“This is all very interesting, sir, but I confess that I’m at a loss as to the meaning of this whole Enric Stormhold business. How does it tie in with your being here in Castle di Caela? Is it just that prophecies may mean something entirely different than we think they mean? If that’s the case, I assure you I’ll take the advice to heart. There’s no need to haunt and bode.”
“Oh . . . prophecies may mean different things to different eyes. Even places do that,” the raven croaked.
“What does Chaktamir mean to you?”
The bird cocked its head curiously, wickedly.
“Why . . . it’s history, sir. Where the Solamnics held off the Nerakans. Where Father fought.”
“Oh, but it’s so much more,” the raven croaked dryly. “Places mean different things to different eyes. And so does history, little man.”
“History?”
“The history, for example, of Benedict di Caela.”
When the name was mentioned, the three thin candles sputtered and went out, plunging the room into a deeper darkness. Then I felt a pricking at my shoulders, the skittering of little claws, like a rat had boarded me. I struggled to shrug off the creature, but I found that I could not move.
Then the brush of a feather at my chest, and a smell of cologne, underlying it another smell of something old and beginning to rot.
And then the voice resumed.
“You have heard the story of Benedict di Caela? Hear it again, little Galen, this time the way it really happened. For history is a web, a labyrinth, and those who remember it remember only their own paths out.”
“I knew it,” I muttered, and the bird at my shoulder chuckled dryly, viciously.
“Knew . . . what?” it asked with a cruel playfulness.
“That you were Benedict di Caela! That the Scorpion and Sir Gabriel Androctus, that both of them—both of you—were Benedict di Caela!”
“Are Benedict di Caela,” the raven hissed. “It’s no great deduction, Weasel. I come back here rather often, you know. But I do that because this castle is mine. And the holdings. And the title itself.
“Four centuries ago I died twice. Once to the east here, at Chaktamir, which is more than a monument to Solamnic saber-rattling. More than a pass where Enric Stormhold fell.”
“I thought you were defeated at the Throtyl Gap near Estwilde.”
“Yes, and the family version has it that I fell there. That I had traveled only that far to the East, gathering an army of rebels as I went. But the truth, little Weasel, is that I was hunted down like the common criminal they had decided I was. As I retreated eastward to Neraka, alone and disconsolate but bound for what I imagined was safety at last, a party of seven closed upon me. My brother Gabriel murdered me there, and my head tumbled from my shoulders.
“But I was dead by then, anyhow. That is, in a matter of speaking. For my father Gabriel had pronounced me dead in the great hall where I dined only this evening, pronounced me dead so he could smuggle his title and lands to my younger brother, my murderer. Whom Father always favored.”
“Sir, I hate to keep being a . . . precisionist, but there is the small matter of your elder brother Duncan’s mysterious death, how it seemed to be wedded to your mixing potions in the tower of the castle. After all, fathers don’t usually pronounce sons dead for no reason.”
“But it was for no reason, Galen. You know the Gabriels of this story by now, know that they are merciless against all adversaries, all rivals.
“That is all I was to them. Adversary. Rival. My poisons were for rats, no matter what monstrosities they imagined.”
“I find it hard to give that credence, sir.”
The claws dug sharply into my shoulder. I flinched and stifled a cry, as the warm, unhealthy smell coursed by me again.
“What you find hard to believe is no concern to me,” the raven rasped. “Brother Duncan died of something. Who knows what it was? But whatever it was, it was not my doing.”
“And the fire?”
“Was mine, admittedly. I burned my brother’s body, yes, and in one of the tower rooms you can see from this window. It was a pyre most . . . Solamnic, for Duncan burned with his weaponry about him, his hands folded upon his chest, clutching a volume of the Measure.
“Of course they do not tell you how I sent him off heroically, content as they are in breathing the air of conspiracy and plot. Di Caelas are bad for that, I know—too intricate for their own good.”
“But why burn Duncan’s body? The clerics of Mishakal, who studied the dead for signs of poison—”
“Would have found what father told them to find. And he would have had his proof then—the testimonies of those sanctimonious men of the goddess would say, ‘Yes, Sir Gabriel, your youngest son—the one named for you—is now your most capable heir, while the middle son is an abject villain, as you have always dreamed and imagined.’
“But I never harmed my brother. Indeed, I followed all the rules, the respectable second son unto the time that Father pronounced me dead.
“Then, over four centuries, I’ve tried to take by force what was rightfully mine, what was seized from me by inveiglement and ambush. You have heard, no doubt, of the rats, the floods, the fires, and the ogres. Each generation I would launch another natural disaster, and each generation some capable di Caela would find a way to steal my inheritance from my grasp once more.”
“What’s it like, sir? This being dead? And why wait a generation between attempts?”
A long pause, as the dark about me was awash in silence, with the too-sweet attar of flowers, with the flutter of wings.
The bird began to whisper.
“I can remember . . . or think I can remember . . . burning in the tower along with the rats I had unleashed on this castle. I remember drowning in the flood, remember all kinds of undoings in all kinds of disastrous circumstances. And when I remember clearly again, it is twenty years later, or thirty.
“Between those times is a hot, red darkness. I sleep through most of it. Sometimes I recall something of lights—scarlet lights, as though smoke itself were burning. And voices, though I can never quite discover words in the swirl of sounds around me.
“Once, the darkness resolved into a cavernous room, its floor a mirror of polished onyx. And about that mirror sat a score of Knights, their weapons broken, their heads bent as they stared into the mirror, which reflected nothing but stars.
“I do not know but that I dreamed those men, that mirror.
“Once the darkness became a landscape bare and cratered, and the moon that rose above it was as black as the onyx mirror, yet radiant somehow. Nothing lived in that forsaken country, but somewhere in the shadow of the rocks a creature was gibbering and whining—whether wounded or lying in wait, I could not tell.
“That was early on. Nor am I sure whether I dreamed that country, either.”
He paused. A faint light crept to the edge of the window. Solinari was on the rise, and some things—larger things—in the room took on line and form. I could see the outline of the bed, the dresser.
“But regardless of the dream,” the raven continued, “regardless of the cries and the torment and the long sleep, I have always awakened in sunlight, dazed but afoot upon Krynn once more. And once more I would set myself to the task of recovering what should be mine.
“This time, however, is different. For the first time in these four hundred years—for the very first time, mind you—the inheritance of the di Caela family descends to a woman. Descends to Lady Enid. And this time I have chosen to follow the rules once again. This time no rats, no goblins, no . . . scorpions. I shall murder nobody, steal from no one.
“Perhaps you wondered why I didn’t descend on Bayard, on you, and kill you outright?”
“It occured to me long ago, sir, but I had no objections to your oversight, if oversight it was.”