Ramiro stood at the lip of the ledge above me, flanked by a handful of Que-Tana. From behind this little tableau rose a voice I had heard only once before yet remembered clearly. It had come to my ears on that day that seemed years ago, when the quake rocked Castle di Caela and I looked into the opals of my brooch and spoke to an apparition.
"You may rest now, Sir Galen," the voice said, and within it, I heard the desolate rush of wind over a lifeless plain. "You may rest now. Your long journey is over. Welcome to the Kingdom of Firebrand, the country of the Que-Tana."
One of the Plainsmen dropped a torch into the gloom beside me, and the cavern took on shape and dimension in an elusive light. I was uncovered, and four of the Que-Tana above me leveled their bows and gazed at me coldly down the shafts of their nocked, barbed arrows.
They lowered a rope then, and I climbed up to join my captive companion, all the while under the sharp sights of the bowmen.
Halfway up the cascade, I looked behind me, over Oliver's pathetically broken body, to the opening at far end of the cavern, through which Shardos and Dannelle had passed in their rush to escape.
The brooch glowed in my hand. Soon it would pass into the hand of our dreadful host. I looked deep into the stones. There I saw Longwalker, camped in the hills miles above us, staring calmly and resolutely into the stones he carried. Then Bayard, lost somewhere in rock-hewn walls, propped on the shoulders of Brandon and my father, moving in ominous torchlight.
I saw a darker vision yet, in which some large, snakelike creature coiled within shadow and slate, its length extending across the continent and his ageless sleep shallow now, and restless.
"Tellus the dale worm," I breathed. "What was it Longwalker said? 'It bears all Solamnia upon its back'?"
But that vision faded, too, and finally I saw my brother Brithelm, somewhere in a room of towering shelves, reading alone and undisturbed by candlelight, those absurd triangular spectacles on his nose.
The stones winked out like stars behind a cloud, and I was afraid then-afraid for the chieftain that my incompetence had betrayed, and for a brother whom I had failed to rescue. I feared for my friends and father, drawn underground and in obvious peril, and most of all for the innocent Dannelle di Caela, whom unknowingly I had sent to find them.
For all of these, I was dreadfully sorry, and whatever Firebrand could devise seemed slight punishment at the moment.
"May the gods speed them," I whispered as I continued to climb. Strong, pale hands clutched my forearms and dragged me up into Firebrand's presence. "May the gods speed all of them, all of us."
Chapter XVIII
With deft little twists of his hand, with a strange, beaked tool of iron, the Namer scored the entwined circlets four, six, ten, twelve times. Then a thirteenth time, the only noise in the far-flung encampment the crackle of the fire that illuminated his delicate work.
"There is a place for each of these stories in a larger story," he told the rapt Plainsmen.
Through the darkness she raced, holding the hand of the blind man.
The faint light from the Plainsmen's torches, from the few feeble lanterns Galen had thought to bring with them, faded suddenly behind her, and she waded through black silence, through the desolate night-struck caverns.
Dannelle di Caela wished that she could avoid all the duties that no doubt would follow. In the darkness, she imagined the path ahead of her, steep through the caverns, then down from the mountains on foot, across the rain-soaked, troll-infested plains, and back to Castle di Caela.
A journey of days, if not weeks.
By which time the hope that glimmered under the mountain would fade, she feared, as finally and completely as the lights had faded behind her.
"Come now, girl! No dawdling!" the juggler whispered ahead of her. She realized she had stopped moving.
"Oh, Shardos!" she exclaimed, much too loudly, her voice echoing through the corridor, raising, she thought in a panic-stricken moment, all kinds of creatures out of the rocks, next to which, no doubt, the vespertile would seem like a sparrow. "Shardos, whatever I can do is going to be too late!"
"Nonsense!" the old man said with a chuckle, drawing her on up the corridor. "As long as you're breathing and fit to be doing it, it is never too late. Let me tell you a story you should know-a story of a great tournament at a castle not far from here."
Shardos could feel the electric pulse of the girl calm in her wrist as, despite herself, she became lost in the tale of the reason behind Bayard's late arrival years ago at the tournament for Enid's hand, a story she enjoyed all the more, the old man thought, because she knew the actors, knew it was true and that it ended happily, despite the power of the villain and the mistakes and stumbling of the hero.
From there, Shardos moved to another story, and then another. Released from paying attention to anything else by the absolute dark and the absolute quiet, Dannelle abided in the world of his telling as the old man fabled the girl toward the surface and the air and the light.
"We have passed through the Veins of Sargonnas," he told her finally, the darkest part of their journey behind them. "The Veins of the Red Fist." "The Veins of the Red Fist?" she asked, knowing she would be drawn into yet another story as readily and completely as she had been drawn down the tunnel ahead of her. "It is a dark name," the juggler began, "and one of mystery, for the bards and the Namers and even the priests themselves have come near forgetting the god. Vengeance he governs, and fire, but beyond that, little is known of him. It is like those gaps in manuscripts where pages are illegible, or blotted out, or torn and destroyed…"
"Lacunae," Dannelle said, taking the old man's hand again as the passage narrowed and darkened. "They call those gaps 'lacunae.' "
"Gaps or lacunae or mysteries, the ways of Sargonnas are more unknown than known. The Plainsmen pair him with the great snake Tellus, who is said to lie in timeless slumber beneath the continent of Ansalon, only to stir at the end of all things. Others see him as a scavenging red bird-a vulture, perhaps, or an enormous condor who dines on the entrails of those who offend his consort, Takhisis."
"This is not pleasant fare for a dark road, Shardos," Dannelle protested. And yet she marveled at Shardos's steadiness, the occasional "Step over, miss," and "Lower the head here, miss."
Around them, small creatures cried out in the darkness, surprised by the strange noises and speed of the two rushing by them, the big dog at their heels. Once Dannelle heard a flutter of wings, once a terrified whirring sound directly under her feet.
So by a dark sense the juggler steered, a sense born of sad years wandering blind over the face of Krynn, Dannelle figured. It was one of those times, rare though they may be, when loss becomes advantage, and weakness strength.
She was surprised to think of Galen in the same thought, surprised to find herself smiling in the darkness.
Years ago, Dannelle di Caela had taken on the betterment of Galen Pathwarden as a kind of quest, for he had come to Castle di Caela in need of every imaginable improvement. When he seated himself on the mahogany chairs in the Great Hall, he would fling his leg over an armrest, and formal dining was a complete embarrassment, for it seemed that up in Coastlund, they had never heard of the fork, thinking it was placed on the table as aesthetic balance to the very real and useful knife and spoon on the other side of the plate.