"Firebrand is behind the door," Brithelm whispered without turning to face me. "He is alone and reveling, having affixed most of the stones to his crown."
"Why, that's… astounding, Brithelm!" I breathed. "How… how can you be so sure? Visions? Augury? Some kind of telepathic trance?"
He turned to me, smiling, a short beam of light cast across his face as if it rose from the door itself.
"Keyholes, Galen. The future unfolds through keyholes. I would have thought you remembered that much."
Outside the door, we readied ourselves. Brithelm crouched again in the keyhole light, while I searched the walls and floors for substantial stones-stones for throwing, in case the circumstances called for such.
"It has been my experience," Brithelm whispered, "that surprise will succeed on almost any front, in almost any circumstance. And usually weapons are not needed."
"I do not recall asking you to draw on your considerable battle experience, Brithelm," I hissed.
We both stood silent outside the door of Firebrand's chambers. From within, the light dipped and altered as someone passed between it and the door-someone moving in directions and paths we could not see, intoning something dreadfully important, no doubt.
I could swear there were two voices in the room.
"It's like Father says, Galen," Brithelm offered, moving toward me in a rustle of red robe, placing his hand on my shoulder.
"I know, I know," I muttered, eyes on the stone floor, which I feared would soon pool with my blood.
"I know you know, but say it with me," Brithelm urged.
"I am no doubt going to die with you, Brother. Grant me the dignity of not repeating Father's rural slogans."
"Now, Galen," Brithelm cautioned merrily, ruffling my tangle of red hair. For a moment, it was as if there was no danger approaching. It was as though we were somewhere back at the moathouse-oh, sixteen or seventeen years ago-and he, the only Pathwarden with a talent for care-taking, was coaxing little Weasel to take his medicine.
Brithelm and I looked directly at one another and spoke in unison one of Father's most time-honored sayings. " Them not skinning can at least hold a leg.' "
I opened the door and we burst suddenly into the room, armed with gathered stones and courage and not a small portion of folly. Dazed for a moment by the bewildering array of torches in the chambers, we looked about aimlessly, stumbling over rock and declivity, searching for Firebrand, for anything or anyone.
Then the light receded, and Firebrand was revealed sitting on a wicker throne in the far corner of the chamber, an unfathomable smile upon his face. Above his head he held the silver Namer's crown of the Que-Nara. And in the midst of that circlet were set thirteen black, gleaming stones.
"We're too late!" I hissed to Brithelm, who nodded in alarm.
"Now from these stones will arise my greater power," Firebrand intoned, his voice rising hysterically as he raised his arms. "I am disappointed in you, Brithelm. Disappointed that, when you might have been my first priest in the Bright Lands, you chose to bury your nose in books of physics and history and… and fauna, idling away your hour of greatness."
"I have been known to dawdle," Brithelm agreed.
Firebrand's eyes rested keenly on the two of us.
"But now your high tide recedes, as they say," he announced. "Your little rescue story comes to a close, Solamnic. For my translation awaits me."
With that, he set the circlet on his head.
He smiled. "All quiet," he said. "Even the Voice is silent before the power of life and death."
Something echoed through the caverns around us- something deep and sorrowful and altogether bereft. Above me and below me and somewhere else in the distance, I heard a great wail and outcry, and before me Firebrand's good eye rolled upward in the socket, its iris and dark pupil vanishing into a milky whiteness as though the Namer was in the midst of trance or seizure.
They tell me that above ground, in the Bright Lands that the Que-Tana had almost forgotten, the namers and chieftains and those with a bent toward wisdom heard wailing, too, but their wisdom was not great enough to understand what had just taken place. As far south as the Eastwall Mountains and the Thar-Thalas River they heard it, mistaking it for the distant cry of birds, and yet at the edge of the Plains of Dust, a group of herb-gathering Que-Teh stopped, bewildered, and stared at the greenery in their hands. The cry faded away somewhere far to the north of them, and they could no longer remember how or why to concoct with the herbs.
Hunters from the Que-Shu tribe, it is said, lost the ancestral trail into antelope country even as they traveled upon it. The people wandered for weeks. Several of the old ones starved. I have heard also that Longwalker's opals flickered and went dull and dim.
Almost as quickly as he had lapsed into abstraction, Firebrand recovered, his good eye dark and alert and piercing.
"Oh, I see it all now," he murmured, as quietly as you would speak if you approached a rare and timid bird in a clearing, where even the slightest disruption and noise would set the discovery to wing. "I see it all…"
No matter how quietly he spoke, though, the words carried in the echoing chamber, buoyed by the emotion in his voice and the cavernous, reflecting walls.
"And now from these walls will arise my great people," Firebrand intoned. "Will arise those whom the Rending took, and the years, and the wars and the fires and the floods and the search for the stones themselves."
"Climbing the Cat Tower," I whispered to Brithelm.
But Firebrand continued, his voice lower now, and calmer.
'Those taken and perhaps not taken, but those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong."
He waved his hand, and through the walls of the cavern it came, passing through smoothly and readily, as though the rock was mist or smoke.
In front of us was the troll from the rain-soaked highlands. In its eyes was a terrible, surpassing weariness, as if it had been called from something more than sleep or labor. From something we could not know yet.
Firebrand folded his hands ceremoniously. As he began, I started for him, stone in hand, but Brithelm grabbed me by the shoulders.
"Whatever it is, it is over, Galen," Brithelm explained. "He called this troll to life hours ago."
"You are right, Brother Brithelm," Firebrand whispered. "Go to your death knowing you could have shared in this glory."
Firebrand chanted yet again, something in an old and corrupt version of the Plainsman tongue, and a hot wind passed through the room, carrying on its waves the sound of an ancient wailing.
The troll came toward us, its yellowed teeth bared.
"He's conjured this up, Brithelm," I whispered urgently. "All you have to do in circumstances such as this is not put faith in the vision."
"The eyes can be deceptive, Brother," Brithelm agreed uneasily. "And yet I do not believe-"
"You taught me this long ago in Warden Swamp," I declared confidently. "You taught me that the way to deal with illusions is simply to disbelieve them, simply to go about your business and let them break like waters around you."
Brithelm cleared his throat, but I was halfway to the throne and Firebrand before he could speak. Swiftly the troll stepped between me and the Namer, but I looked beyond the formidable image and kept walking straight into the glaring, leering product of my enemy's imagination. And bumped into tough leathery skin, into muscle and gristle and claw.
"Galen!" Brithelm called out as I tumbled through the air into the rocks some twenty feet from my enormous and tangible foe. Dazed, I recovered my faculties just in time to see Firebrand climb a rope ladder into a tunnel halfway up the far wall, then pull the ladder up after him.