Dragons of a Lost Star

by Margaret Weis

  “I am Mina,” she said. She raised the amber eyes, and this time she caught him. She gestured. “This is my second-in-command, Galdar.”

  The minotaur gave an abrupt nod of his horned head. He was not comfortable in the Tower. He kept glancing about darkly as if he expected something to spring out and attack at any moment. He was not worried about himself, however. His sole concern appeared to be for Mina. He was protective to the point of worship, adoration.

  Palin was overcome by curiosity. Dalamar was wary.

  “I am interested to know how you made your way unscathed through Nightlund, Lady Mina,” Dalamar said. He sat down in the chair behind his desk, perhaps trying to break that entrancing gaze. “Will you be seated?”

  “Thank you, no,” Mina replied and continued to stand. She now gazed down upon him, putting Dalamar at an unexpected disadvantage. “Why does my being in Nightlund astonish you, Wizard?”

  Dalamar shifted in his chair, not willing to stand up, for that would make him appear vacillating and weak, yet not enjoying being looked down upon.

  “I am a necromancer. I sense magic about you,” he said.

  “The dead drain magic, they feed off it. I am surprised that you were not mobbed.”

  “That which you sense about me is not magic,” Mina replied, and her voice was unusually low and mature for one her age. “You feel the power of the God I serve, the One God. As to the dead, they do not touch me. The One God rules the dead. They see in me the One God, and they bow down before me.”

  Dalamar’s lip twitched.

  “It is true!” Galdar stated, growling in anger. “I saw it myself! Mina comes to lead—”

  “—my army into Nightlund,” Mina concluded. Resting her hand upon the minotaur’s arm, she commanded silence.

  “Lead your army against what?” Dalamar asked sarcastically. “The dead?”

  “Against the living,” Mina replied. “We plan to seize control of Solamnia.”

  “You must have a large army, Lady Knight,” Dalamar said. “You must have brought along every soldier in the Dark Knighthood.”

  “My army is small,” Mina admitted. “I was required to leave troops behind to guard Silvanesti, which fell to our might not long ago—”

  “Silvanesti … fallen …” Dalamar was livid. He stared at her. “I don’t believe it!”

  Mina shrugged. “Your belief or disbelief is all one to me. Besides, what do you care? Your people cast you out, or so I have heard tell. I mentioned that only in passing. I have come to ask a favor of you, Master of the Tower.”

  Dalamar was shaken to the core of his being. Palin saw that despite claiming not to believe her, the dark elf realized she spoke the truth. It was impossible to hear that calm, resolute, confident voice and not believe whatever she said.

  Dalamar struggled to regain at least outward control of himself. He would have liked to have asked questions, demanded answers, but he could not quite see how to do this without revealing an uncharacteristic concern. Dalamar’s love for his people was a love that he constantly denied and in that denial constantly reaffirmed.

  “You have heard correctly,” he said with a tight smile. “They cast me out. What favor can I do for you, Lady Mina?”

  “I have arranged to meet someone here,” she began.

  “Here? In the Tower?” Dalamar was astonished beyond words. “Out of the question. I am not running an inn, Lady Mina.”

  “I realize that, Wizard Dalamar,” Mina replied, and her tone was gentle. “I realize that what I am asking will be an imposition, an inconvenience to you, an interruption to your studies. Rest assured that I would not ask this of you, but that there are certain requirements that must be met as to the location of this meeting. The Tower of High Sorcery fulfills all those requirements. Indeed, it is the only place on Krynn that fulfills the requirements. The meeting must take place here.”

  “I am to have no say in this? What are these requirements of which you speak?” Dalamar demanded, frowning.

  “I am not permitted to reveal them. Not yet. As to your say in this, what you do or say matters not at all. The One God has decided this will be, and therefore this will be.”

  Dalamar’s dark eyes flickered. His face smoothed.

  “Your guest is welcome in the Tower, Lady. In order to make the guest’s stay comfortable, it would help if I knew something about this person … male or female? A name, perhaps?”

  “Thank you, Wizard,” Mina said, and turned away.

  “When will the guest arrive?” Dalamar pursued. “How will I know that the person who comes is the person you expect?”

  “You will know,” Mina replied. “We will leave now, Galdar.”

  The minotaur had already crossed the room and was reaching for the door handle.

  “There is a favor you could do for me in return, Lady,” Dalamar said mildly.

  Mina glanced back. “What is that, Wizard?”

  “A kender I was using in an important experiment has escaped,” Dalamar said, his tone casual, as if kender were like caged mice and were found or lost on a routine basis. “His loss would be of no importance to me, but the experiment was. I would like very much to recover him, and it occurs to me that perhaps, if you are bringing an army into Nightlund, you might come upon him. If you do, I would appreciate his return. He calls himself Tasslehoff,” Dalamar added with an offhanded and charming smile, “as so many of them do these days.”

  “Tasslehoff!” Mina’s attention was caught directly. A crease marred her forehead. “The Tasslehoff who carried with him the magical Device of Time Journeying? You had him here? You had him and the device, and you lost him?”

  Dalamar stared, confounded. The elven wizard was older by hundreds of years than this girl. He had been deemed one of the great mages of his or any time. Though he worked in magic’s shadows, he had gained the respect, if not the love, of those who worked in the light. Mina’s amber-eyed gaze pinned the powerful wizard to the chair. Dalamar wriggled beneath her gaze, struggled, but she had caught him and held him fast.

  Two bright spots of color stained Dalamar’s pale cheeks. The elf’s slender fingers nervously stroked a bit of carving on the desk, an oak leaf. The too-thin fingers traced its shape over and over until Palin longed to rush from his hiding place and seize that nervous hand to make it stop.

  “Where is the device?” Mina demanded, advancing on him until she stood at his desk, gazing down at him. “Did he have it with him? Do you have it here?”

  Dalamar had reached his limit. He rose from his chair, looked down at her, looked down the length of his aquiline nose, looked down from his greater height, looked down from the confidence of his own power.

  “What business can this possibly be of yours, Lady Mina?”

  “Not my business,” Mina said, not at all intimidated. Indeed, it was Dalamar who seemed to shrink as she spoke. “The business of the One God. All that happens in this world is the business of the One God. The One God sees into your heart and into your mind and your soul, Wizard. Though you may hide the truth from my mortal eyes, you cannot hide the truth from the One God. We will search for this kender, and if we find him we will do with him what needs to be done.”

  She turned again and walked away calm, unruffled.

  Dalamar remained standing at his desk, the hand that had nervously traced the oak leaf clenched tightly in a fist that he concealed beneath his robes.

  Arriving at the door, Mina turned around. Her gaze passed over Dalamar, another insect in her display case, and fixed on Palin. In vain he told himself she could not see him. She caught him, held him.

  “You believe the artifact was lost in the Citadel of Light. It was not. It came back to the kender. He has it in his possession. That is why he ran away.”

  Palin doused the magical light. In the darkness, he could see nothing but those amber eyes, hear nothing but her voice. He remained there so long that Dalamar came searching for him. The elf’s footsteps were soft upon the stone stairs, an
d Palin did not hear him until he sensed movement. He looked up in alarm, found Dalamar standing in front of him.

  “What are you still doing here? Are you all right? I thought for certain something had happened to you,” Dalamar said, irritated.

  “Something did happen to me,” Palin returned. “She happened to me. She saw me. She looked straight at me. The last words she spoke were to me!”

  “Impossible,” Dalamar said. “No eyes, not even amber eyes, can see through solid stone and magic.”

  Palin shook his head, unconvinced. “She spoke to me.”

  He expected a sarcastic rejoinder from Dalamar, but the dark elf was in no mood to banter, apparently, for he climbed the stairs leading back to the laboratory in silence.

  “I know that girl, Dalamar,” Palin said.

  Dalamar halted on the staircase, turned to stare. “How?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time. Not since she ran away. She was an orphan. A fisherman found her washed upon the shore of Schallsea Isle. He brought her to the Citadel of Light, to the orphans’ home. She became a favorite of Goldmoon’s, almost a daughter to her. Three years ago she ran away. She was fourteen. Goldmoon was devastated. Mina had a good home. She was loved, pampered. She seemed happy, except I never knew a child to ask so many questions. None of us could understand why she ran off. And now … a Dark Knight. Goldmoon will be heartbroken.”

  “That is very odd,” Dalamar said thoughtfully, and they resumed their climb. “So she was raised by Goldmoon.…”

  “Do you suppose what she said about Tas and the device was true?” Palin asked, as they emerged from the hidden stairwell.

  “Of course, it was true,” Dalamar replied. He walked over to the window, stared down into the cypress trees below. “That explains why the kender ran away. He feared we would find it.”

  “We would have, if we had bothered to think through this rationally, instead of haring off in a panic. What ninnies we are! The device will always return to the one who owns it. Even in pieces, it will always return.”

  Palin was frustrated. He felt the urgent need to do something, yet there was nothing he could do.

  “You could search for him, Dalamar. Your spirit can walk this world, at least—”

  “And do what?” Dalamar demanded. “If I did find him—which would be a miracle to surpass all miracles—I could do nothing except frighten him into burrowing deeper into whatever hole he’s dug.”

  Dalamar had been staring out the window. He stiffened. His body went rigid.

  “What is it?” Palin asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  Dalamar made no answer, except to point out the window.

  Mina walked through the forest, trod upon the brown pine needles.

  The dead gathered around her. The dead bowed to her.

  22

  Reunion of Old Friends

  kender is never out of sorts for long, not even after encountering his own ghost. True, the sight had been a considerable shock, and Tasslehoff still experienced unpleasant qualms whenever he thought about it, but he knew how to handle a qualm. You held your breath and drank five sips of water, and the qualm would go away. This done, his next decision was that he had to leave this terrible place where ghosts went around giving one qualms. He had to leave it, leave it fast, and never, never come back.

  Moss and his father proved to be of little help, since as far as Tas could see, moss had the bad habit of growing on all sides of rocks and trees, with apparently no regard for the fact that someone might be trying to use it to find north. Tasslehoff decided to turn instead to the time-honored techniques that have been developed by kender over centuries of Wanderlust, techniques guaranteed to find one’s self after losing one’s self. The best known and most favored of these involves the use of the body compass.

  The theory behind the body compass is as follows. It is well-known that the body is made up of various elements, among these being iron. The reason that we know the body has iron in it is because we can taste the iron in our blood. Therefore, it stands to reason that the iron in our blood will be drawn to the north, just as the iron needle on the compass is drawn to the north. (Kender go so far to state that we would, all of us, be congregated at the north end of the world if we let our blood have its way. We fight a constant battle with our blood, otherwise we would all collect at the top of the world, thereby causing it to tip over.)

  In order to make the body compass work, you must shut your eyes, so as not to confuse things, extend the right arm with the index finger pointing, then spin around three times to the left. When you stop, open your eyes, and you will discover that you are facing north.

  Kender who use this technique almost never arrive at where they’re going, but they will tell you that they always arrive at where they need to be. Thus it was that Tasslehoff wandered about in the forests of Nightlund for a good many hours (he was not lost), without finding either Solanthus or the way out, and he was just about to try the body compass one last time when he heard voices, real, live voices, not the tickling whispers of the poor souls.

  Tasslehoff’s natural instinct was to introduce himself to the voices, who were perhaps lost, and offer to show them which way was north. However, at this juncture, he heard yet another voice. This voice was inside his head and belonged to Tanis Half-Elven. Tasslehoff often heard Tanis’s voice on occasions such as this, reminding him to stop and think if what he was doing was “conducive to self-preservation.” Sometimes Tas listened to Tanis’s voice in his head, and sometimes he did not, which was pretty much how their relationship had worked when Tanis had been alive.

  This time, Tasslehoff recalled that he was running away from Dalamar and Palin, both of whom wanted to murder him, and that they might either be out hunting for him themselves or they might have sent out minions. Wizards, Tas recalled, were forever sending out minions. Tas wasn’t sure what a minion was—he thought it some sort of small fish—but he decided that it would be conducive to his self-preservation if he climbed a tree and hid in the branches.

  Tasslehoff climbed nimbly and swiftly and was soon settled comfortably high up amidst the pine needles. The three voices, with bodies attached, walked right underneath him.

  Seeing that they were Knights of Takhisis or Neraka or whatever it was they were calling themselves these days, Tas congratulated himself on having listened to Tanis. An entire army, Knights and foot soldiers, marched beneath Tas’s tree. They marched swiftly and did not appear to be in very good spirits. Some darted nervous glances left and right, as if searching for something, while others traveled with eyes facing forward, fearful that if they looked they might find it. There was little talking in the ranks. If they did speak, they kept their voices low. The tail end of the line of soldiers was just moving underneath Tasslehoff’s tree, and he was just congratulating himself on having successfully avoided detection when the front of the line came to a halt, which meant the back of the line had to come to a halt, too.

  The soldiers stopped, standing beneath Tas. They breathed heavily and looked tired to the point of dropping, but when the word came down the line that there was to be a fifteen-minute rest, none of them looked happy. A few squatted down on the ground, but they did not leave the trail, they did not throw off their packs.

  “Let’s get on with it, I say,” said one. “I don’t want to spend another night in this death’s den.”

  “You’re right, there,” said another. “Let’s march on Solanthus. This minute. I’d welcome a fight with an enemy who’s got flesh and blood in him.”

  “Two hundred of us, and we’re going to take Solanthus,” said a third. “Rot! If there were two hundred thousand we couldn’t take that city, even with the help of the One God. It’s got walls the size of Mt. Nevermind. Infernal devices, too, or so I’ve heard. Giant ballista that can shoot dragons out of the skies.”

  “Like you said we’d never take the elf city,” said one of his comrades irritably. “Remember, boys? ‘It’ll take two hundred t
housand of us to whip those pointy-ears.’ ”

  The others laughed, but it was nervous laughter, and no one laughed too long or too loudly.

  “We’re off again,” said one, rising to his feet.

  The others stood up, moved back into formation. Those in front turned to say something to those in back.

  “Keep watch for the kender. Pass it on.” The word came down the line. “Keep watch for the kender.”

  The soldiers in back waited impatiently for those in front to start moving. Finally, with a sluggish lurch, the line of men began to advance, and they were soon lost to Tasslehoff’s eyes and ears.

  “ ‘Keep watch for the kender,’ ” Tas repeated. “Hah! Those must be Dalamar’s minions. I was wrong about the fish part. I’ll just wait here until I’m sure they’re gone. I wonder who this One God is? It must very dull, to have only one god. Unless, of course, it was Fizban, but then there probably wouldn’t be any world, because he’d keep misplacing it, just like he misplaces his hat.

  “Uh, oh!” The kender gave a stifled groan, noting that the troops were heading in the identical direction his finger had pointed. “They’re going north. That means I have to go some other direction. The opposite direction, in fact.”

  Which was how Tasslehoff came at last to find his way out of Nightlund and on the road leading to Solanthus—proving yet again that the kender body compass works.

  Arriving at the great walled fortress city of Solanthus, Tasslehoff walked around the walls until he came to the front entrance. There he stopped to rest himself a bit and to watch with interest the crowds of people coming and going. Those entering the city stood in a long line that moved very slowly. People stood in the road, fanning themselves and talking to their neighbors. Farmers dozed on their carts, their horses knowing enough to move forward as the line inched along. Soldiers posted outside the walls kept watch to make certain that the line continued to move, that no one grew impatient and attempted to shove his way to the front. No one seemed too upset by the delay but appeared to expect it and to take in stride.