Like a gully dwarf he ate, or how she had imagined a gully dwarf would eat. In the first months of Galen's stay at the castle, before he looked around him and began to catch on to the etiquette, Dannelle di Caela would shudder when the lad shoveled gristles of pork beneath the table for the benefit of his most recently befriended dog.
Indeed, befriending was one of Galen Pathwarden's greatest skills. Marigold, Dannelle di Caela's most distant cousin, had befriended the lad when she had grown tired of befriending two of the younger and more handsome palace guards. Galen had been next in line, for some unknown reason, but Dannelle suspected it had something to do with his knightly prospects. Marigold did love a man in armor.
For months, Dannelle had stewed while the two of them simmered in the chambers of the other tower. Galen, it seems, had found the whole arrangement entirely new and altogether fascinating, and Dannelle would watch with rising irritation as lights went on and off in various windows across the courtyard.
And yet that dalliance, too, had gradually stopped, like the sport with the dogs and gristles. Nonetheless, Dannelle had thought to herself not a month ago that the young man's Night ‹file:///ight› of Reflections was coming right on time, that the knighthood within him was growing and blossoming. A knighthood of the new generation, which would not recoil at a girl's desire to hawk and hunt and ride and be something beyond a bauble in the castle like old Sir Robert's tuneless mechanical birds.
She had continued to dream of that knighthood, through the stumbling in battle and the uncertain command, through the misguided visions in the opals and the disasters that seemed to follow when the boy was guided by stone and brooch and omen.
It had been a world of the possible, even when faced with monsters and the dark Que-Tana. That was why it could not end the way it was preparing to end.
In Shardos's stories, the promise of a boy was always realfeed, the magical sword was eventually unsheathed and its power displayed, and the talking bird had something magnificent and important to say. The lost book was found, the wandering ship came home, and the third son prospered despite his unlikely inheritance.
Dannelle di Caela would see Galen again. It was the way that stories ended.
The trail turned sharply upward, and the three of them, dog and juggler and lady of the court, embarked on the last half-mile or so that would bring them to the surface and to as much safety as they could expect here at the borders of imperiled Solamnia.
Dannelle could discern the outline of stone and corridor in a deep, settled grayness. Now she could follow the juggler without being led like a child or a donkey.
"We are nearing the surface, my dear," Shardos said. "Can you smell it?"
Dannelle breathed more easily, taking in the sweet, metallic smell of rain, and beyond it the green of juniper and aeterna.
It was midnight there in the upper mountains, but even the light of the moon seemed unbearably brilliant. Dannelle shielded her face for a moment, covered her head with her cloak. Beside her, Birgis sneezed, no doubt bewildered by the brightness himself.
Shardos took the girl's hand once more and whispered to her kindly.
"Rest, my dear. But only a while. Though the odds seem longer than the distances, I'll wager you have a part to play before the story has ended. But you'll not do it alone, that's for certain. Rest awhile, and aid will come to you."
Her head still covered, her eyes still closed against the moonlight, Dannelle heard the old man turn and descend. He was going back down into the darkness.
"Shardos!" she cried turning around to follow him. He was already at the mouth of the cavern, once again half-hidden by shadow.
"Did you think I would walk you home, m'lady?" he asked, pausing at the edge of the entrance. 'Though the prospect is charming, more charming by far than returning to Firebrand and his pasty underlings, it is nonetheless a walk I cannot make. I am afraid I am needed more below than above."
She took one step toward him, but with a broad wave of his hand, he motioned her back.
"Be of good heart!" he urged. "The time is fast approaching when all of us are called upon to do the hard things. You have a breathing space, Dannelle di Caela, before your hardest travels are at hand. As I said to you but a moment ago, rest awhile and aid will come to you."
Dannelle sat with her face in her hands for a long while. Birgis looked up at her with a strange, wise look of concern, cocking his big head and resting his long, badger-killing snout on her lap. Finally she rubbed the animal's ear in an idle, circular motion, as heedlessly as if this journey, this adventure, were all a daydream over the laundry tubs in Castle di Caela.
Longwalker found Dannelle rubbing the ears of the dog, her eyes staring off into high country. He smiled and led her into the clearing to the little mare-the one who had stayed behind when the other Solamnic horses scattered.
Dreaming girls, he realized, are not the most durable of riders. And the road to Castle di Caela was a long, rough one for a cavalryman, not to mention a sheltered girl used to the attentions of servants and finaglings of courtiers.
But then, he told himself, he must trust on all counts to the most unlikely of heroes: a blind juggler, a bedazzled cleric, and a long-nosed dog. An unlikely trio, who trust their safety to even more unlikely Solamnic Knights: a four-hundred-pound epicure more bent on sirloin and sherry than sword and shield, and the leader, who seemed anything but skilled and experienced and resourceful.
Trust in the likes of these, Longwalker thought, is the beginnings of the strongest faith. The girl started as he laid his hand softly on her shoulder.
Sargonnas saw them all as he looked up from the bottom of the Abyss, in his eyes the fire of black opals. Saw them all and laughed, his laughter the croaking of scavenging birds.
Below tenebral and Que-Tana and vespertile he waited.
Below Firebrand, and below the depths of the opals.
Below darkness itself, below vision and imagining and somewhere even below belief.
And the tunnels under the Vingaards were known as his Veins.
Let Firebrand gather his stones, the dark god thought. Let there be ten, eleven, twelve, but let there be thirteen finally.
Firebrand is fodder, is kindling. But his one eye is my light upon history.
He is like all mortals, all of them caught in their cravings for power or vengeance, or love or recognition or simple respect or something-anything-to lull the pain of their serious wounds.
It does not matter what they want, for it all amounts to the same thing.
Sargonnas reclined on a swirl of dark air in the center of the Abyss. He laughed again, the smell of ordure and smoke and blood rising from deep within the laughter and mingling smell with sight and sound, until even the things that fluttered about him in the Abyss recoiled mindlessly from the stench and the noise.
Their desires change from day to day, Sargonnas thought, and often grow larger and darker.
Why, now Firebrand imagines that godhood lies in the heart of a simple stone. He even believes there is space in the heavens for his stars.
Sargonnas's laughter faded to a glittering red smile. Firebrand, he concluded, is no more than a spyglass. For years, I have watched the world through his eye, known the history he knows. And indeed, it is valuable. But it is not yet enough.
Out of a whirlpool of blackness, Sargonnas sighed. Three thousand years was a long time, even for a god. Three thousand years, in which the only mortal voices he had heard were those like that of Firebrand- those with the foolhardiness or the greed or the anger to call upon him. There had been a dozen or so, perhaps. A mad mage from Neraka, who fancied himself to be the god Chemosh, wearing the skull mask and the hood that hid his terribly mortal anger that he would have to die.