Margaret Weis - Time of the Twins

“No, I don’t suppose I blame you,” Quarath muttered. “Very well, you may go.”

The acolyte nodded, bowed, and returned thankfully to his bed.

Quarath did not go to his bed for long hours, however, but sat in his study, going over and over the report. Then, he sighed. “I am becoming as bad as the Kingpriest, jumping at shadows that aren’t there. If Fistandantilus wanted to do away with me, he could manage it within seconds. I should have realized—this is not his style.” He rose to his feet, finally. “Still, he was with her tonight. I wonder what that means? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the man is more human than I would have supposed. Certainly the body he has appeared in this time is better than those he usually dredges up.”

The elf smiled grimly to himself as he straightened his desk and filed the report away carefully. ‘Yule is approaching. I will put this from my mind until the holiday season is past. After all, the time is fast coming when the Kingpriest will call upon the gods to eradicate evil from the face of Krynn. That will sweep this Fistandantilus and those who follow him back into the darkness which spawned them.”

He yawned, then, and stretched. “But I’ll take care of Lord Onygion first.”

The Night of Doom was nearly ended. Morning lit the sky as Caramon lay in his cell, staring into the gray light. Tomorrow was another game, his first since the “accident.”

Life had not been pleasant for the big warrior these last few days. Nothing had changed outwardly. The other gladiators were old campaigners, most of them, long accustomed to the ways of the Game.

“It is not a bad system,” Pheragas said with a shrug when Caramon confronted him the day after his return from the Temple. “Certainly better than a thousand men killing each other on the fields of battle. Here, if one nobleman feels offended by another, their feud is handled secretly, in private, to the satisfaction of all.”

“Except the innocent man who dies for a cause he doesn’t care about or understand!” Caramon said angrily.

“Don’t be such a baby!” Kiiri snorted, polishing one of her collapsible daggers. “By your own account, you did some mercenary work. Did you understand or care about the cause then? Didn’t you fight and kill because you were being well paid? Would you have fought if you weren’t? I don’t see the difference.”

“The difference is I had a choice!” Caramon responded, scowling. “And I knew the cause I fought for! I never would have fought for anyone I didn’t believe was in the right! No matter how much money they paid me! My brother felt the same. He and I—” Caramon abruptly fell silent.

Kiiri looked at him strangely, then shook her head with a grin. “Besides,” she added lightly, “it adds spice, an edge of real tension. You’ll fight better from now on. You’ll see.”

Thinking of this conversation as he lay in the darkness, Caramon tried to reason it out in his slow, methodical fashion.

Maybe Kiiri and Pheragas were correct, maybe he was being a baby, crying because the bright, glittering toy he had enjoyed playing with suddenly cut him. But—looking at it every way possible—he still couldn’t believe it was right. A man deserved a choice, to choose his own way to live, his own way to die. No one else had the right to determine that for him.

And then, in the predawn, a crushing weight seemed to fall on Caramon. He sat up, leaning on one elbow, staring unseeing into the gray cell. If that was true, if every man deserved a choice, then what about his brother’? Raistlin had made his choice—to walk the ways of night instead of day. Did Caramon have the right to drag his brother from those paths?

His mind went back to those days he had unwittingly recalled when talking to Kiiri and Pheragas—those days right before the Test, those days that had been the happiest in his life—the days of mercenary work with his brother.

The two fought well together, and they were always welcomed by nobles. Though warriors were common as leaves in the trees, magic-users who could and would join the fighting were another thing altogether. Though many nobles looked somewhat dubious when they saw Raistlin’s frail and sickly appearance, they were soon impressed by his courage and his skill. The brothers were paid well and were soon much in demand.

But they always selected the cause they fought for with care.

“That was Raist’s doing,” Caramon whispered to himself wistfully. “I would have fought for anyone, the cause mattered little to me. But Raistlin insisted that the cause had to be a just one. We walked away from more than one job because he said it involved a strong man trying to grow stronger by devouring others...

“But that’s what Raistlin’s doing!” Caramon said softly, staring up at the ceiling. “Or is it? That’s what they say he’s doing, those magic-users. But can I trust them? Par-Salian was the one who got him into this, he admitted that! Raistlin rid the world of this Fistandantilus creature. By all accounts, that’s a good thing. And Raist told me he didn’t have anything to do with the Barbarian’s death. So he hasn’t really done anything wrong. Maybe we’ve misjudged him... Maybe we have no right to try to force him to change...”

Caramon sighed. “What should I do?” Closing his eyes in forlorn weariness, he fell asleep, and soon the smell of warm, freshly baked muffins filled his mind.

The sun lit the sky. The Night of Doom ended. Tasslehoff rose from his bed, eagerly greeted the new day, and decided that he—he personally—would stop the Cataclysm.

“Alter time!” Tasslehoff said eagerly, slipping over the garden wall into the sacred Temple area and dropping down to land in the middle of a flower bed. Some clerics were walking in the garden, talking among themselves about the merriment of the forthcoming Yule season. Rather than interrupt their conversation, Tas did what he considered the polite thing and flattened himself down among the flowers until they left, although it meant getting his blue leggings dirty.

It was rather pleasant, lying among the red Yule roses, so called because they grew only during the Yule season. The weather was warm, too warm, most people said. Tas grinned. Trust humans. If the weather was cold, Yule-type weather, they’d complain about that, too. He thought the warmth was delightful. A trifle hard to breathe in the heavy air, perhaps, but—after all—you couldn’t have everything.

Tas listened to the clerics with interest. The Yule parties must be splendid things, he thought, and briefly considered attending. The first one was tonight—Yule Welcoming. It would end early, since everyone wanted to get lots of sleep in preparation for the big Yule parties themselves, which would begin at dawn tomorrow and run for days—the last celebration before the harsh, dark winter set in.

“Perhaps I’ll attend that party tomorrow,” Tas thought. He had supposed that a Yule Welcoming party in the Temple would be solemn and grand and, therefore, dull and boring—at least from a kender viewpoint. But the way these clerics talked, it sounded quite lively.

Caramon was fighting tomorrow—the Games being one of the highlights of the Yule season. Tomorrow’s fight determined which teams would have the right to face each other in the Final Bout—the last game of the year before winter forced the closing of the arena. The winners of this last game would win their freedom. Of course, it was already predetermined who would win tomorrow—Caramon’s team. For some reason, this news had sent Caramon into a gloomy depression.

Tas shook his head. He never would understand that man, he decided. All this sulking about honor. After all, it was only a game. Anyway, it made things easy. It would be simple for Tas to sneak off and enjoy himself.