'The power of life and death!' he gloated. 'All of their memories are mine! They would have none of me, but now I have their past and future!'
I felt the blade strike leather and metal, felt the old gloves hold with a strength and resilience that was not metal and leather alone, but the years of weathering and sun and rugged use. The staff turned red again, and yellow, and white, and I felt the heat next to me and dropped to my knees at its force…
And the ground shook, hurtling the both of us, crown over backside over gloves over staff, halfway across the clearing.
He was to his feet by the time I had picked up my sword and closed with him. Without his eye patch, which had fallen off in the tremor and tumble, he looked vulnerable, weak. The empty socket opened into a darkness blacker than the caverns and the heart of the godseye, and for a moment, I pitied him.
The crown, too, lay in the white dust beside him, fragmented, the light in its stones fading.
Then, with an outraged cry, Firebrand raised the staff to strike. I rocked back on my heels, my blade flashed swiftly through the smoky air…
And found the soft home of his neck.
I have heard there is indignity in such a thing-that the Nerakans, for one, punish their worst with ritual beheading.
Father has spoken of the time when the Order itself beheaded the most heinous offenders.
And yet there was a quiet that surrounded us afterward. His one good eye was closed, and the body stood there for a moment, as though it was trying to remember something.
As though the moment of its passing had not been reckoned.
Then it fell, also quietly, and I felt a hand touch my shoulder.
Brithelm stood beside me.
'It may have vanished,' he said quietly. 'The troll, I mean.' He smiled at me sadly. 'You will understand,' he added, 'that I did not tarry to find out.'
And the earth wrenched and buckled.
They say that unnatural things began an hour beforehand, before the rumbling and tumult from deep underground.
A traveler, a spice merchant from Kalaman traveling inland to deliver the last of his cargo, who later visited Castle di Caela, watched as panic-stricken tenebrals hurtled into the sunlit air, contracting and crumpling within yards of the caves out of which they issued, striking the earth with that ghastly popping sound and the smell of burnt hair.
It was only in waiting, in standing by the mouth of the highland cavern, that the merchant noticed the ground begin to move.
The quaking was general all over Solamnia, peasants' houses collapsing in rains of dried mud and thatch, the stables filling up with shrieks and movement as the horses felt the tremors and recalled that movements such as these boded disaster.
Disaster was what we were courting, there in the rock-strewn mountains, yet my thoughts were below those rocks, with Shardos and Ramiro.
'They're still under there, Brithelm,' I said, my eyes on the silver circlet at my feet. 'Shardos and Ramiro and the Que-Tana. Perhaps…'
I looked a long time at the godseyes, thinking of the power of life and death and what it might mean to those trapped under miles of cavern and rock.
I thought also of what that power had done to Firebrand.
Yes, when I picked up the circlet there was the nearly unmanageable urge to put it on.
And, yes, for a moment, there passed through my darkest imaginings a kingdom where I sat upon a throne and governed.
Omnipotent, yes, but kindly.
'I know,' Brithelm said, his arm slipping over my shoulder. He smelled of dust and the caverns and, to be honest, of not having washed in too long a time. 'I know. Perhaps they escaped by the other passage, the one Shardos told stories about. That's what you were about to say, wasn't it, Galen?'
I nodded. Whatever else came to pass, I had returned with the brother I set out to find. Let history and heroics rest in the hands of others.
I handed the crown to Brithelm, and beneath us the world kicked and bucked, knocking us off our feet.
The trees about us shook and bent and swayed as though caught in the midst of a windstorm, and the rumbling sound that had swelled through our last minutes in the tunnels began to roar, as rock beat against rock deep in the bowels of the mountains.
Out of the swirling dust came a Que-Tana warrior, shielding his eyes against unfamiliar light. Then Shardos, who pointed out our vantage point uncannily, sightlessly. He shouted something and seized a small Que-Tana child by the arm, dragging her toward us.
Ramiro came next. He stopped in the swirling dust and looked back into the darkness. He, too, shouted something, but I could hear no voice in all the rumble and crash of the tunnels caving in upon themselves. For a frightening moment, the big Knight lost his footing and toppled heavily, the ground tilting underneath him as though he were being funneled into the crevasse that was opening beneath him.
But he leapt to his feet, no doubt the first time since childhood that Ramiro of the Maw had made any movement one might take to be a jump or a scramble. And he had joined us within a matter of seconds, behind him a dozen more of the Plainsmen, then more after that and still more.
There must have been five hundred in all. Squinting, shielding their eyes, their pale skin scalding in even the muffled sunlight, they covered themselves with robes and hides and blankets as their home caved in behind them.
Together we made for the foothills. All around us and above us, the faces of the mountains were collapsing. We moved unsteadily, clutching one another and carrying the children into a safer darkness of leafshade and overhanging branches, where we collapsed, exhausted, as the landscape behind us fell in on itself, like a loaf or cake in the hands of a negligent baker.
A silly image, I am sure, but I do not doubt that even the Cataclysm evoked such foolishness from its witnesses.
To this day, I have sworn off baked goods. They smack too much of catastrophe.
There we sat until it was over. There was a final rumble somewhere off to the north of us, then an incredible stillness, out of which arose an even more incredible birdsong, as a nearby nightingale, duped by the smoke and the dust in the air, warbled in the ruins.
For a while, Brithelm wept for them all-for the Que-Tana who had not escaped, and even for Firebrand. It is safe to say that none of the rest of us could weep for the Namer, and yet each of us stood quietly a moment as the air and the landscape settled.
And I realized that, despite my great misgivings, there was something of history in this.
Chapter XXV
Going home was a long road, as it always is.
