Michael Williams - Galen Beknighted

"You've been this way before, Bradley," she said. "Where from here?"

The young man blushed. Dannelle's touch, it seemed, was volatile in many quarters.

"He has no idea, m'lady," the head engineer replied testily. "'Twas long before this that Bayard Brightblade made the lot of us turn back."

Dannelle nodded in the shadows, being accustomed to unwelcome protection.

"And yet," the young man said, his eyes on the two passages, "after a brief inspection of incline and breadth and the mathematics thereof, I would venture that the leftward passage leads toward Sir Bayard and his party."

"Nonsense, Bradley!" the head engineer sputtered. "Surely you are aware that the workings of the well lie south of here. If Sir Bayard knew aught of engineering and matters hydraulical, he would surely have pursued the passage to the right."

'Then I would venture that Bradley is right," Dannelle interrupted, and the old man gazed at her with something approaching contempt.

"I shall be food for bats!" Gileandos murmured, fumbling hysterically at loose things. "Or giant rats, or lizards, or huge flightless birds that have evolved into something menacing, or… or… that worm I touched!"

Hysteria turned to blind panic as the tutor flung rocks in all directions. As he raised dust in the blackness, he coughed and sneezed and continued to burrow deeper into the rock-pile until he reached the floor of the corridor, until his right hand struck solid rock…

And his left hand metal.

Panting, squealing, fumbling with the lantern, he juggled it from one hand to another, heard the splash of lamp oil on the dark rocks around him. Fumbling in his robes, he came up with a tinderbox, wrenched it open, and drew out flint and tinder…

There were times years ago, in Coastlund, when Gileandos was said to be careless with fire. It was a reputation he did not deserve. Frequently ignited by the youngest and oldest Pathwarden boys-who worked sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem-the tutor spent much of his time in the infirmary, nursing burns and the ill regard of Sir Andrew Pathwarden. In those long, reflective hours on his back (or on his belly, depending on where the fire had struck him) Gileandos had come to believe that he had set the fires himself, or walked into them as part of some huge and fatal design established in the cloudy past of the Age of Dreams.

That was why he was not surprised when his sleeves burst into flame in the corridor and, shouting and spinning like an enormous fireworks display, he pinwheeled up the corridor, straight into a geyser rising from the artesian well, which whirled him about and extinguished him.

And yet, in that blaze of glory, an obscure tutor had saved a shimmering array of Solamnic knighthood and nobility, for the sharp eye of Bradley the engineer caught a glimpse of light wavering down the corridor-the left one, it was, to the young man's great delight-and, pointing out the glimmer to the head engineer and the Lady Dannelle, he proceeded to guide the expedition to its source in the smoldering, smarting tutor.

From there, it was a matter of pickax and shovel against rock, a task taking less than an hour.

Far below the clamor of metal and stone, below the rescue party and below those they had set out to rescue, below the great dale worm Tellus, who stirred uneasily in his hundred thousand years of sleep, the caverns dropped away into nothing, and nothing dropped away into the Abyss. Where Sargonnas waited, watching events unfold.

The dark god frowned. There was a whining at his ear, thin and incessant, like the choiring of mosquitoes.

Something was wrong.

He had plotted so carefully all that had come to pass: hundreds of years ago, setting a dark passage in front of the Scorpion and even darker thoughts in his heart, and at almost the same time finding the Namer through the depths of the opals…

It was all so elaborate and beautiful.

And yet, Sargonnas thought now, turning uncomfortably in the black vacuum of the Abyss, and yet there are too many of them. Wherever 1 look are unforeseen people: the sharp-eyed, mournful Knight and the merry blind juggler, the girl and the priest and the dog…

And since he put on the crown, I have not heard from the Namer anymore. Too variable these mortals were, and something was about to happen that was beyond contingencies.

He stirred, anxiously scanning the Vingaards and the plains and the subterranean cavern beneath both.

He could not figure it. Too many and variable they were.

"Something the Scorpion said in the parchment…" Bayard began thoughtfully, scrambling urgently for answers as the fissure brimmed over and the chamber around his party began to fill with water. "Some clue to that damnable distant machinery…"

His companions paused expectantly, their gazes moving from the dark mechanism faintly seen by some, only imagined by others, until every eye was on Bayard, who frowned, shifted himself on Enid's shoulder, and turned to Brandon Rus.

"Though you may uncover my devices, the note said, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. It's easy and direct, and wouldn't that be the Scorpion's greatest joke, that for all his machineries, the key is not subtle at all but is in fact the simple head of an arrow? That spot in the center of the device, Brandon," he urged as the fissure before them spilled water over their feet and the ceilings rained. "The dark spot, like the pupil of the eye. Can you shoot it with a bow?"

"I don't… Well, it's a terrible long shot from here through cascading water."

"And yet it seems what we must do," Bayard pressed, his gray-eyed stare intent on the younger Knight.

Still Brandon Rus hesitated, looked to the shadowy distance.

'Then step out to knee-deep and hold your breath, damn it!" Sir Robert roared. "You heard Sir Bayard, boy!"

Brandon leapt at the old man's order. In a moment, he was at the edge of the fissure, drawing the powerful bow.

"I'll have to figure weight, and distance, and differences in height, and who knows how thick that mist is across there."

"Brandon!" Enid urged. "I saw you hit a target through a second-story window in the middle of a rainstorm! Is this talent of yours good for anything besides tricks?"

Brandon stepped back, wounded. "There was the one time, though…"

"Damn the one time!" Enid screamed, reaching out and grabbing the young Knight by the sleeve. "Either make the shot or give me the bow and I'll do it."

Brandon Rus paused for a moment, then sprang toward action, his feet in the water before he thought too much about it. One step out, then two steps.

Then his submerged foot felt nothing beneath it.

How can I shoot through this obscurity? he thought, his strong hand trembling as he raised the bow.

The light behind him shifted over the gray mist like the light over a desolate sea. It flickered on the far wall before him, and the wall seemed to recede, to brighten and dim.

Brandon raised the bow, aimed at the turbulence, and was seized again by doubt. What if he missed?

Enid called out something unintelligible from behind him. She leaned over his shoulder and sighted along the shaft of the arrow as the young man aimed at the dark center of the thing at the far end of the chamber.

The lad took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Silently, with the archer's accuracy and skill that made him legendary, he shifted his aim, and the arrow rocketed into the head of the carved circling scorpion that adorned its border.

For a moment, Enid and Raphael cried out in dismay as the others squinted for a sight of the target across the dark distance. Brandon turned away, bowed his head.

"No, Brandon!" Enid shouted. "By the gods, try again!"

"What-" Sir Andrew began.