Galen Beknighted

Chapter XVII

By following the waxing light of the brooch, we found our way over stalagmites across the dark, vaulted chamber. This cavernous world was chaotic, grotesque, as if patched together by formations of rock.

Shardos walked beside me, Dannelle and Oliver directly behind us, and Ramiro tailing them, straddling the stalagmites perilously and squeezing and finagling past cornet and rock formation. The dog Birgis brought up the rear; snorting and whuffling merrily.

Ahead of us, the tenebrals fluttered and dove, glowing with an unearthly light like huge, darting fireflies. Soon their presence became a part of the environs, beneath our notice or beyond it, so that when Shardos cried out and pointed above us, 1 had almost forgotten them.

Above us, a host of the small creatures-ten, perhaps, or even as many as fifteen-circled away from us and poured into a wide tunnel twenty feet up the wall of the cavern, losing themselves once more in the dark.

"That's it," Dannelle said calmly, confidently. "A way out of here foretold by the stones in your hand."

She moved against me for warmth in the cold, cavernous room, and for a moment, I was greatly afraid for all of us.

It was not heartening, following the godseyes, when following them before had led us on a trail into ambush-an ambush that had cost me my brother Alfric. It was all I had to go by, though, the strange and ominous directions of the light in the gems, for I had burrowed us to a crucial point in our journey.

The prospects were not cheerful when it became obvious that there was still some rugged climbing to do before we put this underground chamber behind us. The large room we had crossed ended in a sheet of yellowing limestone, wet and glistening in the torchlight, as though a waterfall had frozen in midplunge before us. Atop the cascade, some twenty feet or so above our heads, lay the black, gaping mouth of yet another tunnel. Through it the tenebrals swarmed like a river of unhealthy light.The stone in front of as had a certain beauty, but it was a beauty that only a mountain goat could have stopped to appreciate.

Resignedly, I held out my hand for whatever passed for climbing gear in this group.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Birgis growled low and menacingly, the rumble beginning deep in his chest and passing swiftly through his bared teeth.

The juggler was moving before the dog's hackles rose. Deftly he slipped a rock in his sling and pivoted, sending the stone hurtling to the margins of light, where it struck the first of the seven creatures emerging from the darkness. The thing whined, staggered, and kept coming. The others came after it. Uncanny, unnaturally white, as swift as illusion, they darted into the light, cluttering and snapping the air.

Ramiro, Oliver, and I drew swords.

"Vespertiles!" Shardos breathed.

And they were on us.

The first of them surged by the juggler with a brief, high- pitched cry and barreled into Ramiro. There was a dull, leathery sound as the two collided and tumbled into the stone cascade. I turned back to face the vespertiles and saw nothing but teeth and hot red glittering eyes as several rose from below me, one climbing up under my tunic, thrashing its way to my throat.

I cried out and tried to push it down, but it scrabbled up my chest, its claws scraping and tearing through my shirt, and then we were fighting under the same ragged skin.

I looked up, and Oliver was rushing toward me, knife glinting in his hand.

"Don't move, Galen!" he cried as the dagger plunged into the front of my tunic, and the vespertile spasmed, stiffened, and softly fell out of my clothing. A blue spot widened around the place Oliver's blade had torn my shirt.

I had time to raise my sword. In a stride, I was next to Shardos, who was grappling with another of the creatures. I slipped my arm between them, shielding Shardos's face, and sunk my sword into the thorax of the vespertile. The blade wrenched in my hand, and I brought it up through bone and gristle and entrail as the monster on the end of my weapon writhed and shrieked, its scream ascending into shrill, barely audible sounds and finally into silence.

I set my foot to its neck and pulled my sword from its body in a swift, grating movement, bringing a course of thin blue fluid up the blood gutter.

I turned to see one of them envelop Dannelle's head, the outline of her face faintly visible through the veins and translucency of its enfolded wings. Swiftly she brought up her dagger, splitting the wing's leather. The creature shrieked and fluttered from her grasp, and Birgis leapt onto its back, grabbing its neck in those long, badger-breaking jaws and worrying it back and forth until it was limp and still.

Oliver and Ramiro drew their swords out of the third vespertile as blood streamed from the ragged cut on the big Knight's forehead. Their companions put to dagger and sword, the remaining monsters turned and scurried back into the darkness, some of them dragging ruined wings.

By the time I had caught my breath, Dannelle was already walking confidently to the foot of the formation as though someone had appointed her mountaineer. She tested its surface for holes, for shelves, for purchase.

"Just what do you have in mind, Dannelle?" I asked in my most commanding voice. She did not heed me. Up the rock face she scrambled, and though she was no monkey, no goat, but still a dazzling girl brought up in luxury, in social grace, she had managed somehow to become a more than adequate climber.

What was more, the view from below was certainly fetching. I marveled as I watched her ascend, the view as round and perfect as distant fruit, and as desperately out of reach.

For a moment, there was peace amid all this tumult and darkness.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Ramiro raised the lantern to provide a better view for the both of us. It was as if he had intruded, had parted a veil with his thick, meaty hands.

"You bring up the rear, Ramiro," I said coldly as I grasped the line Dannelle cast over the edge of the stone cascade. Staggering up the slippery rock, I left the intruder fuming behind me.

The corridor at the top extended endlessly into the darkness and rock, or so it seemed from a quick sweep of the lantern I carried up the rock face.

At first, there was no time to investigate nook and cranny as the two of us helped first a puffing Shardos to the mouth of the tunnel, and next Oliver, who was wrestling with a nervous and wriggling Birgis, wrapped quite securely and safely in a makeshift litter of cloth and rope.

Ramiro himself came last. We lowered the rope for him and steadied him as he swung frantically over the chamber below us. Finally his feet touched solid ground. He knelt, recovering breath and balance.

"I refuse to do that again," he announced, leaning against the tunnel wall.

Three or four tenebrals rushed by us on their way to the chamber we had just left behind.

As we stood between dangers, figuring the odds and the options, all of a sudden the passage ahead of us filled with light and noise. A dozen Plainsmen approached, Que-Tana from their markings, bearing torches and bows and spears. In the midst of them walked their leader, a tall dark-haired man, a diamond-shaped patch over his right eye.

He was older than any of the other Que-Tana I had seen, probably about Shardos's age, and he looked different from the others. His one good eye was smaller, lighter, and though he was pale by Plainsman standards, he was downright ruddy among this underground people. What was more, he had plentiful dark hair, beaded and locked like Longwalker's. Indeed, he looked like a very pale Plainsman-like a Que-Nara priest just recovering from a ghastly illness.

The crown he wore was silver and glowed with the deep violet light of the opals.

The grub-pale tenebrals flashed across the path of the Que-Tana, squeaking desolately as they burrowed into the darkness.

"Of all times to meet them," Ramiro muttered. "Our backs to a freak of nature and our faces to superior numbers. Our best hope lies in the blades of our swords when they close with us."

He smiled fiercely at me, drawing forth that long, double-edged monstrosity he handled like a carving knife.

"There's never been a time," he claimed, "when a Plainsman could hold his own against a Solamnic Knight in close quarters."

It was then that the rain of arrows began.

Clattering onto the stones around us, they came like a menacing avalanche. Under the direction of their leader, the Plainsmen aimed some five yards short of us, and volley after volley drew nearer and nearer, until Ramiro and I were forced to raise our shields above the party, forming a canopy of leather and metal over them.

It was all designed for terror's sake, this relentless barrage of arrows. Pinned down we clearly were, and in open terrain, and as far as I could figure it, at any moment they could have lowered their sights and riddled us with straighter and more deadly shots.

We extinguished our lantern at once, then huddled together, the five of us, shivering as though we were caught in a mountain blizzard.

"That does it!" I finally exclaimed, as yet another wave of arrows swept over us, jarring my hand on the shield. "Whatever befalls the rest of us, I'm finding a way out of this for Dannelle!"

"Indeed not!" the girl exclaimed bravely, but her voice quivered, and I could feel her tremble next to me. "By the gods, I can stand here with the best male among you!"

"Standing here is no real feat of courage, my dear," Shardos explained, his voice a trifle too high-pitched to be taken for calm. "I could guide you readily back the way we came, then send you for help. The only thing is that our visitors may still prove great fanged flies in the ointment."

I thought of the waiting, hungry vespertiles and shuddered.

"Well, then," Oliver announced with a sigh, reluctantly but fearlessly, as though it was his part only to rise from bed in the wee hours of a winter's morning. "Well, then, there should be a sword hand to secure the lass the length of the chamber below."

Ramiro and I looked foolishly at one another. As fortune would have it, at that moment, there came a lull in the shooting, and Oliver slipped from beneath the shields and raced toward the ledge and the lower cavern.

"No, Oliver!" shouted Dannelle. Shardos, turning, groped for the squire but came away clutching nothing as Oliver slid down a stalactite and into the chamber below us. It was too dark to see what was unfolding down there. I heard Oliver shout once from directly below the ledge, then again at a distance and once more at a still greater distance as he drew the giant bats away from the stalactites. Dannelle grasped my arm, and I took her hand. "You have no choice now," I said to her bluntly. "The boy is moving the monsters away to save you. You have no choice but to use the time he is buying to get to the surface, then hasten toward whatever help you can find us."

It was a fiction, and we both knew it. The help Dannelle went for would almost certainly arrive too late. And yet it was good to think about, that help, and with all of our thoughts upon it, at least we could act, could be busy at something when the enemy overwhelmed us in the dim caverns and the dim times. Meanwhile, my directions would surely take her back to Castle di Caela, to the safest place I knew in these troubled parts.

I placed her hand into Shardos's.

The rain of arrows began again as the juggler burst toward the ledge, shielding Dannelle's body with his own. In the half-light from the Plainsmen's torches, I saw the blind man lift an arm above the both of them and, when one or another arrow came too close, swat it from the air in an old juggler's movement that was remarkable and totally unexplainable. It was as though they passed through a downpour without getting wet.

Birgis trotted along merrily after his master, hugging to the safety of ledges and Shardos's cloak.

Dumbstruck, Ramiro and I watched all three of them slide over the ledge. Then we lifted our shields and followed to the lip of the tunnel.

Below me, I saw them blend into the darkness at the far end of the cavern, safely out of the reach of bowshot or vespertiles. Loudly to my right, Oliver shouted again and rushed back in our direction, one of the monsters not far behind him. The boy's intention, no doubt, was to climb the wall and join us. But there was something deceptive about the beast that pursued him, something as subtle as quicksilver and as shifting in form, for its speed propelled it faster by far than the movement of legs or hand, and we learned that at its most fleet, it surpassed the eye itself. The boy was halfway back to us when the vespertile turned and rushed him in a white blur.

Oliver screamed and raised his sword in desperation, but the big, sail-like wings were already covering him.

"No!" Ramiro and I cried out in unison, our eyes fixed to the terrible scene below us, to the vespertile lowering its face like some horrible lover to the boy's unprotected neck. The Que-Tana, shrewdly commanded, chose that moment to rush us, and as I watched the unspeakable fate of Oliver, a solid blow from a Plainsman quarterstaff struck me from behind, sending me skidding toward the ledge after the lantern, which dropped ahead of me, struck the stone ground, and shattered as I hurtled after it, clutching desperately for the ledge, for stalagmites, for anything, somehow righting myself so I managed to hit ground feetfirst but losing my sword and my sense of direction in the process.

Half-dazed, I sat against smooth stone, looking up toward the dodging torches at the high mouth of the tunnel. Above me, I heard the sounds of struggles-thrashing and wrestling and Ramiro bellowing-and here around me in the gibbering darkness, the high-pitched cries of the vesper-tiles.

Oliver moaned somewhere off to my left, and I heard the scraping sound of something monstrous moving across stone and rubble.

There was nothing I could do.

Whatever had happened to Oliver would happen next to me. There was no telling about Ramiro, whose curses grew more elaborate and powerful as he wrestled a dozen Que-Tana above me, nor about Shardos and Dannelle, whom I could only hope had escaped.

For a moment, I felt worse for my friends than for myself, even though I had brought them here.

Above me suddenly a shout burst out of the darkness. It was Ramiro, I was sure, and something in the shout spurred me to action, for there was no pain or panic in that cry. Instead, there was something like triumph.

There in the caves, where we all lay blinded, something above me was passing for hope.

My fingers moved into my pockets, past the nuisance of those old leather gloves, and closed thankfully over metal and reed.

I drew out the whistle-the old dog whistle that was a gift from Brithelm all those many years ago. What impelled me to blow it, I cannot say for sure: something in my childhood schooling, perhaps, or the way it had disturbed the tenebrals when I had used it to call Birgis before.

Whatever my reasons, Huma's dog whistle, as Brithelm and I had called it laughingly, shrilled its silent note through the caverns, and I heard strange, humanlike shrieks above and about me, and the sounds of scurrying, of rustling, of something running away, leaving us alone.

Soon Ramiro called my name down the cascade of wet stone, and I answered, and above was the glimmer of torchlight.

But here about me, the silence was deep, complete. It was like some blackness before the world began, like there was simply nothing here but nothing.

Ramiro stood at the lip of the ledge above me, flanked by a handful of Que-Tana. From behind this little tableau rose a voice I had heard only once before yet remembered clearly. It had come to my ears on that day that seemed years ago, when the quake rocked Castle di Caela and I looked into the opals of my brooch and spoke to an apparition.

"You may rest now, Sir Galen," the voice said, and within it, I heard the desolate rush of wind over a lifeless plain. "You may rest now. Your long journey is over. Welcome to the Kingdom of Firebrand, the country of the Que-Tana."

One of the Plainsmen dropped a torch into the gloom beside me, and the cavern took on shape and dimension in an elusive light. I was uncovered, and four of the Que-Tana above me leveled their bows and gazed at me coldly down the shafts of their nocked, barbed arrows.

They lowered a rope then, and I climbed up to join my captive companion, all the while under the sharp sights of the bowmen.

Halfway up the cascade, I looked behind me, over Oliver's pathetically broken body, to the opening at far end of the cavern, through which Shardos and Dannelle had passed in their rush to escape.

The brooch glowed in my hand. Soon it would pass into the hand of our dreadful host. I looked deep into the stones. There I saw Longwalker, camped in the hills miles above us, staring calmly and resolutely into the stones he carried. Then Bayard, lost somewhere in rock-hewn walls, propped on the shoulders of Brandon and my father, moving in ominous torchlight.

I saw a darker vision yet, in which some large, snakelike creature coiled within shadow and slate, its length extending across the continent and his ageless sleep shallow now, and restless.

"Tellus the dale worm," I breathed. "What was it Longwalker said? 'It bears all Solamnia upon its back'?"

But that vision faded, too, and finally I saw my brother Brithelm, somewhere in a room of towering shelves, reading alone and undisturbed by candlelight, those absurd triangular spectacles on his nose.

The stones winked out like stars behind a cloud, and I was afraid then-afraid for the chieftain that my incompetence had betrayed, and for a brother whom I had failed to rescue. I feared for my friends and father, drawn underground and in obvious peril, and most of all for the innocent Dannelle di Caela, whom unknowingly I had sent to find them.

For all of these, I was dreadfully sorry, and whatever Firebrand could devise seemed slight punishment at the moment.

"May the gods speed them," I whispered as I continued to climb. Strong, pale hands clutched my forearms and dragged me up into Firebrand's presence. "May the gods speed all of them, all of us."