Silvanoshei felt imbued with strength. The chains weighed nothing, were gossamer and silk. He began to run, awkwardly, occasionally tripping and stumbling, but he was doing as well for himself as he might have done with assistance. The elven warriors surrounded him, guarding him, but no one was there to stop them. The Knights of Neraka were acting swiftly to seize Silvanost and wrap the city in its own chains, forged of iron and fire and blood.
The elves and their freed captive traveled north for a short distance, far enough that they could not smell the smoke of destruction. They turned east and, under Rolan’s guidance, came to the river, where the kirath had boats ready to carry the prince upstream, north to the camp of Alhana’s forces. Here they would rest for a short time. They lit no fires, set careful watch.
Silvanoshei had managed to keep up with the rest, although by the end of the journey his breath was coming in painful gasps, his muscles burned, and his hands were covered with the blood that ran from his chafed wrists. He fell more than once, and at last, because his mother pleaded with him, he permitted the other elves to assist him. No word of complaint passed his lips. He held on with a grim determination that won even Samar’s approval.
Once they reached the riverbank and relative safety, the elves hacked at his fetters with axes. Silvanoshei sat still, unflinching, though the axe blades sometimes came perilously close to cutting off a foot or slicing into his leg. Sparks flew, but the chains would not break, and eventually, after all the axe blades were notched, the elves were forced to give up. Without a key they could not remove the iron manacles round Silvanoshei’s ankles and his wrists.
Alhana assured her son that once they arrived at his mother’s camp, the blacksmith would be able to make a key that would fit the locks and so remove them.
“Until then, we travel by boat the rest of the way. The journey will not be nearly so difficult for you, my son.”
Silvanoshei shrugged, unconcerned. He bore the pain and discomfort with quiet fortitude. Chains clanking, he wrapped himself in a blanket and lay down on the ground, again without complaint.
Alhana sat beside her son. The night was hushed, as if all living things held their breath in fear. Only the river continued to speak, the swift-flowing water rushing past them, talking to itself in a deep, sorrowful murmur, knowing what terrible sights it would see downstream, loath to continue on its journey, yet unable to halt the flow.
“You must be exhausted, my son,” Alhana said, her own voice low, “and I will not keep you from your sleep long, but I want to tell you that I understand. You have lived through a difficult time. You have experienced events that might have overwhelmed the best and wisest of men, and you are only a youth. I must confess that I feared to find you crushed by what happened this day. I was afraid that you were so entangled in the snares of the human witch that you would never be free of her. Her tricks are impressive, but you must not be fooled by them. She is a witch and a charlatan and makes people see what they want to see. The power of the gods is gone in this world. I see no evidence that it has returned.”
Alhana paused to allow Silvanoshei to comment. The young man was silent. His eyes, glittering with starlight, were wide open and gazing into the darkness.
“I know that you must grieve over what is now happening in Silvanost,” Alhana continued, disappointed that he did not respond. “I promise you as I promised Rolan of the kirath that we will come back in strength to free the people and drive the legions of darkness from that fair city. You will be restored as king. That is my dearest wish. You have proven by the courage and strength I see in you this night that you are worthy to hold that holy trust, assume that great responsibility.”
A pale smile flickered over Silvanoshei’s lips. “So I have proven myself to you, have I, Mother? You think that at last I am worthy of my heritage?”
“You did not need to prove yourself to me, Silvanoshei,” said Alhana, regretting her words the moment she had spoken them. She faltered, tried to explain. “If I gave you that impression, I never meant to. I love you, my son. I am proud of you. I think that the strange and terrible events of which you have been a part have forced you to grow up rapidly. You have grown, when you might have been crushed by them.”
“I am glad to have earned your good opinion, Mother,” Silvanoshei said.
Alhana was bewildered and hurt by his cool and detached demeanor. She did not understand but, after some thought, put it down to the fact that he had endured much and must be worn out. Silvanoshei’s face was smooth and placid. His eyes were fixed on the night sky with such intensity that he might have been counting every single pinpoint of bright, white light.
“My father used to tell a story, Mother,” said Silvanoshei, just as she was about to rise. The prince rolled over on his side, his chains clanking and rattling, a discordant sound in the still night. “A story of a human woman—I can’t recall her name. She came to the Qualinesti elves during another time of turmoil and danger, bearing a blue crystal staff, saying that she was sent to them by the gods. Do you recall this story, Mother?”
“Her name was Goldmoon,” said Alhana. “The story is a true one.”
“Did the elves believe her when she said that she came bearing a gift of the gods?”
“No, they did not,” Alhana said, troubled.
“She was termed a witch and a charlatan by many elves, among them my own father. Yet she did bring a gift from the gods, didn’t she?”
“My son,” Alhana began, “there is a difference—”
“I am very tired, Mother.” Silvanoshei drew his blanket up over his shoulders and rolled over, so that his back was to her. “May your rest be blessed,” he added.
“Peaceful rest, my son,” said Alhana, bending down to kiss his cheek. “We will speak of this more in the morning, but I would remind you that the Dark Knights are killing elves in the name of this so-called One God.”
There came no sound from the prince except the bitter music of the chains. Either he stirred in discomfort, or he was settling himself for sleep. Alhana had no way of telling, for Silvanoshei’s face was hidden from her.
Alhana made the rounds of the camp, checking to see that those who stood guard duty were at their posts. Assured that all were watchful and alert, she sat down at the river’s edge and thought with despair and anger of the terror that reigned in Silvanost this night.
The river mourned and lamented with her until she imagined that she began to hear words in its murmurings.
Sleep, love; forever sleep
Your soul the night will keep
Embrace the darkness deep
Sleep, love; forever sleep.
The river left its banks. Dark water overflowed, rose up, and drowned her.
Alhana woke with a start to find it was morning. The sun had lifted above the treetops. Drifting clouds raced past, hiding the sun from sight, then restoring it to view, so that it seemed as if the orb were winking at some shared joke.
Angry that she had been so undisciplined as to let herself slumber when danger was all around them, she jumped to her feet. To her dismay, she found that she was not the only one who had slept at her post. Those on guard duty slumbered standing up, their chins on their chests, their eyes closed, their weapons lying on the ground at their feet.
Samar lay beside her. His hand was outstretched, as if he had been about to speak to her. Sleep had felled him before he could say a word.
“Samar!” she said, shaking him. “Samar! Something strange has happened to us.”
Samar woke immediately, flushed in shame to find that he had failed in his duty. He gave an angry roar that roused every elf.
“I am at fault,” he said, bitterly chagrined. It is a wonder to me that our enemies did not take advantage of our weakness to slit our throats! I had intended to leave with the dawn. We have a long journey, and we have lost at least two hours of travel. We must make—”
“Samar!” Alhana cried, her voice piercing his heart. “Come quickly! My son!”
Alhana pointed to an empty blanket and four broken manacles—manacles no axe had been able to cut. In the dirt near the blanket were deep prints of two booted feet and prints of a horse’s hooves.
“They have taken him,” she said, frightened. “They have taken him away in the night!”
Samar tracked the hoof prints to the water’s edge, and there they vanished. He recalled, with startling clarity, the red horse that had galloped riderless into the forest.
“No one took him, My Queen,” Samar said. “One came to fetch him. He went eagerly, I fear.”
Alhana stared across the sun-dappled river, saw it bright and sparkling on the surface, dark and wild and dangerous beneath. She recalled with a shudder the words she had heard the river sing last night.
Sleep, love. Forever sleep.
15
Prisoners, Ghosts, the Dead, and the Living
alin Majere was no longer a prisoner in the Tower of High Sorcery. That is to say, he was and he was not. He was not a prisoner in that he was, not confined to a single room in the Tower. He was not chained or bound or physically restrained in any way. He could roam freely about the Tower but no farther. He could not leave the Tower. A single door at the lower level of the Tower permitted entry and egress, and that was enchanted, sealed shut by a wizard lock.
Palin had his own room with a bed but no chair and no desk. The room had a door but no window. The room had a fire grate, but no fire, and was chill and dank. For food, there were loaves of bread, stacked up in what had once been the Tower’s pantry, along with crockery bowls—most of which were cracked and chipped—filled with dried fruit. Palin recognized bread that had been created by magic and not the baker, because it was tasteless and pale and had a spongy texture. For drink, there was water in pitchers that continually refilled themselves. The water was brackish and had an unpleasant odor.
Palin had been reluctant to drink it, but he could find nothing else, and after casting a spell on it to make certain it did not contain some sort of potion, he used it to wash down the knots of bread that stuck in his throat. He cast a spell and summoned a fire into existence, but it didn’t help lift the atmosphere of gloom.
Ghosts haunted the Tower of High Sorcery. Not the ghosts of the dead who had stolen his magic. Some sort of warding spell kept them at bay. These ghosts were ghosts of his past. At this turning, he encountered the ghost of himself inside this Tower, arriving to take the dread Test of magic. At that turning, he imagined the ghost of his uncle, who had predicted a future of greatness for the young mage. Here he found the ghost of Usha when he had first met her: beautiful, mysterious, fond, and loving. The ghosts were sorrowful, shades of promise and hope, both dead. Ghosts of love, either dead or dying.
Most terrible was the ghost of the magic. It whispered to him from the cracks in the stone stairs, from the torn threads in the carpet, from the dust on the velvet curtains, from the lichen that had died years ago but had never been scraped off the wall.
Perhaps because of the presence of the ghosts, Palin was strangely at home in the Tower. He was more at home here than he was at his own light, airy, and comfortable home in Solace. He didn’t enjoy admitting that to himself. He felt guilty because of it.
After days of wandering alone through the Tower, locked up with himself and the ghosts, he understood why this chill, dread place was home. Here in the Tower he had been a child, a child of the magic. Here the magic had watched over him, guided him, loved him, cared for him. Even now he could sometimes smell the scent of faded rose petals and would recall that time, that happy time. Here in the Tower all was quiet. Here no one had any claim on him. No one expected anything of him. No one looked at him with pity. He disappointed no one.
It was then he realized he had to leave. He had to escape from this place, or he would become just another ghost among many.
Having spent the greater portion of his four days as a prisoner roaming the Tower, much as a ghost might roam the place it was doomed to frequent, he was familiar with the physical layout of the Tower. It was similar to what he remembered, but with differences. Every Master of the Tower altered the building to suit his or her needs. Raistlin had made the Tower of High Sorcery his own when he was Master. He had shared it with no one except a single apprentice, Dalamar, the undead who served them, and the Live Ones, poor, twisted creatures who lived out their miserable, misbegotten lives below the surface of the ground in the Chamber of Seeing.
Upon Raistlin’s death, Dalamar was made Master of the Tower of High Sorcery. The Tower had been located in the lord city of Palanthas, which considered itself the center of the known world. Previously the Tower of High Sorcery had been a sinister object, one of foreboding and terror. Dalamar was a forward-thinking mage, despite being an elf and a Black Robe (or perhaps because he was an elf and a Black Robe). He wanted to flaunt the power of mages, not hide it, and so he had opened the Tower to students, adding rooms in which his apprentices could live and study.
Fond of comfort and luxury as any elf, he had brought into the Tower many objects that he collected over his travels: the wondrous and the hideous, the beautiful and the awful, the plain and the curious. The objects were all gone, at least so far as Palin could discover. Dalamar might have stashed them in his chamber, which was also wizard-locked, but Palin doubted it. He had the impression that if he entered Dalamar’s living quarters he would find them as bare and empty as the rest of the dark and silent rooms in the Tower. These things were part of the past. Either they had been broken in the cataclysmic upheaval of the Tower’s move from Palanthas, or their owner had cast them off in pain and in anger. Palin guessed the latter.
He recalled very well when he had heard the news that Dalamar had destroyed the Tower, rather than permit the great blue dragon Khellendros to seize control of it. The citizens of Palanthas woke to a thundering blast that shook houses, cracked streets, broke windows. At first, the people thought they were under attack by dragons, but after that initial shock, nothing further happened.
The next morning, they were awestruck and astonished and generally pleased to find that the Tower of High Sorcery—long considered an eyesore and a haven of evil—had disappeared. In its place was a reflecting pool where, if one looked, it was said one could see the Tower in the dark waters. Thus many began to circulate rumors that the Tower had imploded and sunk into the ground. Palin had never believed those rumors, nor, as he had discussed with his longtime friend and fellow mage Jenna, did he believe Dalamar was dead or the Tower destroyed.
Jenna had agreed with him, and if anyone would know it would be she, for she had been Dalamar’s lover for many years and was the last to see him prior to his departure more than thirty years ago.
“Perhaps not so long ago as that,” Palin muttered to himself, staring in frustration and simmering anger out the window. “Dalamar knew exactly where to find us. Knew where to lay his hands on us. Only one person could have told him. Only one person knew: Jenna.”
He probably should be glad the powerful wizard had rescued them. Otherwise he and Tasslehoff would be sitting in the dragon Beryl’s prison cell under far less propitious circumstances. Palin’s feelings of gratitude toward Dalamar had effectively evaporated by now. Once he might have shaken Dalamar’s hand. Now, he wanted only to wring the elf’s neck.
The Tower’s relocation from Palanthas to wherever it was now—Palin hadn’t the vaguest idea, he could see nothing but trees around it—had brought about other changes. Palin saw several large cracks in the walls, cracks that might have alarmed him for his own safety had he not been fairly certain (or at least hoped) that Dalamar had shored up the walls with magic. The spiral staircase had always been treacherous to walk, but now was doubly so, due to the fact that some of the stairs had not survived the move. Tasslehoff climbed nimbly up and down the stairs like a squirrel, but Palin held his breath every time.
Tasslehoff—who had explored every inch of the Tower during the first hour of his arrival—reported that the
entrance to one of the minarets was completely blocked off by a caved-in wall and that the other minaret was missing half the roof. The fearful Shoikan Grove that had once so effectively guarded the Tower had been left behind in Palanthas, where it stood now as a sad curiosity. The Tower was surrounded by a new grove—a grove of immense cypress trees.
Having lived among the vallenwoods all his life, Palin was accustomed to gigantic trees, but he was impressed by the cypresses. Most of the trees stood far taller than the Tower, which was dwarfed by comparison. The cypresses held their enormous green-clothed arms protectively over the Tower, shielding it from the view of roaming dragons, particularly Beryl, who would have given her fangs and her claws and her green scaly tail thrown into the bargain for knowledge of the whereabouts of the Tower that had once reigned so proudly in Palanthas.
Peering out of one of the few upper-story windows still in existence in the Tower—many others that he had remembered had been sealed up—Palin looked out upon a thick forest of cypress that rolled in undulating waves of green to the horizon. No matter what direction he looked, he saw only those spreading green boughs, an ocean of limbs and branches, leaves and shadow. No path cut through these boughs, not even an animal path, for the forest was eerily quiet. No bird sang, no squirrel scolded, no owl hooted, no dove mourned. Nothing living roamed the forest. The Tower was not a ship bobbing upon this ocean. It was submerged in the depths, lost to the sight and knowledge of those who lived in the world beyond.
The forest was the province of the dead.
One of the remaining windows was located at the very bottom of the Tower, a few feet from the massive oaken door. The window looked out upon the forest floor, a floor that was thick with shadow, for sunlight very rarely managed to penetrate through the leaves that formed a canopy above.
Amid the shadows, the souls roamed. The aspect was not a pleasant one. Yet Palin found himself fascinated, and often he would stand here, shivering in the cold, his arms folded for warmth in the sleeves of his robes, gazing out upon the restless, ever-moving, ever-shifting congregation of the dead.
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