“There’s a rhyme that goes with it and stuff you have to do to it,” Tas added, “but it’s pretty easy to learn. Fizban said I had to know it so that I could recite it standing on my head and I could, so I’m sure you probably can, too.”
Palin was only half-listening. He looked up at Jenna. “What do you think?”
“It is the Device of Time Journeying,” she said. “I saw it at the Tower of High Sorcery when your father brought it to Dalamar for safekeeping. He studied it, of course. I believe he had some of your uncle’s notes regarding it. He never used it that I know of, but he has more knowledge about it than anyone now living. I never heard that the device went missing. However, as I recall, we did find Tasslehoff in the Tower right before the Chaos War. He might have taken it then.”
Jenna eyed the kender quite sternly.
“I did not take it!” Tas said, insulted. “Fizban gave it to me! He told me—”
“Hush, Tas.” Palin leaned across the table, lowered his voice.
“I don’t suppose there is any way you could contact Dalamar.”
“I do not practice necromancy,” Jenna returned coolly.
Palin’s eyes narrowed. “Come now, you don’t believe he’s dead. Do you?”
Jenna relaxed back in her chair. “Perhaps I don’t. But he might as well be. I have not heard a word from him in more than thirty years. I don’t know where he may have gone.”
Palin looked dubious, as if he did not quite believe her.
Jenna spread her bejeweled hands on the table’s surface, fingers apart. “Listen to me, Palin. You do not know him. No one knows him as I know him. You did not see him at the end, when he came back from the Chaos War. I did. I was with him. Day and night. I nursed him to health. If you could call it that.”
She sat back, her expression dark and frowning.
“I am sorry if I offended you,” Palin said. “I never heard. . . . You never told me.”
“It is not something I enjoy talking about,” Jenna said tersely. “You know that Dalamar was gravely wounded during our battle against Chaos. I brought him back to the Tower. For weeks he hovered between the realm of the living and that of the dead. I left my home and my shop and moved into the Tower to care for him. He survived. But the lo$s of the gods, the loss of godly magic, was a terrible blow, one from which he never truly recovered. He changed, Palin. Do you remember how he used to be?”
“I didn’t know him very well. He supervised my Test in the Tower, the Test during which my Uncle Raistlin took him by surprise, turning what Dalamar had intended as illusion into reality. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he saw I had been given my uncle’s staff.” Palin sighed deeply, regretfully.
The memories were sweet, yet painful. “All I remember of Dalamar is that I thought him sharp-tongued and sarcastic, self-centered and arrogant. I know that my father had a better opinion of him. My father said Dalamar was a very complicated man, whose loyalty was to magic, rather than to the Dark Queen. From what little I knew of Dalamar, I believe that to be true.”
“He was excitable,” Tas chimed in. “He used to get very excited when I started to touch anything that belonged to him. Jumpy, too.”
“Yes, he was all that. But he could also be charming, softspoken, wise. . .” Jenna smiled and sighed. “I loved him, Palin. I still do, I suppose. I have never met any other man to equal him.”
She was quiet a moment, then she shrugged and said, “But that was long ago.”
“What happened between you two?” Palin asked.
She shook her head. “After his illness, he withdrew into himself, became sullen and silent, morose and isolated. I have never been a particularly patient person,” Jenna admitted. “I couldn’t stomach his self-pity and I told him so. We quarreled, I walked out, and that was the last I saw of him.”
“I can understand how he felt,” Palin said. “I know how lost I felt when I realized the gods were gone. Dalamar had practiced the arcane art far longer than I. He had sacrificed so much for it. He must have been devastated.”
“We all were,” Jenna said bluntly, “but we dealt with it. You went on with your life, and so did I. Dalamar could not. He fretted and fumed until I feared that his frustration would do what his wounds could not. I honestly thought he would die of it. He could not eat or sleep. He spent hours locked up in his laboratory searching desperately for what had been lost. He had the key to it, he once told me during one of the rare times he actually spoke to me. He said the key had come to him during his sickness. Now he had only to find the door. It’s my belief,” Jenna added wryly,
“that he found it.”
“So you do not think he destroyed himself when he destroyed the Tower,” Palin said.
“The Tower’s gone?” Tas was stunned. “That great big Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas? What happened to it?”
“I am not even convinced he blew up the Tower,” Jenna said, continuing the conversation as if the kender wasn’t there. “Oh, I know what people say. That he destroyed the Tower for fear the dragon Khellendros would seize it and use its magic. I saw the pile of rubble that was left. People found all sorts of magical artifacts in the ruins. I bought many of them and resold them later for five times what I paid for them. But I know something I’ve never told anyone. The truly valuable artifacts that were in the Tower were never found. Not a trace. The scrollbooks, the spellbooks, those belonging to Raistlin and Fistandantilus, Dalamar’s own spellbooks—those were gone, too. People thought they were destroyed in the blast. If so,” she added with fine irony, “the blast was extremely selective. It took only what was valuable and important, left the trinkets behind.”
She eyed Palin speculatively. “Tell me, my friend, would you take this device to Dalamar if you had the chance?”
Palin stirred restlessly. “Probably not, now that I think of it. If he knew I had it, the device would not remain long in my possession. ”
“Do you truly intend to use it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Palin was evasive. “What do you think? Would it be dangerous?”
“Yes, very,” she answered.
“But the kender used it—”
“If you believe him, he used it in his own time,” she said.
“And that was the time of the gods. The artifact is now in this time. You know as well as I do that the magic of the artifacts from the Fourth Age is erratic in nature. Some artifacts behave perfectly predictably and others go haywire.”
“So I won’t really find out until I try,” Palin said. “What do you suppose could happen?”
“Who knows!” Jenna lifted her hands, the jewels on her fingers glittered. “The journey alone might kill you. You might be stranded back in time, unable to return. You might accidently do something to change the past and, in so doing, obliterate the present. You might blow up this house and everything around it for a twenty-mile radius. I would not risk it. Not for a kender tale.”
“Yet I would like to go back to before the Chaos War. Go back simply to look. Perhaps I could see the moment where destiny veered off the path it should have taken. Then we would know how to steer it back on the right course.”—
Jenna snorted. “You speak of time as if it were a horse and cart. For all you know, this kender has made up this nonsensical story of a future in which the gods never left us. He is a kender, after all.”
“But he is an unusual kender. My father believed him, and Caramon knew something about traveling through time.”
“Your father also said the kender and the device were to be given to Dalamar,” Jenna reminded him.
Palin frowned. “I think we have to find out the truth for ourselves,” he argued. “I believe that it is worth the risk. Consider this, Jenna. If there is another future, a better future for our world, a future in which the gods did not depart, no price would be too great to pay for it.”