Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

"Persistent, are you?" he asked in a level voice. "Most vermin are."

I took an angry step toward him, then remembered I was unarmed. I crouched and fumbled around me in the corridor for something hard and edged that might pass for weaponry, but my hands raced over smooth, weeping stone.

"Weasels and stoats and little toothed things are practiced grovelers, too." Firebrand spat, and I started.

"How did you-"

"Know to call you 'weasel'?" he asked. Though the torch made shadows thick and mottled, I thought I could sense a smile in his voice.

"Oh, I know many things, Weasel. The stones tell me, and the eye in the stones tells me more." He folded his hands in a graceful, almost saintly manner-even more frightening a gesture because it appeared so tender.

"The past is inescapable, Weasel," he intoned, and the godseyes at his brow began to glow, as they had in the Namer's room. "You cannot salvage or cleanse it or even forget it, much less make it right. It is always there, and when you add up your little heroics and measure them against the worst you were, you will be hung on your words, on your own conceiving, as you move from night…"

He paused. In the shadowy distance, I saw his hands rise.

"… to awareness of night" he intoned.

And Marigold walked out of the corridor wall, her hair angular and drenched like a wrecked ship, her white gown muddy and dripping. From behind her-indeed, through her, for she was glowing and strangely translucent-I saw Firebrand turn and rush down the passage until he was lost in the darkness.

"Robert!" she cried. "Where is Sir Robert?"

She looked around her stupidly, water flowing down her in rivulets onto the floor of the tunnel, which remained completely and remarkably dry.

"My combs?" she asked uncertainly, painfully, turning toward me slowly. "My face paint?"

Our eyes met.

"Lacquer?" she murmured, and we stared a long while at each other.

Despite myself, I started to laugh.

Somewhere within me, I had added up the evidence-the translucency, the walking through walls, the simple fact that Marigold of Kayolin was supposed to be miles above me and miles away-but it had not sunk in yet. The only thing sunken, indeed, was the horrid little schooner atop the woman's head, run aground on what rocks or reef I could only imagine.

"Paaastriiiieeees!" she shrieked, and her eyes began to glow, to pinwheel in red fire.

"I'm dead! I'm dead!" she shouted, her hands rushing ineffectually to straighten her shipwrecked hair. "And it's all your fault!"

I raised my hands, shook my head, and looked frantically for side tunnels.

"But this is better," Marigold said, suddenly calm. "This is better, Weasel. Mm-hum. Yes, oh, yes." She stepped toward me, her white robes gliding inches above the floor of the passage. Menacingly she extended her arms.

"This way," she said, her voice almost musical, "we can be together forever!"

Her mouth opened, and yellow troll-like fangs protruded, dripping water and lacquer and blood. I backed down the corridor, with Marigold floating after me, as close as fog, a hint of cheap cologne borne somehow on the stagnant air. Then the Weasel of my beginnings resurged in my here and now, and I panicked and turned to run…

And collided with Alfric.

It is lucky I have a sound heart. Not good or compassionate, I fear, though in my last several years, I have tried to render it so. Nonetheless, it is sound and able to bear a shock or two. Shock one: Marigold. Shock two: my dear, dead brother.

There, sandwiched between the departed brother and the evidently departed other, I was speechless, unarmed, and tracked down, as Firebrand had prophesied, by the ghost of my ruinous past.

"Well," I said, my fears giving way to despair, to a bleak bravado of sorts, "I expect there is nothing in the world that you can ever live down. Once you do it, it more or less runs at you till it has you at bay, then guts you and skins you and hangs you on a wall…"

But neither of them was interested in my gibbering philosophy. Impassively Alfric stared over me and met Marigold's gaze.

"Why bother with him," he asked her unexpectedly, "when you could have me?"

Marigold's face softened. The burning whirl of her eyes slowed and faded, the fangs receded-all but one, anyway, which she pulled her lips over daintily. For a moment, she looked as she always looked in life: burly and selfish and a bit overdone, but strangely compelling in a tarty sort of way.

She snorted and vanished into nothingness, and I turned to my spectral brother with something approaching gratitude. For Alfric had called her off, it seemed-had saved me from an eternity of badgering and ethereal pastry.

'Thank you, Brother," I began in all sincerity.

"We will see if you're inclined to thank me, Galen," he said, "after you have reckoned with me. For you and me have got scores to settle."

I stepped back one stride, then another. My heel touched stone behind me.

"We have odds to even, Galen." My ghostly brother came closer. "And the reckoning begins now."

With the flat of his broadsword blade, Alfric struck my head. Then again and harder he struck, as my vision burst into a hundred glittering flames and I reeled up the corridor.

"You done this to me, too, Weasel!" he shouted, the shrill rise of his voice blending with the rumbling around me and above me.

The dale worm was stirring. Old Tellus, foster son of Chaos and Night, was lifting his lidless eye.

Alfric raised the sword again and stepped forward.

All my weaseling could not avail in this cramped, narrow passage. I was cornered, brought to bay as I had been so many times in the nooks of the moathouse and beneath the beds of unswept guest chambers. But here there was no place to hide or dodge.

There was not enough room to grovel.

So I stood to my full height, and my older brother seemed to shrink a little before me. Perhaps death had diminished his stature-I cannot be sure. For instead of the Weasel who cowered before a formidable larger brother, I was every bit as big as the oaf in front of me.

The punch surprised me, even though I threw it. My right fist hurtled through the dark air of the corridor and caught my brother squarely on the left side of his prominent nose. He reeled, shook his head, almost regained his footing…

And then my left fist came calling, surging out of the shadows below him as it hooked up into the underside of Alfric's chin.

"Whaaa-" he began, but he was falling backward, his arms spread out like the useless wings of a vespertile. Into the wall he tumbled, growing suddenly transparent, almost liquid, as he passed into mud and rock, his sword clattering to the corridor floor behind him.

He looked back at me as he faded, once and for all, into the stone of the tunnel. He smiled-not the wicked grin that had harried me over the past two decades of brotherly abuse, but a smile considerably warmer, perhaps even apologetic, carrying with it the faintest hint of respect.

The most generous moment of his life, it seemed, had come when that life was over.

"I'm sorry, Alfric," I breathed. "But I will avenge you."

I hadn't the time for good-byes. Around me, the corridor was collapsing, filling with palpable dust and fist-sized boulders, while before me somewhere was daylight and air and Firebrand with the opals.

The options were clear. I picked up the sword and began to run with new strength toward the last wavering lights in the burrowing distance.

A seventh, an eighth, and a ninth stone followed into the twining silver, until the twelfth was in place. With confident fingers, the Namer tested each setting, shifting the stone once, twice, until it held fast.