War of the Twins (48 page)

“We’re ready, Raistlin,” he said brightly. “Whoosh away! Gee, won’t Caramon be surprised—”

“I said—come here, Tas,” Raistlin repeated in that soft, expressionless voice. His eyes were on the gnome.

“Oh, Raistlin, you’re not going to leave him here, are you?” Tas wailed. Dropping Gnimsh’s hand, he took a step forward. “Because, if you are, I’d just as soon stay. I mean, he’ll never get out of this by himself. And he’s got this wonderful idea for a mechanical lift—”

Raistlin’s hand snaked out, caught hold of Tas by the arm, and yanked him over to stand beside him. “No, I’m not going to leave him here, Tas.”

“You see? He’s going to whoosh us back to Caramon. The magic’s great fun,” Tas began, twisting around to face Gnimsh and trying to grin, though the mage’s strong fingers were hurting him most dreadfully. But at the sight of Gnimsh’s face, Tas’s grin vanished. He started to go back to his friend, but Raistlin held him fast.

The gnome was standing all by himself, looking thoroughly confused and pathetic, still clutching Tas’s handkerchief in his hand.

Tas squirmed. “Oh, Gnimsh, please. It’ll be all right. I told you, Raistlin’s my fri—”

Raising one hand, holding Tas by the collar with the other, the archmage pointed a finger at the gnome. Raistlin’s soft voice began to chant,
“Ast kiranann kair—
”

Horror broke over Tas. He had heard those words of magic before.…

“No!” he shrieked in anguish. Whirling, he looked up into Raistlin’s eyes. “No!” he screamed again, hurling himself bodily at the mage, beating at him with his small hands.

“—Gardurm Soth-arn/Suh kali Jalaran!”
Raistlin finished calmly.

Tas, his hands still grasping Raistlin’s black robes, heard the air begin to crackle and sizzle. Turning with an incoherent cry, the kender watched bolts of flame shoot from the mage’s fingers straight into the gnome. The magical lightning struck Gnimsh in the chest. The terrible energy lifted the gnome’s small body and flung it backward, slamming it into the stone wall behind.

Gnimsh crumpled to the floor without so much as a cry. Smoke rose from his leather apron. There was the sweet, sickening smell of burning flesh. The hand holding the kender’s handkerchief twitched, and then was still.

Tas couldn’t move. His hands still entangled in Raistlin’s robes, he stood, staring.

“Come along, Tas,” Raistlin said.

Turning, Tas looked up at Raistlin. “No,” he whispered, trembling, trying to free himself from Raistlin’s strong grip. Then he cried out in agony. “You murdered him! Why? He was my friend!”

“My reasons are my own,” Raistlin said, holding onto the writhing kender firmly. “Now you are coming with me.”

“No, I’m not!” Tas cried, struggling frantically. “You’re not interesting or exciting—you’re evil—like the Abyss! You’re horrible and ugly, and I won’t go anywhere with you! Ever! Let me go! Let me go!”

Blinded by tears, kicking and screaming and flailing out with his clenched fists, Tas struck at Raistlin in a frenzy.

Coming out of their terror, the Dewar in the cell began shouting in panic, arousing the attention of dwarves in the other cells. Shrieking and yelling, other Dewar crowded close against the bars, trying to see what was going on.

Pandemonium broke out. Above the cries and shouts could
be heard the deep voices of the guards, yelling something in dwarven.

His face cold and grim, Raistlin laid a hand on Tasslehoff’s forehead and spoke swift, soft words. The kender’s body relaxed instantly. Catching him before he fell to the floor, Raistlin spoke again, and the two of them disappeared, leaving the stunned Dewar to stand, gaping, staring at the vacant space on the floor and the body of the dead gnome, lying huddled in the corner.

An hour later Kharas, having escaped his own confinement with ease, made his way to the cellblock where the Dewar clans were being held captive.

Grimly, Kharas stalked down the aisles.

“What’s going on?” he asked a guard. “It seems awfully quiet.”

“Ah, some sort of riot a while back,” the guard muttered. “We never could figure out what the matter was.”

Kharas glanced around sharply. The Dewar stared back at him not with hatred but with suspicion, even fear.

Growing more worried as he went along, sensing that something frightful had occurred, the dwarf quickened his pace. Reaching the last cell, he looked inside.

At the sight of Kharas, those Dewar who could move leaped to their feet and backed into the farthest corner possible. There they huddled together, muttering and pointing at the front corner of the cell.

Looking over, Kharas frowned. The body of the gnome lay limply on the floor.

Casting a furious glance at the stunned guard, Kharas turned his gaze upon the Dewar.

“Who did this?” he demanded. “And where’s the kender?”

To Kharas’s amazement, the Dewar—instead of sullenly denying the crime—immediately surged forward, all of them babbling at once. With an angry, slashing hand motion, Kharas silenced them. “You, there”—he pointed at one of the Dewar, who was still holding onto Tas’s pouches—“where did you get that pouch? What happened? Who did this?
Where is the kender?”

As the Dewar shambled forward, Kharas looked into the dark dwarf’s eyes. And he saw, to his horror, that any sanity the dark dwarf might once have possessed was now completely gone.

“I saw ’im,” the Dewar said, grinning. “I saw ’im. In ‘is black robes and all. He come for the gnome. An’ ’e come for the kender. An’ e’s comin’ fer us nex’!”

The dark dwarf laughed horribly. “Us nex’!” he repeated.

“Who?” Kharas asked sternly. “Saw who? Who came for the kender?”

“Why, hisself!” whispered the Dewar, turning to gaze upon the gnome with wild, staring eyes. “Death …”

o one had set foot inside the magical fortress of Zhaman for centuries. The dwarves viewed it with suspicion and distrust for several reasons. One, it had belonged to wizards. Two, its stonework was not dwarven, nor was it even natural. The fortress had been raised—so legend told—up out of the ground by magic, and it was magic that still held it together.

“Has
to be magic,” Reghar grumbled to Caramon, giving the tall thin spires of the fortress a scathing glance. “Otherwise, it would have toppled over long ago.”

The hill dwarves, refusing to a dwarf to stick so much as the tip of their beards inside the fortress, set up camp outside, on the plains. The Plainsmen did likewise. Not so much from fear of the magical building—though they looked at it askance and whispered about it in their own language—but from the fact that they felt uneasy in any building.

The humans, scoffing at these superstitions, entered the ancient fortress, laughing loudly about spooks and haunts. They stayed one night. The next morning found them setting
up camp in the open, muttering about fresh air and sleeping better beneath the stars.

“What went on here?” Caramon asked his brother uneasily as they walked through the fortress on their arrival. “You said it wasn’t a Tower of High Sorcery, yet it’s obviously magical. Wizards built it. And”—the big man shivered—“there’s a strange feeling about it—not eerie, like the Towers. But a feeling of … of—” He floundered.

“Of violence,” Raistlin murmured, his darting, penetrating gaze encompassing all the objects around him, “of violence and of death, my brother. For this was a place of experimentation. The mages built this fortress far away from civilized lands for one reason—and that was that they knew the magic conjured here might well escape their control. And so it did—often. But here, too, emerged great things—magics that helped the world.”

“Why was it abandoned?” Lady Crysania asked, drawing her fur cloak around her shoulders more tightly. The air that flowed through the narrow stone hallways was chill and smelled of dust and stone.

Raistlin was silent for long moments, frowning. Slowly, quietly, they made their way through the twisting halls. Lady Crysania’s soft leather boots made no sound as she walked, Caramon’s heavy booted footsteps echoed through the empty chambers, Raistlin’s rustling robes whispered through the corridors, the Staff of Magius upon which he leaned thumping softly on the floor. As quiet as they were, they could almost have been the ghosts of themselves, moving through the hallways. When Raistlin spoke, his voice made both Caramon and Crysania start.

“Though there have always been the three Robes—good, neutral, and evil—among the magic-users, we have, unfortunately, not always maintained the balance,” Raistlin said. “As people turned against us, the White Robes withdrew into their Towers, advocating peace. The Black Robes, however, sought—at first—to strike back. They took over this fortress and used it in experiments to create armies.” He paused. “Experiments that were not successful at that time, but which led to the creation of draconians in our own age.

“With this failure, the mages realized the hopelessness of their situation. They abandoned Zhaman, joining with their fellows in what became known as the Lost Battles.”

“You seem to know your way around here,” Caramon observed.

Raistlin glanced sharply at his brother, but Caramon’s face was smooth, guileless—though there was, perhaps, a strange, shadowed look in his brown eyes.

“Do you not yet understand, my brother?” Raistlin said harshly, coming to a stop in a drafty, dark corridor. “I have never been here, yet I have walked these halls. The room I sleep in I have slept in many nights before, though I have yet to spend a night in this fortress. I am a stranger here, yet I know the location of every room, from those rooms of meditation and study at the top to the banquet halls on the first level.”

Caramon stopped, too. Slowly he looked around him, staring up at the dusty ceiling, gazing down the empty hallways where sunlight filtered through carved windows to lie in square tiles upon the stone floors. His gaze finally came back to meet that of his twin.

“Then, Fistandantilus,” he said, his voice heavy, “you know that this is also going to be your tomb.”

For an instant, Caramon saw a tiny crack in the glass of Raistlin’s eyes, he saw—not anger—but amusement, triumph. Then the bright mirrors returned. Caramon saw only himself reflected there, standing in a patch of weak, winter sunlight.

Crysania moved next to Raistlin. She put her hands over his arm as he leaned upon his staff and regarded Caramon with cold, gray eyes. “The gods are with us,” she said. “They were not with Fistandantilus. Your brother is strong in his art, I am strong in my faith. We will not fail!”

Still looking at Caramon, still keeping his twin’s reflection in the glistening orbs of his eyes, Raistlin smiled. “Yes,” he whispered, and there was a slight hiss to his words, “truly, the gods are with us!”

Upon the first level of the great, magical fortress of Zhaman were huge, stone-carved halls that had—in past
days—been places of meeting and celebration. There were also, on the first level, rooms that had once been filled with books, designed for quiet study and meditation. At the back end were kitchens and storage rooms, long unused and covered by the dust of years.

On the upper levels were large bedrooms filled with quaint, old-fashioned furniture, the beds covered with linens preserved through the years by the dryness of the desert air. Caramon, Lady Crysania, and the officers of Caramon’s staff slept in these rooms. If they did not sleep soundly, if they woke up sometimes during the night thinking they had heard voices chanting strange words or glimpsing wisps of ghostly figures fluttering through the moonlit darkness, no one mentioned these in the daylight.

But after a few nights, these things were forgotten, swallowed up in larger worries about supplies, fights breaking out between humans and dwarves, reports from spies that the dwarves of Thorbardin were massing a huge, well-armed force.

There was also in Zhaman, on the first level, a corridor that appeared to be a mistake. Anyone venturing into it discovered that it wandered off from a short hallway and ended abruptly in a blank wall. It looked for all the world as if the builder had thrown down his tools in disgust, calling it quits.

But the corridor was not a mistake. When the proper hands were laid upon that blank wall, when the proper words were spoken, when the proper runes were traced in the dust of the wall itself, then a door appeared, leading to a great staircase cut from the granite foundation of Zhaman.

Down, down the staircase, down into darkness, down—it seemed—into the very core of the world, the proper person could descend. Down into the dungeons of Zhaman.…

“One more time.” The voice was soft, patient, and it dove and twisted at Tasslehoff like a snake. Writhing around him, it sank its curved teeth into his flesh, sucking out his life.

“We will go over it again. Tell me about the Abyss,” said the voice. “Everything you remember. How you entered.
What the landscape is like. Who and what you saw. The Queen herself, how she looked, her words.…”

“I’m trying, Raistlin, truly!” Tasslehoff whimpered. “But … we’ve gone over it and over it these last couple of days. I can’t think of anything else! And, my head’s hot and my feet and my hands are cold and … the room’s spinning ’round and ’round. If—if you’d make it stop spinning, Raistlin, I think I might be able to recall …”