Arriving at the door, Mina turned around. Her gaze passed over Dalamar, another insect in her display case, and fixed on Palin. In vain he told himself she could not see him. She caught him, held him.
“You believe the artifact was lost in the Citadel of Light. It was not. It came back to the kender. He has it in his possession. That is why he ran away.”
Palin doused the magical light. In the darkness, he could see nothing but those amber eyes, hear nothing but her voice. He remained there so long that Dalamar came searching for him. The elf’s footsteps were soft upon the stone stairs, and Palin did not hear him until he sensed movement. He looked up in alarm, found Dalamar standing in front of him.
“What are you still doing here? Are you all right? I thought for certain something had happened to you,” Dalamar said, irritated.
“Something did happen to me,” Palin returned. “She happened to me. She saw me. She looked straight at me. The last words she spoke were to me!”
“Impossible,” Dalamar said. “No eyes, not even amber eyes, can see through solid stone and magic.”
Palin shook his head, unconvinced. “She spoke to me.”
He expected a sarcastic rejoinder from Dalamar, but the dark elf was in no mood to banter, apparently, for he climbed the stairs leading back to the laboratory in silence.
“I know that girl, Dalamar,” Palin said.
Dalamar halted on the staircase, turned to stare. “How?”
“I haven’t seen her in a long time. Not since she ran away. She was an orphan. A fisherman found her washed upon the shore of Sancrist Isle. He brought her to the Citadel of Light, to the orphans’ home. She became a favorite of Goldmoon’s, almost a daughter to her. Three years ago she ran away. She was fourteen. Goldmoon was devastated. Mina had a good home. She was loved, pampered. She seemed happy, except I never knew a child to ask so many questions. None of us could understand why she ran off. And now . . . a Dark Knight. Goldmoon will be heartbroken.”
“That is very odd,” Dalamar said thoughtfully, and they resumed their climb. “So she was raised by Goldmoon. . . .”
“Do you suppose what she said about Tas and the device was true?”
Palin asked, as they emerged from the hidden stairwell.
“Of course, it was true,” Dalamar replied. He walked over to the window, stared down into the cypress trees below. “That explains why the kender ran away. He feared we would find it.”
“We would have, if we had bothered to think through this rationally, instead of haring off in a panic. What ninnies we are! The device will always return to the one who owns it. Even in pieces, it will always return.”
Palin was frustrated. He felt the urgent need to do something, yet there was nothing he could do.
“You could search for him, Dalamar. Your spirit can walk this world, at least—”
“And do what?” Dalamar demanded. “If I did find him— which would be a miracle to surpass all miracles—I could do nothing except frighten him into burrowing deeper into whatever hole he’s dug.”
Dalamar had been staring out the window. He stiffened. His body went rigid.
“What is it?” Palin asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
Dalamar made no answer, except to point out the window.
Mina walked through the forest, trod upon the brown pine needles. The dead gathered around her. The dead bowed to her.
22
Reunion of Old Friends
A kender is never out of sorts for long, not even after encountering his own ghost. True, the sight had been a considerable shock, and Tasslehoff still experienced unpleasant qualms whenever he thought about it, but he knew how to handle a qualm. You held your breath and drank five sips of water, and the qualm would go away. This done, his next decision was that he had to leave this terrible place where ghosts went around giving one qualms. He had to leave it, leave it fast, and never, never come back. Moss and his father proved to be of little help, since as far as Tas could see, moss had the bad habit of growing on all sides of rocks and trees, with apparently no regard for the fact that someone might be trying to use it to find north. Tasslehoff decided to turn instead to the time-honored techniques that have been developed by kender over centuries of Wanderlust, techniques guaranteed to find one’s self after losing one’s self. The best known and most favored of these involves the use of the body compass.
The theory behind the body compass is as follows. It is well-known that the body is made up of various elements, among these being iron. The reason that we know the body has iron in it is because we can taste the iron in our blood. Therefore, it stands to reason that the iron in our blood will be drawn to the north, just as the iron needle on the compass is drawn to the north. (Kender go so far to state that we would, all of us, be congregated at the north end of the world if we let our blood have its way. We fight a constant battle with our blood, otherwise we would all collect at the top of the world, thereby causing it to tip over.)
In order to make the body compass work, you must shut your eyes, so as not to confuse things, extend the right arm with the index finger pointing, then spin around three times to the left. When you stop, open your eyes, and you will discover that you are facing north. Kender who use this technique almost never arrive at where they’re going, but they will tell you that they always arrive at where they need to be. Thus it was that Tasslehoff wandered about in the forests of Nightlund for a good many hours (he was not lost), without finding either Solanthus or the way out, and he was just about to try the body compass one last time when he heard voices, real, live voices, not the tickling whispers of the poor souls.
Tasslehoff’s natural instinct was to introduce himself to the voices, who were perhaps lost, and offer to show them which way was north. However, at this juncture, he heard yet another voice. This voice was inside his head and belonged to Tanis Half-Elven. Tasslehoff often heard Tanis’s voice on occasions such as this, reminding him to stop and think if what he was doing was “conducive to self-preservation.” Sometimes Tas listened to Tanis’s voice in his head, and sometimes he did not, which was pretty much how their relationship had worked when Tanis had been alive. This time, Tasslehoff recalled that he was running away from Dalamar and Palin, both of whom wanted to murder him, and that they might either be out hunting for him themselves or they might have sent out minions. Wizards, Tas recalled, were forever sending out minions. Tas wasn’t sure what a minion was—he thought it some sort of small fish—but he decided that it would be conducive to his self-preservation if he climbed a tree and hid in the branches.
Tasslehoff climbed nimbly and swiftly and was soon settled comfortably high up amidst the pine needles. The three voices, with bodies attached, walked right underneath him.
Seeing that they were Knights of Takhisis or Neraka or whatever it was they were calling themselves these days, Tas congratulated himself on having listened to Tanis. An entire army, Knights and foot soldiers, marched beneath Tas’s tree. They marched swiftly and did not appear to be in very good spirits. Some darted nervous glances left and right, as if searching for something, while others traveled with eyes facing forward, fearful that if they looked they might find it. There was little talking in the ranks. If they did speak, they kept their voices low. The tail end of the line of soldiers was just moving underneath Tasslehoff’s tree, and he was just congratulating himself on having successfully avoided detection when the front of the line came to a halt, which meant the back of the line had to come to a halt, too.
The soldiers stopped, standing beneath Tas. They breathed heavily and looked tired to the point of dropping, but when the word came down the line that there was to be a fifteen-minute rest, none of them looked happy. A few squatted down on the ground, but they did not leave the trail, they did not throw off their packs.