There were times years ago, in Coastlund, when Gileandos was said to be careless with fire. It was a reputation he did not deserve. Frequently ignited by the youngest and oldest Pathwarden boys-who worked sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem-the tutor spent much of his time in the infirmary, nursing burns and the ill regard of Sir Andrew Pathwarden. In those long, reflective hours on his back (or on his belly, depending on where the fire had struck him) Gileandos had come to believe that he had set the fires himself, or walked into them as part of some huge and fatal design established in the cloudy past of the Age of Dreams.
That was why he was not surprised when his sleeves burst into flame in the corridor and, shouting and spinning like an enormous fireworks display, he pinwheeled up the corridor, straight into a geyser rising from the artesian well, which whirled him about and extinguished him.
And yet, in that blaze of glory, an obscure tutor had saved a shimmering array of Solamnic knighthood and nobility, for the sharp eye of Bradley the engineer caught a glimpse of light wavering down the corridor-the left one, it was, to the young man's great delight-and, pointing out the glimmer to the head engineer and the Lady Dannelle, he proceeded to guide the expedition to its source in the smoldering, smarting tutor.
From there, it was a matter of pickax and shovel against rock, a task taking less than an hour.
Far below the clamor of metal and stone, below the rescue party and below those they had set out to rescue, below the great dale worm Tellus, who stirred uneasily in his hundred thousand years of sleep, the caverns dropped away into nothing, and nothing dropped away into the Abyss. Where Sargonnas waited, watching events unfold.
The dark god frowned. There was a whining at his ear, thin and incessant, like the choiring of mosquitoes.
Something was wrong.
He had plotted so carefully all that had come to pass: hundreds of years ago, setting a dark passage in front of the Scorpion and even darker thoughts in his heart, and at almost the same time finding the Namer through the depths of the opals…
It was all so elaborate and beautiful.
And yet, Sargonnas thought now, turning uncomfortably in the black vacuum of the Abyss, and yet there are too many of them. Wherever 1 look are unforeseen people: the sharp-eyed, mournful Knight and the merry blind juggler, the girl and the priest and the dog…
And since he put on the crown, I have not heard from the Namer anymore. Too variable these mortals were, and something was about to happen that was beyond contingencies.
He stirred, anxiously scanning the Vingaards and the plains and the subterranean cavern beneath both.
He could not figure it. Too many and variable they were.
"Something the Scorpion said in the parchment…" Bayard began thoughtfully, scrambling urgently for answers as the fissure brimmed over and the chamber around his party began to fill with water. "Some clue to that damnable distant machinery…"
His companions paused expectantly, their gazes moving from the dark mechanism faintly seen by some, only imagined by others, until every eye was on Bayard, who frowned, shifted himself on Enid's shoulder, and turned to Brandon Rus.
"Though you may uncover my devices, the note said, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. It's easy and direct, and wouldn't that be the Scorpion's greatest joke, that for all his machineries, the key is not subtle at all but is in fact the simple head of an arrow? That spot in the center of the device, Brandon," he urged as the fissure before them spilled water over their feet and the ceilings rained. "The dark spot, like the pupil of the eye. Can you shoot it with a bow?"
"I don't… Well, it's a terrible long shot from here through cascading water."
"And yet it seems what we must do," Bayard pressed, his gray-eyed stare intent on the younger Knight.
Still Brandon Rus hesitated, looked to the shadowy distance.
'Then step out to knee-deep and hold your breath, damn it!" Sir Robert roared. "You heard Sir Bayard, boy!"
Brandon leapt at the old man's order. In a moment, he was at the edge of the fissure, drawing the powerful bow.
"I'll have to figure weight, and distance, and differences in height, and who knows how thick that mist is across there."
"Brandon!" Enid urged. "I saw you hit a target through a second-story window in the middle of a rainstorm! Is this talent of yours good for anything besides tricks?"
Brandon stepped back, wounded. "There was the one time, though…"
"Damn the one time!" Enid screamed, reaching out and grabbing the young Knight by the sleeve. "Either make the shot or give me the bow and I'll do it."
Brandon Rus paused for a moment, then sprang toward action, his feet in the water before he thought too much about it. One step out, then two steps.
Then his submerged foot felt nothing beneath it.
How can I shoot through this obscurity? he thought, his strong hand trembling as he raised the bow.
The light behind him shifted over the gray mist like the light over a desolate sea. It flickered on the far wall before him, and the wall seemed to recede, to brighten and dim.
Brandon raised the bow, aimed at the turbulence, and was seized again by doubt. What if he missed?
Enid called out something unintelligible from behind him. She leaned over his shoulder and sighted along the shaft of the arrow as the young man aimed at the dark center of the thing at the far end of the chamber.
The lad took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Silently, with the archer's accuracy and skill that made him legendary, he shifted his aim, and the arrow rocketed into the head of the carved circling scorpion that adorned its border.
For a moment, Enid and Raphael cried out in dismay as the others squinted for a sight of the target across the dark distance. Brandon turned away, bowed his head.
"No, Brandon!" Enid shouted. "By the gods, try again!"
"What-" Sir Andrew began.
"Wait!" Bayard said, standing knee-deep in the water, oddly supported by its buoyancy. "The device… I am the device!"
"I beg your pardon?" Sir Robert asked, and Bayard Brightblade began to laugh in relief.
"Brandon Rus," he explained softly, the water rising to midthigh, "has still never missed. For the device was no gnomish machinery, but the Scorpion's firm conviction that there was never a Solamnic Knight who could leave well enough alone."
"I beg your pardon?" Sir Andrew interrupted.
"Raphael," Bayard ordered, "look at the target and tell me what you see."
The lad squinted as he looked out over the waters.
"The same as before, sir. It is still shifting. Almost looks alive."
"It is alive indeed," Bayard replied, wading back toward his comrades, the water to his waist.
"I beg your pardon?" Enid and Raphael asked in unison, and the lord of Castle di Caela laughed again, this time more heartily.
"The fabled 'device,' " he explained, "was no mechanism, but a simple plot. The Scorpion knew that if we found the eye of the worm, which for all the world, I gather, resembles an archer's target, we would do our Solamnic best to strike its center, thereby waking the monster with furious and maddening pain. The only machinery planted on the castle grounds was the parchment geared to draw me to this very spot."
'This rapidly submerging spot," Brandon Rus said somewhat urgently, offering his hand to Bayard Brightblade, who breasted the water in front of him.
"But what of the dale worm?" Sirs Robert and Andrew shouted simultaneously.
"It'll die and make you a hero, Robert," Bayard announced. "Looks to me like you've drowned the damned thing!"
"And us in the bargain," Enid added, "unless we get out of here-now!"
Sputtering, coughing water like a beached swimmer, Bayard climbed out of the brimming pool, sidestepping the jetting warm streams from the great well. Again Brandon lifted the older Knight to his shoulder, and as swiftly as his youth could enable and his burden allow, he waded up the corridor, water rising in the tunnel behind him. He s
tumbled, his strength failing, and called out to those following. And all of them-Enid, Andrew, Robert, and Raphael, gasping at the steam and sliding rock-hauled Bayard and his rescuer back up the corridor. When they reached breathable air, they stopped for a moment and leaned against rock or collapsed altogether on the floor of the tunnel.
"Well, it has happened," Sir Andrew coughed. "We have reached the very foundations of Castle di Caela, and we have seen something there and kept it from wakening, maybe for good. It is over. But I shall be damned if I understood a lick of it."
He smiled, hearing before them the shouts and the pickaxes of the engineers.
It was only a matter of minutes until the hole in the rock and rubble was wide enough for all of them to pass through.
Bradley lifted Sir Bayard through the hole, supported him against the rush of water that entered the tunnel behind him, stumbled for a minute in the onslaught of wave and river-borne rubble, then gained solid footing and strode toward the surface. Around him, the others milled and followed, well-spattered and muddy, battered by rock and daunted by darkness.
Surprisingly old Gileandos lifted his voice in the old song of courage.
"Even the night must fail,
For light sleeps in the eyes
And dark becomes dark on dark
Until the darkness dies."
Jubilant, the others joined in.
"Soon the eye resolves
Complexities of night
Into stillness, where the heart
Falls into fabled light."
So singing, they emerge from the fissure into the cellar of the Great Tower, waterlogged and bedraggled but whole.
In the heart of the Abyss, the dark god frowned and turned on a gust of stagnant air. Defeated, he shrugged, smiled ruefully.
"Damn them," he said flatly, and the void shook around him. "And damn the Namer especially, who is now useless."
Then he yawned and, reclining in hot, dry infinities of nothingness, he closed his fathomless eyes and slept away a century.
Whether indeed it was understood or whether it passed understanding, something had changed in the world under Castle di Caela. The gray mist in the crevasse vanished, leaving behind it a dark that was only the absence of light, that hid nothing more than stone and shadow and occasional creeping things, all in all as harmless as what a curious child might find in the earth beneath an overturned rock.
Far above, two pages sat alone at a table in the Great Hall, where they had sat for hours debating how many places to set for dinner. They broke off their arguments and listened, of all things, to a sudden quiet in the rooms and corridors around them.
It was the first time either had listened in months.
Nor was it unrewarded, for they both started to listen right near the turn of the hour, as noon approached and the castle guests filed in for a luncheon that would taste far better today for some reason.
As the incredible smells of roast pork and apples filtered into the hall, first one boy smiled, then the other.
They did not know why they were smiling. It was something, though, about the smells in the air and the curious light in the room. Something about the silliness of having whiled away the morning in the fine points of etiquette, when there were smells and noises to investigate and a meal of roast pork and potatoes to enjoy.
As the noontide clocks struck in Castle di Caela, the air was filled with a chorus of metallic bird cries. For the first time since Aunt Evania and Sir Robert began this collection of offensive machinery, all of the castle cuckoos sang together, marking the passing hour.
Up in the Vingaard Mountains, a high sun washed the vallenwoods and oaks and maples in a brilliant white light. The leaves turned and silvered in the light breeze from the east, and Longwalker stopped on his way through the wooded foothills. He cocked his head, as if somewhere east of him he had heard something shift, some slight but important movement in the fabric of things.
"Now," he said to the Plainsmen about him. "Old Tellus is at rest. The time is back. It will not be long before they all can return, can go back to words and memory."
It was obscure to them, what Longwalker said. The younger Que-Nara looked at one another, then nodded as though they understood their leader.
Someday, Longwalker thought. Someday you will understand all of this. How those in the hearts of the opal are always only a step from you. That as thin as the line is between breathing and translation, it is just as thin when you come back the other way. You will understand this.
Two strix owls took wing out of the dark branches of a blue aeterna. Shocked by the daylight and the Plainsmen around them, they wheeled quickly in the air and swooped into a stand of golden oak not twenty yards away. The children started, then quickly recovered their calm and implacable faces.
Longwalker frowned privately, lost in his thoughts.
"I do not know what this will bring the Solamnics," he confided to his people, "but there is a grove where the plains meet the foothills, where vallenwood and pine and aeterna mix with the lesser trees. There, if their guiding is done and the Que-Tana have followed, we shall find the others, and stone will link with stone, and cousins will clasp hands in friendship and reunion."
He walked away from his camp on the plains with its lean-tos of hide and light wood, the smell of smoke and roast venison. The earth stilled beneath him as the dale worm settled back into long sleep, but even its slightest shiftings stirred the mountains.
Chapter XXIV
The last of the settings remained stoneless, unadorned. For a moment, the Namer held the thirteenth stone above it.
"This is the One Stone," he said quietly. "Always present in its absence."
He handed the One Stone to the man seated beside him, who in turn handed it to another. And as the stone passed from Plainsman to Plainsman, the Namer brought the story full circle.
There was no doubting that the surface was near, for now the air smelled fresher, greener in the part of the passage around me. Upward I moved, the borrowed sword in my right hand, my left hand grappling for purchase amid loose and tumbling rock.
The deciding was over.
In a rush, I took off up the corridor toward the light. All around me the vast network of tunnel and chamber was crumbling, shaking. It seemed that everything momentous that had ever happened to me centered around an earthquake, and I recalled thinking, If this is the last thing, then there is something just and fitting in it. Then, with an unsettling lurch, the ground I had just crossed split open not ten yards behind me.
I passed through one cloud of red dust, then a corridor branching to my right, which collapsed with a rolling crash that doubled my speed, if doubling was possible. The air was growing thick and powdery, difficult to breathe.
I pulled my cloak up over my mouth and rose. It was a time for opals, that was certain.
A trio of tenebrals rushed by me, chittering. I followed, and I heard someone or something cry out in front of me the instant before I turned a corner.
My momentum propelling me, I turned nonetheless and saw Firebrand ahead, out of reach and practically past recall, scrambling into a gray steady light as the dust passed in waves behind him.
I heard the shriek and the popping as the tenebrals fluttered into the sunlight. With a prayer to whatever god looked after headstrong fools, I rushed to the surface, too, sword at the ready, toward the sunlight and the sound of Firebrand's chanting.
I burst into the Bright Lands with a gasp, with relief, for whatever awaited me, however dangerous, was a change from the gloom and the damp and the stagnant corridors.
I did not know that standing there in confusing light, armed with a long dagger and a shield, my greatest adversary awaited, who made the dark magic of the Scorpion and of Firebrand look like child's play.
It was Galen Pathwarden, the Weasel, oily and mean, crouched on an outcropping of granite. He looked years younger than I remembered myself, and decades younger than I felt.
I remembered
his face when it was my face, years and adventures ago, when I had stared at myself hatefully in the one looking glass Father kept in the moathouse. The beady brown eyes, the matted red hair, the rodent's twitch and squint.
What was it Firebrand had said? Those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong.
Firebrand stood apart from us, laughing wickedly beneath the drooping branches of a vallenwood. The opals glittered in his silver crown, and his eye blazed like the darkest and most powerful stone of all.
"Here's the deal," Weasel whined, slipping behind his shield until he was scarcely visible. "We've come so far together, you and I, to where our differences are just about to bring us to grief…"
I turned my sword in my hand. I could not figure out what to do about this. Somewhere in the corner of my vision, I saw Firebrand move, heard his laughter. Beneath me, the ground rumbled in reply, as though it, too, was laughing.
"So I suggest we just… call things off," Weasel urged. "We depart, whether separately or together, leaving this Firebrand fellow to his own sorry devices."
He raised his head from behind the shield and gave me a knowing wink.
It was the moment I had been waiting for.
Three strides carried me across the clearing. Weasel dropped the shield and backed away, cringing and groveling like some shifty, disgusting vermin. I gripped my sword tightly, took one last step toward Weasel, and drove the blade halfway into his chest.
He looked into my eyes and shrieked.
I looked away, unable to return his gaze. A pain wrenched hot in my chest. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong, I heard once again. I saw Firebrand gliding through the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, circling me like a large, scavenging bird.
I felt Weasel climbing up the sword, pulling himself toward me, driving the blade deeper and deeper into his chest as he moved. Finally he clutched my sword hand in his thin, leathery grasp and pulled me toward him.
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