Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

Then Alfric was on his feet, pushing me back down in his scramble for the door, which he struck headlong and burst open as the tannery flooded with daylight. Gathering my breath, I followed him, diving with a yell into the open courtyard.

The whole castle rocked at the edge of disorder. It was like my memories of the Scorpion's Nest that nightmare afternoon in the pass near Chaktamir. All around us, the walls shook. Stone, mortar, and beam dislodged, and the bright afternoon air dusted over.

A shriek descended from the battlements, where a lone sentry dangled from the very ladder that I had climbed to speak to Bayard that morning. Suddenly, with the crisp, splintering sound that a quarterstaff makes when broken across stone, the ladder gave way, and the sentry fell and lay still, sprawled in an ungainly fashion in the courtyard.

All around us were the shouts of men and the screams of horses. You would think we had walked out into battle, or into the Cataclysm come again. I turned to see after Alfric.

Who was nowhere to be found.

Then I heard a familiar cry arise over all the others, and I rushed toward the source of the noise, fearing the worst. The cry was Bayard's.

I found him lying in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by Sir Brandon, Ramiro, and the Blue Knight. Valorous, Bayard's black stallion, who it seems had provided the final touch to the disaster quite by accident, stood unsteadily only a few yards away.

As I rushed toward my fallen comrade, the rumblings stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Brandon turned toward me, his handsome face ashen, his eyes enormous.

"Quickly! Arrange for a litter!" he shouted. "I fear it's his leg." Nor did such a fear arise from special wisdom or insight. Bayard clutched his shattered leg tightly in his enormous hands.

It had all happened quickly, as disasters will. It seemed that as the aftershocks grew more frequent and violent that terrible morning, that Bayard, astride his most reliable mount, had set about to comb the castle grounds, trying to control damage as best he could.

It was a dramatic gesture and a brave one…

"But not altogether wise," Bayard chuckled, benumbed and bemused and stretched on his back across his bed, Lady Enid and two drawn-faced surgeons in attendance. "For ground that is unsteady underfoot is also unsteady underhoof, my hearties."

Ramiro, Brandon and I had become "hearties" after Bayard, who scarcely took even a glass of wine, had taken his third glass of dwarf spirits-Sir Ramiro's remedy for whatever ailed a Knight or even remotely promised to ail him.

As far as I could tell, the pint of Thorbardin Eagle had done as much damage as quake and horse combined.

Enid was of the same mind. She signaled to Raphael, who removed the bottle. Unaware of his pain-or of his surroundings, for that matter-Bayard continued to speak at bleary length.

One of the physicians brought forth a textral stone-the small, egg-shaped rocks from the Elian Wilds that are known to knit together broken things-that would mend his leg entirely in a month or so if applied constantly. The stone sputtered, as it was supposed to do, and while the surgeon passed it over the fractured leg and the smoke rose, smelling of burnt evergreen and clove and sleep, Bayard told us how the accident had happened.

"Valorous had not traveled a hundred feet from the stable when he capsized," Bayard began. "Capsized most grievously."

He paused and stared at all of us dramatically.

"Most grievously indeed, falling heavily upon this… appendage."

He slapped his fractured right leg. Enid gasped in alarm.

The surgeon jumped back, the textral only half burnt away.

"Are we going to have to restrain you physically, dearest?" Enid asked pleasantly, when she had recovered her composure, but Bayard was off on an elaborate story, in which he swore-by Huma and Paladine and everyone connected in any fashion with any of the gods that you swear by-that the accident had nothing to do with Valorous's footing, that there was nothing the poor creature could help or avoid.

That indeed the venerable stallion had been "ethereally startled."

"I beg your pardon, Bayard?" asked a puzzled Ramiro.

"Something spooked Valorous, Ramiro!" Bayard explained. "Spooked a horse that has stood firm before ogre and minotaur, hobgoblin and the walking dead, in earthquake and in fire. It was as though the poor beast had seen a ghost beyond its reckoning."

Red-eyed and drowsy, Bayard sank back onto the bed as my memory fixed on yellowed faces in the stones.

"And did you… see anything, sir?"

"Galen?" His mind floated back from some distant, abstracted place-the vats of Thorbardin, no doubt. "Had forgotten you were here, boy."

He smiled drunkenly at me.

"So now you're a Knight. Insanity and all."

I decided that now was not the time for interrogation, so I smiled and nodded.

Alone in my quarters, I thought long and hard upon Bayard's ghostly visitors. Things about Castle di Caela had grown altogether too supernatural for my tastes. I rummaged my memories of folk literature, taught to me at the wobbling knee of old Gileandos. Surely he had said something about ghost lore.

Or were his only familiar spirits distilled ones?

"Let's see…" I spoke aloud, seating myself by the faintly glowing fireplace and dabbing a rather hopeless rag at my oily greaves. "Spirits come back to… urge someone to complete a task he failed to complete while he was living.

"Well, if the spirits in question are those of Plainsmen, it's no doubt a dark and bloody quest that promises plenty of mileage and casualties. With my imperiled brother at the end of it.

"Sometimes, though, ghosts don't want a journey at all. Instead they come to urge the living… to avenge their untimely murder.

"I doubt that. If it's Plainsmen, they'd no doubt keep it in their own family like the Pathwardens do, or the di Caelas. Every family has enough intrigue and betrayal without calling in outsiders. And it's beyond me what Brithelm would have to do with a murky tale of vengeance."

I cast the greaves aside, rummaged through my other belongings, and picked up the brooch.

"Damn! Elazar and Fernando will drum me out of the Order if they don't have their self-righteous mitts on this at once."

But the brooch jogged my imagination, and leaning back in my chair, I held it to the light, speculating further.

"Then again, ghosts sometimes announce the prospect of treasure…"

But those days were over. Though a faint greed stirred at the back of my attentions, I could not dwell upon it long. Avarice grew silent at the thought of poor Brithelm, spectral knife at his throat.

It was then that the centermost opal began to flicker. A faint light, fixed at the heart of the stone, expanded, deepened, until it seemed to split the gem like a column of fire in darkness. The room about me tumbled into blackness, as though the only source of light in the world came from the stone in my hand.

I gasped, breathed in moist, subterranean air, carrying with it the chilly smell of mud and water and stagnant time. It felt as though I had fallen into the stone or lay submerged in sunless caverns.

The white light at the center of the opal took on shape, definition, resolving itself into a thin, pale arm, a pale hand clutching a long, menacing dagger.

I grabbed the arms of the chair and waited. No doubt it was the hand I had seen before-the hand at my brother's throat. I steeled myself and looked more closely into the stone, searching intently for movement, for other light, for any sign or clue or landmark that would locate the vision in the world I knew and understood.

Instead, I saw only the light and the hand and the dagger, and finally, beyond these a faintly glimmering visage-the pale face of a Plainsman, marred by a diamond-shaped patch over his right eye. Then a voice rose on all sides of me, whispering back and forth in the stunned darkness of the room.