Galen Beknighted

And the dog races were declared over. Memories are blurred as to how Fernando managed to ride twenty- five miles south toward his holdings near the Garnet Mountains that very night. What is more, he was wrapped in yards of linen and was terribly bruised about his head and shoulders. The bruises somehow matched exactly the carving on the missing leg of the table at the first turn of the dog track.

Sir Elazar, though still at the castle, was also badly bruised, having been found by Raphael the next morning, a victim of collapsing furniture.

The dwarves were gone by noon on the next day, Elazar was packing, and the dogs were kenneled once again, their night of celebrity passed into di Caela history. And so, deprived of sport and diversion, the master of the castle again lay splinted and confined to the infirmary.

It was enough to drive Bayard Brightblade to the di Caela family papers.

For two years, he had promised his wife that, 'given the time and the leisure,' he would gather together the volumes from the library-the ledgers and histories, the journals and logs and lists and registers in which the di Caelas of old kept all kinds of records. Enid hoped that the whereabouts of the missing well cap would come up after desperate page-turning, and the danger of flood could be averted. But she also delighted in her husband's newfound interest in the daily business of the estate and the balance of credit and debit.

Within an hour, the poor man was overwhelmed. Numbers hurtled by him like hostile arrows, and he soon decided that the single most happy advantage of wandering knighthood is its freedom from budgetry and arithmetic.

'Mathematics is for gnomes, anyway,' he muttered, setting aside the account books and moving to the wills. Wills, of course, make for better reading, having been principal weapons in di Caela family combat for centuries.

It was here that Bayard Brightblade read of family feuds and disputes that had passed down through the generations, as each di Caela, on his or her deathbed, seems to have reserved a posthumous slap for one or more descendants. Most clerical older sons inherited the father's favorite prostitute, while fastidious nieces inherited their uncle's privy.

Some bequests were not as jolly: Evana di Caela received only a side of beef from her mother, which, the old woman said, 'should serve as a reminder of what happens to heavy, bovine creatures'; Laurantio di Caela received from his uncle a single dagger with the murky instructions to 'do what needs to be done.'

The Lady Mariel passed down to Enid herself, who was an infant at the time, fifty cats. Bayard thought of how the mad old woman met her fate and laughed wickedly.

'Wonder how she proposed to feed them all?' he asked in all mischief. Then his eye stopped on an older scrap of parchment-centuries old, perhaps, and no larger than the palm of Bayard's hand. And yet it was written in a polished script that was strikingly, unsettlingly familiar.

'Now where…?' he thought, then recognized the writing of Benedict di Caela.

You again, old enemy, Bayard thought, for it was the Scorpion's writing, reaching out to him beyond four centuries and the villain's several deaths.

Having nothing to inherit, I have little to pass to my descendants. My father and that brace of vultures who call themselves my brothers have seen to that.

'We saw to it also, you brigand!' Bayard hissed, surprised at the anger he still felt toward the dead illusionist. Bayard snorted and lifted the parchment to the light.

So I resolve to bequeath chaos and disaster and a curse on generations. Castle di Caela will be mine eventually, for I shall return to it until it falls into my hands.

'Or the curse is lifted,' Bayard pronounced triumphantly, then frowned at the document's conclusion.

And if you who read this have lifted my curse, congratulate yourself no further. If you have been triumphant, prepare to have Castle di Caela snatched from your hands by the rending of the earth. Eventually it will come, as foretold and unstoppable as the rains of autumn or the awakenings of spring. For I have seen to that. Beneath your feet and your thoughts, your histories and even your imaginings, I have set a device in motion. From the wakening of time, from the Vingaard Mountains to the Plains of Solamnia, even unto the foundations of this murderous house, there were forces that awaited my guidance, and you will know of them soon enough. Though you may uncover my devices, you will never strike the mark nor hit the target. And though I may be dead when you read this, be assured that in some dark and comfortless comer of the skies, my laughter mocks you and those who follow you with the fond and foolish hopes that my powers are spent.

Bayard's night was sleepless. The shooting pains in his leg mingled with unsettling thoughts, more baffling than any numbers, as he tried to decipher the will, to plumb the mysterious 'device', to stop the dark laughter. He worried, too, about the young man in the mountains and his ragtag group of followers.

It was almost a week before Bradley, one of the castle engineers, inspecting the foundations and cellars of the castle for flaws and damage the earthquake had wrought, stumbled across the gap in the dungeon.

It was not a large opening, he insisted to an alarmed Bayard and a half-dozing Sir Robert, but dangerous enough. For the great well that lay under the castle, subject to strain and pressure through the extraordinary rainy season, was no doubt brimming and bubbling in the deep recesses of rock, where only a sudden twist of the earth could unleash a flood through the floors of the towers and leave them awash in their own cistern.

To Bayard, it was still a question of plumbing. He soothed himself, thinking, I shall attend to this later. Until the young engineer added that beyond the opening lay a network of runnels.

Now he was far more concerned as to the state of the castle, for there was no telling what vermin or darker thing neither wedged himself in some remote underground cranny nor caused a cave-in or rockslide due to his high spirits. Sir Andrew promised that Robert was 'in good hands.'

Bayard Brightblade was not assured.

Comprising the rest of the group were servants- linkboys and bearers. There were two men trained as sappers, whose talents Bayard thought he could put to less military use. There was also Gileandos the tutor, who hovered about Sir Robert and Sir Andrew, prattling about the differences between stalactite and stalagmite and how one remembered the difference, until Sir Robert suggested that the scholar carry a lantern and make himself 'useful for once.'

All in all, there were nearly twenty of them-'a small army,' Bayard muttered, a little resentfully, because his visions had been of adventure-of a solitary Knight, or at most a band of two or three or four, off into the bowels of the earth, where unknown peril awaited them.

With his group, the numbers were stacked against the lurking dangers. And Bayard admitted he was disappointed by the odds. His followers pressed together around him until he felt like a schoolmaster or a governess off on a jaunt with unruly children in tow.

'What… what does it look like inside there, Bayard?' Sir Andrew asked, squinting over a lantern held much too high by Gileandos.

Together the Knights peered into the fissure. Andrew shifted uncomfortably under Bayard's weight.

'I cannot see a thing while I rock like a boat, Andrew,' Bayard replied curtly, and the old man settled himself.

Brandon Rus leaned forward and, taking a lantern from one of the linkboys, cast light into the fissure.

A tangle of roots, no doubt from the huge hackberry and vallenwood parks just outside the castle wall, spread across the door as though the very veins and arteries of the world lay exposed. Beyond the network of tendrils, there was a greater darkness-some tunnel, no doubt, or a passageway formed where the roots churned and shifted the ground about them.

The explorers, all twenty or more of them, stood gaping at the edge of the darkness. Bayard tried to move forward for a closer look, but the reluctance of his bearers held him back.

'There is nothing of… passageways… in the histories,' Brandon whispered.

'Oh, I have seen them in a chapter or two,' Bayard murmured ominously as startled eyes turned toward him.

Gileandos moved forward and faced the party, his back to the cavity in front of them.

'Gentlemen, you are looking into the mouth of an accident. A quirk of geology. All that's left for any of us is