Galen Beknighted

Chapter XIX

While Bayard and his followers huddled in rubble and fear deep beneath the foundations of Castle di Caela, Dannelle was riding south into the highlands, barely atop the game little palfrey that Longwalker had brought her.

She rode homeward, traveling through the night, uncertain of what she would find when she got there and even more uncertain as to what she would do about it.

She was a comical sight. A young woman scarcely out of her teens, scarcely five feet tall, her hood blown back by the brisk wind and the wild ride, her red hair billowing behind her like a banner.

It was like something from a painting, from a legend or romantic myth, if it were not for the dog behind her on the horse. For Birgis rode with Dannelle, tethered to her back like a Plainsman baby, though the creature weighed nearly as much as the girl herself.

His long snout rested on her shoulder. His tongue dangled blissfully as he tasted the air and reveled in the wind passing over his face.

"It's all beyond my understanding," Dannelle said over the sound of wind and hoofbeats, her only listener the dog draped over her shoulder, his short front legs braced on either side of her neck. He closed his dark eyes and grumbled in her ear. "Beyond my understanding why a strapping old veteran like Longwalker can't gather up his charges and descend on the whole bunch of them down in that warren. I'll bet you he could come back with Galen and Brithelm and Ramiro and leave a lot of smoke in his wake."

She paused a moment, blushing because she was talking to a dog. Birgis sniffed her neck serenely, his long, badger-breaking snout poked seriously under her chin.

"All this talk of ban and bane and cannot lift a hand! Why, the Plainsmen out-Solamnic Solamnics with their promises and posturing."

Birgis snorted and whuffed. It seemed to Dannelle di Caela that he was answering her, saying, "You are right, Dannelle. You are right, and there is salt on your ears."

The girl snorted, too, as Birgis licked her. She nodded her head and flicked the reins, and the palfrey quickened to a gallop on a smooth downhill slope extending for miles into the Vingaard foothills, leaving behind the bare and rocky terrain.

Down into greenery the girl rode, past the spot where, days or years ago-things happened so fast and so far underground she was unsure of time-she and Galen and the others had met the troll on the road.

"It's like forever ago, Birgis, no matter how long it has been by calendar or clock," she mused, and they rode quickly past, the dainty hooves of the pony flinging turf and mud behind them now. "And now the clock has begun to move again-now that I have to ride for help and all. And you know, it's like that clock is making up for lost time, because Galen's in danger and so the hours are shorter and shorter still."

She looked into Birgis's muzzle, and he licked her nose solemnly.

"Oh, and the others, too, Birgis!" she corrected, "though I expect that of all of them, your master Shardos can take care of himself. It's just that Galen… he… means too much to me."

They rode together in silence, and the road seemed to be turning east, though it was hard to tell under the moonlight.

"The one thing that troubles me about all of this," Dannelle confessed as they left the highlands and descended onto the still soggy plains of Solamnia, "is that I haven't the first idea what we shall do when we get to the castle "

Birgis yawned colossally at Dannelle's shoulder. Resolutely she clicked her tongue at the pony beneath her. It was galloping gamely now, stretched far beyond its usual duties as a lady's or child's mount.

Nor was Dannelle aware when the gait of the little horse changed, began to waver and tire. The resting and watering and airing of animals had always been the groom's job, or on long trips the job of the man escorting her. It had been Dannelle di Caela's job to order those men about.

The first she noticed of the palfrey's distress was when the animal slowed to a trot, then a walk, then stopped and refused to move.

The three of them were like a tableau, standing there below the blue fragrant branches of a huge aeterna tree: the stubborn, winded palfrey, the angry young woman, and the dog who sniffed the branches above him for squirrels, unconcerned by the conflict between horse and rider.

"Damn!" she shouted, rifling her saddlebags for a whip or crop or spurs, none of which were to be found since, after all, a Plainsman saddled the horse. Finally, disconsolate and immobile, the girl scrambled out of the saddle, staggered under the heavy dog on her back, slipped in the mud, and fell facefirst in a heap, clutching frantically at the reins that dangled above her head.

Birgis licked the mud from her ear, snorted, and nodded off to sleep atop her. No doubt he dreamed of rabbits, of scraps under a table in a great and generous hall.

Propping herself up on her elbows, Dannelle muttered an oath famous among infantrymen regarding cavalry horses and their imagined ancestry. It was not a pretty phrase. Galen would be astonished to know that she even knew such words, much less that she found occasion to use them. Even Birgis stirred at the sound of it, his hackles rising at its venom and anger.

"This is a sorry excuse for a rescue," she confessed and started to rise, but the weight of the relaxed dog held her down.

When the tremors around Castle di Caela had caved in part of the underground labyrinth and trapped Sir Bayard and his followers, there were others who fared better for the disruption.

The engineers, for example, exhausted with inspections and miffed at being sent back to the surface by the liege lord, had agreed to take the afternoon off and, having hauled a barrel of Thorbardin Eagle into their quarters on the ground floor of the Cat Tower, rode out the quake in singing and the swapping of lies, and none worried about anything for several days afterward.

Then, of course, there was Carnifex, Sir Robert di Caela's celebrated stallion.

In the close confinement of the castle stables, the big animal had been restrained by his own size. Where a smaller beast could turn in its stall and find purchase for bucking or kicking, Carnifex was forced to settle for standing there, shifting his weight, and contemplating the biting of passing grooms.

That is, until the quake rocked the grounds, shaking the door of the stall off its hinges.

It was as though he had planned what followed for years, rehearsed it in his imaginings and refined it to a brutal economy of three swift movements. Smoothly the big horse stepped from the stall, backed toward the door of the stable, and with one resounding kick, the whole damned means of access-lock and bolt and thick board-erupted in splinters across the rain-soaked courtyard.

The grooms outside the stable froze, as though they had been caught in some capital theft. Carnifex turned again and cantered out of the hay-smelling darkness, snorting and nodding, his black eyes glittering.

The four young men assigned to the livery did not look back until they were safely up stairs or ladders and shivering atop the battlements, braving tremor and misstep and rusty or frayed ladder in the process of climbing.

One of the young fools scaled the west wall by the chain of the drawbridge. The boy was clinging to the latticework above the great gate when Carnifex backed up to it and, like some powerful walking siege engine, subjected the thick oaken portal to the same deadly motion with which he had dismantled the entrance to the stables.

"Whoa, 'Fexy boy! Geel Haw! Settle down…" the groom began weakly. Then he gritted his teeth as the great door splintered below him, and Carnifex was through and into the moat, whinnying and breasting the thick water with an almost lunatic calm, stepping out on the far side dripping stagnant water and moss, then striding into the Solamnic distances at a full gallop, erasing the world under his long, effortless strides.

"It's just as well," the boy mused as the big stallion galloped away, a red shape dwindling into a speck on the western horizon. "You was always too fierce for the keeping."

Of course they had to meet. It is the way of adventures and of stories.

Only a few hours passed before the jubilantly free Carnifex, capering across the wet lowlands, came to a stand of blue aeterna where rested a strange, swearing, ten-legged entanglement of girl and pony and dog. He stopped, whether in confusion or curiosity, or simply to catch his breath.

And the muddied girl wobbled out of the puddle and walked toward him, a large, ungainly, and oddly dry dog strapped to her back.

"You are what brought me here," Dannelle said to the stallion. "No. Not you, as much as it was knowing you were there that caused all the problems."

She fumbled with the elaborate network of ties and straps and knots by which Longwalker had bound her and Birgis together.

"For all the times I have said to my Uncle Robert that I was bound and determined to ride you, I suppose I never thought that the chance would come and the options would narrow to the point that I could do nothing else but ride you."

Birgis growled over her shoulder, a lazy, short-lived growl with little or no conviction. Slowly the girl approached Carnifex, lifting her hand.

"You were much less… daunting in the wish world."

She stretched across uncertainties of space, her fingers flexing, extending. Finally she stroked the long, threatening, velvety muzzle.

"They say you run faster in flesh than you run in the legends," she mused. "That words cannot surround the speed of your coming and going."

Her hand was at his withers now.

"You must prove to be faster than words, my Carnifex. You must prove to be faster than time and catastrophe."

With graceful indirection, as though she were approaching a viper, Dannelle sidled to the great horse's flank, and in one strenuous vault, straddled the back of the steed never mounted, never bridled or saddled.

It astonished the both of them. For a moment, Carnifex planted himself solidly in the middle of the muddy road, his ears pricked and his eyes wide in his stiffened, high-borne head.

Then, beyond his own expectation, and certainly beyond that of Dannelle, the big horse turned and galloped toward the castle, the strides lengthening until Dannelle felt as though the two of them hovered above the drowned land itself and a hundred miles had collapsed into one.

"Ride him," muttered a voice at her ear. Or "Ride him" she thought she heard in the hoofbeats and rush of the wind.

But there at her shoulder was Birgis only, his eyes closed and his nose tucked into her hair.

There was neither rest nor movement beneath the cellars of Castle di Caela. Bayard and the Knights picked through rubble in a futile search for the buried Gileandos, coming up instead with a boot and a pair of spectacles and shards of a ceramic flask that carried upon it the faint but unmistakable odor of gin.

They gave up soon, with leaden and downcast faces. The tutor was never a favorite of any of them, especially Andrew, who knew the old man best of all. Nonetheless, there was a real reluctance to their leavetaking-especially to Bayard, who felt that Gileandos was in some way his responsibility.

"'Tis all we can do, Sir Bayard," Sir Robert consoled, laying a bracing hand on the commander's shoulder. "The next order of business is finding us another way out, if there's one to be found."

"Oh, but that's not it at all, Robert," Bayard protested, turning his reddened eyes toward the older man, both of them dappled in shadows by the wavering light from the lantern young Raphael held. "The next order of business is to keep the worm from turning. It is as simple as that. And now that I cannot send the rest of you back, it's all of us down to the heart of these tunnels, if that is where we find the Scorpion's device."

They were all silent at the thought of the dread mechanism. It had lurked in their worst imaginations for a day now-perhaps two days, for the hours bent and broke in the unchanging subterranean darkness. Each of them, no doubt, had an elaborate, monstrous machine in mind, whistling and rumbling and flinging sparks and oil like a gnomish nightmare.

On the other hand, Bayard remembered the Scorpion well and knew that no device he had fashioned would be a loud dramatic thing. Or if it was loud, it was only to call the wrong attentions to the wrong places. The one cog or gear or mechanism that seemed to run all the others could in fact be nonessential-even irrelevant-and to the last the trouble would be where you least expected it.

"Wherever it is to be found," Bayard offered, "the one way we can go is farther down the tunnel. Brandon?"

He extended his arm, and the young Knight slipped beneath it, offering himself once more as a crutch for the older man. Slowly the party began to collect itself.

Enid glided to the other side of her husband, the lamp-carrying Raphael in tow.

Muttering something about mulish nieces, Sir Robert pushed the hefty, reluctant Marigold into the marching order behind the bunched Brightblades and their escort. Only Sir Andrew tarried, sinking into the darkness as the others turned into the corridor and became a fading light in the distance.

"Damn you, Gileandos!" he whispered. "If you hadn't been fool enough to get yourself buried…"

He spun on his heels and strode off to join the party.

"I'd give you the moathouse if you'd only had the sense to come out alive!" he muttered.

Somewhere a million years beneath them, where distances tie themselves together and height and depth are swallowed in darkness, the big god stirred.

He is only a hundred yards from the Scorpion's device, this Brightblade, Sargonnas thought, and a gust of stagnant air smelling of stone and carnage buoyed him to a higher level of the darkness. Only a hundred yards.

There was something in the huge raptor's eye of the god that wavered for a moment. If you were to see it in a human eye, you would recognize it as misgiving, but a god is not accustomed to misgive, and the wavering soon subsided, dispersing like smoke into the Abyss around him.

A hundred yards or a hundred miles, Sargonnas mused. It is all the same when one proceeds in the wrong direction.

He hummed contentedly, and a glaze of ice formed at the rim of the Abyss.

Within the hour, despite Enid's better judgment and the urgings of the older Knights, Bayard had led the party even farther below the foundations of Castle di Caela. The tunnel now widened into a huge, vaulted hall littered with stalagmites and stalactites, both upright and broken, glistening yellow in the light of the lanterns.

Brandon gasped under Bayard's arm and stopped suddenly. Sir Robert, plodding along absently behind them, walked straight into their backs before Enid could stop him. All three men jostled, started…

Then stood still, looking down into the crevasse not a yard in front of them. A narrow bridge of rock, scarcely a toot wide, spanned the yawning gap in front of them and led away into the thick and climbing gloom.

They could not see the bottom of the pit in front of them. Sir Robert picked up a small fragment of limestone and tossed it into the darkness.

The sound returned with surprising speed, for the fragment dropped quickly into the bottom chasm. It was not thirty feet deep.

Then why," Bayard asked aloud what they all were asking to themselves. "Why does it seem so bottomless?"

All of them looked into the crevasse, seeing only a short way into its abiding darkness.

The room felt palpably colder. Somewhere in the distance, near the other side of the stone catwalk, there was a faint whirring sound, like a distant chorus of cicadas. Bayard squinted toward the source of the noise but saw nothing.

"It is the device, sir," Brandon stated matter-of-factly, shielding his eyes against the lantern light and peering across the breadth of the chamber. "By the gods, it could be nothing other."

"I… I am afraid that the light in Raphael's hand has blinded me momentarily, Brandon," Bayard said, flushing. "Would you be so kind as to describe the device in question? I mean, for the benefit of those behind us."

"It's… it's… glittering, shining, crafted of metal, I believe," the young man ventured, "though it is impossible to tell at this distance. No doubt of dwarven make, to have survived this long in the dampness of these caverns."

"Of dwarven make, you say?" Sir Andrew huffed, joining the other Knights at the lip of the mysterious chasm. "How can you tell from fifty yards?"

"A hundred yards," Brandon corrected. "And 1 cannot tell. My eyes aren't as good as they were when I was a boy."

Andrew and Bayard glanced at one another, hiding embarrassed smiles.

Brandon smiled himself, shook his head.

"Then again, I'm quite the one for 'dwarven make' and 'cunningly wrought,' aren't I, gentlemen? As if the blasted thing is not fabulous enough just being down here."

"Go on, Brandon," Sir Robert urged. "Describe the apparatus. This is no time to come down with a case of self-knowledge."

Brandon Rus snorted in amusement.

"Well…" he began again, his eyes intent on the veiled shadows as the older men hung on his arm and words. "There are concentric circles on the thing. Not unlike an archer's butt."

For the first time, Marigold showed an interest in the conversation. Facedown in a bag of silks and cosmetics, her hair newly fashioned into the shape of a sailing ship, she looked up in passionate curiosity. "Whose butt?" she asked innocently.

"'Tis only an archer's term for a target, Cousin Marigold," Enid explained curtly, never lifting her eyes from the murk beyond the huddled party.

"Oh." Somewhat disappointed, the big woman sank back into contemplating her sundries.

"Or like an eye," Brandon continued. "Indeed, quite like an eye. About the target is an old stone painting, that of the scorpion who swallows his tail, the circle and cycle of life, as the old legends have it." His voice rose in excitement at the mythology. "It is the center of the thing that draws your attention, though. Within those concentric circles there is a dark, immoveable center, a darkness next to which the surrounding blackness is gray, almost light."

"As if it led into absolute nothing," Bayard murmured. Brandon nodded. "As it well may, sir, what little I can make out."

He turned, regarding Bayard directly.

"Whatever it is," Bayard observed, "it becomes more dangerous by the hour. It is set here to waken the worm, on that I'd wager. But as to how it will do so I can only guess."

Enid took her husband's hand, as though she was about to guide him through unfathomable dark.

"Well, why in the name of the twenty-seven gods are we prissing here at the edge of this inch-deep chasm like a flock of embroiderers," thundered Sir Robert, "when we could see to our liking if one of us had the simple fortitude to take a closer look?"

And holding high a brightly glowing lantern, he stepped forward onto the footbridge, marching securely toward the sound ahead of him.

"Wait!" Bayard cried, reaching for the rash old man. But his leg gave beneath him and he started to fall, pulling Brandon with him. Sir Robert took ten steps, and fell suddenly from view as the rock gave way beneath him. Clutching the lantern, he tumbled in the dark like a small subterranean shooting star.

"Father!" Enid shouted and stepped to the rippling edge of the chasm.

"Be still, all of you!" Bayard cried out and, steadying himself against Brandon, grabbed for his wife and held her.

Behind them, Marigold trumpeted in dismay.

"Uncle Robert has vanished with my sausages!" she exclaimed. "If we are trapped, I'll starve!"

Icily Enid stared at her most distant cousin as all about them, the men flinched involuntarily.

'Then I can only suggest you lower yourself into whatever lies in front of us, Marigold," Enid said through teeth impossibly clenched, "and retrieve them, casings and gristle and all. And do try to rescue my father if you can find the time."

But Marigold had anticipated her. Already she was waist-deep in the chasm, lowering herself into the whirling darkness with the ungainly grace of a manatee. Soon the big girl had nearly vanished, complete with bag of cosmetics, as the lacquered ship of her hair sank into the murky country below them.

Sir Robert di Caela lay spread-eagled on a stone table, wondering how by all the gods it had managed to cushion his fall.

Even the light in the lantern was intact.

It was welcome to Robert, this sense of his life being spared. Instantly he felt younger-thirty or forty years younger, at least as young as he felt when, as a lean and dangerous swordsman, he traveled east from Solamnia, joining a band of Knights in the Khalkist Mountains, at a little pass called Chaktamir.

It was a feeling he had almost forgotten in the habits of his old age.

Robert breathed the gray mist eagerly. It was cool, harboring the clear blue smell of ozone and imminent water, as though, beyond all possibility, this chasm lay somewhere under the sea.

Was it a shipwreck around him? Robert squinted, struggled to his feet for a better view.

Above him there were shouts, as though all of his companions were speaking to him through blankets. Someone was descending. No doubt they were concerned for his well-being.

Which is better than it has been in decades, he thought with a smile.

About him, the landscape was littered with glass and barrel staves. A sour smell rose on the charged air, reminding him of centaurs, of singing.

What were the words of the song?

As hungry as a dwarf for gold, As centaurs for cheap wine.

It was a wine cellar, or the remnants of one. Robert waded slowly through the rubble. At first, he leaned against a broken-down wine rack. Slowly he examined himself for bruises or breakage. Shadows swirled above him, and a form descended through the tumbling dark until he could make out its girth and its shape and its absurd hair.

"Marigold!" he breathed in exasperation.

Robert felt his own ancient limbs. He was surprisingly intact. For a moment, he thought there might be some restoring magic to this cellar.

What seemed to have happened was that the cellar had dropped. From its previous site at the base of the Cat Tower, where a single flight of stairs had led from the light of the surface down no more than twenty feet to the finest wines in southern Solamnia, the cellar had tumbled, wine racks and barrels and all, into these depths.

Fragments of glass, covered with old wine, stuck to the soles of his boots. Nothing was intact here.

It must have fallen hundreds of feet, he thought. Almost by reflex, he looked above him, as if from this depth and this darkness, not to mention through the mist, he could see the walls of the cellar, left hanging when the floor dropped into the earth.

A clay pipe jutted from the floor beside him, rising out of sight into the darkness. But there, where pipe met floor and seemed to disappear into the rock, lay an enormous clay shield, gnomish letters inscribed on its circumference.

The well cap!" Robert exclaimed in delight. "The cellar must have fallen through onto the damned thing!"

The well cap was cracked and moldy. Water seeped from the crack, and beneath its strained surface, Robert could hear the rumble of the mighty well.

This is a chamber of miracles, he thought triumphantly. Now losing the castle papers rests more easily on these poor old shoulders.

He looked up toward Marigold-still descending- toward his other companions, prepared to trumpet his discovery.

Someone-Brandon? Bayard? — signaled frantically. There was something dreadfully wrong up there.

Then Robert heard the yowling issue from the fissure walls. He looked about him and saw over a dozen slick white things as they crawled, orange-eyed and hissing, from the rubble and the dust and from notches and holes in the stone.

"Mariel's cats!" he marveled. "By the gods, I was right!"

But this was no time for congratulating himself. Quickly he drew his sword and crouched, lantern held high in his left hand, his seasoned blade low in his other, but far too light to an experienced hand.

He looked down. His sword was broken.

Enid watched from above as the white forms crept closer to her father, wavering and wailing.

"What in the name of Hiddukel-" Andrew began.

"Enough speculation," Brandon announced flatly. "I'm going to kill them."

The first bolt from the bow sailed through the rippling mist and pinned one of the things to an overturned barrel. It screamed like a child, that shrill, rending sound of something skidding across glass. Two of the others lunged toward it, reducing it to bone with quick, ravenous tearing and chewing.

Brandon started. He moved away from the edge of the fissure, as though the ground he stood upon had become suddenly too hot.

"Get back here, damn you!" Enid said through clenched teeth, clutching the young Knight's arm. "Killing one doesn't stop the rest of them!"

Robert straddled the well cap, crouched in an old Solamnic battle stance. The cats flitted about him, between barrel and table and crate. He could not keep track of them, but the two that were feeding he could see quite clearly.

They were pale, hairless, with the skin of a grub or a rat's tail. Their ears were large, cupped, batlike, their orange eyes bulbous, too large.

Also too large were the fangs, as though lost in the subterranean darkness, the creatures had reverted to old generations, to the saber-toothed cats whose skulls miners and gravediggers found on occasion.

One of the creatures burst from a hole in the crevasse wall and hit the floor in stride, rushing at Robert, who raised the lantern in front of it.

The cat thing slowed, bent its path around the old Knight, and ran full tilt into the stone wall with a wet, crackling sound.

Robert looked once, looked away, then looked back. It had killed itself through its own momentum.

At once one of the cats was on the old man's left arm, biting, rending, burning in the white light of the lantern. With a quick, painful move, Robert broke the grip of the thing, hurling it across the room. It tumbled into a wine rack, then, dazed, scooted off into the dark.

Unfortunately, the lantern, too, went flying from Robert's hand as he fell. It clattered onto a shelf, rocked there for a moment, its wick sputtering, and then- miraculously-remained lit.

"Thanks be to Huma," Robert breathed, then looked to his damaged hand as the cats circled slowly.

And unaware of the danger below her, Marigold set foot on the floor of the chamber.

They looked like ghosts from her vantage of height. Like phosfire or moonlight rippling on gray water.

And yet they are substantial, Enid thought. Brandon's bow had shown us that.

Substantial and fierce, for the one who latched itself to her father's arm had emerged from the shadows and weaved about him with the rest of its kind.

There were more of the things every time Enid looked. Though Brandon had fired again and again, dropping creature after creature with his flawless aim, it seemed that at least one more came to take the place of each one that fell.

She shook her head as Brandon fired again, the bolt passing through two of the screeching things below him. As for Robert…

Robert di Caela had stretched his injured hand toward the boiling rock beneath him, felt warmth, uncomfortable warmth and wetness, and drew his hand back.

Now up with the sword hand he reached, touching the hilt of the broken sword to the swimming surface of the rock. Across the floor, Marigold approached him, her skirts lifted, the square-sailed vessel nodding atop her head. One of the cats broke out of the darkness, rushed at her madly, then balked at her heft and her withering stare. It seemed that even starvation and generations of inbreeding had not deprived the animal of its most basic instincts of survival.

Robert snorted in amusement, scooted himself against the cap, which was warm but not uncomfortable against his back. The way up the rock face lay ironically at a distance over Marigold's shoulder, the cat-things milling behind her.

Soon they would have the numbers.

Wearily Robert drew up his gauntlets from where they dangled by a rawhide cord at his belt. He put on the iron-studded gloves, wincing painfully as the leather pressed against cut and blister.

I am beyond rescue, he thought. Even if Brandon and Bayard rise to their highest heroics, they cannot possibly get to me in time. And so these gauntlets, which will be better than bare hands when Mariel's cats close in.

He smiled and braced himself, and as the lantern dimmed, he silently prepared himself for Huma's breast.

Above Sir Robert di Caela, things unraveled steadily. His friends looked on as the floor of the chasm milled with white, larval creatures.

"What is going on down there?" Bayard muttered with a rising fury. He had been picking up stones, heavier and heavier, and dropping them upon the flitting pale things below him. Now, winded and clutching at his leg, he leaned against Sir Andrew, his eyesight spangling with pain.

Turning from Bayard and Andrew, Enid looked desperately to her father. He leaned against the well cap, smiling grimly, resolutely, as Marigold approached him and stood beside him bravely, giving but one sidelong glance to the possibly fatal sausages she had come to retrieve. Meanwhile, the white hissing things crawled nearer.

As Enid watched, the air seemed to go white about her, and for a moment, she reeled unsteadily at the edge of the chasm.

It was Raphael who reached her first, but he lacked the weight to pull her back from the ledge. Together, locked by the arms, the two of them hovered over the gray and pooling darkness. An eager chittering rose from the swarming things below them.

And Brandon Rus's strong arm closed about the boy, dragging the two of them to safety.

For a moment, the three of them, Brandon and Raphael, with Enid atop them both, lay in a shivering heap on the solid stone of the ledge. Bayard and Andrew rushed to them, lifting the woman to her feet as Brandon scrambled up.

"Where… Father!" Enid shouted at once, broke from Sir Andrew's grip, and rushed back to the edge of the fissure. For a moment, Raphael, lying on his stomach, looked up and became furious as he saw her totter again, saw all his courage and risk about to amount to nothing.

Then she gained balance, squinted, and looked to the far edge of the cellar.

A light was spreading across Robert's face.

Four days ago, when he had sat half-dozing in the castle infirmary, watching as the servants danced attendance about his son-in-law and the engineers fretted in their oily sobriety, there was something… something…

"For the great well," they had said, "that lies under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, is no doubt brimming and bubbling in deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave us awash in our own cistern."

And what, indeed, might this humming crack in the well cap beside him be but deliverance?

Robert laughed as Marigold swatted away one of the cats who hurtled at her and at Sir Robert's knapsack.

Well, then, Sir Robert thought. This might be a chamber of miracles, after all! And mustering his strength, he drove the hilt of his sword solidly against the crack in the casement.

Not even old Sir Andrew had seen its like. Water surged forth into the fissure like a deluge, and before he could even begin to strip off his armor, Sir Robert found himself knee-deep in a warm sulfurous tide from the artesian well.

He caught himself, rose suddenly from idleness, and slipped off Marigold's knapsack and his breastplate.

Around him, white spectral forms scurried into the cracks of the rocks, screeching and yowling. Whatever they had become through the years and the permanent darkness, Mariel's cats were still cat enough to harbor a healthy fear of water.

Now, stripped to a linen tunic, Sir Robert rose with the water, looking once beneath him to see if Marigold was following. The lantern went out as the water reached its shelf, but in his last glimpse of the girl, he saw her neck-deep, straining to remove her knapsack of cosmetics, wedged between two solid rocks.

Robert caught his breath and tried to swim for her, but the light was gone and he could no longer locate her. Instead, his lungs burning and his muscles cramping, he treaded water, floating toward the faint light above him until, as bereft of worldly goods as a man can be without being completely naked, Sir Robert di Caela rose to the surface of the fissure, where Brandon's strong arms reached out and dragged him onto the stone.

"Marigold?" he gasped as the waters continued to rise, reaching the edge of the crevasse and brimming over. Painfully Robert gained his footing and stood beside his friends and family. Enid embraced her bedraggled father, and Bayard lifted high the lantern he was holding, its light fracturing on the surface of the rising water.

Five minutes they waited. Then ten.

Then, in the middle of the newly formed underground lake, a yellow lacquered schooner broke the surface of the water, floating absurdly at a middle distance atop the drowned, mountainous girl, who clutched her bag of cosmetics in a terrible grip that would no doubt last forever.

"The device, sir!" Brandon muttered, his voice uneasy and puzzled.

"What of it?" Bayard asked impatiently, staring across the rocking surface of the pool. The darkness swirled and congealed, permitting no vision.

"The device, sir. It remains unchecked for all this water and commotion."

Slowly, Bayard slid from the young Knight's grip and knelt on the pooling floor of the cavern.

They had lost Marigold and gained in return less time in which to figure out the workings of whatever machinery lay across the fissure in the blackness. Disconsolately, Bayard lifted his eyes and stared into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of the thing he needed to see.

"If it can't be seen, it can't be managed," he murmured.

And below him and above him-indeed on all sides of him and somehow, unexplainably, even within him-a low rumbling rose, as though the whole subterranean world was laughing.