Kagonesti lh-1

by Douglas Niles

  "Take back your gifts!" he railed. "Useless, pathetic symbols. What use are they to us!"

  The elves of the tribe watched in shock as he picked up the shards, threw them by the handful into the woods, cursing and shouting until, at last, he collapsed into a ragged heap.

  Deeply shaken, Bakali and Kagwallas carried him into the cave. Finally Iydahoe felt shame, knowing his outburst must have terribly frightened the Kagonesti. Still, there was that bleak, all-consuming despair…

  If it hadn't been for the presence of Vanisia, Iydahoe felt that these dire portents might have caused the loss of his own sanity. Yet when his despair seemed darkest, when hopelessness settled over his mind like a burial shroud, she would ask him questions, gently direct his attention back to the mundane life of the tribe-such as it was. Sometimes she just held his hand, and the touch of her soft skin was the strength, the hope that sent a few rays of light spilling through his despair. At other times, they exchanged legends about their peoples. He told her of the Grandfather Ram and Father Kagonesti, while she spoke of wise Silvanos and his long, troubled legacy.

  They shared these tales with the young ones and talked of lighter things as well. Vanisia allowed the girls to play with the large, coiled shell that was her belt buckle, explaining that it came from an ocean shore. For hours Faylai and Tiffli listened, rapt, as she told them of beaches and waves and the sea. Then the youngsters held the shell to their ears, listening, imagining the distant surf.

  The elves drank water sparingly and slept as best they could. Always after dark the winds came, each night louder, more furious than the last. Shreds of bark were ripped from the roofs of the lodges, and dead leaves swirled into the low kettle of the grotto. One by one the smaller lodges had collapsed under the unnatural onslaught.

  Vanisia passed some of the time by making herself a pair of sturdy moccasins, using scraps of hide from the ruined lodges. She was so successful in her endeavor that, in short order, she made footwear for several of the other Kagonesti-and taught the youngsters to do the same. Her silent labors were a source of reassurance, of normalcy to them all, and the young elves brightened perceptibly, wearing their first new clothes in fourteen years.

  On the twelfth morning, Iydahoe awakened to a bleak silence. He saw Vanisia sitting in the mouth of the cave, looking outward. When she noticed that he was awake, she held a finger to her lips and gestured that he should join her.

  "What is it?" he whispered, apprehensive.

  "Look. I don't know where he came from, but he hasn't moved since first light."

  Iydahoe was shocked to see an elderly elf standing under the drooping branches of an oak, apparently observing the battered village from the shelter of the forest. The stranger's hair was long and pure white, and he supported his frail frame by leaning on a stout, crooked staff. A pattern of faded ink seemed to darken the elf's skin in places, and Iydahoe wondered if he saw an oak leaf tattoo over the fellow's left eye. If he had been marked as a Kagonesti, the inking had been done so long ago that it had all but faded.

  For a few minutes Iydahoe observed the old fellow, noting his ragged robe of deerskin, his bare feet, and his emaciated physique. The stranger looked back, seeing the two elves sitting in the door of the lodge but making no move to approach or retreat.

  Finally, Iydahoe rose to his feet. Slowly, with a peculiar sense of reverence, he went outside, under the sickly green heavens. The trees had ceased to bleed, and a stillness had settled over the entire forest. The warrior wrestled with an unsettling sense that he and this old elf were the only two living creatures currently under that oppressive sky.

  "Come, Grandfather. You are welcome here," he said politely, using the honorary term for an elder Kagonesti. "We have jerky and dried fruit. Join us as we break our fast."

  The white-haired elf simply stared, though his dark hazel eyes sparkled. Iydahoe sensed that he had heard every word, but still the ancient figure made no movement, no reply.

  "Do you hear me, Grandfather?" he asked.

  "I hear-but do you, wild elf?" The stranger's voice was strong and resonant, a surprisingly forceful sound emerging from that frail chest.

  "What should I hear?" Iydahoe was puzzled.

  "You offer me help, but you cannot help me. Nor can I help you."

  "Is there any help, any hope?" asked the warrior.

  "You call me Grandfather, and this is wrong. Seek him, wild elf. Seek the true Grandfather of us all. Know the legends, and you shall know where to find him."

  Iydahoe blinked, surprised by the elf's words, and by the serene confidence with which they were spoken. As he tried to formulate a reply, he realized that, in the space of his blink, the ancient hermit had disappeared.

  "Did you see where he went?" he asked Vanisia, who emerged from the cave to look around. She shook her head, and he crossed the village clearing to look behind the great oak. Not only did he see no sign of the stranger, but the muddy ground where the elf had stood was bare of any footprint.

  "When did you first see him?"

  "He was here when I woke up."

  "He never moved?"

  Vanisia shook her head. "No. He stayed by this tree for as long as I watched him." Her green eyes probed his face, and Iydahoe felt something terribly important, a piece of knowledge that he must, somehow, grasp. "What did he say to you?" she asked.

  "He said… seek the Grandfather, 'the true Grandfather of us all.' He means the Grandfather Ram."

  "But seek him? Where…?"

  Something in Iydahoe's face froze Vanisia's question in her throat. Abruptly the warrior saw with abrupt, crystalline clarity what he had to do-and he feared that, already, he was too late.

  "Each of you, pack a bedroll!" ordered the warrior, addressing the young elves who gaped, wide-eyed, from the mouth of the cave. "Everybody take a bundle of jerky-as much as you can carry-and a full waterskin. We're leaving here. Now!"

  None of the young elves paused to question his directive. Instead, they scrambled to clean out the wreckage of the dozen small lodges of the village, and within minutes had gathered bundles of their most treasured belongings. Bakall, Kagwallas, and Dallatar helped the youngest while Iydahoe and Vanisia filled large rucksacks for themselves.

  The warrior never questioned his certainty, his conviction that they were doing the right thing-and that they desperately needed to hurry. He remembered the legends-there was only one place they could go.

  The Grandfather Ram had lived in the highest places of Ansalon, that much he knew from the ancient tales. The aged elf had urged him to seek the places of the Grandfather, and finally Iydahoe understood.

  The Kagonesti needed to climb for their lives.

  In quiet urgency, he led the tribe up the steep slopes leading out the back of the sheltered grotto. Beyond rose the foothills of the Khalkist Mountains, with the snowcapped summits themselves looming into sight just above the nearer crests. These massifs came into full view as, working steadily upward, they soon topped the precipice.

  Iydahoe was surprised to see that many of the summits beyond had lost their nearly permanent mantles of snow. Dark, sinister clouds spewed upward from numerous peaks, and though Iydahoe had occasionally observed smoking mountains far to the north of here, he had never seen so much of the noxious vapor, nor had it ever been this close to his home. Now it curled through the peaks like an ugly, pervasive blanket of gloom.

  "The mountains look dangerous," Vanisia said as she and Iydahoe waited for the last of the children to come up behind them.

  "It may be that they will kill us," he replied simply. "But if we stay here, I believe that we are certainly doomed."

  Iydahoe kept his eyes skyward as they climbed. Clouds seethed in ways he had never imagined-not in his worst nightmares. He felt as though he looked into the surface of a vast, bubbling caldron that was somehow suspended upside down and that covered the entire sky.

  Several of the younger Kagonesti began to whimper, slipping and skidding on the steep slopes, unab
le to maintain the pace. Iydahoe took Faylai, the littlest girl, on his shoulders, bidding her to cling tightly to his neck. With each hand he took the tiny fist of another, leading them toward the element of safety, however small, that they might find above. The Silvanesti female also took the hands of younger elves, and Bakali, Kagwallas, and Dallatar aided their smaller tribemates.

  They climbed through the long day, and when night fell, Iydahoe shouted and cajoled, convincing the elves that they needed to keep going. The clouds blocked even the pallor of the green sky, but the elves could see enough to scale the ascending slopes as the ghastly night filtered toward an eerie, still dawn.

  Dawn of the thirteenth day, Iydahoe remembered.

  Still they kept climbing, crossing the lower mountain ridges now, many thousands of feet above the sprawling forest lands and plains of Vingaard. High summits beckoned to the northeast, but Iydahoe steered the tribe due east, where the mountains flattened into miles of rolling, forested plateau. These woodlands had many trails, while the warrior knew that the summits to the north became a maze of canyons, cliffs, summits, and gorges.

  "Look!" cried Bakali, suddenly crying out in horror as he jx)inted to the northeastern sky. The little tribe was filing across a clearing-a place incongruously studded with wildflowers-amid the pine forest of the plateau.

  Iydahoe saw the wave rippling along the bottom surface of the oily cloud, as if a great stone had been plopped into the caldron of liquid he had earlier imagined. The eerie sky showed through that gap, an even more sinister shade of befoulment than before. The ground began to tremble, huge rocks cracking free from the higher cliffs. The elves staggered, riding a buckling carpet of supple, boulder-strewn turf, ground lacking all solidity and form.

  Abruptly the sky shot through with brightness, green paling to blue and then to a harsh white light that seared Iydahoe's eyes and caused Vanisia to moan in pain. Children began to cry, but the warrior could only grip their hands tightly.

  The subsequent explosion was impossibly, incredibly violent. The rocky ground convulsed, pitching them into the air. Iydahoe clutched the hands of his young tribe- mates, the group of them tumbling madly, momentarily weightless. He felt as though they could fall forever, and it was a strangely peaceful sensation.

  The smash into the bucking ground brought him back to reality with cruel force. Stone gouged Iydahoe's face, and splitting pain racked his skull. He heard the youngsters crying, but for several agonizing moments his eyes brought him only a blur of bright lights and swirling colors-the images of his own pain, he knew.

  Then came the onslaught of full, numbing fear-the knowledge that he had failed, that his tribe was doomed. How could he fight against this kind of power, world- racking might that could rock the very fundament of Krynn? Surely most of his tribe had been killed by this blast! He knew that he, himself, was broken, his body smashed to pulp.

  "Let's go. Get up, Iydahoe!" He heard Vanisia pleading, but he couldn't move. Why should he? There was no hope.

  He heard more crying, then-the terrified sobbing of many young voices. They came from all around him, and Iydahoe blinked. With a supreme effort, he lifted his head, seeing Kagwallas, Bakali-each cradling a pair of crying youngsters. Vanisia knelt beside Iydahoe, and when he moved, she reached out to touch his face.

  "Who's hurt?" he groaned. "How badly?"

  He forced himself to look around, seeing past the white spots that still lingered in front of his eyes. The young elves of the tribe were scattered around him in the meadow. Some sat up while others huddled on the ground, crying. Two, the boy Dallatar and a younger girl, lay perfectly still amid the churned sod and rocks.

  Then the girl, Tiffli, moaned and rubbed a hand across her face. Iydahoe and Vanisia went to Dallatar. The lad showed no sign of awareness, though his chest rose and fell weakly. In desperation, the warrior crawled to the frail form, while Vanisia and Bakali helped Tiffli to her feet.

  But the forest stretched all around them, trees leaning crazily. The bleak clouds had closed in, concealing any view of the horizon or the sky. Which way should they go? There were no heights in view, no clue in the tangled woodland or shattered clearing to indicate where they had been headed before the quake had struck.

  Iydahoe, for the first time in his life, was lost.

  With that knowledge, he released the tiny shard of hope he had grasped-there was no way to escape this disaster. The tribe had no Pathfinder. He had tried to fill the role, had tried to be that which they needed him to be. He had desperately strived to perform tasks for which he was not prepared.

  And he had failed.

  Chapter 30

  Song of the Grandfather

  Despair wighed on Iydahoe, pinning him to the ground, a physical weight that overwhelmed his puny strength. Cataclysm had come to Ansalon, and he and his tribe would die as surely as any insects on a lightning-struck log. If another earthquake wracked the ground, the convulsion would kill the battered elves. Even if the ground remained still, Iydahoe was lost-how could he seek the heights of the Grandfather Ram when he lay directionless on this ruined plateau? Around them stretched a tangle of quake-racked forest. Progress would be painfully slow, perhaps impossible, in every direction.

  Abruptly a glimmer of white showed through the chaos of broken trees. The brightness caught Iydahoe's eye-it seemed the only pure and wholesome thing in this nightmare of a day. Straining to rise, the wild elf found that his muscles worked again. Grimly, desperately, Iydahoe staggered to his feet and took several steps toward the wood.

  "What is it?" asked Vanisia, while Bakali and Kagwallas looked at him curiously.

  "There!" he croaked, as the white patch showed again.

  Then he saw the head-huge, with the broad forehead a swath of alabaster fur. The huge, round eyes, soft and luminescent, studied him with a wisdom and compassion that moved Iydahoe to tears. Glowing pale yellow, those eyes touched him in a way that made him stand more steadily, helped him to swallow his fear and clear his head.

  Only then did he notice the horns, spiraling to either side of that great head. Triple circles, each of them, culminated in the proud, curling points of a mountain king.

  "What are you looking at?" cried Vanisia, stepping after him, touching his hand. Iydahoe knew then that only he could see the Grandfather Ram-and even as he realized this the animal turned, with a flick of its snowy tail, and vanished into the woods.

  "Come. Gather the children. I know which way to go." He stooped and picked up Dallatar. The young elf's breathing was shallow, his eyes rolled back in his head, but he still lived.

  Iydahoe led them into the forest, picking a route through the felled timber that best followed the elusive white figure. He discovered that, by walking along on the trunks instead of the ground, the Kagonesti could make fairly rapid progress. Gradually the plateau sloped again, a gentle incline signaling the beginning of another ascent.

  They broke from the trees onto a grassy slope that extended more steeply upward. The wrenching earthquake had torn numerous fissures in the soil, but Iydahoe had no difficulty finding a straight, smooth path between these frequent chasms. Soon they arrived at a ridge extending from the north to the south, seeing a deep canyon and then lofty, rugged mountains beyond.

  Vanisia instinctively turned north, toward the highest mountains of the Khalkist range and the heart of the smoking inferno that racked the world. Beyond those heights, hundreds of miles away, lay Istar.

  To the south, the mountains were not so high, rounded summits and sheltered, tree-lined slopes. In the far distance beyond them lay the southern lowlands of Silvanesti. Iydahoe stared in that direction and felt the warming comfort of a soothing, return embrace of wisdom. Were those luminous eyes gazing at him from somewhere in that distance?

  "Wait," Iydahoe said, looking at the seething wave of the cloud. The highest ground lay to the north, but he felt strangely drawn to the south. "Follow me. We'll go this way," he declared, trusting his instincts. Still carrying Dallatar, he l
ed the others toward that more gentle terrain.

  The elfwoman's face was streaked with smudges of dirt, her once golden hair tangled with mud and brambles. Vanisia looked at the rising, gentle slopes, then at the tall, black-haired elf. Nodding, she followed, and the youngsters came on behind.

  Wind whipped over the ridge, pushing them first to one side, then, sheering viciously, twisting to send them staggering in the other direction. The clouds had risen high, blanketing the land from far above, and now they could see for dozens of miles.

  On the vast plain beside the mountain range, the ancient flatland that had been known as Vingaard and Solamnia, the northern horizon shimmered. A white edge advanced, with smooth grayness flowing behind. The ground dissolved into something like sky-a bright, smooth surface that swept steadily closer, obscuring woodlands and fields, roads and towns.

  With growing horror, Iydahoe understood. "It's water- the sea flows onto the plain! Ansalon is sinking!"

  Again the elves turned and climbed, this time propelled by a clear sense of urgency, moving toward the southern heights on the path chosen by Iydahoe. They trotted along the smooth tundra of the rising ridge crest, gaining altitude quickly, avoiding the cliffs that towered all around.

  The flood continued below, a deceptively gentle- appearing blanket drawn over the land. As the wave drew closer, the elves saw an angry fringe of furious white water burying forests, sweeping across pasture lands with the speed of a strong wind. It rushed from the north, swelling to fill their entire western horizon, filling out in a great bay to the southwest. Spray, closely followed by massive breakers, surged against the foothills, inundating the grotto where the tribe had made its village. More and more water flowed into the new sea, and the level of its tempestuous surface continued to rise.

  Quickly the surge swept upward, splashing over the slopes that the Kagonesti had climbed only that morning. Waters swept over the ridge, the sea filling the plateau where the tribe had weathered the earthquake. The water churned close now and Iydahoe sensed the menace in the storm-tossed surface. Gales whipped monstrous waves upward, exploding into showers of spray that rose all the way to the ridge crest.