Galen Beknighted

Chapter XV

Seven stones were set in his crown. Seven godseyes: one brought from above, six mined in the dark recesses of the Vingaards.

For Firebrand, it was not enough.

Are there not places for thirteen stones?

Oh, the timid had warned against it, shaking their fingers and saying, "The power over life and death belongs to no man, nor should any man try to take it. For what right has man to govern the plains and the caverns, the places that give birth to him and nurture him and receive his body when he is no more?"

A weakling's argument, in which a false mysticism hid one's fear. One might as well ask what right a man has to govern himself.

But it was more-indeed, much more. For recently Firebrand had felt it, as the visions grew sharper, more consuming, as the stories of those around him came to painful and vivid life in his thoughts. There were times when Firebrand thought he was becoming transparent, when torchlight shone through his extended hands, when he could look through his palms and see the carvings on the stone walls of the corridor. It was only a matter of time, he thought, until he rose beyond himself.

All the more reason for the thirteenth stone, for the power over life and death. For when the prophecy was fulfilled and Firebrand led the Que-Tana back to the surface, he would rule over all the Plainsmen as history renewed itself.

Slowly Firebrand rose from his throne. The Que-Tana below him continued in their tasks, tirelessly combing the stones for the godseyes. He turned from them, his bearskin robe stirring the lifeless air in the Porch of Memory, rocking the flames of the candles, and he climbed up the stairs that were carved in the sheeted stalactites above the throne. He entered the corridor that took him past the Hall of Chanting, where the women recited the Song of Firebrand continuously.

Two miners met him in the corridor, carrying the stone-crushed body of a child between them. They stopped and knelt before the Namer. Firebrand touched his eye patch absently and stepped over the boy's broken body.

One of the miners thought of a curse as the Namer passed, but he cowered, and the words died in his throat.

Past the library Firebrand proceeded, where at his orders, the children had removed the last of the books and destroyed them, because soon all history, all thought and science and poetry-all of anything worth knowing-would reside in the stones on the silver crown.

He stopped and touched the carved writing on a torchlit wall. A poem in Old Que-Nara-a love poem to a dark-haired woman.

Blue light flickered in the Namer's hand. His fingers coursed over the words of the poem, and the stone smoked: beneath them. The words vanished, and in their stead, the wall was glassy and black like obsidian.

Firebrand admired himself in the reflection.

Deeper into the caverns he went, his duties calling him to his own cubicle, where the warriors had taken the kidnapped cleric. He came to the Gates of Flame, the yellow row of stalactites and stalagmites that marked the boundaries of his private quarters. They were long, sharp, and irregular, like teeth of fire.

Stepping through the gate, Firebrand entered the long, narrow part of the underground cavern wherein he resided. He was no longer surprised at the uncanny warmth of this part of the caverns, the wind as regular as a heartbeat, soft against the face of those who approached, carrying upon its back the cloying smell of decay, the floors and the walls of the corridor wet with centuries of sediment.

The voice in the stone has told me how it will come to pass, Firebrand thought as the opals began to glow more brightly, guiding him gently toward the cubicle. I shall rise at the Telling, the Que-Tana at my command, and I shall have not only the Crown Fulfilled-the twelve stones that store the memory of the People-but the forbidden thirteenth stone, forbidden, the voice has told me, because it steals the memory of others.

And there on the Telling Ground, I shall take the years from the People who took years from me. With all of our history in my thoughts, I will start it again. I shall remember what needs remembering, forget what needs forgetting, and history will begin and end in Firebrand.

I shall become a god, no doubt. I expect that now in the Bright Lands there is a starless gap in the skies, awaiting my constellation. And once those stars are placed there, shining like opals in the black heart of the heavens, not even Sargonnas himself will govern me.

Two of the younger warriors helped the captive travel the shifting passageway from the Porch of Memory to the library, where they seated him among empty shelves and desolate tables littered with old manuscripts. They had combed the straw and dust from his hair, mended his tattered red robe, then brought him to the Namer's quarters for an audience with Firebrand. Finally convinced that it was no longer the afterlife in which he found himself, Brithelm had returned to his favorite pursuits: eating, sleeping, and odd studies. Even now he was poring over a zoological volume brought with him out of the wreck of the library.

Within days, Brithelm had become firm in his conviction to study the tenebrals he had observed dangling from the ceilings of the caverns and corridors. He was convinced that the creatures were a lost species of raptor.

Firebrand stooped at the door to the cubicle and entered. Brithelm did not stir, his face above the book, an odd pair of triangular spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.

Firebrand cleared his throat. "So it was an abbey you were building up there? Up in the Br-the Vingaard Mountains?" he asked, leery of this eccentric young man in front of him.

The fellow continued to ponder the text, which he had spread on his lap, the red thicket of his hair bent over the pages, his ruddy hands coursing rapidly over the text. Scrawled Plainsman letters reflected nervously up into the glittering triangles at his eyes.

"The book says, Father Firebrand, that these… tenebrals, as you call them, cannot abide sunshine. Is that so?" he asked, looking up from the book at last.

"Indeed it is far worse than that, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand explained, seating himself with a rustle of robes and furs in the single, hardbacked chair in the sparsely furnished quarters. "The sunlight kills them, shrivels them at once, burns their wings. I would imagine it is a horrible death. But I asked about your abbey. Tell me of your abbey."

"What do they live on?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The tenebrals." Brother Brithelm's face was aglow, fastened on a peculiar interest that he did not want to abandon just now.

Firebrand's memory stirred, returning to the image of a frail young boy, intent on the first hunt. The Namer frowned and wrestled his thoughts back to the time at hand, to the disheveled lad seated on the floor in front of him.

"What do tenebrals eat?" Brithelm asked.

Firebrand shifted uncomfortably on the chair. Apparently the captive would not be satisfied until he knew all about tenebrals. Nor would Firebrand be satisfied in turn, not until he knew all about this mysterious sanctuary in the mountains, about the Knight who was coming with the opals in question.

He longed for the ceremonial stool, the soft, crackling give and take of its woven reed.

Already, it seemed, they had reached an impasse.

"I don't know what they eat, Brother Brithelm. Now as to your-"

"Do you suppose tenebrals could live on the surface after nightfall?" Brithelm interrupted. 'That's why I asked about their feeding habits, for if whatever they eat can be found above ground, why, then…"

Firebrand did not hear him.

Instead, he was remembering something else: the ill-fated assault of the night before. He had tried to wrest the stones from the one who brought them, and to do so by surprise. It would have been safer that way, before the young Knight and his entourage drew near enough to the entrance to find their way down among the Que-Tana.

Firebrand had ordered the Que-Tana warriors not to fear killing the Knight nor any who rode with him. No time could have been better than the time they attacked, when a twist of the knife in the foothills of the Vingaards could have done the business quickly and easily. He would have had the opals by now.

And the young man seated before him would be disposable.

But even the moon was a treacherous light for the subterranean Que-Tana. Lurking in the dark woods, they had ambushed Sir Galen and his followers, but the light was confusing, threatening, and they had failed at their mission.

Those who had failed paid the price. They now dangled by their braided hair in the Chamber of Night, the deep and enormous cavern that underlay the Porch of Memory. There they awaited the vespertiles, the huge flightless bats that roamed the darker margins of Firebrand's kingdom.

The vespertiles were always hungry.

I am a vespertile myself, Firebrand thought with a smile. No. Better yet, I am a spider. Dark and subterranean, weaving elaborate webs in my chambers, my only companion a daft captive cleric who is bait and brother to the approaching quarry.

To Sir Galen Brightblade, the bearer of the opals.

'Tell me," Firebrand repeated, his mood much better now, "of your sanctuary, Brother Brithelm."

"My sanctuary?" Brithelm asked, his shimmering eyes returning to the book. "Oh. I suppose I've never thought of it as mine, actually." And as the young man spoke, his eyes still fixed on the book in front of him, Firebrand gazed into the maze of stalactites in the vaulted ceiling above him and became lost in the web of Brithelm's words.

Brithelm told of an array of wooden houses on wooden stilts, a cluster of tents and lean-tos that looked more like a way station for vagrants than a holy place. It had about it the melancholy frailty of a child's play fortress, vulnerable to invasion and fire. To faulty architecture and falling crossbeams, for that matter.

All around it birds rose into the air with the strange, skidding sound doves make when they take wing. They reeled overhead and flew southward and away, the cold mountain air whistling behind them.

One by one they came to Brithelm, out of the foothills and the plains of Solamnia and Coastlund. Braving inclement weather and rocky trails and the ever-present dangers of goblin and troll and bandit, they came to his ramshackle mountain sanctuary. Brithelm spoke warmly, lovingly of each of them.

From Palanthas came two elderly women, who brought nothing with them except a set of fine china and a stuffed parrot they swore could predict the weather. On their third day in camp, they were thoroughly drenched by a surprising downpour, and the resulting head colds had kept them confined for a week.

There was a pirate captain from Kalaman, whose dreams of shipwreck had plagued him so much that his sleeplessness forced him to retire. In the quiet of the mountains and in Brithelm's calming presence, finally the man slumbered, though his bad dreams were really none the better. He slept in a wooden lifeboat suspended from the stilts beneath one of Brithelm's makeshift huts, his cabin boy above in the hut proper. At every hour of the night, the boy had orders to ring a bell through a trapdoor in the floor of the hut, directly over the captain's head, awakening him so that he would not drown in his dreams.

There was a beautiful blonde woman of about Brithelm's age-Evalinde, she was called. She seemed to have designs on the metaphysical brother and took no discouragement from the fact that he did not notice her, occupied as he was with the summoning of birds and some other strange form of meditation that involved dangling a lizard over an elaborate parchment design and searching for enlightenment.

It might be hard to believe that a bright woman like Evalinde put up with such foolishness, much less kept an interest in Brithelm. Nonetheless, she visited him at night, slipping from her tent into his lean-to when the two moons, red and silver, shone together.

The old Palanthan women consulted their parrot for details of the tryst. It told them, evidently, that Evalinde brought visions to Brother Brithelm. The pirate captain, of course, had other theories.

There were a few more displaced souls in the encampment, perhaps a dozen in all, including an odd-looking dwarf who cames from the gods knew where to sell Brithelm parchment and lizards.

Strangest of all was the blind juggler. Of him, Brithelm was peculiarly silent, though Firebrand plied the lad with questions-idly at first and then more intensely when a mystery rose and surrounded this man called Shardos. But he learned nothing, really, of the juggler.

"How many," he asked the young cleric, "were at your sanctuary at its height?"

"'Its height'?" Brithelm asked, reclining on the cool floor of the cubicle, steepling his fingers behind his head.

"Its most populous," Firebrand urged, leaning forward in the hard chair.

"Oh… one or seven, depending on how you count. Eight, if you count dogs. Do you count dogs, Father Firebrand?"

Firebrand did not count them. Brithelm nodded and explained.

"You see, there was only one, if you count me, who was after all the only one who had really decided to stay there and all. All of the others were visiting for a while. There was Evalinde and the dwarf, the captain and the cabin boy, the juggler and his dog-but you aren't counting dogs-and the two old women from Palanthas. Do you count stuffed parrots? There was one with the women, and if you count it there were nine of us…"

Firebrand did not count parrots either.

"Who… provided for you while you lived there, Brother Brithelm?"

"'Provided,' sir?"

"Food. Protection."

"Bayard Brightblade came once, sir. With my brother Galen. I think they brought loaves and eggs. Perhaps some potatoes and some cheese, too."

Galen Pathwarden, then. Sir Galen Pathwarden, who roams the surfaces above us, who has dispatched scout and skirmisher.

Like so many mercenaries.

When he invades us, dares to come below, he will find the dark not to his liking.

"Are there any… stories about these tenebrals of yours?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Any lore," Brithelm explained, staring at the ceiling. "I take to lore well, you know."

Firebrand sighed.

"If there is, it will be in the volume before you. Fauna is not a strength of our library."

He cleared his throat. Brithelm looked up at him innocently.

"On the other hand, minerals are. Rocks, both igneous and sedimentary. Gypsum and limestone. Gems such as… these."

Carefully he took the crown and showed it to Brithelm. It was an impulse, really. Something told him it was only right that the man should see the stones that would cost him his life.

Perhaps.

Firebrand had not decided how useful the Lightdwellers would be, once the opals were placed in the crown.

It was more than fairness, though, that guided the hand of the Namer. Something in him yearned for a kindred spirit, for another bearer of visions, who would see these stones and know that the Namer of the Que-Tana stood at the borders of prophecy, at the edge of the greatest power imaginable: the power over life and death.

Brithelm rose onto his elbow and examined the stones. Handing the crown back to Firebrand, he reclined once more, his left cheek pressed against the coolness of the stone floor of the chamber.

"Have you anything to eat, sir?" he asked finally. "Being kidnapped surely gives rise to an appetite. Just anything will do-nothing fanciful or strange or rich, and nothing with turnips in it, if you don't mind, Father Firebrand. You see, the turnip is the one thing that jars my internals. If by mistake I eat a turnip, I have to lie on my right side for an hour with my left arm raised over my head. That way the organs return to their proper and natural arrangement."

"I see," snapped Firebrand, his hopes and confidence tumbling. Surely the boy was more cluttered than clairvoyant- all this addled talk of tenebrals and turnips. And yet Firebrand had not given up hope entirely.

"I show you the stones, Brother Brithelm," he announced, cradling the crown in his left hand, "because through them a god speaks to me."

Brithelm lifted his face from the floor and raised an eyebrow. And in loneliness Firebrand told him of the commands of the god Sargonnas-of the prophecy he had been granted and of the powers to come that the god had promised him.

He would need followers, he explained. Men of forthrightness and courage, and above all, of vision.

After Firebrand finished, there was silence in the room for a long while. They were both surprised by the direction the talk had led them.

"This is quite an undertaking you're about, isn't it, Father Firebrand?" Brithelm asked finally.

Firebrand sat in silence. There was no answer to that question.

"What I'd like to know is this, though," the young cleric continued, his face pressed again to the floor of the chamber, his voice muffled by stone. "What if this Sargonnas is lying?"

Firebrand rose, bid a cold farewell to Brithelm, and left the cubicle. Back down the hall he strode, the long crosier of his office clicking woodenly on the stone floor of the cavern. Cursing the Lightdweller and his blasphemy and thickheadedness, Firebrand paused beneath a torch guttering in its sconce, and in the light, yellow on green on yellow, examined the crosier idly.

It was carved with the shapes of plains animals, the names of which Firebrand no longer remembered. Surprised at his own lapse, he leaned against the wall and began to weep.

He was forgetting the Bright Lands.

He had been right all along. The times were urgent, and the worthy few. Indeed, as he feared, he was the only worthy one, and he was alone and not yet come into his power.

But the godseyes were scarcely a mile away, and approaching with the speed of an oncoming storm.

A tenebral flashed by the torch and into the engulfing darkness.