The Eve of the Maelstrom

by Jean Rabe

  The Fifth Age™

  THE EVE OF

  THE MAELSTROM

  JEAN RABE

  DRAGONLANCE ®

  The Eve of the Maelstrom

  © 1998 TSR, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of TSR, Inc.

  Distributed to the book trade in the United States by Random House, Inc. and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Ltd.

  Distributed to the hobby, toy, and comic trade in the United States and Canada by regional distributors.

  Distributed worldwide by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and regional distributors.

  DRAGONLANCE and the TSR logo are registered trademarks owned by TSR, Inc.

  All TSR characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks owned by TSR, Inc.

  TSR, Inc., a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Made in the U.S.A.

  Cover art by Jeff Easley

  First Printing: February 1998

  These ePub and Mobi editions by Dead^Man April, 2012

  Scan by Dead^Man

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-60819

  987654321

  ISBN: 0-7869-0749-5

  8385XXX1501

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  For Mary and Jerry

  Prologue

  KINDRED SPIRITS

  The glaive Dhamon Grimwulf clutched was simple in design yet starkly beautiful, an axe-like blade affixed to a long, polished wooden haft. The edge, curved gently like a smile, gleamed silver in the light that spilled through the window. The weapon was drawn back, steadied. Dhamon’s eyes were steady, too, fixed on Goldmoon’s.

  “My faith will protect me,” Goldmoon whispered as she stepped back, trying to put some distance between herself and the weapon. A few moments would buy time to convince Dhamon this was wrong. Goldmoon’s fingers touched the medallion about her neck, a symbol of her departed goddess Mishakal, and of her undying faith in the goddess.

  “Dhamon, you can fight this. Fight the dragon....”

  There were other voices in the chamber beside hers – that of the dwarf, Jasper, her favored student of many years, and those of Feril, Blister, and Rig. Shouted words, pleading, angry, incredulous words all aimed at Dhamon Grimwulf, the tall man with wheat-blonde hair and piercing eyes. They were meant to stop the glaive, to stop him. But the words ere thrust aside by the red dragon who controlled Dhamon. Against his will, Dhamon listened to the dragon voice inside his head and advanced on the healer.

  Goldmoon, too, thrust all the words aside, and concentrated. “My faith will protect me. My faith... no!”

  Dhamon swung the blade down, striking Jasper, who had suddenly leapt in front of him trying to save Goldmoon. Before the others could react, the weapon was pulled back, this time gleaming red with the dwarf’s blood.

  “Jasper,” Goldmoon whispered.

  The blade poised for the most fleeting of moments. It was suspended for a heartbeat, no more, before continuing on a lethal path toward the famed healer and Hero of the Lance.

  “My faith will protect me,” Goldmoon repeated in a slightly stronger voice. Then she felt the coolness of the metal as it touched her; surprisingly she felt no pain. The gleam of the blade filled her vision. Then she saw nothing. Dhamon and the voices of her friends were gone, as her life was gone.

  She slipped from Krynn.

  A welcoming blackness swallowed Goldmoon, tactile like velvet and somehow comforting. This was death, she knew, and she was not afraid of death. She had never been afraid of it. Death had claimed her husband and one of her daughters years before, had claimed cherished friends – Tanis, Tasslehoff, Flint. Jasper too? In death, she expected to greet them all again.

  The darkness, like a gentle vise, held her briefly, then receded. As the darkness changed to a charcoal gray, it lessened its grip, but it did not release her. Then the space around her lightened further, until her surroundings became almost white, the shade of pale smoke. No floor to stand on, no walls, only a limitless mist. She hovered in its soft embrace, seemingly alone. But she knew he must be here with her.

  “Riverwind.” She spoke the word, though her lips didn’t move. She spoke the word with her mind and heard it clearly, as she also heard the response.

  “Beloved.” He appeared before her as if by magic, young and strong, looking as he had on the day she’d first glimpsed him. His skin was tan, his eyes dark and full, his arms muscular and now wrapped around her. His long black hair fluttered in an intangible breeze.

  “Riverwind... husband, I’ve missed you so.” Goldmoon clung tightly to him and inhaled his scent. Memories flooded her mind: his courtship of her under the disapproving gaze of her father; the exhilarating danger they had experienced together during the War of the Lance; the time they had spent apart; and, above all, his death far from her side. Even after Riverwind had been killed helping the kender against Malystryx the Red, she had sensed that he was with her, part of her.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” Riverwind answered. “I’ve not been complete without you.”

  “To be together again,” she said wistfully. “Complete. For-ever.

  “Forever.” He stared at her. She looked as she had decades ago, full of hope and life, skin shining, silver-gold hair festooned with the feathers and beads of the Que-shu tribe. “Forever, yes. But forever must wait. Goldmoon, you can’t stay here. You must go back.”

  “Go back? To what? Krynn? The Citadel of Light? I don’t understand.”

  “It isn’t your time to die. You have to go back. Feril... the Kagonesti... she can heal you.”

  “Not my time to die?”

  “No. Not yet.” He shook his head. “At least not for a while, love. Forever will have to wait a while longer.”

  “I think not, husband.”

  “Goldmoon...”

  “I’m more than eighty years old. I’ve walked more than enough years on Krynn. Few people are fortunate to live as long. And I’ve had enough of living.”

  He ran a finger across her cheek, his spirit form as vibrant and warm as it had been in life. “But Krynn hasn’t had enough of you, beloved. Not just yet, anyway.”

  “And who or what force decides this? I am dead, River-wind. Am I not?”

  “Dead? Yes. Still... it’s not easy to explain,” he began. “There is still time, if you hurry. Feril can —” He tried to say more, but she cut him off.

  “I will admit I hadn’t expected to die this way. I didn’t think Dhamon would kill me, could bring himself to kill me. I thought he was strong enough to resist the beast that possesses him.”

  “Malystryx.”

  Goldmoon nodded. “She controls him through a scale on his leg. I was so certain he could overcome that. I thought he was the one, the man who could lead the fight against the overlords. I myself chose him, Riverwind, chose him months upon months ago as he kneeled outside the Last Heroes’ Tomb. I looked into his heart. I erred....”

  “Things don’t always turn out the way we expect,” Riverwind replied.

  “No.”

  “The oth
ers need your help.”

  “They can continue the cause without me. Palin, Rig, Blister, Feril...”

  “They need you.” Riverwind’s voice was firm. “There are things you’ve yet to accomplish. The dragons...”

  “How do you know this? Are the gods not truly gone? Do they speak to you? Are they...”

  “You weren’t supposed to die this day. That’s all I know. And that’s all you are permitted to know right now. Another was so fated.”

  “Another was to die? Not me?”

  Riverwind drew his lips into a thin line. With a gesture of his hand the mists parted. They were hovering above the chamber in the Citadel of Light – ghostlike, for no one saw them there. The floor below was covered with blood – Goldmoon’s, Jasper’s, Rig’s. The dwarf was seriously wounded, barely clinging to life, but he was clinging to Goldmoon’s body, sobbing, his eyes wide with disbelief.

  “I will miss them all,” she whispered, her fingers reaching out toward the dwarf.

  “There is still time. Return to them, beloved. Let the Kagonesti aid you. Then help Jasper. Hurry.”

  “Let Feril help Jasper.”

  Riverwind and Goldmoon could faintly discern words swirling in the air – grieving words over Goldmoon and Jasper, venomous words about Dhamon, words of shock that something like this could have happened, words demanding revenge.

  “It wasn’t Dhamon’s fault,” Goldmoon said. “They have to understand that. They’ll eventually realize that.”

  “One of them was to die,” Riverwind repeated. “Not you. Not yet. Dhamon wasn’t meant to kill you.”

  “It wasn’t Dhamon’s fault. The dragon... the scale on his leg... who was supposed to die instead of me?”

  Riverwind shook his head.

  “Who?” she insisted.

  “I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that you must go back.” Riverwind’s voice was firm, tinged with sadness. “We’ll be together again, I promise. It will be soon enough. And you know I’ll always be with you.”

  “In the very air I breathe.”

  “Yes.”

  “No. That isn’t enough.” Goldmoon tilted her head upward, drifted toward the ceiling, through the domed roof. Riverwind followed her, his arguments lost amid the heated words still audible from the chamber below. Again they were surrounded by the pale mist. “I’m not going back, husband. Only forward – to wherever spirits are destined to go. To see Tanis, Tasslehoff, dear Flint – wherever they are. My daughter Brightdawn. My mother. Perhaps finally to reconcile with my father. It is long past my time to join them all. And to join you.”

  “That may be what I wish, too,” he offered. “But it is not what was meant to be. There are powerful dragons to consider.”

  “Ansalon always has dragons.” She placed a finger to his lips, then drew him close. “Precious Riverwind, Krynn does not need this old woman any longer. Nor do I need Krynn. I need you. We are together again – finally and forever. Complete. One old woman will make no difference against the dragon overlords.”

  “Goldmoon, one person can always make a difference.”

  Chapter 1

  AFTER THE STORM

  Pain raced up the dragon overlord’s claw and into his massive blue body.

  “This damnable lance,” he hissed in a zephyr-like voice. He threw back his great, horned head, opened his maw, and spewed a bolt of lightning into the belly of a thick cloud high above. The sky thundered its response, and what had begun as a steady rain deepened into a driving storm. The night was intermittently brightened by the lightning that danced down to his indigo-scaled back, a sensation he normally found pleasing. The wind keened fiercely, and the rain hammered obligingly against his thick hide. But no element of the storm was enough to assuage his suffering.

  The powerful lance burned the dragon, was continuing to burn him with every beat of his enormous wings, with each mile that he crossed. He had been carrying it for the past several hours, ever since he claimed it from the heroes he slew. Yet he refused to let it go, refused to let Fissure, his dark huldrefolk ally, carry it for him. No doubt the goodness of the lance would harm Fissure, too, the dragon thought. It would burn anything evil.

  Khellendros clutched the lance in one claw – Huma’s lance, which the pitiful associates of the sorcerer Palin Majere had worked so hard to retrieve from the frigid realm of Gellidus, the great white dragon who ruled Southern Ergoth. Hooked about a talon was Goldmoon’s Medallion of Faith, also filled with the energy of righteousness, but not so powerful as the lance. Fissure was gingerly grasped in Khellendros’s other claw. A second medallion, a seeming twin of the first, was about the huldre’s neck. Three artifacts from the Age of Dreams. Three the dragon had acquired. There was one more at his lair, a ring of crystal keys. Four should be enough, he remembered Fissure saying.

  “The lance is filled with god-magic! That’s why it burns you so!” the gray-skinned huldre offered, shouting above the gale. “It was crafted to slay dragons, after all!” The tiny man, drenched, hairless, and looking as if he were freshly-sculpted from smooth clay, craned his bald head around so he could look into Khellendros’s flashing eyes. “That lance is the most powerful of these three artifacts – and certainly more powerful than the keys the Knights of Takhisis gained for you.”

  The most powerful and the most painful, Khellendros thought. The dragon growled and tried futilely to thrust the pain to the back of his mind. The lance could do more than simply cause him discomfort. It would scar him certainly. But it could not kill him – probably not even if it plunged into his flesh. He was, after all, a supreme overlord, one of a handful of Krynn’s most awesome dragons, and he would use this hurtful, hateful lance – and the other three artifacts – to open a portal to The Gray.

  The spirit of Kitiara, his long-ago partner in the Dark Queen’s army, wandered somewhere in that dusky dimension. And he would snare her spirit, as he had snared this lance, and by that act return Kitiara to Krynn. Four artifacts ought to be enough.

  But first he had to craft a new body for her spirit.

  He had one, a fine blue spawn – muscular, elegant, perfect. It had been birthed in part from one of his rare tears. But Palin and his conspirators had unknowingly killed the blue spawn, along with dozens of others, when they destroyed his favorite lair in the desert of the Northern Wastes. That he had slaughtered Palin and his companions less than an hour ago was some small consolation. He should have seen to that task earlier, not so much out of revenge – a human motivation that was beneath him – but as a tribute to Kitiara, who in life had been vexed by Palin’s father and uncle, Caramon and Raistlin Majere. The Majeres had plagued her life, and now they haunted her in death.

  For a time, Palin and his fellows had proved useful to Khellendros. On the advice of one of the dragon’s planted spies, an old sycophant who had managed to pass himself off as a scholar, the wizard’s party had unwittingly gathered these artifacts for him.

  On a stretch of ground on the island of Schallsea, not far from the Citadel of Light, they had placed the artifacts. The fake scholar had advised shattering them, claiming that the energy released would increase the level of magic in the world. They had had no idea that it was all a ruse, that Khellendros had been alerted and intended to steal their precious artifacts.

  Their usefulness was at an end. Palin and the others had realized too late that the blue dragon overlord had cornered them. As Khellendros slew them, Fissure killed the sycophant to tidy up loose ends.

  However, Khellendros hadn’t known that holding this damnable lance would be so agonizing. Still, any amount of pain was worth bearing if it meant Kitiara could be welcomed back to Krynn. She had to return, had to be made whole. Khellendros had made a pledge to her – out of loyalty and respect – long ago when she was his partner. He had promised that he would keep her safe. Then one day, when she strayed from his side, she was slain. A grieving Khellendros searched and searched for her spirit, eventually finding it in The Gray. He would keep his
pledge by rescuing her from that faraway dimension. There was no one to stop him – Palin and his friends were now dead. And, best of all, Malystryx the Red and the other overlords were oblivious to his ultimate goal.

  He and Kitiara would be reunited. Soon. But first Khellendros had to endure this hellish pain all the way back to his lair.

  *

  “Khellendros thinks we’re dead,” Rig said. The dark-skinned mariner glanced up, peering in the direction in which the great blue overlord had disappeared. He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I certainly hope he thinks that. Otherwise he’ll come back and try again. And I wouldn’t want him to try again ’cause I don’t think there’d be any trying about it.” The strained, high-pitched voice belonged to Blister, a middle-aged kender who was ambling toward the mariner. “Nope. No trying to it at all in my opinion.” Her gnarled hands were busy – one tugging at Jasper’s sleeve, the other fiddling with her frazzled blonde braid. “Y’see, if he did come back and try again... well... I just have this feeling that he’d be pretty darn successful. I’m kind of surprised to be living and breathing. He’s certainly a very big dragon. I never saw one so big. Did you see his teeth? Big teeth, too.” She paused, her face contorting into a puzzled expression. “So what happened? How’d we escape?”

  “Palin,” Rig supplied the answer.

  “Oh. What did you do?” Blister turned her attention on Palin Majere.

  The sorcerer brushed a long strand of graying hair out of his eyes. “A spell,” he said softly. He hadn’t the energy to speak louder. His shoulders stooped, he leaned against Rig, and sucked a deep breath of damp air into his lungs. The climactic enchantment had taken the last of his resources. He was the most powerful sorcerer on Krynn and one of the few survivors of the Battle of the Rift in the Abyss. But at the moment he felt far from mighty. He was weak, vulnerable, his spirit as ravaged as his mud-stained tunic and torn leggings.