Galen Beknighted

Chapter XIII

"What about the others?" a small child asked, crouched over several little piles of stones and sticks he moved along with the Namer's story. "What of those who stayed at the castle and those in the Namer's caves?"

The Namer nodded and smiled. Slowly he twined the two strands of metal together over the fire, bending them gracefully in his gloved hands.

Here is the story as the Lady Enid told it to me, as I gathered from what others said, what servants said, from what Sir Bayard let fall in moments unguarded. It is the tale of what took place in our absence.

At first, Bayard was his old self, handling in his customary and courteous manner the wave of hysteria that passed through Castle di Caela when Dannelle was discovered missing.

All of this ruling in justice and wisdom is well and good, but Bayard was quickly restless, having dispatched all the daily duties he could notice, foresee, or even imagine by the end of the first day after our departure. That is not to say there wasn't much left to do around Castle di Caela. It is just that Bayard, by temperament an adventuring Knight, had neither the patience nor the skills to attend the details of castle maintenance and government.

It is then that the real story begins.

Only three nights passed, it seems, until Bayard was climbing the Cat Tower. The whisper went from servant to servant as the Knight lay in the infirmary, attended by Enid, who was beyond herself with managing a restless husband and an even more restless estate. The three surgeons stood constantly and irritatingly over the injured Knight, rubbing his leg with their textral stones. The stones steamed and emitted sweet odors, but they lost their early fascination for Bayard and were now part of the boring daily landscape.

On the other hand, Bayard found young Brandon Rus the only bright spot in the bleak hours. It was Brandon who talked to him about hawking and horses, who knew more about those cherished subjects than half a dozen Knights twice his age. However, Brandon knew such things because he was at them constantly, and so he spent most of his day in the castle forest beyond the east wall, restlessly riding and hunting.

Sometimes in the morning, when the wind lifted, Bayard could hear his horn echoing over the grounds of the estate. It was then that he turned uncomfortably, filled with a most un-Solamnic jealousy, and shouted at the surgeons.

Still, Sir Brandon was always welcome. Bayard looked forward to his conversation as a cherished relief from the mournful Sirs Elazar and Fernando, the gloomy Solamnics whose talk was only about violation of rules and missing opals. Nonetheless, when the surgeons left at night, when the hard-pressed Enid napped in her brief rest from entertabling and attending to her husband, Bayard was left alone with his discomfort, with his loneliness and his boredom, with the distant metallic sounds of the one cuckoo clock Enid had not dismantled in her campaign to redecorate the palace old Sir Robert had defaced years ago by absentmindedness and bad taste. Bayard longed for even Elazar's company then, in those bird-haunted and lonely hours, though he knew he would regret it in a matter of minutes.

So the hours passed until the third day, when Sir Bayard Brightblade decided to do something picturesque with his surroundings. He began with an archery range set up through the infirmary window.

After Enid had opened the shutters and moved away from the half-light of noon, drenched by the continuing downpour, and after the three surgeons left dripping with sweat and rain, having carried Bayard, bed and all, to a towering view of the courtyard, an equally soaked servant gloomily set up two targets in the center of the bailey. Then Brandon Rus, perhaps the only dry person in that wing of the castle, pulled up a chair at Bayard's bedside and brought forth a crossbow.

"You have to allow for the height and the distance and the rain, Sir Bayard," he explained politely as he and Raphael nocked the arrow and drew the string, tilting the bow ever so slightly. Calmly he loosed the shaft, and it flew out into the downpour.

Raphael's shout rose above the steady rushing sound of the rain. Sir Brandon's arrow struck the bull's-eye.

Brandon smiled faintly and handed the bow to Bayard.

Sullenly he handed the crossbow back to Brandon.

"'Tis an impossible device to load from a sickbed, sir," the young man explained as they reloaded for the embarrassed Knight.

"'Tis also my damned leg that's ailing, lad, not my arms!" Bayard snapped. After which there was an uncomfortable silence, a stillness in both men. Then Brandon handed the bow back to the recumbent Bayard.

Who missed and missed and missed, the first arrow sailing long, passing over the targets and into an awning of the paddock. The canvas, already sagging with rainwater, burst open and spewed water onto an unfortunate groom currying a mare beneath it. The mare galloped off, leaving the boy behind her, soaked and still clutching a comb.

The second arrow fell closer to its mark, but not close enough, the arrow shivering in the very spot where only a second before a sentry was standing sullenly.

The third arrow hit the top of the windowsill and darted back into the sickroom, ricocheting between Raphael's legs and pinning Bayard's blanket to the wall.

Bayard looked at Sir Brandon, who scooted his chair away from the bedside. Archery, it seemed, was over for the day.

It was time, instead, to bring on the dwarves and the dogs.

For on the third day of Sir Bayard's living in, a party of rive dwarves, making the long trek from Thorbardin north into Palanthas with five barrels of Thorbardin Eagle to barter, trade, or sell at impossible prices, was waylaid by the heavy rains and forced to seek shelter at the first roof, which happened to be that of Castle di Caela. According to Solamnic custom, Enid saw to the quarters of the five from Thorbardin. According to custom, she was also supposed to be responsible for their entertainment.

A duty that Bayard took eagerly out of her hands.

The rooms in the infirmary underwent a bizarre transformation. Doors were opened, in some cases removed. Tables were stacked and ordered, as were the linen cabinets. The result of all these arrangements was a wide, circular path that passed through four of the sickrooms, having its beginning and ending directly in front of Bayard's bed, which was moved, again by the gasping and perspiring surgeons, back to its original site.

A wide, circular path. Makeshift, but good enough for a dog track when money and dwarf spirits circulate.

And circulate they did, the second night of the dwarves' stay, as the races began. Bayard bought one of the barrels of Thorbardin Eagle at a price Sir Robert denounced as "banditry"-at least until his third drink, when the "bandit" became a sober-faced bloodhound who sat down at the final turn of the dog track, allowing a beagle and a pug to pass him, and forfeiting the large amount of money Sir Robert had placed on his promised speed and endurance.

Sir Robert asked Brandon for his bow, preparing to shoot the animal in a fit of gambler's rage. Brandon and Bayard exchanged glances; by now they were the only two sober folk in the room, and their sobriety told them that it would be a real game of chance to determine where Robert di Caela's arrow would lodge, and that the stakes in such a game would be terribly high.

Robert was escorted to bed by Sir Brandon, who gave up escorting after a few steps and hoisted the old man to his shoulders when the two of them reached the stairwell leading to the fourth floor and Sir Robert's quarters.

This left Bayard downstairs, alone in his sobriety, but not without company. Sir Andrew was there, as was Gileandos. Elazar was snoring under the three-legged table that completed the first turn of the dog track, while Fernando, dressed in the ornamental armor worn by old Simon di Caela before he decided he was an iguana, tried in vain to order around anyone-dwarf, guard, page, or dog.

Enid entered the room as the second race began and was faced with this sorry sight. Fernando turned to her. In a booming voice, he proclaimed that she should return to where she belonged.

The whole room dropped into silence and every eye, drunk or sober, snapped around to Fernando. Enid turned icily, haughtily toward the litigious old fool, who had just crossed a boundary that nobody-Knight, dwarf, servant, or dog-could cross without dire peril. For Enid Pathwarden was Pathwarden only through marriage and love for her husband. By blood and by a thousand years of heritage, she was all di Caela.

She was, indeed, the di Caela.

And the dog races were declared over. Memories are blurred as to how Fernando managed to ride twenty-five miles south toward his holdings near the Garnet Mountains that very night. What is more, he was wrapped in yards of linen and was terribly bruised about his head and shoulders. The bruises somehow matched exactly the carving on the missing leg of the table at the first turn of the dog track.

Sir Elazar, though still at the castle, was also badly bruised, having been found by Raphael the next morning, a victim of collapsing furniture.

The dwarves were gone by noon on the next day, Elazar was packing, and the dogs were kenneled once again, their night of celebrity passed into di Caela history. And so, deprived of sport and diversion, the master of the castle again lay splinted and confined to the infirmary.

It was enough to drive Bayard Brightblade to the di Caela family papers.

For two years, he had promised his wife that, "given the time and the leisure," he would gather together the volumes from the library-the ledgers and histories, the journals and logs and lists and registers in which the di Caelas of old kept all kinds of records. Enid hoped that the whereabouts of the missing well cap would come up after desperate page-turning, and the danger of flood could be averted. But she also delighted in her husband's newfound interest in the daily business of the estate and the balance of credit and debit.

Within an hour, the poor man was overwhelmed. Numbers hurtled by him like hostile arrows, and he soon decided that the single most happy advantage of wandering knighthood is its freedom from budgetry and arithmetic.

"Mathematics is for gnomes, anyway," he muttered, setting aside the account books and moving to the wills. Wills, of course, make for better reading, having been principal weapons in di Caela family combat for centuries.

It was here that Bayard Brightblade read of family feuds and disputes that had passed down through the generations, as each di Caela, on his or her deathbed, seems to have reserved a posthumous slap for one or more descendants. Most clerical older sons inherited the father's favorite prostitute, while fastidious nieces inherited their uncle's privy.

Some bequests were not as jolly: Evana di Caela received only a side of beef from her mother, which, the old woman said, "should serve as a reminder of what happens to heavy, bovine creatures"; Laurantio di Caela received from his uncle a single dagger with the murky instructions to "do what needs to be done."

The Lady Mariel passed down to Enid herself, who was an infant at the time, fifty cats. Bayard thought of how the mad old woman met her fate and laughed wickedly.

"Wonder how she proposed to feed them all?" he asked in all mischief. Then his eye stopped on an older scrap of parchment-centuries old, perhaps, and no larger than the palm of Bayard's hand. And yet it was written in a polished script that was strikingly, unsettlingly familiar.

"Now where…?" he thought, then recognized the writing of Benedict di Caela.

You again, old enemy, Bayard thought, for it was the Scorpion's writing, reaching out to him beyond four centuries and the villain's several deaths.

Having nothing to inherit, I have little to pass to my descendants. My father and that brace of vultures who call themselves my brothers have seen to that.

"We saw to it also, you brigand!" Bayard hissed, surprised at the anger he still felt toward the dead illusionist. Bayard snorted and lifted the parchment to the light.

So I resolve to bequeath chaos and disaster and a curse on generations. Castle di Caela will be mine eventually, for I shall return to it until it falls into my hands.

"Or the curse is lifted," Bayard pronounced triumphantly, then frowned at the document's conclusion.

And if you who read this have lifted my curse, congratulate yourself no further. If you have been triumphant, prepare to have Castle di Caela snatched from your hands by the rending of the earth. Eventually it will come, as foretold and unstoppable as the rains of autumn or the awakenings of spring. For I have seen to that. Beneath your feet and your thoughts, your histories and even your imaginings, I have set a device in motion. From the wakening of time, from the Vingaard Mountains to the Plains of Solamnia, even unto the foundations of this murderous house, there were forces that awaited my guidance, and you will know of them soon enough. Though you may uncover my devices, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. And though I may be dead when you read this, be assured that in some dark and comfortless comer of the skies, my laughter mocks you and those who follow you with the fond and foolish hopes that my powers are spent.

Bayard's night was sleepless. The shooting pains in his leg mingled with unsettling thoughts, more baffling than any numbers, as he tried to decipher the will, to plumb the mysterious "device", to stop the dark laughter. He worried, too, about the young man in the mountains and his ragtag group of followers.

It was almost a week before Bradley, one of the castle engineers, inspecting the foundations and cellars of the castle for flaws and damage the earthquake had wrought, stumbled across the gap in the dungeon.

It was not a large opening, he insisted to an alarmed Bayard and a half-dozing Sir Robert, but dangerous enough. For the great well that lay under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, was no doubt brimming and bubbling in the deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave them awash in their own cistern.

To Bayard, it was still a question of plumbing. He soothed himself, thinking, I shall attend to this later. Until the young engineer added that beyond the opening lay a network of runnels.

Now he was far more concerned as to the state of the castle, for there was no telling what vermin or darker thing neither wedged himself in some remote underground cranny nor caused a cave-in or rockslide due to his high spirits. Sir Andrew promised that Robert was "in good hands."

Bayard Brightblade was not assured.

Comprising the rest of the group were servants- linkboys and bearers. There were two men trained as sappers, whose talents Bayard thought he could put to less military use. There was also Gileandos the tutor, who hovered about Sir Robert and Sir Andrew, prattling about the differences between stalactite and stalagmite and how one remembered the difference, until Sir Robert suggested that the scholar carry a lantern and make himself "useful for once."

All in all, there were nearly twenty of them-"a small army," Bayard muttered, a little resentfully, because his visions had been of adventure-of a solitary Knight, or at most a band of two or three or four, off into the bowels of the earth, where unknown peril awaited them.

With his group, the numbers were stacked against the lurking dangers. And Bayard admitted he was disappointed by the odds. His followers pressed together around him until he felt like a schoolmaster or a governess off on a jaunt with unruly children in tow.

"What… what does it look like inside there, Bayard?" Sir Andrew asked, squinting over a lantern held much too high by Gileandos.

Together the Knights peered into the fissure. Andrew shifted uncomfortably under Bayard's weight.

"I cannot see a thing while I rock like a boat, Andrew," Bayard replied curtly, and the old man settled himself.

Brandon Rus leaned forward and, taking a lantern from one of the linkboys, cast light into the fissure.

A tangle of roots, no doubt from the huge hackberry and vallenwood parks just outside the castle wall, spread across the door as though the very veins and arteries of the world lay exposed. Beyond the network of tendrils, there was a greater darkness-some tunnel, no doubt, or a passageway formed where the roots churned and shifted the ground about them.

The explorers, all twenty or more of them, stood gaping at the edge of the darkness. Bayard tried to move forward for a closer look, but the reluctance of his bearers held him back.

"There is nothing of… passageways… in the histories," Brandon whispered.

"Oh, I have seen them in a chapter or two," Bayard murmured ominously as startled eyes turned toward him.

Gileandos moved forward and faced the party, his back to the cavity in front of them.

"Gentlemen, you are looking into the mouth of an accident. A quirk of geology. All that's left for any of us is repairs, if you ask me. Nothing a good stonemason cannot mend and refashion into dungeonry."

Bayard regarded the old tutor curiously but said nothing. All around him, the servants voiced their agreement with the scholar. No doubt they were anxious to be upstairs in warmth and dryness and light.

Among all assembled, Bayard was sure of only one stout heart.

"What do you think, Brandon Rus?" Bayard asked, leaning heavily on the wall at the mouth of the tunnel, one foot already stepping into the tangled darkness beyond the light of the lanterns.

The young man paused, poised between Solamnic courtesy and the truth he was coming to suspect-that indeed, Sir Bayard knew more of this underground mystery than he was letting on, for whatever reason.

"No doubt," Brandon Rus said slowly, tactfully, "the schoolmaster is correct when he claims this to be an accident of nature. All the more reason we should go forward and explore it-for the sake of science, if for nothing else."

"And," Sir Andrew added, "a body can never tell when something like this spreads beneath his foundations and undermines his whole damned architecture."

Bayard breathed raggedly and rested against the strong arms of the younger man. As Sir Andrew stepped behind him, the faint unsavory odor, the smells of unwashed trail dirt and the heavy odors of soured wine, was lost in the smoke of the torch.

Bayard sighed. Hygiene may not have been among Sir Andrew's virtues, but courage and loyalty took its place most gracefully.

The Knights stood together at the lip of the fissure, waiting for something they could not quite fathom.

"As… as… the only accredited scientist in this group," Gileandos began, "I assure you that whatever discoveries you might expect in the bowels of the castle grounds would be minimal at best. Why, this area has been excavated, plowed under, apportioned, and surveyed for a thousand years. There is nothing new beneath Castle di Caela-" "Enough, Gileandos," Sir Robert insisted. "Why, indeed, if there are tunnels, most certainly-" "That will be enough, Gileandos!" Sir Robert thundered, and the whole party stood silent. There was a scuffling sound and the clatter of metal behind them as one of the linkboys dropped his lantern and scurried back up the stairs toward daylight and safety.

"Well…" Sir Robert began, this time more quietly, a note of resignation and almost of sadness passing over his voice as he joined the three others who were preparing to pass from the cellars into the thicket of roots and sliding dirt.

"Give me your lantern," he said to the nearest linkboy. "The rest of you tend to business upstairs. Tell my daughter where we've gone."

"Then we're off for it," he said, grinning exultantly. "It's a glory how so many things come down to a crawl in a dungeon."

His companions looked at one another curiously, then back at Sir Robert. Trained Solamnics all, they waited politely as the rest of the party filed up the stairs toward the Great Hall and fresh air and light. Bayard glanced coldly at Gileandos, who stopped for a moment on the stairwell and leaned into the shadow, no doubt hoping to overhear whatever transpired when the entourage left. The old scholar snorted and cast his eyes downward. Finally Sir Andrew had enough.

"Damn it, man, if you're going to blubber or pout, I'd rather risk all our lives and take you with us."

The tutor scurried back down the steps. Now the darkness in the room grew deeper as the cellar door closed above the six of them. Sir Robert lifted the lantern, and each face was bathed in orange light.

"So here we are," Bayard said with a smile. "One fresh young Knight little tested, one seasoned but somewhat banged up, and three others-"

"Old. The word is 'old.' Like cheese or wine." Sir Andrew chuckled, and Sir Robert laughed gamely.

There was something in the zest and movement of these old Knights that Brandon could not yet understand. Nor Bayard, for that matter, though something in his leg would whisper it in the rainy seasons of the years to come.

Now it was two old men, facing one another at the brink of yet another adventure. Both of them were weary, longing for repose and rest and featherbeds and wine and blankets and the aimless chatter of grandchildren.

Yet both of them knew that whatever lay beyond the walls of the cellar was yet to be encountered.

Bayard raised his hand suddenly. "Hark! Something back in the…"

Great silence filled the cellar. Footsteps rustled across the floor overhead, and a rat skittered into a darker corner, its eyes glowing red for a moment as they reflected the torchlight.

For a long time, there was no sound.

Then there was a faint light at the head of the stairwell. Someone was descending, hand on the railing until the railing ceased. Then the steps became more cautious, more unsteady, as whoever it was continued the slow descent toward the Knights.

"You have been ordered back!" Sir Robert shouted. Something small and accustomed to the dark shrieked in the corner of the cellar, and Gileandos leaped again, the light in his hand bobbing badly.

"Hold that thing steady, Gileandos, or you'll ignite yourself!" Andrew snapped.

The tutor whimpered but held as steady as possible.

"I am afraid I cannot answer to you, Sir Robert," a voice piped down the stairwell.

It was Raphael.

"Raphael, go back up with the others," Bayard ordered impatiently, his eyes already back on the fissure in the cellar wall.

"1 am afraid he cannot answer to you, either, Sir Bayard," echoed another voice, even more familiar.

"Enid!" Robert and Bayard exclaimed in one voice. "Get back up-"

They stared at one another stupidly.