'My sanctuary?' Brithelm asked, his shimmering eyes returning to the book. 'Oh. I suppose I've never thought of it as
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.
There was a beautiful blonde woman of about Brithelm's age-Evalinde, she was called. She seemed to have designs on the metaphysical brother and took no discouragement from the fact that he did not notice her, occupied as he was with the summoning of birds and some other strange form of meditation that involved dangling a lizard over an elaborate parchment design and searching for enlightenment.
It might be hard to believe that a bright woman like Evalinde put up with such foolishness, much less kept an interest in Brithelm. Nonetheless, she visited him at night, slipping from her tent into his lean-to when the two moons, red and silver, shone together.
The old Palanthan women consulted their parrot for details of the tryst. It told them, evidently, that Evalinde brought visions to Brother Brithelm. The pirate captain, of course, had other theories.
There were a few more displaced souls in the encampment, perhaps a dozen in all, including an odd-looking dwarf who cames from the gods knew where to sell Brithelm parchment and lizards.
Strangest of all was the blind juggler. Of him, Brithelm was peculiarly silent, though Firebrand plied the lad with questions-idly at first and then more intensely when a mystery rose and surrounded this man called Shardos. But he learned nothing, really, of the juggler.
'How many,' he asked the young cleric, 'were at your sanctuary at its height?'
''Its height'?' Brithelm asked, reclining on the cool floor of the cubicle, steepling his fingers behind his head.
'Its most populous,' Firebrand urged, leaning forward in the hard chair.
'Oh… one or seven, depending on how you count. Eight, if you count dogs. Do you count dogs, Father Firebrand?'
Firebrand did not count them. Brithelm nodded and explained.
'You see, there was only one, if you count me, who was after all the only one who had really decided to stay there and all. All of the others were visiting for a while. There was Evalinde and the dwarf, the captain and the cabin boy, the juggler and his dog-but you aren't counting dogs-and the two old women from Palanthas. Do you count stuffed parrots? There was one with the women, and if you count it there were nine of us…'
Firebrand did not count parrots either.
'Who… provided for you while you lived there, Brother Brithelm?'
''Provided,' sir?'
'Food. Protection.'
'Bayard Brightblade came once, sir. With my brother Galen. I think they brought loaves and eggs. Perhaps some potatoes and some cheese, too.'
Galen Pathwarden, then. Sir Galen Pathwarden, who roams the surfaces above us, who has dispatched scout and skirmisher.
Like so many mercenaries.
When he invades us, dares to come below, he will find the dark not to his liking.
'Are there any… stories about these tenebrals of yours?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Any lore,' Brithelm explained, staring at the ceiling. 'I take to lore well, you know.'
Firebrand sighed.
'If there is, it will be in the volume before you. Fauna is not a strength of our library.'
He cleared his throat. Brithelm looked up at him innocently.
'On the other hand, minerals are. Rocks, both igneous and sedimentary. Gypsum and limestone. Gems such as… these.'
Carefully he took the crown and showed it to Brithelm. It was an impulse, really. Something told him it was only right that the man should see the stones that would cost him his life.
Perhaps.
Firebrand had not decided how useful the Lightdwellers would be, once the opals were placed in the crown.
It was more than fairness, though, that guided the hand of the Namer. Something in him yearned for a kindred spirit, for another bearer of visions, who would see these stones and know that the Namer of the Que-Tana stood at the borders of prophecy, at the edge of the greatest power imaginable: the power over life and death.
Brithelm rose onto his elbow and examined the stones. Handing the crown back to Firebrand, he reclined once more, his left cheek pressed against the coolness of the stone floor of the chamber.
'Have you anything to eat, sir?' he asked finally. 'Being kidnapped surely gives rise to an appetite. Just anything will do-nothing fanciful or strange or rich, and nothing with turnips in it, if you don't mind, Father Firebrand. You see, the turnip is the one thing that jars my internals. If by mistake I eat a turnip, I have to lie on my right side for an hour with my left arm raised over my head. That way the organs return to their proper and natural arrangement.'
'I see,' snapped Firebrand, his hopes and confidence tumbling. Surely the boy was more cluttered than clairvoyant- all this addled talk of tenebrals and turnips. And yet Firebrand had not given up hope entirely.
'I show you the stones, Brother Brithelm,' he announced, cradling the crown in his left hand, 'because through them a god speaks to me.'
Brithelm lifted his face from the floor and raised an eyebrow. And in loneliness Firebrand told him of the commands of the god Sargonnas-of the prophecy he had been granted and of the powers to come that the god had promised him.
He would need followers, he explained. Men of forthrightness and courage, and above all, of vision.
After Firebrand finished, there was silence in the room for a long while. They were both surprised by the direction the talk had led them.
'This is quite an undertaking you're about, isn't it, Father Firebrand?' Brithelm asked finally.
Firebrand sat in silence. There was no answer to that question.
'What I'd like to know is this, though,' the young cleric continued, his face pressed again to the floor of the chamber, his voice muffled by stone. 'What if this Sargonnas is lying?'
Firebrand rose, bid a cold farewell to Brithelm, and left the cubicle. Back down the hall he strode, the long crosier of his office clicking woodenly on the stone floor of the cavern. Cursing the Lightdweller and his blasphemy and thickheadedness, Firebrand paused beneath a torch guttering in its sconce, and in the light, yellow on green on yellow, examined the crosier idly.
It was carved with the shapes of plains animals, the names of which Firebrand no longer remembered.
