by Dragon Lance
“The message is ‘the world’s gone mad’,” Kemian breathed. His father didn’t share his concern. Tamanier had lived too long, had served Kith-Kanan for too many centuries, not to trust the Speaker’s intuition. At first he’d been frightened, but as his sovereign seemed so unconcerned, the elderly elf quickly mastered his own fear.
Restless, Kemian paced up and down, his slate-blue eyes stormy. “I wish whatever’s going to happen would go ahead and happen!” he exclaimed, slamming his sword hilt against his scabbard. “This waiting will drive me mad!”
“Calm yourself, Kem. A good warrior should be cool in the face of trial, not coiled up like an irritated serpent,” his father counseled.
“I need action,” Kemian said, halting in midstride. “Give me something to do, Your Majesty!”
Kith-Kanan thought for a moment. Then he said, “Go to Mackeli Tower and see if any foreigners have arrived since the rain started. I’d like to know if the rain is also falling outside my realm.”
Grateful to have a task to perform, Kemian bowed, saying, “Yes, sire. I’ll go at once.”
He hurried away.
*
Red rain trickled down Verhanna’s arms, dripping off her motionless fingertips. Beside her, Rufus Wrinklecap squirmed. She glared at him, a silent order to keep still. Ahead, some thirty feet away, two dark figures huddled by a feeble, smoky campfire. Rufus had smelled the smoke from quite a distance off, so Verhanna and her two remaining warriors had dismounted and crept up to the camp on foot. Verhanna grabbed the kender by his collar and hissed, “Are these the Kagonesti slavers?”
“They are, my captain,” he said solemnly.
“Then we’ll take them.”
Rufus shook his head, sending streams of red liquid flying. “Something’s not right, my captain. These fellows wouldn’t sit in the open by a campfire where anyone could find them. They’re too smart for that.”
The kender’s voice was nearly inaudible.
“How do you know? They just don’t realize we’re on their trail,” Verhanna said just as softly. She sent one of her warriors off to the left and the other to the right to surround the little clearing where the slavers had camped. Rufus fidgeted, his sodden, wilting plume bobbing in front of Verhanna’s face.
“Be still!” she said fiercely. “They’re almost in position.” She caught a dull glint of armor as the two elf warriors worked their way into position. Carefully the captain drew her sword. Muttering unhappily, Rufus pulled out his shortsword.
“Hail Qualinesti!” shouted Verhanna, and bolted into the clearing. Her two comrades charged also, swords high, shouting the battle cry. The slavers never stirred.
Verhanna reached them first and swatted at the nearest one with the flat of her blade. To her dismay, her blow completely demolished the seated figure. It was nothing but a cloak propped up by tree limbs.
“What’s this?” she cried. One of her warriors batted at the second figure. It, too, was a fake.
“A trick!” declared the warrior. “It’s a trick!” A heartbeat later, an arrow sprouted from his throat. He gave a cry and fell onto his face.
“Run for it!” squealed Rufus.
Another missile whistled past Verhanna as she sprinted for the trees. Rufus hit the leaf-covered ground and rolled, bounced, and dodged his way to cover. The last warrior made the mistake of following his captain rather than making for the edge of the clearing nearest him. He ran a half-dozen steps before an arrow hit him in the thigh. He staggered and fell, calling out to Verhanna.
The captain crashed into the line of trees, blundering noisily through the undergrowth. When she reached her original hiding place, she stopped. The wounded elf warrior called to her again.
Breathing hard, Verhanna sheathed her sword and put her back against a tree. The red rain coursed down her cheeks as she gasped for breath.
“Psst.”
She jumped at the sound and whirled. Rufus was on his hands and knees behind her.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Trying to keep from getting an arrow in the head,” said the kender. “They was waitin’ for us.”
“So they were!” Furious with herself for walking into the trap, she said, “I’ve got to go back for Rikkinian.”
Rufus grabbed her ankle. “You can’t!”
Verhanna kicked free of his grasp. “I won’t abandon a comrade!” she said emphatically. Shrugging off her cloak, Verhanna soon stood in her bare armor. She drew a thick-bladed dagger from her belt and crouched down, almost on all fours.
“Wait, I’ll come with you,” said the kender in a loud whisper. He scampered through the brush behind her.
Verhanna reached the edge of the clearing. Rikkinian, the wounded elf, was now silent and unmoving, lying face down in the mud. The other warrior sprawled near the phony slavers. Curiously, the stick figures and cloaks had been re-erected.
“Come here, Wart,” the captain muttered. Rufus crawled to her. “What do you think?”
“They’re both dead, my captain.”
Verhanna’s gaze rested on Rikkinian. Her brisk demeanor was gone; two warriors had paid for her mistake. Plaintively she asked, “Are you certain?”
“No one lies with his nose in the mud if he’s still breathing,” Rufus said gently. He squinted at the propped-up cloaks. “The archers are gone,” he announced. Again Verhanna asked him if he was sure. He pointed. “There are two sets of footprints crossing the clearing over there. The dark elders have fled.”
To demonstrate the truth of his words, Rufus stood up. He walked slowly past the fallen elves toward the smoldering fire. Verhanna went to Rikkinian and gently turned him over. The arrow wound in his leg hadn’t killed him. Someone had dispatched him with a single thrust of a narrow-bladed knife through the heart. Burning with anger, she rose and headed for her other fallen comrade. Before she reached him, she was shocked to see Rufus raise his little sword and fall on the back of one of the propped-up cloaks. This time the cloak didn’t collapse into a pile of tree limbs. Arms and legs appeared beneath it, and a figure leapt up.
“Captain!” Rufus shouted. “It’s one of them!”
Verhanna fumbled for her sword as she ran toward the campfire. The kender stabbed over and over again at the cloaked figure’s back. Though not muscular, Rufus possessed a wiry strength, but his attack appeared to have no effect. The cloaked one spun around, trying to throw the pesky kender off. When the front of the hood swung past Verhanna, she froze in her tracks and gasped.
“Rufus! It has no face!” she shouted.
With one last prodigious shake, the cloaked thing hurled Rufus to the ground. The kender’s small sword flew into the woods as Rufus landed with a thud. He groaned and lay still, crimson rain beating down on his pallid face.
Verhanna gave a cry and slashed at the faceless figure, her slim elven blade slicing through the cloth with ease. She felt resistance as the blade passed through whatever lay beneath the cloak, but no blood flowed. Under the hood, where a face should have been, there was only a ball of grayish smoke, as if someone had stuffed the hood with dirty cotton.
Cutting and thrusting and hacking, Verhanna soon reduced the cloak to a tattered mass on the muddy ground. Shorn of its garment, the thing was revealed to be a vaguely elf-shaped column of dove-colored smoke. Two arms, two legs, a head, and torso were visible, but nothing else – only featureless vapor. Realizing she was exhausting herself to no avail, Verhanna stood back to catch her breath.
Rufus sat up slowly and clutched his head. He shook the pain aside and looked up at the smoky apparition standing between him and his captain. His hat had been trodden in the mud, and rain streamed from his long hair. Rufus glanced from the wispy figure to the dying campfire. Only a single coil of vapor, as thick as his wrist, snaked upward from the damp wood, and it twisted and writhed oddly in the still air.
Suddenly the kender had an inspiration. He dragged the other, unoccupied cloak to the fire and threw it over the smolde
ring wood. The sodden material soon extinguished the last of the sparks, and the fire died. As it did, the smoky figure thinned and finally vanished.
There was a long moment of silence, broken only by Rufus’s and Verhanna’s heavy breathing. At last Verhanna demanded, “What in Astra’s name was that infernal thing?”
“Magic,” Rufus replied simply. His attention was centered on retrieving his hat from the mud. Sorrowfully he tried to straighten the long, crimson-stained plume. It was hopeless; the feather was broken in two places and hung limply.
“I know it was magic,” Verhanna said, annoyed. “But why? And whose?”
“I told you those elves were clever. One of them knows magic. He made the ghost as a diversion, I’ll bet, to keep us busy while they escaped.”
Verhanna slapped the flat of her blade against her mailed thigh. “E’li blast them! My two soldiers killed and we’re diverted by magic smoke!” She stamped her foot, splashing blood-colored puddles over Rufus. “I’d give my right arm for another crack at those two! I never even saw them!”
“They’re very dangerous,” said Rufus sagely. “Maybe we should get more soldiers to hunt them down.”
The Speaker’s daughter was not about to admit defeat. She slammed her sword home in its scabbard. “No, by the gods! We’ll take them ourselves!”
The kender jammed his soggy blue hat down on his head. His new clothes were ruined. “You don’t pay me enough for this,” he said under his breath.
*
How empty the great house seemed with Verhanna gone and Ulvian sent off to toil in the quarries of Pax Tharkas. Lord Anakardain was away from the city, with the lion’s share of the Guards of the Sun chasing down the last stubborn bands of slavers. Kemian Ambrodel was out questioning new arrivals in Qualinost about the red rain and other marvels of days past.
So many friends and familiar faces gone. Only he, Kith-Kanan, had remained behind. He had given up his freedom to roam when he accepted the throne of Qualinesti. After all these centuries, he finally understood how his father, Sithel, had felt before him. Bound up in chains like a prisoner. Only a Speaker’s chains weren’t made of iron, but of the coils of responsibility, duty, protocol.
It was hard, very hard, to remain inside the arched bridges of Qualinost, just as it was hard to keep inside the walls of the increasingly lonely Speaker’s house. Sometimes his thoughts were with Ulvian. Had he done right by his son? The prince’s crime was heinous, but did it justify Kith-Kanan’s harsh sentence?
Then he thought of Verhanna, probing every glade and clearing from Thorbardin to the Thon-Thalas River, seeking those whose crimes were the same as her brother’s. Loyal, brave, serious Hanna, who never swerved from following an order.
Kith-Kanan rose from his bed and threw back the curtains from his window. It was long after midnight, by the water clock on the mantle, and the world outside was as dark as pitch. He could hear the bloody rain still falling. It seeped under windowsills and doors.
A name, long buried in his thoughts, surfaced. It was a name not spoken aloud for hundreds of years: “Anaya!”
Into the quiet darkness, he whispered the name of the Kagonesti woman who had been his first wife. It was as if she was in the room with him.
He knew she was not dead. No, Anaya lived on, might even manage to outlive Kith-Kanan. As her life’s blood had flowed out of a terrible sword wound, Anaya’s body had indeed died. But undergoing a mysterious, sublime transformation, Anaya the elf woman had become a fine young oak tree, rooted in the soil of the ancient Silvanesti forest she had lived in and guarded all her life. The forest was but a small manifestation of a larger, primeval force, the power of life itself.
The power – he could think of nothing else to call it – had come into existence out of the First Chaos. The sages of Silvanost, Thorbardin, and Daltigoth all agreed that the First Chaos, by its very randomness, accidentally gave birth to order, the Not-Chaos.
Only order makes life possible.
These things Kith-Kanan had learned through decades of studying side by side with the wisest thinkers of Krynn. Anaya had been a servant of the power, the only force older than the gods, protecting the last of the ancient forests remaining on the continent. When her time as guardian was ended, Anaya had become one with the forest. She had been carrying Kith-Kanan’s child at the time.
Kith-Kanan’s head hurt. He kneaded his temples with strong fingers, trying to dull the ache. His and Anaya’s unborn son was a subject he could seldom bear to think about. Four hundred years had passed since last he’d heard Anaya’s voice, and yet at times the pain of their parting was as fresh as it had been that golden spring day when he’d watched her warm skin roughen into bark, when he’d heard her speak for the final time.
The rain ended abruptly. Its cessation was so sudden and complete it jarred Kith-Kanan out of his deep thoughts. The last drop fell from the water clock. Three days of scarlet rain were over.
His sigh echoed in the bedchamber. What would be next? He wondered.
*
“Thank Astra that foul mess has stopped!” exclaimed Rufus. “I feel like the floor of a slaughterhouse, soaked in blood!”
“Oh, shut up. It wasn’t real blood, just colored water,” Verhanna retorted. For two days, in constant rain, they had tracked the elusive Kagonesti slavers with little result.
The Kagonesti’s trail had led west for a time, but suddenly it seemed to vanish completely. The crimson rain had ceased overnight, and the new day was bright and sunny, but Kith-Kanan’s daughter was weary and saddle sore. The last thing she wanted to listen to was the kender complaining about his soggy clothes.
Rufus prowled ahead on foot, leading his oversized horse by the reins. He peered at every clump of grass, every fallen twig. “Nothing,” he fumed. “It’s as if they sprouted wings and flew away.”
The sun was setting almost directly ahead of them, and Verhanna suggested they stop for the night.
Rufus dropped his horse’s reins. “I’m for that! What’s for dinner?”
She poked a hand into the haversack hung from the pommel of her saddle. “Dried apples, quith-pa, and hard-boiled eggs,” Verhanna recited without enthusiasm. She tossed a cold, hard-boiled egg to her scout. He caught it with one hand, though he grumbled and screwed his face into a mask of disgust. She heard him mutter something about “the same eats, three times a day, forever” as he tapped the eggshell against his knee to crack it – then suddenly let it fall to the ground.
“Hey!” called Verhanna. “If you don’t want it, say so. Don’t throw it in the mud!”
“I smell roast pig!” he exulted, eyes narrow with concentration. “Not far away, either!” He vaulted onto his horse and turned the animal.
Verhanna flopped back the wet hood of her woolen cape and called, “Wait, Rufus! Stop!”
The reckless, hungry kender was not to be denied, however. With thumps of his spurless heels, he urged his horse through a line of silver-green holly, ignoring the jabs and scratches of the barbed leaves. Disgusted, Verhanna rode down the row of bushes, trying to find an opening. When she couldn’t, she pulled her horse around and also plunged through the holly. Sharp leaf edges raked her unprotected face and hands.
“Ow!” she cried. “Rufus, you worthless toad! Where are you?”
Ahead, beyond some wind-tossed dogwoods, she spied the flicker of a campfire. Cursing the kender soundly, Verhanna rode toward the fire. The foolish kender didn’t even have his short sword anymore. In the fight with the smoke creature, Rufus’s blade had been broken.
Serve him right if it was a bandit camp, she thought angrily. Forty, no, fifty bloodthirsty villains, armed to the teeth, luring innocent victims in with their cooking smoke. Sixty bandits, yes, all of whom liked to eat stupid kender.
In spite of her ire, the captain kept her head and freed her sword from the leather loop that held it in its scabbard. No use barging in unprepared. Approaching the campfire obliquely, she saw shadowy figures moving around it.
A horse whinnied. Clutching her reins tightly, Verhanna rode in, ready for a fight.
The first thing she saw was Rufus wolfing down chunks of steaming roast pork. Four elves dressed in rags and pieces of old blankets stood around the fire. By their light hair and chiseled features, she identified them as Silvanesti.
“Good morrow to you, warrior,” said the male elf nearest Rufus. His accent and manner were refined, city-bred.
“May your way be green and golden,” Verhanna replied. The travelers didn’t appear to be armed, but she remained on her horse just in case. “If I may ask, who are you, good traveler?”
“Diviros Chanderell, bard, at your service, Captain.”
The elf bowed low, so low that his sand-colored hair brushed the ground. Sweeping an arm around the assembled group, he added, “and this is my family.”
Verhanna nodded to each of the others. The older, brown-haired female was Diviros’s sister, Deramani. Sitting by the fire was a younger woman, the bard’s wife, Selenara. Her thick hair, unbound, hung past her waist, and peeking shyly out from behind the honey-golden cascade was a fair-haired child. Diviros introduced him as Kivinellis, his son.
“We have come hither from Silvanost, city of a thousand white towers,” said the bard with a flourish, “our fortunes to win in the new realm of the west.”
“Well, you’ve a long way to go if Qualinost is your goal,” Verhanna said.
“It is, noble warrior. Will you share meat with us? Your partner precedes you.”
She dismounted, shaking her head at Rufus. He winked at her as Diviros’s sister handed Verhanna a trencher of savory pork. The captain stabbed the cutlet with her knife and bit off a mouthful. It was good, sweet flesh, as only the Silvanesti could raise.
“What sets you wandering the lonely fields by night, Captain?” asked Diviros, once they were all comfortable around the campfire. He had a thin, expressive face and large amber eyes, which gave emphasis to his words.
“We’re on an elf hunt,” blurted Rufus between mouthfuls.