Michael Williams - Weasel's Luck

So we stood there, looking at one another, Pathwardens and Brightblades and di Caelas. All of a sudden the garden crashed and crackled with the sound of something huge, and the sound of breathing and snuffling increased into low rumbling, with an occasional bellow, as the rotten throats tried forgetfully the bull-cry of the Nerakan warriors.

The enemy approached us through the topiary, sometimes pushing aside the shrubbery with the sound of twigs snapping, of leaves crumpling, sometimes grunting as they staggered into the boles of trees. They were like the walls of the castle in the mist: forming, dissolving, then reforming. But continuing to move toward us.

“Galen!” Bayard snapped. “Can you reach the window from my shoulders?”

Reach the window? Desert my companions?

Desert my companions? What kind of Solamnic notions had infected me, that I should condemn myself for seeking the safest prospect available? Had I been listening to myself when I answered, I might well have heard that Solamnic self-righteous little quiver in my voice.

“I shall try, sir, if you see a further purpose in my doing so.”

“Up on my shoulders, then,” Bayard hissed urgently. “When you’re inside, find your way back to that front door and unlatch it. That should be easy enough. The halls and the rooms inside should be the image of the di Caela keep, just as the keep is from the outside.”

“I know, sir. But, for Huma’s lance-wielding sake, what if-”

“You’d be no more dead there than you would be here.”

Not the most encouraging of prospects. There or here. But Bayard was quite serene about the whole business.

“Take heart and climb atop my shoulders.”

I did, and surprisingly, it was a short jump to the window, which somehow seemed lower than Enid’s window at the di Caela keep. I leaped, clutched the sill, and pulled myself over. The room in front of me was dark.

Behind me I heard Alfric pleading with Bayard, heard Bayard respond that, no, Alfric was far too heavy for such acrobatics and that besides, they needed him for the battle that was sure to come.

“Now stop whining and face the garden,” Sir Robert chimed in. “They’ll come from that direction first, or I’m no tactician.”

I set my dagger on the sill, stood in the darkened room, then looked behind me and below me once more, down to where Bayard stood, sword at the ready, looking up.

“We’ll try to fight our way back around to the door,” he murmured.

“Good luck to you, sir,” I offered.

“Hurry,” he shot back, then smiled and winked at me—a most un-Solamnic gesture.

“The weasel’s luck to you, lad. Which as I gather, has not been bad yet.”

Without stopping to think—as I should have—I plunged into the unlit room.

I made two steps only, and then sunk to my knees in the dark floor. I cried out for Bayard, but stifled the cry when I heard it echoing down the halls of the keep, heard the sound of shouting and the clash of weapons outside the window—sounds that seemed so far away.

I sunk farther, and thought of the quagmires in the Coastlund Swamp. I was sinking into the heart of the Scorpion, I figured. I flailed my arms around the floor of the chamber, striking solid stone at arm’s length, nearly as far from me as I could reach. Breasting through the nothingness like a swimmer in a dark, thick pool of something more solid than water, more liquid than the ground around him, I finally gained purchase on the floor and pulled myself up, out of the morass, discovering to my surprise, that I was entirely dry.

“What is this?” I whispered, touching the floor in front of me to assure that no other pits had been set in the chambers. My hand brushed against a hurricane lamp, fully intact but lying on its side. Picking up the lamp, I fumbled in my pocket for a tinder-box, coming up with gloves only. I swore a stable groom’s curse and pressed on in the general direction of the door—or where Enid’s door was set in the corresponding room in Castle di Caela. Like a monstrous crab I scuttled across the dark floor, groping at the floor beside me for other places in the room where things were not quite solid. I found the door by the light that escaped from beneath it. The hall outside was eerily torchlit, but otherwise the image of the halls of Castle di Caela. Yet, on second look, it was not quite the image. Some small, unidentifiable thing was missing.

Not five cautious steps down the hall, it occurred to me. Mechanical birds. The birds Enid had wound up and hated through the otherwise pampered days of her childhood.

For the halls of the Scorpion’s Nest were silent.

I sat, pondering the corridor ahead of me and behind me, and noticed at points that the walls were swirling as though tiny whirlpools, scarcely the size of a man’s fist, were embedded in them as some kind of bizarre ornament. The whirlpools turned hypnotically clockwise, as gray as the surrounding stones but liquid in texture and shimmering like liquid as they caught and reflected the torchlight.

Walls that, like the floors, could swallow you entirely.

I backed away from them and seated myself in the center of the corridor, those spiraling flaws in the wall at a safe arm’s length.

I breathed heavily, the sound of the sigh racing down the corridor ahead of me, where it mingled with another distant sound, strangely and irritatingly familiar.

The sound of whirring and chirping.

So there was one, at least.

It was just curiosity, a nosiness about other people’s houses and furnishings and decorations, that led me to follow the sound of the mechanical bird. That and the knowledge that the sound came from the direction of the great landing, below which was the main entrance to the keep—the door Bayard had charged me with unlocking.

Relying on my memories of the keep’s exterior, it was not hard to remember where I was. Down the hall straight ahead of me, eyes carefully fixed on the floor to avoid stepping into one of those whirlpools of liquid stone, I picked up a larger, wider hall. This large hall led straight to the landing, and I rested my hands carefully on the banister before I trusted it to support my weight.

Down this hall I went and turned right, into a hall of statuary. Which contained marble di Caelas, but none I had seen commemorated in Sir Robert’s palace.

Instead, it was the family in all its darkest moments.

For here was Mariel di Caela, reclining on a marble divan, marble cats at her throat, her eyes, her breast. It was even more gruesome because it was so white, so smooth.

And Denis di Caela, bearing a marble rat in a marble cage. Not to mention Simon di Caela, basking contentedly forever like a huge white iguana.

It was almost obscene.

Presiding over the lot of them was another statue I had never seen—that of a man hooded and seated on a skeletal throne, sculptured scorpions twisting over the arms of the chair and the man himself. Old Benedict di Caela, enthroned in the dark of brothers’ negligence.

I moved past the door that would have been Dannelle’s in a safer world I recalled most fondly, most despairingly. I continued down the hall to the right, sidestepping a quagmire, then again to the left, then right again until I faced the hallway, where, to my right, the siege of Ergoth raged silently and motionlessly, forever, in paint upon the wall.

At the end of that hall, the mechanical bird was grinding and singing, grinding and singing again. When the bird paused, I heard voices. Two of them, both raised in anger, coming from the door opposite the mural.

The door which, in Castle di Caela, had led to the balcony overlooking the great hall. I opened the door a crack, saw darkness, and smelled expensive cloth and the slight whiff of decay. Beyond that was darkness and, more clearly now, I could hear voices.