“Yes, my lord.” Mina resumed her pacing, as though nothing was amiss.
“The Hall of Sacrilege is located at the bottom of the Tower. There is a guardian, and the Hall is probably filled with traps, but I will assist you.”
“My lord—” Mina began, then fell silent.
“Speak freely, my love.”
“This is so important to you, my lord. Why do you not come yourself? Is this another test? Do you still doubt my love and my loyalty?”
“No, Mina, I do not,” Chemosh replied. “As you say, recovering these artifacts is vitally important to me. I know of nothing more important. But I cannot enter the Tower. Not anymore. Nuitari has blocked up the rat hole through which I managed to sneak the last time. He has made this Tower his domain. No other god may enter it.”
“Then how will you take control of the Tower, my lord?”
“Many Beloved are here already and more arrive daily. I have placed Krell in command, and he is forming a legion of warriors unlike any ever before seen on Krynn—warriors who can kill yet cannot be killed. You are not to concern yourself with this. Do what I ask of you, then return to me as swiftly as possible. I miss you, Mina.”
The Lord of Death was in Castle Beloved on the shores of the Blood Sea and Mina was in a Tower far below the surface of the waves, yet she felt the touch of his hands, his lips brush against her cheek.
“I miss you, my lord,” said Mina. Hearing the longing in his distant voice, her own heart ached. The door handle rattled. They had only a few more moments together.
“Ah, Mina, when I believed you were lost to me, I could not bear the thought of going on. I began to regret immortality. Remember, steal one artifact, just one from the Solio Febalas. That way I can prove to the other gods I have indeed found the treasure. Then cast upon the door the spell I taught you. After that, Nuitari may rant and rave all he likes, but I will be able to enter his tower.”
“Yes, my lord.”
He was gone.
Mina turned from the god to the two wizards who were by turns clomping and skulking into the room.
The dwarf, Basalt, was a hairy black lump. She had never seen his face. He kept his hood pulled down low whenever he was around her, and between that and his scraggly black beard she’d yet to have a good look at him. She could see the half-elf’s face, more was the pity. Caele never wore the filthy cowl that straggled down his back. In truth, the cowl was so coated in grime she doubted the half-elf could peel it off his dirty black robes.
Basalt kept this hood down as usual, but she found Caele staring at her and that made her uneasy.
Before this, the half-elf had never looked at her directly. His gaze sidled about the room until he thought she wasn’t looking at him, and then she felt his eyes on her. The expression in his eyes appalled her. His gaze burned with such malevolence that her hand went instinctively to her hip for a weapon.
He looked at her directly, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a wolfish grin. He kept his hands tucked inside the sleeves of his robes, something else that was odd for him. She glanced back at the dwarf. Basalt seemed ill at ease. He had his hood pulled down lower than usual and he kept peering out from under it, first at her, then at the half-elf, then back to her.
They’re going to kill me, Mina realized.
She found herself more annoyed than frightened. This could interfere with her lord’s plans. She would have to strike first, before they could use their magic on her. She had no weapon and no prospects of gaining one—in this prison cell, at least.
“Why are you vermin here?” she asked coldly.
“You’ve been granted an hour’s freedom to stroll the halls, Mistress,” said Basalt gruffly.
He gestured at the open door and then stood to one side, as did the half-elf, to permit her to walk past them.
They were waiting until her back was turned.
She would take on the half-elf first. The dwarf looked less enthusiastic and maybe the sight of his companion writhing on the floor, choking on his own blood, would cause him to have second thoughts.
Mina was almost level with Caele when she saw his hand twitch beneath his sleeve.
He has a knife there. He’s going to use that, not his magic. Of course, he takes pleasure in killing with his hands …
She tensed, ready to strike, then the Tower shook from bottom to top, knocking her off-balance, so that she lurched into Caele and they both went down onto the floor in a heap.
The compact dwarf was less easy to topple. The shaking of the floor and walls and ceiling sent him staggering, but he maintained his balance.
“What the—” Basalt gasped.
“Nuitari!” A voice yelled, as yet another blow smote the Tower. “Come out of there, do you hear me? Come out and face me!”
“Chemosh!” cried Caele, floundering underneath Mina, who had fallen on top of him.
“No, that’s a woman’s voice!” Basalt said, his face pale and his eyes wide. “Zeboim! She’s found the Tower.” He groaned. “What a time for the Master to be gone!”
“You have to talk to her!” Caele gasped, adding with a snarl and a shove, “Get off me, you clumsy bitch!”
Though Mina was slender, she outweighed the scrawny half-elf, and she was impeding his attempts to try to stand. Her legs tangled with his; her feet tripped him. She jabbed him with an elbow and stuck her knee in his gut.
He was just about to throttle her when another blow smote the Tower and this time even the dwarf went down. They could hear the sound of breaking glass. Wooden beams groaned beneath the strain.
Caele realized somewhat belatedly this would be an ideal time to slay Mina, and he reached up his sleeve for his knife.
It wasn’t there.
He thought at first he’d dropped it, then, looking up, Caele found it.
Mina stood over him, his knife in her hand.
Leaning down, she pressed the point of the blade against his throat.
“If your lips so much as twitch, I’ll slit you from ear to ear,” she said. “The same goes for you, dwarf. If you utter a single word of magic, your partner dies.”
Seeing by Basalt’s irresolute expression that perhaps he might be willing to risk such a tragic loss, Mina called out, “My Lord Chemosh, I pray you, look after these two while I go about your business.”
Two stone sarcophagi appeared in the room. On one sarcophagus was a carved figure of Basalt, his eyes closed, his hands folded across his chest. The other sarcophagus bore a similar representation of Caele.
“Get in,” said Mina, speaking to Basalt.
He looked at the sarcophagus and shook his hooded head.
Caele twitched just then, and she dug the knifepoint in a little deeper. A sliver of red slid down the half-elf’s neck. He held still after that.
“I said, get in,” said Mina.
Seeing the dwarf was not moving, she raised her voice, “My lord—”
Basalt hurriedly climbed inside the sarcophagus. A slab of stone dropped down over the coffin, sealing the dwarf inside.
“You next,” she said to Caele. She shifted the blade from his throat to his ribs and walked him over to the other sarcophagus. When he hesitated, she sliced open enough flesh to persuade him to obey.
He hastily climbed inside, and a stone slab dropped down on him.
“Are they dead, my lord?” Mina asked.
“No,” Chemosh replied, his voice sounding above the roar of the Sea Goddess’s rage. “Not yet. They have air enough to breathe for a short time, if they don’t panic and use up all their air screaming.”
The muffled howls that had been emanating from the half-elf’s coffin ceased abruptly.
“Now, be on your way,” he told her.
“What about Zeboim?”
“She won’t bother you. Strangely enough, she’s here to rescue you.”
Another quake rocked the Tower, causing Mina to stagger.
“Nuitari?”
“Family issues are going to occ
upy a considerable amount of time for the Moon-Faced One. He’s trying to work things out with his cousins. On his return, he will find that he has considerable explaining to do to his sister. For now, the Tower of the Blood Sea is all yours, Mina. You are alone in it.”
“Except for the guardian. I need a weapon, my lord.”
“No, you won’t, Mina,” returned Chemosh. “Only a dragonlance would aid you against this guardian, and unfortunately, I have none of those at my disposal. You have your wits, Mina, and you have my blessing. Use them both.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Mina, and she was alone.
ina found the long, circular staircase that wound around the Tower’s interior and began her descent. The staircase was made of mother-of-pearl and spiraled round and round, reminding her of the interior of a nautilus seashell. She could see here and there cracks in the walls, presumably from the shaking the Tower was enduring at the hands of the outraged goddess, and she worried the next jolt might split the walls. Fortunately the quakes rocking the Tower ceased. Mina could not see outside, but she guessed Nuitari had returned and was now trying to placate his furious sister.
Inside the Tower was silent. The seawater surrounding the structure seemed to suck out the sound, so that every noise made within had a muffled quality to it.
The silence was soothing. Now that she was no longer a prisoner, she felt at home here. She found it comforting, knowing the sea cradled her. Perhaps this stirred some long-buried memory of the shipwreck that had taken her parents from her and left her an orphan, a memory that was always there, lying just beneath the surface. One she could never quite recall.
“Our minds blot out such traumatic events in order to protect us from them,” Goldmoon had once told Mina. “You may remember what happened to you some day or you may never remember. Do not fret over it, child. It is quite natural.”
Mina had fretted. She felt guilty and ashamed that she had no memory of those parents who had loved her dearly, perhaps even sacrificed their lives for her, and she tried hard to bring to mind their faces or the sound of a mother’s voice. She became obsessed with trying to remember, an obsession that ended only when the One God, Takhisis, chided her for wasting her time.
“It does not matter who gave you birth!” Takhisis had said, cold and furious. “I am your mother. I am your father. Look to me for protection and succor and nourishment.”
Mina had obeyed the god’s command as she obeyed all others given to her by the One God. She had never allowed herself to think about her parents again, not until she had been imprisoned in this Tower below the sea. She had so much time on her hands in the Tower, time to think, time to remember her childhood. The frustration and the shame and the need to know returned. Mina took care to keep her obsession to herself. She did not want to anger Chemosh as she had angered Takhisis.
The spiral stairs were lit by magical globules of light placed at intervals and renewed daily by Basalt. Doors, opening off the stairs, led to the other floors of the Tower. Mina glanced at them curiously. She would have liked to explore, to see how the rooms were constructed and what they looked like, for the Tower intrigued her.
She did not have time, however. “I will postpone that for another day,” she said to herself, smiling at the thought, for she knew perfectly well she was never likely to see the inside of this Tower again.
The stairs brought her at last to the Tower’s base. She came up against a door made of steel banded with bronze and inscribed with runes. Runes had also been carved into the stone arch around the door. Mina recognized the runes as being the language of magic, the same as she’d read in the book Nuitari had given her. She knew what the runes said; she just didn’t know what they meant.
Giving up on the runes, Mina inspected the door, trying to find some way inside. The door had no handle, no lock. The runes probably provided information on how to open the door. Mina tried reciting them aloud, to no avail. The door didn’t budge.
Frustrated, Mina gave the door a kick.
The door revolved smoothly and silently on a center linchpin and swung open.
Mina stepped back, eyeing the door warily.
“This is too easy. This is a trap,” she muttered.
She did not enter. Drawing closer to the arched doorway, she examined it carefully.
“What an idiot I am!” she scolded herself. “If this is a trap, it is a magical one and I’ll never find it anyway. I might as well chance it.”
Mina walked through the door and was pleasantly surprised to find herself emerging safely on the other side. She was less pleasantly surprised to hear the door revolve and slam shut behind her. There were no runes on this side of the door. Apparently, once you got in, you were supposed to know the secret of how to get back out.
Shrugging, Mina turned away. She’d deal with that problem when the time came. Now she had her task before her. An amazing task. She stood before what looked to be an enormous fish bowl.
Mina and the other children in the orphanage had kept fish in glass bowls filled with water. The children were taught to feed the fish and care for them. They observed their habits and marveled at how the creatures breathed water as easily as people breathed air. This globe was similar to those fish bowls, except it was much, much larger—as big in circumference as the Tower itself. The glass walls were covered with runes etched into the glass. Shafts of sunlight illuminated the globe and the creatures swimming inside.
“It is beautiful,” Mina said softly, awed. “Beautiful and deadly.”
The graceful jellyfish, drifting along at the mercy of the swirling currents, killed their prey by stinging it with a venom that paralyzed the victim and prevented it from escaping. These jellyfish were enormous, several times Mina’s size, with tentacles long enough to ensnare a full-grown man.
A gigantic squid, large enough to drag a ship beneath the waves, lay sprawled across the floor, its arms trembling as it slept. Stingrays slithered up the crystal sides of the globe. Monstrous bull sharks swam about, their jaws, filled with the rows of razor-sharp teeth, opening and closing. The floor was covered with fire coral, pretty to look at, burning to the touch.
Inside the center of the globe, surrounded by its lethal guards, was the Solio Febalas.
Mina stared, astonished. The Hall was not at all what she expected.
The structure resembled a child’s sand castle. It was simple in design with four walls, a tower at each corner, and crenellations on the battlements. There were no windows. She could see, from this angle, what appeared to be a door, but she could not make out any details. What was truly amazing was that the Hall of Sacrilege, supposedly containing any number of sacred artifacts, was only about four feet tall and four feet wide.
“It must be an illusion, a trick of the water,” Mina said to herself.
She ran her hand over the rune-etched surface of the crystal wall that blocked her way.
“The question is: how do I reach it? I stand outside an impenetrable wall of crystal encompassing water in which are swimming hundreds of deadly creatures. I have no idea how to get inside the globe, and if I manage that, I cannot breathe water, and even if I could, I would have to battle sharks and men-of-war and—”
She caught her breath. A large coral reef that formed a hillock inside the crystal globe gave a lurch, displacing thousands of fish, which swam away from it in flashing-scaled panic. A head emerged from beneath the coral reef, now revealed to be a huge shell, like that of a tortoise.
Gleaming yellow eyes fixed on Mina. She had found the guardian—a sea dragon.
More to the point, the sea dragon had found Mina.
The guardian of the Hall of Sacrilege was a sea dragon known as Midori. Reclusive, bad-tempered, and irritable, Midori was the oldest dragon on Krynn, which made her the oldest living creature in the world.
She numbered her years not by decades but by centuries. She was not sure exactly how old she was. She’d lost count around the ten-century mark. The passage of time meant little to
her. Midori marked her life by momentous events and then only those events that had affected her directly.
One of these was the Cataclysm, for it had been a distinct annoyance. The fiery mountain that had struck the world, killing thousands and destroying a city, had also collapsed a wall of her sea cave, rudely waking her from a fifty-year nap. Rocks tumbled down, half-burying her and wholly burying her treasure hoard. She managed to dig out most of her treasure, but some valuable objects were irretrievably lost. Furious, Midori left her ruined lair and swam into the open sea to find out what all the commotion was about.
A confirmed recluse, a dragon who made no secret of the fact that she loathed and despised every other being on the planet, Midori was forced to seek out others of her kind and actually have conversations with them. This did not improve her humor.
She heard the tale of the Cataclysm from an excited young sea dragon, who told her the history of the human Kingpriests and their transgressions and subsequent punishment by the gods. Midori listened in growing ire. Humans were like fish. Here one minute, gone the next, and always plenty more where the others came from. She saw no reason why the gods should have destroyed a perfectly good lair over such a paltry matter. Seething, Midori moved what remained of her treasure into another lair and went back to sleep.
She slept through the War of the Lance, the Summer of Flame, the Chaos War, the Theft of the World, and the arrival of the Dragon Overlords, who never suspected her existence. She would have continued deep in slumber, but for a horrific scream that jolted Midori out of her sleep and caused her to open her eyes for the first time in several centuries.
The scream was the death cry of Takhisis
Midori had never thought much of the Dark Queen. Some sea dragons had taken part in Takhisis’s wars. Midori had not been one of them. Her life was precious to her, and she saw no need to risk it for another’s cause. If Takhisis ruled the world or if she didn’t, it was all the same to Midori. But now, like the child who long ago left home, yet likes to know that her Mama is still there in case she’s needed, Midori felt bereft and even a little fearful.
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