The Oath and the Measure

lizards and cats.

Sturm drew his sword from its sheath as he ascended to the still brighter second floor, past servants' markers where the great geysers of Two Thirty One had shot through the floors and drenched even the upper stories. Dozens of statues lined the room, stretching back to times before the Cataclysm itself, when both Brightblade and di Caela had walked in uncommon heroism, among the first Knights at the side of Vinas Solamnus. They were all here, forever valiant if somewhat dusty.

Sturm moved by them, inspecting and exploring, his surprise and dismay growing. For here was a statue of Lucero di Caela, Wing Commander in the Great Ogre Wars, his sword drawn, stepping forth into battle. And there the statue of Bedal Brightblade, who singlehandedly fought the desert nomads, holding a pass into Solamnia until help came. There, indeed, was Roderick di Caela, who put down a hobgoblin invasion from Throt at the cost of his own life.

And the last of the statues was of Bayard Brightblade, erected, no doubt, by the Lady Enid in memory of her vanished husband. He, too, was drawing his sword and stepping forth.

Sturm rubbed at his eyes, not believing what he suddenly saw. For what had seemed a fanciful mistake down in the great hall was unsettling and real here in the upper reaches of the keep.

Each hero now had Sturm's face, down to the boyhood scar upon the chin. From one to another he quickly moved, looking, looking again, looking away. This time there was no trick of light. Vertumnus again?

For a while, he sat by the statue of Sir Robert di Caela, his thoughts wandering. It was some time before he came to himself, and at once he scrambled to his feet, intent that night not overtake him in an abandoned castle. Swiftly he ranged from room to room, chamber to chamber, the sunlight as low as his hopes. All of the windows overlooked sheer and no doubt lethal plunges onto the stone pavement of the bailey.

Desperately looking for trellis or vine or mysterious stairwell, Sturm took the steps three at a time, finding himself in the solar on the topmost floor of the keep. The solar was the spacious chamber in which innumerable di Caela lords and ladies had slept away thousands of nights, and after them, two generations of Brightblades. Heir to much of that tradition, Sturm felt a little drowsy the moment he entered the room.

If anything, things looked even more hopeless from here. Above the solar were the battlements, but the lone ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling lay in pieces no larger than his forearm. True, there were windows aplenty-stained glass, for that matter, in rich and various greens-but they were set high in yet another clerestory, to which not even a squirrel could climb.

Sturm seated himself dejectedly on the huge canopied bed, wrapping himself in what remained of the tattered curtains.

'Tomorrow,' he told himself, his eyelids heavy, the curtains musty but warm. 'There are cellars in this place, no doubt, out of which… I surely… can…'

He ran out of words and wakefulness, there amid the evening's green light and floating dust. Twice, maybe three times, he sneezed in his sleep, but he did not awaken.

And so on his very first night on the road, Sturm Bright-blade slept like a seedy lord in the ruins of the castle. He was trapped, with no prospect of escape, and a weariness so great that he slept undisturbed until the morning sun was visible through the trapdoor to the battlements.

The new day, however, was no better. The locks to the cellar broke easily enough, but whatever passages or tunnels once led from the cellars were now blocked. The same earthquake that had unleashed the water on the upper regions of the house had sealed off its lower regions, Sturm concluded. Sadly he rummaged amid empty barrels, bottles, and wine racks, looking for secret doors, hidden corridors, and anything edible. He leaned against the moist wall, flushed with exertion and anger.

'If I ever find Lord Wilderness, or whoever locked me in this place,' he swore, beating his fists against the hard-packed earth of the cellar floor, 'I shall make him pay dearly! I shall… I shall… well, I shall do something, and it will be terrible!'

He closed his eyes and seethed. He felt silly and helpless, unworthy of his knightly inheritance. Before dire vengeance could be visited, before he cornered the scoundrel and exacted fierce, Solamnic justice, he would have to find his way out of his father's father's house.

It looked no better by afternoon. Sturm wandered the halls of the castle, growing more and more familiar with each turn and alcove.

Slowly his anger gave way to rising hunger and fear. The well in the keep and the cistern in the solar provided a trickle of water, but one could starve as easily in a castle, it seemed, as in the wilderness or the desert. That night hunger kept him awake, and he slept fitfully, awakening no more rested than when he had first closed his eyes.

Sluggish and weary, he found himself in midmorning back in the statuary room, drawn to the place and its history. He paced from one end of the hall to the other, passing from one marbled generation to the next with an increasing grogginess, until he reached the statue of Robert di Caela, fixed in the same martial pose as his ancestors and descendants, head strangely askew, as though the long-dead sculptor had sought to preserve his subject's eccentricity through an oddness in the carving.

With a sigh, the lad settled back against the dusty marble of the statue, only to slip from the pedestal onto the floor. In the statuary room, where a score of his ancestors stood enshrined, Sturm Brightblade sat and laughed alone-laughed at his own clumsiness, his unreadiness for all that lay ahead of him. Whimsically he stood, leapt onto the pedestal, and twisted the statue's head in his hands, seeking to right Sir Robert for once in the old man's spotty history.

Sturm laughed and tugged at the marble head, laughed and tugged again, his laughter ringing through the cavernous hall and the sunlight swimming around him. So dizzy he was, so faint and famished, that he never even noticed as the statue tilted, reeled, and tumbled on top of him. His head hit the floor and his breath escaped him.

Sturm awoke to music-the plaintive, solitary sound of the flute and a curious, elusive light among the statues. At first he thought it was a reflection in one of the numerous di Caela mirrors, a flash of moonlight from the window, his own movement caught in burnished bronze. But there was the music he could not explain, and it lent to the light a further, compelling mystery.

He followed the light from the room into the corridor, and the music accompanied him, echoing in the dusty corridors. Standing absolutely still on the landing of the stairwell leading down to the anteroom, Sturm saw the light shift and alter, drifting like mist toward the double doors of the lower great hall. Slowly, his sword drawn, he followed as the light drifted to the center of the large vaulted hall and vanished.

Unnerved, sure that what he had just seen was the first madness of starvation, Sturm seated himself in the high-backed mahogany chair from which he had first observed this forsaken room. Weaker now, his forehead and temples throbbing, he was no longer sure whether he could rise from it again.

'So this is the end of the Brightblade line,' he announced ironically, wearily. 'Starved to death in the feast hall of a castle!'

'If it is the end, then the line has descended to fools and schoolmasters!' a voice, gruff and barely substantial, proclaimed from somewhere in the rafters above the lad.

Startled, Sturm tried to rise, stumbling in weakness and fright.

'Which is not to say that didn't show up before in the bloodline,' the voice continued. Sturm squinted toward the shadowy rafters.

'Who are you?' he asked nervously, 'and… and… where are you?'

'In the balcony,' the voice replied tersely. 'With the rest of the commemorated.'

Then slowly a strange yellow-green light spread from the balcony across the gloomy expanse, and the astonished Sturm marked that the light rose from a helmeted, armored figure astraddle the balcony railing, a pale old man, his face unbearably bright, his features blurred and distant, as though seen through the globe of a lantern.

'Who… who are you?' the lad stammered.

The man was silent, leaning over the balcony like a burning masthead or fox fire, that green, gaseous light in the midst of the marshes. His clothing was dancing with firelight, dripping with an incandescent dew that tumbled to the floor into glittering pools like molten gold. Sturm held his breath at the man's strange menace and