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I muttered into the dark of my hood. “REDEEMED AND CONTINUED.
     The past will be unchangeable. Whatever you have, it will be the truth. And whatever I
     have, it will be better.”
    *****
    Finn of the Dark Hand sat in a huge chair hewn from the cavern wall. He looked hewn from
     stone himself, a sleepless giant or a weathered monument set as a sign of warding along
     the rocky peninsular coast. His right hand was gloved in black, the reason known only to
     himself.
    Around him milled his company of bandits, rough and scarred like burned villages. They bared their knives as they watched the singers, smiling
     wickedly one to another, as though keeping a dreadful secret unto a fast-approaching hour.
    I hovered at the mouth of the cave, listening for an hour to the technically brilliant and
     lifeless songs of the bards. They claimed to play the music for its own sake, for the sake
     of the glory of song, but they all knew otherwise, for always music serves some master.
    Even Finn knew they were liars. Finn, who had held neither harp nor flute, whose poetry
     was ambush and plunder. He leaned into the eroded throne, dismissing the pearly singer
     from Kalaman, the pale lad from Palanthas and the merchant turned poet from Dargaard. Each
     gathered a heel of bread for his song and turned, grumbling, eastward toward Solamnic
     cities and the possibility of castles and shelter.
    It was night. Bats rustled in the upper regions of the cavern, and I remembered an old
     time, a winter time, a cavern and a dry rustling sound. Two last supplicants stood between
     me and the bandit: a beggar whose leg had been damaged in a field accident, and another
     bard.
    While the beggar begged and was given a loaf, and while the bard sang and received a
     crust, I waited in the shadow of the cave.
    None of them had the song. None of them. Neither bard nor minstrel nor poet nor
     troubadour. Their songs rang thinly in the cave, echoing back to them and to us, throwing
     the music into a doubling confusion.
    I had come this far, and for me there was still more to discover, more than thin music and
     mendicant rhymes. When summoned, I stepped to the light, and when the dulled eyes of the
     bandit king rested upon me, I threw back my hood.
    *****
    “Firebringer,” he rasped, and “Orestes the Torch.”
    As all the bandits hastened to be the one to slay me, to end the line and the curse before
     the approving eye of their leader, Finn raised his hand and stayed theirs.
    “No,” he rumbled. The blood of the line of Pyrrhus should not stain the floors of this
     cavern. For remember the curse. Remember the harm it might visit." One shaman, seated by the stone foot of the
     throne nodded in agreement, beads rattling as he fondled his bone necklace.
    I followed the bandit guards into the throat of the cave, to a confusing depth where all
     light had vanished except the glow of candles wedged in rocks and later only the torch
     that guided us. In a great rotunda hundreds of feet below the surface they left me, the
     last of the guards covering their tracks, candle by extinguished candle, and their
     footsteps echoed over each other until the cavern resounded of a passing, vanished army.
    I sat in a darkness most absolute. After only a moment, I heard a voice.
    The language was quiet, insinuating, weaving with the fabric of my thoughts until I could
     no longer tell, especially in this darkness, what words lay outside me and what within.
    OH, TO A WANDERING EYE ... it began, a fragment of song in the darkness.
    I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward, I hoped, the passageway. Bones clattered
     beneath my feet, rattled against rotting wood and rusted strings, striking a hollow music.
     Spinning blindly in the dark, I realized I had left father's harp behind, and knew at once
     that I could not find my way back to it.
    A second voice caught me standing stupidly in the same place, huddled in my cloak,
     expecting the fangs,