He recalled very well when he had heard the news that Dalamar had destroyed the Tower, rather than permit the great blue dragon Khellendros to seize control of it. The citizens of Palanthas woke to a thundering blast that shook houses, cracked streets, broke windows. At first, the people thought they were under attack by dragons, but after that initial shock, nothing further happened.
The next morning, they were awestruck and astonished and generally pleased to find that the Tower of High Sorcery—long considered an eyesore and a haven of evil—had disappeared. In its place was a reflecting pool where, if one looked, it was said one could see the Tower in the dark waters. Thus many began to circulate rumors that the Tower had imploded and sunk into the ground. Palin had never believed those rumors, nor, as he had discussed with his longtime friend and fellow mage Jenna, did he believe Dalamar was dead or the Tower destroyed.
Jenna had agreed with him, and if anyone would know it would be she, for she had been Dalamar’s lover for many years and was the last to see him prior to his departure more than thirty years ago.
“Perhaps not so long ago as that,” Palin muttered to himself, staring in frustration and simmering anger out the window. “Dalamar knew exactly where to find us. Knew where to lay his hands on us. Only one person could have told him. Only one person knew: Jenna.”
He probably should be glad the powerful wizard had rescued them. Otherwise he and Tasslehoff would be sitting in the dragon Beryl’s prison cell under far less propitious circumstances. Palin’s feelings of gratitude toward Dalamar had effectively evaporated by now. Once he might have shaken Dalamar’s hand. Now, he wanted only to wring the elf’s neck. The Tower’s relocation from Palanthas to wherever it was now—Palin hadn’t the vaguest idea, he could see nothing but trees around it—had brought about other changes. Palin saw several large cracks in the walls, cracks that might have alarmed him for his own safety had he not been fairly certain (or at least hoped) that Dalamar had shored up the walls with magic. The spiral staircase had always been treacherous to walk, but now was doubly so, due to the fact that some of the stairs had not survived the move. Tasslehoff climbed nimbly up and down the stairs like a squirrel, but Palin held his breath every time.
Tasslehoff—who had explored every inch of the Tower during the first hour of his arrival—reported that the entrance to one of the minarets was completely blocked off by a caved-in wall and that the other minaret was missing half the roof. The fearful Shoikan Grove that had once so effectively guarded the Tower had been left behind in Palanthas, where it stood now as a sad curiosity. The Tower was surrounded by a new grove
—a grove of immense cypress trees.
Having lived among the vallenwoods all his life, Palin was accustomed to gigantic trees, but he was impressed by the cypresses. Most of the trees stood far taller than the Tower, which was dwarfed by comparison. The cypresses held their enormous green-clothed arms protectively over the Tower, shielding it from the view of roaming dragons, particularly Beryl, who would have given her fangs and her claws and her green scaly tail thrown into the bargain for knowledge of the whereabouts of the Tower that had once reigned so proudly in Palanthas.
Peering out of one of the few upper-story windows still in existence in the Tower—many others that he had remembered had been sealed up—
Palin looked out upon a thick forest of cypress that rolled in undulating waves of green to the horizon. No matter what direction he looked, he saw only those spreading green boughs, an ocean of limbs and branches, leaves and shadow. No path cut through these boughs, not even an animal path, for the forest was eerily quiet. No bird sang, no squirrel scolded, no owl hooted, no dove mourned. Nothing living roamed the forest. The Tower was not a ship bobbing upon this ocean. It was submerged in the depths, lost to the sight and knowledge of those who lived in the world beyond. The forest was the province of the dead.
One of the remaining windows was located at the very bottom of the Tower, a few feet from the massive oaken door. The window looked out upon the forest floor, a floor that was thick with shadow, for sunlight very rarely managed to penetrate through the leaves that formed a canopy above.
Amid the shadows, the souls roamed. The aspect was not a pleasant one. Yet Palin found himself fascinated, and often he would stand here, shivering in the cold, his arms folded for warmth in the sleeves of his robes, gazing out upon the restless, ever—amoving, ever-shifting congregation of the dead.
He would watch until he could stand it no more, then he would turn away, his own soul riven with pity and horror, only to be drawn back again.
The dead could not enter the Tower seemingly. Palin did not sense them near him as he had felt them in the citadel. He did not feel that strange tickling sensation when he used his magic to cast spells, a sensation he had set down as gnats or bits of cobweb or a straggling strand of hair or any of a hundred other ordinary occurrences. Now he knew that what he had felt had been the hands of the dead, stealing the magic from him.
Locked up in the Tower alone with Tasslehoff, Palin guessed that it was Dalamar who had been giving the dead their orders. Dalamar had been usurping the magic. Why? What was he doing with it? Certainly, Palin thought sardonically, Dalamar was not using the magic to redecorate.
Palin might have asked him, but he could not find Dalamar. Nor could Tasslehoff, who had been recruited to help in the search. Admittedly, there were many doors in the Tower that were magically locked to both Palin and the kender—especially the kender.
Tasslehoff put his ear to these doors, but not even the kender with his sharp hearing had been able to detect any sounds coming from behind any of them, including one that led to what Palin remembered were Dalamar’s private chambers.
Palin had knocked at this door, knocked and shouted, but he had received no answer. Either Dalamar was deliberately ignoring him, or he was not there. Palin had first thought the former and was angry. Now he was starting to think the latter, and he was uneasy. The notion came to his mind that he and Tas had been brought here, then abandoned, to live out their days as prisoners in this Tower, surrounded and guarded by the dead.
“No,” Palin amended, talking softly to himself as he stared out the window on the lower floor, “the dead are not guards. They, too, are prisoners.”
The souls clogged the shadows beneath the trees, unable to find rest, unable to find peace, wandering in aimless, constant motion. Palin could not comprehend the numbers—thousands, thousands of thousands, and thousands more beyond that. He saw no one he recognized. At first, he had hoped to find his father again, hoped that Caramon could give him some answers to the myriad questions teeming in his son’s fevered mind. Palin soon came to realize that his search for one soul among the countless many was as hopeless as searching for a single grain of sand on a beach. If Caramon had been free to come to Palin, his father would surely have done so.
Palin recalled vividly now the vision he had seen of his father in the Citadel of Light. In that vision, Caramon had fought his way to his son through a mass of dead pressing around Palin. Caramon had been trying to tell his son something, but before he could make himself understood, he had been seized by some unseen force and dragged away.