Galen Beknighted

Chapter XXII

I came to as Brithelm crouched over me in the Namer's chambers, as Firebrand vanished in the dark of the tunnel above us. It was still possible to get to the villain-my years of pastry and idleness at Castle di Caela had not yet slowed me to the point that I could not catch a one-eyed man in the dark.

There was, however, the matter of the troll in front of us.

"I thought you said that thing was an illusion," I whined, rising painfully to my feet.

Brithelm smiled and shrugged. "You have it mixed up with all those satyrs back in 'Warden Swamp," he said and backed away as the troll approached, smacking his lips, breaking a long stalagmite from the chamber floor, then waving it above his head like a baton.

I looked about me. Suddenly the rocks I could gather and throw seemed much too small, my brother much too weak an ally, and all that vaunted Solamnic training was like Dannelle's riding instruction-well and good in the thinking about it, but dangerous in the face of the real thing.

The troll rushed between us, striking the stone floor a shivering blow. The chamber shook, and for a moment, I thought the troll had shaken it. But it shook again, and the monster lost its footing, stringing slobber through the air as it staggered and turned.

Serenely Brithelm picked up a rock and bounced it harmlessly off the troll's leathery nose. The monster's eyes crossed in consternation, and it looked up in search of its assailant.

"Over here!" Brithelm warbled. And then "Over here!" echoed in the cavernous chamber from somewhere behind the troll. Stupidly the monster turned toward the sound of the echo.

Brithelm winked and called out again.

"Oh, yoo-hoo!"

The troll pivoted left in a complete circle and staggered a little.

I crouched and picked up a couple of stones. Then I saw that my brother was spinning the creature again and again, in slow circles, toward the rockface and the tunnel.

Brithelm sat down, crowed, and flashed green flame from his waving hands, and the troll, who had crouched for a better whack at its target, paused for a moment, dizzy and uncertain at the prospect of this fire.

In a split second, I understood Brithelm's tactic.

The troll crouched, and its gray, knotty back formed an incline of sorts, its shoulders no more than a good athletic leap from the mouth of the corridor above us. Before I could consider further, I was running, building up speed across the floor of the cavern, and the monster had only started to turn when I vaulted onto its backside like a kender acrobat, my legs still churning and arms windmilling, the sheer momentum carrying me up the steep incline of the back onto its shoulders and, in a leap sparked more by fear than by strength or dexterity, headfirst into the mouth of the tunnel.

Firebrand's putting on the crown had done more than muster trolls from the masonry. I have heard that down the hall from us, where Shardos and Ramiro were failing against impossible numbers of Que-Tana, the skirmish stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Blearily, the Plainsmen gaped at one another, thoroughly lost and distracted by a wave of darkness that passed through their hearts. All around the echoing library, staff and sling and spear toppled to the floor as the Que-Tana fighters struggled to recover their bearings.

Ramiro, of course, was battle-hardened enough to know an advantage when he saw one. Despite fatigue and bruises, at once he grabbed Shardos's wrist and lurched in the direction Brithelm and I had gone, intending to cut a path through the Plainsmen around him on his way to rejoining us.

Shardos, however, was having none of it. To everyone's surprise, but especially Ramiro's, the old juggler braced himself on the stony floor of the chamber. Ramiro stopped, puffed angrily, turned to berate the blind man… and discovered a chamberful of wide dark eyes, staring at the two of them expectantly.

The caverns began to tilt then, to shake and rumble ominously.

'The one-eye," one of the Plainsman said tentatively, looking about him uneasily as dust and gravel tumbled from the dome of the chamber. 'The one-eye. The Namer. He is not…"

The lean, pale Que-Tana paused, his brow wrinkled.

"I do not remember a Namer. What is he supposed to be?"

"Look around you," Shardos said confidently. "Where is the one-eye when the world shakes?"

"But he is the Namer!" a young woman protested. "He keeps… keeps…" A look of profound uncertainty passed over her face.

"Keeps what?" Shardos pressed eagerly, freeing his gnarled arm from Ramiro's grasp.

"I… I do not remember, except the Namer knows," the woman replied. "He also knows the way to the Bright Lands."

Several of the Que-Tana looked nervously toward the roof of the chamber again.

"If one…" Shardos began cautiously, ignoring the impatient tugging of Ramiro at his sleeve and the shudder of the earth at his feet, "If one were to show your people the way to the Bright Lands… and know the things that the Namer keeps…"

All eyes turned to the juggler eagerly.

"He would be the Namer," a small child piped.

It was exactly what Shardos wanted to hear.

"I am not sure such a conclusion follows, my dear," Shardos said with a deep breath. "What I am sure of is that there is more than one version of every story and more than one way out of every cavern. Sometimes even more than two ways, two versions. These caverns are old, worn smooth by water. I know many ways out of them."

"Shardos!" Ramiro hissed. "What-"

"Would you like me to show you one of those ways?" Shardos asked, his blank stare still leveled on the Que-Tana.

"Follow the juggler," the woman said quietly. The lean Plainsman who had spoken first now chimed in, followed by the little girl, an ugly, squat axeman near the lectern burned by Firebrand's angry grip, then two of our guards.

Shardos turned to Ramiro, smiling.

"Get ready, my portly companion. We are about to lead an emergence and bridge the abyss between darkness and light."

Ramiro snorted. "If that involves getting out of this godforsaken place, would that I could be right behind you, Shardos! But there's the Oath to reckon with, and one of the Order is no doubt neck-deep in Firebrand at this very moment."

"There are some things larger than that blasted Oath of yours, Ramiro!" Shardos replied sternly. "Do what you like, but look around you first and see if the Oath goes deeper than you imagined."

Ramiro scanned the faces of the Plainsmen in front of him, resting his gaze on the vulnerable pale skin and its terrible fragility. The floor shook again, and a huge cleft opened between him and the passage down which he had seen us go.

"As for Firebrand," Shardos urged softly, "well… 'tis high time you trusted in the gods and in Galen."

"Neither of which has been that reliable, as I recollect," the big man grumbled and, taking the hand of a Que-Tana girl in his own meaty paw, followed the juggler from the chamber as the library filled with dust and rubble behind them.

So together they passed through, juggler and epicure and a hundred befuddled Plainsmen. And that hundred became yet another hundred, and those two hundred a thousand, as the corridors shook and crumbled and threatened to collapse.

Meanwhile, I lay against the far wall of the passage, my feet still absorbing the shock of landing. Below me, Brithelm whooped merrily. The troll snorted, and the sound moved away as the two of them skirted the Namer's room in their dangerous game of taunt and pursuit.

The wall behind me trembled once, then stood still. Gravel tumbled into the corridor in front of me, and the sound echoed on down the passage. I braced myself against the side of the tunnel, started to rise, and felt the leathery wall pulsing beneath my touch, as though deep within it, a great heart was beating.

The wall was alive! And it was growing restless.

"Tellus!" I whispered, and thought of the old legend-of Longwalker's tale of the worm beneath the continent of Ansalon, whose great turning wrought the mountains.

And who would turn again, in the last of times, to undo what he had wrought.

There is no telling how long I would have stood there, speculating and gawking, were it not for the troll's arm shooting into the mouth of the corridor, its claws clicking and grabbing for me.

It seems that Brithelm had been able to hold the monster's attention only so long. Something glimmered on the edge of the big thing's memory, and it recalled, though faintly, that another small creature had shot past it only a few minutes ago.

I was drawn from contemplation when its groping fingers brushed against my ankle.

Yelping, leaping into the air as though an enormous spider had just crawled over my foot, I was fifty feet down the corridor before the hand had closed on empty air.

It was dark here, and the footing was treacherous. I swallowed hard and listened ahead of me.

From somewhere down the passage, borne to me as if it rode on the back of a drafty echo, came the sound of someone falling and an accompanying curse.

Firebrand. Stumbling in the darkness himself, and not yet out of my reach. Blind, I scurried toward the source of the sound. If Tellus indeed was here, dormant amid the caverns and mountains of the Vingaards, was this rumbling and shaking, this turning of the earth, a sign that he was preparing to waken?

I resolved not to think about it. At least not yet. Now a faint light glimmered in front of me, and the smell of sulfur reached me. I knew the Namer had touched hand to something dry and flammable.

Swiftly, silently, my energies renewed, I rushed toward the light, running like a weasel, confident and deep in its own burrow.

The floor of the tunnel shifted beneath me, and I came down hard on one knee. I resolved not to think about it yet. He had not made good time. When the darkness engulfed him and he became unsure of his footing, he had reached toward the walls and found the remnants of torches, dried by the years in ancient, rusty sconces.

The torches went up like thatch in a village fire. He must have watched them in fascination, no doubt sure that the creature he had unleashed on his pursuers was back in the Namer's chamber, finishing a grisly business.

No doubt Firebrand thought he had all the time in the world.

I followed the guttering lights, the smell of smoke, and turned a corner in the passage just in time to see him sixty feet or so ahead of me, his hands encircling a torch just beginning to flare strangely.

He looked over at me, his eye flaming like an opal, like a torch of anger and rage.

"Persistent, are you?" he asked in a level voice. "Most vermin are."

I took an angry step toward him, then remembered I was unarmed. I crouched and fumbled around me in the corridor for something hard and edged that might pass for weaponry, but my hands raced over smooth, weeping stone.

"Weasels and stoats and little toothed things are practiced grovelers, too." Firebrand spat, and I started.

"How did you-"

"Know to call you 'weasel'?" he asked. Though the torch made shadows thick and mottled, I thought I could sense a smile in his voice.

"Oh, I know many things, Weasel. The stones tell me, and the eye in the stones tells me more." He folded his hands in a graceful, almost saintly manner-even more frightening a gesture because it appeared so tender.

"The past is inescapable, Weasel," he intoned, and the godseyes at his brow began to glow, as they had in the Namer's room. "You cannot salvage or cleanse it or even forget it, much less make it right. It is always there, and when you add up your little heroics and measure them against the worst you were, you will be hung on your words, on your own conceiving, as you move from night…"

He paused. In the shadowy distance, I saw his hands rise.

"…to awareness of night" he intoned.

And Marigold walked out of the corridor wall, her hair angular and drenched like a wrecked ship, her white gown muddy and dripping. From behind her-indeed, through her, for she was glowing and strangely translucent-I saw Firebrand turn and rush down the passage until he was lost in the darkness.

"Robert!" she cried. "Where is Sir Robert?"

She looked around her stupidly, water flowing down her in rivulets onto the floor of the tunnel, which remained completely and remarkably dry.

"My combs?" she asked uncertainly, painfully, turning toward me slowly. "My face paint?"

Our eyes met.

"Lacquer?" she murmured, and we stared a long while at each other.

Despite myself, I started to laugh.

Somewhere within me, I had added up the evidence-the translucency, the walking through walls, the simple fact that Marigold of Kayolin was supposed to be miles above me and miles away-but it had not sunk in yet. The only thing sunken, indeed, was the horrid little schooner atop the woman's head, run aground on what rocks or reef I could only imagine.

"Paaastriiiieeees!" she shrieked, and her eyes began to glow, to pinwheel in red fire.

"I'm dead! I'm dead!" she shouted, her hands rushing ineffectually to straighten her shipwrecked hair. "And it's all your fault!"

I raised my hands, shook my head, and looked frantically for side tunnels.

"But this is better," Marigold said, suddenly calm. "This is better, Weasel. Mm-hum. Yes, oh, yes." She stepped toward me, her white robes gliding inches above the floor of the passage. Menacingly she extended her arms.

"This way," she said, her voice almost musical, "we can be together forever!"

Her mouth opened, and yellow troll-like fangs protruded, dripping water and lacquer and blood. I backed down the corridor, with Marigold floating after me, as close as fog, a hint of cheap cologne borne somehow on the stagnant air. Then the Weasel of my beginnings resurged in my here and now, and I panicked and turned to run…

And collided with Alfric.

It is lucky I have a sound heart. Not good or compassionate, I fear, though in my last several years, I have tried to render it so. Nonetheless, it is sound and able to bear a shock or two. Shock one: Marigold. Shock two: my dear, dead brother.

There, sandwiched between the departed brother and the evidently departed other, I was speechless, unarmed, and tracked down, as Firebrand had prophesied, by the ghost of my ruinous past.

"Well," I said, my fears giving way to despair, to a bleak bravado of sorts, "I expect there is nothing in the world that you can ever live down. Once you do it, it more or less runs at you till it has you at bay, then guts you and skins you and hangs you on a wall…"

But neither of them was interested in my gibbering philosophy. Impassively Alfric stared over me and met Marigold's gaze.

"Why bother with him," he asked her unexpectedly, "when you could have me?"

Marigold's face softened. The burning whirl of her eyes slowed and faded, the fangs receded-all but one, anyway, which she pulled her lips over daintily. For a moment, she looked as she always looked in life: burly and selfish and a bit overdone, but strangely compelling in a tarty sort of way.

She snorted and vanished into nothingness, and I turned to my spectral brother with something approaching gratitude. For Alfric had called her off, it seemed-had saved me from an eternity of badgering and ethereal pastry.

'Thank you, Brother," I began in all sincerity.

"We will see if you're inclined to thank me, Galen," he said, "after you have reckoned with me. For you and me have got scores to settle."

I stepped back one stride, then another. My heel touched stone behind me.

"We have odds to even, Galen." My ghostly brother came closer. "And the reckoning begins now."

With the flat of his broadsword blade, Alfric struck my head. Then again and harder he struck, as my vision burst into a hundred glittering flames and I reeled up the corridor.

"You done this to me, too, Weasel!" he shouted, the shrill rise of his voice blending with the rumbling around me and above me.

The dale worm was stirring. Old Tellus, foster son of Chaos and Night, was lifting his lidless eye.

Alfric raised the sword again and stepped forward.

All my weaseling could not avail in this cramped, narrow passage. I was cornered, brought to bay as I had been so many times in the nooks of the moathouse and beneath the beds of unswept guest chambers. But here there was no place to hide or dodge.

There was not enough room to grovel.

So I stood to my full height, and my older brother seemed to shrink a little before me. Perhaps death had diminished his stature-I cannot be sure. For instead of the Weasel who cowered before a formidable larger brother, I was every bit as big as the oaf in front of me.

The punch surprised me, even though I threw it. My right fist hurtled through the dark air of the corridor and caught my brother squarely on the left side of his prominent nose. He reeled, shook his head, almost regained his footing…

And then my left fist came calling, surging out of the shadows below him as it hooked up into the underside of Alfric's chin.

"Whaaa-" he began, but he was falling backward, his arms spread out like the useless wings of a vespertile. Into the wall he tumbled, growing suddenly transparent, almost liquid, as he passed into mud and rock, his sword clattering to the corridor floor behind him.

He looked back at me as he faded, once and for all, into the stone of the tunnel. He smiled-not the wicked grin that had harried me over the past two decades of brotherly abuse, but a smile considerably warmer, perhaps even apologetic, carrying with it the faintest hint of respect.

The most generous moment of his life, it seemed, had come when that life was over.

"I'm sorry, Alfric," I breathed. "But I will avenge you."

I hadn't the time for good-byes. Around me, the corridor was collapsing, filling with palpable dust and fist-sized boulders, while before me somewhere was daylight and air and Firebrand with the opals.

The options were clear. I picked up the sword and began to run with new strength toward the last wavering lights in the burrowing distance.