Tasslehoff was understandably annoyed to hear himself referred to as a liar. He considered dropping down and giving Dalamar and Palin both a piece of his mind but reflected that, if he did so, it would be difficult to explain why exactly he’d gone up the chimney in the first place. He kept quiet.
“It would help if I knew what I was looking for.”
“A scroll! I suppose you know a scroll when you see one.”
“Just find the damn thing!” Tasslehoff muttered. He was growing quite weary of hanging onto the wall. His hands were starting to ache, and his legs to quiver, and he feared he wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer.
“I know what a scroll looks like, but—” A pause. “Speaking of Tasslehoff, where is he? Do you know?”
“I neither know nor care.”
“When we left, he was asleep in the chair.”
“Then he’s probably gone to bed, or he’s attempting to pick the lock of the door to the laboratory again.”
“Still, don’t you think we should—”
“Found it! This is it!” The sound of paper being unrolled. “A Treatise on Time Journeying Dealing Specifically with the Unacceptability of Permitting Any Member of the Graygem Races to Journey Back in Time Due to the Unpredictability of Their Actions and How This Might Affect Not Only the Past but the Future.”
“Who’s the author?”
“Marwort.”
“Marwort! Who termed himself Marwort the Illustrious? The Kingpriest’s pet wizard? Everyone knows that when he wrote about the magic, the Kingpriest guided his hand. Of what use is this? You can’t believe a word that traitor says.”
“So the history of our Order has recorded, and therefore no one studies him. But I have often found what he has to say interesting—if one reads between the lines. For example, notice this paragraph. The third one down.”
Tasslehoff’s stiff fingers began to slip. He gulped and readjusted his hold on the stones and wished Palin and Dalamar and Marwort gone with all his heart and soul.
“I can’t read by this light,” Palin said. “My eyes are not what they used to be. And the fire has gone out.”
“I could light the fire again,” Dalamar offered.
Tasslehoff nearly lost his grip on the stones.
“No,” said Palin. “I find this room depressing. Let us take it back where we can be comfortable.”
They doused the light, leaving Tas in darkness. He heaved a sigh of relief. When he heard the door close, he began his climb once again. He was not a young, agile kender anymore, and he soon found that climbing chimneys in the dark was wearing work. Fortunately, he had reached a point in the chimney where the walls started to narrow, so that at least he could lean his back against one wall while keeping himself from slipping by planting his feet firmly against the wall opposite. He was hot and tired. He had grime in his eyes and soot up his nose and his mouth. His legs were scraped, his fingers rubbed raw, his clothes ripped and torn. He was bored of being in the dark, bored of the stones, bored of the whole business—and he didn’t appear to be any closer to the way out than when he’d started.
“I really don’t see why it is necessary to have this much chimney,”
Tasslehoff muttered, cursing the Tower’s builder with every grimy foothold.
Just when he thought that his hands were going to refuse to clamp down on another stone and that his legs were going to drop off and fall to the bottom, something filled his nose, and for a change it wasn’t soot.
“Fresh air!” Tasslehoff breathed deeply, and his spirits revived. The whiff of fresh air wafting down from above lent strength to Tasslehoff’s legs and banished the aches from his fingers. Peering upward in hope of seeing stars or maybe the sun—for he had the notion that he’d been climbing for the past six months or so— he was disappointed to see only more darkness. He’d had darkness enough to last a lifetime, maybe even two lifetimes. However, the air was fresh, and that meant outside air, so he clambered upward with renewed vigor.
At length, as all things must do, good or otherwise, the chimney came to an end.
The opening was covered with an iron grate to keep birds and squirrels and other undesirables from nesting in the chimney shaft. After what Tasslehoff had already been through, an iron grate was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. He gave it an experimental shove, not expecting anything to come of it. Luck was with him, however. The bolts holding the grate in place had long since rusted away—probably sometime prior to the First Cataclysm—and at the kender’s enthusiastic push the gate popped off.
Tasslehoff was unprepared for its sudden departure. He made a desperate grab but missed, and the grate went sailing into the air. The kender froze again, squinched shut his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and waited for the grate to strike the ground at the bottom with what would undoubtedly be a clang loud enough to wake any of the dead who happened to be snoozing at the moment.
He waited and waited and kept on waiting. Considering the amount of chimney he’d had to climb, he supposed it must be a couple of hundred miles to the bottom of the Tower, but, after awhile, even he was forced to admit that if the grate had been going to clang it would have done so by now. He poked his head up out of the hole and was immediately struck in the face by the end of a tree branch, while the sharp pungent smell of cypress cleaned the soot from his nostrils.
He shoved aside the tree branch and looked around to get his bearings. The strange and unfamiliar moon of this strange and unfamiliar Krynn was very bright this night, and Tasslehoff was at last able to see something, although that something was only more tree branches. Tree branches to the left of him, tree branches to the right. Tree branches up, and tree branches down. Tree branches as far as the eye could see. He looked over the edge of the chimney and found the grate, perched in a branch about six feet below him.
Tasslehoff tried to determine how far he was from the ground, but the branches were in the way. He looked to the side and located the top of one of the Tower’s two broken minarets. The top was about level with him. That gave him some idea of how far he had climbed and, more importantly, how far the ground was below.
That was not a problem, however, for here were all these handy trees. Tasslehoff pulled himself out of the chimney. Finding a sturdy limb, he crawled carefully out on it, testing his weight as he went. The limb was strong and didn’t so much as creak. After chimney climbing, tree climbing was simple. Tasslehoff shinnied down the trunk, lowered himself from limb to friendly and supportive limb, and finally, as he gave a sigh of exultation and relief, his feet touched firm and solid ground. Down here, the moonlight was not very bright, hardly filtering through the thick leaves at all. Tas could make out the Tower but only because it was a black, hulking blot amongst the trees. He could see, very far up, a patch of light and figured that must be the window in Dalamar’s private chamber.
“I’ve made it this far, but I’m not out of the woods yet,” he said to himself. “Dalamar told Palin we were near Solanthus. I recall someone saying something about the Solamnic Knights having a headquarters at Solanthus, so that seems like a good place to go to find out what’s become of Gerard. He may be dull, and he certainly is ugly, and he doesn’t like kender, but he is a Solamnic Knight, and one thing you can say about Solamnic Knights is that they aren’t the type to send a fellow back in time to be stepped on. I’ll find Gerard and explain everything to him, and I’m sure he’ll be on my side.”
Tasslehoff remembered suddenly that the last time he’d seen Gerard, the Knight had been surrounded by Dark Knights firing arrows at him. Tas was rather downhearted at this thought, but then it occurred to him that Solamnic Knights were plentiful and if one was dead, you could always find another.