Whether it was my newfound Knighthood, his complete and natural cowardice, or the simple good sense that urges you to cooperate when someone directs a sword at you, Alfric backed away. Reluctantly he looked down into the vat, then stopped short.
"Brother," he said frantically. "Kill me if you must, but by Sirrion, I'm not touching it! Look!"
He pointed down into the oil.
"The damned stuff is boiling!"
Indeed, the surface of the oil rolled and shuddered, then circles began to radiate within it, swirling outward as they do when you drop a rock into a pond.
It was then that we felt the first tremor. All about us the walls began to shake, the beams above us to shift and crumble. Dust and gravel dropped from the ancient ceiling, and for a moment, I entertained prospects of being buried alive under tons of rubble.
Alfric forgot his oath and was into the oil before the first gravel dropped, submerged in the vat like some grotesque muskrat or otter. The oil closed above him, and for a moment, I was left frighteningly alone, the walls tilting uneasily around me.
A torch fell from its sconce by the tannery door, shivered on the rocking ground, and sputtered out. The room fell into a curious gray shadow, streaked by light from the high windows, as the dust rose until it became difficult to see or even to breathe. All the while the building shook, and I grabbed for the side of the vat to keep my footing.
"Alfric! Alfric!" I shouted, plunging my arm into the oil and reaching down into its wet, heavy darkness for a handful of my brother. Twice I came up with nothing, but on the third try, I pulled him, sputtering, to the surface, my fingers entangled in a shock of red, oily hair.
'There's no safety there, Brother!" I urged, clutching his arm and pulling in a vain attempt to draw him out of the vat. Twice he slipped from my grasp, toppling over backward into the oil, lost from sight again and again as the dust rained and the floor rocked.
On the third time, I managed to tug him over the side of the vat, losing my balance with the effort and the slipperiness of the now well-lubricated floor. My brother landed on top of me, and both of us lay still for a moment as the light and air seemed to leave the room entirely.
Then Alfric was on his feet, pushing me back down in his scramble for the door, which he struck headlong and burst open as the tannery flooded with daylight. Gathering my breath, I followed him, diving with a yell into the open courtyard.
The whole castle rocked at the edge of disorder. It was like my memories of the Scorpion's Nest that nightmare afternoon in the pass near Chaktamir. All around us, the walls shook. Stone, mortar, and beam dislodged, and the bright afternoon air dusted over.
A shriek descended from the battlements, where a lone sentry dangled from the very ladder that I had climbed to speak to Bayard that morning. Suddenly, with the crisp, splintering sound that a quarterstaff makes when broken across stone, the ladder gave way, and the sentry fell and lay still, sprawled in an ungainly fashion in the courtyard.
All around us were the shouts of men and the screams of horses. You would think we had walked out into battle, or into the Cataclysm come again. I turned to see after Alfric.
Who was nowhere to be found.
Then I heard a familiar cry arise over all the others, and I rushed toward the source of the noise, fearing the worst. The cry was Bayard's.
I found him lying in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by Sir Brandon, Ramiro, and the Blue Knight. Valorous, Bayard's black stallion, who it seems had provided the final touch to the disaster quite by accident, stood unsteadily only a few yards away.
As I rushed toward my fallen comrade, the rumblings stopped as quickly as they had begun, and Brandon turned toward me, his handsome face ashen, his eyes enormous.
"Quickly! Arrange for a litter!" he shouted. "I fear it's his leg." Nor did such a fear arise from special wisdom or insight. Bayard clutched his shattered leg tightly in his enormous hands.
It had all happened quickly, as disasters will. It seemed that as the aftershocks grew more frequent and violent that terrible morning, that Bayard, astride his most reliable mount, had set about to comb the castle grounds, trying to control damage as best he could.
It was a dramatic gesture and a brave one…
"But not altogether wise," Bayard chuckled, benumbed and bemused and stretched on his back across his bed, Lady Enid and two drawn-faced surgeons in attendance. "For ground that is unsteady underfoot is also unsteady underhoof, my hearties."
Ramiro, Brandon and I had become "hearties" after Bayard, who scarcely took even a glass of wine, had taken his third glass of dwarf spirits-Sir Ramiro's remedy for whatever ailed a Knight or even remotely promised to ail him.
As far as I could tell, the pint of Thorbardin Eagle had done as much damage as quake and horse combined.
Enid was of the same mind. She signaled to Raphael, who removed the bottle. Unaware of his pain-or of his surroundings, for that matter-Bayard continued to speak at bleary length.
One of the physicians brought forth a textral stone-the small, egg-shaped rocks from the Elian Wilds that are known to knit together broken things-that would mend his leg entirely in a month or so if applied constantly. The stone sputtered, as it was supposed to do, and while the surgeon passed it over the fractured leg and the smoke rose, smelling of burnt evergreen and clove and sleep, Bayard told us how the accident had happened.
"Valorous had not traveled a hundred feet from the stable when he capsized," Bayard began. "Capsized most grievously."
He paused and stared at all of us dramatically.
"Most grievously indeed, falling heavily upon this… appendage."
He slapped his fractured right leg. Enid gasped in alarm.
The surgeon jumped back, the textral only half burnt away.
"Are we going to have to restrain you physically, dearest?" Enid asked pleasantly, when she had recovered her composure, but Bayard was off on an elaborate story, in which he swore-by Huma and Paladine and everyone connected in any fashion with any of the gods that you swear by-that the accident had nothing to do with Valorous's footing, that there was nothing the poor creature could help or avoid.
That indeed the venerable stallion had been "ethereally startled."
"I beg your pardon, Bayard?" asked a puzzled Ramiro.
"Something spooked Valorous, Ramiro!" Bayard explained. "Spooked a horse that has stood firm before ogre and minotaur, hobgoblin and the walking dead, in earthquake and in fire. It was as though the poor beast had seen a ghost beyond its reckoning."
Red-eyed and drowsy, Bayard sank back onto the bed as my memory fixed on yellowed faces in the stones.
"And did you… see anything, sir?"
"Galen?" His mind floated back from some distant, abstracted place-the vats of Thorbardin, no doubt. "Had forgotten you were here, boy."
He smiled drunkenly at me.
"So now you're a Knight. Insanity and all."
I decided that now was not the time for interrogation, so I smiled and nodded.
Alone in my quarters, I thought long and hard upon Bayard's ghostly visitors. Things about Castle di Caela had grown altogether too supernatural for my tastes. I rummaged my memories of folk literature, taught to me at the wobbling knee of old Gileandos. Surely he had said something about ghost lore.
Or were his only familiar spirits distilled ones?
"Let's see…" I spoke aloud, seating myself by the faintly glowing fireplace and dabbing a rather hopeless rag at my oily greaves. "Spirits come back to… urge someone to complete a task he failed to complete while he was living.