Oath and the Measure (13 page)

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 Brightblade 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 beauty.

“Are you the one who … imprisoned me here?” he asked, this time more softly.

“No,” the man answered finally. His voice was resonant and deep and polished like old wood, and the dark mahogany paneling of the hall glowed greenly as he spoke. “No, I am no jailer. And you are the first to call this palace a prison.”

“Who are you?” Sturm asked again. The man stood motionless, a pillar of fire above him.

“Look into your shield, lad, and tell me what you see.”

“I see burnished bronze,” Sturm said, “and my face in the reflection.”

“Hold it up toward
me
, you fool!
Then
look at the reflection! Great Paladine’s Beard! You Brightblades were never quick on the uptake! If Brightblade you are, as your shield and your self-pity tell me.”

As the man glowed and blustered, Sturm raised the shield, tilting it so that the bright reflection seemed to rest in the boss. With the green light gone, the man looked more pale, positively ancient, and Sturm could make out his features, his mustache, the coat of arms on his breastplate.

Red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field. The sign of di Caela, of a vanished name in a vanished house.

“Old grandfather,” Sturm proclaimed, kneeling on the rubble-strewn floor of the hall, “or grandfather of grandfathers, whoever you may be. Or
whatever
—whether apparition or saint or memory, I salute you as di Caela and ancestor!”

Bravely, ceremonially, the lad extended his sword. Now the man in the balcony moved for the first time, his thin arm waving dismissively.

“Get to your feet, boy, or whatever it is that we used to say when the Measure was measured and I had to put up with legions of your kind. This is a
dining
hall, not a shrine, and I’m Robert di Caela, not Huma or Vinas Solamnus or
whoever else you’re proffering swords to in this day and time.”

Robert di Caela sank through the stone balcony as if through dark water. First his glowing boots appeared on the underside of the platform, then his green leggings and sunstruck breastplate. Luminous and colorful as a great tropical bird, he floated gently to the floor of the hall. The oaken doors, Sturm’s sole escape from the room, lay behind Robert, open and visible through the wavering transparency of his body. Phosphorescent weeds and mosses dripped from him as he approached, spangling the dark floor behind him.

Instinctually Sturm backed away.

“A simple back-country knight, I am,” Sir Robert said. “Made even more simple by the fact I am no longer living. Though you’ve stirred the dust and rustled the curtains around here, I mean you no harm, boy—only curious to see you, to find out what brings a Brightblade back after all these years.”

Sturm backed into the chair and sat down with a thump. He knew his family tree well enough not to be surprised that a Di Caela lord was hungry for gossip and news.

Sure enough, the ghost leaned forward, white face framed in a well-kept, elegant white beard. Robert’s countenance was a pantomime mask, the dark mahogany paneling visible in the vacant sockets of the eyes.

“A quest, Lord Robert—” the unnerved boy stammered.

“
Sir
Robert,” the ghost corrected. “Time was when we didn’t priss and petticoat with conflated titles. ‘Sir’ was good enough for the likes of your great-granddad and for the likes of men every bit his equal.”

Sir Robert seated himself on a rickety bench, passing somewhat through it as he spoke, and settling with a puff of dust.

“ ’Twas a time when a quest was a great thing, lad! We went after enchanters! After lost civilizations and worms encircling the continent itself!”

The ghost closed his eyes, as though he dreamt of those days as he spoke.

“And what,” Sir Robert asked bluntly, as his pale eyes flew open, “is the quest on which you’re bound, little Brightblade?”

As though he were charmed, enchanted, or starved past lie or even concealment, Sturm told the ghost the whole story, from the night at the banquet through his own foggy wanderings and his time of entrapment here in Castle di Caela. It struck him as he told it—how long and venturesome it had seemed in the doing, and yet how weak and simple and even foolish to recount.

At the beginning of the story, Sir Robert listened intently, but his ardor didn’t last long. His expression changed from intent to politely attentive, then abstracted and drowsy, then nodding on the edge of sleep.

“Is that all?” he asked. “You’ve set out to meet an opponent no doubt your superior in strength and craft, and you’ve managed to get yourself locked into my estate before you’re even halfway there?”

Sturm flushed and nodded as Sir Robert laughed, a low thin chuckle.

“Well?” the ghost asked, standing and hovering not twenty feet from the lad.

“Sir?”

“Look to your ghost lore, boy! What revenge have I asked for?”

“None, sir.”

“And what unfinished business have I asked you to complete?”

“Indeed, none.”

“Absolutely. As I see it, you’ve enough unfinished business for a lifetime of your own. What treasure do I have?”

“Sir?”

“What
treasure
, damn it! You’ve combed the premises from battlements to cellar. What am I hiding?”

“Nothing, sir.” The lad was weary of interrogation. He
was hungry and tired.

“Then what is left?” Sir Robert prodded. “Sir?”

“What
else
do we ghosts do?”