Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

"Now from these stones will arise my greater power," Firebrand intoned, his voice rising hysterically as he raised his arms. "I am disappointed in you, Brithelm. Disappointed that, when you might have been my first priest in the Bright Lands, you chose to bury your nose in books of physics and history and… and fauna, idling away your hour of greatness."

"I have been known to dawdle," Brithelm agreed.

Firebrand's eyes rested keenly on the two of us.

"But now your high tide recedes, as they say," he announced. "Your little rescue story comes to a close, Solamnic. For my translation awaits me."

With that, he set the circlet on his head.

He smiled. "All quiet," he said. "Even the Voice is silent before the power of life and death."

Something echoed through the caverns around us- something deep and sorrowful and altogether bereft. Above me and below me and somewhere else in the distance, I heard a great wail and outcry, and before me Firebrand's good eye rolled upward in the socket, its iris and dark pupil vanishing into a milky whiteness as though the Namer was in the midst of trance or seizure.

They tell me that above ground, in the Bright Lands that the Que-Tana had almost forgotten, the namers and chieftains and those with a bent toward wisdom heard wailing, too, but their wisdom was not great enough to understand what had just taken place. As far south as the Eastwall Mountains and the Thar-Thalas River they heard it, mistaking it for the distant cry of birds, and yet at the edge of the Plains of Dust, a group of herb-gathering Que-Teh stopped, bewildered, and stared at the greenery in their hands. The cry faded away somewhere far to the north of them, and they could no longer remember how or why to concoct with the herbs.

Hunters from the Que-Shu tribe, it is said, lost the ancestral trail into antelope country even as they traveled upon it. The people wandered for weeks. Several of the old ones starved. I have heard also that Longwalker's opals flickered and went dull and dim.

Almost as quickly as he had lapsed into abstraction, Firebrand recovered, his good eye dark and alert and piercing.

"Oh, I see it all now," he murmured, as quietly as you would speak if you approached a rare and timid bird in a clearing, where even the slightest disruption and noise would set the discovery to wing. "I see it all…"

No matter how quietly he spoke, though, the words carried in the echoing chamber, buoyed by the emotion in his voice and the cavernous, reflecting walls.

"And now from these walls will arise my great people," Firebrand intoned. "Will arise those whom the Rending took, and the years, and the wars and the fires and the floods and the search for the stones themselves."

"Climbing the Cat Tower," I whispered to Brithelm.

But Firebrand continued, his voice lower now, and calmer.

'Those taken and perhaps not taken, but those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong."

He waved his hand, and through the walls of the cavern it came, passing through smoothly and readily, as though the rock was mist or smoke.

In front of us was the troll from the rain-soaked highlands. In its eyes was a terrible, surpassing weariness, as if it had been called from something more than sleep or labor. From something we could not know yet.

Firebrand folded his hands ceremoniously. As he began, I started for him, stone in hand, but Brithelm grabbed me by the shoulders.

"Whatever it is, it is over, Galen," Brithelm explained. "He called this troll to life hours ago."

"You are right, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand whispered. "Go to your death knowing you could have shared in this glory."

Firebrand chanted yet again, something in an old and corrupt version of the Plainsman tongue, and a hot wind passed through the room, carrying on its waves the sound of an ancient wailing.

The troll came toward us, its yellowed teeth bared.

"He's conjured this up, Brithelm," I whispered urgently. "All you have to do in circumstances such as this is not put faith in the vision."

"The eyes can be deceptive, Brother," Brithelm agreed uneasily. "And yet I do not believe-"

"You taught me this long ago in Warden Swamp," I declared confidently. "You taught me that the way to deal with illusions is simply to disbelieve them, simply to go about your business and let them break like waters around you."

Brithelm cleared his throat, but I was halfway to the throne and Firebrand before he could speak. Swiftly the troll stepped between me and the Namer, but I looked beyond the formidable image and kept walking straight into the glaring, leering product of my enemy's imagination. And bumped into tough leathery skin, into muscle and gristle and claw.

"Galen!" Brithelm called out as I tumbled through the air into the rocks some twenty feet from my enormous and tangible foe. Dazed, I recovered my faculties just in time to see Firebrand climb a rope ladder into a tunnel halfway up the far wall, then pull the ladder up after him.

Just in time to see the troll turn and lurch toward me, finger-long claws switching and lashing in the dead air of the chamber.

I came to as Brithelm crouched over me in the Namer's chambers, as Firebrand vanished in the dark of the tunnel above us. It was still possible to get to the villain-my years of pastry and idleness at Castle di Caela had not yet slowed me to the point that I could not catch a one-eyed man in the dark.

There was, however, the matter of the troll in front of us.

"I thought you said that thing was an illusion," I whined, rising painfully to my feet.

Brithelm smiled and shrugged. "You have it mixed up with all those satyrs back in 'Warden Swamp," he said and backed away as the troll approached, smacking his lips, breaking a long stalagmite from the chamber floor, then waving it above his head like a baton.

I looked about me. Suddenly the rocks I could gather and throw seemed much too small, my brother much too weak an ally, and all that vaunted Solamnic training was like Dannelle's riding instruction-well and good in the thinking about it, but dangerous in the face of the real thing.

The troll rushed between us, striking the stone floor a shivering blow. The chamber shook, and for a moment, I thought the troll had shaken it. But it shook again, and the monster lost its footing, stringing slobber through the air as it staggered and turned.

Serenely Brithelm picked up a rock and bounced it harmlessly off the troll's leathery nose. The monster's eyes crossed in consternation, and it looked up in search of its assailant.

"Over here!" Brithelm warbled. And then "Over here!" echoed in the cavernous chamber from somewhere behind the troll. Stupidly the monster turned toward the sound of the echo.

Brithelm winked and called out again.

"Oh, yoo-hoo!"

The troll pivoted left in a complete circle and staggered a little.

I crouched and picked up a couple of stones. Then I saw that my brother was spinning the creature again and again, in slow circles, toward the rockface and the tunnel.

Brithelm sat down, crowed, and flashed green flame from his waving hands, and the troll, who had crouched for a better whack at its target, paused for a moment, dizzy and uncertain at the prospect of this fire.

In a split second, I understood Brithelm's tactic.

The troll crouched, and its gray, knotty back formed an incline of sorts, its shoulders no more than a good athletic leap from the mouth of the corridor above us. Before I could consider further, I was running, building up speed across the floor of the cavern, and the monster had only started to turn when I vaulted onto its backside like a kender acrobat, my legs still churning and arms windmilling, the sheer momentum carrying me up the steep incline of the back onto its shoulders and, in a leap sparked more by fear than by strength or dexterity, headfirst into the mouth of the tunnel.