The War of the Lance t2-3 Read online

  The War of the Lance

  ( Tales 2 - 3 )

  Margaret Weis

  Tracy Hickman

  Michael Williams

  Nick O

  Jeff Grubb

  Nancy Varian Berberick

  Mark Antony

  Douglas Niles

  Margaret Weis,Tracy Hickman,Michael Williams,Nick O'Donohoe,Jeff Grubb,Nancy Varian Berberick,Mark Antony,Douglas Niles,

  The War of the Lance

  Introduction

  The queen of Darkness seeks to reenter the world. Her minions of evil once more grow strong and powerful. Dragons return to Krynn as war sweeps across the land. Every person is called upon to face the evil. Some rise to the challenge. Some fall. But each is, in his or her own way, a hero.

  Michael Williams delves into the soul of the tortured king of Silvanesti in the epic poem, "Lorac."

  "Raistlin and the Knight of Solamnia" by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman tells how the young mage helped a stern knight learn a hard lesson. (Originally published in DRAGON(R) Magazine, Issue 154, February 1990.)

  Roger Moore writes about the vengeful quest of a revenant in "Dead on Target."

  Mara, Queen of Thieves, sneaks into Mountain Nevermind in search of "War Machines" by Nick O'Donohoe.

  Dan Parkinson continues the misadventures of the Bulp clan, as those intrepid gully dwarves search for "The Promised Place."

  Jeff Grubb relates (be warned!) a gnome story in "Clockwork Hero."

  "The Night Wolf" by Nancy Varian Berberick is a tale of three friends who share a dark and deadly secret.

  Mark Anthony's "The Potion Sellers" have a bitter pill of their own to swallow when the wrong people come to believe in their fake cure-alls.

  Richard Knaak writes the story of an evil priest of Chemosh, trying to recover dread magical artifacts from beneath the Blood Sea, in "The Hand That Feeds."

  Foryth Teal, valiant scribe of Astinus, returns to provide us with an exciting account of "The Vingaard Campaign" by Douglas Niles.

  And finally, Tasslehoff Burrfoot tells "The Story That Tasslehoff Promised He Would Never, Ever, Ever Tell" to the kender's good friends, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

  We hope you are enjoying our return to Krynn as much as we are. Thanks to all of you for your support. You are the ones who have made this return journey possible. We look forward to traveling with you again in the future.

  Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

  Lorac

  Michael Williams

  I

  The country of thought is a pathless forest, is an intricate night of redoubling green, where the best and the worst entangle and scatter like distant light on the face of an emerald like a spark on the breast of the fallen seas.

  And yes, it is always like this, for that country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter your stories, no matter the rumors of legend and magic that illumine you through the curtain of years, you come to believe in the web of yourself that history twines in the veins of your fingers, that it knits all purpose, all pardon and injury, recovers the lapsed and plausible blood, until finally, in the midst of believing, you contrive the story out of the rumors, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, and then you will say, beyond truth and belief, this is what it means, for once and at last what it always meant, no more than i knew from the world's beginning is all that it means forever. Perhaps it was love in the towers of thought, in the haunts of High Sorcery, in the towering doctrine of moon and spell and convergence: where the dragons dispersed and the Kingpriest hovered in the blind riots of dogma and piety.

  Perhaps it was love in the breathing radius, in the forest of crystal where thought tunneled into five vanishing countries, forging the five stones at Istar, at Wayreth, in lofted Palanthas.

  Perhaps it was love but more likely thought in the two vanished towers, as the rioting stones dwindled to four, then three, three like the moons in a fracturing orbit, and the towers at Istar and gabled Palanthas echoed and shuddered in the forgotten language, hollow and cold with ancient departures, as high on their turrets the spiders walked, and the moth and the rust corrupted the dream of days.

  II

  But before the towers fell to abandonment, before the fire, the incense of destruction, when the Tower at Istar blossomed in magic and durable light, the parapets shone in the lonely notions of Lorac Caladon, Speaker of Stars.

  Restless in Silvanost, drawn by cold light, by the intricate forest of magic, to the North he came, to glittering Istar where the tests of High Sorcery awaited his judgment, his ordained mathematics, and the first test past, and the second surmounted, he stood as if satisfied high on the parapets in doubtful, striated light, the vaunt of his intellect over the globe of the city, where the green luminescence of the dangered orb called to him out of the Tower's heart.

  In the pathless forest at the end of all centuries, he would hear the song as it tumbled from thought into faceted memory, singing, perpetually singing,

  After the second

  There is no other. o the tests are behind you

  Speaker of suns and the song of the orb

  Is the song of your mind in this ancient tower

  Hollow and loveless with long departures.

  O the tests are behind you speaker of suns

  As history folds in these flourishing walls

  As the tower crumbles and with it the mind

  The first high battlements the house of the Gods

  But I shall lie here as the forest withers

  As the plains descend into winter and nothing

  Unless the song of your thoughts which is everything, is the world,

  Controls and subdues and informs the mystery.

  Take me to silvanost speaker of suns,

  Take me to freedom to the country of green on green.

  Perhaps it was love in the crystal heart, in the refraction of light and beguiling light, love meeting love in his long belief, in dire mathematics, in the mapped parabola of the trining moons, but there in the Tower six reasons converged the hand of the prophet the nesting heart of his will the hurdling thought the summoning crystal and always the ruinous moment, all of them settling in grim alignment, the orb the sixth like a heart in his hand, like a fluttering light a firebrand he carried to ignited Silvanost in the numbered days.

  I am bringing them fire, he said to himself, I am bringing them

  Light in the old gods' story. I am the first

  I will save them in the rising earth

  I will save them and the old world pivots away from my guiding hand.

  So he said to himself, and the shapeless horizon shaded to green and redoubling green as out of his last dreams arose Silvanesti, tangible, fractured in light.

  III

  And outside the forest the world collapsed, a mountain of fire crashed like a comet through jewelled Istar, through the endless city, and the Tower, unmanned and unhouseled, split like a dry stalk in the midst of the ruinous flames, and out of the valleys the mountains erupted, the seas poured forever into the graves of mountains, the long deserts sighed on abandoned floors of the seas, and the highways of Krynn descended into the paths of the dead.

  As hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, as the mountains were burning, as the sea became blood as above and below us the heavens were scattered, as locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet, Silvanost floated on islands of thought, immaculate memory gabled in cloud and dreaming, u
ntouched by the fire, by the shocks of the Rending, and from tower to tower from the Tower of Sorcery down to the Tower of Stars, drowsy in thinking, Lorac imagined an impossible dream of salvation, a country bartered in magic, renewed in his mind to a paradise won in a ranging study.

  And so it appeared in the orb, in the waking hours, in the suddenly secret lodging of light as the globe lay buried, masked and unfabled in the Tower of Stars, the ancestral tower of Speakers, of Silvanost, buried for centuries.

  While the continent burned and the people of Qualinost wandered through ash and the outer darkness, Silvanost floated at the edge of their sight, absent and glorious, down to the edge of their dreams. Lorac watched from the Tower of Stars, from the heart of the crystal, his eye on the face of the damaged world like a rumor of history he was forgetting lost in the fathomless maze of the orb.

  But often at night when the senses faltered and the polished country altered and coiled, the shape of the dream was the Speaker's reflection: The estranging trees were nests of daggers, the streams black and clotted under a silent moon that mourned for the day and the fierce definition of sunlight and knowledge where the trees and towns were named and numbered and always, implacably intended and purposed, far from the tangle of nightmare, the shadow and weave of the forest that wrangled to light in the dreams of Lorac, invading the day with the glitter of flint, subverting the pale and anonymous sun.

  IV

  Then to the North an evil arose in the cloud-wracked skies, for the Dragon Highlords sent sword and messenger, firebrand and word to the Tower of Stars, to rapt Silvanesti, to the dwindling porches of the elf king's ear, promising peace and the forest's asylum in the discord of armies, promising Silvanost free in exchange for the promise of silence, inaction, for a nodding head on the Green Throne.

  And Lorac agreed, his eye on the hooded orb, where miraculous silence promised a blessing of spears, an end to all promise, the dragons by summer.

  And so Silvanesti was emptied of silver, emptied of lives and the long dreaming blood of its last inhabitants as they took to the boats, to the skiffs, to the coracles, aimless on water as cloudy as oracles and the Wildrunners fought in the wake of the water, where their last breath billowed in the spreading sails.

  Alhana Starbreeze, the Speaker's daughter, stood at the helm in the silver passage as they sailed to the South on the Paths of Astralas, on the bard's memory, on history's spindrift, and Lorac behind them ordered his soldiers to leave the unraveling land in the last of the ships, for there in the dark called the forest, called Silvanost, the elm and aeterna choiring like nightingales, singing this song to his turning ear,

  After the last test

  There is no other. o the tests are behind you

  Speaker of suns and the song of the orb

  Is the song of your mind in this ancient tower

  Hollow and loveless with long departures.

  O the tests are behind you speaker of suns

  But I shall lie here as history folds

  In these flourishing walls as the tower crumbles

  And with it the mind the first high battlements

  The house of the Gods but I shall lie here

  As the forest withers as the plains descend

  Into winter and nothing unless the song of your thoughts

  Which is everything, is the world, controls and subdues

  And informs the mystery.

  Keep me in Silvanost speaker of suns, keep me in freedom

  It lay in the chambers secret in stars, above it the Tower and a labyrinth of legends, and the freedom it promised at its crystalline heart was green ice beckoning, flame of the distant voice.

  And drawn by its music, by the unearthly chiming of crystal and shifting thought the Speaker of Suns descended alone to the heart of the Tower where time and the forest and a shaft of moonlight collapsed on the orb, and he reached for the crystal as a thousand voices rose from its brimming fire, all of them singing the lure of the possible, all of them singing the song he imagined, and his thoughts were a fortress, phantasmal ramparts of maple and ash and belief, in his daylit dreams the armies were breaking, the edge of the forest bristled with leaf and invention, and summoned, he reached for the crystal as the globe and the world dissolved in his terrible grasp.

  He knew when the bones of his fingers ignited, when green fire danced on the back of his hands, in the damage of arteries, and he knew at once that the fire was the heart of his error, that neither the strength nor the words nor the mind could govern the magic.

  But the shadows of Silvanost faded from green into red, into brown and untenable gold, the orb was a prison and above Thon-Thalas the long wingbeat of the dragon approached, and the trees bent and bowed in a sinister wind as Lorac beheld this all through the light of the orb, and the dragon, the Bloodbane, came with its whispers, and under its words the old stones tilted, and the Tower of Stars, as white as a sepulchre, twisted and torted as the trees rained blood and the animals shrieked their cries like torn metal in a charmed and perpetual midnight.

  V

  So it was as the centuries gathered and telescoped into the passage of a dozen years, as the bristling heart of Silvanesti festered and doubled and hardened like crystal. And always the promise of Cyan Bloodbane, of the dragon coiled on the crystal globe, always the promise was nothing and nothing and the forest the map of a strangled country, land of stillbirth, of fever, of warped and gangrenous age and of long unendurable dying, until from the North came another invasion of hard light and lances as the Heroes, the Fellowship, the fashioned alliance of elf and dwarf, of human and gnome and kender came to the forest through the nest of nightmare, through the growing entanglement, through bone, through crystal, through all the forgotten banes and allures of the damaged heart, to Silvanost and the disfigured Tower, to Lorac, to the imprisoning Orb, and they freed the Speaker the Tower and town, the forest, the people, the bright orb they freed and like a survivor tumbled the globe through the years through the centuries lodged in the pale hands of others and its old polished carapace bright and reflecting the hourglassed eyes of its ultimate wielder.

  But the sands were draining over the Speaker of Suns, and the knowledge of Lorac, vaulted and various, numbered and faceted, descended and simplified into a knowledge of evil, as the forest unfolded, stripped of the long light, bare of bedazzlement and at last Silvanesti was free of his mind, torn from the labyrinth bearing forever the scars of belief to the last syllable of eventual time, and Lorac died in his daughter's arms, his thoughts in the Tower entombed and surrendered, his last wish a burial underneath Silvanost, driving the green from the body's decay, resolving to forest, resolving to Silvanost forever and ever, his enabling ghost to ascribe and deliver the land that he dreamt of, as thought was translated to dream.

  And yes, it is always like this, for the country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter the stories, no matter the rumors of legend and magic that illumine you through the curtain of years, you come to believe in the web of yourself that history twines in the veins of your fingers, that it knits all purpose, all pardon and injury, recovers the lapsed and plausible blood, until finally, in the midst of believing, you contrive among rumors the story, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, in which you will say, beyond truth and belief,

  This is what it means, for once and at last what

  It always meant, no more than I knew

  From the world's beginning is all

  That it means forever.

  Raistlin and the Knight of Solamnia

  Margaret Weis,Tracy Hickman

  It was a chill night for spring, undoubtedly the reason there were so many people in the inn. The inn wasn't accustomed to such crowds. In fact, it wasn't accustomed to any crowds, for the inn was new, so new that it still smelled of fresh-hewn wood and paint instead of stale ale and yesterday's stew. Called "Three Sheets," after a popular drinking song of the time, the inn was located in — . But where it was located doesn't matter. The inn was des
troyed five years later in the Dragon Wars and never rebuilt. Small wonder, for it was on a road little traveled then and less traveled after the dragons leveled the town.

  It would be some time yet before the Queen of Darkness plunged the world into what she hoped would be eternal night, but already, in these years just prior to the war, her evil shadow was spreading. Goblins had always been a problem in this realm, but suddenly what had been small bands of raiders who struck isolated farms had grown into armies attacking villages.

  "What's His Lordship offering?" queried a mage clad in red robes who occupied a booth — the one nearest the fire and the most comfortable in the crowded inn — with just one companion. No one thought of joining them. Though the mage was sickly in appearance, with a hacking cough that nearly bent him double, those who had served with him in previous campaigns whispered that he was quick to anger and quicker with his spells.

  "Standard rate — two pieces of steel a week and a bounty on goblin ears. I signed us up." The man responding was a large, burly warrior who sat down opposite his questioner. Shedding his plain, undecorated cloak in the heat of the room, the warrior revealed hardmuscled arms the size of tree trunks and a chest like a bull's. He unbuckled from around his waist a sword belt, laying on the table near at hand a sword with every appearance of having been well and skillfully used.

  "When do we get our pay?"

  "After we drive out the goblins. He'll make us earn it."

  "Of course," said the mage, "and he won't be out any cash to those who die. What took you so long?"