Dragonlance 16 - Dragons Of A Lost Star (21 page)

Tasslehoff rose to present the novel idea that perhaps the kender should not be sent back to die, but at this juncture Dalamar fixed Tas with a cold eye and said that in his opinion the most important thing they could do to help save the world, short of slaying the humungous dragons, was to send Tasslehoff back to die and that they would have to figure out some way to do it without the Device of Time Journeying.

Dalamar and Palin began snatching books from the shelves, paging through them, muttering and mumbling about rivers of time and Graygems and kender jumping in and mucking things up and a lot of other mind-numbing stuff. Dalamar magicked up a fire in the large fireplace, and the room that had been cold and dank, grew warm and stuffy, smelling of vellum, mildew, lamp oil, and dead roses. Since there was no longer anything of interest to see or hear, Tasslehoff’s eyes decided to close. His ears agreed with his eyes, and his mind agreed with his ears, and all of them took another brief nap, this one of his own choosing.

Tas woke to something poking him uncomfortably in the posterior. His nap had apparently not been as brief as he thought, for it was dark outside the window—so dark that the darkness had overflowed from outside and was now inside. Tasslehoff could not see a thing. Not himself, not Dalamar, and not Palin.

Tasslehoff squirmed about in the chair in order to stop whatever was sticking him in a tender region from sticking him. It was then, after he woke up a bit, that he realized the reason he couldn’t see either Palin or Dalamar was that they were no longer in the room. Or, if they were, they were playing at hide and seek, and while that was a charming and amusing game, the two of them didn’t seem the type to go in for it.

Leaving his chair, Tasslehoff fumbled his way to Dalamar’s desk, where he found the oil lamp. A few embers remained in the fireplace. Tas felt about on the desk until he discovered some paper. Hoping that the paper didn’t have a magic spell written on it or if did, it was a spell that Dalamar didn’t want anymore, Tas stuck the end of the paper in the fireplace, lit it, and lit the oil lamp.

Now that he could see, he reached into his back pocket to find out what had been poking him. Taking out the offending object, he held it to the oil lamp.

“Uh, oh!” Tas exclaimed.

“Oh, no!” he cried.

“How did you get here?” he wailed.

The thing that had been poking him was the chain from the Device of Time Journeying. Tas threw it onto the desk and reached back into his pocket. He pulled out another piece of the device, then another and another. He pulled out all the jewels, one by one. Spreading the pieces on the desk, he gazed at them sadly. He might have actually shaken his fist at them, but such a gesture would not have been worthy of a Hero of the Lance, and so we will say here that he did not.

As a Hero of the Lance, Tas knew what he should do. He should gather up all the pieces of the device in his handkerchief (make that Palin’s handkerchief) take them straightway to wherever Palin and Dalamar were, and hand them over and say, quite bravely, that he was prepared to go back and die for the world. That would be a Noble Deed, and Tasslehoff had been ready once before to do a Noble Deed. But one had to be in the proper mood for being Noble, and Tas discovered he wasn’t in that mood at all. He supposed that one also had to be in the proper mood to be stepped on by a giant, and he wasn’t in that particular mood either. After seeing the dead people roaming about aimlessly outside—especially the dead kender, who didn’t even care what they had in their pouches—Tasslehoff was in the mood to live and go on living.

He knew this was not likely to happen if Dalamar and Palin discovered that he had the magical device in his pocket, even if it was broken. Fearing that any moment Palin and Dalamar might remember they’d left him here and come back to check on him or offer him dinner, Tasslehoff hurriedly gathered up the pieces of the magical device, wrapped them in the handkerchief, and stuffed them in one of his pouches.

That was the easy part. Now came the hard part.

Far from being Noble, he was going to be Ignoble. He thought that was the right word. He was going to Escape.

Leaving by the front door was out. He had tried the windows already, and they were no help. You couldn’t even break them by heaving a rock through the glass like you could an ordinary, respectable window. Tas had heaved, and the rock had bounced off and landed on his foot, smashing his toes.

“I have to consider this logically,” Tas said to himself. It may be noted as a historical fact that this was the only time a kender ever said such a thing and only goes to show how truly dire was the situation in which he found himself. “Palin got out, but he’s a wizard, and he had to use magic to do it. However, using logic, I say to myself—if nothing but a wizard can get out can anything other than a wizard get in? If so, what and how?”

Tas thought this over. While he thought, he watched the embers glow in the fireplace. Suddenly he let out a cry and immediately clapped his hand over his mouth, afraid that Palin and Dalamar would hear and remember him.

“I’ve got it!” he whispered. “Something does get in! Air gets in! And it goes out, too. And where it goes, I can go.”

Tasslehoff kicked and stomped on the embers until they went out. Picking up the oil lamp, he walked into the fireplace and took a look around. It was a large fireplace, and he didn’t have to stoop all that much to get inside. Holding the lamp high, he peered up into the darkness. He was almost immediately forced to lower his head and blink quite frantically until he dislodged the soot that had fallen into his eyes. Once he could see again, he was rewarded by a lovely sight—the wall of the chimney was not smooth. Instead it was nubbly, wonderfully nubbly, with the ends and fronts and sides of large stones sticking out every which way.

“Why, I could climb up that wall with one leg tied behind my back,” Tasslehoff exclaimed.

This not being something he did on a regular basis, he decided that it would be far more efficient to use two legs. He couldn’t very well climb and hang onto the oil lamp, so he left that on the desk, thoughtfully blowing out the flame first so that he wouldn’t set anything on fire. Entering the chimney, he found a good foot- and handhold right off and began his climb.

He had gone only a short distance—moving slowly because he had to feel his way in the darkness and pausing occasionally to wipe gunk out of his eyes—when he heard voices coming from below. Tasslehoff froze, clinging like a spider to the wall of the chimney, afraid to move lest he send a shower of soot raining down into the fireplace. He did think, rather resentfully, that Dalamar might at least have spent some magic on a chimney sweep.

The voices were raised and heated.

“I tell you, Majere, your story makes no sense! From all we have read, you should have seen the past flow by you like a great river. In my opinion, you simply miscast the spell.”

“And I tell you, Dalamar, that while I may not have your vaunted power in magic, I did not miscast the spell. The past was not there, and it all goes wrong at the very moment Tasslehoff was supposed to die.”

“From what we have read in Raistlin’s journal, the death of the kender should be a drop in time’s vast river and should not affect time one way or the other.”

“For the fourteenth time the fact that Chaos was involved alters matters completely. The kender’s death becomes vitally important. What of this future he says he visited? A future in which everything is different?”

“Bah! You are gullible, Majere! The kender is a liar. He made it all up. Where is that blasted scroll? That should explain everything. I know it is here somewhere. Look over there in that cabinet.”

Tasslehoff was understandably annoyed to hear himself referred to as a liar. He considered dropping down and giving Dalamar and Palin both a piece of his mind but reflected that, if he did so, it would be difficult to explain why exactly he’d gone up the chimney in the first place. He kept quiet.

“It would help if I knew what I was looking for.”

“A scroll! I suppose you know a scroll when you see one.”

“Just find the damn thing!” Tasslehoff muttered. He was growing quite weary of hanging onto the wall. His hands were starting to ache, and his legs to quiver, and he feared he wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer.

“I know what a scroll looks like, but—” A pause. “Speaking of Tasslehoff, where is he? Do you know?”

“I neither know nor care.”

“When we left, he was asleep in the chair.”

“Then he’s probably gone to bed, or he’s attempting to pick the lock of the door to the laboratory again.”

“Still, don’t you think we should—”

“Found it! This is it!” The sound of paper being unrolled.
“A Treatise on Time Journeying Dealing Specifically with the Unaccept-ability of Permitting Any Member of the Graygem Races to Journey Back in Time Due to the Unpredictability of Their Actions and How This Might Affect Not Only the Past but the Future.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Marwort.”

“Marwort! Who termed himself Marwort the Illustrious? The Kingpriest’s pet wizard? Everyone knows that when he wrote about the magic, the Kingpriest guided his hand. Of what use is this? You can’t believe a word that traitor says.”

“So the history of our Order has recorded, and therefore no one studies him. But I have often found what he has to say interesting—if one reads between the lines. For example, notice this paragraph. The third one down.”

Tasslehoff’s stiff fingers began to slip. He gulped and readjusted his hold on the stones and wished Palin and Dalamar and Marwort gone with all his heart and soul.

“I can’t read by this light,” Palin said. “My eyes are not what they used to be. And the fire has gone out.”

“I could light the fire again,” Dalamar offered.

Tasslehoff nearly lost his grip on the stones.

“No,” said Palin. “I find this room depressing. Let us take it back where we can be comfortable.”

They doused the light, leaving Tas in darkness. He heaved a sigh of relief. When he heard the door close, he began his climb once again.

He was not a young, agile kender anymore, and he soon found that climbing chimneys in the dark was wearing work. Fortunately, he had reached a point in the chimney where the walls started to narrow, so that at least he could lean his back against one wall while keeping himself from slipping by planting his feet firmly against the wall opposite.

He was hot and tired. He had grime in his eyes and soot up his nose and his mouth. His legs were scraped, his fingers rubbed raw, his clothes ripped and torn. He was bored of being in the dark, bored of the stones, bored of the whole business—and he didn’t appear to be any closer to the way out than when he’d started.

“I really don’t see why it is necessary to have this much chimney,” Tasslehoff muttered, cursing the Tower’s builder with every grimy foothold.

Just when he thought that his hands were going to refuse to clamp down on another stone and that his legs were going to drop off and fall to the bottom, something filled his nose, and for a change it wasn’t soot.

“Fresh air!” Tasslehoff breathed deeply, and his spirits revived.

The whiff of fresh air wafting down from above lent strength to Tasslehoff’s legs and banished the aches from his fingers. Peering upward in hope of seeing stars or maybe the sun—for he had the notion that he’d been climbing for the past six months or so— he was disappointed to see only more darkness. He’d had darkness enough to last a lifetime, maybe even two lifetimes. However, the air was fresh, and that meant outside air, so he clambered upward with renewed vigor.

At length, as all things must do, good or otherwise, the chimney came to an end.

The opening was covered with an iron grate to keep birds and squirrels and other undesirables from nesting in the chimney shaft. After what Tasslehoff had already been through, an iron grate was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. He gave it an experimental shove, not expecting anything to come of it. Luck was with him, however. The bolts holding the grate in place had long since rusted away—probably sometime prior to the First Cataclysm—and at the kender’s enthusiastic push the gate popped off.

Tasslehoff was unprepared for its sudden departure. He made a desperate grab but missed, and the grate went sailing into the air. The kender froze again, squinched shut his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and waited for the grate to strike the ground at the bottom with what would undoubtedly be a clang loud enough to wake any of the dead who happened to be snoozing at the moment.

He waited and waited and kept on waiting. Considering the amount of chimney he’d had to climb, he supposed it must be a couple of hundred miles to the bottom of the Tower, but, after awhile, even he was forced to admit that if the grate had been going to clang it would have done so by now. He poked his head up out of the hole and was immediately struck in the face by the end of a tree branch, while the sharp pungent smell of cypress cleaned the soot from his nostrils.

He shoved aside the tree branch and looked around to get his bearings. The strange and unfamiliar moon of this strange and unfamiliar Krynn was very bright this night, and Tasslehoff was at last able to see something, although that something was only more tree branches. Tree branches to the left of him, tree branches to the right. Tree branches up, and tree branches down. Tree branches as far as the eye could see. He looked over the edge of the chimney and found the grate, perched in a branch about six feet below him.

Tasslehoff tried to determine how far he was from the ground, but the branches were in the way. He looked to the side and located the top of one of the Tower’s two broken minarets. The top was about level with him. That gave him some idea of how far he had climbed and, more importantly, how far the ground was below.

That was not a problem, however, for here were all these handy trees.

Tasslehoff pulled himself out of the chimney. Finding a sturdy limb, he crawled carefully out on it, testing his weight as he went. The limb was strong and didn’t so much as creak. After chimney climbing, tree climbing was simple. Tasslehoff shinnied down the trunk, lowered himself from limb to friendly and supportive limb, and finally, as he gave a sigh of exultation and relief, his feet touched firm and solid ground.

Down here, the moonlight was not very bright, hardly filtering through the thick leaves at all. Tas could make out the Tower but only because it was a black, hulking blot amongst the trees. He could see, very far up, a patch of light and figured that must be the window in Dalamar’s private chamber.

“I’ve made it this far, but I’m not out of the woods yet,” he said to himself. “Dalamar told Palin we were near Solanthus. I recall someone saying something about the Solamnic Knights having a headquarters at Solanthus, so that seems like a good place to go to find out what’s become of Gerard. He may be dull, and he certainly is ugly, and he doesn’t like kender, but he is a Solamnic Knight, and one thing you can say about Solamnic Knights is that they aren’t the type to send a fellow back in time to be stepped on. I’ll find Gerard and explain everything to him, and I’m sure he’ll be on my side.”

Tasslehoff remembered suddenly that the last time he’d seen Gerard, the Knight had been surrounded by Dark Knights firing arrows at him. Tas was rather downhearted at this thought, but then it occurred to him that Solamnic Knights were plentiful and if one was dead, you could always find another.

The question now was, how to find his way out of the forest.

All this time he’d been on the ground, the dead were flowing around him like fog with eyes and mouths and hands and feet, moving past him and over him, but he hadn’t really taken any notice, he’d been too busy thinking. He noticed now. Although being surrounded by dead people with their sad faces and their hands that plucked at one of his pouches wasn’t the most comfortable experience in the world, he thought perhaps they might make up for being so extremely cold and creepy by providing him with directions.

“I say, excuse me, sir— Madam, excuse me— Hobgoblin, old chum, could you tell me— I beg your pardon, but that’s my pouch. Hey, kid, if I give you a copper would you show— Kender! Fellow kender! I need to find a way to reach— Drat,” Tasslehoff said after several moments spent in a futile attempt to converse with the dead. “They don’t seem to see me. They look right through me. I’d ask Caramon, but just when he might be useful, he isn’t around. I don’t mean to be insulting,” he added in irritable tones, trying without success to find a path through the cypress trees that pressed thick around him, “but there really are a lot of you dead people! Far more than is necessary.”

He continued searching for a path—any sort of a path— but without much luck. Walking in the dark was difficult, although the dead were lit with a soft white light that Tas thought was interesting at first but after awhile, seeing that the dead looked very lost, sorrowful, and terrified, he decided that darkness—any darkness—would be preferable.

At least, he could put some distance between himself and Palin and Dalamar. If he, a kender who was never lost, was lost in these trees, he had no doubt that a mere human and a dark elf—wizards though they might be—would be just as lost and that by losing himself he was also losing them.

He kept going, bashing into trees and knocking his head against low branches, until he took a nasty tumble over a tree root and fell down onto a bed of dead cypress needles. The needles were sweet-smelling, at least, and they were decently dead—all brown and crispy—not like some other dead he could mention.

His legs were pleased that he wasrf’t using them anymore. The brown needles were comfortable, after you got used to them sticking you in various places, and, all in all, Tasslehoff decided that since he was down here he might as well take this opportunity to rest.

He crawled to the base of the tree trunk, settled himself as comfortably as possible, pillowing his head on a bed of soft green moss. It was not surprising, therefore, that the last thing he thought of, as he was drifting off to sleep, was his father.

Not that his father was moss-covered.

It was his father telling him, “Moss always grows on the side of a tree facing—”

Facing. . .

Tas closed his eyes.

Now, if he could just remember what direction . . .

“North,” he said and woke himself up.

Realizing that he now could tell what direction he was traveling, he was about to roll over and go back to sleep when he looked up and saw one of the ghosts standing over him, staring down at him.

The ghost was that of a kender, a kender who appeared vaguely familiar to Tas, but then most kender appear familiar to their fellow kender since the odds are quite likely that in all their ambulations, they must have run into each other sometime.

“Now, look,” said Tasslehoff, sitting up. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have spent most of the day escaping from the Tower of High Sorcery, and—as I am certain you know—escaping from sorcerous towers makes a fellow extremely tired. So if you don’t mind, I’m just going to go to sleep.”

Tas shut his eyes, but he had the feeling the ghost of the kender was still there, still looking down at him. Not only that, but Tas continued to see the ghost of the kender on the backs of his eyelids, and the more he thought about it the more he was quite certain he had definitely met that kender somewhere before.

The kender was quite a handsome fellow with a taste in clothes that others might have considered garish and outlandish but that Tasslehoff considered charming. The kender was festooned with pouches, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the expression on the kender’s face—sad, lost, alone, seeking.

A cold chill shivered through Tasslehoff. Not a thrilling, excited chill, like you feel when you’re about to pull the glittering ring off the bony finger of a skeleton and the finger twitches! This was a nasty, sickening kind of chill that scrunches up the stomach and squeezes the lungs, making it hard to breathe. Tas thought he would open his eyes, then he thought he wouldn’t. He squinched them shut very hard so they wouldn’t open by themselves and curled into an even tighter ball. He knew where he had seen that kender before.

“Go away,” he said softly. “Please.”

He knew quite well, though he couldn’t see, that the ghost hadn’t gone away.

“Go away, go away, go away!” Tas cried frantically, and when that didn’t work, he opened his eyes and jumped to his feet and yelled angrily at the ghost, “Go away!”

The ghost stood staring at Tasslehoff.

Tasslehoff stood staring at himself.

“Tell me,” Tas said, his voice quivering, “why are you here? What do you want? Are you . . . are you mad because I’m not dead yet?”

The ghost of himself said nothing. It stared at Tas a little longer, then turned and walked away, not as if it wanted to but because it couldn’t help itself. Tas watched his own ghost join a milling throng of other restless spirits. He watched until he could no longer distinguish his ghost from any other.

Tears stung his eyes. Panic seized him. He turned and ran as he had never run before. He ran and ran, not looking where he was going, smashing into bushes, caroming off tree trunks, falling down, getting up, running some more, running and running until he fell down and couldn’t get up because his legs wouldn’t work anymore.

Exhausted, frightened, horrified, Tasslehoff did something he had never done.

He wept for himself.