Galen Beknighted

Chapter XXIV

The last of the settings remained stoneless, unadorned. For a moment, the Namer held the thirteenth stone above it.

"This is the One Stone," he said quietly. "Always present in its absence."

He handed the One Stone to the man seated beside him, who in turn handed it to another. And as the stone passed from Plainsman to Plainsman, the Namer brought the story full circle.

There was no doubting that the surface was near, for now the air smelled fresher, greener in the part of the passage around me. Upward I moved, the borrowed sword in my right hand, my left hand grappling for purchase amid loose and tumbling rock.

The deciding was over.

In a rush, I took off up the corridor toward the light. All around me the vast network of tunnel and chamber was crumbling, shaking. It seemed that everything momentous that had ever happened to me centered around an earthquake, and I recalled thinking, If this is the last thing, then there is something just and fitting in it. Then, with an unsettling lurch, the ground I had just crossed split open not ten yards behind me.

I passed through one cloud of red dust, then a corridor branching to my right, which collapsed with a rolling crash that doubled my speed, if doubling was possible. The air was growing thick and powdery, difficult to breathe.

I pulled my cloak up over my mouth and rose. It was a time for opals, that was certain.

A trio of tenebrals rushed by me, chittering. I followed, and I heard someone or something cry out in front of me the instant before I turned a corner.

My momentum propelling me, I turned nonetheless and saw Firebrand ahead, out of reach and practically past recall, scrambling into a gray steady light as the dust passed in waves behind him.

I heard the shriek and the popping as the tenebrals fluttered into the sunlight. With a prayer to whatever god looked after headstrong fools, I rushed to the surface, too, sword at the ready, toward the sunlight and the sound of Firebrand's chanting.

I burst into the Bright Lands with a gasp, with relief, for whatever awaited me, however dangerous, was a change from the gloom and the damp and the stagnant corridors.

I did not know that standing there in confusing light, armed with a long dagger and a shield, my greatest adversary awaited, who made the dark magic of the Scorpion and of Firebrand look like child's play.

It was Galen Pathwarden, the Weasel, oily and mean, crouched on an outcropping of granite. He looked years younger than I remembered myself, and decades younger than I felt.

I remembered his face when it was my face, years and adventures ago, when I had stared at myself hatefully in the one looking glass Father kept in the moathouse. The beady brown eyes, the matted red hair, the rodent's twitch and squint.

What was it Firebrand had said? Those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong.

Firebrand stood apart from us, laughing wickedly beneath the drooping branches of a vallenwood. The opals glittered in his silver crown, and his eye blazed like the darkest and most powerful stone of all.

"Here's the deal," Weasel whined, slipping behind his shield until he was scarcely visible. "We've come so far together, you and I, to where our differences are just about to bring us to grief…"

I turned my sword in my hand. I could not figure out what to do about this. Somewhere in the corner of my vision, I saw Firebrand move, heard his laughter. Beneath me, the ground rumbled in reply, as though it, too, was laughing.

"So I suggest we just… call things off," Weasel urged. "We depart, whether separately or together, leaving this Firebrand fellow to his own sorry devices."

He raised his head from behind the shield and gave me a knowing wink.

It was the moment I had been waiting for.

Three strides carried me across the clearing. Weasel dropped the shield and backed away, cringing and groveling like some shifty, disgusting vermin. I gripped my sword tightly, took one last step toward Weasel, and drove the blade halfway into his chest.

He looked into my eyes and shrieked.

I looked away, unable to return his gaze. A pain wrenched hot in my chest. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong, I heard once again. I saw Firebrand gliding through the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, circling me like a large, scavenging bird.

I felt Weasel climbing up the sword, pulling himself toward me, driving the blade deeper and deeper into his chest as he moved. Finally he clutched my sword hand in his thin, leathery grasp and pulled me toward him.

"The deal is this is this is this," he chattered, his fingers groping for my throat. I felt heavy, leaden and slow, as though I, not he, was the one who was conjured from stone.

Behind me, the sound of footsteps approached.

"You're a liar, Firebrand!" I shouted and hung on.

I remember thinking, swiftly and in some recess where words could not reach, as I wrestled myself in the clearing. Thinking that Firebrand could summon figure after figure from my brief but disreputable past. However, he could not make me heed them.

And no doubt Weasel was the worst he could do.

I heaved, straddled my slithering opponent.

There was something of a game in this. And despite my discomfort when the past came to call, I could weasel a game with the best of them, matching trivial strategy with trivial strategy until my opponent collapsed with exhaustion.

I recall smiling at the prospect. My laughter, too, rose out of that tangle of limbs, out of the bright clearing where the villains walked, and when he heard it, Firebrand hushed and the air about us became suddenly tense and sober. Beneath me, the earth stilled.

Then the Weasel in my clutches began to change shape.

Into a snake, its notched head waving above me like the tail of a scorpion…

Which he became next, the snake head narrowing into the poised spike of a verminous tail, and the tail descending, descending…

But never wounding me, never striking home.

I took courage from this and held tighter as the scorpion beneath me grew and branched and bristled, its chitinous back sprouting white leathery wings and coarse, matted fur…

And beneath me twisted a vespertile, perhaps the same one who had folded itself over poor little Oliver…

And still I held on, something in the holding becoming adventure, a challenge, a game…

Until the great earth roiled and shook beneath me, and to my right, in the grove, I heard the dry, ripping sound of a vallenwood uprooting.

And it was Tellus the dale worm I was riding, and through all this I kept telling myself, It is approaching, approaching; soon the bastards will run out of changing shapes and we shall see what happens then…

And Weasel was water, was light on a sword, was tunnel on tunnel, was nothing…

And my grip did not relax, and I was laughing more loudly than ever, thinking, "This is the worst you can do? This is all, Firebrand?"

And the landscape tilted one disastrous last tilt and waver, and there was a boy beneath me with beady brown eyes, matted red hair, a rodent's twitch and squint.

But a boy who was afraid. Who was only a boy, his bluster and weaseling all he knew of courage in a country prone to shift and explosion, where brothers bludgeoned and tutors ignited, and the whole world rankled at the whim of a self-righteous Order.

He looked away from me and shivered. I felt the sword pass though my heart, too. The wrestle became an embrace as I wrapped my arms around the poor little fellow.

Where before there was a wound, there was now peace.

And as suddenly as he had appeared, Weasel was gone. I lay on the ground for a long, forgetful moment, savoring the peace and the stillness and the air and the light.

Then the ground beneath me murmured again, and somewhere behind and above me Firebrand cursed and fell silent. I rose slowly and turned to face him, the sword in my hand light and familiar.

He held his staff in front of him, and for the first time I noticed it was iron, edged with a glinting blade.

"It is down to the two of us, Solamnic," Firebrand hissed. "It is strange, is it not, that all magics come down to a hand-to-hand fight in a clearing?"

He was already beaten. I moved toward him, waving the sword like a scythe, and we closed in a clatter of metal.

Three times we locked weapons, three times stared at one another over the wrestling blades. He was a strong man, and larger than I, but there was something to all my training, all the thumps and lectures under the tutelage of Bayard Bright-blade that had taught me balance, taught me to shift, to vary my footing and place my weight so that even the most formidable opponent was forced to stretch and stagger.

At that moment, I could have taken on the troll. On the third parry, I felt Firebrand give a little, felt him buckle under the twisting and locking of weaponry. With an agile turn, he leapt back, brushing against a blue aeterna bush, sending cones and needles flying.

"But magic is inexhaustible, Solamnic," he intoned. "And it rises when you expect it the least…"

His staff began to glow, first red, then yellow, then white. I could feel the heat from where I stood. Firebrand stepped forward, brought the weapon whistling down through the air, and I blocked it with my sword, but the heat passed through the metal and became unbearable.

I staggered backward, my sword ringing harmlessly as it tumbled onto the rocks at Firebrand's feet. Defiantly he kicked it away and walked toward me, glowing staff in his hand.

Again the godseyes on his brow began to flicker. His eye half closed ecstatically, and again the earth rumbled.

"The power of life and death!" he gloated. "All of their memories are mine! They would have none of me, but now I have their past and future!"

"You killed my brother, you bastard!" I snapped, reaching into my tunic and drawing forth those ragged leather gloves. Quickly I slipped them on, having scarcely the time to raise my hands before the glowing staff descended.

I felt the blade strike leather and metal, felt the old gloves hold with a strength and resilience that was not metal and leather alone, but the years of weathering and sun and rugged use. The staff turned red again, and yellow, and white, and I felt the heat next to me and dropped to my knees at its force…

And the ground shook, hurtling the both of us, crown over backside over gloves over staff, halfway across the clearing.

He was to his feet by the time I had picked up my sword and closed with him. Without his eye patch, which had fallen off in the tremor and tumble, he looked vulnerable, weak. The empty socket opened into a darkness blacker than the caverns and the heart of the godseye, and for a moment, I pitied him.

The crown, too, lay in the white dust beside him, fragmented, the light in its stones fading.

Then, with an outraged cry, Firebrand raised the staff to strike. I rocked back on my heels, my blade flashed swiftly through the smoky air…

And found the soft home of his neck.

I have heard there is indignity in such a thing-that the Nerakans, for one, punish their worst with ritual beheading.

Father has spoken of the time when the Order itself beheaded the most heinous offenders.

And yet there was a quiet that surrounded us afterward. His one good eye was closed, and the body stood there for a moment, as though it was trying to remember something.

As though the moment of its passing had not been reckoned.

Then it fell, also quietly, and I felt a hand touch my shoulder.

Brithelm stood beside me.

"It may have vanished," he said quietly. "The troll, I mean." He smiled at me sadly. "You will understand," he added, "that I did not tarry to find out."

And the earth wrenched and buckled.

They say that unnatural things began an hour beforehand, before the rumbling and tumult from deep underground.

A traveler, a spice merchant from Kalaman traveling inland to deliver the last of his cargo, who later visited Castle di Caela, watched as panic-stricken tenebrals hurtled into the sunlit air, contracting and crumpling within yards of the caves out of which they issued, striking the earth with that ghastly popping sound and the smell of burnt hair.

It was only in waiting, in standing by the mouth of the highland cavern, that the merchant noticed the ground begin to move.

The quaking was general all over Solamnia, peasants' houses collapsing in rains of dried mud and thatch, the stables filling up with shrieks and movement as the horses felt the tremors and recalled that movements such as these boded disaster.

Disaster was what we were courting, there in the rock-strewn mountains, yet my thoughts were below those rocks, with Shardos and Ramiro.

"They're still under there, Brithelm," I said, my eyes on the silver circlet at my feet. "Shardos and Ramiro and the Que-Tana. Perhaps…"

I looked a long time at the godseyes, thinking of the power of life and death and what it might mean to those trapped under miles of cavern and rock.

I thought also of what that power had done to Firebrand.

Yes, when I picked up the circlet there was the nearly unmanageable urge to put it on.

And, yes, for a moment, there passed through my darkest imaginings a kingdom where I sat upon a throne and governed.

Omnipotent, yes, but kindly.

"I know," Brithelm said, his arm slipping over my shoulder. He smelled of dust and the caverns and, to be honest, of not having washed in too long a time. "I know. Perhaps they escaped by the other passage, the one Shardos told stories about. That's what you were about to say, wasn't it, Galen?"

I nodded. Whatever else came to pass, I had returned with the brother I set out to find. Let history and heroics rest in the hands of others.

I handed the crown to Brithelm, and beneath us the world kicked and bucked, knocking us off our feet.

The trees about us shook and bent and swayed as though caught in the midst of a windstorm, and the rumbling sound that had swelled through our last minutes in the tunnels began to roar, as rock beat against rock deep in the bowels of the mountains.

Out of the swirling dust came a Que-Tana warrior, shielding his eyes against unfamiliar light. Then Shardos, who pointed out our vantage point uncannily, sightlessly. He shouted something and seized a small Que-Tana child by the arm, dragging her toward us.

Ramiro came next. He stopped in the swirling dust and looked back into the darkness. He, too, shouted something, but I could hear no voice in all the rumble and crash of the tunnels caving in upon themselves. For a frightening moment, the big Knight lost his footing and toppled heavily, the ground tilting underneath him as though he were being funneled into the crevasse that was opening beneath him.

But he leapt to his feet, no doubt the first time since childhood that Ramiro of the Maw had made any movement one might take to be a jump or a scramble. And he had joined us within a matter of seconds, behind him a dozen more of the Plainsmen, then more after that and still more.

There must have been five hundred in all. Squinting, shielding their eyes, their pale skin scalding in even the muffled sunlight, they covered themselves with robes and hides and blankets as their home caved in behind them.

Together we made for the foothills. All around us and above us, the faces of the mountains were collapsing. We moved unsteadily, clutching one another and carrying the children into a safer darkness of leafshade and overhanging branches, where we collapsed, exhausted, as the landscape behind us fell in on itself, like a loaf or cake in the hands of a negligent baker.

A silly image, I am sure, but I do not doubt that even the Cataclysm evoked such foolishness from its witnesses.

To this day, I have sworn off baked goods. They smack too much of catastrophe.

There we sat until it was over. There was a final rumble somewhere off to the north of us, then an incredible stillness, out of which arose an even more incredible birdsong, as a nearby nightingale, duped by the smoke and the dust in the air, warbled in the ruins.

For a while, Brithelm wept for them all-for the Que-Tana who had not escaped, and even for Firebrand. It is safe to say that none of the rest of us could weep for the Namer, and yet each of us stood quietly a moment as the air and the landscape settled.

And I realized that, despite my great misgivings, there was something of history in this.