Regene's eyes followed the small gray thread of smoke, the incense drifting through the arched doorway and into the room where she saw, just in glimpsing, a bed hung with soft netting, the standard drapery of a Tarsian summer rife with black flies. He smiled, a lean humorless twitch of his lips, and he made his choice in that moment. He would take her offer and take her with him to Karthay. Why not? She had her ambitions, and he sensed they would not clash with his own. He rose, took their cups and the bottle of wine, and held it to the light to see how much remained. He then tucked it under his arm, walked toward the bedroom, and said, "Come along, then."
She followed, and in the mirror on the wall he saw her satisfied smile. Later that day, as the sun set in gold over Tarsis, he watched her sleeping and touched her cheek, once in magic. Only that light touch did he need to read what she dreamed, to know what she felt and how deep and strong was her ambition. She would do, he thought, as a companion on this journey. He thought there was some symmetry to the two of them, White Robe and Black, putting their hand to this task, which, when it succeeded, would prevent the Blue Lady from waging her war and tearing apart the fragile balance five years of blood and grief had established.
He lay back, drowsy, listening to the sound of the city growing still at day's end. He thought this task Ladonna had set him would not be so hard in the doing.
In the morning, they woke, the dregs of wine in their cups, the memories of love-making still on their bodies, and they went to find breakfast. Fed, they returned to his rooms, and he told her of Tramd and the avatars and of Ladonna's charge to eliminate him.
"A political assassination?" Regene professed herself surprised that the resources of the Tower would be put to such a use.
"It would surprise me, too," he said, "if that were what's happening. It isn't."
She listened in silence when he told her the fullness of his charge, the intent and the hoped-for outcome. He did not tell her what lay beyond the task accomplished. He made no mention of Palanthas. What, after all, could he say about it? He knew only one more thing about the Tower of High Sorcery at Palanthas than he'd known when he'd left Wayreth. On the Old King's Road, two days before he returned to Tarsis, he had learned in a tavern that the Tower at Palanthas was not shut up and sealed with a curse. It had been-no story lied about that-but it was not now. A mage had entered it, one who had worn red robes in his time and changed them for black after the War of the Lance. That mage had walked through the horrors of Shoikan Grove as a lord walks in his peaceful garden at dawn. As a lord into his palace, he had entered into the Tower. Once inside, he forbade entry to all who approached, and Dalamar did not doubt this made the Conclave of Wizards uneasy. The mage was Raistlin Majere, he of the hourglass eyes and the golden skin. He had not gone out of the story of Krynn as an old Wildrunner once had suggested. He was, it seemed, enlarging his place in the tale.
None of this did Dalamar say to Regene, for whatever she professed of the shape of her own ambition, his was to please Ladonna with the completion of her mission. He would not chance it that this would look to Regene like a good way to add to her body of work. He would use her as she offered, but he would do no more.
After that, the two mages spoke only of ways to get to Karthay, and they did not deliberate long. They chose the wings of magic over the white-winged sails of ships that would take them over the sea. They left on the morning of the next day, and each thought, Well, I know how far I'll trust this one, and that far should get me what I want.
Chapter 19
Dalamar stood on the shore of a grim isle. The groaning of the sea and the weary sigh of waves against the rocky shore filled the gray dawn. He looked from the cheerless sky to where Regene walked toward a broad arm of stone thrust out from the land. All around lay bleached bones, shattered skulls, and the wretched shards of once proud keels. These were not the remains of one shipwreck but many. They were not friendly harbors, the stony shores of Karthay. Hardly anyone put into them on purpose. Few who found themselves flung here by storm or chased by the pirates who haunted Mithas and her sister isle Kothas lived to bemoan their fate. Here was Karthay, that isle where the dark dwarf lived.
Regene stopped in her walking and waved him down the beach. He went, picking his way over stones, kicking aside bones. When he rounded the promontory, he saw that a road met the beach perhaps a quarter-mile away. Broad and smooth, it led in winding stages up the mountainside to where a towered citadel crowned the high peak. No magic warded the road, no traps, no barriers were erected. But then, why should there be? Somewhere near, on one of the lesser peaks behind the citadel, a dragon the color of blue steel lurked. He had seen it in Ladonna's magic-wrought map, and he remembered her warning.
High in the sky, gulls creaked, their gray wings and white backs catching the first glimmer of the day. Regene looked up to the crags rising above the sea. Her cheeks, always known to him as rosy and plump, shone pale now.
"Do you feel it?" she whispered. He had to step closer to hear her. "Do you feel it, Dalamar?"
He stood still, extending his senses, reaching in magic all around the isle, up to the sky, down to the sea, around the stone and mountains.
"Feel what?"
She shuddered. "It's been a long time since I've been outside the Tower. We are all calm in there, a peaceful lot. We study, and we observe the courtesy of the Master's hospitality." She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. "And-you may have noticed-though Black Robes and White Robes and Red practice their magic, spin their spells, work their charms and talismans, we don't much feel the… the intrusion of another Order's sorcery. I feel it here, though, Black magic like claws raking my skin."
"Interesting." Dalamar looked up the hill to the towered citadel. "Hadn't you considered that?"
"I did," she said. "I just didn't think one place could hold so much evil." She looked at him along the length of her shoulder, eyeing him. He saw her re-thinking him, looking back to two nights in his bed, to conversations in his rooms. He saw her recognize him. "I hadn't thought," she said, not marveling and not afraid, "that you were part of this."
Dalamar shrugged. "I am what I am, Regene. Part of the dark, as you are part of the light. One, I think, is no better or worse than the other."
Her sapphire eyes widened, just for an instant, as though she heard blasphemy. Then, swiftly she said, "Yes, of course. We know that, we mages."
Cold wind ran down the road, down the hill to the sea. "But outside the world of the Tower," Dalamar said, "where theory meets the hard bones of the world, what we know is not so pretty as it once seemed, is it?"
She didn't answer. He nodded, and he didn't waste time wondering whether he had been foolish to bring her on this journey. In the instant he determined that she showed a sign of failing him, he would cast her aside as a warrior the weapon whose blade was chipped, whose grip was cracked.
You have visitors, said the dragon, the blue whose name was Blade.
On a bed of silks and satin, in a chamber high above the sea, a dwarf groaned, his mouth a ruin of split lips and bleeding gums, his teeth rotted, his flesh scaled. His beard hung in white tatters. His skull shone gray through patches of stringy hair. In his mind, an image flashed, dragon-sent to this one who could see nothing outside his own window. A dark elf walked upon the shore, heading for a White-robed mage not far ahead. He knew them! He had felt the dark elf's hatred days before in the library, but he hadn't thought it would amount to more than the wrath of a pup who had no chance at him. The White Robe, he knew her, too.