Galen Beknighted

Chapter XII

"Not so fast!" I warned, the worst of my suspicions returning. For what could someone waiting for the power of the opals possibly mean but that he had been waiting for me all along, had followed us this far and set up camp, knowing that I would fly to his fires and to my destruction like a dim-sighted, dim-witted moth?

I leapt away from the fire toward the darkness, where I knew my horse was tethered. But Longwalker stayed close to the flame and called out to me, his level voice reaching me suddenly and softly, as though I was thinking his words to myself.

"Not so quickly, Solamnic. I have been waiting for you, but I am no thief."

I paused, my back to the fire and the Plainsman.

"Now," he said, after a silence. "Linger awhile longer and listen to the rest of my story. Your brother, lost amid stones and darkness, would thank you for hearing me out."

I turned to face him, breathing more slowly, my hand relaxing its grip on the hilt of my sword.

I could not have left anyway-not without Shardos, who had not stirred from his place, intent on Longwalker's tale. I muttered an oath at the circumstances: Everywhere I looked, I was responsible for someone, it seemed, and though I had known the man scarcely more than a day, I could no more abandon him than I could Dannelle or Ramiro. Or Brithelm, for that matter.

The sudden flight toward the horses, away from all of this history and magic, was simply the ridiculous first of my options. I sighed and returned cautiously to the fire. When the Measure orders you to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed and the helpless, it never says how large and powerful and downright frightening the oppressing forces can be.

"I was speaking of the crowns," Longwalker said. "Of the crowns and their powers, and a time in which the people held them and used them wisely."

I nodded and sat beside Shardos, who still had not moved.

"The Ogre Wars," Longwalker continued, "back in the Age of Might, made that happier time but a memory. All of the crowns were either destroyed or damaged or vanished, suffering the loss of most or all of their stones. The last Telling, four hundred years before the Rending-what you call the Cataclysm-was a time of great sorrow. Terrible gaps lay in the years, for even the wisest of Namers could not remember the stories without the crowns and stones to guide them. So the People were cut off from their fathers, from the memories."

"It could not end that way," Shardos whispered quietly and urgently. The firelight played over his dark, grizzled face, his vacant eyes. "Your people could not let the wars steal their memory."

"And, of course, the duty fell to the Que-Nara," Longwalker said.

"I have heard little of the Que-Nara," I said, "except that yours are the most priestly and visionary of the Plainsmen."

"Or the luckiest, perhaps," Longwalker added, his face breaking into an enormous, jagged grin. "Ours was the only crown that survived undamaged, so ours was the task of rescuing memory.

"Half of us went below the earth, into the dark of many voices, there among the swimming lights and the great snake that bears all Solamnia upon its back…"

I hid a smile at the creaking poetry of the old legends, but Longwalker was watching nothing but the flames.

"They wandered under the earth through a passage known only to the Namer and passed down from one to the next, as the young Namer adorned his hair and put on the crown, and the old one passed into silence. Once the Que-Nara were there in the darkness, they hunted the stones in the veins of the ground."

"To replace the ones that were missing?" I asked. But Longwalker kept at the telling.

"The rest of us stayed above, as guardians, and to assure that the Que-Nara would survive rockfall and tremor and flood and the changes of the earth. And for the lives of six chieftains, the Que-Nara below spoke to the Que-Nara above, for six of the stones were in the keeping of the Que-Nara below, and six of them we kept with us."

Longwalker paused. He looked up at me and extended his hand, his fingers as long and knotted as branches. I knew without words that he wanted to hold the opals. Silently, with only the slightest doubt and reluctance, I handed him the brooch.

He stared into it deeply, as though he looked beyond it into something murky and imponderable. As though he had found the bottom of the stones.

"Now is the time to tell of the one who awaits you," he said, handing the brooch back to me. 'Tell me what you see in the godseyes, Solamnic."

Instantly my suspicions returned.

"You're not… up to some Plainsman hypnosis, are you? I mean, is there some kind of trick your tribe has to lull enemies to sleep?"

"Most certainly there is," Longwalker admitted, "but this is not that trick. Look into the opals, Solamnic."

I did so reluctantly. Like black pools they were, reflecting the light of the fire, of the rising red moon, and yet underneath the reflection, something was moving. I leaned forward, squinting against the firelight. The stones began to glow as they had last night in the clearing, and I shuddered, remembering where the glow had led me and where I had led Alfric in turn.

Suddenly I saw figures shimmering and moving in the depths of the stones. It was as though I watched them through a crystal, as though in a core of fire there was a window or door through which they walked, faint shapes in the rippling blackness. The world inside the stones was a world long vanished, and I watched the vision and knew I was looking back through the years, into the depths of the past.

There were twenty of them easily, perhaps two dozen. The cloud in the stones obscured the shapes, made counting difficult. But the feathers and the symbols they wore were Que-Nara.

The country around them was forest-an unbearably bright forest that shimmered sea-blue. Perhaps it was the woods or southern Hylo, doomed by the Cataclysm that would follow in the years to come. For I knew without being told that this was an older time, before the Kingpriest's decrees and the Rending, though for the life of me, I cannot tell you how I knew such a thing.

As I watched, the Que-Nara established camp in a woodland clearing. Quickly and with great skill, the old ones and the children gathered the wood, kindled a slow, smokeless fire that shone gold on green, and the stones in which I watched this scene glimmered at the edges with a borrowed light.

One of them, a young man, leather diamonds and bone stars woven into the thick web of his hair, crouched some distance from the fire, his attentions on something cupped in his hands. For a moment, I disregarded him, my thoughts on the campfires and the families huddled about them, but the stones would not show me those fires and families, fixing my sight instead on the young man at the edge of the light.

I did not know his name. Why I should expect to know it, I could not tell you, but the stones were firm in this, and the first thought that rose to my mind as I watched him about his obscure business was that I did not know his name.

The second thought was that the young man was the one who spoke to me in the vision-the one who claimed to have kidnapped my brother Brithelm.

I had spoken to this one not four nights ago, and yet this scene was two centuries, three centuries old. It was like the light from distant Chemosh, which the astronomers say reaches the eye decades after it rises from the surface of the star.

I felt Longwalker watching me as 1 thought this. His presence was of little concern: My thoughts were fixed on the young man I saw in the stone, on the past unfolding, as though a mural in the halls of Castle di Caela sprang suddenly to life, and history moved in my marveling sight.

The nameless youth held a crown in his hands-a crown of woven silver, into which four, five, six opals were set. It was difficult to tell how many.

I shook my head, and the stones I was watching directed my eyes to the stones in the crown. Stones within stones within stones, like mirrors facing each other at the ends of a long hall, in which the eye is swallowed forever into something like eternity.

My eye plunged downward into the dark of the opals, and the scene before me was swallowed up in darkness, and darkness was all around me…

"Wait," Longwalker said, and I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. "Follow no further. That is how Firebrand lost himself, in sounding the bottom of the stones."

Sounding the bottom of the stones? It was all mystery, all Plainsman hocus-pocus. And yet there was something in those depths that called me further, so that it took everything I had to resist it, and yet I was not sure I had resisted it, not sure…

The pressure at my shoulder increased.

"Good," Longwalker said. "Now you will see what happened."

Again the young man was in view, the crown on his head and a faint, fanatical smile on his lips. The children of the Plainsmen shied from him, adults turned from him in the councils, until his only companion, his only confidant, was the crown he talked to by the fire's edge.

His people looked on in suspicion, drawing signs of warding on the ground before they lay down to sleep.

Soon he traveled a mile behind them. They would not permit him to venture any closer. A voice traveled with him, cold and obscure and insinuating. I could hear it talking to him, could hear it saying…

So it always is with the gifted, with the god-ordained. For your eyes see into the time to come, and if you look long enough, my friend, you will see a time in which all the Que-Nara understand your gifts and hearken to the words of your prophecies.

Then, the voice said, and the ground over which the young man walked was suddenly covered with glittering blades of ice, then I shall tell you what to say to them; they shall hear the words of your mouth as prophecy, and in the time that follows, we shall be among you.

"According to your will, Sargonnas," the young man said.

"Sargonnas!" I exclaimed, tearing my gaze from the stones.

"Sargonnas the Consort," Shardos said quietly. "Prince in the Dark Pantheon."

"I know where you are in the story, Solamnic," Longwalker said, "because I have seen it so many times. What they transacted in that ill hour, Namer and god, only the gods themselves know."

We looked at one another uneasily. At last the big Plainsman smiled faintly.

"Tarry but a while longer, Sir Galen, for the story has a middle and an end."

And in the stones were the rocky foothills, a circle of boulders in a bleak country.

The Plainsmen surrounded the Namer, and a chieftain pronounced the charges and the crimes.

"False prophecy," they said, and "corrupting the young." "Conjury," and "rending the earth."

"'Rending the earth'?" I asked.

"Who is to say that the tremors in the mountains are not his doing still?" Longwalker asked. "His, and that of the evil prince he serves."

I started to return my eyes to the stones, but the Plainsman waved his big hand.

"You have seen enough," he said. "Do not look into what follows, for the ceremony is private when a man is cast from the tribe.

'The stones in the Namer's Crown were divided among the elders, his eye was taken according to the Old Ways, and the wound seared by the white-hot blade of the spear."

I gasped and swallowed hard. It was all a bit fierce and nomadic for my tastes.

"Wh-Why the eye, Longwalker? Why not just… muster the poor lad out? It seems a little harsh, this ceremony of exile and the cutting that goes with it."

"It's actually kind, Galen," the juggler added, stirring from his place by the fire and stretching his spindly old legs. Not for the first time, I wondered how Shardos had learned all of these tales.

"Kind in a rather stark, Plainsman way, that is," the old man continued. "For though it maims the outcast, it also protects him, in an odd fashion. It is an outward sign to the other Plainsmen among whom he wanders that, though he is an exile and cannot be taken in, he is not to be harmed, for perpetually he suffers for his wrongdoings."

"It still sounds harsh to me," I insisted, and Longwalker frowned.

"What," he asked, "would Solamnics do to one who betrayed their Order?"

I was not sure, but I admitted that the Measure would call for something drastic, something with a taste of high drama, no doubt.

"As I thought," Longwalker replied with satisfaction, and he told me the rest of the story: how the outcast left the Que-Nara, but not without stealing the crown and one of the opals. How he wandered for months, guided alone over the desolate landscape by hints and suggestions from the voice that had taken up residence in the cold silver of the crown on his head, which spoke to him somehow through the single, unnaturally glimmering opal.

How after weeks of wandering, the young Namer was not sure whether the voice in his ear was that of a god or a stone or a crown, or perhaps the softer voice of his own prophetic gifts, and how he praised himself for his "insight and foreknowledge." How the wanderings would take him by the way he knew as the Que-Nara Namer-the secret way unto the rest of the tribe, buried deep under the ground.

"Almost at the moment he reached them," Longwalker said, his dark eyes bleak and ominous, "the Rending raced along the spine of the world and the earth burst open, and nothing has ever been the same…"

"You don't believe," I insisted, "that this Namer, this-"

"Firebrand, he calls himself."

"Did this… Firebrand… have anything to do with the Rending?"

Longwalker shook his head. "I cannot say. It also puzzles me how he has lived through the lives of six chieftains."

It puzzled me, too, but there was a whiff of mystery and murk about anything to do with the Plainsmen.

"How… how do you know he is with them? I mean, with the Que-Nara beneath the ground?"

"In the last few weeks, I have seen him, spoken to him," Longwalker said, with a quick motion drawing a warding sign in the dust by the fire. "He laughs at us and says that his wounded eye has stared down our weapons."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"That the people below took him in despite his wounded eye. That his eye must have deceived them, then his words, for now they follow him without question, and that the time will come when his crown is complete-complete beyond the twelve, he says, for it is his plan to set the thirteenth stone and bring forth the power of life and death."

"And I am walking right into his hands, bringing him the very thing he seeks?" I asked apprehensively.

"The very thing he seeks may be his undoing,"

Longwalker mused. "You see, Firebrand is right, for I am powerless against him. His taken eye is my undoing, in a way. For even if I knew the way beneath the mountains into his dark kingdom-which was a way lost to us when Firebrand took the knowledge with him-I could not harm him, tor the blade that marked him has stayed my hand."

I crouched in a puzzled silence. Beside me, Shardos cleared his throat uncomfortably and stirred the fire with a stick.

"Do you mean you cannot lay hands on Firebrand? Not even to save your people?"

"Not even if he harms my people. For he will harm them by stealing their memory, and if I lay hands on him, I am saying that memory is not worth the stealing.

"But," he continued, green mischief deep in his eyes like fire in the opals, "that is not to say I cannot sit back and let someone else-someone not of the People-lay hands on him. Nor that I would not be pleased to do so. For the hands that destroy Firebrand will carry history. They will bind wounds and unite a sundered nation. Perhaps it is my task only to watch them at their business. Sometimes the doing is the waiting."

Moths sailed through the baffled attic between my ears.

"I'm sorry, Longwalker," I said finally, "but I don't really have the stuff of history and all. I'm afraid that all I'm after is my brother Brithelm, and once I have him, my quarrel with this Firebrand is more than likely over. I am no hero."

As if to prove my point, I told the Plainsman the whole unsavory story of my opals: how the stones came to me long ago from the coffers of an evil illusionist, as a bribe to betray Bayard Brightblade, not to mention my family. I dragged the gems through the whole adventure with the Scorpion-from the dusty rooms of my castle to the illusory rooms of his, and despite their time in my possession, I knew little more about them than I did when I first grasped them in my money-hungry clutches.

"I survived, of course, Longwalker," I concluded, squinting into the darkness of the tall shape now standing just outside the firelight's edge. "But it took all my ingenuity and soft words and courage, finally, to pry me out of the Scorpion's clutches. I fear I am just about spent of all those virtues."

"But you survived, of course. And that in itself is something. The night is long," he added abruptly, "and ahead of you a longer journey. By now you must know we have no intent to harm you. Trusting that, you should sleep calmly in your camp tonight."

He smiled his ragged, broken smile and said, "We heard about these stones, that Firebrand awaited their coming. It is our nature to be concerned when such things take place. So we wanted to find them, to see that the hands into which they have fallen are… gentle hands that may guard that stillness well."

"I know of these things, too, Longwalker," I said. "I have seen the fires from a distance, in the mountains and in the gems. A brother of mine is somewhere beneath those mountains, and another…" I choked.

It was still too soon to talk of Alfric. Longwalker rose from the fire and moved slowly and graciously toward the edge of the light, leaving me with my thoughts for a moment.

"Longwalker?" I said at last, having gathered myself together again. "What have you heard from my brother-the one Firebrand has taken?"

"Only what you have told me now, Solamnic," he replied, moving back into the light.

He looked down on me almost gently, and I stood, helping Shardos to his feet. The three of us walked toward the edge of the camp. Between two tall rocks far to our west, a faint fire was glowing, and from that region I heard the sound of Ramiro's laughter, carrying over miles and no doubt fueled by a flask of Thorbardin Eagle.

"I believe you now, Solamnic," Longwalker said quietly. "You will care for the stones and for my people wisely."

"But why? Why should you believe in me? I wish your people and their history well, but it is my brother and only my brother I am after. And I shall do anything to win his freedom."

"That in itself is something," the Plainsman said bluntly. "I believe that the gods always send my people something. You seem to be the one tree on the plain."

'That is not encouraging, Longwalker."

Then you have more of encouragement to learn," Longwalker said mysteriously, leading me to the horses.

It was a lonely trip back to our campsite. Lily plodded, worn down, no doubt, by her fear of the Plainsmen's clothing. I led Shardos's horse, puffing and snorting, through the rising rocks, the old man snoring in the saddle.

I labored under my own burden. The stones weighed heavily in my speculation, for at heart I have always hated responsibilities that offer me no chance to order about those around me. And the whole murky business of this Firebrand and his crown and visions made me doubly uneasy.

Waiting may be doing, but to me, that night, it seemed too much like doing nothing.

There in the darkness, as the path we were on began to ascend more steeply toward the faint light of our campfire, I thought about planting the stones on Shardos.

But the old man's moon of a face smiled in serene sleep behind me, and I knew that my thoughts were idle-that I was not going to take the coward's way out. But damned if I knew what way I would take instead.