Fistandantilus Reborn

by Douglas Niles

  Foryth Teel, the lad was not surprised to see, busied himself copying down some notes. The historian had certainly seen the grim scene enacted before them, but his face gave no clue to any distress that he might have been feeling.

  Trying to disappear into his corner, Danyal let his hands settle protectively over his belt buckle. He pulled on his shirt, insuring that the material drooped over the metal bracket. He had left behind his fishing pole and creel when he was captured, and the bandits had taken his knife, but he was determined to keep secret the existence of the silver heirloom.

  Some time later Zack came toward them. Danyal was certain they were going to be killed, but Foryth merely held up his hands, allowing the man to cut the leather thong that had bound the historian to the stake. Hesitantly Danyal did the same, recoiling as the butcher wheezed a waft of putrid breath in his face.

  The lad’s tether was cut, and soon he and Foryth were standing, flexing their muscles, allowing circulation to reach into the previously deadened parts of their bodies. Their hands remained tightly bound together at the wrists, but at least they could move around, stretching their legs and working the kinks out of their backs.

  “Hurry up there,” snapped Kelryn Darewind, striding farther into the cave to address his two captives. “We’ve got to get started. It’ll take us all night to get to our next shelter, and I want to be inside by the dawn.”

  Danyal thought the bandit leader seemed jumpy and anxious; he looked over his shoulder for a moment, then stared intently into the shadows at the edges of the cave.

  “Tsk—it’ll take a minute just to be able to move again,” Foryth said, limping forward, leaning against the cave wall to help him balance. Kelryn glared at the man, and Danyal had a glimmer of terrible fear.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” the lad offered, stepping to the historian’s other side and taking his arm. Together, still hobbling, they made their way to the entrance of the cave.

  Two of the bandits had already dragged Gnar’s corpse away, but the place where he had died was marked by a great smear of blood, and Danyal found his eyes drawn to the place with magnetic inevitability.

  “Lot of blood in a man—or boy, for that matter!” hissed Zack, his breath hot in Danyal’s ear as the murderer cackled gleefully.

  “Let’s go!” snapped Kelryn, and Zack flipped an angry look at his leader before leading the party out of the cave.

  Fortunately Foryth had restored the feeling to his legs by the time they reached the rutted road. Under the pale light of a half-full Solinari, they started northward again, climbing along the edge of one of the steep-sided valleys that cut into the heights of the Kharolis Mountains.

  For several hours, they marched in grim silence. The bandits seemed surly and suspicious, cursing at the unexpected sound of a clattering stone or softly griping at each other about inconsequential matters. Danyal kept quiet, wishing he could just be forgotten, left to himself in this rugged wilderness.

  Kelryn, who had been leading the band, eventually ambled to the side of the road and waited for the two captives to reach him. He fell into step beside Foryth Teel, regarding the historian with a pensive expression that seemed darkly sinister in the moonlight.

  “I can’t help noticing that it seems you have started out on your quest with a rather ill-suited selection of companions and weaponry. What, in fact, do you know of the dangers that might be encountered in these mountains?”

  “Tsk,” Foryth replied dismissively. “It is the historian’s job to record the details of those dangers where they are discovered. It is not my place to do battle, to change the face of Krynn through actions of my own.”

  “Yet you very nearly didn’t survive to record that history,” replied the bandit. “And you should know that I am not the only thing you need to fear in these heights.”

  “And what other manner of danger might we encounter?” Foryth reached for his book, then, apparently deciding that the complications of writing and walking outweighed the need for immediate accuracy, dropped the tome back into his pack.

  “There’s a dragon.” Danyal spoke boldly, forgetting himself enough that he wanted to contribute to the conversation.

  “Ah, the squire speaks. And he is correct.” Kelryn addressed Foryth Teel. “I assume that you caught sight of the wyrm in the days before our meeting?”

  “No!” Foryth objected. “I would certainly have remembered such an occurrence.”

  “Um, you were asleep,” Danyal said, giving the historian a nudge with his elbow. “I saw the dragon fly over, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “What?” Foryth scowled at the lad, and for a moment Danyal had a glimpse of what a real squire might feel like after he had displeased his master. “You should always wake me up for a dragon!”

  “Yes, sir. I-I’ll make sure I do that,” Dan replied, uncertain as to whether the historian was really making a point or simply going along with the youth’s story.

  “And was there enough light that you could see the nature of this serpent?” asked Kelryn, turning his own attention to the youth.

  “Yes. It was red—and huge,” Danyal said, his voice thickening as he recalled the monster.

  He wanted to say that it had destroyed his village, flown from the sky to bring ruin and death to innocent Waterton. But he dared say no more, or he would risk revealing the charade of his relationship to Foryth Teel, the utterly fictional relationship with its promise of ransom that seemed to be the only thing currently keeping Danyal alive.

  “You felt the awe?”

  The lad nodded mutely, remembering the way his guts had seemed to liquefy in his belly at the sight of the monster, hating the tears that welled in his eyes with the memory. Fortunately Kelryn seemed to take his emotions as nothing more than the normal reaction in one who had encountered such an awe-inspiring beast.

  “I suspect you saw the red dragon known as Flayze,” the bandit lord declared. “He is the bane of these mountains, a bully and predator against elf, dwarf, and man. Wicked to the core, he relishes nothing so much as the slow death of one of his enemies, unless it is gorging himself on a haunch of charred meat.”

  “You know him?” Danyal was amazed to hear the man speak of the serpent with such familiarity.

  “Indeed. He has something that I cherish, that I want very much. Yet even more, I have had cause to hate him for many long years.”

  “What does he have?” asked the youth, only to recoil as Kelryn’s eyes went blank and his face lost every hint of emotion.

  Any thoughts of obtaining further information about that history were blocked by the forbidding expression on Kelryn’s face.

  “Always wake me up for a dragon!” Foryth insisted once more, as if distressed that the conversation had proceeded so far without him.

  “Why?” snapped the lad peevishly. “Would you try to kill it?”

  “Of course not!” Foryth was horrified. “Why, such an act would completely shatter any historian’s pretense of neutrality! It’s hard to think of anything that could be more disruptive of the proper observer’s role.”

  “Not to mention that killing a dragon is far from an easy thing to do,” Kelryn noted. Once again his tone was light, and in spite of himself, Danyal felt a flash of relief that the bandit lord’s aloof mood had passed so quickly.

  “How can a dragon be slain?” asked the youth. He had a vague memory of his intentions when he had started up the valley from Waterton. From the vantage of a few days’ distance, his goal of killing the monstrous serpent seemed laughably unattainable, not to mention suicidal.

  “The best way has always been to get a bigger, stronger dragon to do it for you,” Kelryn said with a bitter laugh. “It’s how the Dark Queen was defeated during the last war.”

  “But this dragon wasn’t killed.”

  “No.” The bandit lord shook his head seriously, considering his reply. “If you live long enough, you will find that many dragons, wyrms of all the clans of metal and color, still dwe
ll in many of the hidden corners of Ansalon.”

  “Why don’t they rule the world, then?” Danyal couldn’t think of any way that a serpent such as Flayze could be stopped, if the monster took it into his head to claim any kind of realm for himself.

  “That’s a good question. What does our historian have to say on the matter?”

  Foryth scowled, tsking a few times as he pondered the subject. “The best reason seems to be that they don’t want to,” he said finally. “Gilean knows that any one of them could wreak a great deal of havoc if it decided to do so. But they fight among themselves all the time—at least, all the time when they’re not sleeping. And a big dragon sleeps a lot, sometimes for ten or twenty years at a stretch. Each dragon is more concerned with its own comfort than with other matters.”

  “Don’t the Knights of Solamnia hold them in check, sort of?” Dan asked. Remembering the gleaming armor, the brawny size, and easy, capable grace of the few such armored horsemen that he had seen, the lad tried to picture a human fighter competing with the massive killing force of a red dragon. Even that picture was scary, as Danyal was forced to conclude that the would-be dragonslayer would truly be facing a hopeless task.

  Both Kelryn and Foryth were shaking their heads.

  “Bah!” the bandit lord said with a curse. “The knights are old women now, weaklings who are afraid of their own shadows. There are none of the bold lancers left from the days of the war.”

  “That is open to debate,” the historian disputed. “But you should know, lad, that the tales of a knight on horseback killing a dragon, no matter how courageous he is, how pure his heart and steady his hand, are merely the stuff of legend and fiction. No, a mighty dragon has very little to fear from anything except another mighty dragon.”

  “But there has to be some way!” insisted Danyal, so intently that both men turned to regard him with interest. “I mean, it’s hard to believe all those stories, all the legends of dragonslayers and heroes and stuff, were just made up,” he concluded lamely.

  “Remember the old saying: ‘Never underestimate the imagination, nor the thirst, of a bard,’ ” Foryth noted with a benign chuckle. “Most of those tales you’re recalling were invented by a traveling minstrel who needed a good tale in order to sing himself a supper and a pitcher or two of fine ale. Such poets and artists should not be confused with the true student of history—that is, the dispassionate historian.”

  “Ssst!”

  The warning came from the darkness ahead. Danyal stiffened, watching the hunched figure of Zack slip off the road. The other men of the band, too, shrank into the shadows.

  Then he heard whistling, melodic notes rising through the night air.

  And he knew that the bandits had found another victim.

  Chapter 26

  A Heart of Blood and Fire

  circa 374 AC

  Fistandantilus heard the pulse through the ears of his host, and it was closer than it had ever been before. Blood quickened in the incorporeal stuff of his mind, and renewed hunger tingled in his tongue, tantalized his memories.

  The bloodstone!

  Fistandantilus lusted for the touch of that potent artifact, knew that its arcane force would allow him to master—and then destroy—this wretched kender. The wizard’s essence churned with vigor as he tried—as he had tried for so many decades—to make his power felt.

  And for the first time in the foggy expanse of his entrapment, he was close to succeeding. At last the bloodstone and his kender host were nearing each other, approaching the connection that would open the way to his freedom and his revenge!

  For a moment, the spirit basked in anticipation of tormented victims, of the blood and the souls and the lives that would be his for the feasting. He was determined that there would be killing enough to satiate the hunger nurtured in this unthinkably long imprisonment.

  But then another power intruded into his arcane awareness. This was a force that disturbed the true linkage between the essence of the wizard and his ancient bloodstone! It was a mysterious presence, a film of gauze that shrouded his control, masked his power, yet at the same time it was a force magical, spiritual, and ghostly. And it fought for the bloodstone with the same vigor and the same sense of proprietary ownership that drove the wizard’s own hungry essence.

  He sensed vaguely that this intrusive power was centered near the person of a human, and it was competing with Fistandantilus, powerful enough to block the archmage’s best hope of success.

  Seething, hateful of this new complication, the wizard sensed that the bloodstone was getting closer still. He heard the pulse as a loud cadence, thumping through his very self.

  It was really, truly near! Now the talisman reached out to him with tendrils of glorious heat, close enough to be almost within his reach. Tingles of power and awareness shivered through the archmage’s ethereal being. The cadence of life that had once been a distant suggestion was now a thunderous drumbeat resonating constantly, driving him with insatiable hunger and need.

  But it was a bitter fact that the bloodstone was actually within the reach only of the pathetically directionless kender, the person who had been an unwilling and unwitting host to the spiritual essence of Fistandantilus for more than a century.

  The ghostly spirit writhed and twisted, groping for a tiny snippet of control. But there was still that interference, the force that blocked him, competed for the power of the gemstone. And instead, the essence of evil could only despair as the fiery enchantment of the stone came so close that it all but sang out its message of vitality, of hope, of life itself.

  Then the impending conjunction was shattered beyond restoration, cast aside by the shield he could perceive but not identify. Infuriated, Fistandantilus turned the full power of his attentions toward one of these companions. Quickly he saw that this was a human lad, a person easily distinguished from the faceless mass of humanity.

  This was his enemy, the source of the mask that was a power equal to the ancient one’s. The presence, the competing essence fought with him, brushed him aside. Overwhelmed, Fistandantilus felt his awareness slipping away.

  The kender was once again his own master.

  And another person, the human boy, was added to the list of those who had to die.

  Chapter 27

  A Whistling Wanderer

  First Kirinor, Reapember

  374 AC

  Danyal watched as the whole group of bandits took shelter in the ditch, while Kelryn seized Foryth and him by the arms and pulled them out of sight behind a boulder beside the mountain road. The slope above them was steep and rocky, while across the way, the ground dropped into infinite blackness. From the remembered view at sunset, the lad knew that the terrain on the other side of the road plunged down a steep incline toward a mountain stream far below.

  He tried to see through the darkness, but Dan could make out nothing of what was approaching along the track. All he could hear was the tuneful whistling, the sound growing slowly louder as they waited.

  “Who do you suppose it is?” Foryth asked, the sound of his voice carrying through the night air.

  “Silence!” hissed Kelryn, pulling the historian farther back from the road.

  Danyal, meanwhile, lowered himself to the ground and peered around the edge of the large rock, seeking some sign of the approaching whistler. He could see the vague shapes of the huddled bandits crouching in the ditch, fading moonlight reflecting dully off exposed steel. The lad remembered Zack’s keen blade, the bandit’s willingness to wet that razor edge in the blood of seemingly anyone within reach, and he prayed that the unwitting traveler would suddenly turn around, would flee down that dark mountain road.

  The next sounds he heard dashed all those hopes, even as they sent the bandits into consternation.

  “Hi there! What are you doing in that muddy ditch? It’s a lot drier up here on the road.”

  The eight men of Kelryn’s band lunged forward to form a ring around the diminutive traveler Danyal saw
in their midst. The thugs growled like wild animals, though their presence didn’t seem to startle or worry the lone wanderer.

  “Oh, were you waiting for me? That’s nice. Pleased to make your acquaintance—Emilo Haversack, at your service. And you are …?”

  “A kender!” declared Zack in disgust, advancing on the unconcerned fellow.

  “Why, yes. Haversack is a kender name, after all—one of the finest, oldest, and most honorable of all the kender clans, if I say so myself. And of course I do, because nobody else will.”

  Somehow the kender had passed through the ring of bandits to make his final remarks before Kelryn, Foryth, and Danyal. Though they hadn’t emerged from the shelter of the concealing boulder, Danyal realized with vague surprise, the diminutive stranger had somehow wandered right up to them.

  “Emilo Haversack, at your service,” he repeated, clasping Danyal’s bound hands and pumping enthusiastically.

  “Hey—he got my purse!” shouted one of the bandits, a burly and sullen archer known as Bolt, as the group whirled toward the kender.

  “What? Oh, this?” Emilo was holding a small leather sack, a pouch that jingled as he lifted it. “You must have dropped it. Here!”

  The kender tossed the pouch back to Bolt, but as it sailed through the air, a stream of silvery coins tumbled out, bouncing and rolling across the road.

  “My steel!” roared the bandit, dropping to his knees and trying to sweep together all the coins. Laughing uproariously, the other members of the band joined in the fun, snatching any of their compatriot’s coins that rolled out of his reach.

  Danyal watched in amazement as Emilo took Foryth’s hands in a vigorous handshake, then bowed deeply to Kelryn Darewind.

  “Anyone could see that you’re the esteemed leader of these bold fellows. I’m honored to make your acquaintance. Emilo Haversack, at—”