"Sssst! Dan-this way."
He stopped and stared, finally perceiving the outlines of a dark opening at the base of the rocky knoll. Gingerly he stepped around the prickly bushes, avoiding the thorns while at the same time taking care not to leave any sign of his passage.
Foryth, Mirabeth, and Emilo were huddled within a small alcove in the rock. The place was too tiny to be called a cave, but it was spacious enough to hold them all as long as nobody wanted to lie down, and, more importantly, it was well concealed from the woods beyond.
"You're Danyal, they told me," Emilo said as soon as the youth made himself comfortable in the small enclosure. "Pleased to make your acquaintance… again."
"Urn, me, too." It was strange, this loss of memory, but the lad was glad to see that Emilo seemed to have regained his vitality. Dan wanted to ask questions: Why, for example, had Emilo taken it into his head to rescue them? But he doubted that the kender would know the answers, at least not now, and he didn't want to upset him further by posing queries that would only highlight the unfortunate fellow's loss of memory.
In any event, it seemed to be the kender who was determined to ask questions.
"Foryth said you were traveling into the mountains by yourself, and then Mirabeth told me that your village was burned by a dragon. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It wasn't your fault," Danyal declared curtly, even as he was surprised by his own snide reaction. Still, one thing he knew was that he didn't want sympathy. He laughed bitterly as he remembered his plans in that long ago time-was it just four days ago? — when his world had died.
"I was on my way to kill that dragon," he admitted, sheepish over his earlier brusque attitude. "I guess I never gave any thought about how I was going to do it. All I had was a fishing pole and a little knife, and I don't even have those anymore!" Again he laughed, trying to sound harsh, sensing that he had wandered dangerously close to the brink of tears.
"And what about you?" Emilo, to Danyal's relief, had turned to Foryth. "Do your studies often bring you this far away from the temple library?"
"Er, no." Foryth cleared his throat, then repeated the mannerism, and Danyal sensed that he was reluctant to talk, a reluctance that made the lad all that much more curious about the historian's tale.
"Actually, I have been given a chance-sort of a last chance, to tell the truth-to be ordained into the priesthood of Gilean."
"This is some kind of a test?" Danyal guessed. "Getting to Loreloch?"
"Not that, specifically. You see, I have studied the priestly doctrines for many years, but I have never been able to master the casting of a spell. I pray to Gilean with utmost sincerity, asking for guidance, for a hint of power. But there is nothing there."
"And if you don't cast this spell…?" probed the youth.
"Then I shall never become a priest. My life's objective, all the fruits of my labors, the volumes of my writing, shall have been for naught."
"I don't think so!" objected Danyal. "You told me that story about Fistandantilus. It was good. You don't have to cast a spell in order to make the words you write on paper, the histories you tell, mean something. To make them be important, I mean."
"But the most highly regarded historians of Krynn have been priests of Gilean," moaned Foryth. "And all I need is one spell, a single, simple enchantment that would prove my faith. Then I could join their numbers!"
"I wouldn't count on a priest of the Seekers giving you one," Danyal muttered sourly. "And I can't believe you still want to go to Loreloch!"
"It's more important now than ever. I simply must see the writings, the records of Kelryn Darewind. How did the archmage become a god? Where does he reside? And are there other facets to his faith, sects in different parts of Krynn? These questions must be answered."
The historian drew a deep breath, continuing firmly. "There are very few things about Fistandantilus that have escaped the light of the historian's torch. But the details of his passing, at the time of Skullcap's creation and beyond, have always called for further investigation. And now it seems there was real import there, occurrences that we never suspected!"
"And you're going to study those things but remain aloof, uninvolved?" Dan asked, remembering the historian's concern over his intervention that had kept the lad alive.
"Er… yes, of course. That is, I have to be. Tsk." Foryth shook his head, flustered. "My efforts would be doomed to failure if I should let myself become attached to individuals or, worse yet, attempt to play a role myself."
"But how does all this study and research help you learn a spell?" Mirabeth voiced the same question that Danyal had been wondering about. "My father said- that is, I heard somewhere that priests pray for their spells, get them from their god." She halted, flustered, though only Danyal seemed to notice the kendermaid's distress.
"Well, I guess it doesn't, to tell the absolute truth," Foryth admitted with slumping shoulders. But then he raised his head, and his narrow chin jutted forward in an approximation of determination. "But I don't know where to find a spell, so I thought it made sense to do something useful while I was looking."
"You can't argue with that," Emilo agreed with an amiable chuckle.
Despite his willingness to do just that, Danyal was forced to concede that the kender was right-Foryth's decision made as much sense as anything else. "Good luck, then," said the lad. "I hope you find that magic."
"You know, in a way I envy you kender," Foryth said, leaning his head against the cave wall and shifting his eyes from Mirabeth to Emilo. "Your folk are, in many ways, the favorites of Gilean. True neutrals, that's the kender. Nary a care in the world as you go wherever your mood and your interests take you."
"I don't know about that," Emilo said seriously. He chewed thoughtfully on the tail of his topknot. "Of course, right now I don't known much about anything. But it seems to me that we have cares just like humans. And that business about being truly neutral… I'd like to think we know the difference between good and evil.
"And that we practice a little more of the former," the kender added with a soft laugh. He lapsed into silence, and for a time, the four companions just rested. They shared cool water from Mirabeth's canteen, and finally Danyal decided he would bring up some of the things that had been bothering him.
"About these… seizures," he said to Emilo. "Have you had them all your life?"
"Well, yes, I think so. Actually," the kender admitted, chewing on his topknot, "I'm not sure. You see, I don't remember my childhood or my early life. So I've had these attacks ever since I can recall."
"What's the first thing you remember? Where were you, and how long ago was it?"
"Well, those are good questions. I remember that I was in Dergoth, on the plains around Skullcap. I met some elves there, and they fed me and gave me water. From what they told me, I was about ready to die there in the desert."
"When did that happen?" Foryth asked, warming to the questions with the interest of the true historian. "Did they tell you the year?"
"As a matter of fact, they did. It was two hundred and fifty something, as I recall."
"That's more than a hundred years ago," Danyal said with a whistle. "I didn't think kender lived to be that old-not that you look old, that is. But that's part of it, isn't it? You don't look that old."
"More than a hundred years?" Emilo looked puzzled. "I could have sworn that it was just last winter, or maybe a little before that. But not a hundred years!"
"What do you remember of where you were, what you were doing, last winter?" Foryth took over the interview. "Were you and Mirabeth traveling together then?"
"Well…" Suddenly Emilo looked frightened. He cast a worried glance at the kendermaid and asked, "I didn't know you then, did I?"
"No," she said.
"But-but why can't I remember? When did I meet you? How long ago?"
"It was just a few days ago, actually," Mirabeth said. She turned her head, including the two humans in her explanation. "I was wandering on my ow
n-that is, I'd been by myself for a little while. I was having some trouble, I guess you could say, and Emilo came along and helped me out."
"Did he rescue you from bandits, too?" Danyal asked, only half teasing.
"No," she replied with a soft laugh. The lad decided that he liked that sound a lot. "I was trying to camp, but my lean-to had fallen over and my bedroll was soaked with rain. I couldn't get a fire going, and I was sitting in the woods, teeth chattering, feeling sorry for myself. He almost scared me out of my skin when he walked up and said-"
"Emilo Haversack, at your service?" guessed Danyal.
Mirabeth grinned at him. "The same thing he said to you, I presume."
"And he was-at our service, I mean. Really, you saved our lives," declared the young human. "I guess I haven't told you that, but you did."
"Oh, now, tsk," interjected Foryth Teel. "I admit that business of being tied up was unpleasant, but I hardly think Kelryn was going to do us in."
"Then you weren't paying attention! Do you remember Zack-the way he liked to play with his knife?" Danyal shuddered at the memory. "He wasn't ever going to let us get away, despite what Kelryn said."
Still, he admitted privately, it was Kelryn Darewind himself who was the scariest of all the bandits.
"You mentioned that wizard, Fistandantilus," Emilo said, drawing the historian's attention away from Dan. "It seems to me I've heard a lot about him. I just can't remember any of it."
"There's a lot to know," declared Foryth enthusiastically. "He was the Master of Past and Present, you know. The first wizard-and one of only a very small number-who learned how to travel through time. An arch-mage who manipulated history by altering his own position in the River of Time. He had an influence on ages of elves and men, in an era before the Cataclysm-"
"And in Skullcap and Dergoth afterward," noted the kender, bobbing his head.
"He must have been awfully old. Was he human, or perhaps an elf?" asked Danyal.
"Oh, absolutely human-in a way, human many times over," Foryth said with a grim chuckle. "You see, he absorbed the spiritual essence of other humans, for the most part young men who were gifted with magic. These sacrificial lambs were destroyed, and the power of the archmage was maintained and increased with the passing of years. Eventually he had consumed the essence of many men, and his power had become greater than any other mage's in the history of Krynn."
"How?" The lad had a hard time imagining the magical power, the bizarre consumption, that the historian described.
"It's said that he used a gem-a bloodstone. That's one of the things I wondered about, but Kelryn Darewind wouldn't discuss it."
"I saw a bloodstone once," Emilo said.
Danyal looked at the kender and gasped in shock. Emilo's eyes had gone blank and lifeless, devoid of expression or awareness. His jaw hung slack and he sighed sorrowfully, shoulders slumping as if the air had all gone out of him.
"A bloodstone?" Foryth was apparently unaware of the kender's sudden alteration, for he pressed forward with obvious excitement. "They're very rare, you know! Where was it? Could it have been-"
"It pulsed… hot, hot blood…" Emilo spoke sharply, visibly straining to push out the words. His lips stretched taut over his teeth, and he grimaced between each quick, bursting phrase. The voice was deep and rasping, very unlike the high-pitched chatter of the kender's normal speech.
"Yes, I remember the stone. And then the portal was there, colors… whirling. I sensed the magic. It pulled me, drew me in!" Eyes wild, Emilo backed against the rock wall, recoiling from the three companions who watched, aghast. "And then she was there, laughing, waiting for me!"
The Kender's sudden scream of terror reverberated through the enclosed space of the cave, and Danyal instantly pictured the sound resonating through the woods and valley far beyond their hiding place.
Emilo drew another breath, but by then the youth was on him, pressing him down, a sturdy hand pressed over the kender's mouth. Only when he felt the thin, wiry body relax underneath him did Danyal release his hold, rocking back on his haunches as he tried to offer his frightened companion a reassuring smile.
Mirabeth was kneeling at Emilo's side, and she took his hand and cradled his head against her shoulder. The kender's eyes were blank again, but this time Danyal was almost relieved by the lack of expression; it was certainly preferable to the awful, haunting terror that swept over Emilo Haversack's features a few moments before.
The sun was high in the sky when at last they relaxed. After sipping another drink of water, Danyal was relieved to lean his head on a mossy log and allow himself to fall asleep.
CHAPTER 30
A Telling Ear
First Bakukal, Reapember
374 AC
Danyal awakened with a strong feeling that it was late afternoon. The air beyond the rocky niche was still, and he heard cicadas chirping, the steady droning of plump, lazy flies. It was Reapember, he recalled, though the temperature-and the hot, stuffy smell of the air-seemed more suggestive of midsummer than early fall.
He saw that Mirabeth, too, was awake. Her brown eyes were staring at him as he stretched and slowly brought himself back to full awareness of their surroundings. Foryth and Emilo still slept, leaning together against the opposite wall of their little niche in the rock wall.
"I've been thinking we should go out and have a look around… before dark, I mean," the kendermaid whispered.
Danyal nodded; her suggestion was the same thing that he himself had decided. As quietly as possible they slipped between the cliff and the thornbush, crouching as they looked into the woods to the right and left.
The scent of lush pine was pure and overwhelming, seeming to deny the existence of anything dangerous. But Danyal wasn't in any mood to take chances. Still moving with care, he crept forward, under the branches of a thick pine. Fortunately underbrush was scarce and the going was relatively easy. The forest floor was a that of brown needles broken from numerous branches. Some of the trees, like the one he currently used for shelter, were massive, while others were mere saplings.
He had the feeling that any one of them could have concealed a dangerous enemy.
Mirabeth crept forward to join him, and for several minutes they lay on their bellies, silent and intent, watching the woods for anything out of the ordinary. Abruptly the kendermaid nudged Danyal, almost causing him to gasp in alarm until he saw that she was smiling.
Following her pointing finger, he saw a doe and a fawn grazing a mere stone's throw away.
The two watchers kept completely still, scarcely breathing, as the pair of deer pulled at the tufts of grass that, in places, poked through the carpet of dried pine needles. Shadows dappled the rich brown coat of the doe, while the speckles on the fawn's back and flanks seemed to sparkle like diamonds as the creature cavorted through patches of sunlight. Alternately tense and playful, the young deer moved around its mother with upraised ears and stiltlike, unsteady legs.
For long minutes the animals moved slowly across Dan's and Mirabeth's fields of vision, and the lad took heart from the knowledge that the shy creatures would certainly have taken flight if any threat was lurking nearby. Finally the deer wandered away, lost behind the screening trunks of the woods, and the two wanderers rose to their feet.
"I tried to mask our path through the meadow beyond these woods," Danyal explained. "Let's take a look and make sure we don't have anyone on our trail."
Mirabeth nodded and moved away with lithe grace. With a flash of guilt, Danyal watched her from behind, thinking she was very pretty. She moves like a girl, he realized-a human girl-though she could have been sixty or seventy years old, for all he knew.
When she turned to see if he was following, he blushed furiously, even more so when he saw her shy smile and suspected that she knew he had been watching her. Lowering his eyes, he concentrated on following through the woods without making a lot of noise.
Taking a circuitous route away from their shelter, Dan and Mirabeth dropped i
nto a rock-bedded ravine. The gully scored a straight path through the woods, angling generally toward the large meadow where the lad had created the false trail. Following the natural trench for several minutes, they finally saw the brightness of full daylight through the trees. It was easy to scramble out of the ravine, using roots and vines for handholds. At the top, they wriggled forward until they were concealed beneath a pine tree at the very edge of the forest.
"There!" Mirabeth's warning was a barely audible breath of air.
Danyal saw them at the same time: six scruffy figures, moving through the meadow along the trail that the four companions had left the previous night.
"I wonder where the others are." Again Mirabeth spoke in a hushed voice.
Indeed, though the men were too far away to see their faces, Danyal knew that two of the bandits were missing from this group. From the matted hair and beards that he saw, he guessed that one of those absent was Kelryn Darewind.
"They're coming up to the place where I hid the trail," he whispered, his stomach churning into his throat as the men reached the edge of the woods. Only when they turned toward the stream did he allow himself to relax, realizing as he exhaled that he was trembling.
"It worked," he breathed, his sense of elation sublime, but tempered by knowledge of the nearness of danger. "They're following the false path I made!"
He heard shouts in tones of disgust as the bandits came to the edge of the water, though he couldn't hear exactly what they were saying.
"It sounds like they've been that way before," Mira-beth deduced. "Looks like they've been double-checking the trail-and that's where they lost it."
Dan realized she was right. "They must have backtracked once they lost the trail in the stream." But how persistent would they be in looking for the concealed trail? Would they keep searching? And where were the other two men?
Several of the bandits were engaged in a heated argument, pointing both upstream and down, while another of the fellows seemed ready to start back to the woods.
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