The Oath and the Measure

Chapter 10

In the Southern Darkwoods, kneeling above the clear green pool in the midst of the clearing, Vertumnus stirred the waters playfully. His fingers skimmed the surface of the pool, showering droplets over the image of Sturm and Mara trapped in a rainstorm miles away. Evanthe and Diona watched delightedly as the image shivered and dispersed and formed again.

"Drown them!" Evanthe hissed wickedly, her pale hands brushing a lock of hair from the Green Man's brow.

"Drench and douse them!" urged Diona.

"Only a rain," Vertumnus laughed and stirred the waters again. "The grass needs watering."

"Only a rain?" Evanthe whispered. "Only a rain, when you could do such marvels…"

"As the winds would rumor for ages," Diona coaxed, finishing her sister's sentence. 'The things you could do, Lord Wilderness, had you the mind and the imaginings and… and the gumption!"

Vertumnus ignored the dryads, crouched, and breathed on the surface of the waters.

In the pool's misty reflection, seen from afar, as though they appeared in a crystal ball or a Dragonorb, the young man and the elf maiden huddled together, gray shapes in the driving rain. Suddenly, from the bundled shadows an arm lifted, pointing toward a hillside, a distant shelter. They hastened toward it, their shapes dwindling into the net of rain. Behind them, scuttling and gibbering to itself, a drenched spider followed tamely.

"Rain falls on the just," Vertumnus murmured, and waved his hand over the pool, "and the unjust."

The mists parted on the surface of the water, revealing an encampment in a copse-a tattered web between two junipers, and a thatch-covered cabin only recently abandoned. The waters of the pool stilled and settled, and at the edge of the image, a hooded light bobbed from reflected tree to reflected tree-a lantern in the hand of a dark, caped figure.

"Ah," sighed Lord Wilderness and leaned forward until his face nearly touched the surface of the water. Quietly he whistled something in the magical tenth mode, which the old bards used to look through rock and over distance and sometimes into the future.

The image shivered, and the dark man in the copse lifted the lantern to his own inscrutable face.

"Boniface!" Vertumnus exclaimed. "Of course!"

Quietly, efficiently, the finest swordsman in Solamnia inspected the clearing and encampment. He stepped into the cabin and emerged, almost in one breath, frowning and looking about. Stroking his long, dark mustache, he stood beneath the broken web, apparently lost in thought, and then, as if he had known all along the direction in which his search would take him, wheeled about and vanished from the clearing, the blue evergreens closing behind him like the water's surface over a diver.

"Who is he?" Evanthe breathed.

"Yes," Diona echoed. "Who is he? And why does he follow them?"

"Just a shadow in the snow," Vertumnus replied. "But where is the mistress? For her path will cross with his."

The dryads looked at one another in disappointment.

"That hag?" Diona asked scornfully. "What would you with her, when the likes of us are here?"

"That old carrion bird," Evanthe said. "She smells of dark earth and death. No herbs in creation can cover those smells."

"Where is she?" Vertumnus repeated.

And as he awaited her arrival, he stared at the settling surface of the pool and lifted the flute to his lips.

"This will make a lean-to of sorts," Sturm sputtered as he spread his cloak between outstretched branches of oak and water maple. A makeshift tent, it was, but already the cloth sagged with the downpour.

"Of sorts, it will," Mara said. "But not a good one. The rock is limestone here. Cave country, I'll wager."

"Then you have my blessing to search for caves," Sturm said curtly. The long trek and the rain had worn away his patience. Silently he knotted the last corner of his cape to a maple limb, then stood back to admire his handiwork.

Eagerly, water beading and flickering on his bulbous black abdomen, Cyren scurried into the patchwork shelter. He crouched, obscured behind a thicket of his own legs, and rumbled contentedly as Mara, standing outside in the rain, turned impatiently to face her Solamnic companion.

"You're no woodsman, are you?" she asked, as the cape bellied with water and the branches leaned together.

Sturm watched glumly as his encampment collapsed, sending a sputtering, chittering Cyren out into the rain and halfway up a nearby oak. It was then that the music rose again, weaving through the rain and rising loudly above Cyren's scolding and the intermittent crashes of thunder. Mara looked at Sturm in astonishment.

In turn, he looked back at her, masking his own considerable surprise.

"We'll follow the sound," he said. "And if there are caves we are meant to find… well, we will find them."

The elf opened her mouth to protest, but her odd escort with his serious demeanor and ill-fitting armor had turned away from her, plunging into the sheeted rain.

Mara couldn't see Sturm's smile of amusement, for this magical music might inveigle and distract him, might lead him astray or dump him in a swamp somewhere. But this one evening, Vertumnus had done him two favors: The music led him somewhere, at least. And it had stopped the infernal elven complaining.

The nearest cave was less than a mile from the copse. Cyren spotted it first from above. Rumbling excitedly, he motioned his companions toward the small, bramble-covered mouth of the cave. But his enthusiasm cooled when Sturm made it clear that Cyren should precede them into the darkness. The idea, of course, was that a giant spider made a more formidable entrance than young man or elf maiden, but Cyren moved cautiously, extending one leg, then another, then a third, as though he walked over coals. Clicking nervously and startling at his own echo, he poked his head into the cavern, then backed out again, staring at Sturm so dolefully that he might have been pathetic had he not been so ugly.

Sturm waved the spider back toward the cave once, twice, a third time-each time less patiently than the first. Finally, when Cyren balked again, the lad drew his sword and quietly but firmly waved once more.

Muttering, the creature entered the darkness and crouched in terror at the cavern entrance. Assured at last that the place was empty and safe, the transformed prince spun a web in its farthest corner and went to sleep contentedly, dreaming strange dreams in which elven towers and beautiful girls stood side by side with bats and swallows and flying squirrels-countless winged and succulent animals entangled in sticky thread. Luin entered next and stood, warm and dripping in the center of the cave, until Luin, too, fell asleep and dreamed the fathomless dreams of horses.

Mara and Sturm sat together by a smoldering fire near the mouth of the cave, too wet and miserable to sleep. Sturm had taken off his breastplate and set it by Cyren's web, giving the spider more than one cautious glance as he did so. Carefully, almost daintily, he had removed his boots, poured the water from them, and set them to dry by the fire. Mara was much less fastidious. Shivering in her sodden furs, her dark hair matted to her forehead, she seemed to be courting pneumonia.

She could have done the sensible, indeed the healthy thing, by drying herself and slipping out of the furs into a warm blanket. Indeed, Sturm's promise that he would look the other way gave her pause for a moment, until she looked closely into his eyes and decided she didn't believe him. Instead, dripping and trembling, Mara lifted her flute and began to play. It was a pensive little folk melody Sturm recognized as Que-Shu Plainsman in origin. It haunted him, casting his memories back to his growing years beside the Crystalmir Lake, far to the south in Abanasinia.

Now, beside his other miseries, the music was making him homesick.

"I've had enough of piping for this season," Sturm protested gruffly, stretching his hands toward the warmth of the fire. Between wet fur and wet horse and the smoke from an ill-made fire, the smell in the cave was getting to be unbearable, and all things, weather and company and situation alike, seemed to conspire against him.

"Enough of piping?" Mara asked with a wretched little smile as she lowered the flute. "Afraid I'll turn you into another spider?"

"Turn if you will," Sturm offered glumly. "Cyren over there seems happy in his webbing. Or if you must pipe, pipe in the mode of Chislev so that somewhere in the midst of us there is harmony at least."

"So you know a little of the bardic modes," Mara observed. She wasn't especially impressed.

"No more than a standard Solamnic schooling," Sturm replied. "Seven modes, established in the Age of Dreams. One for each of the neutral gods. Philosophers claim that music and the spirits of man are interwoven as subtly as… Cyren's web over there. Dangerous stuff, though. The red gods are tricky servitors."

"No more than standard Solamnic schooling indeed," chided Mara, and Sturm frowned. "The red modes are no more treacherous than penny whistle tunes. They lift your spirits because you're taught to be happy when you hear a lilting piece in a major key, and thoughtful and a little melancholy when the song is slow and minor. Now, the white modes are another matter…"

She lifted the flute to her lips.

"The white modes?" Sturm asked, and again Mara began to play the little Plainsman tune, her fingers blurring this time as they raced along the flute. Though the melody was the same and the elf maiden played it as quietly and as slowly as she had before, there was something different in the feel of the music, as though somehow it had been filled with a sudden depth and direction. Cyren's web shivered and hummed in response, and the rain shrank from the mouth of the cave, forming a small rainbow on the damp ground as it receded.

"Did you do that?" Sturm asked skeptically, then gasped as he looked at the elf. For her robes were thoroughly dry, and her hair as well, as though the music were a hot, dry wind that had passed over and through her, until now, comfortable, even toasty, Mara lay back, nodding toward sleep.

She looked at Sturm with heavy-lidded eyes. For a moment, she didn't speak, and the filaments of the spider's web hummed on, echoing the vanished music, repeating the melody once more before they, too, stilled and were silent.

"What do you think?" she asked, her voice remote and echoing as though she spoke to Sturm from somewhere deep in the recesses of the cave. "It was the white mode you heard, the martial Kiri-Jolith combined with a Que-Shu rain hymn to drive back the waters from our threshold."

"But I heard nothing-I mean, nothing really different than when you played before."

"How sad for you," Mara said, holding the flute up to the firelight, examining it idly. "How sad… and how odd."

"Odd?" Sturm asked. "Why odd? It was the same melody, was it not?"

"One was" Mara agreed. "But the other, the white mode, took its place in the absences of the red, in the space between the notes of the Plainsman song. You didn't hear it because you weren't expecting to hear it. Some people can't hear it even when they're listening for it. They seem to be born not to hear it. Perhaps you are one of those."

"What do you mean by that?" Sturm asked testily. He fancied himself a good deal better than tone-deaf. Yet on this rainy afternoon, one tune had seemed identical to the other, and yet the second one had all the magic.

"What do you mean?" he repeated, but suddenly the girl was standing, alert as a wild animal when something foreign and dangerous crosses into its territory.

"Shhh!" she breathed. "Did you hear it?"

"Hear what?" Sturm asked angrily. Time and again, it seemed, his senses were called into question. Mara motioned him to be silent, then crept to the mouth of the cave, dagger in hand. Behind them, Luin stirred uneasily, and Cyren clicked and whistled somewhere back in the darkness.

"Something is out there," Mara whispered. "Something besides the wind and the rain is moving through the high grass over on the other side of that rise."

They looked at one another uncertainly.

"Stand back, Lady Mara," Sturm ordered, his confidence none too strong. "I expect that tending to something besides wind and rain is more my kind of duty than yours."

Drawing his sword, he stepped out into the rain, impressed by his own bravado. Mara looked at him skeptically, but he barely noticed. It was only after he was halfway to the rise in question that he realized he had left behind helmet, breastplate, and shield.

"So much for dash and daring," he sputtered as the rain ran in rivulets down his forehead. "There's no going back now."

Low to the ground, he skirted the rise to the south. For a moment, he passed beneath a lone blue aeterna tree, and all about him was dry and fragrant and loud with the spattering rain in the branches. Then quickly out of the shadows he burst, his sword at the ready and a fierce, boar-hunting cry on his lips.

Not twenty yards away, something dark crossed from tree to tree and scurried behind a large, moss-covered boulder. Sturm didn't break stride. Sensing that he had the advantage of surprise, he loped across the clearing and scaled the boulder with a single, athletic bound, hurtling down upon the caped figure below him before whoever it was had a chance to raise weapon, dodge, or even move.

A tangle of limbs and robes and water, the two tumbled and slid down the hillside, churning the sopping ground as they fell and wrestled. Somewhere amid a wrenching somersault, Sturm dropped his sword. He opened his mouth to cry out, his face plowed into the mud, and he came up stunned and sputtering.

Almost at once the caped man threw Sturm back against the boulder and staggered to his feet. Groping almost blindly in the mud for his sword, for a rock or a sizable limb, Sturm came up with nothing but a handful of grass and gravel and roots, which he hurled at his adversary with a shout.

The caped man dodged gracefully-a dancer's move, or an acrobat's-and Sturm's humble missile sailed by harmlessly. Staggering from the force of his throw and slipping on the slick, rain-soaked hillside, Sturm managed to right himself and, for the first time, get a good look at his adversary.

Dripping with mud and soil, his cloak interwoven with grass and dried vines, the man looked like an effigy fashioned of forests and night. Slowly, indignantly, he brushed his cloak, and the soil and greenery tumbled from his arms and shoulders.

Sturm gasped, his eyes flickering over boulder and bush, over sloping ground in a desperate search for the sword. Off to his left, in the midst of crushed high grass, he caught a faint glimmer of metal.

The man was silent, his face muffled by hood and rain, but his movements were unsettlingly familiar. Sturm, however, had no time for guesswork. Slipping in the mud, bracing himself once more against the boulder, he lunged up the hill, reaching the sword just before the caped man closed with him. A gloved hand grasped his wrist in a fierce and powerful grip, and Sturm went flying again into the side of the boulder, his vision flashing white as the air rushed from him.

Sturm stood slowly, astonished that he had managed to hold on to the sword. Painfully he raised it and, true to the form of combat dictated by the Measure, waited for his opponent to draw blade. But the opponent stood motionless, a dark silhouette in the driving rain. Sturm waved the sword over his head, yet still the man did nothing.

Then unexplainably, as though it rose from the waterlogged earth about them, the sound of the flute bubbled through the rainy air.

Sturm shouted again, his fear and anger warring for mastery. "By Paladine, I challenge you!"

He stopped short, stupefied by the words that had rushed from him before he had time to consider them. In anger and in fear, he had sworn by the highest of gods. Oath and Measure bound him. There was no going back.

Reluctantly, almost as if he could read the thoughts of the lad in front of him, the caped man drew his sword. Sturm's blade flicked out in a clumsy arc. The caped man's sword turned the blow with a quick, feline grace. Again Sturm lunged at his opponent, this time with a forceful thrust, but the caped man parried it easily, almost thoughtlessly. Sturm stumbled forward, caught off balance by the sheer recklessness of his own attack. He fell to one knee and skidded over the wet ground, scrambling to his feet at the sound of the caped man's laughter.

Spinning about in rage, Sturm raised his sword above his head and brought it whistling down in a sudden, blindingly quick movement. It was all the caped man could do to raise his sword. Blade crashed against blade, and the rainy hillside echoed with the sound.

Both men staggered back, each surprised at the force of the blow. Quietly they regarded one another through the dwindling rain, on a hillside furrowed and torn by their awkward battle.

The caped man rubbed his shoulder and transferred his sword to his left hand. Slowly, confidently, he pointed the blade at Sturm, who looked down at his own blade, shattered and useless in his hand.

In desperation, Sturm drew his knife, stepped back, and stared into the glittering eyes of his enemy, who closed with him confidently, preparing for the final blow.