Michael Williams - Weasel's Luck

With a cry and a sudden, powerful movement, the Scorpion pushed Bayard away. Bayard tumbled backward toward the Scorpion’s throne, and the dark-robed villain followed, his eyes glowing with a blue-white light, the pendulum bright in his lowered left hand, his black-edged weapon raised triumphantly in his right. Around him from the dark recesses of the room came the scratching sound of more of his little monsters scrambling to join him.

Feeling like a child’s toy on a string, I shinnied a little farther up the curtain and called to Bayard, “The pendulum!”

He showed no sign of hearing me, struggling as he was to get to his feet in his extremely heavy armor. But he had heard, evidently.

In dodging the downward stroke of the Scorpion’s sword, Bayard brought his own blade up and, flashing through the air, cleanly through the Scorpion’s left wrist.

The hand skittered across the floor, writhing like a scorpion or spider, the chain of the pendulum tangled about its fingers. The Scorpion shrieked and held up the stump of his left arm, then toppled backward onto the hundreds of verminous creatures he had summoned from the darkness.

With the pendulum now gone, they descended on him blindly and hungrily. Benedict screamed, shuddered, and was lost in the clicking, rattling convergence of scorpions, in the plunging of hundreds and hundreds of venomous stingers.

Light then shot through the walls of the room, as the gray swirls of cloud dissolved in sunlight, evaporating to brisk air and a bare mountain pass that then began to shake and crumble.

The Scorpion’s Nest was a ruin. What little remained of the stones in the castle—the skeleton of an ancient foundation, of a wall or two, of flights of stairs that led to nowhere—tottered and began to fall. An old wall collapsed toward Enid and Sir Robert, and would have no doubt crushed the life from both of them had not Sir Robert raised his great Solamnic shield. Stone and mortar tumbled against ancient metal . . . And the metal held.

All around us and below us the ground was opening, roiling, heaving, as though we had walked into the focus of an earthquake so violent, so widespread that it might well be the Cataclysm come again, transforming the surface of Krynn in its wreckage. Bayard stepped to the platform where the Scorpion’s throne, once bone white and tall and menacing, had burst into pieces.

Bayard whistled, and Valorous, true to his name, came galloping out of a notch in the rocks, followed by the other horses. The big stallion was calm, obedient, but those who followed him were balanced at the edge of panic, frothing and snorting and rolling their eyes. When the ground had begun to shake and the rocks to fall, they reverted to instinct and followed the herd master—the lead stallion who, thankfully, had remained impressively composed. Only one horse and the mules, willful to the end, were left to the earthquake. Into that turning earth the dead men walked or tumbled. Back to the quiet they went, into the peace that each of them, Nerakan or Solamnic, had earned for himself at dreadful cost a generation before. The land closed over them and continued to churn and boil as my companions did what they could to calm their horses, mount, and begin to ride.

“Bayard!” I shouted as he swept Enid up onto Valorous. The lady safe beside him, he was arranging the safety of the others. No room, then, on Valorous.

My brothers were doubled up on Brithelm’s horse, Alfric’s mule having vanished somewhere. With a flick of his glove to the horse’s rump, Bayard set the two older Pathwardens west at a full gallop, over the shifting gravel and rock toward safety, followed closely by Sir Ramiro, burden enough for my little pack mare, which was bearing up beneath him.

“Jump, boy!” Sir Robert called up to me, rising in his stirrups atop a skittish Estrella, as the balcony from which I dangled like a crystal in a pendulum began to sway, snap, and teeter dangerously.

“Not too close, Sir Robert!” shouted Bayard. “It’s likely to fall at any moment! Swing out on the curtain, Galen! Swing out to Sir Robert!” The tough old Knight opened his arms and nodded urgently. I began to swing on the curtain, going higher and higher as the balcony above me began to weave. Back and forth, back and forth I flew, until at the sound of something falling behind me, I let go and tumbled through the air, a flying weasel on an aerial route to Sir Robert di Caela, whom I trusted to catch me and carry me out of the chaos, safely into the lowlands.

I had not figured on Estrella, who, spooked by yet another tremor beneath her hooves, skipped nervously forward at the worst of all possible moments. Sir Robert reached back desperately, but his mare had moved too far.

The ground surged rockily up to meet me. So did the darkness.

Head injuries are strange things, as Bayard could have told me from his time in the Vingaard Mountains. So my memories are spotty as to what happened after the fall of the Scorpion’s Nest. Indeed, by the time my memory became certain, we were back in Castle di Caela and preparations were underway for the betrothal banquet.

But here is what happened, as best I can put it together from Bayard’s accounts, from what Alfric told me grudgingly, from what is reliable in Brithelm’s account, and from my scattered memories. When the Scorpion fell to the floor of the hall and was covered by his mindlessly stinging creatures, when the castle began to collapse, we rushed to do what we had set out to do back at Castle di Caela—to escape the destruction of the Scorpion and return to safety the girl on whom all prophecy hinged. The rocks of Chaktamir tumbled into the gap, covering Scorpion and scorpions, the Nest, and all of the dead—Nerakans and Solamnics, all at peace again. It was there that we rested, and Sir Robert, who had tucked me under his arm like a rolled-up carpet, lowered me, unconscious, into the waiting arms of Brithelm and Enid. Enid. I would have blushed in embarrassed delight had I been conscious to do so. But Enid dropped me all of a sudden, with a little cry of dismay that was the first thing I heard when the fall awakened me. Sir Ramiro was thrashing Alfric within an inch of his life, there in the peaceful foothills of Estwilde. Though they had agreed upon Bayard’s heroism in the taking of the Scorpion’s Nest, their argument as to who might receive second laurels had passed apparently from merely ill-spirited to downright aggressive. Both were puffing from exhaustion and rage, and they were red from embarrassment, when Enid herself pulled them apart.

There followed a long round of revivals, of reconciliations. And soon, Alfric and Sir Robert were to their feet. Or so I am told. I still wobbled and fell to the ground, babbling about centaurs and the customs of drowning, and asking for my dice.

We were out of the mountains before I recalled leaving the little red prophets somewhere in the rough country around me. No doubt they are buried to this day amid rubble and rock, somewhere in the foothills of Estwilde.

I asked Bayard to pause and help me look for the Calantina dice, but he would have nothing to do with “such foolishness,” saying I had outgrown playthings and false prophecy.

I was inclined to agree. I have no particular need of the future, though my hands still itch for the red dice and the wooden verses that, even if they did not explain the things that came to pass, provided an explanation into which you could fit those things and feel better.

I have put prophecy aside and, for the moment, scheming.

The sparks that we all expected would fly between Bayard and Enid finally began on the long road back to Castle di Caela. Sparks were also flying between Sir Ramiro and Alfric. My brother’s bluster and boasting had not worn well on the old Knight after so many miles. Indeed, Sir Robert’s diplomacy was called upon at the very gates of Castle di Caela, when Sir Ramiro pushed Alfric from his horse and into the moat for the sole reason that my eldest brother had “a face that deserved pushing into a moat.”