Margaret Weis - Dragons of Vanished Moon

“A very pretty sentiment, Majere,” Mina responded. “I will write that on your tomb. What of you, Dark Elf? Have you made your decision? I trust you will not be as foolish as your friend.” Dalamar spoke finally, but not to Mina. He spoke to the blue flame, burning in the center of the still pool of dark water.

“I have looked into the night sky and seen the dark moon, and I have thrilled to know that my eyes were among the few eyes that could see it. I have heard the voice of the god Nuitari and reveled in his blessed touch as I cast my spells. Long ago, the magic breathed and danced and sparkled in my blood. Now it crawls out of my fingers like maggots swarming from a carrion carcass. I would rather be that corpse than be a slave to one who so fears the living that she can trust only servants who are dead.”

A single hand smote the door. The door and the spell that guarded it shattered. Mina entered the chamber. She entered alone. The jet of flame that burned in the pool shone in her black armor, burned in her heart and in her amber eyes. Her shorn red hair glistened. She was might and power and majesty, but Palin saw that the amber eyes were red and swollen, tears stained her cheeks, grief for Goldmoon. Palin understood then the depth of the Dark Queen’s perfidy, and he had never hated Takhisis so much as he hated her now. Not for what she had done or was about to do to him, but for what she had done to Mina and all the innocents like her. Mina’s Knights, fearful of the powerful wizards, hung back upon the shadowy stairs. Dalamar’s voice raised in a chant, but the words were mumbled and inarticulate, and his voice faded slowly away. Palin tried desperately to summon the magic to him. The spell dissolved in his hands, ran through his fingers like grains of sand from a broken hourglass.

Mina regarded them both with a disdainful smile. “You are nothing without the magic. Look at you—two broken-down, impotent old men. Fall on your knees before the One God. Beg her to give you back the magic! She will grant your pleas.”

Neither Palin nor Dalamar moved. Neither spoke.

“So be it,” said Mina.

She raised her hand. Flames burned from the tips of her five fingers. Green fire, blue and red, white, and the red-black of embers lit the Chamber of Seeing. The flames merged together to form two spears forged of magic. The first spear she hurled at Dalamar.

The spear struck the elf in the breast, pinned him against the wall of the Chamber of Seeing. For a moment, he hung impaled upon the burning spear, his body writhing. Then his head sagged, his body went limp.

Mina paused. Holding the spear, she gazed at Palin.

“Beg,” she said to him. “Beg the One God for your life.” Palin’s lips tightened. He knew a moment’s panicked fear, then pain sheared through his body. The pain was so horrific, so agonizing that it brought its own blessing. The pain made his last living thought a longing for death.

Dalamar had said to Palin, “You do understand the significance of the gnome?” Palin had not understood the significance at that moment, nor had Tasslehoff. The kender understood now. He sat in the small and boring room in the Tower of High Sorcery, a room that was pretty much devoid of anything interesting: sad-looking tables and some stern-backed chairs and a few knick-nacks that were too big to fit in a pouch. He had nothing to do except look out a window to see nothing more interesting than an immense number of cypress trees—more trees than were absolutely necessary, or so Tas thought—and the souls of the dead wandering around among them. It was either that or watch Conundrum sort through the various pieces of the shattered Device of Time Journeying. For now Tas understood all too well significance of the gnome.

Long ago—just how long ago Tasslehoff couldn’t remember, time had become extremely muddled for him, what with leaping forward to one future that turned out wasn’t the proper future and ending up in this future, where all anyone wanted to do was send him back to the past to die—anyhow, long ago, Tasslehoff Burrfoot had, through no fault of his own (well, maybe a little) ended up quite by accident in the Abyss.

Having assumed that the Abyss would be a hideous place where all manner of perfectly horrible things went on—demons eternally torturing people, for example—Tas had been most frightfully disappointed to discover that the Abyss was, in fact, boring. Boring in the extreme. Nothing of interest happened. Nothing of disinterest happened. Nothing at all happened to anyone, ever. There was nothing to see, nothing to handle, nothing to do, nowhere to go. For a kender, it was pure hell.

Tas’s one thought had been to get out. He had with him the Device of Time Journeying—this same Device of Time Journeying that he had with him now. The device had been broken—just as it was broken now. He had met a gnome—similar to the gnome now seated at the table across from him. The gnome had fixed the device—just as the gnome was busy fixing it now. The one big difference was that then Tasslehoff had wanted the gnome to fix the device, and now he didn’t. Because when the Device of Time Journeying was Palin and Dalamar would use it to send him—Tasslehoff Burrfoot—back in time to the point where the Father of All and of Nothing would squash him flat and turn him into the sad ghost of himself he’d seen wandering about Nightlund.

“What did you do with this device?” Conundrum muttered irritably. “Run it through a meat grinder?”

Tasslehoff closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the gnome, but he saw him anyway—his nutbrown face and his wispy hair that floated about his head as though he were perpetually poking his finger into one of his own inventions, perhaps the steam-powered preambulating hubblebubble or the locomotive, self-winding rutabaga slicer. Worse, Tas could see the light of cleverness shining in the gnome’s beady eyes. He’d seen that light before, and he was starting to feel dizzy. What did you do with this device? Run it through a meat grinder? were exactly the same words—or very close to them—that the previous gnome had said in the previous time. To alleviate the dizzy feeling, Tasslehoff rested his head with its topknot of hair (going only a little gray here and there) on his hands on the table. Instead of going away, the uncomfortable dizzy feeling spiraled down from his head into his stomach, and spread from his stomach to the rest of his body.

A voice spoke. The same voice that he’d heard in a previous time, in a previous place, long ago. The voice was painful. The voice shriveled his insides and caused his brain to swell, so that it pressed on his skull, and made his head hurt horribly. He had heard the voice only once before, but he had never, ever wanted to hear it again. He tried to stop his ears with his hands, but the voice was inside him, so that didn’t help.

You are not dead, said the voice, and the words were exactly the same words the voice had spoken so long ago, nor were you sent here. You are not supposed to be here at all.

“I know,” said Tasslehoff, launching into his explanation. “I came from the past, and I’m supposed to be in a different future—”

“Is that... is that my fault?” Tas asked, faltering.

The voice laughed, and the laughter was horrible, for the sound was like a steel blade breaking, and the feel was of the slivers of the broken blade piercing his flesh.

Don’t be a fool, kender. You are an insect. Less than an insect. A mote of dust, a speck of dirt to be flicked away with a brush of my hand. The future you are in is the future of Krynn as it was meant to be but for the meddlings of those who had neither the wit nor the vision to see how the world might be theirs. All that happened once will happen again, but this time to suit my purposes. Long ago, one died on a Tower, and his death rallied a Knighthood. Now, another dies on a Tower and her death plunges a nation into despair. Long ago, one was raised up by the miracle of the blue crystal staff. Now the one who wielded that staff will be raised up — to receive me.