifex strode up the incline and charged toward the half-repaired entrance, Dannelle hanging on desperately atop him.

  It is hard to imagine the surprise of those engineers who, still aching from their bout with Thorbardin Eagle and settled in for a safe, undemanding afternoon of examining gears and pulleys, were confronted suddenly by a wild horse surging through the woodwork, a long-vanished noblewoman astride it.

  In a moment, everyone scattered. Engineers and carpenters dove from their path, and whether by reflex or foresight or simply damned good luck, Dannelle di Caela grabbed the dangling chain of the drawbridge mechanism and swung acrobatically from the back of the horse, landing ankle-deep in the sucking mud and precariously, dramatically gaining her balance.

  She looked cautiously around for an audience. She seemed disappointed, but decided that the engineers would do.

  Dannelle was telling her story before Carnifex was out of sight, before Birgis had shaken the water from his coat and trotted merrily through the shattered drawbridge. She told them the lengthy story as, filled with alarm, the engineers carried her between them toward the infirmary, terrified that they would be blamed for any of her bruises or breaks or discomfiture.

  Birgis tipped along behind them, yawning and wagging his tail.

  "Which brings us to this juncture," Dannelle concluded, "where I guided the stallion over the moat outside and in through the drawbridge…"

  "A daring exploit that must have been, m'lady," the head engineer commented absently, shifting the girl's weight in his bony arms.

  "Not so daring, that," she objected, well schooled in false modesty. "The moat was full, after all, and would have cushioned my fall from the saddle, and then there was the mud…"

  "I beg your pardon?" the man said, his beard trembling, his eyes suddenly intent.

  'There was the mud in the courtyard that-"

  'The moat was full, you say?"

  Dannelle nodded. "I suppose the lot of you have been busy in my absence. Where are the others?"

  Without waiting for her answer-indeed, dropping the young woman perfunctorily at the steps of the infirmary- the engineer turned and raced toward the cellars of Castle di Caela, where the brimming moat had told him that the underground was filling with water.

  Birgis trotted up to the indignant young woman and

  again most reverently licked her nose. He murmured in her ear, something that sounded like words again to the jostled Dannelle.

  "You are muddy," he seemed to say, "and you smell like salt."

  Birgis charged off jubilantly around the corner of a guardhouse, and something squawked and fluttered from the direction he had taken.

  Down in the tunnels below the castle, something stirred in the rubble. Gileandos, tutor to the Pathwardens, scrambled out from a rockpile, trailing gravel and dust.

  He did not know he had been unconscious for a day.

  "Oh, dear!" he exclaimed. "Oh, dear! I fear that my companions have been… submerged past all recovery."

  His hands fluttered like bats in the darkness. He could not see them.

  After scrambling and worrying and exclaiming and fluttering, the tutor groped in the darkness, found a large rock-one, in fact, which missed his head by inches in — the cave-in-and seated himself upon it.

  "Now, think clearly, Gileandos," he told himself. "There is… there is a lantern in these whereabouts, and if the gods are kind, it is still in working order."

  Like a mole, he turned and dug in his subterranean bli
ndness, his soft, thin fingers scrabbling through rock and dust.

  Above Gileandos, the engineers stopped at a fork in the passage and caught their breath. The dozen or so castle servants they had brought along-grooms, sappers, a cook or two-ran into one another in the gloomy, lamplit corridor. Following behind the stumbling wall of men, Dannelle stepped through the crowd and laid a muddy hand on the shoulder of the younger and more promising engineer.

  "You've been this way before, Bradley," she said. "Where from here?"

  The young man blushed. Dannelle's touch, it seemed, was volatile in many quarters.

  "He has no idea, m'lady," the head engineer replied testily. "'Twas long before this that Bayard Brightblade made the lot of us turn back."

  Dannelle nodded in the shadows, being accustomed to unwelcome protection.

  "And yet," the young man said, his eyes on the two passages, "after a brief inspection of incline and breadth and the mathematics thereof, I would venture that the leftward passage leads toward Sir Bayard and his party."

  "Nonsense, Bradley!" the head engineer sputtered. "Surely you are aware that the workings of the well lie south of here. If Sir Bayard knew aught of engineering and matters hydraulical, he would surely have pursued the passage to the right."

  'Then I would venture that Bradley is right," Dannelle interrupted, and the old man gazed at her with something approaching contempt.

  "I shall be food for bats!" Gileandos murmured, fumbling hysterically at loose things. "Or giant rats, or lizards, or huge flightless birds that have evolved into something menacing, or… or… that worm I touched!"

  Hysteria turned to blind panic as the tutor flung rocks in all directions. As he raised dust in the blackness, he coughed and sneezed and continued to burrow deeper into the rock-pile until he reached the floor of the corridor, until his right hand struck solid rock…

  And his left hand metal.

  Panting, squealing, fumbling with the lantern, he juggled it from one hand to another, heard the splash of lamp oil on the dark rocks around him. Fumbling in his robes, he came up with a tinderbox, wrenched it open, and drew out flint and tinder…