The walls of the corridor were painted with old designs, scratched with old graffiti. Plainsman was the language, and the drawings were of creatures the Namer knew well- the antelope, the leopard, the wild boar, and the hawk. It was only when he passed the first fork in the passage that the drawings began to change-at first gradually, then rapidly, birds on the wing transformed into strange geometrical swirls, the familiar form of the leopard now no more than the bright play of color on color. The writing changed, too-the phrases and language and finally even the letters.

From the changes, the Namer knew that generation by generation, the Que-Tana in this underground kingdom were breeding away from the memories of their time in the light. Like heartfish, he told himself. Like heartfish in a cavern.

He had heard of the tiny red fish, once river dwellers in the sunlight of the Age of Dreams, who entered the underground and evolved without eyes there in the dark recesses. For the first time, he had seen them in his travels as the passage he had followed crossed by the edge of a slow-moving subterranean brook. A kind of changing, of breeding away, had taken place among the Que-Tana, too, as their history filled with darkness and moisture and endless search for the stones until that story was the only story they had, their brothers in the Bright Lands mythical, almost forgotten, reached only through the magic of the stones for which they searched incessantly.

And now the stones had vanished, torn from them by a dark and mysterious hand. There was no explaining it, no consolation but the simple fact that they had seen it coming in the stones for years-that years ago, a voice in the stones had told them the story of Firebrand, of how he would come when the stones were gone and the darkness at its closest about them.

It was the legend they chanted to soothe themselves, and it was that chant that echoed up the hidden corridor, finding its way by coincidence or evil design into the ears of the approaching Namer.

"In the country of the blind," it began, and as he heard it, he marveled at his dark and uncommon luck.

"In the country of the blind,

Where the one-eyed man is king

And the stones are eyes of gods,

Are pathways to remembering,

"There three centuries of gloom

Pass under rending, drought, and wars,

Until the Firebrand comes to us

Upon his brow a dozen stars.

"Out of his wound the stones will speak,

Will lead us from the groves of night

And with the power of life and death

Restore us to forgotten light!'

Circumstance this might have been, he told himself now, eye half-closed, reclining like a basking reptile in the damp and the darkness of the Porch of Memory, his subjects smiling about him on their tireless business. Coincidence, perhaps, that, like the Firebrand of their legends, I had been grievously, unfairly wounded. And that when their stones and their hopes were lost, I descended to them, carrying a stone and the first glimmer of hope reborn.

But if it were only circumstance, only coincidence, why then did the stone flare in the palm of my hand and strike their faces with a fierce and godly light?

And why did I refuse it at first when they bowed to me, saying, "No, good brothers, oh, no," but then consenting to wear the crown-my crown-for the Que-Tana?

And how, in the midst of my visions, could I discover the opals that over these three hundred years have come to replace the ones the Que-Tana had lost? How indeed, unless I am the prophet that the stones have told me I am?

How indeed, unless I am the Firebrand of whom they sing?

Tell me that, if you challenge my place on this throne.

Madly he looked about, his eye wide and its pupil a flashing, stellar black in the torchlight.

"Well, then," he breathed hoarsely, his people continuing at their tasks below him, as accustomed to Firebrand talking to himself as they were to the flights of tenebrals through the caverns, to the musical dripping of water and the vast silences of the black recesses beyond and below them.

"Well, then. I see no challengers."

He laughed a nervous little high-pitched laugh and squinted into the darkness, where torchlight approached and there was the sound of warriors and of triumphant return.

They carried a robed figure, bound and blindfolded. Framed by the torchlight, his wild shock of red hair tumbled in all directions, as though he had been caught somehow in a monstrous wind.

There had been no trouble finding the red-haired man, the messengers had said. Camped not a mile from the entrance, he was in a rickety house on stilts decorated with holly and paper lanterns and an odd, foul-smelling old stuffed parrot that frightened the youngest Que-Tana out of a year's growth.

Other than the simple fright of the boy, there were no wounds, no casualties. It had all been terribly easy.

If this was the man he wanted. The brother of the one with the opals.

He looked like the one in the stones-the flashing image of the cleric in the makeshift camp, high in the mountains amidst the snow. But it seemed too easy.

"Brithelm?" Firebrand asked quietly, repeating a name he had heard while wearing the crown.

The blindfold was lifted from the eyes of the red-haired man, who blinked in amazement as he looked about him.

"Oh, my!" he exclaimed. Then he looked up the cataract of stone to where Firebrand was seated, silver crown blazing on his brow.

"Oh, this is not how I pictured the afterlife!" the man announced, to the bewilderment of his captors. "I always thought it would be less gloomy, a little greener! But at least Gileandos was wrong about the whole thing, and that's gratifying beyond belief!"

He smiled foolishly at the Que-Tana assembled around him. Several of the older men stepped away from him, making the warding sign against madness. He stepped toward the closest of the warriors, extending his hand in that old, Solamnic gesture of acquaintance that Firebrand had learned to despise over the centuries.

"Brithelm Pathwarden, I am!" he announced. "And I suppose we should be friends, seeing as we'll no doubt be here for eons and all!"

The Namer stirred the fire, and its sparks rose to illumine the crags and furrows and green eyes of a nearby face. Slowly he took yet another cord of metal from the weathered hand.

"In the Bright Lands," the Namer murmured, "the young Knight had not foreseen other meetings"

We traveled much of the afternoon, snaking north over broken trails and around rubble-clogged passes, over terrain I would have imagined impassable.

Our destination was still Brithelm's camp, a little beyond the site I remembered from my former visit. For according to Shardos, my ethereal brother had settled less than a mile from the underground entrance through which these nocturnal Plainsmen were wont to come to the surface on rare occasions. Leave it to Brithelm to wade into dire circumstance. Unfortunately, it appeared that on this occasion, no fool's luck had arisen to spirit him away from danger.

It was to this entrance we traveled, guided by a blind man. I did not have time to stop and laugh at these ironies, for my brother Brithelm lay endangered somewhere below us, and who knew what the coming days would hold for him if I was not quick and resolute?

We rode in a column, sharp-eyed little Oliver at the head, leading by the reins the stocky little pied packhorse on which we had seated the old juggler. Though the young squire guided the horse, he was more on the lookout for adversaries than for directions since we steered ourselves by Shardos's dark sense, by the smell of the evergreens, and the soundless pressure the old man felt in his ears as the landscape altered, rising and dipping around us.