“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 Goldmoon 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?
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 Unacceptability 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.
Dragons of a Lost Star Page 21
