The Inheritance

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  She could not, and it seemed that those who followed, godless though they claimed to be, could ascribe the work to no mortal hand or even the craft of time. They trod carefully, following Char and Elansa. None remained untouched by the beauty around them, this place that made their old robber den seem like a fox's hole. One after another—even sullen Arawn—spoke oaths whose meaning till now had never been felt.

  By the gods’ good grace…

  In the name of Reorx…

  By Paladine’s shining glance, have you ever seen the like of this?

  Elansa took a deep breath of cool air. Breathing, she tasted water. Somewhere a stream ran, chuckling over stone.

  "I hear water, Char, and you promised us we could fill the bottles fat."

  In the crowd, Arawn muttered something, his voice twisted and sour.

  Like a whip-crack, Dell snapped, "Shut up and keep moving."

  If Arawn said more, Elansa didn't hear it. Char had stopped between two columns of stone, thick stalactites reaching nearly to the floor.

  "Look," he said.

  Breathless, she stood at the edge of a series of stairs winding down. And these were stairs, not the chance shaping of time and rivers. Someone had made these steps. Someone had carved them, as steps had been carved in the robber den, but these were broad and shallow. They reminded Elansa of the gracious flow of steps leading into Solostaran’s banquet hall. At the foot of the stairs ran a broad silver stream, its voice magnified by echoes.

  Impulse took Elansa, and she ran down the steps as though she were traipsing into the elf king’s feasthall, a princess bejeweled and silken gowned. She paused, she turned, and in the dim light on one of the risers, she saw the mark of a lily such as is found in some corners of the Tower of the Sun. Craft, indeed! With good cause did these steps remind her of home. That mark alone suggested the maker of these had done work in the Tower of the Sun a long time ago.

  Others followed, and Brand came last. She bent to the water and then knelt on the stone. Making a cup of her hands, she scooped up an icy drink, the water so cold it hurt her teeth. Nonetheless, she drank her handful and then another. She splashed her face and neck and looked around longingly, sighing for a place to wash off the stink of long days and nights unbathed.

  She turned, for she felt the touch of familiar eyes on her. Brand looked at her, his head back like a man considering. "If you want," he said, "I could—"

  She stood and walked past him, but she never looked at him. If she wanted, he could arrange for her to bathe. He could find her a private place. She knew those words were on his lips, and she knew the bath would not have been so private as she'd liked. He would be there, guard or company in the water.

  As she brushed past him, she heard him say, "It would have been what you wanted."

  Later, when she thought about those words, later with him asleep beside her and the light of campfires gleaming on the links of the chain that held her Blue Phoenix, she lifted a hand to touch it. Ah, lightly, lightly, she didn't want to wake him.

  It quickened to her touch, her lovely Blue Phoenix. She was to have banished a blight with the help of the magic in this talisman. She was to have healed trees in Bianost and made them whole again. The sapphire pulsed just beneath her fingertips. Brand stirred, sighing in his sleep. His face eased a little, the hard lines of it softening.

  She wondered if he felt the magic in the stone.

  He turned onto his side, his face hidden.

  Chapter 11

  Elansa felt Brand's eyes on her everywhere she went. They tracked, they followed, and when she turned or lifted her head to look at him, he did not look away. He was thinking about her, and she knew he was weighing something, perhaps her fate. He watched her eat, and she did not challenge. She drank from the stream, slipped away into the privy place, and came back. He watched her leave, he watched her return, and she did not challenge.

  Elansa pressed her back to cold stone and rested her head against the wall. Brand stood talking to Char, the two a little apart from the others. The dwarf gestured, sometimes broadly, sometimes subtly.

  Quiet as a shadow, Tianna dropped down to sit beside her. She took a broad-bladed dagger from her belt and a whetstone from a little leather pouch In silence, she made stone and steel sing, honing the weapon. Little sparks flew, dancing in the dim light. She lifted the blade, touched it lightly with her finger, and found it keen. She turned it and, not looking up, said, "What are they talking about?"

  The question surprised her. Elansa shrugged. "I'd be the last to know."

  At this, the half-elf looked up. "You should be the first. You sleep with him."

  Elansa watched the sparks fly. "Not by choice. There is no pillow talk, Tianna. There is only…" She shook her head. There was only command. "You had a better chance for that than I will or want."

  Elansa studied her face. "Tianna had a lovely face. Her lips were wide, and her eyes were not so long as an elf’s but lovelier than a human's. She had bathed, somewhere in privacy, as did Dell. They could. They had long ago let their male companions know how they would enforce their privacy. And so her hair, clean and shining, was the brightest thing not afire in the cavern. She wore it in a thick braid, and a widow’s peak framed her brow.

  Tianna looked up, and her long eyes gleamed with humor. "He can be a good lover," she said, low. "I didn't get tired of that."

  Elansa ventured a question. "What did you get tired of?"

  Tianna looked around, at Brand and Char in their animated conversation, at Swain and Ballu and Chaser rolling the bones, at Dell sleeping and Arawn brooding. Her glance swept past Nigh-toothless Kerin, Pragol, Loris, and Bruin, whose hair was the same color as a wolf's pelt. She looked at her father, the elf who spoke very little and not to many of his companions.

  She said, "I’m tired of this. Tired of moving and tired of all these men." She sighted along the edge of her dagger, the tip of it glittering. "I won't be leaving him now. There is too much shifting and change in the air. One of us goes, and it could all come down."

  "Arawn would like that."

  "He acts like he would. No matter. I'm here for now. When we get where we're going…" She shook her head. "Brand'll be getting where he's going. Me, I'll just be going."

  They sat a moment. Chaser crowed in triumph, and Swain grumbled about ill luck.

  The silence settled in again. Tianna slid Elansa one swift sidelong glance and whispered, "You'll want to keep an eye on me, princess."

  Elansa understood that the words weren't warning but suggestion. Tianna got to her feet and strode away. Elansa, for months a prisoner, had grown used to living as a captive. She knew how to keep her feelings close. As though the half-elf had said nothing at all, she settled back against the wall, feeling the cool damp stone against her shoulders.

  She looked around her. A grander cavern, still this little forest of stone was a robber’s den. For this time, these brief hours of rest, the outlaws had fallen into old patterns—gambling, sleeping, and quarreling. She knew all their voices. She could pick them out with her eyes closed. She heard them each night in her sleep. She stretched out her legs and stretched her arms up high She was cold and cramped and weary. The light shafting down from some high crack in the stone ceiling grew fainter, paler. Day was ending. Perhaps moonlight would soon reach down here.

  Ah, for the smell of the outside air, the freshness of a quickening breeze! She thought of the red—tailed hawk, winged and free. Secretly, behind the mask of her face, she thought of Tianna’s words. Keep an eye on me, princess. They sounded like wind in the sky. They sounded like hope.

  She felt his eyes on her—Brand’s keen glance. Wrapped in her cloak, as much against his regard as against cold, Elansa lay down with her back to the wall. As she had long ago learned to do, she slept, but she didn't sleep peacefully. For the first time since her capture, Elansa dreamed.

  She dreamed about being watched. Eyes were upon her—Brand’s brown eyes, weighing her, judging her. She dre
amed she did not suffer that. She dreamed she allowed it, and in her dream, she looked into those eyes and spoke as a princess speaks, in the full confidence that her station was her shield, her rank her defense against all who would harm her. She was, after all, an elf among these half-savage outlaws, a princess of the royal house of Qualinesti.

  She said, "Look, Brand, as deeply as you dare, and see if I am afraid of you."

  In her dream, she was not.

  Elansa felt the shadow of the hand before she felt the flesh and bone. Cool, sliding over her flesh, she felt the shadow gliding. Her heart slammed up into her throat. She stiffened and jerked away. Too late! A hard, callused palm clamped across her mouth, another grasped her wrists, her two slender wrists in one broad-handed clasp, prisoned as though by ropes again.

  Elansa’s blood pounded in her temples. It seemed the whole dark world beat to the rhythm of her sudden terror. Her breath snagged in her throat, pressed back by the hand across her mouth, and she struggled, trying to find flesh to bite. Her teeth came down upon the pads of the palm. Her captor grunted, and she tasted blood even as he gripped harder. Eyes wide, she saw in the pale moonlight the flaring red outline of a man bent over her. By that dim light she saw his eyes, wide and white, and his mouth opening. His breath reeked of spiced jerky, and he stank of sweat and smoke.

  "Hush," he whispered.

  Brand.

  A little, Elansa relaxed. Her muscles eased, the tension drained.

  Brand's grip on her hands loosened. In one swift motion he pulled her to her feet. "Quiet, and come with me."

  Shaking and wrapping her cloak around her shoulders against the chill of the underground, she stood in barely broken darkness. Faint light suffused the cavern—the light of the two moons gone pale for all the dark distance it had to travel to find them. Brand stood close, his beard bristling against her face.

  "Come," he said, and his breath touched her cheek.

  She heard no threat, no danger in his voice. He turned, assuming obedience. Following, Elansa walked carefully past the sleeping forms of Brand's outlaws. Char and Fang, master and hound, each twitched in sleep. Passing those two, she smelled the scents of hound and dwarf spirits all tangled up. She walked around Dell in her corner. Arawn and the others were hunched and unmoving as stone. Four were missing. She saw them in the distance, darker forms against the darkness, standing watch near the entrances to this stony forest.

  Elansa looked across the stream to the stony wall, at all the pillars built up over centuries uncounted, minerals dripping down from the roof to form accretions on the floor, age after age growing tall until this wonderful forest of stone lived beneath the earth, illuminated by thin shafts of moonlight and pale blades of sunlight. This was the work of gods, or the work of the world itself. Yet here in this wonderful place someone had fashioned steps, the breadth and height carefully measured, the stone beautifully smoothed and polished, and her feet knew those steps as well as she knew those in the elf king’s hall.

  Elansa and Brand walked to the water, right to the edge of the stone where the stream was noisiest. When he stood farthest from his men, Brand put his back to the water and turned to face her.

  "Now, tell me something," he said. Here fell a broader shaft of mingled moonlight, so she saw how bright his eyes were. "Tell me what you know about Pax Tharkas."

  "Pax—"

  "Hush!"

  He warned even as she heard her own voice begin to echo. Behind them, someone stirred, then stilled. Over her shoulder she saw Swain at one of the entrances turn his head, then turn back to his watch.

  "Pax Tharkas," she whispered. "I know much about it, or what it used to be. Why? Hasn't Leyerlain told you about it?"

  "Never cared about it till lately. Tell me what you know."

  Curiosity pricking her, she said, "Pax Tharkas has long tales attached to it. In the library at Qualinost we have a whole room devoted to the histories of the place. Our greatest king commissioned the building of it—"

  "Kith—Kanan."

  "Yes," she said, surprised to hear that name on human lips.

  Brand shrugged. "In the Stonelands, you hear things." He cocked a curious eye. "You kin to him?"

  Coolly, she murmured, "No. My husband is Kethrenan Kanan, and he is kin to the ancient king."

  But his attention had wandered. He was not impressed. "Ah, well, married to kingly kin, that’s not so bad." Again, he quickened, his eyes glinting with barely suppressed eagerness as he returned to what most interested him. "Now. Pax Tharkas. Tell me."

  Low in the air of the cave, torch smoke drifted through the faint beams of moonlight that arrowed down from a ceiling they could not see. Two hounds growled over a bone. Char dreamed again.

  "Pax Tharkas was, a long time ago, a monument to friendship between elves and dwarves and humans."

  She looked past him, to the black-and-silver stream running, and warmed to her story, telling him that for a thousand years and half a thousand more the fortress whose name means Peace of Friendship stood inviolate, guarding all the land about in three kingdoms. The rich Tharkadan Iron Mines were there, safe behind the great walls and guarded by the two tall towers. From there came the iron and steel that had, before the treaty, been the cause of wars between dwarves and elves and humans. With the treaty and the building of the fortress to seal it, trading pacts were made, and wars became the stuff of history.

  Then came the Cataclysm and the withdrawal of the gods from Krynn, the withdrawal of the elves to Qualinost and the dwarves to Thorbardin, the scattering of the humans….

  In those hard times, the very face of Krynn was remade. Seas shoved out of their basins, and the climate across the face of the world changed. In the ensuing years, kingdoms fell like toppled sand castles, and the wealthy became poor, and poor people became desperate. Pax Tharkas became the sole property of the mountain dwarves, the far western outpost of Thorbardin manned by clans grown suspicious of outsiders. Old alliances fell to dust, old treaties were forgotten, and the names of old friends went unspoken as the elves of Qualinesti and the dwarves of Thorbardin grew eager to turn inward where the godless could not come.

  "Pax Tharkas was many long years in the making, and few deny it is the finest craft of dwarven hands," Elansa said. "It’s built astride a south-running mountain pass, an enormous fortress of stone with two tall towers and an outer wall no enemy has ever breached. Kith-Kanan, the first king of the Qualinesti, our first Speaker of the Sun, is buried there in a fine crypt, and his Royal Guard lies near."

  "Have you ever seen it?" Brand asked.

  "The crypt in the Hall of the Ancients? No. No one alive has. It’s guarded by dire magic. And I've never seen Pax Tharkas itself." Her voice dropped low. "But I think we are near Pax Tharkas."

  Brand's eyes lit with amusement. "What makes you say that?"

  She pointed to the step upon which they stood. "Dwarf-made, don't you agree?"

  He didn't disagree. How could he? He'd spent years in the outlands of Thorbardin. The mark of dwarves was everywhere to be found and not in the least noted in the ancient stonework in the robber-hall under Hammer Rock. Cunningly worked columns lay shattered beneath the ledge where his men had long kept watch, as though some great temple had once stood, then fallen. If one didn't see mountain dwarves much outside Thorbardin, one often saw the ancient work of their hands.

  Elansa took his silence for agreement. "I believe the dwarf who made these steps must have been in the Tower of the Sun. I'm sure he saw the steps these mirror. This work is ancient, and so are the steps in Qualinost. He was, I think, one of the designers of Pax Tharkas."

  Brand snorted. "A step’s a step."

  She bent to one knee, tracing her fingers along the riser until she felt the mark that made her case. "Look." She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. "Put your hand here and see the proof of what I say."

  He bent, and she guided his hand toward the mark she wanted him to feel. So close to him that she felt his breath on her cheek,
she knew his surprise when he touched and traced the lily-mark.

  "That is the mark a dwarf made upon those steps in the Tower of the Sun, in the feast hall, and that hall was commissioned by a woman whose name, in Elvish, means Lily of the Night. Why would her sigil be here in this place if the maker of these steps hadn't had to do with Qualinost and Ashanlilana, the Lily of the Night?"

  "An elven queen," he said, "marked there and marked here."

  Color rose to Elansa’s cheek. Ashanlilana hadn't been a queen in Qualinost, though for a time she had been queen in the king's bed. The Lily of the Night had managed no official status for herself, though her mark, her lily, remained in several chambers of the ancient Tower of the Sun—on tiles, stair risers, and in bas-relief on two of the colonnades that led out from the tower and into the royal family’s private gardens. She had, in her time, had great influence on the heart of the king.

  "Tell me this," Brand said, pulling her to her feet, "who lives in Pax Tharkas now?"

  "Why, no one." Did these humans know nothing?

  Did they roam between the Tower of the Sun and Pax Tharkas as though they'd been dropped down into foreign lands? "No one lives there. The dwarves held on to it for nearly a century after the Cataclysm, but they lost it during the Dwarfgate War. Now the only things living there are ravens and wolves and rats and—"

  "Ghosts. You call it Pax Tharkas, and dwarves do. The rest of us call it the Fortress of Ghosts."

  That was a dark enough name for a place meant to stand as a monument to friendship, but it wasn't the name that made her draw in her breath. Sudden understanding and wonder filled her, and she looked over her shoulder to the place where she saw Char and his hound.

  "He led us all this way, so close to Pax Tharkas, with no sight of sun or moons or stars."

  "He's a good guide when he's not drinking. None better in the hills around or even here in the belly of Krynn."

  "I don't doubt he is. Arawn doesn't seem to agree."