Riverwind p2-1

by Paul B. Thompson

“Oh?” Thouriss said.

  “I am well over two hundred years old,” she said.

  “Extraordinary,” said the reptilian commander. “How do you explain your youthful appearance?”

  “There are many like me in my country. We age, but we never grow up.”

  Now Krago was very alert. He leaned far over the table, to get closer to the elf girl. “Arrested development? I would like to hear more of this.”

  “Krago is deeply interested in such matters,” interjected Thouriss. “Growth and aging are his prime areas of study.”

  “Ahem.” Catchflea pointedly cleared his throat. “What is to become of us?”

  “I haven't decided,” Thouriss said. He scratched one of his metallic fingernails on his silver plate. The resulting screech set Riverwind's teeth on edge.

  “We are merely travelers,” Riverwind said. “We only want to go our own way.”

  “I will decide,” Thouriss said with sudden irritation. “Do not vex me. It does not serve your cause.”

  “You have no right to keep us here. We are free people.” Thouriss smashed a fist on the table. A candlestick toppled and rolled off onto the ground. “I have a right to do anything I please! I command here!” Krago coughed into his water glass. Thouriss stood up in irritation. “Go back to your cell until I send for you. And when I do, you will not know if I am going to free you or have you beheaded!”

  He growled an order in a harsh guttural tongue, and the guards surrounded the table. Riverwind, Catchflea, and Di An went quietly with them.

  Krago rose and circled behind Thouriss. He touched a cool hand to the back of the commander's heavily muscled neck. “Your blood is racing,” the cleric said soothingly. “You lost your temper for no good reason.”

  “I know. I know.” Thouriss breathed fast through his narrow nostrils.

  “The barbarian was goading you, and you did what he wanted. That is bad, Thouriss. A leader must remain cool under stress.”

  “I know!” Thouriss smote the tabletop again with his fist.

  The thick wood cracked and a sliver pierced the tablecloth, embedding itself in his hand. He held the injured hand up, watching the greenish blood well out of the tiny wound.

  “Krago,” he whimpered, “take it out!”

  “All right, come to my chamber.”

  The powerful commander trailed after the smaller, less imposing human, cradling his injured hand. “I don't feel like a leader. So many people know so much more than I do,” said Thouriss.

  The cleric resumed walking. “That's only natural. How old are you?”

  The creature counted on his fingers. “Four, no five.”

  “Five months old,” Krago said evenly. “Remarkable. A human at five months is still a mewling thing, unable to walk or talk. In a year, you'll be wiser and more powerful than any draconian ever created.”

  In Krago's study, Thouriss held still as the human plucked the splinter out with a pair of forceps. Thouriss put the wound to his lips and licked the few drops of blood away.

  “Does your blood taste like mine?” he asked ingenuously.

  Krago dropped the forceps in a drawer. “I don't know. I doubt it.”

  “Because you are human and I am not,” Thouriss said. “I could kill the tall human and taste his.”

  “No, that would be frivolous. Besides, civilized creatures don't eat each other,” said Krago.

  “Why?”

  “It's not polite.” With a yawn, Krago reached for a thick volume on his shelf and gave it to Thouriss. “Here is a history of the Empire of Ergoth. Read this, and you'll see how civilized beings behave.”

  Thouriss eyed the book distastefully. “I am a warrior. I don't like to read.”

  “But you must try if you are to grow wiser. And soon you'll have a companion, someone to talk to about everything you learn. No longer will you be alone.”

  Thouriss's slit eyes widened. “Tell me her name again?”

  “Lyrexis. Your mate's name will be Lyrexis.'

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cibbabar

  “I have an idea that our captor is a child,” Riverwind noted. Neither the old man nor the elf girl understood. “He has the mind and moods of a child. Krago is some kind of mentor.”

  “Ah!” Catchflea said. “I begin to see!”

  “I don't,” Di An complained.

  “The reason Thouriss acts the way he does-asking questions about ordinary things, growing angry when questioned; these are the reactions of a child, yes?”

  “If you say so. But what does it mean?”

  Riverwind surveyed their barren cell. The torchlight from outside was fitful at best. “I'm not sure. Something strange is going on in this place. The lizard folk and their goblin soldiers are not here to build homes and grow crops. But what is their purpose?” Riverwind sat down with his back to the wall. “Catchflea, do you have your acorns?”

  “Yes, the guards didn't take them.”

  “Consult them. See if you can discover what's brewing here.”

  The old man performed his ritual. He shook the gourd and dumped the nuts on the dusty stone floor. “Ha!”

  Di An peered over Catchflea's shoulder. “What do you see?”

  The old man's face was clouded with strain. “Darkness. Death. The acorns show death marching across the land.”

  Riverwind leaned forward. “Our deaths? “

  “I'm not certain.” The soothsayer peered closely at the acorns, touching them with one finger.

  Riverwind said. “Ask about Krago and his purpose.”

  Round and round went the acorns in the gourd. “Ha!” Catchflea exclaimed. He perused the formation of the nuts. “I do not understand,” he said, frowning. “Very strange!”

  “What?”

  “Here it calls him midwife. Why should it say that?”

  “A midwife assists at a birth,” Di An offered.

  “This one shows him standing in darkness with liquid silver beads running from his cupped hands.”

  “Quicksilver,” Di An suggested.

  “And this! This is the strangest answer of all.” To Riverwind it was just an acorn, lying almost vertically on its knobby cap. “A seed planted in blood. That's what I see. A seed planted in blood.”

  The three huddled together as the cold from the bare stone floor seeped through their clothes. No one could make much sense of Catchflea's augury. They passed a few moments, each with his own thoughts. Riverwind finally said, “We must stop them.”

  “How can we? They are many and strong,” said Di An.

  “I don't know. But if we don't, the spreading darkness and death Catchflea saw will surely be visited on our homes and families.”

  “It seems a certainty,” the old man said, his voice pained.

  “Perhaps we can enlist the Aghar in our cause…”

  The cell door flew open without preamble. Two goblins bulked large in the opening. “Come with us, girl,” said one.

  Di An clutched Riverwind's arm. “What do you want with me?”

  “Master Krago wants to speak with you.”

  “I don't want to go!” she hissed in the plainsman's ear.

  Riverwind laid his hand over hers. “Be brave,” he said.

  “Come, girl,” one of the goblins rumbled.

  Di An walked slowly to the door. The guards bore one feeble lantern. Di An cast a glance at the pale faces of her friends.

  “Good-bye, giant. And you, too, old giant,” she said, her voice carrying finality.

  Di An was taken to the ruined palace, but not through the columned facade where they'd first met Thouriss. Her guards took her nearly to the base of the East Falls. There, amid the tumult and the spray, she spied a door in the palace wall, artfully painted to resemble a crack in the stone blocks. The goblins pushed her into the opening and took up positions outside.

  It was close and warm inside, but Di An still shivered. She was in a dark foyer. Ahead, a warm orange light cut across the shallow corridor. She walked slo
wly toward the light.

  The place smelled strongly of snakes. She soon saw why: the corridor was lined with a series of open-ended cells, which a small contingent of lizard men occupied. It was supper time for them. Folding leather tables groaned under the weight of deer haunches, sides of beef and pork, and whole chickens. The lizard men ate their meat raw, with much cracking of bones and tearing of pale, bloodless flesh. Di An hurried by them. A slit eye or two glanced her way, but mostly they ignored her.

  The passage ended on a right turn. Water trickled down the wall, leaking in from the waterfall outside. Di An quickened her pace. Before she knew it, she was running, not knowing where she was going or why she ran. There was a new smell in the air-a familiar one. Hot metal.

  The corridor abruptly ended where the way was blocked by a massive fill of loose rock and broken stone. To the right was a narrow door, a strip of carpet nailed over it. Di An cautiously drew the carpet aside.

  “Come in,” Krago said. He was sitting in a heavy wooden chair, books and parchments strewn around him. At his left, a furnace gave off a steady, dull roar. A gang of gully dwarves labored over it, feeding coal to the fire and pumping large leather bellows. Other Aghar pounded pestles in a giant mortar. Red dust clung to their faces and hands. Two dumpy females scooped up red rocks and tossed them in the mortar. Krago was refining cinnabar.

  “Come over here,” the human said. Di An approached. The room was divided by a high bookcase, fully seven feet tall and at least thirty feet long. The shelves were crammed with books, scrolls, lumps of stone, beakers, vials, pots, and retorts.

  In the near corner stood a glazed stone vat. As Di An crossed over to Krago's chair, a squat gully dwarf waddled in front of her. The gully dwarf carried a pot brimming with liquid silver on his head. He climbed a short ladder set beside the vat and emptied the quicksilver into it. From the sound it made, Di An guessed the vat was almost full.

  “You are extracting quicksilver,” she said.

  “Eh, yes, I am. Though I'm down to the last of my ore. I need at least a hundredweight more.” Krago scribbled something on a vellum page with a quill. He put down the quill. “Come this way.”

  The bookcase turned at right angles, making a smaller private area off the main room. The bookcase also enclosed a sizable area. Di An wondered what went on behind the wooden wall.

  “Here we are. Sit.” Di An perched on a folding stool. Krago dropped onto a hard-looking frame bed. He focused his attention on the elf girl, shutting out the sounds from the furnace area.

  “I'm very interested in this condition of yours,” the cleric began. “You really haven't aged outwardly since you were, what, twelve? Thirteen?”

  “By human terms, yes,” Di An said.

  “And this happens to others in your country?”

  “More and more often.”

  “Interesting.” Krago still believed Di An's homeland to be Silvanesti. “Do the wise men of your country know why this condition occurs?” he asked, leaning toward her and resting his hands on his knees.

  “It is a matter of dispute,” she replied. “The commonest answer is that smoke and fumes from our foundries collect in the-” She started to say “cave” and checked herself. “In the air and affect our mothers when they are with child.”

  “Metallic vapors poisoning the unborn,” Krago mused, nodding. “This might have some bearing on my own experiments. Hmm.” He searched for a pen and something to write on. “What sort of metals do your people work?” asked Krago, rummaging through his shabby robe.

  “All kinds. Iron, copper, lead, silver, gold, tin.”

  “Not quicksilver?” He paused in his probings.

  “There is little use for it. Besides, it is too dangerous to mine,” she said. She thought about the gully dwarves covered in dust. “Haven't you seen the sickness in the gullies?”

  “Oh, I don't pay much attention to them. Thouriss handles the workers. I merely choose the tasks they are to do.”

  Krago seemed mild enough, so Di An essayed a question of her own. “What are you using all the quicksilver for? Are you minting gold?”

  He laughed. “Nothing so mundane! No, the liquid metal is essential for my work, that's all. But to return to you; this perpetual youth of yours, this is a valuable thing.”

  “I call it a curse.”

  Krago's brows went up. “Why?”

  She looked away from him. “To remain a child by size and temperament? Never to grow? Never to know the love of a mate?” Her gaze came back to him. “I call it a curse.”

  “Many humans would give much to live for hundreds of years, even in the body of a child,” Krago said. “So much time for research. Time to see the fruition of decades of work.” His eyes were distant.

  “Empty time,” she said. “Empty decades.”

  He looked her up and down. “There are probably cures for your condition.”

  Her eyes widened. “Cures? Would you have such a cure?”

  Krago tapped the side of his face with a finger and frowned at her in concentration. “An impurity of the blood keeps you in this state, I believe. I do have potions that can cleanse the blood.” He turned and regarded the shelves that formed the walls of his sleeping quarters. Mumbling to himself, he went to a section near Di An's stool and poked about in the vials and bottles.

  “There was something here-” he said. Bottles rocked and rattled as he rummaged through them. “Ah, this.” He lifted a yellowed glass bottle from the rear of the shelf and brushed dust and grime from it. “Four drops of this, taken when the Silver Moon is ascendant, should clear the metallic impurity,” he said. “It would be a fascinating experiment.” He put the bottle back on a lower shelf and looked at Di An. “Though I fail to see why you want to grow old and die.”

  Di An stared at the bottle. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be an adult. So many times in her two centuries of life she had cursed her smallness, her child's body. Since meeting the plainsmen, her desire to be an adult had increased. Would Riverwind care differently for her if she were truly a woman?

  A crash rose from the corner where the gully dwarves were working the furnace. The ore-scoopers had dumped a load of cinnabar over one of the pestle pounders, and the offended party was chasing the scoopers around, trying to brain them with the massive marble pestle. Despite the looks of outrage, it was an eerily silent fracas. For the gully dwarves did not utter a sound.

  “How do you keep them so quiet?” Di An asked. “I thought they talked all the time.”

  “Thouriss had their tongues cut out, so they couldn't talk of what they see,” Krago explained casually. “I must attend to them.”

  He left her sitting on the stool and went off to calm the gully dwarves. Di An pitied the unfortunate gully dwarves, but her attention had been captured by the yellow bottle on the shelf. She couldn't take her eyes off it. Should she take it now? She knew nothing about the moons of Krynn and their places in the sky. Would Krago actually help her?

  She glanced over her shoulder. Krago was embroiled in an argument with the Aghar. They mimed their woes to him as he urged them to get back to work. Di An slipped off the stool and snatched the bottle. She pulled the cork with her teeth and measured four drops into the palm of her hand. She licked the oily liquid off her palm and replaced the cork.

  She set the bottle back in its place on the shelf. Di An's tongue was numb where the potion had touched it. The numbness spread down her throat and across her jaws. Her eyes watered. A ringing started in her ears. Medicine wasn't supposed to hurt you-merciful gods, she'd poisoned herself!

  “No, no!” Krago burst out. “Put the ore in the mortar!”

  The elf girl staggered to her feet. Water-she had to have water. She wandered down the length of the bookshelf, searching through tearing eyes for a life-saving drink. The books and shelf swam before her eyes. Heat seemed to roar through her. She gasped for air.

  A stick of wood stuck out of the shelf, right at Di An's face level. She grasped t
he stick blindly to keep herself from falling. It swung down. With a clank, a section of bookcase swung inward. Oddly patterned light flooded over her. Without thinking, Di An had opened a secret door into a hidden portion of the chamber. Hoping that there was water in there, she entered. Dimly, Di An heard Krago shout behind her as she walked through the portal.

  It was very bright, this place, but the heat was less intense. Di An stumbled over a rise in the floor and went down on her hands and knees. She must have remained like this for a while, for the next thing she knew, Krago was there, pulling her to her feet.

  “What are you doing in here?” he was shouting at her. He peered closely at her white, strained face. “Did you take the potion?” Di An nodded dazedly. “Stupid girl! The time was not quite right. Who knows what the effect on you might be?”

  The glare lessened, and Di An realized it was an effect of the potion rather than the inner room itself. She was leaning against the inside of the wooden bookcase. Stomach cramps sliced through her slight body. She gasped and bent over. Then, Krago's hand was on her shoulder.

  “Drink this,” he said.

  She straightened and found he was holding a slim glass vial out to her. She didn't care what it was, as long as it made her feel better.

  It did. It halted her pain. The details of the room leaped into clarity, and the ringing in her head stopped. Di An looked past Krago and saw that the room was filled with all sorts of strange apparatus. Magic circles were drawn on the wall; sigils and glyphs of obscure purpose covered the stone floor. A double row of alembics, pelicans, and distilling retorts lined the walls. And in the center of it all was a great vat, cast in solid glass and braced with metal straps. Now that the torment of her body had eased, she took in the contents of the strange room. She had no idea what purpose all these things could serve.

  “What? What is it?” she said hoarsely.

  “You might as well know,” he said, folding his arms. With an exasperated sigh, Krago took the elf girl's hand. “Come and see the crowning achievement of my work.”

  The vat, eight feet in diameter, was filled to the rim with quicksilver. Floating half-submerged in the silver bath was a still-unformed thing. At least the details were unformed; the general shape was clear enough. Two arms, two legs, a head-the thing was red and glistening, like fresh, raw meat. A mouth split the unfeatured face. Needlelike teeth protruded from the thing's bloodless gums.