Dragons of a Lost Star

16 A Bored Kender

Palin placed the comatose kender in one of the shabby, dust-covered and mildewed chairs that stood at the far end of the library, a portion that was in shadow. Affecting to be settling Tas, Palin took the opportunity to look closely at Dalamar, who remained seated behind the desk, his head bowed into his hands.

Palin had seen the elf only briefly on first arriving. He had been shocked then at the ruinous alteration in the features of the once handsome and vain elven wizard: the gray-streaked black hair, the wasted features, the thin hands with their branching blue veins like rivers drawn on a map, rivers of blood, rivers of souls. And this, their master . . . Master of the Tower.

Struck by a new thought, Palin walked over to the window and looked down into the forest below, where the dead flowed still and silent among the boles of the cypress trees.

“The wizard-lock on the door below,” Palin said abruptly. “It was not meant to keep us in, was it?”

No answer came from Dalamar. Palin was left to answer himself. “It was meant to keep them out. If that is true, you might want to replace it.”

Dalamar, a grim look on his face, left the room. He returned long moments later. Palin had not moved. Dalamar came to stand beside him, looked into the mist of swirling souls.

“They gather around you,” Dalamar said softly. “Their grave-cold hands clasp you. Their ice lips press against your flesh. Their chill arms embrace you, dead fingers clutch at you. You know!”

“Yes,” said Palin. “I know.” He shook off the remembered horror.

“You can’t leave, either.”

“My body cannot leave,” Dalamar corrected. “My spirit is free to roam. When I depart, I must always come back.” He shrugged. “What is it the Shalafi used to say? ‘Even wizards must suffer.’ There is always a price.”

Dalamar lowered his gaze to Palin’s broken fingers. “Isn’t there?”

Palin thrust his hands into the sleeves of his robes. “Where has your spirit been?”

“Traveling Ansalon, investigating this fantastical time-traveling story of yours,” Dalamar replied.

“Story? I told you no story,” Palin returned crisply. “I haven’t spoken one word to you. You’ve been to see Jenna. She was the one who told you. And she said that she hadn’t seen you in years.”

“She did not lie, Majere, if that’s what you’re insinuating, although I admit she did not tell you all the truth. She has not seen me, at least not my physical form. She has heard my voice, and that only recently. I arranged a meeting with her after the strange storm that swept over all Ansalon in a single night.”

“I asked her if she knew where to find you.”

“Again, she told you the truth. She does not know where to find me. I did not tell her. She has never been here. No one has been here. You are the first, and believe me”—Dalamar’s brows constricted—”if you had not been in such dire straits, you would not be here now. I do not pine for company,” he added with a dark glance.

Palin was silent, uncertain whether to believe him or not.

“For mercy’s sake, don’t sulk, Majere,” Dalamar said, willfully misinterpreting Palin’s silence. “It’s undignified for a man of your age. How old are you anyway? Sixty, seventy, a hundred? I can never tell with humans. You look ancient enough to me. As for Jenna ‘betraying’ your confidence, it is well for you and the kender that she did, else I would have not taken an interest in you, and you would now be in Beryl’s tender care.”

“Do not try to taunt me by remarking on the fact that I am old,” Palin said calmly. “I know I have aged. The process is natural in humans. In elves, it is not. Look in a mirror, Dalamar. If the years have taken a toll on me, they have taken a far more terrible toll on you. As for pride”—Palin shrugged in his turn—”I lost that a long time ago. It is hard to remain proud when you can no longer summon magic enough to heat my morning tea. I think you have reason to know that.”

“Perhaps I do,” Dalamar replied. “I know that I have changed. The battle I fought with Chaos stole hundreds of years from me, yet I could live with that. I was victorious, after all. Victor and loser, all at the same time. I won the war and was defeated by what came after. The loss of the magic.

“I risked my life for the sake of the magic,” Dalamar continued, his voice low and hollow. “I would have given my life for the sake of the magic. What happened? The magic departed. The gods left. They left me bereft, powerless, helpless. They left me— ordinary!”

Dalamar breathed shallowly. “All that I gave up for the magic—my homeland, my nation, my people . . . I used to consider I had made a fair trade. My sacrifice—and it was a wrenching sacrifice, though only another elf would understand—had been rewarded. But the reward was gone, and I was left with nothing. Nothing. And everyone knew it.

“It was then I began to hear rumors—rumors that Khellendros the Blue was going to seize my Tower, rumors that the Dark Knights were going to attack it. My Tower!” Dalamar gave a vicious snarl. His thin fist clenched. Then, his hand relaxed, and he gave a grating laugh.

“I tell you, Majere, gully dwarves could have taken over my Tower, and I could have done nothing to stop them. I had once been the most powerful wizard in Ansalon, and now, as you said, I could not so much as boil water.”

“You were not alone.” Palin was unsympathetic. “All of us were affected the same way.”

“No, you weren’t,” Dalamar retorted passionately. “You could not be. You had not sacrificed as I had sacrificed. You had your father and mother. You had a wife and children.”

“Jenna loved you—” Palin began.

“Did she?” Dalamar grimaced. “Sometimes I think we only used each other. She could not understand me either. She was like you, with her damnable human hope and optimism. Why are you humans like that? Why do you go on hoping when it is obvious that all hope is lost? I could not stomach her platitudes. We quarreled. She left, and I was glad to see her leave. I had no need of her. I had no need of anyone. It was up to me to protect my Tower from those great, bloated wyrms, and I did what I had to do. The only way to save the Tower was to appear to destroy it. And I did so. My plan worked. No one knows the Tower is here. No one will, unless I want it to be found.”

“Moving the Tower must have taken an immense amount of magical power—a bit more than would be required to boil water,” Palin observed.

“You must have had some of the old magic left to you.”

“No, I assure you, I did not,” Dalamar said, his passion cooling. “I was as barren as you.”

He gave Palin a sharp and meaningful glance. “Like you, I understood magic was in the world, if one knew where to look for it.”

Palin avoided Dalamar’s intense gaze. “I do not know what you’re implying. I discovered the wild magic—”

“Not alone. You had help. I know, because I had the same help. A strange personage known as the Shadow Sorcerer.”

“Yes!” Palin was astonished. “Hooded and cloaked in gray. A voice that was as soft as shadow, might have belonged to either man or woman.”

“You never saw a face—”

“But I did,” Palin protested. “In that last terrible battle, I saw she was a woman. She was an agent of the dragon Malystryx—”

“Indeed?” Dalamar lifted an eyebrow. “In my last ‘terrible’ battle, I saw that the Shadow Sorcerer was a man, an agent for the dragon Khellendros who, according to my sources, had supposedly left this world in search of the soul of his late master, that demon-witch Kitiara.”

“The Shadow Sorcerer taught you wild magic?”

“No,” Dalamar replied. “The Shadow Sorcerer taught me death magic. Necromancy.”

Palin looked back out the window to the roaming spirits. He looked around the shabby room with its books of magic that were so many ghosts, lined up on the shelves. He looked at the elf, who was thin and wasted, like a gnawed bone. “What went wrong?” he asked at last.

“I was duped,” Dalamar returned. “I was given to believe I was master of the dead. Too late, I discovered I was not the master. I was the prisoner. A prisoner of my own ambition, my own lust for power.

“It is not easy for me to say these things about myself, Majere,”

Dalamar added. “It is especially hard for me to say them to you, the darling child of magic. Oh, yes. I knew. You were the gifted one, beloved of Solinari, beloved of your Uncle Raistlin. You would have been one of the great archmages of all time. I saw that. Was I jealous? A little. More than a little. Especially of Raistlin’s care for you. You wouldn’t think I would want that, would you? That I would hunger for his approval, his notice. But I did.”

“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.

He shoved aside the tree branch and looked around to get his bearings. The strange and unfamiliar moon of this strange and unfamiliar Krynn was very bright this night, and Tasslehoff was at last able to see something, although that something was only more tree branches. Tree branches to the left of him, tree branches to the right. Tree branches up, and tree branches down. Tree branches as far as the eye could see. He looked over the edge of the chimney and found the grate, perched in a branch about six feet below him.

Tasslehoff tried to determine how far he was from the ground, but the branches were in the way. He looked to the side and located the top of one of the Tower’s two broken minarets. The top was about level with him. That gave him some idea of how far he had climbed and, more importantly, how far the ground was below.

That was not a problem, however, for here were all these handy trees. Tasslehoff pulled himself out of the chimney. Finding a sturdy limb, he crawled carefully out on it, testing his weight as he went. The limb was strong and didn’t so much as creak. After chimney climbing, tree climbing was simple. Tasslehoff shinnied down the trunk, lowered himself from limb to friendly and supportive limb, and finally, as he gave a sigh of exultation and relief, his feet touched firm and solid ground. Down here, the moonlight was not very bright, hardly filtering through the thick leaves at all. Tas could make out the Tower but only because it was a black, hulking blot amongst the trees. He could see, very far up, a patch of light and figured that must be the window in Dalamar’s private chamber.

“I’ve made it this far, but I’m not out of the woods yet,” he said to himself. “Dalamar told Palin we were near Solanthus. I recall someone saying something about the Solamnic Knights having a headquarters at Solanthus, so that seems like a good place to go to find out what’s become of Gerard. He may be dull, and he certainly is ugly, and he doesn’t like kender, but he is a Solamnic Knight, and one thing you can say about Solamnic Knights is that they aren’t the type to send a fellow back in time to be stepped on. I’ll find Gerard and explain everything to him, and I’m sure he’ll be on my side.”

Tasslehoff remembered suddenly that the last time he’d seen Gerard, the Knight had been surrounded by Dark Knights firing arrows at him. Tas was rather downhearted at this thought, but then it occurred to him that Solamnic Knights were plentiful and if one was dead, you could always find another.

The question now was, how to find his way out of the forest. All this time he’d been on the ground, the dead were flowing around him like fog with eyes and mouths and hands and feet, moving past him and over him, but he hadn’t really taken any notice, he’d been too busy thinking. He noticed now. Although being surrounded by dead people with their sad faces and their hands that plucked at one of his pouches wasn’t the most comfortable experience in the world, he thought perhaps they might make up for being so extremely cold and creepy by providing him with directions.

“I say, excuse me, sir— Madam, excuse me— Hobgoblin, old chum, could you tell me— I beg your pardon, but that’s my pouch. Hey, kid, if I give you a copper would you show— Kender! Fellow kender! I need to find a way to reach— Drat,” Tasslehoff said after several moments spent in a futile attempt to converse with the dead. “They don’t seem to see me. They look right through me. I’d ask Caramon, but just when he might be useful, he isn’t around. I don’t mean to be insulting,” he added in irritable tones, trying without success to find a path through the cypress trees that pressed thick around him, “but there really are a lot of you dead people! Far more than is necessary.”

He continued searching for a path—any sort of a path— but without much luck. Walking in the dark was difficult, although the dead were lit with a soft white light that Tas thought was interesting at first but after awhile, seeing that the dead looked very lost, sorrowful, and terrified, he decided that darkness—any darkness—would be preferable.

At least, he could put some distance between himself and Palin and Dalamar. If he, a kender who was never lost, was lost in these trees, he had no doubt that a mere human and a dark elf—wizards though they might be—would be just as lost and that by losing himself he was also losing them.

He kept going, bashing into trees and knocking his head against low branches, until he took a nasty tumble over a tree root and fell down onto a bed of dead cypress needles. The needles were sweet-smelling, at least, and they were decently dead—all brown and crispy—not like some other dead he could mention.

His legs were pleased that he wasn’t using them anymore. The brown needles were comfortable, after you got used to them sticking you in various places, and, all in all, Tasslehoff decided that since he was down here he might as well take this opportunity to rest.

He crawled to the base of the tree trunk, settled himself as comfortably as possible, pillowing his head on a bed of soft green moss. It was not surprising, therefore, that the last thing he thought of, as he was drifting off to sleep, was his father.

Not that his father was moss-covered.

It was his father telling him, “Moss always grows on the side of a tree facing—”

Facing. . .

Tas closed his eyes.

Now, if he could just remember what direction . . .

“North,” he said and woke himself up.

Realizing that he now could tell what direction he was traveling, he was about to roll over and go back to sleep when he looked up and saw one of the ghosts standing over him, staring down at him.

The ghost was that of a kender, a kender who appeared vaguely familiar to Tas, but then most kender appear familiar to their fellow kender since the odds are quite likely that in all their ambulations, they must have run into each other sometime.

“Now, look,” said Tasslehoff, sitting up. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have spent most of the day escaping from the Tower of High Sorcery, and—as I am certain you know—escaping from sorcerous towers makes a fellow extremely tired. So if you don’t mind, I’m just going to go to sleep.”

Tas shut his eyes, but he had the feeling the ghost of the kender was still there, still looking down at him. Not only that, but Tas continued to see the ghost of the kender on the backs of his eyelids, and the more he thought about it the more he was quite certain he had definitely met that kender somewhere before.

The kender was quite a handsome fellow with a taste in clothes that others might have considered garish and outlandish but that Tasslehoff considered charming. The kender was festooned with pouches, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the expression on the kender’s face

—sad, lost, alone, seeking.

A cold chill shivered through Tasslehoff. Not a thrilling, excited chill, like you feel when you’re about to pull the glittering ring off the bony finger of a skeleton and the finger twitches! This was a nasty, sickening kind of chill that scrunches up the stomach and squeezes the lungs, making it hard to breathe. Tas thought he would open his eyes, then he thought he wouldn’t. He squinched them shut very hard so they wouldn’t open by themselves and curled into an even tighter ball. He knew where he had seen that kender before.

“Go away,” he said softly. “Please.”

He knew quite well, though he couldn’t see, that the ghost hadn’t gone away.

“Go away, go away, go away!” Tas cried frantically, and when that didn’t work, he opened his eyes and jumped to his feet and yelled angrily at the ghost, “Go away!”

The ghost stood staring at Tasslehoff.

Tasslehoff stood staring at himself.

“Tell me,” Tas said, his voice quivering, “why are you here? What do you want? Are you . . . are you mad because I’m not dead yet?”

The ghost of himself said nothing. It stared at Tas a little longer, then turned and walked away, not as if it wanted to but because it couldn’t help itself. Tas watched his own ghost join a milling throng of other restless spirits. He watched until he could no longer distinguish his ghost from any other.

Tears stung his eyes. Panic seized him. He turned and ran as he had never run before. He ran and ran, not looking where he was going, smashing into bushes, caroming off tree trunks, falling down, getting up, running some more, running and running until he fell down and couldn’t get up because his legs wouldn’t work anymore.

Exhausted, frightened, horrified, Tasslehoff did something he had never done.

He wept for himself.