by Brian Daley
Knaves and scoundrels all, to hear the stories, Crassmor reflected. They were said to care considerably more for their skins than for glory or reputation. Among them was lanky Berrin-Gar, whose nickname was Crane, who looked like a gawky youth, all elbows and buckteeth and cowlick, but was, by all accounts, a murderous swordsman. Next to Crane was his constant companion, stout little Pullen of Lai, also called Pony-Keg, his squat body, heavy with fat and muscle, even stronger than it looked. With them was the best gambler in the Order, Tarafon Quickhand, turned out like a peacock, reeking of expensive scent. The gorgeous sword on which Tarafon’s gloved hands rested had been in hock to usurers on any number of occasions.
There was Griffin, clean-shaven, handsome as a sculptor’s model, more of a student’s turn of mind than a warrior’s. He’d authored a variety of tracts and monographs on his own and others’ experiences in the Beyonds. Griffin was sole survivor of a vendetta that had extinguished another family and left him the only member of his own. By Griffin was old Hoowar Roisterer, fat and pouch-eyed, cheeks dotted with broken red blood vessels, nose forever swollen. Hoowar was a second son, like Crassmor; he’d once held promise of becoming Grand Master of the Order, but had drunk and reveled himself out of the chance for reasons Crassmor had never heard. Hoowar caroused still. There was the moody Bosrow Feng, perhaps the finest rider and horse trainer in the Order. Standing beside him was Bram Lydris, who went two-sworded and never bore a shield, outcast. Crassmor recalled that, for some reason, Sandur had liked the Lost Boys.
Bint had announced Crassmor. The Grand Master summoned the initiate to the altar. The gathered Knights of the Order of the Circle of Onn broke into the Hymn of the Order. The Lost Boys sang too, with a good deal of hesitation and misremembered words. Crassmor walked that timeworn stone aisle under banners and blazonry draped in profusion from the rafters overhead.
Weapons and trophies hung on the smooth brown stone walls or were suspended by wires from the rafters. Crassmor had never particularly cared for those last, things like the head of the monster Alixxi, struck off by the knight Corro long ago, now staring out over the room from its mounting board like a bulge-eyed fish. No more appetizing was the desiccated and dusty body of a thing half woman and half bird, whose wings were deployed by rods. There was a trophy flag captured by Jaan-Marl, the Grand Master himself, from the midst of a hundred of Temuchin’s men, and the dirty, chipped, broken jawbone of an ass, clamped to a plaque commemorating its victory over thousands.
Crassmor reached the altar, central point of the fortress and focal point of the Order of the Circle itself. Under a hemisphere of clear skylight which showed the last of the dusk lay a grassy little hillock, as green and placid as it had been uncounted years before when the Circle had first appeared on it. The Circle of Onn rested on it still, like the finger ring on Combard’s hand grown to something five times the height of a man, standing upright on its rim. Around it ran carvings whose meanings were lost to the dwellers of the Singularity. The only real knowledge left about the Circle was that the Charmed Realm’s original settlers had used it to get there. When, how, whence they’d come, or why were matters lost to antiquity. Etched into the stone wall that ran waist-high around the little hillock were the words that had inspired the graffiti over the Least Door: “All Things Cyclical Sustain Hope.”
Before the hillock was the plain onyx altar of the Order. On it stood Jaan-Marl, Grand Master of the Order, white-haired and white-bearded, still fit and shrewd, although he was the oldest man present. He sang the hymn in a surprisingly high, tremulous voice, not well but determinedly. As Crassmor joined him on the altar, the hymn ended.
Off to one side were the highest-ranking knights, Combard among them. The initiate was surprised to see that Ironwicca had exercised the royal prerogative in attending, even though the King was no member of the Order.
Jaan-Marl asked who sought admission to the Order; Crassmor answered his name. The Grand Master filled the hall with the questions, “Who vouches for this knight? Who sponsors him to our ranks?”
An uneasy silence grew where Combard should have spoken up at once. As it drew on, the Grand Master’s eyes left Crassmor’s and sought his father’s. Crassmor dared look aside and saw that Combard was staring straight at the Circle of Onn, his face a mask.
Whispers passed among the ranked and waiting champions. The ceremony had never departed from form; all were on new ground. The King put a sinewy hand on Combard’s mailed arm. The old man stirred as if emerging from a dream. He handed his sword aside to Ironwicca, stepping out onto the altar as if his legs threatened to fail him.
Crassmor had turned back to face the Grand Master, who waited in glacial calm. Combard came up behind and Jaan-Marl gestured. Crassmor went down on one knee. He felt rather than saw his father’s iron-gloved hands hovering over either shoulder. Then they came down, hard. The son dared hope for a moment that it was an affirmation.
Departing from ritual again, Combard announced, “I, Combard, of House Tarrant its Lord, now sponsor in the stead of my slain son Sandur his brother, Sir Crassmor.”
Crassmor nearly looked around at that. Certainly it violated nothing for Combard to phrase the thing so, but it made the old man’s bitterness clear, Crassmor was only a substitute.
Jaan-Marl resumed. “Where is any man among us who would speak against this initiate? This is the occasion to object; there will be no other, henceforth and forever.”
Crassmor thought for a moment that his father might speak. There would then have been only two options: Crassmor’s withdrawal from the hall forever, or single combat to decide the issue. Crassmor glanced up at the Circle, gleaming as if it had been polished, though no hand had touched it in generations. He studied the ages-old carvings and resigned himself never to see it again; he felt that the moment was near when he would walk from that hall and not return.
Instead, another silence descended, this one more in keeping with ceremony. The Grand Master let it linger slightly longer than was usual. “There is none,” he judged at last. Taking Crassmor’s hands, he brought him to his feet. Combard’s hands fell away; he resumed his place and took his sword back from Ironwicca. Jaan-Marl drew Crassmor around to face the assembled knights. He boomed, “Welcome, Sir Crassmor, newest of our brothers in the Order of the Circle of Onn.”
Swords went aloft in a glittering field. Men cheered, perhaps a little reservedly, but heartily enough to suit Crassmor. When the cheers died away—not a long time—the Grand Master completed his part in the ceremony by saying, “Go forth now, Knight of Onn, in service to this Order and all those things for which it stands. I assign you to go over our borders into the Beyonds. Keep watch against any dangers that may threaten our home and right such wrongs as you may encounter.”
Crassmor nearly reeled. Into the Beyonds! The only ones to react at once were the Lost Boys, who broke into unseemly hoots. They’d all received that same charge from Jaan-Marl; Crassmor was now one of them. A few seconds later the assembled knights cheered again, without great enthusiasm.
Stunned, Crassmor considered his new predicament. He’d taken it for granted that, as heir to a great House, he’d be assigned duties within the Singularity, to learn jurisprudence, politics, administration, and leadership. Instead, he’d been commissioned to the most perilous and lonely duty, chancing out among the Beyonds, a deep scout. He looked to his father, who met his gaze, and knew that Combard had arranged this with his lifelong friend Jaan-Marl.
It was time for the sponsor to end the ritual. Combard spoke loudly the traditional injunction. “Go forth, Knight of the Circle. Prove yourself worthy.” The formula took on new and sobering meaning.
Crassmor threw his head back and howled the prescribed response at the rafters, “At your command!”
He descended from the altar in a trance, striding back the way he’d come because he didn’t know what else to do. There was no other sound but his footsteps. The other knights began to hail him then with raised blades, but their th
oughts, he knew, were more with the feast to come than with their new comrade in arms. Crassmor had no appetite, thirst, or desire for revelry. At the end of the hard gray aisle the Lost Boys were slapping one another on the back and howling. There seemed to be more good humor to it than derision. Crassmor felt a sudden envy of their beleaguered fellowship.
Hoowar Roisterer, bleary-eyed from preparatory celebration, tucked his sword under one arm and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Welcome, Sir Crassmor, to the Beyonds, where we’d rather rest than quest!”
Preparations for his departure were carried out by retainers who knew far more about them than Crassmor. He refused use of either Kort or Bordhall when the stable-master mentioned them; the horses summoned too-vivid memories of Sandur. Crassmor’s armor was burnished, his weapons edged, and rations and equipment readied by a household of servitors who preferred not to meet his gaze or address him if they could avoid it. Most of them saw this tacit exile as nothing less than a death sentence. Crassmor had been assigned to the Beyonds; he would be there until such time as the Grand Master should change his commission, but unless Jaan-Marl died and was replaced by someone ill-disposed toward Combard, that change wouldn’t come until and unless Combard willed it so.
Barring the rare circumstance of a general recall, for an emergency like the invasion of the lizard riders, there was only one eventuality that would end Crassmor’s sojourn, aside from Combard’s forgiveness—the death of the Lord of House Tarrant and Crassmor’s ascendency. The new knight didn’t dwell on that, afraid that longing for Willow might somehow lead him to wish for his father’s death. Reconciliation was what Crassmor hoped for, however long he might have to wait; survival was his chosen course.
And he would be alone. He’d thought of taking a squire, but Bint would no longer speak to him beyond what formality demanded, blaming him for Sandur’s death, following Combard’s lead. In the end, Crassmor decided against asking anyone to share his peril, not wanting the responsibility for another life.
One man had been happy with the turn of events—Crassmor’s uncle Furd, abbot of the Klybesians. Couched in pious clichés as it had been, Furd’s reaction had shown his delight nevertheless. Should Crassmor fail to survive in the Beyonds, Combard would die without heir. The Tarrant holdings would pass into the guardianship of Furd, a stupendous increase in the wealth of the Klybesians.
The day after his calamitous initiation into the Order, Crassmor came across his father and uncle as they sat together in the solarium of House Tarrant. They were sipping the demitasse Combard so loved and smoking the twisted, ropelike little cigars favored by Furd. In wing-backed chairs, basking in the sunlight, both seemed at ease and harmless. Crassmor, watching unnoticed from the doorway, felt an unexpected pulse of sympathy for them, recalling the tribulations of their upbringing as described by Ironwicca. In a third chair, sharing the cigars and demitasse, was Mooncollar, well known among the Klybesian monks and marked, it was said, for greater things. Mooncollar was small and nearly bald, a thin-boned, older man who walked with a limp from some childhood malady.
Crassmor drew back and listened unashamedly; his presence only interrupted conversations in House Tarrant nowadays, never enhanced them.
Furd eased himself in the chair, his blue velvet cassock whispering against his corpulence. “But, brother, have you forgotten mercy?” The word came to him so easily that he cheapened it, making it sound utilitarian.
“The Beyonds will decide,” Combard shot back unhappily. “The decision has passed from my hand.” He raised his little cup, then lowered it and turned to Furd in sudden heat as Mooncollar looked on silently. “He is a Knight of Onn now; he wears the heir’s ring, both of those by my doing. Would you have me go back on my word?”
The tone of his voice said that he and his brother were on the edge of an irredeemable exchange. Crassmor knew with shock that he was, in a way, in Combard’s unbending fashion, being defended. The new knight’s mouth compressed; affection dueled with resentment within him.
“Not in a thousand lifetimes,” Furd said. Crassmor was surprised to detect no dishonesty in that.
Mooncollar, staring down into his dark coffee, put in, “His Reverence perhaps only meant that you have put a loved one in peril.”
Combard had faced him angrily, but Mooncollar’s quiet comment had given him no provocation. Now Furd put his fingertips together and added, “How often has this sort of thing happened before? We all look to Sir Crassmor’s return.”
With no joy, in your case, thought the subject of the conversation from where he listened.
Mooncollar had gotten an opening that he seemed to have been working for. “What, then, of problems of succession, of inheritance? This involves a man who will be in the Beyonds, always a difficult state of affairs.”
“Setting some sort of limit doesn’t seem unreasonable, brother,” Furd added. “If you should—if House Tarrant should be left lordless—gods forbid it!—and Crassmor should fail to return after an adequate, stipulated time, someone must see to the affairs of this place.”
“Legal provisions would not be out of order,” Mooncollar suggested with a meaningful glance at Furd.
Crassmor was surprised at the conviction in his father’s words. “I send him out into danger; that he deserves.” Then he added solemnly, “But I’ll set no death sentence on him. That he has not earned; I decided that in Blue Dell.”
Furd frowned. “Harm may come to House Tarrant by your failure to make the proper provisions.”
Combard shouted, “Then harm will!”
Moments passed. “I neither raised nor sentenced him,” Furd pointed out.
Combard put down his cup, dropped his cigar, and knelt with a moan at his brother’s side. Crassmor understood then how close they’d become under their mother’s tutelage. “You did not,” Combard acknowledged. “I don’t know him, don’t understand or trust him. I hope I haven’t damned myself for the times I’ve wished Sandur were alive and—Furd! Don’t ask me to abandon him altogether!”
Furd put a hand to Combard’s cheek, nodding. Crassmor was somewhere in between an emotional breakdown and outright violence, fingering Shhing’s hilt and watching his uncle. “It will all come out right, Combard,” the abbot promised.
For you, you think, Crassmor finished. He eased back out of the entranceway of the solarium with a particular eagerness to stay alive.
There was only one high point in the days between the ceremony before the Circle of Onn and his departure. A flustered door warder summoned Crassmor to the courtyard of House Tarrant, saying that men were there to see him. Crassmor went, puzzling, to find the place in an uproar.
The Lost Boys had come calling.
The rare occurrence of their all being together in the Singularity—those who’d managed to live through the Beyonds and the war with the lizard riders—had necessitated a momentous, days-long celebration, shadowed by the awareness that they must all go forth again soon, but fueled by it as well. They’d arrived in vehicles borrowed from the extensive collection of otherworldly transport maintained at Gateshield. One of these oddities was a long, brightly painted beer wagon drawn by eight magnificent Clydesdales. Crassmor thought how unlikely it was that any beer remained in the kegs. The other transport was a small flatbed wagon pulled by a team of twelve giant, long-legged, flightless birds. The flatbed rode rather low on its suspension; Crassmor concluded it had come from some Reality with a lighter gravity.
Just now, Hoowar Roisterer was arguing with the Tarrant stablemaster, both men purple-faced, the stablemaster taking issue with the notion of permitting the birds into his province. Crane, seated astride one of the Clydesdales, gave Crassmor a quick, bucktoothed grin and slipped him a wink. Squat little Pullen of Lai—Pony-Keg—had caught another Lost Boy, Tribben the Shriek, who, firmly under the influence, had fallen off the beer wagon.
Griffin was even then engaged in deep conversation with Crassmor’s aunt Byborra’s new handmaiden; the scholar-knight’s hand ha
d already settled on the girl’s hip, raising a blush in her cheeks. There seemed to be an altercation taking place over a dice game on the flatbed. The giant birds were giving nasty looks to one and all and calling among themselves in a queer, chirping sort of yodel. Several of the Lost Boys were entreating a startled guardsman to tell them where the nearest latrine was.
Tarafon Quickhand was carrying a plain sword, meaning that his best was in hock yet once more. He was in the process of applying a generous spoonful of mustard to a sandwich. Under his arm was a bottle of that strange beverage he so loved, ginger ale. Tarafon smiled at Crassmor when he saw him. “We have come for your shivaree, lucky lad, moved by good fellowship to welcome a new chum.”
“Moved by penury as well,” Hoowar Roisterer admitted in a split-second aside, and instantly resumed his remonstrance with the stablemaster.
“And we wore out our welcome just about everywhere else,” Pony-Keg put in, and dropped Tribben the Shriek, who scarcely noticed.
House Tarrant was still in mourning for the Outrider’s death, but when Combard appeared at the doors—silencing the madness in his courtyard—he simply looked at them for a moment, said, “Make you welcome,” and departed. Knights of the Order of the Circle of Onn usually welcomed a new initiate with festival and shivaree, but the more respectable and staid knights, aware of the situation at House Tarrant, had forgone celebration. The Lost Boys, having a new member added to their ignoble group, regarded that as intolerable. In addition, they were never inclined to permit an occasion for carousal to elude them. Those among the Lost Boys who still had family in the Singularity were out of favor and none of them had much money; the Beyonds were rarely the setting for the acquisition of riches. Crassmor’s feeble protests were brushed aside, and the drunken, amiable wastrels invaded the main hall of House Tarrant. Crassmor remembered then that no Knight of Onn could refuse another his hospitality; the Lost Boys began their good-naturedly exploitative wassail. They stayed for two nights and the day in between, dancing, singing, forcing Crassmor to play the zither and the lap harp, seriously depleting the food and drink of House Tarrant, and making immoral overtures to the scullery maids and female servitors. Crassmor found himself having a good time.
