Galen Beknighted

Chapter XXI

"Steep" and "formidable" were indeed the words for it.

With Brithelm leading, we took every downward path imaginable, all of which seemed to circle as though we descended through the whorls of a shell. My brother guided us through the torchlit passages that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves, and when a sudden gust of wind from a side corridor extinguished the flames ahead of us, he guided us by an unexpected glow from the tips of his fingers.

The walls of the corridor were scratched with graffiti in the swirling alphabet of the Plainsmen. Names, Brithelm said they were mostly, as we hastened by them-names and religious slogans in which he said he could find no clear theology.

As we descended even farther, the letters gave way to pictographs and drawings of bats and tenebrals. There was one disconcertingly deft drawing of an enormous vespertile closing its monstrous, leathery wings around a band of Que-Tana. The drawing was abstract, almost childlike, and it summoned a deep and rousing fear within me, and evidently also in Brithelm, for he clutched the front of my tunic when I stopped to stare at the scene, then pulled me onward.

I thought of Oliver, shuddered, and doubled my pace.

Those drawings gave way to yet others of surface animals such as horses and leopards and, occasionally, birds. The two moons, red and silver, careened over a herd of pegasi, Finally a city lay toppled to its foundations, surrounded by designs and patterns only, abstract and geometrical, squares and spheres and rhomboids and a strange, geometrical man astride it, his head among the clouds and a swath of soot from a nearby sconce obscuring his face and eyes.

It was the final drawing; the walls were bare as we descended even farther. We had gone too deep for tenebrals, into the very core of the mountain.

Deeper still we went, past where vespertile guano caked the walls and floors of the corridor, to a depth where bone and shards of strange pottery were all that kept the tunnels from a sort of smooth sameness of milky brown rock. Then even bone and broken earthenware gave way to clean tunnels that were unnaturally dark and quiet, as if at some point we had crossed a border into a region where living things could not long abide.

"So this leads us to Firebrand, you say?" I asked my brother, who weaved in and out of the light.

"Surely it does, Galen," he replied. "I've been in those very quarters, but they blindfolded me on the way there and back. So instead of firsthand experience, I shall rely on a sort of… scholarly pursuit."

He smiled and looked at me directly.

"I saw the maps in that library back there, and I have pieced together the directions from the library to Firebrand's quarters with only a little research and common sense. This is the way, I am reasonably certain. It leads not only to Firebrand, but to his quarters and no doubt to the Namer's Tunnel and the secret passage back up to the surface."

He stopped in the tunnel, pausing in movement and thought until I nearly lost balance trying to keep from running into him. He looked at me wryly and frowned.

"At least I suppose so," he concluded.

"At a thousand feet beneath the surface," I snapped, "one does not rest well with supposings, Brother."

To that he was silent, dodging ahead of me like something frayed and insubstantial.

Now, Brithelm was never all that reliable in a library.

To him, a wealth of books was like a mountain range tunneled through by an army of mad dwarves-much like the terrain we found ourselves in at the time. For just when he would get going in his research, would follow a fact or a thought or a phrase from one book to the next, something new and more interesting in that next book would catch him off guard and lure him away as though he had followed an interesting side tunnel, until he would lose himself in the maze of his own interests, having forgotten entirely what had brought him to the library in the first place.

As a result, my brother believed that the Cataclysm was the result of the "double cellars" popular in Istar almost three centuries ago, and that although legend blamed the Kingpriest of that city for the disaster, true blame resided in the architect who, in a reckless attempt to create space in cramped properties near the center of town, chose to build one basement under another and undermine the foundations of block after block of ancient buildings.

Brithelm also believed there were walking trees in Estwilde and that the men of Ergoth had eyes in the back of their heads, through which they could see the past. He believed in a third black moon.

Nor was my brother's research any better on things closer to home: As a boy, growing up in a house where religious observance was rare, he decided that he would celebrate major religious holidays, but he never could figure out or understand the idea of movable feasts. Yes, the feasts moved, but not according to anyone else's calendar. Sometimes we would celebrate Yule in summer, sometimes in spring.

It turned out that Brithelm began to confuse regular holidays with those movable feasts, until he would wake each of us on odd days with the announcement that "Today is your birthday." And though each of us recognized the mistake full well, none of us ever corrected him, eager as we were for the presents. Brithelm, after all, was the only generous Pathwarden.

Though I am not quite twenty, by his tally and because of my greed, at last count I have celebrated fifty-seven birthdays.

All of this is a long way of saying that I was afraid that the research had misfired again. Here we were, a quarter of a mile below light and fresh air, trusting in a common sense that had not displayed itself as all that prominent a Pathwarden quality, and a sense of direction that might well lead us back into the jaws of vespertiles or worse.

My legs were tired, and the air was fetid. I was feeling my fifty-seven years.

After a while, our wandering became an issue. There in the bare corridors, I completely abandoned my hope in my brother's judgment.

"Suppose with me for a second, Brithelm," I suggested as we came puffing to a junction of tunnel and tunnel. "Just suppose. What if… those rooms are no longer a Namer hideaway of sorts? What if they're used for something entirely different? Or used not at all-those rooms you read about?"

"It will not matter," Brithelm stated flatly, coming to a sudden stop in the corridor so that I nearly ran into him. "It will not matter, because this is not the way to the rooms I read about."

He turned to me sheepishly.

I imagined us there in the corridor-lost entirely and completely and no doubt forever, white bones moldering into the history of the caverns and tunnels as our small intrusion into the lives of the Que-Tana faded to a footnote in one of the massive histories we had seen in the Porch of Memory.

I hadn't the heart to rail at Brithelm, who could not be blamed that his readings had gone awry. Our mission, I am afraid, was further imperiled by the fact that we had no weapons. In our ignited exit from the Porch of Memory, we had left anything fit for menace lying among papers and crumpled Que-Tana.

"There is, however, another way to find the path to Firebrand," Brithelm said, squinting into the corridor ahead of us.

I looked at him expectantly.

"Let us stand here until we can figure out what it is," he suggested. He sat calmly on the floor of the corridor, drew forth his spectacles, and put them on.

"Brithelm, I really think that-"

"Hush, Brother. Hush. Sit here and join me."

I seated myself at his side. I fidgeted as I thought of the Namer somewhere, fixing the stones into his crown, preparing to receive the power of life and death while I joined my brother in wool-gathering.

"Have you a scarf, Galen?" Brithelm whispered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"A scarf," Brithelm repeated, graciously but firmly. "Or a bandanna. Or even a sleeve that you do not need."

"No, I'm afraid I- Stop it!"

I clutched him by the shoulders and spun him around to face me.

"Listen to me, Brithelm! We are not in the best of straits here. There are a thousand Que-Tana who would gladly skin us alive, and their leader is somewhere on these premises thinking he's about to translate himself into a deity and is ready to destroy the lot of us in the whole harebrained venture, and we are the only ones who can stop him, and we are seated in the middle of an empty corridor discussing fabric and accessories like a damned pair of ladies-in-waiting!"

"I want you to blindfold me, Brother," Brithelm replied serenely. "If scholarship alone does not work, I shall have to recreate the circumstances under which I visited the Namer's quarters. It is the best of our hopes."

In resignation, in fatigue, perhaps in a bit of despair, I lay back on the floor of the corridor, resting my head against cool stone for a moment.

Then voices arose-a strange echoing in the rock, rising

from the stone itself, as voices in a closed room will reach you when you set the mouth of a ceramic cup to the door and listen.

Voices I could not untangle from each other.

"Nor will we tarry that long before the light returns and the mountains settle…

"Here the text speaks of fire, of fire and stone and memory…"

"They are not edible, those tenebrals, and the sooner you…"

"… and of course it will be the best of hunts, for you are sturdy and strong and of age and a chieftain's son…"

"It is pretty bad, Weasel…"

Then, above all of these, a last voice rising shrill and mournful and filled with the music of a cold, impassable desert.

"… does not lie. But this might be the first. Oh, find them, find them. Together we will learn their language. Together the darkness will take away shame and fire and the hurt, hurt, hurt in your eye and spreading through your veins now, so that you cannot eat. And when you have found the stones, when you have found them, none may return to tell them where you are. At least for the girl and the old blind man, make it painless as the god has taught you…"

I started to my feet, and the voices stopped.

There was no waiting this out.

"Just close your eyes, idiot!" I snapped. "Close your eyes and follow your homing instincts, and if we survive this and you ever breathe a word of it to anyone in the Order or out of it, for that matter, I shall… I shall… fashion something that makes igniting Gileandos look like a purification ritual!"

"Now," Brithelm whispered, and closed his eyes as he stood up. The faintest green glow arose from his hands, which were clasped behind him as casually as if he were out for a morning stroll.

Where we were going, and what it had to do with Firebrand, for that matter, I had yet to figure out. But I followed my brother's lead, the luminous green hands stretched out ahead of me, weaving and floating like a tenebral.

It was no more than a brief span before the outline of my brother-shoulders, shadowy robe, jungle of unkempt hair-rose out of the darkness in complete silhouette. Which meant, of course, that somewhere ahead of us was another source of light.

It shone from beneath a warped oaken door, marred by stain and rot, by what time and water do to the things we build. The door was barely ajar and probably could never be closed completely anymore.

Frantically I watched as closely as I could-for details, for signs, for clues as to what we might be up against-and awaited my brother's direction.

"I do not know what we have been led to," Brithelm cautioned from the murk ahead of me, "but it's as likely the Namer's quarters as anything."

By the dim light, I saw him drop to his knees and crawl forward until he reached the door. There he stayed for the longest while, his face turned from me.

From his posture, I assumed he was praying, meditating, or otherwise observing, so I waited the proper and reverent time, though I must confess that I grew impatient.

"Remember us also in your prayers, Brother," I urged. 'Then remember us here, if you would, for I await your instruction."

"Firebrand is behind the door," Brithelm whispered without turning to face me. "He is alone and reveling, having affixed most of the stones to his crown."

"Why, that's… astounding, Brithelm!" I breathed. "How… how can you be so sure? Visions? Augury? Some kind of telepathic trance?"

He turned to me, smiling, a short beam of light cast across his face as if it rose from the door itself.

"Keyholes, Galen. The future unfolds through keyholes. I would have thought you remembered that much."

Outside the door, we readied ourselves. Brithelm crouched again in the keyhole light, while I searched the walls and floors for substantial stones-stones for throwing, in case the circumstances called for such.

"It has been my experience," Brithelm whispered, "that surprise will succeed on almost any front, in almost any circumstance. And usually weapons are not needed."

"I do not recall asking you to draw on your considerable battle experience, Brithelm," I hissed.

We both stood silent outside the door of Firebrand's chambers. From within, the light dipped and altered as someone passed between it and the door-someone moving in directions and paths we could not see, intoning something dreadfully important, no doubt.

I could swear there were two voices in the room.

"It's like Father says, Galen," Brithelm offered, moving toward me in a rustle of red robe, placing his hand on my shoulder.

"I know, I know," I muttered, eyes on the stone floor, which I feared would soon pool with my blood.

"I know you know, but say it with me," Brithelm urged.

"I am no doubt going to die with you, Brother. Grant me the dignity of not repeating Father's rural slogans."

"Now, Galen," Brithelm cautioned merrily, ruffling my tangle of red hair. For a moment, it was as if there was no danger approaching. It was as though we were somewhere back at the moathouse-oh, sixteen or seventeen years ago-and he, the only Pathwarden with a talent for care-taking, was coaxing little Weasel to take his medicine.

Brithelm and I looked directly at one another and spoke in unison one of Father's most time-honored sayings. " Them not skinning can at least hold a leg.' "

I opened the door and we burst suddenly into the room, armed with gathered stones and courage and not a small portion of folly. Dazed for a moment by the bewildering array of torches in the chambers, we looked about aimlessly, stumbling over rock and declivity, searching for Firebrand, for anything or anyone.

Then the light receded, and Firebrand was revealed sitting on a wicker throne in the far corner of the chamber, an unfathomable smile upon his face. Above his head he held the silver Namer's crown of the Que-Nara. And in the midst of that circlet were set thirteen black, gleaming stones.

"We're too late!" I hissed to Brithelm, who nodded in alarm.

"Now from these stones will arise my greater power," Firebrand intoned, his voice rising hysterically as he raised his arms. "I am disappointed in you, Brithelm. Disappointed that, when you might have been my first priest in the Bright Lands, you chose to bury your nose in books of physics and history and… and fauna, idling away your hour of greatness."

"I have been known to dawdle," Brithelm agreed.

Firebrand's eyes rested keenly on the two of us.

"But now your high tide recedes, as they say," he announced. "Your little rescue story comes to a close, Solamnic. For my translation awaits me."

With that, he set the circlet on his head.

He smiled. "All quiet," he said. "Even the Voice is silent before the power of life and death."

Something echoed through the caverns around us- something deep and sorrowful and altogether bereft. Above me and below me and somewhere else in the distance, I heard a great wail and outcry, and before me Firebrand's good eye rolled upward in the socket, its iris and dark pupil vanishing into a milky whiteness as though the Namer was in the midst of trance or seizure.

They tell me that above ground, in the Bright Lands that the Que-Tana had almost forgotten, the namers and chieftains and those with a bent toward wisdom heard wailing, too, but their wisdom was not great enough to understand what had just taken place. As far south as the Eastwall Mountains and the Thar-Thalas River they heard it, mistaking it for the distant cry of birds, and yet at the edge of the Plains of Dust, a group of herb-gathering Que-Teh stopped, bewildered, and stared at the greenery in their hands. The cry faded away somewhere far to the north of them, and they could no longer remember how or why to concoct with the herbs.

Hunters from the Que-Shu tribe, it is said, lost the ancestral trail into antelope country even as they traveled upon it. The people wandered for weeks. Several of the old ones starved. I have heard also that Longwalker's opals flickered and went dull and dim.

Almost as quickly as he had lapsed into abstraction, Firebrand recovered, his good eye dark and alert and piercing.

"Oh, I see it all now," he murmured, as quietly as you would speak if you approached a rare and timid bird in a clearing, where even the slightest disruption and noise would set the discovery to wing. "I see it all…"

No matter how quietly he spoke, though, the words carried in the echoing chamber, buoyed by the emotion in his voice and the cavernous, reflecting walls.

"And now from these walls will arise my great people," Firebrand intoned. "Will arise those whom the Rending took, and the years, and the wars and the fires and the floods and the search for the stones themselves."

"Climbing the Cat Tower," I whispered to Brithelm.

But Firebrand continued, his voice lower now, and calmer.

'Those taken and perhaps not taken, but those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong."

He waved his hand, and through the walls of the cavern it came, passing through smoothly and readily, as though the rock was mist or smoke.

In front of us was the troll from the rain-soaked highlands. In its eyes was a terrible, surpassing weariness, as if it had been called from something more than sleep or labor. From something we could not know yet.

Firebrand folded his hands ceremoniously. As he began, I started for him, stone in hand, but Brithelm grabbed me by the shoulders.

"Whatever it is, it is over, Galen," Brithelm explained. "He called this troll to life hours ago."

"You are right, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand whispered. "Go to your death knowing you could have shared in this glory."

Firebrand chanted yet again, something in an old and corrupt version of the Plainsman tongue, and a hot wind passed through the room, carrying on its waves the sound of an ancient wailing.

The troll came toward us, its yellowed teeth bared.

"He's conjured this up, Brithelm," I whispered urgently. "All you have to do in circumstances such as this is not put faith in the vision."

"The eyes can be deceptive, Brother," Brithelm agreed uneasily. "And yet I do not believe-"

"You taught me this long ago in Warden Swamp," I declared confidently. "You taught me that the way to deal with illusions is simply to disbelieve them, simply to go about your business and let them break like waters around you."

Brithelm cleared his throat, but I was halfway to the throne and Firebrand before he could speak. Swiftly the troll stepped between me and the Namer, but I looked beyond the formidable image and kept walking straight into the glaring, leering product of my enemy's imagination. And bumped into tough leathery skin, into muscle and gristle and claw.

"Galen!" Brithelm called out as I tumbled through the air into the rocks some twenty feet from my enormous and tangible foe. Dazed, I recovered my faculties just in time to see Firebrand climb a rope ladder into a tunnel halfway up the far wall, then pull the ladder up after him.

Just in time to see the troll turn and lurch toward me, finger-long claws switching and lashing in the dead air of the chamber.