Surprised at his own lapse, he leaned against the wall and began to weep.
He was forgetting the Bright Lands.
He had been right all along. The times were urgent, and the worthy few. Indeed, as he feared, he was the only worthy one, and he was alone and not yet come into his power.
But the godseyes were scarcely a mile away, and approaching with the speed of an oncoming storm.
A tenebral flashed by the torch and into the engulfing darkness.
Chapter XVI
As the trail at last began to widen and the rocks to become familiar, I hoped what I had seen in the opals and heard from old Shardos had been utterly wrong, that somehow everyone's senses had been jostled by fire and flood and earthquake. That when we arrived in the clearing where last saw Brithelm, things would be as I left them: the camp surprisingly unchanged, my visionary brother standing precariously at the top of one of his stilted cabins, trying to draw birds to the site with handfuls of seed and suet so he could read the omens in their patterns of flight.
But the camp had vanished. It had been here, I could tell by the boards and the stilts, the thatch and the canvas. In the clearing, a boat hung desolately from a single frayed rope, the shambles of a cabin forming a circle about it.
Nothing else had been left standing. A huge black spot lay at the center of the clearing, as fresh and unforgiving as a wound. The smoke still rose from it, and I wondered what anyone could find at my brother's encampment that was worth burning. On either side of the fire-scarred ground lay rubble, pitiful relics of the odd but wonderful community.
We all sat quietly on horseback, struck into silence. Finally Shardos stood in the stirrups and breathed deeply.
'The whole place smells of dust and collapse,' he pronounced much too loudly. 'Bear with me, friends. Our destination is but a mile from here. As the story says, 'It is where four vallenwoods grow, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen. A path runs between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covers-a hole in the cliff face. A hole with darkness at its bottom.' '
Brithelm would have looked on a place like this, bare and colorless and altogether dismantled, as a country of hope and promise.
'Look around you, brother,' I could imagine him saying-imagine as sharply and vividly as if he, not Dannelle, were seated on horseback beside me. 'Look at the… the absence of distraction!' I thought of the hundreds of times he had listened for my prospects in bleak circumstances, how over the childhood years, I had confided it all-Alfric's bullying, Gileandos's stupidity and injustice, Father's thickheadedness.
My own ungovernable weaseling.
How through all of this he had seemed not to listen, had drawn my attention instead to birds in the courtyard, to some fortunate turn in the moathouse architecture or a particularly lovely autumn moonrise. And how after all his distractions, I had returned to Alfric or Gileandos or Father more anchored and sane for the distracting.
He was the best one in the many sides of my families. There was no way that I was going back without him.
There's another story this reminds me of,' Shardos said with a smile. I must have sighed, for he cocked his head curiously in my direction. His hearing kept astounding me.
Not that I cared altogether. For since we had left Longwalker's camp, Shardos had been a compendium of tales, spread before us in an elaborate weave where the thread of one plot entangled with that of another, where the hero of a minotaur bandit saga locked horns, so to speak, with the brother of an hourglass-eyed mage in a gladiatorial conflict that did or did not happen, depending on which version of the tale you listened to. There were stories of ice-reavers, of Huma at the height of his powers, of even a kender romance mixed in with a Plainsman's search for a crystal staff and a Solamnic siege in the dead of winter. Somehow all of these stories were connected, though none of us could follow them through all their complications to see how legend fit with fable and fable with tale. Shardos saw to the bottom of them all, evidently, juggling them all as deftly as he juggled crockery or torches or knives.
'Brithelm,' I said. 'Brithelm is hostage somewhere under all of this, and…'
For a moment, the strong tears surged again, and I drew my hood over my face.
'There, boy, there,' Shardos soothed, his milky eyes turned in my direction with a hollow stare that was unsettling. 'If your brother's whereabouts has you all that bothered, then I'll take you to find him straightaway.'
'Enough, juggler,' Ramiro cautioned, then turned to me. 'It's no country for hope nor for jest. I'd rather not lose the rest of us if you're bent on guiding us down among these underdwellers. If you're risking five lives to recover one, then you'd best allow that this Firebrand has done the worst he can do and leave it alone at that.'
'You need not send us packing right away, Sir Ramiro,' I said sharply. 'I shall stay the course. I have decided that if Shardos claims he can find my brother, why, the least I can do is a little of what he says.'
Ramiro turned ponderously toward me, looking at me candidly and a little unkindly.
'I await your orders,' he said through clenched teeth.
'Shardos?' I called, and the blind man stepped forward.
'It is near sunset,' the juggler offered cheerily. 'The bird-songs are changing, and the wind dying down. 'Tis the best time to embark.'
Ramiro began the demanding process of dismounting. Oliver rushed to his side, grunted, and wrangled him down. Owls called in the high rocks that surrounded us, and with a nod from Ramiro, Oliver moved away from the fire and walked quickly toward the horses, stripping a long overhanging branch from an aeterna tree as he made his way back down the trail to guard the skittish animals from the ominous sounds of the approaching night. One of the horses whickered behind us, and you could hear Oliver faintly clicking and cooing and consoling the creature.
Only Dannelle remained near me. I could feel her eyes on me.
I took a deep breath. In went the thin mountain air, fresh with its icy edge and a faint whiff of aeterna, Out came the orders.
'So we follow Shardos,' I said. 'And we shall see what happens. Leave the horses here, neither tied nor tethered. They're no good to us under the ground, and perhaps they'll find their way back to the plains if we don't make it too hard for them by harnessing them to this and that.'
'There was little generalship in that decision,' Dannelle whispered teasingly as Shardos crossed the campsite and took a narrow path through the undergrowth beyond it. Ramiro and Oliver followed reluctantly.
'It is all the generalship I've got,' I confessed.
So we fared, each of us burdened with rope and lantern and hand axe and piton-whatever necessary things we could gather from the horses we were leaving behind us. It was not fully dark before we reached the vallenwoods. Sharp-eyed little Oliver, walking with Shardos at the head of our column, returned to us with the news.
'A place there is, like the juggler spoke of, Sir Galen,' the boy announced breathily, apparently winded from the longest sentence he had spoken since we departed from Castle di Caela. 'The trees with the dolmen and the opening beyond 'em, and something flying out of the dark there.'
'Flying?'
'Yes, sir. Some of 'em fell once they came out. It was like they were diving or something. They leapt into the
