The reign of Istar t2-1 Read online

  The reign of Istar

  ( Tales 2 - 1 )

  Margaret Weis

  Tracy Hickman

  Michael Williams

  Richard A. Knaak

  Roger E. Moore

  Douglas Niles

  Nancy Varian Berberick

  Margaret Weis,Tracy Hickman, Michael Williams,Richard A. Knaak, Roger E. Moore,Douglas Niles,Nancy Varian Berberick

  The reign of Istar

  Paladine, you see the evil that surrounds me! You have been witness to the calamities that have been the scourge of Krynn… You must see now that this doctrine of balance will not work!

  "… I can sweep evil from this world! Destroy the ogre races! Bring the wayward humans into line! Find new homelands far away for the dwarves and the kender and the gnomes, those races not of your creation…

  "… I demand that you give me, too, the power to drive away the shadows of evil that darken the land!"

  So the Kingpriest prayed on the day of the Cataclysm.

  He was a good man, but intolerant, proud. He believed his way to be the right way, the only way, and insisted that everyone else — including the gods — follow his thinking. Those who disagreed with him were, by definition, evil and, according to the law, must be "converted" or destroyed. The stories in this volume deal with the effects of such edicts and beliefs on the people of Ansalon at the time prior to the Cataclysm.

  Michael Williams begins this series, appropriately, with a prophecy for the last days in "Six Songs for the Temple of Istar."

  "Colors of Belief," by Richard A. Knaak, tells the story of a young knight who travels to Istar in search of the truth. He finds it, though not quite in the way he expected.

  A crusty old trainer of young knights must cope with a most unorthodox recruit in "Kender Stew," by Nick O'Donohoe.

  "The Goblin's Wish," by Roger E. Moore, is a tale of a disparate band of refugees, driven together by need, who almost find the power to overcome evil. Almost.

  "The Three Lives of Horgan Oxthrall," by Douglas Niles, continues the theme of unlikely allies, forced to band together in the face of a common enemy, as told by a clerk to Astinus.

  Nancy Varian Berberick writes about alliances of a more intriguing nature in "Filling the Empty Places."

  Dan Parkinson tells how the small and seemingly insignificant can end up playing an important role in history in "Off Day."

  Our novella, "The Silken Threads," reveals the fate of the true clerics and tells how Nuitari, the guardian of evil magic, attempts to thwart the ambitions of the black-robed wizard known as Fistandantilus.

  We are delighted to be visiting Krynn once again, along with many of the original members of the DRAGONLANCER game design team and some new friends we met along the way. We hope you enjoy "The Reign of Istar" and that you will join us for further journeys through Krynn in subsequent volumes in this series.

  Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

  Six Songs For the Temple of Istar

  Michael Williams

  According to legend, the author of these songs is the obscure Silvanesti bard Astralas, born about the time of the Proclamation of Manifest Virtue. Well over a century old when his voyage commenced, the elven prophet supposedly set sail for Istar shortly before the Edict of Thought Control, returning with a series of confused and confusing visions of an impending disaster. He vanished under mysterious circumstances around the time of the Cataclysm; some say that he was destroyed by the elven priestesses of Istar, acting in accordance with the edict. Some also say that in the nightmare days of chaos that followed the Cataclysm, Astralas traveled the forests of Ansalon, forever reciting these songs. The fifth of the songs — the account of the visions themselves — occurs in more than a hundred oral versions throughout the continent. This, however, is the only known manuscript version.

  Quivalen Sath, Archivist of The Qualinesti Poetic Records

  I

  Astralas, called into song by the fluted god

  Branchala of the leaves, called when I haunted the woods of Silvanost, two thousand and sixty years since the signing of scrolls, since the sheathing of armies.

  O when the god called me, the twin moons crossed on the prow of my ship, and the ocean was red on silver, encircling light upon inarticulate light from the settled darkness rushing, awaiting my song.

  And O when the god called me, this was my singing, my prophecy compelled in a visitation of wind.

  II

  The language of wind is one tongue only, pronounced in the movement of cloud and water, voiced in the rattle of leaves in the breath between waiting and memory, it stalks elusive as light and promise.

  The language of wind is the vanishing year preserved in recollection, and always it yearns for a season the heart might have been in its wild anointing.

  And the wind is always your heartbeat, is breathing remote as the impassive stars, and it moves from arrival to leaving, leaving you one song only:

  Oh, that was the language of wind,

  you say, and what does it mean

  To the leaves and the water,

  always, what does it mean?

  So it found me the first time at the banks of Thon-Thalas, at the last edge of river, after the ministries of inkwell and tutor, after the damaged heirloom of days, when the long thoughts burrow and the childhood dances on dark effacements of memory, losing the self in the dance.

  I remembered too much, unabled for the sword and buckler, for spellbook and moon, for altar and incense, for the birds' veiled grammar and the seasons' alembic, and always the river was telling me telling me

  Come, Astralas, come to the waters:

  I am the last home, it was saying,

  The refuge of dreams

  And the sleep of reason.

  Come to midcurrent, Astralas.

  I shall carry you past your failures.

  Come to midcurrent and open your arms

  As you fall into spindrift,

  To movement, to light on the water,

  To water itself, enraptured and lost

  As the whole world vanishes.

  And always the river spoke like this, always the dark current lulling the heart and the mind into that undertow where the homelands shift behind you and fade, and you think they have vanished in the necessity of rivers, in the battlements of forest, so that if you return to recover your path you are lost in the maze of leaf and inevitable current, of fore and aft, of the homelands always receding.

  So spoke the river, and darkly I hearkened, suspended in darkness, in the heart's surrender.

  A boat for the passage

  I began to fashion, hides stripped in the lime pits sealed with tallow and stitched by the tendon of flax as the awl and the needle passed through and over the supple and skeletal wood:

  The sails bellied forth in carnivorous winds, and in dark, in surrender, the ship moved rudderless, launched on insensible currents, borne to the South where the Courrain covers the edge of the world.

  And borne to the South

  I lay on the deck, and the boat was a cradle, a bride's bed, a gray catafalque carried into the night, it was strong wine and medicine, sleep past remembrance and past restoration, and as I lay down in the veinwork of halyards

  I decided to rise up no longer.

  And the date of my death was my embarkation.

  III

  Something there is in the rudderless sailing, abandoning hope as the husk of desire, architectures of boat and body coalesce with the water and the disburdening wind
.

  In the south, the sails filled with words and the boat took wing above the denial of waters.

  Softly the wind spoke under the pulse of the sails:

  Come, Astralas, ride into prophecy:

  I am the breath of a God,

  the wind was saying, the source of dreams and the webwork of reason.

  Astralas, open your arms:

  I shall pass through your fingers as brindled light,

  as a vision from the brows of a weary king.

  Hasten to Istar, domed and templed,

  where sunlight refracts on bronze and silver,

  on crystal and burnished iron.

  Ten visions there you shall read and interpret,

  in that comfortable city where truth without pain governs the span of the hand,

  glitters like moonlight over immovable waters.

  But you, Astralas,

  impressed for your terrible voyage,

  cannot make truce with the wind and the water in the breath of your veins,

  because they are with you forever.

  The trees wept blood at my departure, staining the whiteness of birches and butternut, glittering dark on the maple and oak, blood that was falling like leaves in a thousand countries, greater than augury, sprung from prophetic wounds, as I sailed through the mouth of ancient Thon-Thalas like a prayer into endless ocean.

  In the mazed and elaborate swirl of omens, of long prophecies, comes a time when you stand in the presence of oracles, but what they foretell is mirrors and smoke.

  When I reached the Courrain

  I was standing on deck, despair having moved to the country of faith, and slowly the coast took a shape and a name, as the forest dwindled to Silvanost, green on water on green.

  At long last, to portside lay the watch fires of Balifor, the manhandling country of kender, of hoopak and flute and rifled treasuries.

  The smoke from the coastline mingled with clouds from the mountains in the high air resolving to nebulous hammer and harp, to veiled constellations, as the shores of Balifor sighed with departures of gods.

  North and west along the coast, cradled by pine-scented wind, by infusion of hemlock, the long plains climbed into mountainous green, and everywhere forest and ocean, ocean and forest twined with the westernmost haze of the damaged horizons, until the traveler's fancy supposes Silvanost rising again in dreams of retrieval, but instead it is priest-ridden Istar, sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense, the long smoke rising destroyed in its own celebrations.

  There in the branching seas, in warm waters harmful and northern, the wind took me westward skirting a desolate land.

  IV

  Now the sea is a level and heartless country, boiling with unsteady fires:

  The salt air smothers the coastal lights, but the mast, the shipped oars, ignite with the corposant, and all through the water a green incandescence, and often at night the coastline is dark, obscured by the luminous reef by the Phoenix of Habbakuk, low in the canceling west, and the wind and the water are borrowed and inward as light.

  And on those same nights, on the face of the waters, unexplainable darkness embarks from the starboard to port like a dream beneath memory as though from the ocean a new land is rising, proclaimed by the distant and alien calls of the whales.

  The compass needle flutters and falls into vertiginous waters, and waking to sunlight fractured on spindrift, the impervious jade of the ocean below you, you dismiss the night, you turn it away, which is why this song returns to you quietly at full noon, when the assembled sea is changing past thought and remembrance above the eternal currents.

  And now the northerlies rising fierce, equatorial, the madman's wind, the mistrals of prophecy, guiding me into the bay.

  Karthay tumbled by to the portside, the city of harbors where the sorcerer's tower waits out the erosion of mountains, as the northerlies lifted my boat from the waters' embrace.

  Into the Bay of Istar we rushed like an unforeseen comet, like a dire thing approaching the webbed and festering streets, the harbor's edge where the wind sailed over me, calming the vessel at the feet of the mountainous piers: where the wind sailed over me, catching the web of the kingdom as it blew where it wished, and none could tell where it came or went, and it dove through the alleys, vaulted the towers, and lay waste the house of the last Kingpriest.

  The augurers took it as one immutable sign, to add to the bloodtears of alder and vallenwood, to the pillared eruptions of campfire and forge, to the flight of the gods and the gods returning.

  And the sound of my coming was a warning sign.

  Ten visions, O Istar, lie sleeping in the great crystal dome of your Kingpriest's Temple, where the walls recede from the plumb line, where foundations devolve through corundum through quartz, through limestone through clay, to the half-fallen dreams of foundation.

  Ten visions lie sleeping and my song has awakened them all.

  For my words are the leveling wind, are the blood of the trees and the fire on the shores, the gods walk in my song, where ten visions waken in the hands of my singing:

  I offer them, glittering, shattered, and the gods break in my hands.

  V

  Istar, your army in Balifor is a gauntlet, clenched on a quicksilver heirloom.

  Your priests in Qualinost are dazzlements of glass fractured on red velvet.

  Your light hand in Hylo steals breath from the cradle:

  Ice on the glove.

  In Silvanost, the white thighs of the women wade through the muddied waters of Thon-Thalas.

  Your sword arm in Solamnia entangles in filaments, in the spider's alley.

  Your children in Thoradin dream away ancestries of green earth and sun.

  The shards of remembered Ergoth collect to a broken vessel from dispersion they call the planet's twelve corners.

  One name on the lips of Thorbardin the rows of teeth unmarked gravestones.

  Your fingers in Sancrist fumble the intricate hilt of a borrowed sword.

  But, Istar, the last song is yours, the song at the center of songs:

  A bleached bone on the altar.

  VI

  And last generation of Istar, pure generation, born of bright stones drawn from the crown of a mountebank's hat, whose goodness is ordinance, precise, mathematical, stripped of the elements in the hearts fire and the earth of the body, in the water of blood and the air's circumference:

  You have passed through your temple unharmed until now, but now all of Istar is strung on our words on your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers that its price is forever that it draws you through meteors through winter's transfixion through the blasted rose through the shark's water through the black compression of oceans through rock through magma to yourself to an abscess of nothing that you will recognize as nothing that you will know is coming again and again under the same rules.

  So says the wind in one tongue only, pronounced in the movement of cloud and water, given voice by the rattle of leaves.

  In the breath between waiting and memory it stalks elusive as light and promise.

  So says the wind in the long year preserved in the heart'srecollection, and always it yearns for another and blessed year that the heart might have been in its wild anointing.

  And the wind is always your heartbeat, is breathing remote as the impassive stars, and it moves from arrival to leaving, leaving you one song only.

  Oh, that was the language of wind,

  you say, and what does it mean

  to the leaves and the water,

  and always is what it means.

  Colors of Belief

  Richard A. Knaak

  Arryl Tremaine stepped into the common room of Timon's Folly, the inn where he was staying, and immediately noted the eyes that fixed on him. He was clad in simple traveling clothes. Those in the inn could not know for certain that he was a Knight of Solamnia, but they COULD mark him as a foreigner. That in itself br
ought attention enough. Had he not prudently decided to leave his armor back in his room, the rest of the patrons would not have pretended that they were looking anywhere but at him.

  Ignoring the others, he marched toward the innkeeper, a heavy, bustling man named Brek. The innkeeper was the only one to give him any sort of greeting, likely because he felt a kinship with the young knight. Brek's grandfather had been the Timon whose folly had earned the inn its name — and likewise drove the family to leave Solamnia. Timon had been a Knight of the Sword, like Tremaine.

  Tremaine was of the opinion that Timon's line had grown much too soft in only two generations.

  "Good evening, Sir Tremaine," the man said in a voice that carried well. Now all the patrons looked up.

  "Master Brek." Arryl Tremaine's own voice was low and just a hint sharp at the moment. "I have asked you to not use my title."

  Solamnic Knights were a rare sight in the land of Istar, much less the holy city of the same name. Arryl, coming from the more secluded southwest of his own country, had never truly understood why. Both the knighthood and the Kingpriest — he who was ruler of Istar — served the same lord, the god of light and goodness, Paladine. Once compatible, the two servants no longer seemed to be able to work side by side. There were rumors that the church had grown jealous of the knights' power, and the knights jealous of the church's wealth. A Tremaine never bent low enough to believe such rabble-rousing. The House of Tremaine might have seen better days, but the pride of the family was still very much in flower. The young knight had come to Istar three days earlier to learn the truth.