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
As the voices choired and swelled in the ancient Que-Tana Song of Firebrand, the one man worthy of the name lifted the Namer's crown. Maimed by fire, and an unlikely hero because of his maiming, he had nonetheless led a people into the light.
Unlike the pretender to his name and his crown, this new Firebrand would treat his calling and the stones with reverence and care. Quietly he placed the crown upon his own head. Now he sang the names of the heroes, and the Plainsmen chanted back a refrain as a thousand voices joined in committing those names to memory.
Going home was a long road, as it always is.
There's some philosophy in that, but lengthening the miles for my little company was the simple fact that our horses were gone. We couldn't have brought them with us underground, where the narrow passages and delicate footing would have jammed them in the rocks, no doubt, or brought a thousand equine pounds down upon one of us.
Still, you couldn't help but regret their absence when the prospect of walking doubled the length of your journey-a journey that had to be long, it turned out, to contain all that I learned.
The dust that the quake had raised did not settle until evening came, until all of us had reached an even thicker cluster of trees at the base of the foothills, spread over a cluster of towering rocks.
From the top of the largest rock, through the parted branches when the moon and the stars emerged, you could see down and east into the foothills and the plains of Solamnia beyond. When the lights winked on in the westmost villages of my adopted country, I was watching with my brother Brithelm, the two of us wrapped in a blanket against weather and wind and night.
"I suppose that one of us will have to tell Father," I observed after a silence. "I mean, about Alfric."
My brother nodded, his eyes still fixed on the country below him. His red hand slipped from under the blanket, its index finger glowing, as he traced aimless designs on the surface of the rock.
"1 just imagine him down there among the rocks," I continued. "Him and Marigold, of course. Beginning some ghostly dance in eternity."
"That's almost poetic, Galen," Brithelm said with a sad smile, "until you remember what kind of dancers they were while alive and breathing."
"It's as though everything came together in misfortune down there, Brithelm," I said and paused.
"Brithelm, I have a confession."
My brother looked at me solemnly.
"I saw Weasel back in those caverns. Not me, but the one I was years ago when all this adventuring began. And I came to the conclusion that I'm not all that different from what I was then about… about this whole knighthood business. I've been lying, Brithelm. Lying to almost everyone about my courage and my principles and the Measure and the Oath, until now and again I almost believe my own stories.