Galen Beknighted

Chapter XXIII

A seventh, an eighth, and a ninth stone followed into the twining silver, until the twelfth was in place. With confident fingers, the Namer tested each setting, shifting the stone once, twice, until it held fast.

"Now they are all together," he announced. "Each fixed in a holy permanence, bound to each other always in memory."

As she slept in the saddle, Dannelle di Caela dreamed she was riding with Sir Galen.

The two of them, astride the enormous Carnifex, galloped into a clearing of towering pine and aeterna; the light was blue and white about them.

She was proud to ride with him, behind him on the back of this formidable horse they had broken together. Carnifex snorted and steamed, but he was bested and knew it, his wild strength bridled in obedience to the combined will of man and woman.

In the dream, the horse reared up, its forelegs pawing the misted air. Galen twisted in the saddle and reached for Dannelle…

But she was falling… falling…

As she jerked awake, riding with Birgis atop the racing Carnifex, it seemed to Dannelle that the trees she passed were blurring, transforming themselves into huge swaths of blue and green. It seemed that the landscape around her was dissolving, that only she and the dog-who sniffed and rumbled amiably at her shoulder-remained from the world she remembered.

She was relieved to see the Cat Tower pierce the horizon. As the walls of the castle and the fluttering pennants atop it became clear in front of her, she lowered her head and pressed the strong flanks of the horse with her knees. Birgis stirred a bit in the harness on her back.

"Sit back, damn it!" she started to exclaim, but the wind rushed into her face, choking her and drowning the words. Her thoughts moved quickly over the ground ahead of her, outrunning Carnifex and the wind and even the reddening sunlight breaking across the pennantry.

Now the walls loomed before her, the crenellation and windows sharply defined. Now she made out the arms of di Caela, of Brightblade and Pathwarden and Rus on the fluttering pennants.

Good, she thought. They all are here. And fifty miles of riding has come down to the next half hour.

For Dannelle di Caela intended an arrival that was showy and brilliant, nothing short of completely spectacular.

Riding Carnifex over the drawbridge she came, full speed across the courtyards, amid a flurry of hoofbeat and color and the shouting of heralds, straight to Sir Robert di Caela, who in her dreams of this moment stood agape before the double oaken doors of the Great Tower, scarcely believing his eyes.

For this red-haired slip of a girl he so often disparaged had not only arrived in time to save her companions beneath the Vingaards, but also arrived on the back of Carnifex, the horse Sir Robert had claimed she could not ride.

There were two problems with this just and wonderful vision: First of all, the Lady Dannelle di Caela was uncertain as to how she would dismount from her horse.

And secondly, the drawbridge in question was boarded up by makeshift carpentry. Behind it stood engineers with little better to do than weathering hangovers and speculating as to how to repair the mechanism kicked asunder by a big stallion not two days before.

For several years, everyone in Castle di Caela had marveled at the lack of foresight or intelligence shown by the fabled nomad chief who had given Carnifex to Sir Robert.

"Such a fine piece of horseflesh," they marveled. "As a gift outright."

And they shook their heads at nomadic stupidity.

All but the grooms in the stable, who had known for several years that Sir Robert had the worst of the deal-that the real stupidity lay in part with the old lord of the castle, but chiefly with the big horse itself.

Carnifex did not shorten his stride. Ignoring the cries of the woman atop him, her frantic tugging at his long silver mane, the animal lowered its head and whickered, its speed increasing until a panic-stricken Dannelle scarcely noticed they were airborne.

The horse and his two passengers leapt from the far bank of the brimming moat and splashed into the mud on the other side. Birgis, by far the most practical of the three, untangled himself and plunged into the water, as with a short, powerful surge, Carnifex strode up the incline and charged toward the half-repaired entrance, Dannelle hanging on desperately atop him.

It is hard to imagine the surprise of those engineers who, still aching from their bout with Thorbardin Eagle and settled in for a safe, undemanding afternoon of examining gears and pulleys, were confronted suddenly by a wild horse surging through the woodwork, a long-vanished noblewoman astride it.

In a moment, everyone scattered. Engineers and carpenters dove from their path, and whether by reflex or foresight or simply damned good luck, Dannelle di Caela grabbed the dangling chain of the drawbridge mechanism and swung acrobatically from the back of the horse, landing ankle-deep in the sucking mud and precariously, dramatically gaining her balance.

She looked cautiously around for an audience. She seemed disappointed, but decided that the engineers would do.

Dannelle was telling her story before Carnifex was out of sight, before Birgis had shaken the water from his coat and trotted merrily through the shattered drawbridge. She told them the lengthy story as, filled with alarm, the engineers carried her between them toward the infirmary, terrified that they would be blamed for any of her bruises or breaks or discomfiture.

Birgis tipped along behind them, yawning and wagging his tail.

"Which brings us to this juncture," Dannelle concluded, "where I guided the stallion over the moat outside and in through the drawbridge…"

"A daring exploit that must have been, m'lady," the head engineer commented absently, shifting the girl's weight in his bony arms.

"Not so daring, that," she objected, well schooled in false modesty. "The moat was full, after all, and would have cushioned my fall from the saddle, and then there was the mud…"

"I beg your pardon?" the man said, his beard trembling, his eyes suddenly intent.

'There was the mud in the courtyard that-"

'The moat was full, you say?"

Dannelle nodded. "I suppose the lot of you have been busy in my absence. Where are the others?"

Without waiting for her answer-indeed, dropping the young woman perfunctorily at the steps of the infirmary- the engineer turned and raced toward the cellars of Castle di Caela, where the brimming moat had told him that the underground was filling with water.

Birgis trotted up to the indignant young woman and

again most reverently licked her nose. He murmured in her ear, something that sounded like words again to the jostled Dannelle.

"You are muddy," he seemed to say, "and you smell like salt."

Birgis charged off jubilantly around the corner of a guardhouse, and something squawked and fluttered from the direction he had taken.

Down in the tunnels below the castle, something stirred in the rubble. Gileandos, tutor to the Pathwardens, scrambled out from a rockpile, trailing gravel and dust.

He did not know he had been unconscious for a day.

"Oh, dear!" he exclaimed. "Oh, dear! I fear that my companions have been… submerged past all recovery."

His hands fluttered like bats in the darkness. He could not see them.

After scrambling and worrying and exclaiming and fluttering, the tutor groped in the darkness, found a large rock-one, in fact, which missed his head by inches in — the cave-in-and seated himself upon it.

"Now, think clearly, Gileandos," he told himself. "There is… there is a lantern in these whereabouts, and if the gods are kind, it is still in working order."

Like a mole, he turned and dug in his subterranean blindness, his soft, thin fingers scrabbling through rock and dust.

Above Gileandos, the engineers stopped at a fork in the passage and caught their breath. The dozen or so castle servants they had brought along-grooms, sappers, a cook or two-ran into one another in the gloomy, lamplit corridor. Following behind the stumbling wall of men, Dannelle stepped through the crowd and laid a muddy hand on the shoulder of the younger and more promising engineer.

"You've been this way before, Bradley," she said. "Where from here?"

The young man blushed. Dannelle's touch, it seemed, was volatile in many quarters.

"He has no idea, m'lady," the head engineer replied testily. "'Twas long before this that Bayard Brightblade made the lot of us turn back."

Dannelle nodded in the shadows, being accustomed to unwelcome protection.

"And yet," the young man said, his eyes on the two passages, "after a brief inspection of incline and breadth and the mathematics thereof, I would venture that the leftward passage leads toward Sir Bayard and his party."

"Nonsense, Bradley!" the head engineer sputtered. "Surely you are aware that the workings of the well lie south of here. If Sir Bayard knew aught of engineering and matters hydraulical, he would surely have pursued the passage to the right."

'Then I would venture that Bradley is right," Dannelle interrupted, and the old man gazed at her with something approaching contempt.

"I shall be food for bats!" Gileandos murmured, fumbling hysterically at loose things. "Or giant rats, or lizards, or huge flightless birds that have evolved into something menacing, or… or… that worm I touched!"

Hysteria turned to blind panic as the tutor flung rocks in all directions. As he raised dust in the blackness, he coughed and sneezed and continued to burrow deeper into the rock-pile until he reached the floor of the corridor, until his right hand struck solid rock…

And his left hand metal.

Panting, squealing, fumbling with the lantern, he juggled it from one hand to another, heard the splash of lamp oil on the dark rocks around him. Fumbling in his robes, he came up with a tinderbox, wrenched it open, and drew out flint and tinder…

There were times years ago, in Coastlund, when Gileandos was said to be careless with fire. It was a reputation he did not deserve. Frequently ignited by the youngest and oldest Pathwarden boys-who worked sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem-the tutor spent much of his time in the infirmary, nursing burns and the ill regard of Sir Andrew Pathwarden. In those long, reflective hours on his back (or on his belly, depending on where the fire had struck him) Gileandos had come to believe that he had set the fires himself, or walked into them as part of some huge and fatal design established in the cloudy past of the Age of Dreams.

That was why he was not surprised when his sleeves burst into flame in the corridor and, shouting and spinning like an enormous fireworks display, he pinwheeled up the corridor, straight into a geyser rising from the artesian well, which whirled him about and extinguished him.

And yet, in that blaze of glory, an obscure tutor had saved a shimmering array of Solamnic knighthood and nobility, for the sharp eye of Bradley the engineer caught a glimpse of light wavering down the corridor-the left one, it was, to the young man's great delight-and, pointing out the glimmer to the head engineer and the Lady Dannelle, he proceeded to guide the expedition to its source in the smoldering, smarting tutor.

From there, it was a matter of pickax and shovel against rock, a task taking less than an hour.

Far below the clamor of metal and stone, below the rescue party and below those they had set out to rescue, below the great dale worm Tellus, who stirred uneasily in his hundred thousand years of sleep, the caverns dropped away into nothing, and nothing dropped away into the Abyss. Where Sargonnas waited, watching events unfold.

The dark god frowned. There was a whining at his ear, thin and incessant, like the choiring of mosquitoes.

Something was wrong.

He had plotted so carefully all that had come to pass: hundreds of years ago, setting a dark passage in front of the Scorpion and even darker thoughts in his heart, and at almost the same time finding the Namer through the depths of the opals…

It was all so elaborate and beautiful.

And yet, Sargonnas thought now, turning uncomfortably in the black vacuum of the Abyss, and yet there are too many of them. Wherever 1 look are unforeseen people: the sharp-eyed, mournful Knight and the merry blind juggler, the girl and the priest and the dog…

And since he put on the crown, I have not heard from the Namer anymore. Too variable these mortals were, and something was about to happen that was beyond contingencies.

He stirred, anxiously scanning the Vingaards and the plains and the subterranean cavern beneath both.

He could not figure it. Too many and variable they were.

"Something the Scorpion said in the parchment…" Bayard began thoughtfully, scrambling urgently for answers as the fissure brimmed over and the chamber around his party began to fill with water. "Some clue to that damnable distant machinery…"

His companions paused expectantly, their gazes moving from the dark mechanism faintly seen by some, only imagined by others, until every eye was on Bayard, who frowned, shifted himself on Enid's shoulder, and turned to Brandon Rus.

"Though you may uncover my devices, the note said, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. It's easy and direct, and wouldn't that be the Scorpion's greatest joke, that for all his machineries, the key is not subtle at all but is in fact the simple head of an arrow? That spot in the center of the device, Brandon," he urged as the fissure before them spilled water over their feet and the ceilings rained. "The dark spot, like the pupil of the eye. Can you shoot it with a bow?"

"I don't… Well, it's a terrible long shot from here through cascading water."

"And yet it seems what we must do," Bayard pressed, his gray-eyed stare intent on the younger Knight.

Still Brandon Rus hesitated, looked to the shadowy distance.

'Then step out to knee-deep and hold your breath, damn it!" Sir Robert roared. "You heard Sir Bayard, boy!"

Brandon leapt at the old man's order. In a moment, he was at the edge of the fissure, drawing the powerful bow.

"I'll have to figure weight, and distance, and differences in height, and who knows how thick that mist is across there."

"Brandon!" Enid urged. "I saw you hit a target through a second-story window in the middle of a rainstorm! Is this talent of yours good for anything besides tricks?"

Brandon stepped back, wounded. "There was the one time, though…"

"Damn the one time!" Enid screamed, reaching out and grabbing the young Knight by the sleeve. "Either make the shot or give me the bow and I'll do it."

Brandon Rus paused for a moment, then sprang toward action, his feet in the water before he thought too much about it. One step out, then two steps.

Then his submerged foot felt nothing beneath it.

How can I shoot through this obscurity? he thought, his strong hand trembling as he raised the bow.

The light behind him shifted over the gray mist like the light over a desolate sea. It flickered on the far wall before him, and the wall seemed to recede, to brighten and dim.

Brandon raised the bow, aimed at the turbulence, and was seized again by doubt. What if he missed?

Enid called out something unintelligible from behind him. She leaned over his shoulder and sighted along the shaft of the arrow as the young man aimed at the dark center of the thing at the far end of the chamber.

The lad took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Silently, with the archer's accuracy and skill that made him legendary, he shifted his aim, and the arrow rocketed into the head of the carved circling scorpion that adorned its border.

For a moment, Enid and Raphael cried out in dismay as the others squinted for a sight of the target across the dark distance. Brandon turned away, bowed his head.

"No, Brandon!" Enid shouted. "By the gods, try again!"

"What-" Sir Andrew began.

"Wait!" Bayard said, standing knee-deep in the water, oddly supported by its buoyancy. "The device… I am the device!"

"I beg your pardon?" Sir Robert asked, and Bayard Brightblade began to laugh in relief.

"Brandon Rus," he explained softly, the water rising to midthigh, "has still never missed. For the device was no gnomish machinery, but the Scorpion's firm conviction that there was never a Solamnic Knight who could leave well enough alone."

"I beg your pardon?" Sir Andrew interrupted.

"Raphael," Bayard ordered, "look at the target and tell me what you see."

The lad squinted as he looked out over the waters.

"The same as before, sir. It is still shifting. Almost looks alive."

"It is alive indeed," Bayard replied, wading back toward his comrades, the water to his waist.

"I beg your pardon?" Enid and Raphael asked in unison, and the lord of Castle di Caela laughed again, this time more heartily.

"The fabled 'device,' " he explained, "was no mechanism, but a simple plot. The Scorpion knew that if we found the eye of the worm, which for all the world, I gather, resembles an archer's target, we would do our Solamnic best to strike its center, thereby waking the monster with furious and maddening pain. The only machinery planted on the castle grounds was the parchment geared to draw me to this very spot."

'This rapidly submerging spot," Brandon Rus said somewhat urgently, offering his hand to Bayard Brightblade, who breasted the water in front of him.

"But what of the dale worm?" Sirs Robert and Andrew shouted simultaneously.

"It'll die and make you a hero, Robert," Bayard announced. "Looks to me like you've drowned the damned thing!"

"And us in the bargain," Enid added, "unless we get out of here-now!"

Sputtering, coughing water like a beached swimmer, Bayard climbed out of the brimming pool, sidestepping the jetting warm streams from the great well. Again Brandon lifted the older Knight to his shoulder, and as swiftly as his youth could enable and his burden allow, he waded up the corridor, water rising in the tunnel behind him. He stumbled, his strength failing, and called out to those following. And all of them-Enid, Andrew, Robert, and Raphael, gasping at the steam and sliding rock-hauled Bayard and his rescuer back up the corridor. When they reached breathable air, they stopped for a moment and leaned against rock or collapsed altogether on the floor of the tunnel.

"Well, it has happened," Sir Andrew coughed. "We have reached the very foundations of Castle di Caela, and we have seen something there and kept it from wakening, maybe for good. It is over. But I shall be damned if I understood a lick of it."

He smiled, hearing before them the shouts and the pickaxes of the engineers.

It was only a matter of minutes until the hole in the rock and rubble was wide enough for all of them to pass through.

Bradley lifted Sir Bayard through the hole, supported him against the rush of water that entered the tunnel behind him, stumbled for a minute in the onslaught of wave and river-borne rubble, then gained solid footing and strode toward the surface. Around him, the others milled and followed, well-spattered and muddy, battered by rock and daunted by darkness.

Surprisingly old Gileandos lifted his voice in the old song of courage.

"Even the night must fail,

For light sleeps in the eyes

And dark becomes dark on dark

Until the darkness dies."

Jubilant, the others joined in.

"Soon the eye resolves

Complexities of night

Into stillness, where the heart

Falls into fabled light."

So singing, they emerge from the fissure into the cellar of the Great Tower, waterlogged and bedraggled but whole.

In the heart of the Abyss, the dark god frowned and turned on a gust of stagnant air. Defeated, he shrugged, smiled ruefully.

"Damn them," he said flatly, and the void shook around him. "And damn the Namer especially, who is now useless."

Then he yawned and, reclining in hot, dry infinities of nothingness, he closed his fathomless eyes and slept away a century.

Whether indeed it was understood or whether it passed understanding, something had changed in the world under Castle di Caela. The gray mist in the crevasse vanished, leaving behind it a dark that was only the absence of light, that hid nothing more than stone and shadow and occasional creeping things, all in all as harmless as what a curious child might find in the earth beneath an overturned rock.

Far above, two pages sat alone at a table in the Great Hall, where they had sat for hours debating how many places to set for dinner. They broke off their arguments and listened, of all things, to a sudden quiet in the rooms and corridors around them.

It was the first time either had listened in months.

Nor was it unrewarded, for they both started to listen right near the turn of the hour, as noon approached and the castle guests filed in for a luncheon that would taste far better today for some reason.

As the incredible smells of roast pork and apples filtered into the hall, first one boy smiled, then the other.

They did not know why they were smiling. It was something, though, about the smells in the air and the curious light in the room. Something about the silliness of having whiled away the morning in the fine points of etiquette, when there were smells and noises to investigate and a meal of roast pork and potatoes to enjoy.

As the noontide clocks struck in Castle di Caela, the air was filled with a chorus of metallic bird cries. For the first time since Aunt Evania and Sir Robert began this collection of offensive machinery, all of the castle cuckoos sang together, marking the passing hour.

Up in the Vingaard Mountains, a high sun washed the vallenwoods and oaks and maples in a brilliant white light. The leaves turned and silvered in the light breeze from the east, and Longwalker stopped on his way through the wooded foothills. He cocked his head, as if somewhere east of him he had heard something shift, some slight but important movement in the fabric of things.

"Now," he said to the Plainsmen about him. "Old Tellus is at rest. The time is back. It will not be long before they all can return, can go back to words and memory."

It was obscure to them, what Longwalker said. The younger Que-Nara looked at one another, then nodded as though they understood their leader.

Someday, Longwalker thought. Someday you will understand all of this. How those in the hearts of the opal are always only a step from you. That as thin as the line is between breathing and translation, it is just as thin when you come back the other way. You will understand this.

Two strix owls took wing out of the dark branches of a blue aeterna. Shocked by the daylight and the Plainsmen around them, they wheeled quickly in the air and swooped into a stand of golden oak not twenty yards away. The children started, then quickly recovered their calm and implacable faces.

Longwalker frowned privately, lost in his thoughts.

"I do not know what this will bring the Solamnics," he confided to his people, "but there is a grove where the plains meet the foothills, where vallenwood and pine and aeterna mix with the lesser trees. There, if their guiding is done and the Que-Tana have followed, we shall find the others, and stone will link with stone, and cousins will clasp hands in friendship and reunion."

He walked away from his camp on the plains with its lean-tos of hide and light wood, the smell of smoke and roast venison. The earth stilled beneath him as the dale worm settled back into long sleep, but even its slightest shiftings stirred the mountains.