Weasel's Luck

Chapter Sixteen

We learned what had occuredonly after the di Caela castle guard burst into the chambers of the Lady Enid to find the very lovely and very unconscious Dannelle di Caela, who on awakening told of the mysterious abduction.

The two of them, she and Enid, had been seated by the Lady Enid’s antique dresser, ridiculing the failed suit of Gabriel Androctus, whom Enid had described as having “all the glamor of an undertaker.” It was then that a cloud—a darkness of some sort—settled on the hearthstones and blotted out the light of the fire.

“At first we thought there was damage in the fireplace,” Dannelle explained weakly, propped up by maids and pillows. “Something perhaps to do with the flue, I suggested, since the flue is the only part of the fireplace I can name for you. And Cousin Enid approached the hearth, drawing up her skirts and listening absolutely not at all to my warnings that she should stop there—that she would soon find herself in smoke and ash that would ruin her dress, not to mention her complexion. But you know Cousin Enid.

“She stepped toward the hearth and, all of a sudden, vanished entirely. I could hear her scuffling and shouting from somewhere within the darkness, and immediately I rushed to her aid . . . but found myself here, bound and gagged in this bed. I had no idea how much time had passed, but then I heard the scuffling and shouting just outside the window. It could not have been long.

“I struggled to break free of the ropes, to loosen the gag so I could shout for help. But for the life of me I could not move and . . . I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

Standing by the antique dresser, as far away as possible from where Dannelle lay, I listened to the distraught story. I felt ashamed at the point where Dannelle rushed to her cousin’s aid, remembering how I had drawn back into the shrubbery when the shadow descended the wall.

As Dannelle told what had happened, Robert di Caela and Bayard sat attentive—and worried, obviously—in straight-backed chairs by the bedside. Brithelm stood at the notorious window with Sir Ramiro of the Maw and Sir Ledyard.

Alfric was somewhere slinking.

When the story was over, the men stared at one another—stared long and hard. Emotions rushed to Robert di Caela’s face. Fears and angers raced over that noble countenance like scorpions over a white throne, or like a dark cloud over the moonlit wall of a keep. But the time for flocking emotions passed quickly. He was the first to speak.

“So my daughter has been taken Huma knows where. Then the problem that lies before us is a simple one: how do we recover her?”

Brithelm turned from the window. Bayard leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. Neither of them spoke at first, both a little nervous in the presence of the di Caela patriarch. I was no better, watching them from my position of safety behind the mantle.

“Would that it had not come to this,” Sir Robert began, “especially in a time when we are so uncertain.

“Scarcely a month ago I received the news that Bayard Brightblade would attend this tournament. I received that news with joy, certain he was the prophecy’s choice for my heir, and glad of it.

“And now the claims of that heir have been challenged by one whose claim to these holdings has . . . authority. One who wins the tournament, whose prize is my daughter Enid and all the di Caela holdings, and yet who turns out to bear a name that also figures in the fate of my family, though in ways more dark and terrible than I would wish or even imagine.”

Bayard sat back, sighed, and waited for Sir Robert to finish.

“At least this poor girl has not been harmed,” I interrupted weakly, gesturing at Dannelle. She smiled, though wanly.

“Thank you, Galen Pathwarden,” she breathed. “You’re very . . . chivalrous. I shall not forget,” the Lady Dannelle went on disarmingly, “that you were the first to my side in my distress.”

I’d surprised myself on that one, too.

“My pleasure,” I muttered, and Sir Ramiro snickered by the window. I shot him a glance of white-hot hatred. Sensing my discomfort, Bayard spoke.

“Still, gentlemen, there is so much to piece together in this story. Perhaps we could convene elsewhere, where time and quiet are our allies and where we can think clearly about the situation in front of us, having left in the capable hands of maids and surgeons the welfare of those dear to us. Let us convene and reason together, gentlemen We have tactics to ponder.”

And ponder they did, in the main hall of the keep, where we had arrived after wandering down half a dozen corridors; across a huge stone bridge that spanned an indoor garden where Sir Robert kept exotic plants that smelled much too sweet for my liking; through familiar territory, where the di Caela statues and the sound of mechanical birds lay ahead of us; and eventually down the stairs to the main floor and the great hall itself. It was here we debated where the Scorpion could have taken Enid. We stood there among the tables which had glittered with candlelight and polished armor only a few nights ago, and it seemed as though every place imaginable on the wide surface of Krynn was mentioned in the hour we talked. No suggestion was encouraging, and I found it hard to be attentive to what the Knights were saying.

Because all the while, something kept telling me that I should remember something about the raven in my quarters the night before . . .

Sir Ledyard suggested we might well find the Scorpion and his captive somewhere upon the Sirrion Sea to the southwest. Nobody paid any attention to him; everyone had known his answer would have something to do with the sea, and besides, the Sirrion was much too far away.

Sir Robert was all for looking in Estwilde because of the glain opals he had seen earlier that afternoon. After he made this pronouncement, he considered the matter settled.

Sir Ramiro thought that solution was too obvious, that someone as subtle as the Scorpion would not betray his hand so readily. He suggested we search first in the Garnet Mountains south of the castle, if for no other reason than it was cold and high and thin-aired—the most unpleasant place around and therefore, according to Sir Ramiro’s reasoning, the ideal haunt for the Scorpion. The two old men began to bicker, and I wouldn’t doubt they’d have come to blows had not Bayard stepped between them.

Bayard argued for the Vingaard Mountains. He felt he had seen the Scorpion’s power at its strongest there, and wasn’t there something about magic’s being stronger the closer one got to its source?

None of the Knights were experts on the subject of magic. All eyes turned to Brithelm, who smiled inanely and shrugged.

“I don’t know enough about the Scorpion’s kind of magic, gentlemen,” he explained apologetically. “After all, clouds and talking birds are beyond my powers.”

“So what do we do?” Sir Ramiro asked impatiently. “Spread out and comb the whole continent? It would take years.”

“And the Scorpion, as you call him, doesn’t strike me as all that patient,” Sir Ledyard agreed, his broad eastern accent ringing in the great hall.

Had things continued in that fashion, we might never have stumbled across the answer. The Knights would have blustered and pronounced until all hours, and I would have sat there trying to remember what it was I should remember—what the Scorpion had disclosed the night before, in the darkness before Brithelm had walked into the room.

But immediately after Sir Ledyard had spoken, we heard a tearing sound and a cry above us. The Knights turned, drawing their swords, and I, sure it was the Scorpion come back, was under the chair like a whippet in Father’s great hall.

Alfric was dangling by a curtain from the balcony, cursing loudly and windmilling his stubby Pathwarden legs.

Evidently I had not been the only one to discover that particular hiding place and its advantages. Alfric, it turned out, had been up there while routes were suggested and questions were asked, and while leaning forward to hear just what was being said and how it might pertain to him, he stepped onto what he thought was a narrow extension of the balcony, a catwalk beyond its carved railing, but which was in fact nothing at all but thin air, a catwalk not even a cat could walk.

So there he was, suspended by a curtain he had managed to grasp when his fall began, beneath him several formidable Knights who were not overly concerned with his plight at the moment, and a brother who was whispering “drop him on his neck, please, Paladine!” Not an enviable place to be. As the curtain gave way and slowly lowered my brother to the floor of the hall, you could see him frantically scan the room for exits. Sir Robert had Alfric by the arm and had thrown him into a table before my eldest brother’s churning feet had touched the ground or Bayard could intervene.

“A fine array of guests I’ve entertained these last several days! One steals my daughter and another spies on me from my own balcony! I shall trust old Benedict before I offer hospitality again!”

Alfric cowered among the shattered plates, tangled in a fine linen tablecloth. Bayard stepped between Sir Robert and my cornered brother, who turned to me accusingly.

“Once again there is a council of the valiant, and everyone invited but old Alfric. You told them to leave me out, Weasel, so’s I wouldn’t have no chance to rescue Enid and win her hand in marriage.”

“For Huma’s sake, lad,” Sir Robert began, “shelve your courtship for a while!”

It was just like Alfric to throw a fit of persecution and blame me for somehow organizing a conclave of Knights whose specific purpose on this planet was to exclude him from any adventure. I thought back to his strange, almost psychotic version of what had gone on in the moat house as we were growing up—of the kind older brother he imagined himself, continually beleaguered by intolerable younger brothers.

It was incredible how someone could misread the past.

A banner in the hall swayed with a draft of wind. A single metallic cuckoo squawked above, from somewhere near the now-uncovered entrance to the balcony.

Misread the past.

I felt the memory of the dark, the brush of a wing. I smelled perfume and decay. For a moment the room around me blurred. Then it returned. The lights were even brighter, the colors more intense. It had fallen into place, that memory.

“Bayard, quickly! What was that prophecy of yours?”

“This is no time for mysticism!” Sir Robert stormed. “By the horns of Kiri-Jolith, I shall hang myself before I let another Path warden clear the threshold of my house!” Sir Ramiro grabbed his old friend and wrestled him away from. me.

“Please, Bayard! I’m sure it’s important!”

Bayard spoke after a silence in which the big, torch-lit room seemed even more vast, even more desolate.

“As I have learned it from my young days of exploring the library at Palanthas, the prophecy went so:

With that, he paused, having aired the future and found it confusing. We all faced each other, standing at the sides of one of Sir Robert’s long and elegant tables. Somewhere in the depths of the keep a mechanical whir and a whistle burst forth, then silence.

A strange look of puzzlement took residence in the face of each Knight.

Then, of course, they looked at me, as if I were a disinterested observer, or someone capable of telling true prophecy from false.

“Honestly, sirs. It’s in there somewhere. I’m sure.”

“Listen again, Galen.” Bayard insisted. “Maybe there’s something I’ve missed all along, something so obvious it would take a child to notice.”

Not a very flattering reason to ask my opinion, but I listened nonetheless, as the same tired old verses rushed over me, filled with their puzzles and wooden rhymes. I sat in Sir Robert’s enormous ceremonial chair, dangled my feet over the edge, jostled the dice in the pouch of my tunic.

The Knights stood attentively after the recital, waiting for my judgment, my answer. I squirmed and huddled at the back of the chair.

“For Huma’s sake, boy,” Sir Robert began testily, “your protector is not in a bardic contest here! We’re trying to recover my daughter, and we’re looking for clues, not reveling in bad rhymes!”

“If you please, sir, I am just over a near-fatal fever,” I began, but Bayard interrupted.

“Begging your pardon, Sir Robert, but I don’t think the boy is playing literary games.”

He turned to me and continued, kindly but urgently.

“Go on, Galen.”

“It’s what the Scorpion said. Or didn’t say. I don’t think he ever said that the prophecy was wrong, just that you were wrong about it, Bayard. Indeed, now that I think on it, I believe . . . no, I am absolutely certain, he said that there was more than one way to read it!

“So the question becomes not how you’ve been reading it all these years, Bayard, but how the Scorpion’s been reading it.”

I had always wondered if anything Gileandos had taught me would come in handy. Taking a deep breath and rising from the chair, I launched myself onto the dreadful paths of conjecture, pacing back and forth in front of the assembled Knights.

“Look, it all comes from something he said to me about his ‘own bright blade.’ Apparently, he thinks that if Bayard isn’t the bright blade of the prophecy, then it’s a real blade indeed.”

I turned again to Sir Robert.

“As I told you, sir, he said that before he threatened to kill your daughter.”

“So?”

“So he’s trying to lift a curse, too. Look, he certainly doesn’t like returning from the dead to gnaw at your family tree once every generation. I don’t think he has much of a choice.”

“I don’t follow,” said Sir Robert, walking toward his chair and sitting down. “We don’t invite him back. He is, after all, our curse.”

“And you are his!” Brithelm exclaimed, and I could see from his expression that he was catching on to what I was after. “After all, the two Gabriels deep in the di Caela past didn’t play fairly with old Benedict. One disinherited him, the other—regardless of what the di Caelas say about slaying him in battle and all—defeated him at the Throtyl Gap, then pursued him east to the pass at Chaktamir and killed him.”

Sir Robert nodded.

“Very well. The Pathwardens are right about the family . . . mishap four centuries back. It’s embarrassing—indeed, almost dishonorable—what Gabriel the Elder and Gabriel the Younger did, but I don’t see why we need to haul that skeleton from the family closet.”

“Because the skeleton has hauled itself out and is visiting the family once every generation, Robert!” Sir Ramiro replied with a low chuckle.

“Very well! Very well! What does it have to do with the prophecy, damn it!” Sir Robert snapped.

“The di Caelas are Benedict’s curse just as much as he is theirs,” Brithelm responded. “And he thinks that what he’s doing will free him and destroy the family who has wounded him.”

Sir Robert leaned back in the chair and fell silent. Again a cuckoo whirred somewhere on the ground floor of the castle. Outside, thunder rolled, and I could feel a closeness, a prospect of rain, gather in the air.

“Could the Scorpion be right?” Sir Robert asked evenly, locking his hands behind his head and staring up at the balcony. “Are we, not the Scorpion, the curse?”

“We’ll have to go to Chaktamir to find out, sir,” I replied.

“Chaktamir?”

“Remember what the prophecy says?” I asked. “‘When things have reached their darkest pass’?”

Sir Robert nodded distantly, his mind still on the prospect of prophecy turned around, of the foretold end of the di Caelas. Wearily he shook himself from his musings, rose to his full patrician height, and paced across the room.

“I can’t imagine things any darker than this,” he declared.

“But maybe it doesn’t just mean ‘things have reached their worst state,’ Sir Robert. Maybe whoever wrote the prophecy had in mind a real pass through real mountains.”

Sir Robert paused and took that in. Distant thunder rumbled once again.

“Perhaps. But how do you know it’s Chaktamir, Galen? Why not somewhere in the Garnet Mountains, or the Throtyl Gap?”

“I don’t know, sir. At least not for sure. But it adds up, doesn’t it? The pass at Chaktamir is dark to begin with because folks seldom use it any more, after Enric’s battle with the men of Neraka. It’s dark with Solamnic and Nerakan blood.

“Dark with Benedict’s blood, for that matter. After all, Gabriel the Younger caught up with him in the pass at Chaktamir.

“Finally, it’s dark because your history has made it dark. If the story is spread that Benedict died in the Throtyl Gap, then it’s easy to believe he died in battle, rather than in some shabby and questionable di Caela hunt.

“I’d say the darkest pass by any reading is Chaktamir, Sir Robert. And I believe that’s where you’ll find the Scorpion. And find your daughter.”

I looked about me. Brithelm was smiling, seated in a hard, high-backed chair, feet propped up on a table. Sir Ledyard and Sir Ramiro stood at either side of Sir Robert di Caela. Both these strange new Knights were nodding—agreeing with me. Bayard stared at me, his face impassive.

Alfric toyed with a tablecloth folded on a nearby chair, his mind scarcely on anything. Sir Robert folded his arms and looked at me curiously.

“What about the ‘generations from the grass,’ Galen?” he asked.

“I don’t have any idea, sir. Clever will only get you so far in a prophecy, I imagine.

“Most of all, I don’t know whom the prophecy’s for—Bayard or you or the Scorpion—but it’s at Chaktamir where the whole thing is resolved, for good or ill or both.

“Of that, I’m certain. I guess.”

Bayard smiled faintly and steepled his fingers. I remembered the pose—one I had seen back at the moat house on a morning that seemed like years ago.

Then his smile broadened. He stood, hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Then it’s to Chaktamir.”

“So comes to pass the most harebrained decision I have ever made,” Sir Robert di Caela concluded, sitting even more heavily in the same chair into which he had fallen an hour ago. The candles burned low, and the shadows rose in the hall of the banquet room until even the backs of chairs stretched long and ominous shadows over the floors.

“My most harebrained decision,” he repeated.

“We are to set off in a direction suggested by a seventeen-year-old boy of questionable honesty, who admits to trying his own fortune with the red dice of Estwilde, never quite understanding their meanings.

“We follow the shadow that this boy saw, knowing only that it went eastward—not how far it has traveled or even if it changed directions when it was out of sight. We go on the evidence of a prophecy we no longer know we are reading correctly.”

He turned to me and addressed me frankly.

“You do not have the best reputation for accuracy, boy.”

Bayard sighed and looked despairingly into the flickering candles.

“Nonetheless, Sir Robert,” Bayard claimed hoarsely, “your daughter is missing, and Galen’s is the best guess as to her whereabouts.”

The old man nodded firmly.

Finally, Sir Robert turned from me, though something told me that he would like very much to dismiss me—-to send me back to Coastlund in a wagon or a sack. I withdrew the Calantina dice from my tunic and held them palm up.

Nine and . . .

The light was bad, and Sir Robert began speaking again. I looked up and lost the reading. Nine and something. Something large.

Sign of the Weasel? Sign of the Rat?

Or of something entirely unexpected?

“If I am to find my daughter, it seems that this . . . oracular boy is forced upon me.”

He looked at all of us standing in front of him, shook his head in wonderment, then reddened and stood up wearily. His shadow darkened the entire south end of the hall, where the candles had guttered and burned out. He raised his sword in the ancient Solamnic salute, and his voice resonated in the high rafters of the great hall.

“Gather the Knights remaining at Castle di Caela. Gather those encamped in the fields surrounding, and call back those within the sound of the clarion trumpet. This very night we are off to Chaktamir. And woe betide the Scorpion when we find him there!”

While the gentlemen rummaged through armor, I made my final preparations for leaving Castle di Caela. Prospects of escape now seemed impossible.

Nor did I want to escape, especially.

Alone in my chambers for a “time of contemplation” before we set out, I tried to recover the reading of the Calantina—the one I had cast in the shadowy hall scarcely an hour ago. Down on my knees like an unlucky gambler, I rolled them again and again in hopes of seeing the same sign, but as is the way with history and with dice, the reading was gone forever. I cast in vain, receiving the Adder, the Centaur, the Hawk, the Mongoose, the Wyvern—not a nine among them. With each roll, the dice became more confusing.

As is the way with prophecy.

So I gathered my things together, taking care to put on my best tunic and the tooled gloves I had kept hidden so often throughout our journey from Coastlund.

Enjoying my renewed appearance, my red hair watered and slicked and combed into place with my fingers, I waited for the water in the basin to settle, then looked at my reflection.

Perfect. You never could tell who would be watching.

Prepared, adorned, and even a little resplendent if you counted the gloves, I scurried from my quarters down to the courtyard of Castle di Caela, where perhaps a dozen more squires were saddling horses, gathering provisions, and putting all in readiness for the journey east.

Together we busied ourselves with the final preparations, saddling and bridling Valorous, Sir Robert’s black mare Estrella, and more everyday horses for the other Knights and for my brothers. Three mules were brought from the surrounding farmlands, and that very night they were loaded with provisions and clothing and arms. Burdened and rained upon, they looked the sullenmost of all the beasts I had seen on this twisting, weather-plagued journey.

The pack mare also went with us, although reluctantly, straightening her legs and leaning backwards against the reins, snapping at a large stable boy until he turned and, to my great satisfaction, caught her a blow across the jaw that wobbled her knees and silenced her until she could be rigged and saddled and boarded. For, yes, my place was on her back again. Bayard believed that she would keep me mounted despite terrain and weather and my own incompetence.

If the poor pack mare’s load was made heavier by the addition of me to the freight on her back, then I wonder if it felt any lighter as we passed through the gates of Castle di Caela. For I felt a little lighter myself at that moment, when I turned to look back at the keep through the half light of morning and the rain that was now quite heavy.

I could swear that I saw, through the shifting grayness, a light at Lady Enid’s window. I could swear that I saw Dannelle di Caela standing there, graceful and pale and framed by the light of the window. And graceful and pale, she lifted her graceful, pale arm, and waved at me departing. My ears were hot. Instinctively, my hand went to my hair.

Which was wet and plastered to my head like the pelt of some repulsive drowned animal. I raised my hood, pretended not to notice her, and faced eastward.

At the last moment before the gates closed I looked back over my shoulder as heroically, as romantically as I could manage from atop a beast of burden. But with the angle of the road and the morning shadows and the rising rain, the window was a blur of light rapidly fading, and Dannelle was obscured entirely.

Chapter Seventeen

The road south from the castle was washed with rain already. The downpour had stripped whatever browned or reddened leaves had remained clinging to the trees, and now the countryside was bare and gray and gloomy, at last making good on the winter the skies had promised for a while.

There were twenty of us, only six of us Knights. Sir Robert could have brought his palace guards, but the practical man within him recoiled at leaving Castle di Caela undefended. He could have brought part of his escort, but the Solamnic Knight in him recoiled at “sending an army to do a Knight’s work,” as he put it. So they were left behind.

Though it seemed to me that this was the time for armies, for catapults and ballistae and engines of war—anything to take the Scorpion’s attention from yours truly—the task ahead of us began with twenty of us, and twenty of us only.

Bayard rode in the lead atop Valorous. Sir Robert brought up the rear on Estrella—I believe he was back there to round up any Pathwardens trying to escape. I rode in the middle, sandwiched between brothers and soaked in the dismal morning showers.

Alfric’s gloom was contagious. He sat atop his horse, wrapped in a bulky blue robe, the hood pulled so far over his face that he looked like a huge, animate bag of wet laundry. Even his horse, no monument to spirit to begin with, bowed its head sullenly against the cold morning rain.

He felt swindled, he had claimed back at the gates of Castle di Caela.

“For why,” he asked, “is everyone so sure that Enid is going to marry Bayard if we rescue her? Seems to me that it’s been decided a little too soon.”

He fell into a sulking silence.

But if Alfric’s gloom was contagious, Brithelm was thoroughly immune, his musings somewhere far from this road, this part of the country, as he sat benignly and unhooded to the worst the rain had to offer. Lost in thought, he was lost to the rest of us. His horse was his sole guide, as it followed my pack mare unquestioningly. We rode without rest until mid-morning. It was some Solamnic notion, I suppose, that you traveled farther and more efficiently when you were so miserably uncomfortable that the prospect of ambush or a monster in the roadway would seem like a welcome break from the routine.

To make things worse, neither of my brothers was speaking—to me, to each other, to anyone, as far as I could figure. Brithelm remained lost in thought behind me, his eyes on the rain and on the eastern horizon, and Alfric was ahead of me, suspicious and sulking, no doubt trying to guess what goods I had on him and what I had told the Knights.

So I drifted in and out of slumber that morning, jogged awake by a sudden rise in the road or a dip when the pack mare slipped or sank a bit into the mud. On occasion a distant roll of autumn thunder would disturb my sleep, or the rain would drip inside my cloak and across my face, sprinkling and startling me. One time I was jostled awake by Bayard, who had slowed Valorous and let most of the party pass him. Reining his horse in abreast of mine, he offered me a large, coarse cotton handkerchief.

“Whatever these vapors were that saddled you back at the castle, you haven’t shed them yet. I can hear your sniffling all the way up the column.”

“Who’d have thought it, Sir Bayard?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“All along you’ve made fun of these dice I carry with me. And now all of us are armed and appointed and drenched by the rain, following a prophecy that’s every bit as many-sided and cloudy as any of the Calantina readings. What’s the difference?”

“You explained the prophecy quite well for a skeptic.”

“But you haven’t answered my question. What is the difference?”

Bayard smiled and flicked Valorous across the withers with the wet leather reins. The big horse snorted and lurched toward the head of the column, and Bayard called back to me.

“Maybe no difference.”

By mid-morning of the next day, we reached the swollen eastern fork of the Vingaard River. There was no longer time for musing, for pondering mysteries. As I looked ahead of me into the gray rush of waters, I could see that the Vingaard had overflowed its banks. Fording would be dangerous, perhaps even deadly.

“Flood time nearly, boys,” Sir Ramiro shouted, championing the obvious above the sound of the rain and the river. “Autumn is the flood season here anyway, and we have come at the wrong time . . .”

He looked up at Bayard sullenly, thick brows cascading water.

“. . . Perhaps even to the wrong place?”

Things about us grew even more ominous, even more gloomy as the rain fell and the river rose and the overcast day permitted no sun. Here at the banks of the Vingaard, it seemed as though everything was fixed against us: the clever enemy, the night’s head start, the terrible weather. Even the land itself had betrayed us. I sat atop the pack mare. Things could be worse. We could be out there in mid-current.

“Across the ford, then, young fellow?” an elegant voice boomed in my ear, and I started at the presence of Sir Robert di Caela beside me. There was the sound of more horses approaching, and soon Sir Ledyard and Brithelm had joined us.

“Well, Galen?” Sir Robert insisted, wrapping his cloak more tightly against the mounting rain.

“Galen?” Bayard chorused, leaning forward and stroking Valorous’s mane as the big horse shouldered its way between Ledyard’s big mare, Balena, and Sir Robert’s smaller, more graceful Estrella.

“I don’t know,” I murmured into my hood. I crouched, curled up, and tried to look like a piece of baggage on the pack mare’s back.

“Speak up, boy! These are old ears and clamorous raindrops!”

“It’s just . . . just that I don’t think this mare of mine is going to breast that current out there. You didn’t see her in the swamp and on the mountain paths, Sir Robert. She’s far more . . . anxious and roundabout than she seems on level ground and a wide road.”

“We’re all a little more jumpy at an impasse,” declared Sir Ramiro, who had approached astride his big, forgiving percheron. Water cascaded off his gray wool robe like springs coursing down from a mountain lake.

“Get to what we need to do,” he said, smiling wickedly. “And leave me . . . to encourage the mare.”

Bayard pointed toward a stretch on the river bank, almost submerged in the rising water. Sir Robert nodded, and galloped over to inform the rest of our companions.

I could have mulled over this crossing for hours, stacked thought upon thought until I had confused myself completely and entirely, as Gileandos said I was inclined to do.

But there was no time for thinking. Immediately my companions began tying together the pack mare and the mules. The Knights hitched their cloaks tightly about their legs so as not to tangle in the rushing water. And Sir Ramiro slapped the rump of the pack mare sharply with his enormous hand. She started and leaped toward the water.

We were fording the Vingaard.

The water was icy cold about my ankles. I drew my feet from the stirrups of the saddle, thought twice about it, and braved the water for the purchase on the back of my steed.

The mare grunted, then breasted the current. To the right of all of us squires, Brithelm’s horse began to navigate the waters, and to the right of him was Sir Robert on Estrella. Beyond them was Alfric, then two other Knights, then Ledyard and Ramiro, and then Bayard, of course, active and secure atop Valorous. Alfric, who had been challenging Bayard’s authority at every turn of the road, was more than willing to let my protector take the rightmost path.

The boy to the immediate right of me, a blond-haired gap-toothed monstrosity from Caergoth, grinned hatefully at me.

“Got that mare in line?” he taunted nasally. “Or is it the rider that’s got to be pushed through the water?”

“Those teeth will look good tangled in seaweed,” I replied, and slapped the pack mare on the rump again. We slid farther out into the current, then sagged in the water a moment as the riverbed gave way beneath the mare and she began to swim.

I pressed my knees against her sides. I held to her mane so tightly that she snorted and shook her head at first: then I loosened my grip, but not too much, thinking of the current that could carry a drowned body almost all the way to Thelgaard Keep.

In midstream the waters were indeed tricky, plunging into an undertow deep and powerful along the spine of the river. When we reached that point in the crossing, we were pulled more insistently, more heavily. One of the mules brayed behind us, and through the rain I saw a bundle slip from its back into the driving current. The gap-toothed boy reached for it in vain.

“I’m losing hold!” he cried, and toppled into the water.

“Brithelm!” I screamed frantically as the boy slipped downstream behind my brother. It sounded thin and shrill and cowardly above the roar of the river. I was almost embarrassed to have cried out, for certainly someone would haul the oaf from the water. But then a swell in the current rushed over us, knocking me from the back of the mare.

I was dangling from the saddle by my right ankle, which had lodged in the stirrup and had twisted in all directions. But the ankle held, and the stirrup held, and my head was above the surface, gasping and coughing out the water that rushed by me and into me.

I windmilled my arms frantically, recalling the times I had seen people swim and hoping that going through the actions would somehow give me control over the current that was dragging me southward to death. Several times I went under, and thinking too fast, I recalled the legends about going under for the third time. How many times had it been? Six?

Another swell of water rolled over me.

Seven?

Through the glaze of river water and sunlight I saw a hand over me, large and extended somewhere up in the air I was longing to get to. My head surfaced for a moment, long enough to hear Ledyard cry out, “Here, boy!”

Then came the dark and marbled green of the water, and the sense of coming unmoored, of being carried by the current.

It was not too bad, really, this floating. It was for a moment like emerging from a deep and immensely satisfying dream, or returning there. I could not figure which, and soon I ceased to bother with figuring altogether.

Was this what the fish saw, looking up?

The light, green and then gold where the sunlight broke upon it?

Was this the last vision of the drowned, before the weeds entangled them and made them cold?

I did not care, relaxing, enjoying the movement and light, preparing to forget all of them: Enid and Dannelle, my brothers and Sir Robert and . . .

Bayard.

Who pulled me by the hair from the current, up into the cold and into the painfully bright light where it hurt so much to breathe that I felt dizzy and sick.

He draped me over the saddle, pounding on my back as he did so, and I coughed water for what must have been an hour.

Above the water, in the dry land of harsh air and duty and of thinking too much, I forgot the current and the dangerous dreams of the river. Bayard set me gently on the southern bank of the Vingaard: I wondered about Sir Robert, the Ladies di Caela, my brothers, remembered Bayard who had drawn me from the water and from certain drowning.

Remembered the rest of our party.

Who had been halved by the river.

There is, in the easternmost fork of the Vingaard River, a sudden surge in the midstream current even more powerful than the steady undertow which is the constant bane of the rivermen and of those who foolishly try to cross.

“The Vingaard Drift,” the rivermen call it, and when they can, they defend against it by poling the boats across as you would a barge, by dropping anchor when the Drift is at its worst. There is no prophecy that accounts for it, no way to predict its rise and its fall. Indeed, few know of it beyond those who make the river their living.

It so happened that the Drift had chosen to rise at the moment we crossed, sweeping many of us from our saddles into the merciless current. In the moment after Bayard-caught me up from the tide that rushed around him, the huge, struggling form of Sir Ledyard followed in my wake.

“When I reached for him,” Bayard concluded, his voice shaking from loss of breath, from struggle and something more deep and disturbing and sorrowful, “he drew his arm away. Drew his arm away, Galen, shouting that we should save ourselves, that he would right himself downstream.”

From somewhere around Bayard I heard the sound of weeping. Brithelm, no doubt, though I could not see through the water and the memories of the water now covering my face.

“Sir Robert? Sir Ramiro?” I asked.

“They have gone to follow the path of the river, hoping for a sand bar, a downed tree, anything to which our friends might cling.

“We have no hope, Galen. By now they are deep into the plains of Solamnia. In the country of the brave and the innocent. May Sir Ledyard find the seas at last.”

“Receive them all to Huma’s breast,” rose a familiar voice behind Bayard. Alfric stood beside my protector.

“This blanket stayed dry, Weasel,” he muttered, tossing a rough wool coverlet over me. I do not mind saying that I wept a little while after Sir Robert came heavily back from downstream and from a luckless search. The Drift had swelled, had knocked a full dozen of us, mounts and armor and weapons and all, tumbling into its dark and rushing midst. It was a tangle of limbs and blankets and outcry, Sir Ramiro told me, when he returned from the search covered with mud and river weed. Squires and Knights had tumbled southward until they were lost from sight in the strong tow of the river.

Bayard was right. We had no hope of finding them.

I wept for Ledyard, whom I would never really know, for the dozen or so drowned with him, and for the gap-toothed blond squire upon whom I had wished outrage too easily and too unluckily. I began to wonder if this, too, was the Scorpion’s doing, if his hand was at the reins of the river, guiding the rise of the Drift at the worst possible of times.

The way ahead of us was cloudy, what awaited us at Chaktamir, dark and obscure. Sir Robert sat wearily beside me, armor tolling metal on metal, the hour of sadness.

“It’s terribly early, I know,” he began. “All of us mourn, all of us are still. . . taken aback at the events of this morning.

“But another life depends on our quickness, our determination, our knowledge of the roads. Remember that Enid may be somewhere ahead of us. We must take up pursuit before something terrible happens to her in the eastlands.

“So take courage. Where do we go from here?”

His eyes were intent upon the east, the rushing sound of the river behind us and ahead of us the plains of eastern Solamnia as they rose and roughened into the tough little country of Throt—a thicket of roads and not-roads, paths and waterways, any of which the Scorpion might have taken with his priceless spoils. We chose one path among all of these—straight to the pass of Chaktamir. Bayard rose in the saddle, shielded his eyes, and made out a copse of vallenwood on the eastern horizon that seemed to be a landmark of sorts. Heavily and wearily we traveled east.

With the copse directly ahead of us. Bayard turned in the saddle and called back to the rest of the party.

“We go southwest from here, crossing two roads and a wheat field. Then we come to another road, which we take due east, keeping the Throtyl road to our left, the mountains to our right.”

“And soon we will reach Chaktamir?” Sir Robert called back.

It seemed that Sir Robert knew little of the lands east of his holdings. Bayard rode back to us frowning, shaking his head.

He explained, politely but briskly, leaning across Valorous’s neck.

“I’m afraid that the pass is still five days’ hard ride from here, Sir Robert. On the day after tomorrow we should pass through the Throtyl Gap into Estwilde, then two days more until the road forks, the southerly branch leading to Godshome and Neraka beyond, the easterly toward the pass itself.

“Eventually we will reach the foothills of the Khalkist Mountains, and following this same road, we will climb steadily, almost a day’s journey, until we come to Chaktamir, seated high in the land that once belonged to the men of Neraka and now is no creature’s.

“It is there, Sir Robert, that the Scorpion will wait for us. And there your daughter will rest—unharmed, I pray—awaiting us also.”

Their heads moved closer together, and the two men exchanged words in private. Alfric leaned far over his saddle to try and catch what was being said. He heard nothing, evidently, and tried to right himself in the saddle.

But midway back to the upright position the weight of his armor took over, and he dropped from the saddle, face first onto the rocky ground. Brithelm helped my red-faced brother to his feet, while Alfric fired questions at Bayard.

“How do you know this?”

“I’ve been to Chaktamir before. Ten years ago . . .”

“So he has been to Chaktamir before!” Alfric exclaimed triumphantly. “You heard him say that, Sir Robert! Now I ask you: why in the name of Paladine should we let ourselves be guided by somebody who is suspiciously familiar with the places that the Scorpion goes to?”

Ramiro leaned his ampleness back on his long-suffering horse and laughed.

“Young Pathwarden, I’ve been to Chaktamir twice myself. Perhaps there’s a conspiracy afoot you haven’t noticed!”

“What’s your problem, Alfric?” Bayard asked calmly, idly stroking Valorous’s mane, clearing it of mud and stray brambles.

“Ever since we left the castle,” Alfric whined, “it’s been ‘Bayard, do this,’ and ‘Bayard, lead us here’! When we get to Enid, of course she’s going to want to marry you, on account of you’re the only one Sir Robert lets do anything!”

“Is that what is bothering you, Alfric?” Bayard asked slowly, dangerously, and I huddled deeply into the wool blanket I had been given, for I could tell by the flatness in his gray eyes that Alfric had just passed into the eye of a great and powerful storm.

“That is what bothers you, when we have lost fourteen to the current behind us?

“There will be plenty for you to do, Alfric,” Bayard declared coldly. “And sooner than you’d like, I’d wager.

“For our enemy is already watching.”

Bayard pointed to a spot not far ahead of us, where a bare-branched, dying vallenwood drooped heavily on the gray and rain-soaked plains.

In its topmost branches a raven perched.

Two days later, we passed through the Throtyl Gap. It is a country as rocky and forbidding as eastern Coastlund—plains, to be sure, but plains steeply rolling, rising gradually out of the fertile river lands to the west until the country around the traveler is parched and cracked, like the face of a moon through astronomer’s glasses, or like a landscape ravaged by fire.

Through this desolate region of dark, volcanic rock we were led by Bayard, at a slower pace than before because of the terrain and also because the accident at the river had left many of our horses and mules bruised and skittish. They balked, bit, kicked, and brayed through the lengthened hours of the journey. They were not alone in their weariness, their discontent. Each of us had suffered a pounding fording the Vingaard.

Bayard and I led the way, Bayard following a worn path through the glittering rocks, occasionally calling back something to Sir Robert, who followed us. Ramiro and Alfric followed Sir Robert. Alfric crouched uncomfortably in the saddle as though he expected a hail of arrows at any time, and Sir Ramiro grew less and less amused with my brother’s cowardice and bluster as the miles wore on. Brithelm brought up the rear, and several times, to Sir Robert’s great impatience, we had to stop and send Ramiro back for him. Once the big Knight found Brithelm bird-watching, once lifting a rock to inspect more closely the hardy insect life of Throtyl Gap.

A third time Ramiro found Brithelm dazed and sitting in the middle of the trail, felled by a low-hanging branch he had not noticed while riding along rapt in meditation.

Bayard occasionally lent a hand at guiding the pack mare, but more often he was examining the rocks for the trail, mounting and dismounting as our path was lost and recovered in the hard, volcanic terrain. Ahead of us and above us, the only birds were predators and scavengers, the only trees were pine, spruce, and a ragged strain of vallenwood which could not sink its roots deep in the rocky soil and, as a result, grew stunted and bent in the dreary landscape.

“The country of hawks,” Bayard muttered once, skillfully reining Valorous around me in order to herd the pack mare back onto the road. “The hardiest animals venture up here, and kill one another simply because there’s nothing else to prey on.”

“Sounds like growing up in the Pathwarden moat house,” I ventured, and he laughed harshly, drawing beside me as the road widened and a cold wind struck our faces from out of the south.

“Or on the streets of Palanthas,” he countered, smiling. Then he grew serious.

“Something’s come over you, Galen, and in ways I could not have foreseen back in the moat house when you first pleaded your case in front of me. You’re . . .”

“Less of a vermin?”

Bayard flushed.

“I’d have said ‘more cooperative,’ ” he ventured, eyes on the road ahead of him. “Were it not for your size, and . . .”

He looked at me, smiled, and turned away.

“. . . and for the absolute refusal to cooperate of that moustache you’re trying to grow, I’d take you for the oldest Pathwarden among us.

“What I’m trying to say, Galen, is that there’s Knighthood peeking out through your seams.”

I had no time to bask in the compliment. For the road was rockier, and steeply ascending, and ahead of us the hawks were turning.

By noon of the next day, it was more than hawks ahead of us. On occasion the eastern horizon shimmered with that brilliant, metallic mist that is the hand of mirage, that makes you think you are looking through water at the country ahead of you.

The mirage itself was inhabited. Strange things walked upright through the blurred landscape. Nor could we make out their form all that clearly—it was, after all, a mirage into which we looked. But dark red and brown they were, and hairless, and ever running from one fading, dissolving rock to the next one. Sometimes the mirage would vanish, only to appear again several winding miles east of where we last saw it. Each time it was peopled by dark, scurrying forms.

The horses grew skittish at something in the air.

“W-what are they, Bayard?” I asked uneasily.

“I am not sure. I do know we have crossed into Estwilde, and if the Scorpion knows we are coming, they may be his scouts. Or his first wave of illusions.”

Sir Robert reached into his robe, drew something out, and cast it by the roadside. Sir Ramiro followed suit, and when he did I heard the faint tinkle of breaking glass.

“What’s going on, Bayard?” I asked, but my protector had not been watching. His horse had moved slightly ahead of mine, and he rode with his eyes fixed to the road ahead of us.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Sir Robert and Sir Ramiro each reached into his robe, drew something out, and threw it away. I haven’t the least idea what Robert discarded, but Ramiro’s was glass, I am sure.”

Bayard chuckled softly, murmured, “The old school.”

“I don’t understand.”

“An old Solamnic custom. When a Knight rides into battle, there is always the possibility he’ll be killed.”

“Of course.”

“If something were to happen to you, chances are there’s something on your person—something small, perhaps, but there nonetheless—that you’d rather your people not find when your body returns to them.”

“I see. And then what I saw . . .”

“Was our two older Knights discarding their vexations. I have no idea what Sir Robert cast aside, but Sir Ramiro’s was dwarf spirits.

“It always is.”

Deftly, quickly, Bayard’s hand flashed out from under his robe. Something small and glittering sailed through the air and into the rocks above the trail. I heard a metallic ring as something fell from rock to rock and finally settled and became still.

To this day I do not know what it was.

As we rode farther, the purple of the Khalkist Mountains rose gradually, mistily out of the eastern margins. Somewhere within those mountains lay Chaktamir, lay the pass, and when I first made them out on the horizon I thought again on the custom, of the prospect of my returning on a shield.

Yes, I had thought of it before, but always as some grand, dramatic scene out of the romances, in which everyone tore hair and wailed and apologized to my lifeless form for the injuries done me. My final return would be high theater, suitable punishment to Father for the lack of attention I received or perceived from my days in the moat house.

Now I thought of what I should discard—what it would be best if he never saw. It was between the gloves and the Calantina dice: the gloves ill-gotten, the dice smacking of eastern superstition, incantation, incense, and the sacrifice of birds.

It was a close call. For a moment I thought of discarding both, but I figured that would be excessive. Especially since I had absolutely no intention of returning to Coastlund, alive or dead. I wondered what Enric Stormhold had cast away.

My aim had improved since the nightmarish time in the Vingaard Mountains. The dice skittered between the rocks, tumbling to rest somewhere in the high weeds that lined the path we followed. It’s anyone’s guess what that final cast read.

Chapter Eighteen

As we approached the Khalkist mountains the grim signs of the Scorpion were everywhere. The rising ground was burned ahead of us—deliberately, not as if by wildfire or something natural and blind. Wide swaths of blackened earth lay in front of us, then land relatively untouched where the only sign of violation was the occasional dark, unrecognizable symbol freshly burned into the rocks rising from the borders of our trail. It began to snow as we ascended the western inclines of the Khalkists. But even the snow would not settle on the scars of the foothill fires, as though the spots were still warm. As we reached the mountains proper, the mists descended and the snow receded behind us.

It was there that we saw the first of the pikes. They leaned on the eastern horizon like dark standards or banners, but something in the way they drooped—like thin branches laden with heavy fruit—caused us to rein in our horses, to come to a stop on the narrow road.

Bayard squinted eastward, shielding his eyes with a gloved hand. He turned to me, his face pale.

“I cannot see what they are,” he said, “but I have my suspicions.”

Before I could ask, he started toward the dark, slanting needles ahead of us. The severed heads on the ends of the pikes had been dead some time. It was the horses who knew them first, snorting and rearing. The mules sat on the trail and refused to budge; only a strong Sir Ramiro and a firm riding crop got them going again. I can’t say that I blamed them. The dried and withered faces had sunken in upon the skulls. From the designs of the helmets—the kingfishers, the roses—I could tell that they once sat atop Solamnic shoulders.

“An old Nerakan strategy,” Ramiro explained, guiding his skittish animal around the first of the pikes. “A sign to your enemies to come no farther.”

“Have they been set here long?” Alfric asked apprehensively.

Ramiro did not answer as we filed along the path, winding between the grim warnings. But when his hand moved to the hilt of his sword, it was sign enough.

Perhaps the mist around us was thicker than we had thought. Perhaps knowing we had crossed into the mouth of the old Chaktamir Pass, scene of bloody history both noble and best forgotten, had set our thoughts to wandering. But none of these reasons could explain the castle and its sudden appearance. It was as though the mist solidified, that at one moment the fog began to take on the substance of stone. Startled, Alfric brought his horse to a sudden stop, sliding in the frost and gravel. My mare and Brithelm’s mule piled into the horse from behind, and Bayard had to move Valorous deftly aside to avoid the tangle of horse, mare, mule, and Pathwarden, all limbs and eyes, looking up to the heights of the castle.

“This looks familiar,” Alfric ventured.

“Perhaps that’s because it’s drawn to the plans of Castle di Caela, boy,” Sir Robert snapped. So it was.

It stood, a big gray castle, a huge tower at each corner of its large, rectangular courtyard. As the last reddening light of the sun struck the flag on the tall southwest tower, our eyes were drawn by the play of red and black in the castle standard.

Sable scorpion statant on a field gules.

A black scorpion on a red flag. Simple and bloody and daunting.

“The Scorpion’s Nest,” Sir Robert breathed. “We’re nearing the end of this.”

Sir Ramiro and Sir Robert reined in their horses beside us.

“It is. As I live and breathe, it is. Castle di Caela, stone for stone!” Robert exclaimed.

“‘Somehow those illusions have delivered him a castle,’” Bayard breathed, quoting something I should have remembered but could not. “How predictable of old Benedict, if Benedict it is, to model his castle, down to the very crenelations and to the mortar itself, upon the one castle he knows intimately, has known for over four hundred years.”

“It is an outrage,” Sir Robert stated.

“It is also not real, and therefore nothing to trouble yourself over, Robert,” soothed old Ramiro.

“And easy to find our way around,” Brithelm insisted. Everyone turned and looked at him. He stood calmly amid the rocks, looking up at the castle as if he were a general taking stock of his siegecraft. He took his eyes from the castle and rested them on Sir Robert.

“Benedict’s had his eye on Castle di Caela for centuries. He knows it intimately. It’s no challenge for him to slip undetected through the halls of the keep, but we know Castle di Caela, too, and if the Scorpion’s copy resembles it more than outwardly, that resemblance is to our advantage. That is, when we’re inside.”

Thinking of the swamp and its illusions, I hurled a rock toward the walls ahead of me and heard it clatter against the stonework.

Solid, this time.

“You mean we’re going in?” Alfric whimpered, glancing behind him down the trail.

“Hush, Alfric,” snapped Sir Ramiro. “We’re at his damned gates, after all.”

A flutter of wings and the soft gurgling sound of pigeons descended from the wall off to our left. Over there, somewhere near the main gate of the castle, the huge birds, purple and glistening with a dirty metallic shine, were coming to light on the battlements.

There was movement, then a dim outcry from somewhere within the walls.

Bayard drew his sword, and the other two Knights did likewise. Alfric ducked behind his horse and drew his menacing long knife.

Bayard turned to me.

“You, too,” he admonished softly. “It’s about to begin.”

I drew my sword.

Begin it did, in a new and unexpected form.

I had been prepared for satyrs, for some other half-human, half-beast arrangement such as the Scorpion seemed fond of throwing against his enemies—minotaurs, perhaps, or even the lizard men of whom legends had arisen lately.

But not prepared for centaurs.

We had dismounted because of the steep climb, and we were leading our horses toward the castle gate. Then it opened, and two of the creatures issued forth, lumbering unsteadily, almost drunkenly toward us over the rocks and the incline. I wondered for a moment about the truth of the old proverbs about centaurs and wine. Then the smell that reached me stopped my wondering entirely. It was a smell of neither wine nor spirits, but of mold and dried vegetation and decay. The smell of a swamp—but the smell of a deeper decay beneath all that moss and mud and vallenwood and cedar—the smell when dead flesh, left exposed to the air and the moisture and the unseasonably warm autumn days, begins to rot.

“Walking dead!” Sir Robert exclaimed. “Spit into the sunlight by Chemosh!” He stepped toward them warily, followed by Bayard, then Ramiro.

I waved my knife as menacingly as I could, though I had no idea what earthly good a piece of cutlery would do against creatures of such size.

A whistling sound arose from their throats, as though they mocked the act of breathing or had forgotten how to breathe.

They were now close enough that I could see the wounds.

Who saw them fall, Kallites and Elemon. I remembered Agion’s story.

Riddled with arrows as though they had walked through a gathering of archers.

Who saw them fall.

Still in the side of the larger—Kallites or Elemon? I could not remember the details of the tale—arrows were imbedded to the nock, to the feathers. With the smaller it was as though the arrows—feather and shaft entirely—grew from his chest and shoulders.

My companions raised their swords as the centaurs stumbled blindly into their midst, flailing with their huge arms and the clubs they carried.

The larger centaur struck Sir Robert a heavy blow with its forearm. The old man was knocked off his feet and tumbled into a cursing heap at the side of the trail. At that moment Enid di Caela almost came into her inheritance, for the big creature reared, preparing to bring his front hooves crashing down on Sir Robert. I rushed toward Sir Robert, knife drawn.

Bayard, however, slipped behind the centaur before it noticed—indeed, before I had noticed—and hamstrung the creature with a blinding swipe of the sword. The big thing tottered and fell over on its side, struggled to right itself. It was only a second before Bayard’s sword flashed once again, and the big centaur’s head rolled several yards down the slanting trail.

Ramiro had that strange fat man’s grace—the quickness and agility you never expect in someone his size. He went for the smaller centaur and circled it like an immense and deadly fencing master, sword extended in front of him. His first serious lunge struck home on the stumbling, ungainly centaur. Which did not fall.

Which hissed, widened its dull black eyes, and climbed down the blade toward Ramiro. It climbed until the blade burst through its back and it had Ramiro in its fetid, crushing embrace. But its arms were not long enough to encircle the big Knight, much less crush him. Quickly Ramiro shrugged away his attacker and dislodged his sword with the sound of a knife drawn through a rotten melon. Then he spun quickly, putting all his considerable weight behind his sword.

The blow was so clean that the centaur’s head came down upon its shoulders and wobbled there for a moment before toppling off.

The air about us lay stilled and foul.

Sir Robert groaned and creaked as Brithelm helped him up from the roadside. Ramiro and Bayard sheathed their swords, standing over their fallen enemies. And something sniffled in the road behind us, curled into a dark heap.

“Alfric?” Bayard called.

“Alfric?”

But there was no answer. My brother lay clenched and shivering in a pile of gravel, covered by a blanket. Bayard looked back at me.

“Alfric?” I began, with no better results.

“Get control of yourself!” Sir Robert ordered, shaking himself from Brithelm’s grasp and striding toward my veiled brother. Robert di Caela was never one for charity.

“Maybe,” Alfric stated flatly, eyes still tightly shut, “this rescue business has got out of hand.”

“That’s absurd, Alfric,” Bayard said calmly.

“Absurd and treacherous,” Ramiro muttered, as he turned and lumbered toward Alfric.

“Come now, Alfric,” I joined in. “How do you think Enid would take this hysteria?” At which he burrowed even more deeply into the blanket, shivering even more fiercely, as if caught up in a strange and deadly fever. Brithelm rested his hand on Alfric’s shoulder.

Ramiro stepped forward, dealing a swift kick to the knot of blanket and brother. Alfric grunted, whimpered, and curled into a tighter ball.

Now it was Sir Robert’s turn, and we all dreaded it.

“Alfric. Son.”

No response. Sir Robert sighed.

“Alfric, if you don’t come out from hiding this minute, you’ll have to answer to this.”

If anything outweighed Alfric’s fear, it was his curiosity. He peered from beneath the blankets and saw Sir Robert holding a sword.

In no time, Alfric was out of the blanket quickly, and we all started toward the gates of the castle, Sir Robert whispering to Brithelm a judgment that the wind picked up and carried down to us as we followed them.

“It is a fortunate thing that your brother came when called. A few minutes more of this disobedience and I should have been forced to kill him.”

Sir Robert followed that with a threatening glance back at Alfric, who had begun to shiver a little once more. Sir Robert turned to face the castle ahead of him, and his shoulders shook in turn. But from where I walked, it looked like the shaking of laughter, a pleasant relief after a long afternoon of sorrow.

It was at that moment that Agion stumbled out through the gate. At first both Bayard and I cried out joyously, sure that we had somehow been mistaken during that sad time in the Vingaard Mountains, that the trident through his great heart and the humble little funeral had all taken place in a nightmare we now only dimly remembered as we saw our friend weave toward us.

We rejoiced until we saw the look in his eyes.

The dullness, the flatness. The look of the dead, beyond caring or recall.

Agion weaved slowly toward Bayard, club raised in his swollen, yellowed hand. Bayard stood his ground, drew his sword, and raised it.

Then lowered his weapon as the centaur drew near him.

“Bayard! It’s no longer Agion!” I shouted.

But my protector stood there motionless, his sword at his side. The centaur stopped in front of him and slowly, mechanically raised its heavy club.

I do not know how I got to Bayard’s side. Brithelm said later that he had never seen me move so quickly, and don’t forget he had seen me in flight many times about the moat house. Whatever the circumstances, the next thing I knew I was between Bayard and Agion, facing the dead centaur.

“No! Agion! It’s Bayard! It’s Galen!” I shouted, waving my arms.

For a moment the dull, flat eyes softened. But only for a moment, as the steely hardness of death returned, and the Agion-thing raised its club, hissed, and prepared to bring both of us into its darkened world. The moment of delay was enough. Sir Robert, battered and sore though he might be, was not entirely disabled—as we discovered when he rushed between me and the centaur, deflecting the downward stroke of the club with the flat of the ancient di Caela sword. Then, turning the sword above his head in a time-honored, brisk Solamnic fencing maneuver, he brought it up and over, slicing neatly through the bloated neck of Agion. Everything went away. I was deep in black nothingness, and though I may have dreamed while I lay unconscious on the ground in the Chaktamir Pass, I do not remember dreaming.

I remember only the waking, Bayard shaking me back into light and cold and pain, and into a sadness I did not recognize for a moment—a sadness I could not place until I saw the centaur bodies and remembered.

“As you said,” Bayard soothed, helping me to my feet, “it was no longer Agion.”

“And yet. . . for a moment there, I thought it was Agion, thought that despite death and what the Scorpion had wrought, our old friend stayed his hand,” I murmured.

“Perhaps he did, lad,” Sir Robert replied softly. “And let it encourage us, for it shows that the Scorpion’s power does not go on forever.”

“That some things,” Brithelm added softly, “are stronger than death.”

We paused in silence for a moment. Sir Robert pointed toward the open gate. And two by two we walked toward its menacing arch.

Through a curtain of driving snow, through the hovering mist, they appeared—the shadows of men, crouched, shambling, almost apelike in their movements. Though the forms were dim behind us and beside us, I could tell they were carrying weapons; the slim shadows of curved Nerakan swords lay in their shadowy hands. The cold air around us drummed with groans and inhuman cries.

It was as though someone were smothering an army.

Bayard drew his sword and started for the heart of the shadows, but Brithelm grabbed his arm.

“Sir Bayard, your duty lies in the castle—a task none but you can perform. For who knows but that the Lady Enid faces horrors that make ours seem light?”

“B-but . . . ,” Bayard began.

“Into the castle, sir, and may the gods speed you.” Brithelm smiled serenely, confidently. An arrow flew out of the mist and clattered on the stony ground beside him.

“By Paladine, you’ll not stand against an army alone, lad!” bellowed Sir Ramiro. “Give me an armed enemy any day, rather than the cloudy hocus-pocus you’ll find in that house of mirrors there. Bring ’em on, dead or alive! I’ll be watching your back, Brithelm!”

Ramiro drew his sword, pushed me toward Bayard, and took his place beside my calm, clerical brother. Bayard grabbed my arm and pulled me, struggling, onto the drawbridge, Alfric and Sir Robert following closely behind us.

As we crossed the bridge toward the gate looming dark in front of us, Bayard leaned into me and whispered, “Don’t worry, son.”

We looked back upon my brother, the man of peace, bearing weapons among mist-covered stones. Beside him stood that hulking, merry man, Ramiro, whose enormous shield was raised over both of them to guard against the arching arrows.

“I trust we shall see them both again, Galen. Accidents avoid them.”

Suddenly a red light shot from Brithelm’s hand and buried itself in the shadowy forms in front of him. A loud shriek tore through the mist, and the army stopped in its tracks, hovering some distance away from our little rear guard.

“Damn!” I heard Ramiro rumble before I lost his voice in the mist and the outcry of shadowy soldiers.

“Everywhere you look, this damnable sleight of hand! What does it take for a man to find sensible company?”

And he laughed heartily, shaking his shield in front of the gibbering soldiers.

From that point on, the laughter faded. We passed first under the great arch of the castle gate. The courtyard itself seemed dreamed up, half-remembered from images of Castle di Caela and built with an eye to the floor plans only. The buildings were the same shape and size, rising from the same points within the courtyard. That is, as far as I could see. For at the far reaches of the courtyard, the towers and shops and stables—the battlements themselves—were lost behind mists, or dissolved into mists. Sometimes a wall would be there, then seemed to be there no longer, as though it were solid or insubstantial, depending on a gust of wind or the intensity of the snow.

I was possessed of the uncanny feeling that the builder had it right only by blueprint. The keep and the towers and the other structures looked hollow, made up for visitors.

Whether it was from the mist or from some darker intention, the ground seemed to appear in front of us as we crossed toward the bailey. We dismounted at once, letting the horses go where they would in the confines of the courtyard. They would be safe, no doubt, and perhaps unnecessary from this time on. Behind us, outside the walls, screams arose out of the fog. For a moment Bayard paused, turned, ind prepared to go back. Then he muttered “Enid,” grabbed me by the arm, and virtually lifted me above the mist as the horses galloped off. Together, slowly, we tested our first few steps, then picked up the pace to catch Sir Robert and Alfric, who had sprinted on ahead of us. We overtook them at the door of the keep. Which, unlike the gate, was locked. Sir Robert had tried it once, twice, and now was pacing, stomping and blustering, while Alfric used Father’s sword in an idiotic attempt to pry open the door.

“Out of the way!” Bayard shouted, and Alfric, accustomed to scrambling out of everyone’s way, did so with surprising ease and grace. Bayard took four steps and leaped toward the door, giving it a resounding kick. The door shivered but neither broke nor dislodged. Bayard bounced off the thick oak and clattered to the ground where he lay winded and dazed. Behind us and around us, the courtyard seemed to come to life. From somewhere in the mists I could hear heavy movement, the creak of leather and of metal, and the grumble of something large stirring and breathing. It was beginning to move our way.

Bayard labored to his feet with help from Sir Robert and prepared to rush the door again. Alfric moved quickly beside me and tugged at my sleeve.

“There’s something out there, Brother, and I expect it has designs on us by now.”

I agreed and said, “We’d better distract Sir Bayard before he injures himself, and then find a window to gain entry. Whatever lies in store for us is not through that door, evidently.”

Bayard crashed against the door in question, then lay motionless beside it before beginning once more the painful struggle to his feet. The sounds—the snuffling, the movement of armor—grew nearer, and huge, horned things now hovered dark at the edge of the mist.

“Demons!” Alfric exclaimed.

“Men of Neraka,” Sir Robert corrected, grabbing my eldest brother, “dressed in their ceremonial minotaur helmets, calling on Kiri-Jolith to scatter their enemies. And some time dead from the smell of them. Pick up your sword. They’re coming this way. Quickly, around the side of the keep. If I’m not mistaken, there will be windows there.”

We understood well enough, and the four of us started off toward where we hoped devoutly would be windows, Sir Robert clanking in the lead and Alfric no less noisy right behind him, I followed the two of them, blending in and out of the mist as quietly as one of Mariel di Caela’s cats, and Bayard hobbled along at the rear, sword drawn.

It was evident by the time we reached the topiary and the chamber window that the Nerakan soldiers—or whatever they were—had gained ground on us. At first, thinking they were upon us, we drew our weapons as we turned the corner of the keep wall and saw horned figures in the garden by the window. But those were only shrubbery in the shape of owls, and we relaxed but a moment before we could hear, through the mists beyond the garden, the sound of snuffling and steady movement.

“Keep going around the wall!” Alfric urged. “They’ll catch us here for sure! There must be other windows! You should know, Sir Robert!”

“Oh, there are other windows,” Sir Robert mused calmly, “but none on this side of the keep that we can reach. Just listen; ahead of us, along the wall, is the same sound we have been running from since first we heard it. Whether it is armed men, or monsters, living or dead, we should prepare to take them here. The last thing they’ll expect is a fight, so that is precisely what we’ll give them.”

So we stood there, looking at one another, Pathwardens and Brightblades and di Caelas. All of a sudden the garden crashed and crackled with the sound of something huge, and the sound of breathing and snuffling increased into low rumbling, with an occasional bellow, as the rotten throats tried forgetfully the bull-cry of the Nerakan warriors.

The enemy approached us through the topiary, sometimes pushing aside the shrubbery with the sound of twigs snapping, of leaves crumpling, sometimes grunting as they staggered into the boles of trees. They were like the walls of the castle in the mist: forming, dissolving, then reforming. But continuing to move toward us.

“Galen!” Bayard snapped. “Can you reach the window from my shoulders?”

Reach the window? Desert my companions?

Desert my companions? What kind of Solamnic notions had infected me, that I should condemn myself for seeking the safest prospect available? Had I been listening to myself when I answered, I might well have heard that Solamnic self-righteous little quiver in my voice.

“I shall try, sir, if you see a further purpose in my doing so.”

“Up on my shoulders, then,” Bayard hissed urgently. “When you’re inside, find your way back to that front door and unlatch it. That should be easy enough. The halls and the rooms inside should be the image of the di Caela keep, just as the keep is from the outside.”

“I know, sir. But, for Huma’s lance-wielding sake, what if-”

“You’d be no more dead there than you would be here.”

Not the most encouraging of prospects. There or here. But Bayard was quite serene about the whole business.

“Take heart and climb atop my shoulders.”

I did, and surprisingly, it was a short jump to the window, which somehow seemed lower than Enid’s window at the di Caela keep. I leaped, clutched the sill, and pulled myself over. The room in front of me was dark.

Behind me I heard Alfric pleading with Bayard, heard Bayard respond that, no, Alfric was far too heavy for such acrobatics and that besides, they needed him for the battle that was sure to come.

“Now stop whining and face the garden,” Sir Robert chimed in. “They’ll come from that direction first, or I’m no tactician.”

I set my dagger on the sill, stood in the darkened room, then looked behind me and below me once more, down to where Bayard stood, sword at the ready, looking up.

“We’ll try to fight our way back around to the door,” he murmured.

“Good luck to you, sir,” I offered.

“Hurry,” he shot back, then smiled and winked at me—a most un-Solamnic gesture.

“The weasel’s luck to you, lad. Which as I gather, has not been bad yet.”

Without stopping to think—as I should have—I plunged into the unlit room.

I made two steps only, and then sunk to my knees in the dark floor. I cried out for Bayard, but stifled the cry when I heard it echoing down the halls of the keep, heard the sound of shouting and the clash of weapons outside the window—sounds that seemed so far away.

I sunk farther, and thought of the quagmires in the Coastlund Swamp. I was sinking into the heart of the Scorpion, I figured. I flailed my arms around the floor of the chamber, striking solid stone at arm’s length, nearly as far from me as I could reach. Breasting through the nothingness like a swimmer in a dark, thick pool of something more solid than water, more liquid than the ground around him, I finally gained purchase on the floor and pulled myself up, out of the morass, discovering to my surprise, that I was entirely dry.

“What is this?” I whispered, touching the floor in front of me to assure that no other pits had been set in the chambers. My hand brushed against a hurricane lamp, fully intact but lying on its side. Picking up the lamp, I fumbled in my pocket for a tinder-box, coming up with gloves only. I swore a stable groom’s curse and pressed on in the general direction of the door—or where Enid’s door was set in the corresponding room in Castle di Caela. Like a monstrous crab I scuttled across the dark floor, groping at the floor beside me for other places in the room where things were not quite solid. I found the door by the light that escaped from beneath it. The hall outside was eerily torchlit, but otherwise the image of the halls of Castle di Caela. Yet, on second look, it was not quite the image. Some small, unidentifiable thing was missing.

Not five cautious steps down the hall, it occurred to me. Mechanical birds. The birds Enid had wound up and hated through the otherwise pampered days of her childhood.

For the halls of the Scorpion’s Nest were silent.

I sat, pondering the corridor ahead of me and behind me, and noticed at points that the walls were swirling as though tiny whirlpools, scarcely the size of a man’s fist, were embedded in them as some kind of bizarre ornament. The whirlpools turned hypnotically clockwise, as gray as the surrounding stones but liquid in texture and shimmering like liquid as they caught and reflected the torchlight.

Walls that, like the floors, could swallow you entirely.

I backed away from them and seated myself in the center of the corridor, those spiraling flaws in the wall at a safe arm’s length.

I breathed heavily, the sound of the sigh racing down the corridor ahead of me, where it mingled with another distant sound, strangely and irritatingly familiar.

The sound of whirring and chirping.

So there was one, at least.

It was just curiosity, a nosiness about other people’s houses and furnishings and decorations, that led me to follow the sound of the mechanical bird. That and the knowledge that the sound came from the direction of the great landing, below which was the main entrance to the keep—the door Bayard had charged me with unlocking.

Relying on my memories of the keep’s exterior, it was not hard to remember where I was. Down the hall straight ahead of me, eyes carefully fixed on the floor to avoid stepping into one of those whirlpools of liquid stone, I picked up a larger, wider hall. This large hall led straight to the landing, and I rested my hands carefully on the banister before I trusted it to support my weight.

Down this hall I went and turned right, into a hall of statuary. Which contained marble di Caelas, but none I had seen commemorated in Sir Robert’s palace.

Instead, it was the family in all its darkest moments.

For here was Mariel di Caela, reclining on a marble divan, marble cats at her throat, her eyes, her breast. It was even more gruesome because it was so white, so smooth.

And Denis di Caela, bearing a marble rat in a marble cage. Not to mention Simon di Caela, basking contentedly forever like a huge white iguana.

It was almost obscene.

Presiding over the lot of them was another statue I had never seen—that of a man hooded and seated on a skeletal throne, sculptured scorpions twisting over the arms of the chair and the man himself. Old Benedict di Caela, enthroned in the dark of brothers’ negligence.

I moved past the door that would have been Dannelle’s in a safer world I recalled most fondly, most despairingly. I continued down the hall to the right, sidestepping a quagmire, then again to the left, then right again until I faced the hallway, where, to my right, the siege of Ergoth raged silently and motionlessly, forever, in paint upon the wall.

At the end of that hall, the mechanical bird was grinding and singing, grinding and singing again. When the bird paused, I heard voices. Two of them, both raised in anger, coming from the door opposite the mural.

The door which, in Castle di Caela, had led to the balcony overlooking the great hall. I opened the door a crack, saw darkness, and smelled expensive cloth and the slight whiff of decay. Beyond that was darkness and, more clearly now, I could hear voices.

One was sweet and high and melodious, one low and melodious and deadly.

Enid and the Scorpion.

Obviously, they were not getting along.

I stood not six feet from a set of curtains that resembled those of the Castle di Caela, right down to the velvet and the stitchery—as much as I could tell in the gray dimness of the balcony I was on. Beyond those curtains the voices rose and ebbed in the old duet of argument.

I closed the door behind me.

“Remember, you are my prisoner, my dear.” The Scorpion’s voice rose coldly, menacingly. Enid, bless her soul, was not intimidated in the least.

“You cannot have this arrangement both ways, Cousin Benedict. Either I am your hostage, and therefore you should keep me in confinement under lock and key, as is the custom with hostages, or I am the singular, although reluctant, object of your affections, in which case you are no more dear to me than those clicking vermin outside the door.”

“What if I were to untie you, Lady Enid?” The Scorpion’s voice slipped back into its old ways—smooth and honeyed and terribly inviting. “If I do so, “will you look on me with any . . . greater regard?”

Slowly I creeped toward the opening in the curtains, drawn by the faint crack of light. I stirred the floor with my hands, remembering my adventures in the chambers and on the landing, remembering Alfric’s tumble from a balcony where stone was stone and curtains were curtains.

Her answer came as I touched the cloth and began to part the heavy velvet ever so slightly. Enid’s voice swelled even louder, riding a wave of scorn and amusement.

“Oh, Benedict, Benedict. You could untie me and grant me full run of your castle, and I would still regard you with indifference. I would, however, appreciate the favor, and I might ask Sir Robert to be a little less severe with you when he comes to rescue me.”

She was bluffing the Scorpion, bluffing him well and considerably. I looked through the curtains and saw the both of them.

Enid was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair, all blond and brown-eyed and surpassing beautiful. Also fearless and surpassing angry.

Across from her sat old Benedict—the Scorpion of my apprehensions and nightmares—crouched and hooded on his skeletal throne, which looked strangely smaller, strangely more flimsy, less menacing.

“Sir Robert! Sir Robert!” the Scorpion called mockingly. “My dear, your father is a blustering, reckless fool.”

“Which is why you had to steal his daughter, rather than confront him directly,” Enid answered merrily, ironically.

“You think he will come and rescue you. Oh, yes, Lady Enid, he will walk into the arms of my soldiers, into the arrows and the daggers of the long dead men of Neraka—the ‘generations from the grass,’ as the prophecy calls them. He will feel the Scorpion’s sting, my sweet one.”

The Scorpion leaned back on his throne and laughed richly, venomously. From the folds of his robe he drew something that shone, something that glittered, and he began to speak as he held the pendulum to the light, swinging it back and forth like a cheap carnival hypnotist.

I did not notice the swirling gray stone near the railing of the balcony, and it was all I could do to grab the curtain as I fell through it. My stifled cry of alarm was not stifled enough. Both Enid and the Scorpion looked up at me from their seats in the great hall.

For the first time, I saw clearly that Enid’s hands were tied to the arms of her chair. And the eyes of the Scorpion glowed red, glowed blue, glowed white.

“Welcome, Weasel,” he purred, clutching the arms of his throne with a grip that whitened his knuckles. “We were just getting ready to . . . discuss you.”

Chapter Nineteen

“We can always discuss this later, if you’d like,” I offered, but the Scorpion was having none of it. He leaned forward on his throne, his eyes spiraling though all the colors of fire until they took on the white of the fire’s very center.

“I think I have no further need of you,” he snarled, his voice stripped of its deadly music, become something harsh and remotely human. We were in his country now, where he had no more need of masks. He pointed at the floor below me, the golden pendant dangling from his long, pale index finger. The spot of floor to which he pointed began to turn, twist, and glitter, much like the walls and floors of the corridors through which I had passed. But this vortex was black, not the slate gray of the walls and the other floors.

I squinted and looked closer.

A blanket of scorpions covered the floor beneath me. They flickered and twisted in the torchlight, poisonous tails aloft. To fall into their midst would make you pray on the way down that the fall itself would kill you. Slowly, ever so carefully, I tried to pull myself up the curtain and over the railing of the balcony, praying to Gilean, to Mishakal, to whatever god or goddess came to mind for a strongly woven fabric in my hands, for careful carpentry on the railing and no more illusions where I was headed. The mechanical bird chattered again in the hall outside.

I sighed and whispered to myself, “Now just climb up and tunnel your way out of here, Weasel.”

Then I saw the giant scorpion, its black scales shimmering, its sharp tail raised, as it began a slow climb down the curtain, clutching the hem and the stitchery on its way toward my hands. Things like this compose your worst nightmares. I reached for the railing, only to have my hand pass through it as though it were made of smoke.

There was nothing of substance to serve as a lifeline. I let myself down the curtain as far as I could, hand over hand like I was descending a rope. Then I thought of the boiling throng of creatures below me and stopped where I was, not daring to move down any farther, lest I run out of curtain.

Still the giant scorpion approached me, its black tail raised and its delicate legs dancing over the soft drapery.

“Get away!” I hissed. The thing paused, tail turning in the air like a black leaf catching moisture or sunlight, then hopped threateningly in my direction before pausing ironically on a gold tassel not a yard from my hands.

“Such heroism!” the Scorpion drawled ironically. “A creature not a tenth your size, and you shy from him as though he were . . . poison?” His laughter rose into a piercing howl; the scorpions below me churned more frantically, and Enid covered her ears.

“You’re not known for picking the fair fight yourself, Benedict!” Enid shouted angrily. She was saying something more, but her words warred with his laughter and lost.

Finally, when the laughter subsided, Benedict looked up at me. With a strange, demented tenderness he smiled, but I could see his glowing eyes sink farther and farther into their sockets, and the framework of the skull emerging from the pale, yellowed skin.

“You did me good service once, did you not, Galen Pathwarden?”

The verminous thing above me paused in its descent, as its master spoke. “As reward for your service, little Weasel, you shall live longer than all your friends.”

Enid shot an angry glance at me, reminded, no doubt, of the stories of my betrayals. I looked remorseful and shrugged, or at least as much as I could while hanging from a drapery. Her anger softened,,. Helplessly we stared at one another. Helplessly I dangled. Above me and below me, the chittering poisonous things awaited their orders. I was left in wicked suspension. Dimly through the halls, I could hear someone pounding at the door—the door I had tried to get to, to open. The Scorpion cupped his hand to his ear, ironically.

“We have visitors, my dear! Don’t get up. I’ll answer the door!” he exclaimed, then burst once again into laughter. “It should be my father-in-law, if I am not mistaken.”

He turned to me, his eyes glowing.

“And I am never mistaken. For after your verbal gymnastics, your long nights with poetry and history and Solamnic lore, it is I who broke the code of the prophecy, not Bayard, who nursed it for a lifetime, nor Sir Robert, who pondered it like his father did and his father before him.

“I like to think that a little bit of . . . the bardic soul resides within me,” he mused, and leaned back on his throne exultantly.

“If it does, Uncle Benedict, I’d wager it is lonely,” Enid retorted.

“Silence, child,” Benedict commanded softly, almost soothingly. “For your . . . bridal time is nigh.”

From the folds of his robe he drew a dagger. It shimmered in the off-yellow light of the hall as he placed it delicately on the arm of his throne. Just as he did, the door to the Great Hall shivered and burst from its hinges. Bayard and Sir Robert stood in the doorway, swords drawn. Sir Robert’s left hand was tangled in Alfric’s hair, which he had used as a rein to guide my reluctant brother to the spot. Alfric puffed and whimpered.

“Welcome,” the Scorpion intoned ominously. “I have awaited you, Bayard Brightblade. And you . . . Sir Robert. There is time—not much time, but time enough—to take up our quarrel of four centuries. But first, let us cover a wound more freshly opened, a factional dispute of scarcely thirty years back.”

He held out his hands, palms up, and raised them slowly above his head. Its chain entwined in the fingers of his left hand, the pendulum dangled and glittered.

“Let my friends resume their quarrel. . . where your high-and-mighty Order fancies it has put all quarrel to rest,” he pronounced casually. “Let ‘generations from the grass arise and lay the curse aside.’”

Beneath me the scorpions began to scatter, the floor of the hall to shake and crack. When the attention of its master turned elsewhere, my enemy from above resumed his scrambling descent.

“Stop right there!” I threatened, trying to sound menacing, then clamping my mouth shut in the realization that the creature might be following the sound of my voice. I reached into the mist for my belt and the knife that hung . . .

Did not hang.

I remembered the windowsill through which I had entered this castle, the glitter of iron in the light of the red moon. My dagger was conveniently three corridors away, forgotten on a windowsill beyond my reach. In vain I fumbled through my pockets for anything sharp or heavy. At last my desperate hand rested on something rough, thick, and leathery.

“The gloves!” I hissed, and the scorpion creeped down the curtain, now within a foot of my one clinging hand.

I slipped on a glove, using one hand and my mouth in a movement that, given other circumstances, I’d have dismissed as acrobatic if not downright impossible. Agility had always been my strong suit, and the suit was stretched to its limit of strength there at the end of the Scorpion’s curtains. The merchant who had sold them to me had boasted of the gloves’ sturdiness, that indeed they could “stand up to a knife if they were called to do so, young sir.”

As the scorpion tested the fabric not six inches from my hand, its jointed leg strumming the rough embroidery, I reached forward and grabbed the creature with my gloved hand, gripping it as hard as I could. I heard the sound of its skeleton crackle and felt something breaking in the padded palm of my hand. The lethal tail wound its way out of my grip from between my fingers, arched and plunged harmlessly time and again into the thick, resilient leather.

For once, a merchant had not lied.

I hurled the remnants of the creature from me and watched them fall in fragments to the floor of the hall. Which was now erupting around my friends.

Through the mist and the rocks and the floor, a battalion was rising, breaking through stone and tile. Some wore minotaur helmets, the sign of the Nerakan soldier then and now. All were armed with the feared scimitars and the half-moon shield of the Western Corps, the branch of the army that had fallen to Enric, Stormhold—and to my father—thirty years back at the Battle of Chaktamir.

As the Scorpion watched calmly from his seat in the hall, his soldiers climbed out of the ground and onto their feet, trudging toward Bayard and Robert and Alfric. Moss and earth and ordure dripped from their hair, and the ivory of the bones lay bare through the yellowed, mottled flesh. The smell was that of a slaughterhouse long abandoned.

Alfric wrenched away from Sir Robert, leaving a handful of red hair behind him, and sprang out the door in an instant, only to come back shamefacedly when other noises arose from the hall—the smothered, almost bleating battle-cry of more undead soldiers.

I started my ascent of the curtain, checked for purchase on the balcony, and found a solid spot after an endless minute of pawing the air with my foot. But from that height I was powerless to help as the numbers grew against us.

Bayard and Sir Robert stood back to back so that between the two of them, they could see the entire hall and the outlying corridor. Alfric tried vainly to sandwich himself between them, but was elbowed away with the warning from Sir Robert, “Stand your own ground, boy! We need even the sorriest of swords at this pass!”

Alfric whimpered and drew his sword. Steadily the Nerakan soldiers closed in on my companions. Meanwhile, the Scorpion rose from his throne, walked to Enid’s chair, and very calmly began to untie her wrists from the armrests. Though she was obviously unnerved by the creatures the Scorpion had called from out of the ground, she was not about to swoon or scream. Instead, she fetched a blow to her captor’s chest that sent him staggering backward, and only a viper-quick grab at the girl kept her from escaping.

“Come with me,” the Scorpion said, as he dragged the struggling Enid back toward his pedestal, where the dagger sat waiting on the arm of his throne. A murmuring sea of black scorpions converged upon them, parting to form a pathway from one chair to the other.

“Up on the pedestal, my dear,” he urged.

It was then—too late, I feared, but nonetheless swiftly—that Bayard Brightblade began to cut his own path through the men of Neraka. Often urgency shackles the hand of the swordsman, but it brought Bayard to life, to a blinding swiftness. Five Nerakans fell to his sword in an instant, and it was all that Sir Robert could do to follow in the wake of the younger Knight. Alfric in turn followed Sir Robert, his face blanched, his own blade shaking in his extended hand.

All outcry, all the moans and bellows ceased. The hall was silent except for the shuffling of long-dead feet, the skittering of scorpions, and the sound of Bayard’s sword striking continually, wetly home. It was as though the Nerakans were lining up for execution. But halfway through the undead soldiers, Bayard’s path slowed, as bodies heaped upon and against bodies, as the Nerakans began to mill in front of him, as they fell back into one another and were buoyed and carried by those who approached the battle from behind them. They shrank back from him as though even having passed through death, they were still daunted by this harrowing, bright champion in front of them.

Walled off from Bayard by his legion of moving, decaying flesh, the Scorpion raised his knife.

“Wait!” I shouted, and my voice piped embarrassingly thin and shrill in the large hall. Bayard’s sword stilled, and Sir Robert stood stiffly behind him, his hand stretched toward the Scorpion in silent anguish. The Nerakan soldiers lowered their weapons and stared stupidly, lifelessly at their leader standing on the platform. For a moment the Scorpion paused. The red light of his eyes flickered as he glanced up to me. I began once again to burrow in words, to bargain for time, hoping devoutly that Bayard would think of something violent and heroic before I ran out of breath and argument.

“You think you have that prophecy figured as neat as a recipe, with no line left unexplained and unmanaged?”

I glanced at Bayard, who was looking at me, sword raised overhead.

Move, Bayard. Move quickly, like a striking snake. Let’s see a little Solamnic velocity in this nest of scorpions!

So I thought and hoped, but Bayard did not move. And the Scorpion’s dagger stayed poised above Enid as I spoke.

“What if you’re wrong, Benedict? After all, you’ve proven that Bayard misread the prophecy entirely. As did Sir Robert, evidently. So what if you did, too? What if that little piece of doggerel has squirmed away from all three of you—Bayard, Robert, and Benedict—and there’s another solution to all this rhyme and foreboding?

“After all, you kill the bride but the line doesn’t end. Sir Robert can father more children, more di Caelas to wrestle you down each time you trundle back to claim your inheritance.”

“Which is why I brought her here, fool!” the Scorpion proclaimed. “Now all the di Caelas are under my roof, and the line ends where they do!”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps not,” I answered triumphantly. Another invention had occured to me, and for all I knew it stood just as good a chance of being true as any story, poem, or prophecy I had heard so far. For as my thoughts raced, they had settled on lamplight in a window, on a pale arm waving.

“Have you heard of Dannelle di Caela, sir?”

The hand holding the dagger wavered. Bayard started for the platform, but the Scorpion wheeled and, clutching Enid to him, brought the dagger to her throat. Again the creatures at his feet began to chitter and mill.

“Stand back, Solamnic! Prophecy or no, if you come any nearer, I’ll send this girl to Hiddukel!”

“Regardless, ‘a girl succeeds to all,’ Benedict,” I urged. “For if you kill Enid, who will be Sir Robert’s heir but Dannelle di Caela?”

“No,” the Scorpion said quietly. He grasped Enid so tightly that she cried out, startling him. For a moment he lost his grip on the girl, and she wriggled free of his encircling arm.

Now, Enid di Caela was her father’s daughter—no helpless damsel in distress. She fetched the Scorpion a sound kick in the leg that sent him stumbling to the center of the platform, where he clutched the arm of his throne to regain his balance.

A moment’s stumble was all she needed. Enid slipped through the milling Nerakans and into her father’s arms, as Bayard stepped quickly between her and the Scorpion’s ghastly army.

“Kill her!” the Scorpion shrieked, pointing a bony finger at the escaping Enid, but it was too late. The girl had returned to the protection of Bayard Brightblade, who put four Nerakans to the sword with movements so quick that the blade even ceased to blur and became invisible, and only the swarm of bodies between him and the Scorpion allowed the scoundrel to rush toward the far door of the great hall, surrounded by his clattering black attendants.

I whooped and started down the curtain again, still slowly, testing the cloth for strength and for vermin in the folds.

For a moment it looked as though the Scorpion would escape. Bayard pushed one more Nerakan to the floor, ducked the slash of another’s scimitar, and beheaded a third with a quick, flashing movement of his sword arm. Sir Robert, after parrying a slow thrust from a Nerakan scimitar, severed the hand that held it. The undead soldier dropped to his knees and Alfric, who had been hiding behind Enid when the battle resumed, slipped in behind the half-fallen Nerakan and stabbed him in the back.

But even more quickly than the Knights moved through his undead protectors, the Scorpion made his way toward the door and freedom. His cloak wrapped around him, he moved with the silent grace of an enormous nocturnal bird, the door not ten feet in front of him now.

Then as though he had conjured them with a wave of that mysterious crystal, in that very doorway stood Ramiro and Brithelm.

Both were bedraggled and tattered—a little worse for wear from their struggle in the pass—but neither was about to give way to the thing they had come so far to hunt down. Sword drawn, Ramiro stepped through the door and approached old Benedict from one side, while Bayard cut a path toward him from another. The Scorpion raised his pendulum, and hundreds of small beasts, their sharp tails poised for the fatal sting, scurried toward Sir Ramiro.

A red light tumbled from Brithelm’s hands, and the floor of the room was awash with an unearthly fire that bathed the creatures and set them burning. There on the floor between my brother and their dark-hooded commander the scorpions twisted, contorted, and crackled.

Then they began to sting each other.

Slowly the red fire faded from about the charred, spidery remains of the scorpions. And I heard my brother speaking in quiet mourning.

“I am sorry. Even to such as you, I am sorry.”

The Scorpion backed away. Still, he remained undaunted. Cautiously he backed to a corner, his red eyes taking in the hall. Once again he raised his hands, and again the ground began to tremble and boil.

“Oh, but it is not over, fools and Solamnics and more fools,” he crowed. “We are gathered together—all of us beneath this roof of rock and cloud and fable—to bring an end to this prophecy, this wondering. No Dannelle di Caelas! The fate of the house is decided here! For remember the prophecy says that: ‘Generations from the grass/will rise and lay the curse aside.’ You have seen but the first generation. Now suffer the second!”

Slowly, more armed men clambered out of the swirling ground, leaving churned earth and moss and yellowed, tattered cloth behind them. The first arm bursting through the floor carried with it the shield of the House of Stormhold.

I stayed where I was, halfway down the dangling curtain.

“Yes, Bayard Brightblade!” Benedict shouted, his voice shrilling as the long-dead Solamnic Knights staggered to their feet, reaching into the swirl of cloud and earth below them to draw forth their weapons. “The men of Neraka join hands with these from your ancient order! Death is the leveler, all faction and race and country put aside in the long and abiding hatred for the living!”

The dead Solamnics righted themselves, more than a hundred strong. Clumsily, listlessly, they proffered their swords in the time-honored salute of the Order. By their gray and decaying hands it was scarcely recognizable—almost a mockery.

Bayard lowered his sword in dismay. All of the rest, even Sir Ramiro and Sir Robert, shrank from the earth-covered Knights, from the bandages and the smell.

Death may well be the leveler, but what was it that Brithelm said? Some things are stronger than death!

With a cry almost in unison, a dry, papery yell that despite its dryness, despite its fragility, shook the things in the Scorpion’s hall, the Solamnic dead raised their swords and charged.

Straight at the waiting men of Neraka.

Through all these decades of death and oblivion, they had awakened to defend against a Nerakan assault. Some things, indeed, were stronger than death, among them the ancient oath, Est Sularus oth Mithas—my honor is my life—in the breathless breathing of each dry-voiced Knight.

It was as though time, too, had held its breath for a generation, and with a sudden, terrible gasp breathed again.

“No!” cried the Scorpion as, despite his best plans and orders, the ancient armies again locked weapons.

“You are commanded—”

But there was no time to speak, for Bayard Brightblade was hurtling toward him through the dozens of skirmishes that had erupted in the hall. From his black robe the Scorpion drew a sword whose blade was a dark blue steel. It glittered as black as onyx in the yellowed light of the room, and no sooner had he raised it than Bayard’s great blade came crashing down upon it, driving Benedict to his knees. They locked blades there for a moment, Bayard resting all his muscle and weight on the sword beneath him, the Scorpion pushing up with the bristling strength of a dozen men, the pendulum swinging wildly from his left hand as he brought it, too, to the pommel of the sword in a frantic attempt to stop Bayard’s unyielding push downward. They poised at the far corner of the room in a violent balance, and for a moment the bright blade forced the dark one back, the silvery glint of Bayard’s hundred-year-old sword inching closer and closer to the face of the enemy.

With a cry and a sudden, powerful movement, the Scorpion pushed Bayard away. Bayard tumbled backward toward the Scorpion’s throne, and the dark-robed villain followed, his eyes glowing with a blue-white light, the pendulum bright in his lowered left hand, his black-edged weapon raised triumphantly in his right. Around him from the dark recesses of the room came the scratching sound of more of his little monsters scrambling to join him.

Feeling like a child’s toy on a string, I shinnied a little farther up the curtain and called to Bayard, “The pendulum!”

He showed no sign of hearing me, struggling as he was to get to his feet in his extremely heavy armor. But he had heard, evidently.

In dodging the downward stroke of the Scorpion’s sword, Bayard brought his own blade up and, flashing through the air, cleanly through the Scorpion’s left wrist.

The hand skittered across the floor, writhing like a scorpion or spider, the chain of the pendulum tangled about its fingers. The Scorpion shrieked and held up the stump of his left arm, then toppled backward onto the hundreds of verminous creatures he had summoned from the darkness.

With the pendulum now gone, they descended on him blindly and hungrily. Benedict screamed, shuddered, and was lost in the clicking, rattling convergence of scorpions, in the plunging of hundreds and hundreds of venomous stingers.

Light then shot through the walls of the room, as the gray swirls of cloud dissolved in sunlight, evaporating to brisk air and a bare mountain pass that then began to shake and crumble.

The Scorpion’s Nest was a ruin. What little remained of the stones in the castle—the skeleton of an ancient foundation, of a wall or two, of flights of stairs that led to nowhere—tottered and began to fall. An old wall collapsed toward Enid and Sir Robert, and would have no doubt crushed the life from both of them had not Sir Robert raised his great Solamnic shield. Stone and mortar tumbled against ancient metal . . . And the metal held.

All around us and below us the ground was opening, roiling, heaving, as though we had walked into the focus of an earthquake so violent, so widespread that it might well be the Cataclysm come again, transforming the surface of Krynn in its wreckage. Bayard stepped to the platform where the Scorpion’s throne, once bone white and tall and menacing, had burst into pieces.

Bayard whistled, and Valorous, true to his name, came galloping out of a notch in the rocks, followed by the other horses. The big stallion was calm, obedient, but those who followed him were balanced at the edge of panic, frothing and snorting and rolling their eyes. When the ground had begun to shake and the rocks to fall, they reverted to instinct and followed the herd master—the lead stallion who, thankfully, had remained impressively composed. Only one horse and the mules, willful to the end, were left to the earthquake. Into that turning earth the dead men walked or tumbled. Back to the quiet they went, into the peace that each of them, Nerakan or Solamnic, had earned for himself at dreadful cost a generation before. The land closed over them and continued to churn and boil as my companions did what they could to calm their horses, mount, and begin to ride.

“Bayard!” I shouted as he swept Enid up onto Valorous. The lady safe beside him, he was arranging the safety of the others. No room, then, on Valorous.

My brothers were doubled up on Brithelm’s horse, Alfric’s mule having vanished somewhere. With a flick of his glove to the horse’s rump, Bayard set the two older Pathwardens west at a full gallop, over the shifting gravel and rock toward safety, followed closely by Sir Ramiro, burden enough for my little pack mare, which was bearing up beneath him.

“Jump, boy!” Sir Robert called up to me, rising in his stirrups atop a skittish Estrella, as the balcony from which I dangled like a crystal in a pendulum began to sway, snap, and teeter dangerously.

“Not too close, Sir Robert!” shouted Bayard. “It’s likely to fall at any moment! Swing out on the curtain, Galen! Swing out to Sir Robert!” The tough old Knight opened his arms and nodded urgently. I began to swing on the curtain, going higher and higher as the balcony above me began to weave. Back and forth, back and forth I flew, until at the sound of something falling behind me, I let go and tumbled through the air, a flying weasel on an aerial route to Sir Robert di Caela, whom I trusted to catch me and carry me out of the chaos, safely into the lowlands.

I had not figured on Estrella, who, spooked by yet another tremor beneath her hooves, skipped nervously forward at the worst of all possible moments. Sir Robert reached back desperately, but his mare had moved too far.

The ground surged rockily up to meet me. So did the darkness.