“He is ill. Should we do something?” Gerard asked uneasily.
“No, Sir Knight. Leave him be,” Laurana admonished gently.
“There is nothing we can do for him. There is nothing we should do formm. This is necessary to him. Though he suffers now, he will be better for this release.”
“I’m sorry, Palin,” Tasslehoff cried remorsefully. “I didn’t think it would hurt you. Honestly, I didn’t! It never hurt me.”
“Of course it would not hurt you, wretched kender!” Palin returned, the pain a living thing inside him, twisting and coiling around his heart so that it fluttered in his chest like a frantic bird caught by the snake. “To you it is nothing but a pretty toy! To me it is an opiate that brings blissful, wondrous dreams.” His voice cracked. “Until the effect wears off. The dreams end and I must wake again to drudgery and despair, wake to the bitter, mundane reality.”
He clenched his hand over the device, quenched the light of its jewels. “Once,” he said, his voice tight, “I might have crafted a marvelous and powerful artifact such as this. Once I might have been what you claim I was—Head of the Order of White Robes. Once I might have had the future my uncle foresaw for me. Once I might have been a wizard, gifted, puissant, powerful. I look at this device and that is what I see. But I look into a mirror and I see something far different.”
He opened his hand. He could not see the device for his bitter tears. He could see only the light of its magic, glinting and winking, mocking. “My magic dwindles, my powers grow weaker I, every day. Without the magic, there is one hope left for us—to hope that death is better than this dismal life!”
“Palin, you must not speak like that!” Laurana said sternly.
“So we thought in the dark days before the War of the Lance. I remember Raistlin saying something to the effect that hope was the carrot dangled before the nose of the cart horse to fool him into plodding forward. Yet we did plod forward and, in the end, we were rewarded.”
“We were,” said Tas. “I ate the carrot.”
“We were rewarded all right,” Palin said, sneering. “With this wretched world in which we find ourselves!”
The artifact was painful to his touch—indeed, he had clutched so tightly that the sharp-edged jewels had cut him. But still he held it fast, caressing it covetously. The pain was so much preferable to the feeling of numbness.
Gerard cleared his throat, looked embarrassed.
“I take it, sir, that I was right,” he said diffidently. “This is a powerful artifact of the Fourth Age?”
“It is,” Palin answered.
They waited for him to say more, but he refused to indulge them. He wanted them to leave. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to sort out his thoughts that were running hither and yon like rats in a cave when someone lights a torch. Scuttling down dark holes, crawling into crevices and some staring with glittering, fascinated eyes at the blazing fire. He had to endure them, their foolishness, their inane questions. He had to hear the rest of Tasslehoff’s tale.
“Tell me what happened, Tas,” Palin said. “None of your woolly mammoth stories. This is very important.”
“I understand,” Tas said, impressed. “I’ll tell the truth. I promise. It all started one day when I was attending the funeral of an extremely good kender friend I’d met the day before. She’d had an unfortunate encounter with a bugbear. What happened was. . . er . . .”—Tas caught sight of Palin’s brows constricting—“never mind, as the gnomes say. I’ll tell you that story later. Anyhow during her funeral, it occurred to me that very few kender ever live long enough to be what you might call old. I’ve already lived a lot longer than most kender I know and I suddenly realized that Caramon was likely to live a lot longer than I was. The one thing I really, really wanted to do before I was dead was to tell everyone what a good friend Caramon had been to me. It seemed to me that the best time to do this would be at his funeral. But if Caramon outlived me, then me going to his funeral would be something of a problem.
“Anyway, I was talking to Fizban one day and I explained this and he said that he thought what I wanted to do was a fine and noble thing and he could fix it up. I could speak at Caramon’s funeral by traveling to the time when the funeral was taking place. And he gave me this device and told me how it worked and gave me strict instructions to just jump ahead, talk at the funeral, and come straight back. ‘No gallivanting,’ he said. By the way,” Tas asked anxiously, “you don’t think he’d consider this trip ‘gallivanting,’ do you? Because I’m finding that I really am enjoying seeing all my friends again. It’s much more fun than being stepped on by a giant.”
“Go on with the story, Tas,” Palin said tersely. “We’ll discuss that later.”
“Yes, right. So I used the device and I jumped forward in time, but, well, you know that Fizban gets things a bit muddled now and then. He’s always forgetting his name or where his hat is when it’s right on his head or forgetting how to cast a fireball spell and so I guess he just miscalculated. Because when I jumped forward in time the first time, Caramon’s funeral was over. I’d missed it. I arrived just in time for refreshments. And while I did have a nice visit visiting with everyone and the cream cheese puffs Jenna made were truly scrumptious, I wasn’t able to do what I’d meant to do all along. Remembering that I’d promised Fizban no gallivanting, I went back.
“And, to be honest”—Tas hung his head and shuffled his foot—“after that, I forgot all about speaking at Caramon’s funeral. I had a really good reason. The Chaos war came and we were fighting shadow wights and I met Dougan and Usha, your wife, you know, Palin. It was all immensely interesting and exciting. And now the world is about to come to an end and there’s this horrible giant about to smash me flat and it was at that precise moment that I remembered that I hadn’t spoken at Caramon’s funeral. So I activated the device really quickly and came here to say what a good friend Caramon was before the giant steps on me.” .
Gerard was shaking his head. “This is ridiculous.”
“Excuse me,” said Tas, stem in his turn. “It’s not polite to interrupt. So anyway I came here and ended up in the Tomb and Gerard found me and took me to see Caramon. And I was able to tell him what I was going to say about him at the funeral, which he enjoyed immensely, only nothing was like I remembered it the first time. I told that to Caramon, too, and he seemed really worried, but he dropped dead before he had time to do anything about it. And then he couldn’t find Raistlin when he knew that Raistlin would never go on to the next life without his twin. Which is why I think he said I was to talk to Dalamar.” Tas drew in a deep breath, having expended most of his air on his tale.
“And that’s why I’m here.”
“Do you believe this, my lady?” Gerard demanded.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Laurana said softly. She glanced at Palin, but he carefully avoided her gaze, pretended to be absorbed in examining the device, almost as if he expected to find the answers engraved upon the shining metal.
“Tas,” he said mildly, not wanting to reveal the direction of his thoughts,” tell me everything you remember about the first time you came to my father’s funeral.”
Tasslehoff did so, talking about how Dalamar attended and Lady Crysania and Riverwind and Goldmoon, how the Solamnic Knights sent a representative who traveled all the way from the High Clerist’s Tower and Gilthas came from the elven kingdom of Qualinesti and Silvanoshei from his kingdom of Silvanesti and Porthios and Alhana came and she was as beautiful as ever. “And you were there, Laurana, and you were so happy because you said you’d lived to see your dearest dream come true, the elven kingdoms united in peace and brotherhood.”