Galen Beknighted

Chapter XVI

"Meanwhile," the Namer intoned, his voice lowering to almost a whisper yet still carrying, through skill or magic or trick of the wind, to even the farthermost of the assembled fires. "Meanwhile the young man descends into darkness, where there are eyes among the stones."

Quietly he reached into the folds of his mottled robe, producing a handful of dark gems.

As the trail at last began to widen and the rocks to become familiar, I hoped what I had seen in the opals and heard from old Shardos had been utterly wrong, that somehow everyone's senses had been jostled by fire and flood and earthquake. That when we arrived in the clearing where last saw Brithelm, things would be as I left them: the camp surprisingly unchanged, my visionary brother standing precariously at the top of one of his stilted cabins, trying to draw birds to the site with handfuls of seed and suet so he could read the omens in their patterns of flight.

But the camp had vanished. It had been here, I could tell by the boards and the stilts, the thatch and the canvas. In the clearing, a boat hung desolately from a single frayed rope, the shambles of a cabin forming a circle about it.

Nothing else had been left standing. A huge black spot lay at the center of the clearing, as fresh and unforgiving as a wound. The smoke still rose from it, and I wondered what anyone could find at my brother's encampment that was worth burning. On either side of the fire-scarred ground lay rubble, pitiful relics of the odd but wonderful community.

We all sat quietly on horseback, struck into silence. Finally Shardos stood in the stirrups and breathed deeply.

"The whole place smells of dust and collapse," he pronounced much too loudly. "Bear with me, friends. Our destination is but a mile from here. As the story says, 'It is where four vallenwoods grow, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen. A path runs between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covers-a hole in the cliff face. A hole with darkness at its bottom.' "

Brithelm would have looked on a place like this, bare and colorless and altogether dismantled, as a country of hope and promise.

"Look around you, brother," I could imagine him saying-imagine as sharply and vividly as if he, not Dannelle, were seated on horseback beside me. "Look at the… the absence of distraction!" I thought of the hundreds of times he had listened for my prospects in bleak circumstances, how over the childhood years, I had confided it all-Alfric's bullying, Gileandos's stupidity and injustice, Father's thickheadedness.

My own ungovernable weaseling.

How through all of this he had seemed not to listen, had drawn my attention instead to birds in the courtyard, to some fortunate turn in the moathouse architecture or a particularly lovely autumn moonrise. And how after all his distractions, I had returned to Alfric or Gileandos or Father more anchored and sane for the distracting.

He was the best one in the many sides of my families. There was no way that I was going back without him.

There's another story this reminds me of," Shardos said with a smile. I must have sighed, for he cocked his head curiously in my direction. His hearing kept astounding me.

Not that I cared altogether. For since we had left Longwalker's camp, Shardos had been a compendium of tales, spread before us in an elaborate weave where the thread of one plot entangled with that of another, where the hero of a minotaur bandit saga locked horns, so to speak, with the brother of an hourglass-eyed mage in a gladiatorial conflict that did or did not happen, depending on which version of the tale you listened to. There were stories of ice-reavers, of Huma at the height of his powers, of even a kender romance mixed in with a Plainsman's search for a crystal staff and a Solamnic siege in the dead of winter. Somehow all of these stories were connected, though none of us could follow them through all their complications to see how legend fit with fable and fable with tale. Shardos saw to the bottom of them all, evidently, juggling them all as deftly as he juggled crockery or torches or knives.

"Brithelm," I said. "Brithelm is hostage somewhere under all of this, and…"

For a moment, the strong tears surged again, and I drew my hood over my face.

'There, boy, there," Shardos soothed, his milky eyes turned in my direction with a hollow stare that was unsettling. "If your brother's whereabouts has you all that bothered, then I'll take you to find him straightaway."

"Enough, juggler," Ramiro cautioned, then turned to me. "It's no country for hope nor for jest. I'd rather not lose the rest of us if you're bent on guiding us down among these underdwellers. If you're risking five lives to recover one, then you'd best allow that this Firebrand has done the worst he can do and leave it alone at that."

"You need not send us packing right away, Sir Ramiro," I said sharply. "I shall stay the course. I have decided that if Shardos claims he can find my brother, why, the least I can do is a little of what he says."

Ramiro turned ponderously toward me, looking at me candidly and a little unkindly.

"I await your orders," he said through clenched teeth.

"Shardos?" I called, and the blind man stepped forward.

"It is near sunset," the juggler offered cheerily. "The bird-songs are changing, and the wind dying down. 'Tis the best time to embark."

Ramiro began the demanding process of dismounting. Oliver rushed to his side, grunted, and wrangled him down. Owls called in the high rocks that surrounded us, and with a nod from Ramiro, Oliver moved away from the fire and walked quickly toward the horses, stripping a long overhanging branch from an aeterna tree as he made his way back down the trail to guard the skittish animals from the ominous sounds of the approaching night. One of the horses whickered behind us, and you could hear Oliver faintly clicking and cooing and consoling the creature.

Only Dannelle remained near me. I could feel her eyes on me.

I took a deep breath. In went the thin mountain air, fresh with its icy edge and a faint whiff of aeterna, Out came the orders.

"So we follow Shardos," I said. "And we shall see what happens. Leave the horses here, neither tied nor tethered. They're no good to us under the ground, and perhaps they'll find their way back to the plains if we don't make it too hard for them by harnessing them to this and that."

"There was little generalship in that decision," Dannelle whispered teasingly as Shardos crossed the campsite and took a narrow path through the undergrowth beyond it. Ramiro and Oliver followed reluctantly.

"It is all the generalship I've got," I confessed.

So we fared, each of us burdened with rope and lantern and hand axe and piton-whatever necessary things we could gather from the horses we were leaving behind us. It was not fully dark before we reached the vallenwoods. Sharp-eyed little Oliver, walking with Shardos at the head of our column, returned to us with the news.

"A place there is, like the juggler spoke of, Sir Galen," the boy announced breathily, apparently winded from the longest sentence he had spoken since we departed from Castle di Caela. "The trees with the dolmen and the opening beyond 'em, and something flying out of the dark there."

"Flying?"

"Yes, sir. Some of 'em fell once they came out. It was like they were diving or something. They leapt into the sky and… and folded up. It was like something in the air crushed them. They fell straight to the ground. From up close, they look like burned squirrels or something."

"Tenebrals," Shardos announced, slipping silently back into our midst.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked.

"Harmless, really," the juggler said. 'They tell me the things glow underground. Their blood is luminous, but their wits are dim. I have heard that dozens issue from caverns before the sun goes down, and the action of sunlight on their skin is fatal. I'm not sure of the science involved. But that's another story, and neither here nor there."

Shardos paused, tilting his head as though he listened to Oliver's movement and breath. "Be most vigilant now, friends, for soon we pass through the gates of the Que-Tana, and on those faculties of yours will hinge the fate of Sir Galen's brother."

He led us into the clearing, past the vallenwoods and the dolmen, down a narrow trail, amid bramble and undergrowth, to a fissure in the side of the mountain.

The old blind man stood at the opening and looked up at us merrily.

Tor a while in this coming darkness, I shall see as well as any of you. Perhaps even better."

With Birgis in tow, and clutching the dark rocks upon the walls of the fissure, he edged down the hewn stone path.

In the next few moments, we all must have looked at one another a dozen times, each of us sizing the situation, wrestling fear and misgiving and pure common sense, exchanging glances, a few muffled words, and no doubt a superstitious prayer or two-Get me out of this alive, and I'll rush to the door of the nearest monastery.

I waited a long, troubled moment above the fissure, saying good-bye to the wind and the twilight. Then, catching my breath, I followed, listening hard for pale Plainsmen or for trolls or for something inexpressibly worse.

What I heard was the uneven breathing of Dannelle following me. Behind her walked Oliver, and towering over the both of them, I could see Ramiro. And then, as complete darkness closed around us, I said a brief prayer to whatever god favored the luck of fools and the nerve of shaken Knights, and I followed the sound of Shardos's careful steps, the snorts and whuffles of Birgis.

"Let me tell you a story…" Shardos whispered back to me, and the mountainous night engulfed us.

Had there been light to see us by, I am sure we would have looked awkward and strange.

Shardos ranged below me on the downward climb, scrambling nimbly from rock to rock, clutching Birgis under his left arm. The dog, it seemed, hated enclosed spaces, and on occasion a loud rumble or whimper or yelp rose up to me through the windless, damp air.

I was ready to rumble or yelp myself. Twice Ramiro had slipped, shaking dust and rock down upon the rest of us from above. We all would stop, shiver, send prayers or oaths flying though the darkness around us, and then continue. I figured that at any moment he would fall, and hoped that when he did, he would make the supreme sacrifice and not grab out for purchase and drag someone down with him, but plummet to his death quietly and solitarily.

Dannelle and Oliver, on the other hand, descended gracefully, soundlessly, sandwiched between me and the puffing Ramiro, who, amid stumbles, was cursing his own lack of foresight for following me anywhere, especially to the center of the world.

The silence around us grew even more still at our passing.

Occasionally something would burst into flight by my face, erupting with squeals and light and burring and the sound of frantic wingbeat as it rushed by on its way to the surface.

Tenebrals," Shardos whispered, and I thought of the strange, collapsing creatures that had rushed on wing from the mouth of the fissure. I hoped, for their dim-witted sake, that it was dark on the surface above us.

Almost an hour later, the guidance I had hoped for from Shardos came remarkably to pass. For in the candlelit, lan-ternlit recesses of earth, we stumbled about like blind things while the truly blind found resource in his other senses.

For a thousand feet down (or so it seemed), Shardos guided us by touch. His skilled hands and feet scrambled over jutting rocks, and he would pause, pointing dramatically at unstable shelves, at notches in the fissure wall too shallow for purchase.

Twice I shifted my lantern from one hand to the other, moving the light for a better grip on the rock walls around me. Everything that lay more than twenty feet from me was lost in the darkness beyond the pathetic glow of the lamp I carried. Twice we reached tunnels, branching away from the fissure into even a deeper dark. At the lip of those tunnels, Shardos would stop and tilt his head, as though listening or smelling or feeling the moisture in the air. Twice he shook his head, again dramatically.

That way lay danger, evidently. Or at least a dead end, a passage leading nowhere-especially not to Brithelm.

On occasion, a noise from below us made Shardos pause. Nimbly he hugged the wall of the fissure, motioning for silence or stillness or just plain attentiveness. His signal was relayed back up the line of followers, and whatever it meant in particular, I am sure we gave it to him.

After those pauses, he would move again, downward and downward, sometimes far more quickly than the full-sighted oafs behind him could manage. When his hearing told him he was losing us, he would stop and allow us to catch up.

At the third passageway, he whispered, "This is the one, Sir Galen." I joined him on the wide shelf of rock that jutted out into the chasm. Dannelle climbed down to stand beside me, followed by a nimble Oliver. Ramiro hung on the rocks a step or two above us, conscious of his weight as always, how it might be the last thing an overhang would need.

I stepped into the passage, lifted my lantern, and the tunnel in which we stood emerged out of darkness into a low, orange light. Three or four tenebrals who had been dangling from the roof of the tunnel shot out into the chasm, chittering wildly, their pale wings glowing more dimly as they flew away from us.

For a moment, I thought of phosfire, the dim light of decay that ranges over swamplands in warmer country north of here. But my attention soon returned to the situation at hand.

Ramiro grumbled. I looked up to see his enormous backside, hanging out into the chasm like some kind of clownish awning.

"Would you rather keep scrambling down the walls like a bunch of salamanders until we reach the core of the planet and our flesh is burned away?" I chastised.

Slowly, doubtfully, Ramiro took the step or two to the lip of the cavern, then let his weight down carefully.

Of course, the floor of the tunnel held.

What the lantern displayed was no less unsettling when we had joined each other on the landing. We found ourselves at the entrance to a large, low room of rock, stretching for hundreds of feet in all directions, but never any higher, it seemed, than ten feet or so above our heads. Stalactites drooped from the low ceiling, here like fangs or a row of teeth, there like a smooth stone curtain, making the room difficult to negotiate-well nigh impossible without the light my lantern provided.

"Birgis?" Dannelle whispered. "Galen, where's the dog?"

Thinking only that I'd be damned before I lost yet another member of the party, never considering the danger it could bring, I reached in my pocket, pushed aside the gloves, and wrapped my fingers around the dog whistle. Placing it to my lips, I blew three short, brief bursts into the stagnant air of the cavern. At the opposite end of the enormous room, the sound of rustling wings and of wild, pained chittering arose as the tenebrals stirred uneasily, alarmed at the noise we could not hear.

Something belched at my feet. Birgis appeared out of nowhere, snuffling at my shoes. I stroked him behind the ears and seated myself on a low, rounded stalagmite.

"Well, where do we go from here, juggler?" Ramiro asked aggressively, leaning back against a huge stone drapery. A silence followed, in which we heard the flapping wings of a bat or tenebral-or something-dodging through the stalactites at the far edge of the light. "Here we are, half lost down a crack in the earth, not even close enough to our destination to draw enemies."

Dannelle stirred angrily.

"It is grand of you to be so concerned about enemies at this juncture, Ramiro," she observed ironically. "Nonetheless, I think what we do is up to the leader. Who, if my understanding is correct, is not you."

As if to second her words, Shardos gestured in my direction.

"I believe the choice is Sir Galen's," he murmured.

All eyes-even the blank ones of Shardos-turned toward me. I looked around me, then behind me, where Birgis sat on a flat rock, scratching his ear and staring simply and expectantly.

I looked up, pretending to be mulling a great decision, though in fact I was searching frantically, desperately, for anything that would make sense of this underground labyrinth.

A trio of tenebrals fluttered overhead. They circled rapidly, began to descend and, seeming to sense the presence of the lantern, dodged its light and warmth in a blind rush back into the darkness toward the far end of the cavern. Off in the dark, the large room filled with the rustle of innumerable wings.

Through the frayed cloth of the pouch in which I had placed it, I saw a faint light as the brooch began to glow.