"Don't you admit the. . family resemblance?" asked Tamex, a sinister glee in his voice. "Why, the two of you are exactly alike!"
He gestured to the Kingpriest, who had fallen to his knees, moaning and shaking his head.
"You, sir," Tamex said, "are nought but a backwa shy;ter king. A ruler of ghosts and little fictions. And you, Fordus Firesoul…"
His amber eyes fixed Fordus once again.
"You are as much a tyrant as the man you sought to overthrow. I knew you always had it in you. In all your talk of liberation, you have only shackled, only oppressed!
"Yes, the two of you are identical! And you are both my creatures!"
With a cry, Fordus leapt for Tamex, but the crystal warrior tumbled into dust and swirled in a blinding cloud through the room. The dust rose, glittering and eddying, and flashed suddenly, painfully, into the Prophet's eyes.
Blinded, Fordus fell to the hard stone floor, grop shy;ing for his dropped dagger, for anything. Slowly the Kingpriest approached the helpless rebel.
"Forgive me," the Kingpriest murmured ironi shy;cally, as delicately he touched the collar at Fordus's neck, removing the opals with a whispered spell. He stalked from the room as the golden tore around the Prophet's neck began to sparkle, tighten, compress.
Blute lightning played over the glittering metal, whichVontracted with a slow, inexorable motion. Fordus, writhing and gasping, clutched savagely at the strangling collar, tried to cry out. He fell face first to the floor, stirring the unswept dust with his last, desperate thrashing. Slowly, with a choking cry, he sank into a black, abiding darkness, where the army of the dead opened their ranks to receive him. His last breath eddied on the dusty floor of the Great Tower of Istar.
At the door, the Kingpriest turned, looking guiltily back into the rooni He whispered a last incantation, waving his hand over the dead Prophet, and the body of his son, now unprotected, hardened, blanched, and crumbled quickly into sand.
"I could not have done otherwise," he declared, to nothing but theidust and his conscience. "He was found in the salnds of tljie desert,/fhe protective tore I had devised around his neck. Sand and opals were the unsteady ground of his prophecy. Now to sand he returns, but his memory ….
Nor will the world remember, Takhisis replied, min shy;gling the remains of Fordus with the whirlwind that rose and vanished through the chamber window. We will veil it all, y0u and I.
We shall decide what history is. Create it…
Or destroy it.
The Kingpriest reeled, as relief and sorrow and secret ambition warred for mastery in his heart.
Now do my bidding.
"But…" began the Kingpriest, but the last wisp of dust spiraled swiftly out the window, leaving a whisper in its wake.
Prepare for the incantation. The one we planned in the first days.
"But it is too soon. ." began the Kingpriest, and his protest died in his throat.
Be ruled by me, the window murmured, and the chamber settled into unnatural darkness.
The Prophet was vanquished.
In a chaotic swirl above the Kingpriest's Tower, a faint, reptilian outline coalescing and dissolving in the whirling sand, Takhisis watched and laughed.
Now the Cataclysm was inevitable. Now the world would begin again in chaos; the gods would be readmitted.
And she would await them all.
From her stronghold she could seize them as they tried to enter the plane. Oh, yes, they would all come-good and neutral and evil alike-but her clergy would be there before them, her way estab shy;lished, and the blandishments of their followers would fall on deaf ears.
The age to come would be hers entirely, and last for thousands of years.
All that remained was the Kingpriest's ritual, the binding of her spirit in the glain opals, the gods-blood stones. Then her stay would be permanent.
Never again would she be driven from-Krynn.
How long yet would she wait? A year, perhaps two. The elven miners brought forth an abundance of gems from the dark.
From a dark far deeper than they imagined, Takhi shy;sis thought, and chuckled as her whirlwind moved through the cloudy Istarian sky.
But thoughts of the Lucanesti brought her back to StormlightyThe last of the rebel triad.
She wpmd see to that elf. If only out of thoroughness.
With a shriek, the whirlwind dove into the streets of the city.
The elf reeled and stumbled in the wind. Full of gravel and sand, it encircled him, whirling him about, smothering him in a harsh and stinging flood.
In the heart of the wind, Takhisis swirled and laughed.
Swept along by the bizarre sandstorm, the elf gasped and choked as the salt rushed into his nostrils, down his throat, into his eyes until, blinded, he groped his way across the Tower yards, looking for shelter, for covering, for the lee side to the pummeling wind.
Takhisis laughed again, more harshly as the pitiful creature tried to raise his lucerna against the gritty blast.
His hands clutched stone, mortar. With great effort, he pulled himself against the Tower wall as the wind Shrieked and battered.
Like a fly in a gale he was. Like a straw in a whirl shy;wind.
So fare all who vie with the power of a god.
Takhisis watched contentedly, her low purr rum shy;bling in the air like thunder over Istar as the elf encrusted with sand and stone.
I have vitrified him, she thought. Only a moment more…
Then, from somewhere far below her, imbed shy;ded in the depths of rock and water and earth, arose a murmur, a cry of a thousand voices so deep and remote that only a god's hearing could discern it.
The miners! Takhisis shrieked and hurled hysteri shy;cally against the ancient stone of the tower, sand and salt rattling against the windows. Then with a strange and urgent sighing, she settled on the cobbled streets of Istar, pouring like sand through the cracks of the stones in a sudden and frantic descent to the depths of the earth. The goddess was air and fire, salt and sand and glittering dark light, and as she poured through the crevasses~of the undercity, she forgot her victory, the dead reheL chieftain and his broken, abandoned bard, and the elf translated into crusted, dried stone.
Deep in the tunnels beneath the city, Spinel knew that something had changed-that for a moment, and perhaps only for a moment, the chains of the Lucanesti were loosened ever so slightly.
The old elf crouched in the lamplight and whis shy;pered the last of his directions to Tourmalin. The younger elf turned away, and raced with a handful of followers down the deepest incline.
They would leave the mines collapsed in their wake, burying the fabled opals under a hundred foot of rock. It would be decades before anyone-human or elf or even dwarf-could mine them again.
Tourmalin had cleared the rubble of a hundred cave-ins. She knew how the stones fell, how a slip shy;ping shelf of rock, an ill-guided pick, or a miner's spell might collapse the whole spindly arrangement of tunnel and winze and shortwall until the ground above them shuddered as the planet fell in on itself.
Jargoon, younger still, and a band of reckless younglings, would set pick and adze to the new beams supporting five of the six adits to the opal mines.
One lasfentrance would remain, and the Lucanesti would use it, overpower their guards by sheer number.
Then would be the fresh light of moon and stars, and breezes the likes of which Spinel barely remem shy;bered, and the smell of cedar and open water.
With a wakened resolve that bordered on hope, the old elf rose and made for the last of the adits.
Sifting through the layers of shivering stone, a dark sand tumbling through the porous volcanic rock, Takhisis growled and muttered.
The-least likely of saboteurs. A fossil of an elf and his cringing people.
Wluie-her eyes had been elsewhere, her powers diyerted:
The dark salts settled in a lightless chamber, then rose in an eddy of underground-wind, rattling eerily against the porous rock, sifting and stirri
ng through the subterranean blackness.
The opals were lost to her now, the mines caved in and closed to her slaves and minions.
There was enough of the glain dust to bring her into the world. Not in the form and the strength she would like, and perhaps not for the thousand years she had yearned for and craved.
But fifty years. Perhaps a hundred. Enough to punish all those who had foiled her.
It would be enough.
But meanwhile the Lucanesti would pay for the time she would lose. Pay dearly and in kind, with the time they had remaining.
Gasping for air in the collapsing tunnels, Spinel led a handful of the Lucanesti, mainly children, toward a wavering light-the last of the entrances, supported and protected by the young elf Jargoon.
The amber torchlight was soft, almost silky/ through his lowered lucerna, and the children daneed at the edge of his vision, their dark robes flickering like blades of translucent fire.
Somewhere below, Spinel prayed, Tourmalin was guiding the rest of the elves-the most skillful sappers and miners-toward thejsame entrance, the same faint source of light and air. Breathing a last hopeful petition to Branchala, the old elf followed the dodging, visionary light through the winding and crumbling corridors.
Sabotage had been easy. The Kingpriest had little regard for safety, and the whole network tumbled in upon itself in a vast, subterranean chain reaction. Already dust was rising from the lower corridors, and Spinel urged the younglings on, lifting a frail little elf-maid to his crusted shoulders and carrying her toward the entrance and freedom.
"Where are we going?" she asked, and asked again as the corridor snaked up through thick, glassy layers of obsidian.
Spinel soothed her with a faint, musical cooing, reached up and stroked her shoulder with a knobby hand.
He must protect these children. The fate of the Lucanesti lay in their futures.
^ Spinel calmed the children, stepped over the body of a battered Istarian sentry sprawled at the intersec shy;tion of two collapsed tunnels. It was apparent that Jargoonjiail been hard at work, and judging from the face of the poor Istarian, the elves had been enthusiastically merciless.
Holding his breath, the old elf rushed up the corri shy;dor, past another felled sentry, and another. Now the entrance to the mine was fully visible, a bright arch in the receding gloom some hundred yards away.
Spinel quickened his steps.
But where was Jargoon and his company? Spinel looked to the side tunnels, all collapsed and filled with rubble.
There was no sign of the other elves.
Long before the Lucanesti were brought to the cav shy;erns below Istar, before the long line of Kingpriests
and the city itself, a race of creatures ruled the intricate underworld of obsidian and brittle pumice and ages of dark voldanic gems.
The spiritvnaga had guarded these recesses dili shy;gently, jealously, hoarding the jewels, the precious metals-any stone that caught their depthless, glit shy;tering eyes-and guarding their riches out of sheer and aimless greed.
When the elves had come, the naga had fought against their invasion, and the nightmares of Lucanesti children were soon peopled with these monsters. Enormous serpents with passionless, blank human faces became the villains of a thousand elven legends, and every catastrophe from famine to collapsed tunnels was seen as the doing of the naga. Most importantly, the beasts practiced a rough and villainous magic, armed with an array of spells that blinded and stunned their unfortunate victims, so that the creatures might approach them and, using a magic more ancient and despicable still, drain their prey of all moisture, leaving the elves a mocking heap of opalescent bone.
Sinister and marginal, the spirit naga were a mys shy;tery to the Lucanesti, to the Istarians, to dwarf and druid aswell.
But nojt to Takhisis.
Long ago the goddess had found them and made them her minions.
The time had come to deploy them.
Now, an ancient naga crouched in the shadows beside the last clear entrance to the Istarian mines, hissing with hungry anticipation. The sinuous, scaled form flashed once in the rubble.
It was answered by another movement in the darkness on the other side of the entrance.
Which was enough for the old elf to understand.
Two of them. And no sign of Jargoon.
The monsters would make short work of the chil shy;dren, here at the edge of freedom, unless …
How did the words of the chanting go? It had been a hundred years since he used the spell, four hundred seasons with his thoughts on tunnels and corridors and hidden veins of opal.
Yet it was there, if he mined his memory wisely.
Slowly, Spinel lowered the elf-child to the tunnel floor. A faint rumbling from the rocks let him know the naga awaited them, had begun their long and treacherous incantations.
"Culet," he whispered to the little elf-maid. "When I tell you to run toward the light, you will do so. It is a game we can play, you and I, but remember to keep running when you reach the light and the wind. The rest of the people will follow."
Two of the older elf-children exchanged troubled glances, andthe corridor filled with the sound of a dry rustle, like something crawling over a century of leaves.
"Do not concern yourselves with me," Spinel assured them, affecting bravery, confidence, hoping his voice did not betray him. "You will follow Culet on my signal, and I shall join you later."
May the gods grant that reunion, he thought, his gaze flickering over the stirring darkness, the deep muttering in the rocks.
Slowly his arm encircled the elf-maid. Spinel guided her to the forefront of the company and, with a last, quick embrace, pushed her forward and away from him.
"Now!" he commanded, and the girl ran dutifully toward the light, the others following. Spinel ran with them, his old, stony bones creaking with sud shy;den movement, and there, at the entrance to the mines, he turned to face the waiting creatures.
Mouthing an old elven incantation, Spinel stood in the opening, and a globe of amber light formed around him. As each child, each youngling passed through the glow, it was as though they were cleansed and delivered. Shielding their eyes, they burst into sunlight and fresh airland a new, unex shy;pected life.
The nagas, unable to penetrate the amber glow of magic, groaned angrily in the darkness.
Finally, the last of the elf children leapt free of the mine. The light around him fading, Spinel prepared to follow, but the incantations, faint during his own swelling magic, grew louder and louder still.
Blocking out thought, and will, and memory.
Wearily, he took a last step toward the light, and his unveiled eyes looked longingly at the rockface, a patch of green and a spray of wildflowers in the midst of the black obsidian.
Gentian, he thought. And I had almost forgotten.
The monsters slithered into the light, blockingxthe entrance, Rising and arching, their pale, human› faces expressionless, they chanted the last of the spell to the humped, opalescent pillar at the edge of the cavernous dark.
Spinel became one with his ancestors and the earth that covered them.
The Dark Queen hovered in the upper chambers of the opal mines. A black dust whirling in the stag shy;nant passages, she heard the rumbling deep in the ground and rejoiced.
What difference did it make that the mines col shy;lapsed? That the elven younglings had escaped?
Most of the Lucanesti were far underground, easy prey for rockslides and spirit naga. As for the rest…
They would suffer the most in her impending return.
For now was the hour, when the Kingpriest chanted and the glain dust, the godsblood, filled with her fierce and abysmal life.
This did not go according to her schedule. Had it not been for that impudent ancient elf-the one who lay stony dead at the very edge of light and free shy;dom-she could have planned all things in her own time.
But now, the remaining opals darkly glittering in the depths of t
he earth, far from the grasp of her minionsTitwas as good a time as any. And a time to demolish the twenty or so remaining Plainsmen in the southern passes, the fool of a slave, the bard- the lot of them.
As though a wind rose from the deepest recesses of the planet, the dark dust rose and sifted through the cracks in the earth, merging into a hulking black cloud, sprouting tail and talon and tattered wings in its headlong flight for the lofty parapets of the King-priest's Tower.
When the windows spoke to him, clouded in smoke and approaching evening, their message was urgent, angered.
Now is the time, they told the Kingpriest. Your bride awaitsryou in the collected dust.
But he no longer believed the voices. It was fear that prompted his magic, rather than hope and desire. Sifting the glain dust through his trembling hands, he began the first of the incantations, his breath enkindling the dust, spangling it with a harsh, artificial light.
I must not fail, he thought. Bride or no bride, I must do the bidding of the voice.
He did not notice the clouckpf smoke and sand until it surrounded him, pouring through the stained opalescent windows and filling his chamber with a thick, choking haze.
Then the dust in his hands rose and mingled with the blinding air.
You have done your part, the voices proclaimed. I will let you live for now.
He knew better than to ask for the woman, the bride-the beautiful girl crafted of dust opalescent and promised him years ago by the dark voice in the clerestory. She would not come. He knew that he had been deceived. Duped and humiliated, weaker than he had ever imagined himself to be, the King-priest watched helplessly as the cloud darkened and solidified and poured out the opened windows.
Emerging from the temporary stonesleep that had saved him from Takhisis's anger, Stormlight watched from the foot of the Tower as a new whirlwind stirred on the balcony.
Dark sand eddied and rose, and within it the flat, opaque dust of the glain opals. The elf saw three shapes intertwined in the heart of the cloud: Tamex and Tanila, their amber eyes glittering with a strange, reptilian identity…
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