Margaret Weis - Time of the Twins

Keeping a firm grip on the pouch with the magical device, Tas reached the end of the hall and skidded around it, slamming up against the opposite wall in his haste. Oh, no! His heart went from jumping around in his chest to land with a thud at his feet. He began to wish irritably that his heart would stay put. Its gyrations were making him nauseous.

The hall was filled with clerics, all dressed in white robes! How was he ever to spot Crysania? Then he saw her, about half-way down the hall, her black hair shining in the torchlight. He saw, too, that clerics swirled about in her wake, shouting or glowering after her as she ran by.

Tas leaped to the pursuit, hope rising again; Crysania had been necessarily slowed in her wild flight by the crowd of people in the Temple. The kender sped past them, ignoring cries of outrage, skipping out the way of grasping hands.

“Crysania,” he yelled desperately.

The crowd of clerics in the hall became thicker, everyone hurrying out to wonder about the strange trembling of the ground, trying to guess what this portended.

Tas saw Crysania halt more than once, pushing her way through the crowd. She had freed herself when Quarath came around the corner, calling for the Kingpriest. Not watching where she was going, Crysania ran into him, and he caught hold of her.

“Stop! My dear,” Quarath cried, shaking her, thinking her hysterical. “Calm yourself!”

“Let me go!” Crysania struggled in his grasp.

“She’s gone mad with terror! Help me hold her!” Quarath called to several clerics standing nearby.

It suddenly occurred to Tas that Crysania did look mad. He could see her face as he drew near her, now. Her black hair was a tangled mess, her eyes were deep, deep gray, the color of the storm clouds, and her face was flushed with exertion. She seemed to hear nothing, no voices penetrated her consciousness, except, perhaps, one.

Other clerics caught hold of her at Quarath’s command. Screaming incoherently, Crysania fought them, too. Desperation gave her strength, she came close to escaping more than once. Her white robes tore in their hands as they tried to hold her, Tas thought he saw blood on more than one cleric’s face. Running up, he was about to leap on the back of the nearest cleric and bop him over the head when he was blinded by a brilliant light that brought everyone—even Crysania—to a halt.

No one moved. All Tas could hear for a moment were Crysania’s gasps for breath and the heavy breathing of those who had tried to stop her. Then a voice spoke.

“The gods come,” said the musical voice from out the center of the light, “at my command—“

The ground beneath Tasslehoff’s feet leaped high in the air, tossing the kender up like a feather. It sank rapidly as Tas was going up, then flew up to meet him as he was coming down. The kender slammed into the floor, the impact knocking the breath from his small body.

The air exploded with dust and glass and splinters, screams and shrieks and crashes. Tas could do nothing except fight to try to breathe. Lying on the marble floor as it jumped and rocked and shook beneath him, walls split, pillars fell, and people died.

The Temple of Istar was collapsing.

Crawling forward on his hands and knees, Tas tried desperately to keep Crysania in sight. She seemed oblivious to what was happening around her. Those who had been holding her let go in their terror, and Crysania, still hearing only Raistlin’s voice, started on her way again. Tas yelled. Quarath was lunging at her, but, even as the cleric hurtled towards her, a huge marble column next to her toppled and fell.

Tas caught his breath. He couldn’t see a thing for an instant, then the marble dust settled. Quarath was nothing but a bloody mass on the floor. Crysania, apparently unhurt, stood staring dazedly down at the elf, whose blood had spattered all over her white robes.

“Crysania!” Tasslehoff shouted hoarsely. But she didn’t notice him. Turning away, she stumbled through the wreckage, unseeing, hearing nothing but the voice that called to her more urgently now than ever.

Staggering to his feet, his body bruised and aching, Tas ran after her. Nearing the end of the hall, he saw Crysania make a turn to her right and go down a flight of stairs. Before he followed her, Tas risked a quick look behind him, drawn by a terrible curiosity. The brilliant light still filled the corridor, illuminating the bodies of the dead and dying. Cracks gaped in the Temple walls, the ceiling sagged, dust choked the air. And within that light, Tas could still hear the voice, only now its lovely music had faded. It sounded harsh, shrill, and off-key.

“The gods come...”

Outside the great arena, running through Istar, Caramon fought his way through death-choked streets. Much like Crysania’s, his mind, too, heard Raistlin’s voice. But it was not calling to him. No, Caramon heard it as he had heard it in their mother’s womb, he heard the voice of his twin, the voice of the blood they shared.

And so Caramon paid no heed to the screams of the dying, or the pleas for help from those trapped beneath the wreckage. He paid no heed to what was happening around him. Buildings tumbled down practically on top of him, stones plummeted into the streets, narrowly missing him. His arms and upper body were soon bleeding from small, jagged cuts. His legs were gashed in a hundred places.

But he did not stop. He did not even feel the pain. Climbing over debris, lifting giant beams of wood and hurling them out of his way, Caramon slowly made his way through the dying streets of Istar to the Temple that gleamed in the sun before him. In his hand, he carried a bloodstained sword.

Tasslehoff followed Crysania down, down, down into the very bowels of the ground—or so it seemed to the kender. He hadn’t even known such places in the Temple existed, and he wondered how he had come to miss all these hidden staircases in his many ramblings. He wondered, too, how Crysania came to know of their existence. She passed through secret doors that were not visible even to Tas’s kender eyes.

The earthquake ended, the Temple shook a moment longer in horrified memory, then shivered and was still once more. Outside was death and chaos, but inside all was still and silent. It seemed to Tas as if everything in the world was holding its breath, waiting...

Down here—wherever here was—Tas saw little damage, perhaps because it was so far beneath the ground. Dust clouded the air, making it hard to breathe or see and occasionally a crack appeared in a wall, or a torch fell to the floor. But most of the torches were still in their sconces on the wall, still burning, casting an eerie glow in the drifting dust.

Crysania never paused or hesitated, but pressed on rapidly, though Tas soon lost all sense of direction or of where he was. He had managed to keep up with her fairly easily, but he was growing more and more tired and hoped that they would get to wherever they were going soon. His ribs hurt dreadfully. Each breath he drew burned like fire, and his legs felt like they must belong to a thick-legged, iron-shod dwarf.

He followed Crysania down another flight of marble stairs, forcing his aching muscles to keep moving. Once at the bottom, Tas looked up wearily and his heart rose for a change. They were in a dark, narrow hallway that ended, thankfully, in a wall, not another staircase!

Here, a single torch burned in a sconce above a darkened doorway.

With a glad cry, Crysania hurried through the doorway, van ishing into the darkness beyond.

“Of course!” Tas realized thankfully. “Raistlin’s laboratory! It must be down here.”

Hurrying forward, he was very near the door when a great, dark shape bore down on him from him behind, tripping him. Tas tumbled to the floor, the pain in his ribs making him catch his breath.