“Remember, Galen Pathwarden. The scorpion returns as quickly as it departs, as unexpectedly. But we will take stock, at midnight, in the guest quarters of the moat house. At that hour, the armor is mine. Or you are.”
Suddenly the boots stood before the chair, the intruder using it as a step to rise to the sill of the window and out, down three dizzying stories into the gathering dark, the shutters of the window creaking back and forth behind him. I knew from experience that it would still be safer underneath the bed. Above me I heard movement, creaking, a servant climbing the steps to the bell tower, and soon afterwards, the ten tolls of the bell that signaled the hour.
There followed a long pause in which the air in the chambers began to warm, the sound of bird’s song outside the window resumed, and I finally ceased shaking, crawled out into the light, and lay sprawled on the floor for a moment, recovering my breath amidst a litter of dark opals.
For dark opals they were, and a sizable bribe for my efforts and silence. I gathered them up, inspecting them for flaws. The Scorpion, as I decided to call him in honor of both his companions and his wardrobe, was evidently a man of his word.
Which gave me pause, naturally. For a man who keeps his word in one venue …
Is likely to keep it in others.
I sprang to my feet and out the door of Alfric’s quarters, leaving behind me the room half-swept, the windows open, and the fireplace heavy with ashes. Down the narrow granite stairwell I rushed, touching perhaps two steps on my way to the second floor, landing heavily, off balance, then recovering in stride on my way to the door of the guest chambers.
Which was triply locked. Bolt upon bolt upon bolt.
And the keys dangling from Alfric’s belt in the main hall somewhere, no doubt ringing together as pleasantly as sleigh bells while their bearer’s little brother awaited midnight and the dancing in his skin.
I drew out my knife and began gouging at the upper lock.
There I might have stayed, whimpering and gouging until the hour of reckoning, growing more frantic and more defeated as the minutes passed. But luck—Weasel’s luck, as Alfric called my ability to fall in a midden and come up smelling like jasmine—stepped in after a long absence.
I heard the sound of someone ascending the stairs toward Alfric’s quarters. From the heavy tread and the puffing and muttering, I knew that my brother had been paying court to the wine while Father and Sir Bayard had been distracted by nobility and conversation.
Hulking like an ogre, smelling of pork and port, Brother Alfric paused, reeling, on the second floor landing. Shading his eyes with one meaty hand, he squinted down the hall in my direction.
“You again, Weasel? I just saw you on the stairway.”
By the way, he calls me Weasel, if you haven’t guessed. “Galen” means “Weasel” in Old Solamnic, and Alfric has other reasons—unfair reasons—of his own.
“The old gallon distemper,” I explained, referring to his wine-slanted vision. “How is your guest enjoying his stay?” I continued, my voice full of sweetness and brotherly affection—as best I could imitate, at least.
But it had dawned on Alfric that I was hovering about the guest chambers door in a way that I should not be hovering. Lumbering up the hall he came, his fists clenched, promising mayhem.
“What was you trying to do to that lock, little brother?”
“I’m not here, Alfric. You just saw me on the stairway, remember? What you see before you is a resinous vision, the dregs of the wine.”
I never claimed to have planned this all too well. But he stopped at that and puzzled it out for a moment. Meanwhile I scrambled to my feet, backed away from him, and kept talking.
“Brother dear, even as I speak there are mysteries milling about this moat house, endangering all of us.”
It sounded good.
“Endangering you above all others. For you are to be the squire of a certain reputable Knight whose … belongings may be at jeopardy this very evening.”
Alfric paused in his unsteady charge, hiccupped, and stared at me in stupid puzzlement. If he came after me, he would have the stones—and probably the whole story—in an instant. Would probably drub me senseless in exchange.
My visitor would return, would find the the armor still locked away behind a door thrice bolted. Would ask for his stones back, which I would not have.
Would dance in my skin.
I kept talking, quickly, desperately, dancing through memory, through invention, through downright lies.
“Brother, only now when I was at the finishing touches to your quarters … there flitted a dark shape in and out of the shadows in the courtyard.”
“A servant?” Alfric had stopped, panting and leaning against the wall of the corridor. His ragged red hair clung sweatily to his forehead: when Sir Bayard had sworn to whip him into shape, the noble Solamnic had admitted it was “a monstrous undertaking.”
“Servants don’t flit in and out of shadows, Alfric. Burglars do.”
“Burglars?”
“And what is there around this backwater moat house worth the burgling?”
Alfric stared at me questioningly.
“Sir Bayard’s armor, damn it!” I shouted, then lowered my voice, afraid that the noise would carry downstairs. “Coming down to get you would have raised a stir, perhaps for nothing. But I had to know that the armor was safe, especially since it had been entrusted to my dear brother’s safekeeping, and if he lost it … well, his squirehood—your squirehood, Alfric—would be delayed even longer than … ill fortune …”
“And politics …,” Alfric interrupted, sliding down the corridor wall to a sitting position.
“And politics … have delayed it already.”
I could not resist reminding him that a twenty-one-year-old squire was a bit grotesque, like our ancient tutor Gileandos sending flowers, sonnets, and scandalous proposals to Elspeth, our twenty-year-old milkmaid.
“You expect me to believe that? Expect me to believe that even if there is a burglar, he could get in past them locks and all our servants and the dogs?”
“Look at our servants, Alfric. Look at our dogs. This castle is wide open to any secondstory man who crawls out of our own private swamp down the road. The servants themselves are always complaining of missing pennies, missing baubles and beads.”
“Some of that’s you, Galen.”
“And some you. But we both know our petty thievery doesn’t add up around here. There’s more that slips through the cracks than slips through the cracks, if you catch my meaning.”
I’m not sure he did, but his dimwitted face fell.
“About this burglar?”
“Outside before the bell struck ten.”
“A dark shape?”
“Flitting in and out of the shadows, Alfric. A burglar if I ever saw one.”
My eldest brother curled up on the floor of the hall, jamming his head between his knees.
“Oh, little brother! What shall I do?”
This was better. I looked at Alfric, then down to the window at the opposite end of the hall. Outside I could hear the call of a cuckoo as it settled somewhere for the night—probably in another bird’s nest, where it would lay its egg and fly on under cover of darkness, as the old legends said, leaving its young to the kindness of a robin, a nightingale, one of the pretty singers who would raise the croaking infant as its own.
“All isn’t lost, Alfric. After all, the armor may still be in the room.”
He looked up at me hopefully, his big gap-toothed grin awash in the torchlight. I thanked the gods that the brains that ran in the family had never run after him.
“So first of all, we should check to see that the armor is there.”
I looked back to the door, and in a sudden rush Alfric was on me. I was slammed against the wall and hung there, feet dangling helplessly in the corridor. A strong hand gripped my throat, another tangled less than lovingly in my hair.
“You better not be up to nothing, Weasel
.”
I began to weep, flatter, lie.
“Please, please, Brother, don’t throttle the baby of the family! I know you’re a good man, you’re going to be a fine squire and an even finer Knight! Remember, Father had younger brothers, all of whom survived well into adulthood! He’s come to consider that a family tradition.”
Alfric took the hint. His grip slackened, and I took courage.
“Of course I’m not up to anything. No need to borrow trouble, Brother. The worry and the confusion and the running around headless will come soon enough if there’s no armor in this room.”
Alfric let me drop and was on his knees by the door in a moment, knife in hand and gouging where I had left off gouging.
“Alfric?”
“Shut up, Weasel.” The irritating and frantic sound of metal on metal as the knife slid through the lock. I looked down the hall. Nobody there.
“Alfric, the reason you’re so essential in this is that you have the keys to the room on your belt.”
After fumbling with keys and locks for a while, we gained entry to the guest chambers which tonight were to house the most ingenious of Solamnic swordsman. It was the most richly appointed room in the moat house, Father being a zealot about hospitality: each wall was hung with tapestries, the enormous bed was covered with goose down blankets, and the fire blazed cheerily.
It was not a room for misdeed.
Alfric charged in ahead of me, lurching in a drunken panic toward the standing closet; I hovered behind him, thinking frantically of explanations I could summon if Sir Bayard Brightblade were to walk in the door and find us burrowing in his belongings.
Thinking frantically of how I might proceed from here.
Alfric stumbled once, grabbed the doors of the closet, and pulled. Of course they were locked. Of course the key was on the ring at his belt, and of course he had forgotten it, too, in the anxiety and wine. Inside the closet, the armor rattled like a ghost in an old story.
You can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention. It all added up—the recklessness, the jostling, the heavy armor in the closet. After my brother had fumbled with the keys a long and distressing moment, one fit into the lock. With his considerable brute strength, Alfric yanked at the door, which flew open readily.
Bringing with it Sir Bayard Brightblade’s extraordinarily heavy breastplate.
Which, when it made contact with my brother’s head, set up a ringing that might well have disturbed my father and Bayard in their Solamnic discussions downstairs, and upstairs might have roused Brithelm from his meditations and Gileandos from his stupor.
But it did none of these. It did nothing, in fact, except lay out my brother on the floor of the guest chambers. The ringing of metal on the rocklike substance of my brother’s head was lost in the ringing from the bell tower. As I said, you can see a miracle coming for miles if you only pay attention.
“Look out, Alfric,” I said, quietly and in gratitude, as the eleventh bell tolled.
The rest was uncertainty, waiting alone in the guest chambers for the hour before the intruder returned and the armor changed hands. Outside all the birds were still silent, except for the nightingale, who sang merrily while I lingered and stewed.
I cast the red dice I kept always beside me to determine fortune. I rolled nine and nine, tunnel on tunnel for the Sign of the Weasel—great fortune, considering my nickname–though had I remembered the second line that went with the dice spots, I should have been less secure.
So I waited until the tower bell began to toll once more, steeling myself for the return of the intruder. At the seventh ring I heard something outside in the hall—down by the window, as if someone were climbing through.
The acrobatics alone were impressive.
I scuttled toward the bed, ready to dive beneath it should the Scorpion fellow be less the man of his word than he allowed. But a groaning behind me brought me up short.
There was a knot in the miracle. For my brother was waking at midnight, to the gods knew what mayhem.
That is when the helmet occured to me. It lay beside the breastplate on the floor, slightly dirty because of Alfric’s lack of squirely attention, but impressive nonetheless, with its intricate weavings of inlay, copper and silver and brass.
Footsteps approached up the hall toward the guest room, as my brother stirred toward wakefulness and, of course, toward my ruin.
There was no time to deliberate. I snatched up the helmet as I rushed to my brother’s side, and raising it above me, brought the whole damned artifact—visor and crown and plume, iron and copper and silver and brass—crashing down upon his forehead. Again the sound of the impact was lost in the bells. Alfric grunted and fell back upon the floor, where he lay still.
My panic subsided. My reason returned. For a long minute I stood in dismay above my brother, thinking that the murder for which I had shown promise those five years ago on the moat house battlements had now come to pass.
There was a movement at the door. I did not turn but dove toward the bed. A strong hand grasped my ankle and dragged me into the center of the room, where I lay shivering and bleating. Behind me I could hear the Scorpion lift the armor in a quick, fluid, almost effortless movement. And again came the voice—still soft, still poisonous.
“You have done passably well, little one, though the violence with which you concluded was a bit … untidy.”
I looked around. A black, hooded figure moved to the door, the heavy suit of armor slung over its shoulder like a bundle of sticks or a blanket. Then it stopped and turned.
The red glow of the eyes shot through me like the grip that had pained and poisoned me scarcely two hours past.
“Your ring.”
“I—I beg your pardon?”
“Your naming ring, little man.” And the gloved hand stretched forth, palm extended. “You see, we are bound together by more than … a gentleman’s agreement, shall we say? I would be more content—indeed, more comfortable—with some token of our transactions in hand.”
“Not my naming ring!”
“Oh, but you can have the stones back, sir. They’re certainly worth more than this little copper ring, and, after all, they were yours in the first place.”
The intruder stood silently, gloved palm extended. Reluctantly I removed the ring, copper but intricately carved—one of a kind. It had been given to me four years ago, on the night of my thirteenth birthday when I had passed into the rather sorry manhood I had now botched up even more by dealing with some sort of armor-craving villain.
If anything identified a Solamnic youth, it was his naming ring.
I tossed the ring to the Scorpion. It disappeared with a flicker of his gloved hand.
“By the way,” he murmured, “I still hold you to the rest of your bargain. Not a word of this to anyone, for on the night you speak that word I shall hear of it … no matter where I am. Perhaps that very night your skin will come due. Perhaps another night. But it will be soon, oh, yes, very soon.” And quickly, stepping over a slowly stirring Alfric, he was out the door.
Someone—perhaps a servant—raised the alarm, and I stood there at a loss, hoping that stalwarts such as my father, such as the incomparable Bayard Brightblade, could harness the character in black boots before he slipped back into darkness with the armor and his plans for my skin. I had no idea how swift and efficient the intruder was, how the armor would have vanished, and he with it, by the time that Father, by now burdened with wine, and Sir Bayard, cold sober but burdened with Father, had climbed the stairs to a belated rescue.
CHAPTER 2
I did not know how the countryside would take it, what the farmers and peasants would say when my visitor, now disguised in the armor he had taken from Sir Bayard, began to turn the villages near our moat house into his own private fief. However, marauding never played well in the rural areas—the demands for tribute and cheeses, for livestock to be slaughtered and roasted on the spot. The demands for money and for daughters. Though
for what purpose this disguise and rampage, I could not say.
The very day after the armor was stolen, peasants began to arrive at the moat house to petition my father. Each one bore his hat in hand, and each one suggested, simply and humbly at first, that “the Master do something about the troubles in our village.”
The “something” suggested was usually that Father draw and quarter the offending knight, placing various parts of his anatomy “upon a platter” (what part of the anatomy depended upon the peasant’s imagination).
“If the Master wills it, there’s a lot of us what would like to see the culprit’s head set before us on a silver platter.”
“If it would not take too much of the good Master’s time and trouble, the wronged people of Oak Hollow would fancy dearly the sight of those thieving fingers set in a row on a bronze platter.”
“Oh, that his heart was pulsing on a copper dish beside the well in my back yard!”
And onward, as each tried to outdo his neighbor, as the simple folk descended to bodily parts I had never heard of, until I wondered what they thought about besides torture while they worked their fields.
Father listened only halfheartedly, his attention, no doubt, on the negligence of his boys. He was an old style Solamnic Knight, all stern and strict to the Code and the Measure. That any guest would be robbed beneath his roof was enough to send him into paroxysms and assure that Alfric would be placed under house arrest for his negligence—and confined to the moat house “until further notice.”
Moreover, the ransacked guest was Sir Bayard Brightblade, one of the most promising Knights in northern Ansalon, whose swordsmanship and bravery (and good sense, evidently) had been rumor even as far to the north as here in our godforsaken, backwater estate in the middle of Coastlund (which was northwest of the Vingaard Mountains and southeast of nowhere). Bayard was quietly, politely stewing, no doubt vexed at the delay that kept him at our estate when he would much rather be on his way to Solamnia, where he could batter the heads of younger men in a contest for a girl he had yet to meet, if what I was hearing was true.
Weasel's Luck Page 2