“But if there’s no joy and merriment, then of course the days will be dark,” Tas argued. “What else do you expect?”
“How much joy did you feel, kender, when you heard the news that hundreds of your people in Kendermore had been slaughtered by the great dragon Malystryx?” Gerard asked grimly, “and that those who survived were driven from their homes and now seem to be under some sort of curse and are called afflicted because they now know fear and they carry swords, not pouches. Did you laugh when you heard that news, kender, and sing ‘tra la, how merry we are this day’?”
Tasslehoff came to a stop and rounded so suddenly that the Knight very nearly tripped over him.
“Hundreds? Killed by a dragon?” Tas was aghast. “What do you mean hundreds of kender died in Kendermore? I never heard that. I never heard anything like that! It’s not true. You’re lying.… No,” he added miserably. “I take that back. You can’t lie. You’re a Knight, and while you may not like me you’re honor bound not to lie to me.”
Gerard said nothing. Putting his hand on Tas’s shoulder, he turned the kender around bodily and started him, once again, on his way.
Tas noticed a queer feeling in the vicinity of his heart, a constricting kind of feeling, as if he’d swallowed one of the more ferocious constricting snakes. The feeling was uncomfortable and not at all pleasant. Tas knew in that moment that the Knight had indeed spoken truly. That hundreds of his people had died most horribly and painfully. He did not know how this had happened, but he knew it was true, as true as the grass growing along the side of the road or the tree branches overhead or the sun gleaming down through the green leaves.
It was true in this world where Caramon’s funeral had been different from what he remembered. But it hadn’t been true in that other world, the world of Caramon’s first funeral.
“I feel sort of strange,” Tas said in a small voice. “Kind of dizzy. Like I might throw up. If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to be quiet for awhile.”
“Praise be,” said the Knight, adding, with another shove. “Keep walking.”
They walked in silence and eventually, about midmorning, reached Solace Bridge. The bridge spanned Solace Stream, an easy-going, meandering brook that wandered around the foothills of the Sentinel Mountains and then tumbled blithely through South Pass until it reached the White Rage River. The bridge was wide in order to accommodate wagons and teams of horses as well as foot traffic.
In the old days, the bridge had been free for the use of the traveler, but as traffic increased over the bridge, so did the maintenance and the upkeep of the span. The Solace city fathers grew weary of spending tax money to keep the bridge in operation and so they erected a tollgate and added a toll-taker. The fee required was modest. Solace Stream was shallow, you could walk across it in places, and travelers could always cross at other fords along the route. However, the banks through which the stream ran were steep and slippery. More than one wagon load of valuable merchandise had ended up in the water. Most travelers elected to pay the toll.
The Knight and the kender were the only ones crossing this time of day. The toll-taker was eating breakfast in his booth. Two horses were tied up beneath a stand of cottonwood trees that grew along the bank. A young lad who looked and smelled like a stable hand dozed on the grass. One of the horses was glossy black, his coat gleamed in the sunlight. He was restive, pawed the ground and occasionally gave a jerk on the reins as a test to see if he could free himself. The other mount was a small pony, dapple gray, with a bright eye and twitching ears and nose. Her hooves were almost completely covered by long strands of fur.
The constricting snake around Tas’s heart eased up a good deal at the sight of the pony, who seemed to regard the kender with a friendly, if somewhat mischievous, eye.
“Is she mine?” Tas asked, thrilled beyond belief.
“No,” said Gerard. “The horses have been hired for the journey, that is all.”
He kicked at the stable hand, who woke up and, yawning and scratching at himself, said that they owed him thirty steel for the horses, saddles, and blankets, ten of which would be given back to them upon the animals’ safe return. Gerard took out his money purse and counted out the coin. The stable hand—keeping as far from Tasslehoff as possible—counted the money over again distrustfully, deposited it in a sack and stuffed the sack in his straw-covered shirt.
“What’s the pony’s name?” asked Tasslehoff, delighted.
“Little Gray,” said the stable hand.
Tas frowned. “That doesn’t show much imagination. I think you could have come up with something more original than that. What’s the black horse’s name?”
“Blackie,” replied the stable hand, picking his teeth with a straw.
Tasslehoff sighed deeply.
The tollbooth keeper emerged from his little house. Gerard handed him the amount of the toll. The keeper raised the gate. This done, he eyed the Knight and kender with intense curiosity and seemed prepared to spend the rest of the morning discussing where the two were headed and why.
Gerard answered shortly, “yay” or “nay” as might be required. He hoisted Tasslehoff onto the pony, who swiveled her head to look back at him and winked at him as if they shared some wonderful secret. Gerard placed the mysterious bundle and the sword wrapped in the blanket on the back of his own horse, tied them securely. He took hold of the reins of Tas’s pony and mounted his own horse, then rode off, leaving the toll-taker standing on the bridge talking to himself.
The Knight rode in front, keeping hold of the pony’s reins. Tas rode behind, his manacled hands holding tight to the pommel of the saddle. Blackie didn’t seem to like the gray pony much better than Gerard liked the kender. Perhaps Blackie was resentful of the slow pace he was forced to set to accommodate the pony or perhaps he was a horse of a stern and serious nature who took umbrage at a certain friskiness exhibited by the pony. Whatever the reason, if the black horse caught the gray pony doing a little sideways shuffle for the sheer fun of it, or if he thought she might be tempted to stop and nibble at some buttercups on the side of the road, he would turn his head and regard her and her rider with a cold eye.
They had ridden about five miles when Gerard called a halt. He stood in his saddle, looked up and down the road. They had not met any travelers since they had left the bridge, and now the road was completely empty. Dismounting, Gerard removed his cloak and rolling it up, he stuffed it in his bedroll. He was wearing the black breastplate decorated with skulls and the death lily of a Dark Knight.
“What a great disguise!” Tas exclaimed, charmed. “You told Lord Warren you were going to be a Knight and you didn’t lie. You just didn’t tell him what sort of Knight you were going to become. Do I get to be disguised as a Dark Knight? I mean a Neraka Knight? Oh, no, I get it! Don’t tell me. I’m going to be your prisoner!” Tasslehoff was quite proud of himself for having figured this out. “This is going to be more fun—er, interesting—than I’d expected.”
Gerard did not smile. “This is not a joy ride, kender,” he said and his voice was stern and grim. “You hold my life and your own in your hands, as well as the fate of our mission. I must be a fool, to trust something so important to one of your kind, but I have no choice. We will soon be entering the territory controlled by the Knights of Neraka. If you breathe a word about my being a Solamnic Knight, I will be arrested and executed as a spy. But first, before they kill me, they will torture me to find out what I know. They use the rack to torture people. Have you ever seen a man stretched upon the rack, kender?”
“No, but I saw Caramon do calisthenics once, and he said that was torture.…”
Gerard ignored him. “They tie your hands and feet to the rack and then pull them in opposite directions. Your arms and legs, wrists and elbows, knees and ankles are pulled from their sockets. The pain is excruciating, but the beauty of the torture is that though the victim suffers terribly, he doesn’t die. They can keep a man on the rack for days. The bones never return to t
heir proper place. When they take a man off the rack, he is a cripple. They have to carry him to the scaffold, put him in a chair in order to hang him. That will be my fate if you betray me, kender. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir Gerard,” said Tasslehoff. “And even though you don’t like me, which I have to tell you really hurts my feelings, I wouldn’t want to see you stretched on the rack. Maybe someone else—because I never saw anyone’s arm pulled out of its socket before—but not you.”
Gerard did not appear impressed by this magnanimous offer. “Keep a curb on your tongue for your sake as well as mine.”
“I promise,” said Tas, putting his hand to his topknot and giving it a painful yank that brought tears to his eyes. “I can keep a secret, you know. I’ve kept any number of secrets—important secrets, too. I’ll keep this one. You can depend on me or my name’s not Tasslehoff Burrfoot.”
This appeared to impress Gerard even less. Looking very dour, he returned to his horse, remounted and rode forward—a Dark Knight leading his prisoner.
“How long will it take us to reach Qualinesti?” Tas asked.
“At this pace, four days,” Gerard replied.
Four days. Gerard paid no more attention to the kender. The Knight refused to answer a single question. He was deaf to Tasslehoff’s very best and most wonderful stories, and did not bother to respond when Tas suggested that he knew a most exciting short cut through Darken Wood.
“Four days of this! I don’t like to complain,” Tas said, talking to himself and the pony since the Knight wasn’t listening, “but this adventure is turning out to be dull and boring. Not really an adventure at all, more of a drudge, if that is a word, which whether it is or not certainly fits the situation.”
He and the pony plodded along, looking forward to four days with no one to talk to, nothing to do, nothing to see except trees and mountains, which would have been interesting if Tas could have spent some time exploring them, but, as he couldn’t, he’d seen plenty of trees and mountains at a distance before. So bored was the kender that the next time the magical device came back to him, appearing suddenly in his manacled hands, Tasslehoff was tempted to use it. Anything, even getting squished by a giant, would be better than this.
If it hadn’t been for the pony ride, he would have.
At that moment, the black horse looked around to regard the pony balefully and perhaps some sort of communication passed between horse and rider for Gerard turned around too.
Grinning sheepishly and shrugging, Tas held up the Device of Time Journeying.
His face fixed and cold as that of the skull on his black breastplate, Gerard halted, waited for the pony to plod up beside him. He reached out his hand, snatched the magical device from Tas’s hands, and, without a word, thrust the device in a saddlebag.
Tasslehoff sighed again. It was going to be a long four days.
10
Lord of the Night
he Order of the Knights of Takhisis was born in a dream of darkness and founded upon a remote and secret island in Krynn’s far north, an island known as Storm’s Keep. But the island headquarters had been severely damaged during the Chaos War. Boiling seas completely submerged the fortress—some said due to the sea goddess Zeboim’s grief at the death of her son, the Knights’ founder, Lord Ariakan. Although the waters receded, no one ever returned to it. The fortress was now deemed too remote to be of practical use to the Knights of Takhisis, who had emerged from the Chaos War battered and bruised, bereft of their Queen and her Vision, but with a sizeable force, a force to be reckoned with.
Thus it was that a Knight of the Skull, Mirielle Abrena, attending the first Council of the Last Heroes, felt confident enough to demand that the remnant of the Knighthood that remained be granted land on the continent of Ansalon in return for their heroic deeds during the war. The council allowed the Knights to keep territory they had captured, mainly Qualinesti (as usual, few humans cared much about the elves) and also the land in the northeastern part of Ansalon that included Neraka and its environs. The Dark Knights accepted this region, blasted and cursed though parts of it were, and set about building up their Order.
Many on that first council hoped the Knights would suffocate and perish in the sulphur-laden air of Neraka. The Dark Knights not only survived, but thrived. This was due in part to the leadership of Abrena, Lord of the Night, who added to that military title the political title of governor-general of Neraka. Abrena instituted a new recruitment policy, a policy that was not so choosy as the old policy, not so nice, not so restrictive. The Knights had little problem filling their ranks. In the dark days following the Chaos War, the people felt alone and abandoned. What might be called the Ideal of the Great “I” arose on Ansalon. Its main precept: “No one else matters. Only I.”
Embracing this precept, the Dark Knights were clever in their rule. They did not permit much in the way of personal freedoms, but they did encourage trade and promote business. When Khellendros, the great blue dragon, captured the city of Palanthas, he placed the Dark Knights in charge. Terrified at the thought of these cruel overlords ravishing their city, the people of Palanthas were amazed to find that they actually prospered under the ruler ship of the Dark Knights. And although the Palanthians were taxed for the privilege, they were able to keep enough of their profits to believe that life under the dictatorial rule of the Dark Knights wasn’t all that bad. The knights kept law and order, they waged continuous war against the Thieves Guild, and they sought to rid the city of the gully dwarves residing in the sewers.
The dragon purge that followed the arrival of the great dragons at first appalled and angered the Knights of Takhisis, who lost many of their own dragons in the slaughter. In vain the Knights fought against the great Red, Malys, and her cousins. Many of the Knights’ order died, as did many of their chromatic dragons. Mirielle’s cunning leadership managed to turn even this near disaster into a triumph. The Dark Knights made secret pacts with the dragons, agreeing to work for them to collect tribute and maintain law and order in lands ruled by the dragons. In return, the dragons would give the Dark Knights a free hand and cease preying upon their surviving dragons.
The people of Palanthas, Neraka, and Qualinesti knew nothing of the pact made between the Knights and the Dragons. The people saw only that once again the Dark Knights had defended them against a terrible foe. The Knights of Solamnia and the mystics of the Citadel of Light knew or guessed of these pacts but could not prove anything.
Although there were some within the ranks of the Dark Knights who still held to the beliefs of honor and self-sacrifice expounded by the late Ariakan, they were mostly the older members, who were considered out of touch with the ways of the modern world. A new Vision had come to replace the old. This new Vision was based on the mystical powers of the heart developed by Goldmoon in the Citadel of Light and stolen by several Skull Knights, who disguised themselves and secretly entered the Citadel to learn how to use these powers for their own ambitious ends. The Dark Knight mystics came away with healing skills and, more frightening, the ability to manipulate their followers’ thoughts.
Armed with the ability to control not only the bodies of those who entered the Knighthood but their minds as well, the Skull Knights rose to prominence within the ranks of the Dark Knights. Although the Dark Knights had long and loudly maintained that Queen Takhisis was going to return, they had ceased to believe it. They had ceased to believe in anything except their own power and might, and this was reflected in the new Vision. The Skull Knights who administered the new Vision were adept at probing a candidate’s mind, finding his most secret terrors and playing upon those, while at the same time promising him his heart’s desire—all in return for strict obedience.
So powerful did the Skull Knights grow through the use of the new Vision that those closest to Mirielle Abrena began to look upon the Skull Knights with distrust. In particular, they warned Abrena against the leader, the Adjudicator, a man named Morham Targonne.
Abrena s
coffed at these warnings. “Targonne is an able administrator,” she said. “I grant him that much. But, when all is said and done, what is an able administrator? Nothing more than a glorified clerk. And that is Targonne. He would never challenge me for leadership. The man grows queasy at the sight of blood! He refuses to attend the jousts or tourneys but keeps himself locked up in his dingy little cabinet, absorbed in his debits and his credits. He has no stomach for battle.”
Abrena spoke truly. Targonne had no stomach for battle. He would have never dreamed of challenging Abrena for the leadership in honorable combat. The sight of blood really did make him sick. And so he had her poisoned.
As Lord of the Skull Knights, Targonne announced at Abrena’s funeral that he was the rightful successor. No one stood to challenge him. Those who might have done so, friends and supporters of Abrena’s, kept their mouths shut, lest they ingest the same “tainted meat” that had killed their leader. Eventually Targonne killed them too, so that by now he was firmly entrenched in power. He and those Knights who were trained in mentalism used their powers to delve into the minds of their followers to ferret out traitors and malcontents.
Targonne came from a wealthy family with extensive holdings in Neraka. The family’s roots were in Jelek, a city north of what had formerly been the capital city of Neraka. The Targonne family’s motto was the Great “I,” which could have been entwined with the Great “P” for profit. They had risen to wealth and power with the rise of Queen Takhisis, first by supplying arms and weapons to the leaders of her armies, then, when it appeared that their side was losing, by supplying arms and weapons to the armies of Takhisis’s enemies. Using the wealth obtained from the sale of weapons, the Targonnes bought up land, particularly the scarce and valuable agricultural land in Neraka.
The scion of the Targonne family had even had the incredible good fortune (he claimed it was foresight) to pull his money out of the city of Neraka only days before the Temple exploded. After the War of the Lance, during the days when Neraka was a defeated land, with roving bands of disenfranchised soldiers, goblins, and draconians, he was in sole possession of the two things people needed desperately: grain and steel.
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