Bayard sat back in the saddle and raised his hood against the cool wind of the afternoon. “Both of you are wrong,” he stated flatly. “Perhaps you should listen more carefully,” he added, “instead of setting forth your harebrained theories of justice.
“The story of this Benedict,” he resumed, shifting the reins casually from one hand to the other, “began in envy and, as far as I can tell, ends there. He kept at remove from his brothers, there in old Gabriel’s castle—the Castle di Caela, it came to be called, for obvious reasons.
“There young Benedict plotted, ‘mixing poison in his thoughts, dreaming of accidents,’ as the old Book of Vinas Solamnus has it. But accidents can be traced, and in those times the clerics of Mishakal had ways of stopping, of entirely reversing the spread of poison. Even if they were too late, if the poisoned wretch lay dead and past their powers of reversal and healing, they could still trace a poison in the bloodstream, determine its ingredients, when it was administered, and who had mixed it.
“When that failed, they could make the dead talk, uncover the murderer. So for years young Benedict mixed the poison only in dreams, for he was far too timid to murder outright. Instead, he sat alone and brooded, and he thought vengeful thoughts.
“The greatest poison, of course, is that of envy,” Bayard pronounced, and stared pointedly at me, demanding some sort of response.
“Well, sir, I should put hemlock above envy in your poisons, for I have seen envious men live for years. But I am no apothecary. I have no talent for chemistry.”
“Or for metaphor,” Bayard retorted, and picked up the story once more.
“So in a sense—a metaphorical sense—Benedict poisoned himself there in the castle as his thoughts wandered. And when someone is so envenomed, poisoned in thought and in deed, his every discovery is poisoned as well. His every touch is poison.”
“Like the Scorpion?” I asked, and instantly wished I could take back those words. For I had given my nemesis a name in that moment, had revealed I knew more of the man in black who haunted the moat house and the swamp—knew more than an honest boy should know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and waited for trouble.
But I heard Agion add, “Or like the viper,” and looking up, saw Bayard nod in agreement.
“Or like the poisonous creatures of legend and of history, Agion. Yes, you might say Benedict was one of those creatures, in a sense.
“For the poison had grown inside him until even the things he found, which might have been used to the benefit of all around him—might indeed have won him an inheritance passing that of his brothers—he turned instead to things monstrous and wicked. As he did with the pendulum.”
Pendulum? There was something about . . .
“Found it he did,” Bayard explained, “in the cellar of the very Castle di Caela he coveted, while he fumbled through the darkness searching for a place to practice at the illusions he was learning, fanciful and increasingly insane. He clutched the pendulum to himself, thinking nothing of it for a while. That is, until he brought it out into the light, taking it to his quarters in the upper chambers of the castle. There, drawing it from the folds of his robe, he saw it for the first time.
“Gold was its chain, and the ornament upon that chain was crystal.”
Was crystal. Bayard’s words struck me like the light of a hundred stars in the darkness. I remembered the swamp, the clearing, the goats, the scattered fires . . .
“And dangling that pendulum in front of his eyes, Benedict thought his poisonous thoughts, dreamed his dreams of accidents. As he looked through the crystal, a spider in the corner of his chamber grew to unnatural size, took on unnatural shape . . .”
Like the goats who changed suddenly, unnaturally, into satyrs.
“And would have crawled from the web of its own devising and poisoned him for sure . . . had he not looked once more and seen the creature for what it was all along—the simple spider he had watched in the room’s corner those two days past.”
Bayard paused and looked up at Agion.
“This tale of the spider explains the Curse of di Caela—or at least gives it birth in the histories we know.”
I was taken aback.
Surely not. Surely this old chestnut from the Book of Vinas Solamnus had nothing to do with what I had witnessed two nights back in a clearing in a swamp. Surely books had nothing . . . But Bayard was taking up the story again.
“Benedict knew, then, from this accident of vision, that the pendulum was a piece of power. But from whence had it come? Historians disagree.
“Some claim it had been dropped by a kender, who had found it the gods knew where and in what residence, for there were kender then even as there are kender now. Some claim the pendulum had become dislodged, by accident or by some large and evil design, from the cornerstone of the castle, where it had lain imbedded for generations, awaiting one so envious, so devious, as to use it in the ways that its use was intended. But of course, there are many such legends on the face of Krynn.
“Does it really matter? For the results were the same, whether Benedict acted on an evil that was born within himself by his own discontent and envy, his own early and dark studies, or whether he acted as the instrument of a larger evil that was reaching its hand into the fabric of the world.
“Smaller evil or larger, rest assured that the rats in the cellar adopted new and monstrous forms as Benedict dangled the gold and crystal pendulum in front of his eyes. Legend has it that they sought out Duncan’s room as Benedict instructed, and that when old Gabriel heard the cries of his eldest son and rushed into those chambers intending to rescue the boy, he opened the door onto a scene most unspeakable, which the histories shrink from recording because of its horror.
“Yet the same historians affirm that Duncan’s body was neither bruised nor scarred, that it lay serene, so unmarred by death that the embalmers paused in their grotesque, unhappy task, fearing coma, catatonia, or the mystic’s sleep. But dead he was, and the clerics of Mishakal could find no wounds upon him, no poison within him.
Like the centaurs in Agion’s story.
“Gabriel the Younger, however, smelled a rat, you might say.” Bayard smiled, raised his gloved hand. “He had been hunting at the foot of the Garnet Mountains on the night Benedict discovered the pendulum—on the night henceforth known in Solanthus and surrounding parts of Solamnia as the Night of the Rats.
“Though the clerics found nothing in Duncan’s chambers that suggested foul play, Gabriel the Younger knew that foul play it was, and sent word to his father that the clerics of Mishakal should make Duncan speak from beyond the darkness.
“Old Gabriel recoiled at first, as any father would. For there was something of violation, of a fierce and unnatural disturbance in this practice, even when it lay in the hands of the white-robed clerics with their holiest of intentions. But his youngest son urged him most passionately, saying, ‘Far more unnatural it is, Father, that brother should arise and murder brother for his inheritance and holdings.’ Old Gabriel was inclined to agree, ordering the clerics to grant speech unto Duncan that night in the sepulchre.
“Meanwhile, Gabriel the Younger hid in the mountains.
“His one surviving brother was there, at Castle di Caela, awaiting the ceremonies on the night of the equinox when the priests assembled. Whether his guilt was that of the murderer, or of a more subtle guilt that none could name, none could say. Nor will we ever know for sure.
“Whatever the case, the fire that broke out in the sepulchre the night before the sounding was a fierce one, and was set by hand. The robes found in Benedict’s quarters had suffered burns at the hems, and smelled darkly of lamp oil and phosfire and ash.