Test of the Twins Page 2

  Here and there, he saw spirals of smoke curling up, only to be whipped away immediately by the storm wind. Undoubtedly from more lightning strikes, he thought. But, in an odd sort of way, that reminded him of something, too. Like Caramon, he was becoming increasingly convinced that he knew this place.

  Wading through the mud, trying to ignore what the icky stuff was doing to his green shoes and bright blue leggings, Tas decided to try an old kender trick To Use When Lost. Closing his eyes and blotting everything from his mind, he ordered his brain to provide him with a picture of the landscape before him. The rather interesting kender logic behind this being that since it was likely that some kender in Tasslehoff’s family had undoubtedly been to this place before, the memory was somehow passed on to his or her descendants. While this was never scientifically verified (the gnomes are working on it, having referred it to committee), it certainly is true that—to this day—no kender has ever been reported lost on Krynn.

  At any rate, Tas, standing shin-deep in mud, closed his eyes and tried to conjure up a picture of his surroundings. One came to him, so vivid in its clarity that he was rather startled—certainly his ancestors’ mental maps had never been so perfect. There were trees—giant trees—there were mountains on the horizon, there was a lake.…

  Opening his eyes, Tas gasped. There was a lake! He hadn’t noticed it before, probably because it was the same gray, sludge color as the ash-covered ground. Was there water there, still? Or was it filled with mud?

  I wonder, Tas mused, if Uncle Trapspringer ever visited a moon. If so, that would account for the fact that I recognize this place. But surely he would have told someone.… Perhaps he would have if the goblins hadn’t eaten him before he had the chance. Speaking of food, that reminds me …

  “Caramon,” Tas shouted over the rising wind and the boom of the thunder. “Did you bring along any water? I didn’t. Nor any food, either. I didn’t suppose we’d need any, what with going back home and all. But—”

  Tas suddenly saw something that drove thoughts of food and water and Uncle Trapspringer from his mind.

  “Oh, Caramon!” Tas clutched at the big warrior, pointing. “Look, do you suppose that’s the sun?”

  “What else would it be?” Caramon snapped gruffly, his gaze on a watery, greenish-yellow disk that had appeared through a rift in the storm clouds. “And, no, I didn’t bring any water. So just keep quiet about it, huh?”

  “Well, you needn’t be ru—” Tas began. Then he saw Caramon’s face and quickly hushed.

  They had come to a halt, slipping in the mud, halfway down the trail. The hot wind blew about them, sending Tas’s topknot streaming out from his head like a banner and whipping Caramon’s cloak out. The big warrior was staring at the lake—the same lake Tas had noticed. Caramon’s face was pale, his eyes troubled. After a moment, he began walking again, trudging grimly down the trail. With a sigh, Tas squished along after him. He had reached a decision.

  “Caramon,” he said, “let’s get out of here. Let’s leave this place. Even if it is a moon like Uncle Trapspringer must have visited before the goblins ate him, it isn’t much fun. The moon, I mean, not being eaten by goblins which I suppose wouldn’t be much fun either, come to think of it. To tell you the truth, this moon’s just about as boring as the Abyss and it certainly smells as bad. Besides, there I wasn’t thirsty.… Not that I’m thirsty now,” he added hastily, remembering too late that he wasn’t supposed to talk about it, “but my tongue’s sort of dried out, if you know what I mean, which makes it hard to talk. We’ve got the magical device.” He held the jewel-encrusted sceptre-shaped object up in his hand, just in case Caramon had forgotten in the last half-hour what it looked like. “And I promise … I solemnly vow … that I’ll think of Solace with all my brain this time, Caramon. I—Caramon?”

  “Hush, Tas,” Caramon said.

  They had reached the valley floor, where the mud was ankle-deep on Caramon, which made it about shin-deep on Tas. Caramon had begun to limp again from when he’d fallen and wrenched his knee back in the magical fortress of Zhaman. Now, in addition to worry, there was a look of pain on his face.

  There was another look, too. A look that made Tas feel all prickly inside—a look of true fear. Tas, startled, glanced about quickly, wondering what Caramon saw. It seemed pretty much the same at the bottom as it had at the top, he thought—gray and yucky and horrible. Nothing had changed, except that it was growing darker. The storm clouds had obliterated the sun again, rather to Tas’s relief, since it was an unwholesome-looking sun that made the bleak, gray landscape appear worse than ever. The rain was falling harder as the storm clouds drew nearer. Other than that, there certainly didn’t appear to be anything frightening.

  The kender tried his best to keep silent, but the words just sort of leaped out of his mouth before he could stop them.

  “What’s the matter, Caramon? I don’t see anything. Is your knee bothering you? I—”

  “Be quiet, Tas!” Caramon ordered in a strained, tight voice. He was staring around him, his eyes wide, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously.

  Tas sighed and clapped his hand over his mouth to bottle up the words, determined to keep quiet if it killed him. When he was quiet, it suddenly occurred to him that it was so very quiet around here. There was no sound at all when the thunder wasn’t thundering, not even the usual sounds he was used to hearing when it rained—water dripping from tree leaves and plopping onto the ground, the wind rustling in the branches, birds singing their rain songs, complaining about their wet feathers.…

  Tas had a strange, quaking feeling inside. He looked at the stumps of the burned trees more closely. Even burned, they were huge, easily the largest trees he had ever seen in his life except for—

  Tas gulped. Leaves, autumn colors, the smoke of cooking fires curling up from the valley, the lake—blue and smooth as crystal …

  Blinking, he rubbed his eyes to clear them of the gummy film of mud and rain. He stared around him, looking back up at the trail, at that huge boulder.… He stared at the lake that he could see quite clearly through the burned tree stumps. He stared at the mountains with their sharp, jagged peaks. It wasn’t Uncle Trapspringer who’d been here before.… “Oh, Caramon!” he whispered in horror.

  CHAPTER

  2

  hat is it?” Caramon turned, looking at Tas so strangely that the kender felt his inside prickly feeling spread to his outside. Little bumps appeared all up and down his arms.

  “N-nothing,” Tas stammered. “Just my imagination. Caramon,” he added urgently, “let’s leave! Right now. We can go anywhere we want to! We can go back in time to when we were all together, to when we were all happy! We can go back to when Flint and Sturm were alive, to when Raistlin still wore the red robes and Tika—”

  “Shut up, Tas,” snapped Caramon warningly, his words accented by a flash of lightning that made even the kender flinch.

  The wind was rising, whistling through the dead tree stumps with an eerie sound, like someone drawing a shivering breath through clenched teeth. The warm, slimy rain had ceased. The clouds above them swirled past, revealing the pale sun shimmering in the gray sky. But on the horizon, the clouds continued to mass, continued to grow blacker and blacker.

  Multicolored lightning flickered among them, giving them a distant, deadly beauty.

  Caramon started walking along the muddy trail, gritting his teeth against the pain of his injured leg. But Tas, looking down that trail that he now knew so well—even though it was appallingly different—could see to where it rounded a bend. Knowing what lay beyond that bend, he stood where he was, planted firmly in the middle of the road, staring at Caramon’s back.

  After a few moments of unusual silence, Caramon realized something was wrong and glanced around. He stopped, his face drawn with pain and fatigue.

  “C’mon, Tas!” he said irritably.

  Twisting his topknot of hair around his finger, Tas shook his head.

  Caramon gla
red at him.

  Tas finally burst out, “Those are vallenwood trees, Caramon!”

  The big man’s stern expression softened. “I know, Tas,” he said wearily. “This is Solace.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Tas cried. “It—it’s just some place that has vallenwoods! There must be lots of places that have vallenwoods—”

  “And are there lots of places that have Crystalmir Lake, Tas, or the Kharolis Mountains or that boulder up where you and I’ve both seen Flint sitting, carving his wood, or this road that leads to the—”

  “You don’t know!” Tas yelled angrily. “It’s possible!” Suddenly, he ran forward, or he tried to run forward, dragging his feet through the oozing, clinging mud as fast as possible. Stumbling into Caramon, he grabbed the big man’s hand and tugged on it. “Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” Once again, he held up the time-traveling device. “We—we can go back to Tarsis! Where the dragons toppled a building down on top of me! That was a fun time, very interesting. Remember?” His shrill voice screeched through the burned-out trees.

  Reaching out, his face grim, Caramon grabbed the magical device from the kender’s hand. Ignoring Tas’s frantic protests, he took the device and began twisting and turning the jewels, gradually transforming it from a sparkling sceptre into a plain, nondescript pendant. Tas watched him miserably.

  “Why won’t we go, Caramon? This place is horrible. We don’t have any food or water and, from what I’ve seen, there’s not much likelihood of us finding either. Plus, we’re liable to get blasted right out of our shoes if one of those lightning bolts hits us, and that storm’s getting closer and closer and you know this isn’t Solace—”

  “I don’t know, Tas,” Caramon said quietly. “But I’m going to find out. What’s the matter? Aren’t you curious? Since when did a kender ever turn down the chance for an adventure?” He began to limp down the trail again.

  “I’m just as curious as the next kender,” Tas mumbled, hanging his head and trudging along after Caramon. “But it’s one thing to be curious about some place you’ve never been before, and quite another to be curious about home. You’re not supposed to be curious about home! Home isn’t supposed to change. It just stays there, waiting for you to come back. Home is someplace you say ‘My, this looks just like it did when I left!’ not ‘My, this looks like six million dragons flew in and wrecked the joint!’ Home is not a place for adventures, Caramon!”

  Tas peered up into Caramon’s face to see if his argument had made any impression. If it had, it didn’t show. There was a look of stern resolution on the pain-filled face that rather surprised Tas, surprised and startled him as well.

  Caramon’s changed, Tas realized suddenly. And it isn’t just from giving up dwarf spirits. There’s something different about him—he’s more serious and … well, responsible-looking, I guess. But there’s something else. Tas pondered. Pride, he decided after a minute of profound reflection. Pride in himself, pride and determination.

  This isn’t a Caramon who will give in easily, Tas thought with a sinking heart. This isn’t a Caramon who needs a kender to keep him out of mischief and taverns. Tas sighed bleakly. He rather missed that old Caramon.

  They came to the bend in the road. Each recognized it, though neither said anything—Caramon, because there wasn’t anything to be said, and Tas, because he was steadfastly refusing to admit he recognized it. But both found their footsteps dragging.

  Once, travelers coming around that bend would have seen the Inn of the Last Home, gleaming with light. They would have smelled Otik’s spiced potatoes, heard the sounds of laughter and song drift from the door every time it opened to admit the wanderer or regular from Solace. Both Caramon and Tas stopped, by unspoken agreement, before they rounded that corner.

  Still they said nothing, but each looked around him at the desolation, at the burned and blasted tree stumps, at the ash-covered ground, at the blackened rocks. In their ears rang a silence louder and more frightening than the booming thunder. Because both knew that they should have heard Solace, even if they couldn’t see it yet. They should have heard the sounds of the town—the sounds of the smithy, the sounds of market day, the sounds of hawkers and children and merchants, the sounds of the Inn.

  But there was nothing, only silence. And, far off in the distance, the ominous rumble of thunder.

  Finally, Caramon sighed. “Let’s go,” he said, and hobbled forward.

  Tas followed more slowly, his shoes so caked with mud that he felt as if he were wearing iron-shod dwarf boots. But his shoes weren’t nearly as heavy as his heart. Over and over he muttered to himself, “This isn’t Solace, this isn’t Solace, this isn’t Solace,” until it began to sound like one of Raistlin’s magical incantations.

  Rounding the bend, Tas fearfully raised his eyes—

  —and heaved a vast sigh of relief.

  “What did I tell you, Caramon?” he cried over the wailing of the wind. “Look, nothing there, nothing there at all. No Inn, no town, nothing.” He slipped his small hand into Caramon’s large one and tried to pull him backward. “Now, let’s go. I’ve got an idea. We can go back to the time when Fizban made the golden span come out of the sky—”

  But Caramon, shaking off the kender, was limping ahead, his face grim. Coming to a halt, he stared down at the ground. “What’s this then, Tas?” he demanded in a voice taut with fear.

  Chewing nervously on the end of his topknot, the kender came up to stand beside Caramon. “What’s what?” he asked stubbornly.

  Caramon pointed.

  Tas sniffed. “So, it’s a big cleared-off space on the ground. All right, maybe something was there. Maybe a big building was there. But it isn’t there now, so why worry about it? I-Oh, Caramon!”

  The big man’s injured knee suddenly gave way. He staggered, and would have fallen if Tas hadn’t propped him up. With Tas’s help, Caramon made his way over to the stump of what had been an unusually large vallenwood, on the edge of the empty patch of mud-covered ground. Leaning against it, his face pale with pain and dripping with sweat, Caramon rubbed his injured knee.

  “What can I do to help?” Tas asked anxiously, wringing his hands. “I know! I’ll find you a crutch! There must be lots of broken branches lying about. I’ll go look.”

  Caramon said nothing, only nodded wearily.

  Tas dashed off, his sharp eyes scouring the gray, slimy ground, rather glad to have something to do and not to have to answer questions about stupid cleared-off spaces. He soon found what he was looking for—the end of a tree branch sticking up through the mud. Catching hold of it, the kender gave it a yank. His hands slipped off the wet branch, sending him toppling over backward. Getting up, staring ruefully at the gunk on his blue leggings, the kender tried unsuccessfully to wipe it off. Then he sighed and grimly took hold of the branch again. This time, he felt it give a little.

  “I’ve almost got it, Caramon!” he reported. “I—”

  A most unkenderlike shriek rose above the screaming wind. Caramon looked up in alarm to see Tas’s topknot disappearing into a vast sink hole that had apparently opened up beneath his feet.

  “I’m coming, Tas!” Caramon called, stumbling forward. “Hang on!”

  But he halted at the sight of Tas crawling back out of the hole. The kender’s face was like nothing Caramon had ever seen. It was ashen, the lips white, the eyes wide and staring.

  “Don’t come any closer, Caramon,” Tas whispered, gesturing him away with a small, muddy hand. “Please, stay back!”

  But it was too late. Caramon had reached the edge of the hole and was staring down. Tas, crouched beside him on the ground, began to shake and sob. “They’re all dead,” he whimpered. “All dead.” Burying his face in his arms, he rocked back and forth, weeping bitterly.

  At the bottom of the rock-lined hole that had been covered by a thick layer of mud lay bodies, piles of bodies, bodies of men, women, children. Preserved by the mud, some were still pitifully recognizable—or so it seemed to Caramo
n’s feverish gaze. His thoughts went to the last mass grave he had seen—the plague village Crysania had found. He remembered his brother’s angry, grief-stricken face. He remembered Raistlin calling down the lightning, burning everything, burning the village to ash.

  Gritting his teeth, Caramon forced himself to look into that grave—forced himself to look for a mass of red curls.…

  He turned away with a shuddering sob of relief, then, looking around wildly, he began to run back toward the Inn. “Tika!” he screamed.

  Tas raised his head, springing up in alarm. “Caramon!” he cried, slipped in the mud, and fell.

  “Tika!” Caramon yelled hoarsely above the howl of the wind and the distant thunder. Apparently oblivious to the pain of his injured leg, he staggered down a wide, clear area, free of tree stumps—the road leading past the Inn, Tas’s mind registered, though he didn’t think it clearly. Getting to his feet again, the kender hurried after Caramon, but the big man was making rapid headway, staggering through the mud, his fear and hope giving him strength.

  Tas soon lost sight of him amid the blackened stumps, but he could hear his voice, still calling Tika’s name. Now Tas knew where the big man was headed. His footsteps slowed. His head ached with the heat and the foul smells of the place, his heart ached with what he had just seen. Dragging his heavy, mud-caked shoes, fearful of what he would find ahead, the kender stumbled on.

  Sure enough, there was Caramon, standing in a barren space next to another vallenwood stump. In his hand, he held something, staring at it with the look of one who is, at last, defeated.

  Mud-covered, bedraggled, heartsick, the kender went to stand before him. “What?” he asked through trembling lips, pointing to the object in the big man’s hand.

  “A hammer,” Caramon said in a choked voice. “My hammer.”

  Tas looked at it. It was a hammer, all right. Or at least appeared to have been one. The wooden handle had been burned about three-fourths of the way off. All that was left was a charred bit of wood and the metal head, blackened with flame.