Galen Beknighted

Chapter XX

Now calmly, almost reverently, the Namer set a dark stone in a notch of the circlet. He set another, and again one more. Soon six stones lay in a glimmering field, and the Namer continued, setting and naming.

"There are all kinds of traps," he said, and his listeners shifted uneasily and looked about.

The vaulted room wherein Ramiro and I found ourselves was lined with nearly empty shelves, littered only with an occasional ledger, scroll, or manuscript. Leather volumes sat precariously high out of reach, their spines scrawled with lines and patterns that were either some incredibly random form of decoration or an indecipherable alphabet. Some were moldy from the ever-present damp.

It made Gileandos's library look small and shabby. What was more, since the leather was regularly oiled on most bindings, I gathered that these volumes had been read at one time or another, unlike those we had back home in the moathouse, which our tutor had collected for their thickness and mustiness and ponderous-sounding titles.

Under Gileandos's tutelage, I had never been all that much of a book lover, so for me, these volumes, too, were just interior decoration. Far more to my interest were the Que-Tana themselves, the dreadfully pale creatures who glided in and out of the room on obscure duties.

They were not much more attractive in daily activity than they were as hillside assailants. They were sort of blue-skinned, with bulbous eyes and sparse waxen hair-at first glance, more like exotic tubers than humans. Their speech was indecipherable when they addressed each other, though it sounded, as you might expect, faintly like the language Longwalker had spoken to his followers, full of hard consonants and little breathing. Yet it was no longer Que-Nara Plainsman that was spoken, but a darker tongue, filled with enormous silences and echoes and deep watery vowels that rose from the depths of the throat.

I heard the same music in their common speech when they spoke to us, their fluency drawn into the dark undertow of their subterranean accents. I thought of hot springs and geysers.

Quite abruptly, the business and noise around me died down. Adorned more formally, with beads and necklaces and carrying a tall hooked staff, Firebrand himself approached me from the far end of the porch.

"I trust you have been made comfortable?" he asked, pulling a reed chair to my bedside and seating himself.

Ramiro sidled casually within earshot. The Que-Tana, on the other hand, moved quickly away before the man was seated, attending shyly to some task on the other side of the room.

"Oh, as comfortable as can be expected," I answered in common speech.

"I see," Firebrand replied. "I fear there's little I can do regarding either your departed brother or the vespertiles, but perhaps we can see to it that your… remaining brother is restored to you."

"It would be about time," I said. "A whole day and a half we've been confined here, by my reckoning. And after all, my brother's release was the deal we struck through the opals."

Firebrand gestured dramatically, and through the door strode Brithelm, as disheveled as ever, but looking all right considering kidnap and submergence. Brithelm smiled amiably, bumped into a lectern, and sent rolls of parchment flying about him.

"Excuse me," he murmured, as Plainsmen rushed to retrieve the skittering rolls. Brithelm bent over, picked up one leaf of a manuscript, and scanned it as he walked to a sconce on the wall to get some light firmly at his back.

"Brithelm!" I shouted. "Thank the gods you're alive!"

He lifted his eyes from the page in front of him, and stared reverently toward the rock ceiling of the room.

"I thank the twenty-one gods that I am alive," he pronounced solemnly and returned to his reading.

"History!" he exclaimed delightedly. "My favorite!"

A young woman, her patience stretched beyond restraint, snatched the paper from his hand.

"Does it just go on and on about architecture?" Brithelm asked her disappointedly. "When I read history, I do love a good sword fight!"

"Well, then," Firebrand broke in, his fingers twitching with impatience. "About the deal we struck. As I recall, you have something to hand over to me, Sir Galen." He leaned forward, his dark hair spreading over his face, covering dark brow and leather eye patch and burning solitary eye.

I stood my ground. We had come to a place where neither fear nor courage made any difference. Firebrand had us- my brother, Ramiro, and me-and he would do whatever he wanted, regardless of my cowardice or bravado.

"As I understand," I replied, "you have waited centuries for what I bring you. Wait but a while longer, while I greet my brother."

I had no time for further words: Brithelm was on me, glad-handing me, thumping my back, and saying over and over again how happy he was that I had "dropped in for a visit."

His happiness, of course, made it clear that he had not heard about Alfric. But this was hardly the time for telling him. The way I had it figured, he stood to lose another brother in the coming hours.

"Actually, Galen," Brithelm said into the fresh silence as the Que-Tana drew near us and listened, "there's little else to do down here besides read and answer Firebrand's many questions."

"Many… questions?" I asked, looking over my brother's shoulder into the menacing eye of our captor.

"I trust, Sir Galen, that the… amenities have ended," he said coldly, an edge of anger in his voice. He extended his hand, palm up, and the air about us was charged, incandescent.

Slowly, reluctantly, I handed him the brooch. He trembled briefly and sighed when it lay in his hand. His Que-Tana bodyguards closed in a tight circle around him, their black eyes fierce and expectant. Ramiro, reclining all this time on a cot, rose to his feet and stood by me, looming.

"Now," I said as Firebrand lifted the brooch to the light, examining it ecstatically, "there is the matter of our leaving…"

"You have seen one another again, have you not?" he asked gruffly, his eye never leaving the glittering opals. "That is all I promised, if I remember correctly."

"Why, you mountebank of a…" Ramiro began, but the presence of a dozen glaring bodyguards rendered him discrete and silent.

Lowering the brooch and pinning it delicately to the shoulder of his robe, as smoothly and effortlessly as a woman prepares her jewelry for a banquet, Firebrand fixed his eye on me, regarding me directly. An ironic smile flickered across his face.

"You would make none too good a lawyer… Weasel, isn't it?" he asked playfully. "Oh, yes, I know all of that business, for the stones in my crown allowed me to watch you finagle your way about that little backwater castle as you came into knighthood. You were better as a weasel, lad, with your slyness and gutter smarts. If you had left Brithelm where he was, had backed off from your foolhardy venture while you had the chance, you'd still have another brother in the Bright Lands. Indeed, you'd still have years ahead of you."

He paused, rolling the staff in his dark hand.

"As it is, the years compress into minutes, and the Pathwardens themselves dwindle rapidly. I expect that your father back in Solamnia will think little of that honor of yours when he measures it against the lives of three sons and the death of his name."

I started to answer him, but the words fled down a dark corridor, leaving me alone and speechless and downright miserable, knowing that beneath all Solamnic show and glitter, my father's heart would agree with this villain, that through the years remaining for the old man, a part of him would hate me for my high-minded stupidity, for the chivalry that cost him all his heirs. Firebrand stared at me and nodded, assured that his words had drawn the deepest blood.

"I'll take him for you, lad, entourage or not!" Ramiro whispered at my shoulder.

I shook my head disconsolately as the captor's words continued to sink and settle.

"Hardly the talk of a philosopher-king, Master Namer!" another familiar voice called out heartily behind me. I turned to see Shardos, his hands tied, escorted by two Plainsmen into the swimming light of the library.

"What would you know of philosophy, sirrah?" Firebrand growled, gripping the staff tightly.

"Oh… not that much," Shardos replied, stepping away from his guards and walking cautiously across the chamber. He came to the very lectern against which Brithelm had stumbled and stepped around it deftly. "Not that much. Only that it keeps a man from twitching after visions."

"Is that so?" Firebrand asked, the anger rising in his voice. Then suddenly the anger rushed from him. His shoulders slumped and his eye softened, and he stared at the old juggler with a look of surprise and fascination.

"Attend to the gentleman!" he snapped at the guards. "Can't you see that he is blind?"

Gruffly brushing aside the pale helping hands, Shardos seated himself atop a library table, his large hands gripping the yellowed wood. His blank eyes scanned the room.

I coughed loudly, intentionally. His gaze uncannily fastened on me.

"Sir Galen," he said quietly, a strange half-smile on his face. "It appears that we are all together again."

"Except…" Ramiro began absently and caught himself. His meaty faced flushed with embarrassment at the prospect of almost having betrayed Dannelle's escape to the Que-Tana.

But Shardos caught the words and juggled them gracefully. "Of course," he said quickly. "Except for my dog, whom I shall miss sorely."

"Who is this man, Galen?" Firebrand asked, walking slowly toward the old man.

"Shardos is my name," the juggler replied. "Traveler, jongleur, purveyor of history and lore, and juggler to the courts of seven kings."

"I see," Firebrand said, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. "A juggler, you say?"

The Que-Tana Namer stood his ground now, a good knife's throw from the table and from Shardos. It was as though a wall of light lay between them, transparent but impenetrable. Firebrand circled Shardos, staring at him from every side, and it occured to me that our captor was afraid.

Afraid, no doubt, because he had not seen this man in his vaunted visions.

"A juggler? But-"

"It is every man's question," Shardos interrupted. "And there is no answer but in the juggling itself."

The Plainsmen guards moved toward the blind man, but Firebrand raised his hand, waved them away.

"Juggler and… purveyor of lore?"

"Balance and sleight of hand are more common than they used to be, sir," Shardos replied merrily. "Nowadays a man has to branch out-to sing and tell stories while the bottles tumble butt over neck in the air. Mere jugglery is a poor man's trade, but you can eat when you throw in song and tale amidst the fruit and crockery."

"Shall we escort him somewhere, Namer?" one of the guards asked.

"Song and tale?" Firebrand asked, ignoring his underling. Absently he walked to the obstructing lectern, his back to the juggler.

Almost as absently, Shardos began to sing:

"In the country of the blind, Where the one-eyed man is king And the stones are eyes of gods And pathways to remembering…"

"Enough!" Firebrand shouted, clutching the sides of the lectern. The silver circlet he wore on his head flickered with a dark light, and smoke blossomed from beneath his grasping fingers, singeing the wood.

Ramiro and I glanced sidelong at each other, and my big companion emitted a low whistle.

"Not fully mounted, this one," he whispered to me as Firebrand spun toward Shardos with a rattle of bead and bone and a creaking of leather.

"So a snatch of old song comes back to you, juggler?" Firebrand asked, and what little civility was left in his voice he had banished entirely. "But your primary talent… is legerdemain, is it not?"

Shardos said nothing, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond his adversary. With a quick, powerful lunge, Firebrand stepped directly in front of the old man, gathering objects from the lectern as he moved-an ink bottle, a book, a piece of parchment, and finally a small, sharp, glittering penknife. Extending his hands to the juggler, the Que-Tana Namer smiled wickedly.

"Juggle these," he hissed. "Juggle these, or you shall find things most… excruciating for your comrades."

Though I knew nothing of the juggler's art, I knew that the task before Shardos was a formidable one. Four items, each of different shape and weight, made for a clumsy performance, and the introduction of the piece of parchment, which would flutter and catch on the slightest breath in the chamber, was surpassing cruel to any man in Shardos's line of work, much less a blind man.

But Shardos took the objects with a smile and, standing atop the library table, held them aloft while he surveyed the room with that penetrating, vacant stare. Almost instinctually, the Que-Tana began to crowd around him, Firebrand included, until only four of our captors remained beside us.

Almost instinctually in turn, Ramiro and I glanced at one another, reckoning the odds.

Three of our Plainsmen escorts were formidable enough, in their paint and leather, their sharp spears at the ready. But the fourth one, a man at least a head taller than Ramiro, looked as sturdy as a vallenwood, though I doubted he was much brighter. Nonetheless, his line of work did not partake of higher mathematics. Even the usually dauntless Ramiro looked once at the menacing hulk beside him and shook his head.

We would have to wait for other options to arise. But what was it Longwalker had said, miles above me and days away from me, by a fire at the foot of the mountains?

"Sometimes the waiting is the doing."

"It will be a feat justly celebrated!" Shardos began, holding the strange, disparate objects in plain sight above the nodding heads of the Plainsmen. "These objects, as unlike as poet and soldier, no more kin to each other than godseye miner and forest-dwelling elf, will find their way and their proper place in the great turning of things, where the wheeling path of the book in the air crosses that of the ink bottle."

Quietly, as Shardos held the attention of his audience, Firebrand slipped from the edge of the crowd and moved to a far point in the dimly lit chamber, where he was lost among shadows and leaning shelves.

Frantically I tried to see where he had gone. With the opals in tow, he was no doubt looking for a private spot, away from the eyes of his people and his prisoners, where he could be about the ensorcellments that Longwalker dreaded so. And surely with the opals in tow, he would no longer find any of us useful.

My thoughts were darkening quickly, and I might well have sunk into the stupors and sorrows, had Shardos's act not become suddenly interesting.

"In my travels," the juggler said, "I have found it often a delight to sing for my hosts while I juggle." He cleared his throat dramatically.

"A delight indeed," Ramiro whispered ironically.

"Oh, yes, Ramiro!" chorused my brother, on whom all irony was lost. "I love a singer as much as a sword fight!"

"Hush! Both of you!" I muttered, and Shardos continued.

"Unfortunately, I have fallen on hard times in my travels, and fallen in with a rather… rough-hewn company in my later years. I am afraid that the only juggling songs I remember are a bit on the racy side for the women and children among you…"

"That's absurd!" Ramiro commented. "The old bastard remembers everything!"

"Hush!" I repeated.

'Therefore," Shardos announced, "I shall sing the salty chorus in its original language, so as not to offend the more delicate ears in our midst."

Ramiro looked at me and frowned. I winked at him solemnly. For the "slyness and gutter smarts" that Firebrand accused me of were spinning and focusing like elaborate gnomish machinery. Something was afoot, and we would not be long in the finding out.

I looked back to Shardos just in time to see the ungainly juggling begin.

How Shardos was able to send that paper tumbling through the windless air, wrapping bottle and book and knife around it, is beyond me to this day. Perhaps it was more sleight of hand than jugglery. Whatever the case, my attentions were fixed not on the objects, but on the words of the old man's song, beginning, as you might expect, in the common speech.

"Your one true love's a sailing ship That anchors at our pier. We lift her sails, we man her decks, We scrub the portholes clear,"

Then, atop the same old marching tune, the song slid into Old Solamnic, a language familiar to only three of Shardos's listeners: Ramiro, Brithelm, and me.

"They do not understand this part, They stand around and gape, They think I'm after dirty things Instead of your escape."

A dozen sets of eyes turned to us. I confess I was gaping myself, stunned at the old man's brass.

Then my brother, the innocent fool of my imaginings, began to laugh. He looked at me, repeated "your escape" in a loud Old Solamnic, punctuating it with an ancient, obscene hand sign that would have made even Marigold blush.

The Plainsmen had not been underground forever. They began to laugh at my brother, and I found myself laughing, too-not at the gesture as much as the sheer bizarreness of seeing my brother make it.

Meanwhile, Shardos continued in common speech, the bawdy trail song filling the room.

"And, yes, our lighthouse shines for her, And, yes, our shores are warm; We steer her into harbor- Any port in a storm.

"The sailors stand upon the docks, The sailors stand in line, As thirsty as a dwarf for gold Or centaurs for cheap wine."

Then, in an ancient and surprisingly graceful dancer's turn, the old juggler spun himself about on the stage. Uncannily the piece of parchment flattened itself in the air, lying steady as though it still rested upon the lectern from which Firebrand had taken it. About it, the book and the bottle and the knife wheeled on their own, as though set in motion by some primordial design, and Shardos sang more verses, again in Old Solamnic.

"Follow where you saw him go

Out through the corridor,

The legends say his allies

Are those you've fought before,

"I can't make hide nor hair of that;

You should expect the worst,

There is a legend tied to this

I'll save for the final verse."

He smirked, painfully aware that his rhymes were straining. But we were after directions, not aesthetics. All three of us laughed, and the dark-eyed Que-Tana nodded and smiled among themselves, sure that some naughtiness lay in the Old Solamnic.

With a flourish, Shardos pocketed the paper, then the ink bottle, as he sang yet one more verse in common.

"For all the sailors love her

And flock to where she's moored,

Each man hoping that he might

Go down, all hands on board."

The adult Plainsmen chuckled at the suggestions of the verse, as did three of our guards. The fourth one, the dense enormity at Ramiro's side, stared in wonder at the book and knife, which continued to circle one another in the air.

Shardos smiled, stamped his foot, and pocketed the book as he began a final verse in Solamnic.

"No matter what you see or hear

Avoid the thirteenth stone,

And no matter what you think

Leave the crown alone."

As the last Solamnic "alone" crossed his lips, the juggler plucked the knife from the air. But instead of hiding it away, as he had all the other objects, Shardos wheeled toward us suddenly and hurled the blade end over end through the cavern.

It glittered in torchlight as it tumbled through the air and lodged in the chest of the big bodyguard.

For a moment, everyone was stunned. The enormous Plainsman looked stupidly down at his chest, then, as though his wound was only then dawning on him, tumbled to his knees and, with a wordless outcry, onto his face.

There was a brief, familiar pause, as there often is when first blood is drawn in a skirmish between inexperienced fighters, when both sides stop, see what has been wrought, and take in the knowledge that this is real, that the fighting is for keeps and is only beginning.

Then, like some enormous fluked monster rising from the depths of the Blood Sea, Ramiro lurched free of the guards, grabbed the nearest Plainsman by his long, braided hair, and sent the man hurtling into the nearest wall, rattling a torch from its sconce in the process.

Throughout the large stone room, lights were extinguished and things hurled, and the dry curses and calls of the Que-Tana bounced off the tricky walls. I threw my first stone-at the nearest of my foes, of course, for I figured there was no point to any jugglery of my own.

The rock clattered harmlessly past the dried grass stool on which Firebrand had sat, and my target crouched and loaded a sling.

With a deft move of his hand, now glowing with a simple but surprisingly powerful clerical magic, Brithelm seized the wrist of a large Plainsman who was choking Shardos. In my brother's grip, the Que-Tana passed at once into deep, snoring sleep on the cavern floor as Brithelm turned to face further onslaught and Shardos caught his breath again.

Something blurred in the air in front of me, a dark thing flying out of the dappled torchlight, and I had no time to move or fear or even reflect…

And a dark, deft hand plucked the stone from the air, as neatly as it had once caught crockery in the wealthy halls of Palanthas and in floating palaces on the Blood Sea.

Quickly Shardos hurled the rock back into the milling Plainsmen, end over end into the rising shadow. In the vanguard of that mass of robes and pale skin, one shadow fell, clutching at its side.

Then Ramiro rushed in the wake of the stone, scattering Plainsmen as he waded in among our adversaries. His meaty fist found the face of a Plainsman warrior. Blood spouted from the pale man's septum, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he fell to the stone floor, scattering beads and teeth.

Bellowing with delight, Ramiro dodged the downward arc of a Que-Tana club, and as the wielder staggered, the big Knight planted his wide, hobnailed boot squarely on the backside of the Plainsman and propelled him headfirst into three of his approaching comrades, who toppled like drunks at a country fair. Caught up in the rampage, the big man hurdled a downed stalagmite, felling two stalactites when he leapt too high in his enthusiasm. Staggering, he caught one of the stone icicles before it hit the ground and brought the heavy thing whistling up into the groin of yet another approaching enemy. Another he struck, and then another, until his dangerous path brought him to a dropped sword. Puffing, he crouched over, picked it up, and came up in the stance that the ogres call "the Feminator."

Twenty Plainsmen crouched involuntarily and took a step back, which gave Brithelm a chance to reach Ramiro's side. Together the two of them, a most unlikely tandem, backed toward the shelves at the far end of the chamber, forming as they did a narrow passage through the windmilling confusion of robe and armor and weapon.

"Go on, lad!" Shardos shouted in my ear above the cries of the Plainsmen. I resisted his push, for since the Solamnic Order was closing with the Que-Tana at last, it seemed that the only fitting action was to answer their blows.

Shardos restrained me.

"We can hold them back only a little while," he said merrily, a curious smile spreading over his face. "And after all, who better to send burrowing after vermin than a weasel?"

He pushed me again, and this time I was on my way, straight toward the ponderous shelves at the end of the chamber.

I slipped behind Brithelm and Ramiro, the bluish arms of the Plainsmen reaching for me, clutching, grabbing. Brithelm had spread a green, unnatural spellfire through the chamber, and for a minute, our adversaries recoiled, overwhelmed by light.

Blinded a little myself by the brilliant glow, I staggered until my eyes adjusted, until the shadowy outline of the shelves emerged from the dazzlement. Recovering my bearings, I raced toward the far entrance.

But I had lost valuable time.

Ahead of me, racing to cut off my escape, a lean, fierce-looking Plainsman half again my size positioned himself and raised a glistening onyx war hammer. I took a long, gathering step and leapt into him, and the two of us crashed to the floor, the hammer skittering harmlessly into the wall in front of me.

Then, for the first time in a long time, I had my eldest brother Alfric to thank. For in the forgotten arenas of the moathouse, he had sharpened my wrestling well, in a childhood when to be a little brother was to dodge, to scramble, to grapple with things larger than yourself.

Larger the man was, but also surprisingly fragile. In a moment, I was atop him, his head in my hands. I twisted my arms abruptly, and the snapping sound that followed seemed to echo in a deep and silent chasm far from the shouting and clash of metal around me.

As I knelt there, the imagined silence gave way to the outcry behind me. Then two strong hands lifted me, and I recognized my brother Brithelm's voice as he coaxed and assured me with words that I could not recognize then nor remember now, and together we rose and raced from a land of chaos and knives into the far shadows and the cold corridor beyond.