"I will," Sturm assured. "I will." With that, the red figure vanished.
Sturm turned to the steps, but could see nothing beyond the sphere of ruddy light cast by the torch. He took a deep breath and went down.
It was cold in the secret vault, and he was glad to be wear ing Merinsaard's thick tunic. At the bottom of the steps, some eight feet beneath the level of the corridor, he found two more corpses. They were unmarked, but their faces told too well how they had met their fate. The trap door had sealed them in, and in the ensuing hours the men had suffo cated.
Sturm turned from the dead robbers. As he did, his torch light gleamed on something metallic. He walked into the velvet darkness, his breath pluming out before him. The glow of the torch fell over a suit of armor.
Sturm swallowed hard, trying to force down the lump in his throat. With one shaking hand, he reached out to brush the dust from the etched steel. It was. It was his. Sturm had found his father's suit of armor. Breast- and backplate, greaves, schildrons, and helmet were all there. The superla tive war armor etched with the rose motif. The helmet had high horns on the forehead, making Sturm's old headgear, still dented from Rapaldo's axe, seem like a cheap imitation.
The armor was hung on a wooden frame. As Sturm ran his hands over the cherished suit, he felt the soft, cold links of a chain mail shirt under the breastplate. And hanging from the waist by a single thickness of scarlet ribbon was a slip of yellow parchment. Inscribed in Angriff Brightblade's forceful hand were the words, For My Son.
Sturm was filled with such joy at that moment, he could scarcely breathe. The mortal shell of a man could weaken and die, but the virtues that made him a leader among men, a Knight of Solamnia, were embodied in the imperishable metal. Sturm's life was half complete. All that remained was to know of his father's fate.
He threw off Merinsaard's clothes and, dusty or not, began to put on the armor. It fit well, almost perfectly. The shoulders were a bit roomy, but Sturm would grow into them. He finished tying the cops to his boots and lifted the breastplate off the crossbar. Beneath it, hanging from a sin gle peg, was the sword.
The hilt curved toward the point in a graceful are, the steel as clean and shiny as when it had come from the forge.
The long handle was wrapped in rough wire, to ensure a tight grip even when soaked with blood. The almond shaped pommel was hard brass, engraved with the symbol of the rose.
Sturm could bear it no longer. He felt the tears flow over his cheeks and made no move to wipe them away. He had not cried like this since the night he'd left his father behind, twelve years ago.
The sword came lightly off its peg. The balance was per fect, and the handle fit Sturm's hand as though it had been made for him. He drew Merinsaard's silver-handled weapon and tossed it, clanging, to the cold stone floor. Sturm slipped his father's sword into the black scabbard and hur riedly fit the breastplate and backplate over his head. He was still closing the buckles under his arms when he heard a strange humming.
Merinsaard's sword was glowing. The hum emanated from it. Sturm shoved the stand over on top of the glowing blade, and he watched, open-mouthed, as the sword rose into the air, flipping the heavy wooden crosstree over effort lessly. Merinsaard's sword drifted toward the stairs, and
Sturm hastily snatched up his father's helmet and followed.
The silver sword slanted upward, out of the vault.
The floating blade moved unerringly across the great hall to the despoiled kitchen and out the door. There stood Mai tat, unmoving, like a statue of alabaster. The nervous stal lion had never been so quiet. The sword came on, point first. The blade slowly circled the horse, its point barely touching Mai-tat's neck. The glow reached out to engulf the horse. The charger began to writhe and shrink within its white aura. He stepped forward, ready to cut the suffering animal down, but the fierce heat radiating from the sword stopped him. The glow intensified to searing level. There was a flash of blinding light and a great clap of thunder.
Sturm was hurled back against the wall, the breath driven from his body.
A deep-throated laugh filled the courtyard. The hair on
Sturm's neck prickled. He coughed and rubbed his eyes.
Where Mai-tat had been, there now was Merinsaard, fully armed and full of rage.
"So, Brightblade! This is the.treasure you traveled so far to find! Is it worth dying for?" he roared.
Sturm fell back a pace, his head throbbing from the shock of Merinsaard's appearance. Finding his voice, he replied,
"The relics of a noble past are always worth having. But I don't expect to die just yet."
Sturm brought the Brightblade sword on guard. Merin saard cut wide circles in the air with his own blade, but he didn't come forward to fence. He raised the silver sword high and declaimed, "Do you know what it was you so care lessly carried forth from my camp, impudent fool? This sword is the key to all the negative planes. It is Thresholder, the pathway to power! I allowed you to escape, worm; five seconds after you left me bound and gagged, I was free and plotting how best to follow you. Was it not convenient that you should impersonate me, and ride me in my equine form all the way here?"
An unnatural wind sprang up, blowing hot in Sturm's face. "It's a pity you did not stay a horse!" he said boldly. "In that form, at least you were a useful creature!"
A ball of silver fire flew out from Thresholder's tip. It spi raled up to the donjon's roof and burst there, shattering the tiles asunder. Sturm ducked inside the kitchen as broken rock rained down where he'd been standing.
Merinsaard laughed. "Flee, little man! Only now do you realize with whom you have trifled!" merinsaard smashed through the wall. He whipped his silver blade to and fro, leaving arcs of crackling-hot light behind. Sturm dodged into the great hall just ahead of a siz zling tongue of fire that scored molten ruts in the slate floor.
Merinsaard was toying with him. He could bring the whole castle down on Sturm if he desired.
Sturm wanted to stand and fight, but only on ground of his own choosing. There would be less debris to fling at him on the open battlements, so Sturm led the maniacal warlord to the second floor and down the narrow corridor where
Sturm's bedroom used to be. Sturm cleared the end of the corridor just as Merinsaard entered it. The warrior-wizard sent white fire blasting down the empty passage, opening a hole through a wall two feet thick. Sturm ran on, past the third and fourth floors, to the roof.
"Come back, young Brightblade! You can't hide forever!"
Merinsaard taunted him. A miasma of anger and evil settled over the entire castle. Sturm came to a section of wall where the wooden boarding had been burned away. He teetered along a charred beam, thinking the heavier Merinsaard could not follow, then crouched behind the rubble from a fallen tower and tried to plan an attack.
When he came to the burned area, Merinsaard folded his arms across his chest and muttered a spell in an ancient, gut tural tongue. Black clouds collected around the hoarding, and Merinsaard simply walked across on the vapor, chuck ling fiercely as he came. Sturm pushed over a section of bro ken wall in a desperate attempt to impede the wizard's approach. Thresholder swept back and forth, shattering the tumbling blocks into gravel.
"Where will you go next?" chortled Merinsaard. "You are running out of castle, Brightblade. What a disappointment you would have been to your father. He was a true warrior, ten times the man you'll ever be. My men pursued him for months after they sacked the castle. He survived them all, even the Trackers of Leereach."
"What was he to you?" Sturm shouted. "Why should you want his death?"
"He was a Knight and a battle lord. My mistress could not allow him to live if our plan for conquest was to go for ward." A blast from the silver sword shaved off the top of the battered tower. "What an irony it is that you will die wearing his armor. What a supreme moment for my Dark
Queen!"
He's right, Sturm thought. I've run out of castle, and I'm not the man my father was. A curved wall of the tower closed in behind him. Sturm looked up. There was no place to go – no place but down.
Tiny droplets of fire burst around Sturm's feet. He hopped aside, perilously close to the edge. "Jump, boy.
Cheat my revenge, why don't you? It will be easier than the death I have in mind for you," Merinsaard said, a scant five yards away. Sturm looked down. It was a long, long fall.
"Take the step. Jump. For you it can be over quickly," hissed the wizard.
There was no hope. This was the end. Sturm would never again see his friends or solve the mystery of his father. For him, there was only a choice of deaths. A single step, and oblivion. Didn't every man want an easy death when his time came? But you're not every man! his mind screamed.
You're the son and grandson of Solamnic Knights! his mind screamed. This knowledge helped melt the icy fear that gripped his heart.