“So you’ve said more times than I care to count.” She tried to smooth out the wrinkles he had just put in her bright Festival dress. She stepped behind Galen, leaning her chin on his shoulder as she peered down at his work. “Still, this one looks like it’s your best yet, my love.”
Galen grunted his agreement, turning back to the work. It also helps when the stone talks back to you and tells you where you are making mistakes, he thought ruefully. Better not to mention that little secret.
Berkita, however, was not one to be easily denied. “Oh, leave it, Galen!” she said, tugging at his sleeve and bestowing one of her most formidable pouts in his direction. “We’re going to miss it!”
Galen glanced at the street outside the shop. The crowds of the morning had noticeably thinned, and those people that remained were moving hurriedly toward the square.
“I’ve already told you, I’ll be there as soon as I take care of—”
“Galen, please, just this once you could leave the work and—”
The gruff, familiar voice rumbled behind them both. “Your pardon, please.” Cephas’s voice sounded like gravel. “Galen, I have some trouble er forge. Give er hand, by a good lad?”
Galen glanced at the dwarf. Cephas had his head down, shuffling his large, booted feet.
“Ah, there, you see,” Galen quickly said to Berkita. “Look, you run up and get us a place by the tall oak on the east side. I’ll take care of this little problem and be there as soon as I can.”
Berkita’s violet eyes narrowed at him.
“You want a good spot for the blessing, don’t you?” Galen said sweetly. “I’ll be right there, I promise.”
Her voice conveyed cold determination and a hot anger that were both barely controlled. “Galen Arvad, if you miss this Blessing of the Eye and Talon, I swear you’ll be sleeping above the forge again, you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you. Now stop wasting time and go get us our blessing place!” He swatted at her as she turned, and she was careful to only almost get out of the way. Her bright ribbons bounced with her beautiful dark hair. She smiled warily back at Galen and with a quick warning glance hurried up the street.
Galen and Cephas watched her go.
“Better you should tell her, eh?” Cephas sniffed.
“No.” Galen shook his head sadly. “Better I should get well, and better you should get out of here before the Pir monks show up.”
Cephas grunted, tugging at his forge apron. He hung it near the furnace, then disappeared into his little cavern at the back of the shop. Moments later he reappeared, pulling an oversized tunic over his head.
Galen could not help but laugh. “Where did you get that?”
The yellow-colored tunic was gaudily embroidered with white flowers and green vines. It was barely large enough to fit around the dwarf’s middle, but the sleeves had to be rolled up to accommodate his short arms. He had pushed an absolutely mammoth brimmed hat on his head down to his ears. Three long purple feathers stuck vertically from its brim.
Cephas placed both fists on his wide hips. “What wrong ye? Festival er is, eh?”
“Yes, it is Festival indeed,” Galen responded. Not for the first time did he question the wisdom of having a blind dwarf determine fashion for himself. “You look very . . . festive.”
“Aye, festive is as er was!” Cephas responded proudly. “Gods of men no use to dwarves er is, but Cephas join for any dance or feast er is!” The dwarf clomped off to the opening at the front of the shop, touched the northern frame of the door, and pulled out his walking stick. He seemed almost sighted when it came to the shop itself, moving with confidence and working the furnace, forge, and bellows with ease. Yet he rarely left the shop, and on those occasions when he did, he had to make his way more carefully about town by feel and whatever other senses he relied upon.
Cephas was not truly blind, of course, no more so than any other dwarf, Galen supposed. Underground, in the dark tunnels of the dwarven realms, he could no doubt see as clearly as Galen could at noon above ground. It was the light of the surface that blinded him—even the stars, he said, burned his eyes. Galen wondered what had driven such a talented and amiable dwarf as Cephas out from among his own kind. Those times he had tried to broach the subject, Cephas had been very clear in not wishing to talk about it.
Occasionally, Galen satisfied this hole in his knowledge by making up stories. Perhaps Cephas was a merchant lost from his normal trade routes and too proud to admit his mistake. Perhaps he was a bandit cast out by his renegade brothers when he sought to go straight. To Galen, Cephas had a thousand histories all at once, and none of them true.
Galen sighed. Not much time to dwell on such things now, he decided. He hurried up the stairs to his old apartment, opened the package he had left there, and pulled out his own Festival costume. It was a light blue shirt with a rose-colored doublet. He thought he would cut quite a handsome figure in the outfit. Berkita, he knew, would be impressed.
The great trumpets atop the Kath-Drakonis were sounding. It was the call to the Election. There was not much time left.
Still, it wouldn’t do to get his costume dirty. He laid it out carefully on the old bed and then hurried back downstairs.
The reversed carving Galen had been working on the table began to move. The figures turned their faces toward him, whispering. “Closer come! Closer come! Tell to secrets have we!”
Galen moved quickly to the forge and reached down, pressing against the eastern edge of a particular paving stone. In a moment, the stone door swung open in the floor. Cephas himself had designed the counterweight stone door. Its artistry was so good that when closed it vanished into the stones that blanketed the floor of the forge. With a last glance around the foundry room, Galen swung down through the opening, pulling the door closed above him.
It was not technically a cavern, or even a cave. It was more like a cellar that had been carefully hidden from the prying eyes of his neighbors. The pitch-black room had been carefully caulked by the dwarf to admit no light whatsoever. Galen had first thought that the dwarf wanted the space as somewhere to sleep without having to wear the blindfold that kept out the light of the upper world. Cephas, however, preferred to sleep next to the forge itself. What use the dwarf had for this room, then, was something of a mystery to Galen.
However, its usefulness to Galen was obvious. Here he could hide without fear of being discovered by the Pir monks. The room was not wide but it ran east under the floorboards of the storefront, allowing Galen to hear what was going on in the shop above.
He did not have long to wait. As predictable as the sunrise, Galen thought as he smiled to himself. The footfalls of the Pir monks shook dust down on him as they moved through the shop. He could even hear them fingering some of his wares. It was something of a game each year between the merchants and the monks. The merchants would purposefully leave out a few items, knowing that the monks would pilfer them. The monks, in turn, seemed to know where the line between offering and theft was drawn. There were occasional problems down through the years, but the local priestess was always good about moderating any hard feelings. As he crouched in the darkness, he could hear some of his own wares lightly clanging as they left his shop. For him it was rather like putting a bell around the neck of a cat: he could always tell when the monks were gone by the silence of his own gifts.
Through the floorboards, he heard the muffled sound of the horns, but their tune had changed. Now they sounded the Reveler’s Trump. Somewhere up there, the parade was beginning. By tradition, the fools and jesters led the procession, symbols of the Mad Emperors of Rhamas. It ended with the Dragon Priest taking his position on the Kath steps. The Election would be next.
Galen waited a few moments, then released a quiet sigh of relief. The jingling overhead had receded along with the booted footsteps. They were leaving. He visualized their robes moving down the street, checking each shop for anyone like him who actually was trying to avoid the Election. He purposefully
waited longer still just to be sure, and then stepped gingerly back under the stone door.
He had performed his reappearing act before. Ever since he was fourteen and the voices started coming to him, he had feared someone would make a mistake and include him in the Election. At first he had gone unnoticed, hiding in the Whethril Woods or by the waterfall until it was all over. His mother had died when he was very young and he never knew what happened to his father, who was gone by the time he was twelve. The Pir monks had taken charge of him then and apprenticed him to a trade almost at once. The older he grew, the more difficult it was to escape the notice of friends and acquaintances in the town, but each year, with increasing skill, he had managed it.
Today, he knew, would be the most difficult of all, but he had been thinking about this a long time. Arriving at the Festival in the all-too-brief lull between the Election itself and the blessing was a fine hair to split. Nevertheless, for the love of his dear wife he needed to make this work. He knew that eventually down the years he would run out of excuses, but the voices, he was convinced, had grown less over the last year. He hoped that they would disappear entirely, thanks to the good influence of his beloved Berkita.
Galen tilted his head. There were no further noises from above except the distant rumbles of the crowd up at the north end of the Processional. The revels were almost finished—and there was no noise from the shop above. With a final careful pause to be sure, he pushed the stone trapdoor silently upward and climbed back into the forge room.
The shop front was still, as was Processional Street beyond. Not a soul could be seen in what had only a short time ago been teeming with activity. This was all going exactly as he had planned.
Galen gingerly climbed the stairs to his old rooms, pulling off his old tunic as he went. He quickly changed into his Festival costume, smiling as he pulled on his rose doublet. He tugged at it to straighten the seams and smoothed its heavily embroidered cloth.
“She’s going to love me in it!” he spoke out loud.
“You look ridiculous in it!” said the doorknob.
“What do you know of fashion?” Galen did not mind speaking with the voices when he was alone. He simply considered it the same as when other people spoke to themselves. “You’re just a doorknob.”
“I can’t keep them out anymore,” the doorknob responded nonsensically. “They’re coming in and I can’t keep them out.”
A deep fanfare rumbled through the walls, followed at once by a roar from the distant crowd.
“Sorry, no time to chat,” Galen said, twisting the doorknob and opening the door.
He quietly slipped down the stairs. He needed to be ready for his dash up the Processional. Timing was everything. He might have tried to go back up Barb’s Lane, but the thought of confronting all those voices made him physically ill.
“Galen! Back go!” said the stone figures in the carved mold. “Darkness the in stay. Safe is it where stay!”
The voices in his own shop were bad enough, he thought ruefully. Every remaining piece in the forge seemed to be talking to him all at once.
“Fly, boy, fly! There’s a destiny . . . a fate that is your doom and your redemption . . .”
“Lost! Lost! All is lost!”
“Never go home again. The world is changing, madly changing . . .”
It was always worse at Festival, he reminded himself, tying the closure on the doublet. He turned the corner at the base of the stairs. It is always worse at—
Galen stopped suddenly, frozen in fear and astonishment.
A ghost was standing in his shop.
The monk from his dream!
“You!” Galen blurted.
“You!” the monk yelped back at nearly the same instant.
They both stood there, locked in an impossibly long moment, unable to move or utter another sound. The gaunt Inquisitor appeared to be every bit as astonished as Galen. He was identical in every detail to the man in his dream.
Slowly, the monk spoke.
“I . . . know you!”
Galen stumbled desperately backward, slamming against his workbench. His tools scattered in a loud clattering on the floor. The delicate mold shattered with a thunderous crack against the foundry floor stones. Galen clawed his way past the iron door into the forge room, then pulled hard at the squealing door into the empty storage yard beyond.
“Wait!” yelled the Inquisitor. “Come back!”
Galen turned to his left, dashing down the narrow alley south.
“Run, Galen!” the broken signs in the alley yelled. “He’s coming! He’s coming!”
“Stop!” the monk was shouting, his voice somewhere behind Galen.
Cagger’s Row ran diagonally down toward the harbor. Maybe if he could get down to the harbor, then east down the shore, there were places where he could hide, places he knew that they would never find him.
A voice called from somewhere nearby. “Halt! Stand, in Vasska’s name!”
The Pir Guardians! They were supposed to be up at the square—they were never in the town streets during the Election! He cast about, searching for some avenue of escape.
The shops about him were all open for the inspection of the monks, so he ducked into Dav Jekin’s chart shop. In the back, he searched the racks of fishing and navigational charts that lined the walls, but an exit eluded him.
The charts all sang to him, their voices a jumble of sounds competing for his attention as he moved among them. “Faraway lands . . . Exotic and frightful ports . . . The roads we take do not always lead us where we thought to go . . .”
“No! Please stop!” It was the Inquisitor again! He had followed Galen into the shop.
Galen frantically dashed through the racks of charts. Suddenly he found it—the door to the back alley. If he could just duck into that alley and through a few additional shops, he might buy himself enough time to lose the monks and miss the Election as well.
“Dreams of places beyond the horizon . . . destinies not yet realized . . .”
“Please,” the monk called out to him, “all I want is . . .”
“This way,” the door called to him. “This is the way . . .”
Galen pulled open the door.
The Guardians were waiting for him on the other side. Their strong hands grasped him at once, pulling him out. They dragged him back down the alley and up the Processional past his own shop.
“You’re late,” a Guardian intoned flatly, “but not too late for the Election.”
Glancing back, Galen could see the ghost from his dream standing before his own shop.
5
Festival
The Guardians’ hands were rough and callused. Strange, he thought, that he should remember that detail. His world was crumbling around him yet all he could think of at the time were those rough hands against the fine cloth of his rose-colored tunic.
The disintegration of his plans was trumpeted with unheard voices the length of the street. The carved posts and pillars each cried out to him, wailing and warning. The rush of their sound filled his head. It came just as it had come every year, but he had never been this close to the Election itself. In years past, Galen had always instinctively gauged his safety in terms of just how far he could get away from the Election. Now the Guardians dragged him—nearly carried him—closer to the dread place.
The various carvings that adorned the shops of the Processional seemed to all be talking at once.
“Fight them, Galen! Give us a show!”
“Flee! Your life and your future . . . flee them both!”
“. . . telling you once and for all . . .”
His life as a smithy had made him strong, but he was nevertheless no match for his captors. They were the Guardians of Vasska, both feared and revered by everyone he knew. Even if he could somehow break free of them, he knew his own friends and neighbors would aid the monks of the Inquisition in hunting him down—if he were of the Elect.
If he were one of the Elect? As the
y neared the edges of the square, Galen snatched at another thought. Perhaps it would not be as bad as he feared. He had run from this black monster of the night for so many years, perhaps it would not be so fearsome in the bright light of day, faced down eye to eye and toe to toe. Perhaps it was just an irrational childhood fear that caused him each year to run and hide. Perhaps he was stronger than the doubting words that his illness whispered in his head.
“Galen! Woe and doom! Weep for our Galen!”
“Hail, Galen! Galen the Glorious! Galen the Conqueror!”
The Guardians heard nothing and said nothing. To remain stoically uninvolved and unyielding in the cause of Vasska was their defining characteristic. They neither knew nor cared to know who they held in their iron grip—all they knew was to take Galen from wherever they found him and deposit him in the place where he was supposed to be. They soon came upon a line of their brothers who had closed off the street ahead, who parted with eerie prescience as Galen was dragged forward. With a forceful shove, the smithy was launched into the seething mob beyond.
“Galen! It’s about time, boy!”
Through the throng, Galen glimpsed the smiling, weathered face of Ansal, Berkita’s father, a huge man who towered somewhat above the crowd. He still fashioned his silver hair after the traditional manner of the ancient smithies: pulled back from his tall forehead and bound into a long ponytail. It was a lifetime habit that he refused to give up, even though he had left the craft to Galen as a wedding present the year before.
“Galen! Where have you been!” Berkita demanded. “The processional is nearly over!”
For a moment, Galen had trouble concentrating on her through all the noise, both from the throng and from inside his head.
“Berkita,” he said, at last being able to focus. “I need to . . . I mean . . .”
“Galen Arvad!” Berkita’s eyes narrowed suddenly at the sight of him. “What are you doing in that doublet?”
“What?” Galen blinked, trying to concentrate. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve known for a month my dress was going to be orange! How could you do this to me? We’ll look terrible together!”
Mystic Warrior Page 4
