Galen Beknighted

I knew without words that he wanted to hold the opals. Silently, with only the slightest doubt and reluctance, I handed him the brooch.

He stared into it deeply, as though he looked beyond it into something murky and imponderable. As though he had found the bottom of the stones.

'Now is the time to tell of the one who awaits you,' he said, handing the brooch back to me. 'Tell me what you see in the godseyes, Solamnic.'

Instantly my suspicions returned.

'You're not… up to some Plainsman hypnosis, are you? I mean, is there some kind of trick your tribe has to lull enemies to sleep?'

'Most certainly there is,' Longwalker admitted, 'but this is not that trick. Look into the opals, Solamnic.'

I did so reluctantly. Like black pools they were, reflecting the light of the fire, of the rising red moon, and yet underneath the reflection, something was moving. I leaned forward, squinting against the firelight. The stones began to glow as they had last night in the clearing, and I shuddered, remembering where the glow had led me and where I had led Alfric in turn.

Suddenly I saw figures shimmering and moving in the depths of the stones. It was as though I watched them through a crystal, as though in a core of fire there was a window or door through which they walked, faint shapes in the rippling blackness. The world inside the stones was a world long vanished, and I watched the vision and knew I was looking back through the years, into the depths of the past.

There were twenty of them easily, perhaps two dozen. The cloud in the stones obscured the shapes, made counting difficult. But the feathers and the symbols they wore were Que-Nara.

The country around them was forest-an unbearably bright forest that shimmered sea-blue. Perhaps it was the woods or southern Hylo, doomed by the Cataclysm that would follow in the years to come. For I knew without being told that this was an older time, before the Kingpriest's decrees and the Rending, though for the life of me, I cannot tell you how I knew such a thing.

As I watched, the Que-Nara established camp in a woodland clearing. Quickly and with great skill, the old ones and the children gathered the wood, kindled a slow, smokeless fire that shone gold on green, and the stones in which I watched this scene glimmered at the edges with a borrowed light.

One of them, a young man, leather diamonds and bone stars woven into the thick web of his hair, crouched some distance from the fire, his attentions on something cupped in his hands. For a moment, I disregarded him, my thoughts on the campfires and the families huddled about them, but the stones would not show me those fires and families, fixing my sight instead on the young man at the edge of the light.

I did not know his name. Why I should expect to know it, I could not tell you, but the stones were firm in this, and the first thought that rose to my mind as I watched him about his obscure business was that I did not know his name.

The second thought was that the young man was the one who spoke to me in the vision-the one who claimed to have kidnapped my brother Brithelm.

I had spoken to this one not four nights ago, and yet this scene was two centuries, three centuries old. It was like the light from distant Chemosh, which the astronomers say reaches the eye decades after it rises from the surface of the star.

I felt Longwalker watching me as 1 thought this. His presence was of little concern: My thoughts were fixed on the young man I saw in the stone, on the past unfolding, as though a mural in the halls of Castle di Caela sprang suddenly to life, and history moved in my marveling sight.

The nameless youth held a crown in his hands-a crown of woven silver, into which four, five, six opals were set. It was difficult to tell how many.

I shook my head, and the stones I was watching directed my eyes to the stones in the crown. Stones within stones within stones, like mirrors facing each other at the ends of a long hall, in which the eye is swallowed forever into something like eternity.

My eye plunged downward into the dark of the opals, and the scene before me was swallowed up in darkness, and darkness was all around me…

'Wait,' Longwalker said, and I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. 'Follow no further. That is how Firebrand lost himself, in sounding the bottom of the stones.'

Sounding the bottom of the stones? It was all mystery, all Plainsman hocus-pocus. And yet there was something in those depths that called me further, so that it took everything I had to resist it, and yet I was not sure I had resisted it, not sure…

The pressure at my shoulder increased.

'Good,' Longwalker said. 'Now you will see what happened.'

Again the young man was in view, the crown on his head and a faint, fanatical smile on his lips. The children of the Plainsmen shied from him, adults turned from him in the councils, until his only companion, his only confidant, was the crown he talked to by the fire's edge.

His people looked on in suspicion, drawing signs of warding on the ground before they lay down to sleep.

Soon he traveled a mile behind them. They would not permit him to venture any closer. A voice traveled with him, cold and obscure and insinuating. I could hear it talking to him, could hear it saying…

So it always is with the gifted, with the god-ordained. For your eyes see into the time to come, and if you look long enough, my friend, you will see a time in which all the Que-Nara understand your gifts and hearken to the words of your prophecies.

Then, the voice said, and the ground over which the young man walked was suddenly covered with glittering blades of ice, then I shall tell you what to say to them; they shall hear the words of your mouth as prophecy, and in the time that follows, we shall be among you.

'According to your will, Sargonnas,' the young man said.

'Sargonnas!' I exclaimed, tearing my gaze from the stones.

'Sargonnas the Consort,' Shardos said quietly. 'Prince in the Dark Pantheon.'

'I know where you are in the story, Solamnic,' Longwalker said, 'because I have seen it so many times. What they transacted in that ill hour, Namer and god, only the gods themselves know.'

We looked at one another uneasily. At last the big Plainsman smiled faintly.

'Tarry but a while longer, Sir Galen, for the story has a middle and an end.'

And in the stones were the rocky foothills, a circle of boulders in a bleak country.

The Plainsmen surrounded the Namer, and a chieftain pronounced the charges and the crimes.

'False prophecy,' they said, and 'corrupting the young.' 'Conjury,' and 'rending the earth.'

''Rending the earth'?' I asked.

'Who is to say that the tremors in the mountains are not his doing still?' Longwalker asked. 'His, and that of the evil prince he serves.'

I started to return my eyes to the stones, but the Plainsman waved his big hand.

'You have seen enough,' he said. 'Do not look into what follows, for the ceremony is private when a man is cast from the tribe.

'The stones in the Namer's Crown were divided among the elders, his eye was taken according to the Old Ways, and the wound seared by the white-hot blade of the spear.'

I gasped and swallowed hard. It was all a bit fierce and nomadic for my tastes.

'Wh-Why the eye, Longwalker? Why not just… muster the poor lad out? It seems a little harsh, this ceremony of exile and the cutting that goes with it.'

'It's actually kind, Galen,' the juggler added, stirring from his place by the fire and stretching his spindly old legs. Not for the first time, I wondered how Shardos had learned all of these tales.

'Kind in a rather stark, Plainsman way, that is,' the old man continued. 'For though it maims the outcast, it also protects him, in an odd fashion. It is an outward sign to the other Plainsmen among whom he wanders that, though he is an exile and cannot be taken in, he is not to be harmed, for perpetually he suffers for his wrongdoings.'

'It still sounds harsh to me,' I insisted, and Longwalker frowned.

'What,' he asked, 'would Solamnics do to one who betrayed their Order?'