Dragonlance 16 - Dragons Of A Lost Star (20 page)

16

A Bored Kender

Palin placed the comatose kender in one of the shabby, dust-covered and mildewed chairs that stood at the far end of the library, a portion that was in shadow. Affecting to be settling Tas, Palin took the opportunity to look closely at Dalamar, who remained seated behind the desk, his head bowed into his hands.

Palin had seen the elf only briefly on first arriving. He had been shocked then at the ruinous alteration in the features of the once handsome and vain elven wizard: the gray-streaked black hair, the wasted features, the thin hands with their branching blue veins like rivers drawn on a map, rivers of blood, rivers of souls. And this, their master . . . Master of the Tower.

Struck by a new thought, Palin walked over to the window and looked down into the forest below, where the dead flowed still and silent among the boles of the cypress trees.

“The wizard-lock on the door below,” Palin said abruptly. “It was not meant to keep us in, was it?”

No answer came from Dalamar. Palin was left to answer himself. “It was meant to keep them out. If that is true, you might want to replace it.”

Dalamar, a grim look on his face, left the room. He returned long moments later. Palin had not moved. Dalamar came to stand beside him, looked into the mist of swirling souls.

“They gather around you,” Dalamar said softly. “Their grave-cold hands clasp you. Their ice lips press against your flesh. Their chill arms embrace you, dead fingers clutch at you. You know!”

“Yes,” said Palin. “I know.” He shook off the remembered horror. “You can’t leave, either.”

“My body cannot leave,” Dalamar corrected. “My spirit is free to roam. When I depart, I must always come back.” He shrugged. “What is it the
Shalafi
used to say? ‘Even wizards must suffer.’ There is always a price.” Dalamar lowered his gaze to Palin’s broken fingers. “Isn’t there?”

Palin thrust his hands into the sleeves of his robes. “Where has your spirit been?”

“Traveling Ansalon, investigating this fantastical time-traveling story of yours,” Dalamar replied.

“Story?
I
told you no story,” Palin returned crisply. “I haven’t spoken one word to you. You’ve been to see Jenna.
She
was the one who told you. And she said that she hadn’t seen you in years.”

“She did not lie, Majere, if that’s what you’re insinuating, although I admit she did not tell you all the truth. She has not seen me, at least not my physical form. She has heard my voice, and that only recently. I arranged a meeting with her after the strange storm that swept over all Ansalon in a single night.”

“I asked her if she knew where to find you.”

“Again, she told you the truth. She does not know where to find me. I did not tell her. She has never been here. No one has been here. You are the first, and believe me”—Dalamar’s brows constricted—”if you had not been in such dire straits, you would not be here now. I do not pine for company,” he added with a dark glance.

Palin was silent, uncertain whether to believe him or not.

“For mercy’s sake, don’t sulk, Majere,” Dalamar said, willfully misinterpreting Palin’s silence. “It’s undignified for a man of your age. How old are you anyway? Sixty, seventy, a hundred? I can never tell with humans. You look ancient enough to me. As for Jenna ‘betraying’ your confidence, it is well for you and the kender that she did, else I would have not taken an interest in you, and you would now be in Beryl’s tender care.”

“Do not try to taunt me by remarking on the fact that I am old,” Palin said calmly. “I know I have aged. The process is natural in humans. In elves, it is not. Look in a mirror, Dalamar. If the years have taken a toll on me, they have taken a far more terrible toll on you. As for pride”—Palin shrugged in his turn—”I lost that a long time ago. It is hard to remain proud when you can no longer summon magic enough to heat my morning tea. I think you have reason to know that.”

“Perhaps I do,” Dalamar replied. “I know that I have changed. The battle I fought with Chaos stole hundreds of years from me, yet I could live with that. I was victorious, after all. Victor and loser, all at the same time. I won the war and was defeated by what came after. The loss of the magic.

“I risked my life for the sake of the magic,” Dalamar continued, his voice low and hollow. “I would have given my life for the sake of the magic. What happened? The magic departed. The gods left. They left me bereft, powerless, helpless. They left me— ordinary!”

Dalamar breathed shallowly. “All that I gave up for the magic—my homeland, my nation, my people . . . I used to consider I had made a fair trade. My sacrifice—and it was a wrenching sacrifice, though only another elf would understand—had been rewarded. But the reward was gone, and I was left with nothing. Nothing. And everyone knew it.

“It was then I began to hear rumors—rumors that Khellen-dros the Blue was going to seize my Tower, rumors that the Dark Knights were going to attack it. My Tower!” Dalamar gave a vicious snarl. His thin fist clenched. Then, his hand relaxed, and he gave a grating laugh.

“I tell you, Majere, gully dwarves could have taken over my Tower, and I could have done nothing to stop them. I had once been the most powerful wizard in Ansalon, and now, as you said, I could not so much as boil water.”

“You were not alone.” Palin was unsympathetic. “All of us were affected the same way.”

“No, you weren’t,” Dalamar retorted passionately. “You could not be. You had not sacrificed as I had sacrificed. You had your father and mother. You had a wife and children.”

“Jenna loved you—” Palin began.

“Did she?” Dalamar grimaced. “Sometimes I think we only used each other. She could not understand me either. She was like you, with her damnable human hope and optimism. Why are you humans like that? Why do you go on hoping when it is obvious that all hope is lost? I could not stomach her platitudes. We quarreled. She left, and I was glad to see her leave. I had no need of her. I had no need of anyone. It was up to me to protect my Tower from those great, bloated wyrms, and I did what I had to do. The only way to save the Tower was to appear to destroy it. And I did so. My plan worked. No one knows the Tower is here. No one will, unless I want it to be found.”

“Moving the Tower must have taken an immense amount of magical power—a bit more than would be required to boil water,” Palin observed. “You must have had some of the old magic left to you.”

“No, I assure you, I did not,” Dalamar said, his passion cooling. “I was as barren as you.”

He gave Palin a sharp and meaningful glance. “Like you, I understood magic was in the world, if one knew where to look for it.”

Palin avoided Dalamar’s intense gaze. “I do not know what you’re implying. I discovered the wild magic—”

“Not alone. You had help. I know, because I had the same help. A strange personage known as the Shadow Sorcerer.”

“Yes!” Palin was astonished. “Hooded and cloaked in gray. A voice that was as soft as shadow, might have belonged to either man or woman.”

“You never saw a face—”

“But I did,” Palin protested. “In that last terrible battle, I saw she was a woman. She was an agent of the dragon Malystryx—”

“Indeed?” Dalamar lifted an eyebrow. “In my last ‘terrible’ battle, I saw that the Shadow Sorcerer was a man, an agent for the dragon Khellendros who, according to my sources, had supposedly left this world in search of the soul of his late master, that demon-witch Kitiara.”

“The Shadow Sorcerer taught you wild magic?”

“No,” Dalamar replied. “The Shadow Sorcerer taught me death magic. Necromancy.”

Palin looked back out the window to the roaming spirits. He looked around the shabby room with its books of magic that were so many ghosts, lined up on the shelves. He looked at the elf, who was thin and wasted, like a gnawed bone. “What went wrong?” he asked at last.

“I was duped,” Dalamar returned. “I was given to believe I was master of the dead. Too late, I discovered I was not the master. I was the prisoner. A prisoner of my own ambition, my own lust for power.

“It is not easy for me to say these things about myself, Majere,” Dalamar added. “It is especially hard for me to say them to you, the darling child of magic. Oh, yes. I knew. You were the gifted one, beloved of Solinari, beloved of your Uncle Raistlin. You would have been one of the great archmages of all time. I saw that. Was I jealous? A little. More than a little. Especially of Raistlin’s care for you. You wouldn’t think I would want that, would you? That I would hunger for his approval, his notice. But I did.”

“All this time,” said Palin, his gaze returning to the trapped souls, “I have been jealous of you.”

“The silence of the empty Tower twined around them.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Palin said at last, almost loathe to break that binding silence. “To ask you about the Device of Time Journeying—”

“Rather late for that now,” Dalamar interrupted, his tone caustic. “Since you destroyed it.”

“I did what I had to do,” Palin returned, stating it as fact, not apology. “I had to save Tasslehoff. If he dies in a time that is not his own, our time and all in it will end.”

“Good riddance.” Dalamar gave a wave of his hand, walked back to his desk. He walked slowly, his shoulders stooped and rounded. “Oblivion would be welcome.”

“If you truly thought that you would be dead by now,” Palin returned.

“No,” said Dalamar, stopping to glance out another window. “No, I said oblivion. Not death.” He returned to his desk, sank down into the chair. “You could leave. You have the magical earring that would carry you through the portals of magic back to your home. The earring will work here. The dead cannot interfere.”

“The magic wouldn’t carry Tasslehoff,” Palin pointed out, “and I won’t leave without him.”

Dalamar regarded the slumbering kender with a speculative, thoughtful gaze. “He is not the key,” he said musingly, “but perhaps he is the picklock.”

Tasslehoff was bored.

Everyone on Krynn either knows, or should know, how dangerous a bored kender can be. Palin and Dalamar both knew, but unfortunately they both forgot. Their combined memory lapse is perhaps understandable, given their preoccupation with trying to find the answers to their innumerable questions. What was worse, not only did they forget that a bored kender is a dangerous kender, they forgot the kender completely. And that is well nigh inexcusable.

The reunion of these old friends had gotten off to a pretty good start, at least as far as Tas was concerned. He had been awakened from his unexpected nap in order to explain his role in the important events that had transpired of late. Perching on the edge of Dalamar’s desk and kicking his heels against the wood— until Dalamar curtly told him to stop—Tasslehoff gleefully joined in the conversation.

He found this entertaining for a time. Palin described their visit to Laurana in Qualinesti, his discovery that Tasslehoff was really Tasslehoff and the revelation about the Device of Time Journeying, and his subsequent decision to travel back in time to try to find the other time Tasslehoff had told him about. Since Tasslehoff had been intimately involved in all this, he was called upon to provide certain details, which he was happy to do.

He would have been more happy had he been allowed to tell his complete tale without interruption, but Dalamar said he didn’t have time to hear it. Having always been told when he was a small kender that one can’t have everything (he had always wondered why one couldn’t have everything but had at last arrived at the conclusion that his pouches weren’t big enough to hold it all), Tas had to be content with telling the abbreviated version.

After he had described how he had come to Caramon’s first funeral and found Dalamar head of the Black Robes, Palin head of the White Robes, and Silvanoshei king of the united elven nations, and the world mostly at peace and there were no— repeat—no humungous dragons running about killing kender in Kendermore, Tasslehoff was told that his observations were no longer required. In other words, he was supposed to go sit in a chair, keep still, and answer questions only when he was asked.

Going back to the chair that stood in a shadowy corner, Tasslehoff listened to Palin telling about how he had used the Device of Time Journeying to go back into the past, only to find that there wasn’t a past. That was interesting, because Tasslehoff had been there to see that happen, and he could have provided eyewitness testimony if anyone had asked him, which no one did. When he volunteered, he was told to be quiet.

Then came the part where Palin said how the one thing he knew for a fact was that Tasslehoff should have died by being squished by Chaos and that Tasslehoff had not died, thus implying that everything from humungous dragons to the lost gods was all Tasslehoff’s fault.

Palin described how he—Palin—had told him—Tasslehoff— that he had to use the Device of Time Journeying to return to die and that Tasslehoff had most strongly and—logically, Tas felt compelled to point out—refused to do this. Palin related how Tasslehoff had fled to the citadel to seek Goldmoon’s protection by telling Goldmoon that Palin was trying to murder him. How Palin had arrived to say that, no, he was not and found Gold-rnoon growing younger, not older. That caused the conversation to take a bit of a detour, but they soon—too soon, as far as Tas was concerned—returned to the main highway.

Palin told Dalamar that Tasslehoff had finally come to the conclusion that going back in time was the only honorable thing to do—and here Palin most generously praised the kender for his courage. Then Palin explained that before Tas could go back, the dead had broken the Device of Time Journeying and they had been attacked by draconians. Palin had been forced to use the pieces of the device to fend off the draconians, and now pieces of the device were scattered over most of the Hedge Maze, and how were they going to send the kender back to die?