The voice in the stone has told me how it will come to pass, Firebrand thought as the opals began to glow more brightly, guiding him gently toward the cubicle. I shall rise at the Telling, the Que-Tana at my command, and I shall have not only the Crown Fulfilled-the twelve stones that store the memory of the People-but the forbidden thirteenth stone, forbidden, the voice has told me, because it steals the memory of others.
And there on the Telling Ground, I shall take the years from the People who took years from me. With all of our history in my thoughts, I will start it again. I shall remember what needs remembering, forget what needs forgetting, and history will begin and end in Firebrand.
I shall become a god, no doubt. I expect that now in the Bright Lands there is a starless gap in the skies, awaiting my constellation. And once those stars are placed there, shining like opals in the black heart of the heavens, not even Sargonnas himself will govern me.
Two of the younger warriors helped the captive travel the shifting passageway from the Porch of Memory to the library, where they seated him among empty shelves and desolate tables littered with old manuscripts. They had combed the straw and dust from his hair, mended his tattered red robe, then brought him to the Namer's quarters for an audience with Firebrand. Finally convinced that it was no longer the afterlife in which he found himself, Brithelm had returned to his favorite pursuits: eating, sleeping, and odd studies. Even now he was poring over a zoological volume brought with him out of the wreck of the library.
Within days, Brithelm had become firm in his conviction to study the tenebrals he had observed dangling from the ceilings of the caverns and corridors. He was convinced that the creatures were a lost species of raptor.
Firebrand stooped at the door to the cubicle and entered. Brithelm did not stir, his face above the book, an odd pair of triangular spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.
Firebrand cleared his throat. "So it was an abbey you were building up there? Up in the Br-the Vingaard Mountains?" he asked, leery of this eccentric young man in front of him.
The fellow continued to ponder the text, which he had spread on his lap, the red thicket of his hair bent over the pages, his ruddy hands coursing rapidly over the text. Scrawled Plainsman letters reflected nervously up into the glittering triangles at his eyes.
"The book says, Father Firebrand, that these… tenebrals, as you call them, cannot abide sunshine. Is that so?" he asked, looking up from the book at last.
"Indeed it is far worse than that, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand explained, seating himself with a rustle of robes and furs in the single, hardbacked chair in the sparsely furnished quarters. "The sunlight kills them, shrivels them at once, burns their wings. I would imagine it is a horrible death. But I asked about your abbey. Tell me of your abbey."
"What do they live on?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"The tenebrals." Brother Brithelm's face was aglow, fastened on a peculiar interest that he did not want to abandon just now.
Firebrand's memory stirred, returning to the image of a frail young boy, intent on the first hunt. The Namer frowned and wrestled his thoughts back to the time at hand, to the disheveled lad seated on the floor in front of him.
"What do tenebrals eat?" Brithelm asked.
Firebrand shifted uncomfortably on the chair. Apparently the captive would not be satisfied until he knew all about tenebrals. Nor would Firebrand be satisfied in turn, not until he knew all about this mysterious sanctuary in the mountains, about the Knight who was coming with the opals in question.
He longed for the ceremonial stool, the soft, crackling give and take of its woven reed.
Already, it seemed, they had reached an impasse.
"I don't know what they eat, Brother Brithelm. Now as to your-"
"Do you suppose tenebrals could live on the surface after nightfall?" Brithelm interrupted. 'That's why I asked about their feeding habits, for if whatever they eat can be found above ground, why, then…"
Firebrand did not hear him.
Instead, he was remembering something else: the ill-fated assault of the night before. He had tried to wrest the stones from the one who brought them, and to do so by surprise. It would have been safer that way, before the young Knight and his entourage drew near enough to the entrance to find their way down among the Que-Tana.
Firebrand had ordered the Que-Tana warriors not to fear killing the Knight nor any who rode with him. No time could have been better than the time they attacked, when a twist of the knife in the foothills of the Vingaards could have done the business quickly and easily. He would have had the opals by now.
And the young man seated before him would be disposable.
But even the moon was a treacherous light for the subterranean Que-Tana. Lurking in the dark woods, they had ambushed Sir Galen and his followers, but the light was confusing, threatening, and they had failed at their mission.
Those who had failed paid the price. They now dangled by their braided hair in the Chamber of Night, the deep and enormous cavern that underlay the Porch of Memory. There they awaited the vespertiles, the huge flightless bats that roamed the darker margins of Firebrand's kingdom.
The vespertiles were always hungry.
I am a vespertile myself, Firebrand thought with a smile. No. Better yet, I am a spider. Dark and subterranean, weaving elaborate webs in my chambers, my only companion a daft captive cleric who is bait and brother to the approaching quarry.
To Sir Galen Brightblade, the bearer of the opals.
'Tell me," Firebrand repeated, his mood much better now, "of your sanctuary, Brother Brithelm."
"My sanctuary?" Brithelm asked, his shimmering eyes returning to the book. "Oh. I suppose I've never thought of it as mine, actually." And as the young man spoke, his eyes still fixed on the book in front of him, Firebrand gazed into the maze of stalactites in the vaulted ceiling above him and became lost in the web of Brithelm's words.
Brithelm told of an array of wooden houses on wooden stilts, a cluster of tents and lean-tos that looked more like a way station for vagrants than a holy place. It had about it the melancholy frailty of a child's play fortress, vulnerable to invasion and fire. To faulty architecture and falling crossbeams, for that matter.
All around it birds rose into the air with the strange, skidding sound doves make when they take wing. They reeled overhead and flew southward and away, the cold mountain air whistling behind them.
One by one they came to Brithelm, out of the foothills and the plains of Solamnia and Coastlund. Braving inclement weather and rocky trails and the ever-present dangers of goblin and troll and bandit, they came to his ramshackle mountain sanctuary. Brithelm spoke warmly, lovingly of each of them.
From Palanthas came two elderly women, who brought nothing with them except a set of fine china and a stuffed parrot they swore could predict the weather. On their third day in camp, they were thoroughly drenched by a surprising downpour, and the resulting head colds had kept them confined for a week.
There was a pirate captain from Kalaman, whose dreams of shipwreck had plagued him so much that his sleeplessness forced him to retire. In the quiet of the mountains and in Brithelm's calming presence, finally the man slumbered, though his bad dreams were really none the better. He slept in a wooden lifeboat suspended from the stilts beneath one of Brithelm's makeshift huts, his cabin boy above in the hut proper. At every hour of the night, the boy had orders to ring a bell through a trapdoor in the floor of the hut, directly over the captain's head, awakening him so that he would not drown in his dreams.