Galen Beknighted

breathable air, they stopped for a moment and leaned against rock or collapsed altogether on the floor of the tunnel.

'Well, it has happened,' Sir Andrew coughed. 'We have reached the very foundations of Castle di Caela, and we have seen something there and kept it from wakening, maybe for good. It is over. But I shall be damned if I understood a lick of it.'

He smiled, hearing before them the shouts and the pickaxes of the engineers.

It was only a matter of minutes until the hole in the rock and rubble was wide enough for all of them to pass through.

Bradley lifted Sir Bayard through the hole, supported him against the rush of water that entered the tunnel behind him, stumbled for a minute in the onslaught of wave and river-borne rubble, then gained solid footing and strode toward the surface. Around him, the others milled and followed, well-spattered and muddy, battered by rock and daunted by darkness.

Surprisingly old Gileandos lifted his voice in the old song of courage.

'Even the night must fail,

For light sleeps in the eyes

And dark becomes dark on dark

Until the darkness dies.'

Jubilant, the others joined in.

'Soon the eye resolves

Complexities of night

Into stillness, where the heart

Falls into fabled light.'

So singing, they emerge from the fissure into the cellar of the Great Tower, waterlogged and bedraggled but whole.

In the heart of the Abyss, the dark god frowned and turned on a gust of stagnant air. Defeated, he shrugged, smiled ruefully.

'Damn them,' he said flatly, and the void shook around him. 'And damn the Namer especially, who is now useless.'

Then he yawned and, reclining in hot, dry infinities of nothingness, he closed his fathomless eyes and slept away a century.

Whether indeed it was understood or whether it passed understanding, something had changed in the world under Castle di Caela. The gray mist in the crevasse vanished, leaving behind it a dark that was only the absence of light, that hid nothing more than stone and shadow and occasional creeping things, all in all as harmless as what a curious child might find in the earth beneath an overturned rock.

Far above, two pages sat alone at a table in the Great Hall, where they had sat for hours debating how many places to set for dinner. They broke off their arguments and listened, of all things, to a sudden quiet in the rooms and corridors around them.

It was the first time either had listened in months.

Nor was it unrewarded, for they both started to listen right near the turn of the hour, as noon approached and the castle guests filed in for a luncheon that would taste far better today for some reason.

As the incredible smells of roast pork and apples filtered into the hall, first one boy smiled, then the other.

They did not know why they were smiling. It was something, though, about the smells in the air and the curious light in the room. Something about the silliness of having whiled away the morning in the fine points of etiquette, when there were smells and noises to investigate and a meal of roast pork and potatoes to enjoy.

As the noontide clocks struck in Castle di Caela, the air was filled with a chorus of metallic bird cries. For the first time since Aunt Evania and Sir Robert began this collection of offensive machinery, all of the castle cuckoos sang together, marking the passing hour.

Up in the Vingaard Mountains, a high sun washed the vallenwoods and oaks and maples in a brilliant white light. The leaves turned and silvered in the light breeze from the east, and Longwalker stopped on his way through the wooded foothills. He cocked his head, as if somewhere east of him he had heard something shift, some slight but important movement in the fabric of things.

'Now,' he said to the Plainsmen about him. 'Old Tellus is at rest. The time is back. It will not be long before they all can return, can go back to words and memory.'

It was obscure to them, what Longwalker said. The younger Que-Nara looked at one another, then nodded as though they understood their leader.

Someday, Longwalker thought. Someday you will understand all of this. How those in the hearts of the opal are always only a step from you. That as thin as the line is between breathing and translation, it is just as thin when you come back the other way. You will understand this.

Two strix owls took wing out of the dark branches of a blue aeterna. Shocked by the daylight and the Plainsmen around them, they wheeled quickly in the air and swooped into a stand of golden oak not twenty yards away. The children started, then quickly recovered their calm and implacable faces.

Longwalker frowned privately, lost in his thoughts.

'I do not know what this will bring the Solamnics,' he confided to his people, 'but there is a grove where the plains meet the foothills, where vallenwood and pine and aeterna mix with the lesser trees. There, if their guiding is done and the Que-Tana have followed, we shall find the others, and stone will link with stone, and cousins will clasp hands in friendship and reunion.'

He walked away from his camp on the plains with its lean-tos of hide and light wood, the smell of smoke and roast venison. The earth stilled beneath him as the dale worm settled back into long sleep, but even its slightest shiftings stirred the mountains.

Chapter XXIV

The last of the settings remained stoneless, unadorned. For a moment, the Namer held the thirteenth stone above it.

'This is the One Stone,' he said quietly. 'Always present in its absence.'

He handed the One Stone to the man seated beside him, who in turn handed it to another. And as the stone passed from Plainsman to Plainsman, the Namer brought the story full circle.

There was no doubting that the surface was near, for now the air smelled fresher, greener in the part of the passage around me. Upward I moved, the borrowed sword in my right hand, my left hand grappling for purchase amid loose and tumbling rock.

The deciding was over.

In a rush, I took off up the corridor toward the light. All around me the vast network of tunnel and chamber was crumbling, shaking. It seemed that everything momentous that had ever happened to me centered around an earthquake, and I recalled thinking, If this is the last thing, then there is something just and fitting in it. Then, with an unsettling lurch, the ground I had just crossed split open not ten yards behind me.

I passed through one cloud of red dust, then a corridor branching to my right, which collapsed with a rolling crash that doubled my speed, if doubling was possible. The air was growing thick and powdery, difficult to breathe.

I pulled my cloak up over my mouth and rose. It was a time for opals, that was certain.

A trio of tenebrals rushed by me, chittering. I followed, and I heard someone or something cry out in front of me the instant before I turned a corner.

My momentum propelling me, I turned nonetheless and saw Firebrand ahead, out of reach and practically