Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

Firebrand's putting on the crown had done more than muster trolls from the masonry. I have heard that down the hall from us, where Shardos and Ramiro were failing against impossible numbers of Que-Tana, the skirmish stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Blearily, the Plainsmen gaped at one another, thoroughly lost and distracted by a wave of darkness that passed through their hearts. All around the echoing library, staff and sling and spear toppled to the floor as the Que-Tana fighters struggled to recover their bearings.

Ramiro, of course, was battle-hardened enough to know an advantage when he saw one. Despite fatigue and bruises, at once he grabbed Shardos's wrist and lurched in the direction Brithelm and I had gone, intending to cut a path through the Plainsmen around him on his way to rejoining us.

Shardos, however, was having none of it. To everyone's surprise, but especially Ramiro's, the old juggler braced himself on the stony floor of the chamber. Ramiro stopped, puffed angrily, turned to berate the blind man… and discovered a chamberful of wide dark eyes, staring at the two of them expectantly.

The caverns began to tilt then, to shake and rumble ominously.

'The one-eye," one of the Plainsman said tentatively, looking about him uneasily as dust and gravel tumbled from the dome of the chamber. 'The one-eye. The Namer. He is not…"

The lean, pale Que-Tana paused, his brow wrinkled.

"I do not remember a Namer. What is he supposed to be?"

"Look around you," Shardos said confidently. "Where is the one-eye when the world shakes?"

"But he is the Namer!" a young woman protested. "He keeps… keeps…" A look of profound uncertainty passed over her face.

"Keeps what?" Shardos pressed eagerly, freeing his gnarled arm from Ramiro's grasp.

"I… I do not remember, except the Namer knows," the woman replied. "He also knows the way to the Bright Lands."

Several of the Que-Tana looked nervously toward the roof of the chamber again.

"If one…" Shardos began cautiously, ignoring the impatient tugging of Ramiro at his sleeve and the shudder of the earth at his feet, "If one were to show your people the way to the Bright Lands… and know the things that the Namer keeps…"

All eyes turned to the juggler eagerly.

"He would be the Namer," a small child piped.

It was exactly what Shardos wanted to hear.

"I am not sure such a conclusion follows, my dear," Shardos said with a deep breath. "What I am sure of is that there is more than one version of every story and more than one way out of every cavern. Sometimes even more than two ways, two versions. These caverns are old, worn smooth by water. I know many ways out of them."

"Shardos!" Ramiro hissed. "What-"

"Would you like me to show you one of those ways?" Shardos asked, his blank stare still leveled on the Que-Tana.

"Follow the juggler," the woman said quietly. The lean Plainsman who had spoken first now chimed in, followed by the little girl, an ugly, squat axeman near the lectern burned by Firebrand's angry grip, then two of our guards.

Shardos turned to Ramiro, smiling.

"Get ready, my portly companion. We are about to lead an emergence and bridge the abyss between darkness and light."

Ramiro snorted. "If that involves getting out of this godforsaken place, would that I could be right behind you, Shardos! But there's the Oath to reckon with, and one of the Order is no doubt neck-deep in Firebrand at this very moment."

"There are some things larger than that blasted Oath of yours, Ramiro!" Shardos replied sternly. "Do what you like, but look around you first and see if the Oath goes deeper than you imagined."

Ramiro scanned the faces of the Plainsmen in front of him, resting his gaze on the vulnerable pale skin and its terrible fragility. The floor shook again, and a huge cleft opened between him and the passage down which he had seen us go.

"As for Firebrand," Shardos urged softly, "well… 'tis high time you trusted in the gods and in Galen."

"Neither of which has been that reliable, as I recollect," the big man grumbled and, taking the hand of a Que-Tana girl in his own meaty paw, followed the juggler from the chamber as the library filled with dust and rubble behind them.

So together they passed through, juggler and epicure and a hundred befuddled Plainsmen. And that hundred became yet another hundred, and those two hundred a thousand, as the corridors shook and crumbled and threatened to collapse.

Meanwhile, I lay against the far wall of the passage, my feet still absorbing the shock of landing. Below me, Brithelm whooped merrily. The troll snorted, and the sound moved away as the two of them skirted the Namer's room in their dangerous game of taunt and pursuit.

The wall behind me trembled once, then stood still. Gravel tumbled into the corridor in front of me, and the sound echoed on down the passage. I braced myself against the side of the tunnel, started to rise, and felt the leathery wall pulsing beneath my touch, as though deep within it, a great heart was beating.

The wall was alive! And it was growing restless.

"Tellus!" I whispered, and thought of the old legend-of Longwalker's tale of the worm beneath the continent of Ansalon, whose great turning wrought the mountains.

And who would turn again, in the last of times, to undo what he had wrought.

There is no telling how long I would have stood there, speculating and gawking, were it not for the troll's arm shooting into the mouth of the corridor, its claws clicking and grabbing for me.

It seems that Brithelm had been able to hold the monster's attention only so long. Something glimmered on the edge of the big thing's memory, and it recalled, though faintly, that another small creature had shot past it only a few minutes ago.

I was drawn from contemplation when its groping fingers brushed against my ankle.

Yelping, leaping into the air as though an enormous spider had just crawled over my foot, I was fifty feet down the corridor before the hand had closed on empty air.

It was dark here, and the footing was treacherous. I swallowed hard and listened ahead of me.

From somewhere down the passage, borne to me as if it rode on the back of a drafty echo, came the sound of someone falling and an accompanying curse.

Firebrand. Stumbling in the darkness himself, and not yet out of my reach. Blind, I scurried toward the source of the sound. If Tellus indeed was here, dormant amid the caverns and mountains of the Vingaards, was this rumbling and shaking, this turning of the earth, a sign that he was preparing to waken?

I resolved not to think about it. At least not yet. Now a faint light glimmered in front of me, and the smell of sulfur reached me. I knew the Namer had touched hand to something dry and flammable.

Swiftly, silently, my energies renewed, I rushed toward the light, running like a weasel, confident and deep in its own burrow.

The floor of the tunnel shifted beneath me, and I came down hard on one knee. I resolved not to think about it yet. He had not made good time. When the darkness engulfed him and he became unsure of his footing, he had reached toward the walls and found the remnants of torches, dried by the years in ancient, rusty sconces.

The torches went up like thatch in a village fire. He must have watched them in fascination, no doubt sure that the creature he had unleashed on his pursuers was back in the Namer's chamber, finishing a grisly business.

No doubt Firebrand thought he had all the time in the world.

I followed the guttering lights, the smell of smoke, and turned a corner in the passage just in time to see him sixty feet or so ahead of me, his hands encircling a torch just beginning to flare strangely.

He looked over at me, his eye flaming like an opal, like a torch of anger and rage.