Gerard dashed down the stairs as fast as ever he could and was the first to reach Caramon. He feared to find the big man in terrible pain, for he must have broken every bone in his body.
Caramon did not appear to be suffering however. He had already left mortal cares and pain behind, his spirit lingering only long enough to say good-bye. Laura threw herself beside him on the ground. Taking hold of his hand, she held it pressed to her lips.
“Don’t cry, my dear,” he said softly, smiling. “Your mother’s here with me. She’ll take good care of me. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, Daddy!” Laura sobbed. “Don’t leave me yet!”
Caramon’s eyes glanced around at the townspeople who had gathered. He smiled and gave a little nod. He continued to search through the crowd and he frowned.
“But where’s Raistlin?” he asked.
Laura looked startled, but said, brokenly, “Father, your brother’s been dead a long, long time—”
“He said he would wait for me,” Caramon said, his voice beginning strong, but growing fainter. “He should be here. Tika’s here. I don’t understand. This is not right. Tas. . . What Tas said. . . A different future. . .”
His gaze came to Gerard. He beckoned the Knight to come near.
“There’s something you must. . . do,” said Caramon, his breath rasping in his chest.
Gerard knelt beside him, more touched by this man’s death than he could have imagined possible. “Yes, sir,” he said. “What is it?”
“Promise me . . .” Caramon whispered. “On your honor. . . as a Knight.”
“I promise,” said Gerard. He supposed that the old man was going to ask him to watch over his daughters or to take care of his grandchildren, one of whom was also a Solamnic Knight. “What would you have me do, sir?”
“Dalamar will know. . . . Take Tasslehoff to Dalamar,” Caramon said and his voice was suddenly strong and firm. He looked intently at Gerard. “Do you promise? Do you swear that you will do this?”
“But sir,” Gerard faltered, “what you ask of me is impossible! No one has seen Dalamar for years. Most believe that he is dead. And as for this kender who calls himself Tasslehoff . . .”
Caramon reached out his hand, a hand that was bloody from his fall. He grasped hold of Gerard’s most unwilling hand and gripped it tightly.
“I promise, sir,” said Gerard.
Caramon smiled. He let out his breath and did not draw another. His eyes fixed in death, fixed on Gerard. The hand, even in death, did not relinquish its grip. Gerard had to pry the old man’s fingers loose and was left with a smear of blood on his palm.
“I’ll be happy to go with you to see Dalamar, Sir Knight, but I can’t go tomorrow,” said the kender, snuffling and wiping his tear-grimed face with the sleeve of his shirt. “I have to speak at Caramon’s funeral.”
Chapter Four
A Strange Awakening
Silvan’s arm was on fire. He couldn’t put out the blaze, and no one would come help him. He called out for Samar and for his mother, but his calls went unanswered. He was angry, deeply angry, angry and hurt that they would not come, that they were ignoring him. Then he realized that the reason they were not coming was that they were angry with him. He had failed them. He had let them down, and they would come to him no more. . . .
With a great cry, Silvan woke himself. He opened his eyes to see above him a canopy of gray. His vision was slightly blurred, and he mistook the gray mass above him for the gray ceiling of the burial mound. His arm pained him, and he remembered the fire. Gasping, he shifted to put out the flames. Pain lanced through his arm and hammered in his head. He saw no flames, and he realized dazedly that the fire had been a dream. The pain in his left arm was not a dream, however. The pain was real. He examined the arm as best he could, though every movement of his head cost him a gasp.
Not much doubt. The arm was broken just above the wrist.
The flesh was swollen so that it looked like a monster arm, a strange color of greenish purple. He lay back down and stared around him, feeling sorry for himself, and wondered very much that his mother did not come to him when he was in such agony. . . .
“Mother!” Silvan sat up so suddenly that the pain coiled round his gut and caused him to vomit.
He had no idea how he came to be here or even where here was. He knew where he was supposed to be, knew he had been dispatched to bring help to his beleagured people. He looked around, trying to gain some sense of the time. Night had passed.
The sun shone in the sky. He had mistaken a canopy of gray leaves for the ceiling of the burial mound. Dead gray leaves, hanging listlessly from dead branches. Death had not come naturally, as with the fall of the year, causing them to release their hold on life and drift in a dream of reds and golds upon the crisp air.
The life had been sucked from leaves and branches, trunk and roots, leaving them desiccated, mummified but still standing, a husk, an empty mockery of life.
Silvan had never seen a blight of this kind attack so many trees before, and his soul shrank from the sight. He could not take time to consider it, however. He had to complete his mission.
The sky above was a pearl gray with a strange kind of shimmer that he put down to the aftereffects of the storm. Not so many hours have passed, he told himself. The army could hold out this long. I have not failed them utterly. I can still bring help.
He needed to splint his arm, and he searched through the forest undergrowth for a strong stick. Thinking he’d found what he sought, he put out his hand to grasp it. The stick disintegrated beneath his fingers, turned to dust. He stared, startled. The ash was wet and had a greasy feel to it. Repulsed, he wiped his hand on his shirt, wet from the rain.
All around him were gray trees. Gray and dying or gray and dead. The grass was gray, the weeds gray, the fallen branches gray, all with that look of having been sucked dry.
He’d seen something like this before or heard of something like this. . . . He didn’t recall what, and he had no time to think.
He searched with increasingly frantic urgency among the graycovered undergrowth for a stick and found one eventually, a stick that was covered with dust but had not been struck with the strange blight. Placing the stick on his arm, gasping at the pain, he gritted his teeth against it. He ripped off a shred of his shirt-tail and tied the splint in place. He could hear the broken ends of the bone grind together. The pain and the hideous sound combined to nearly make him pass out. He sat hunched over, his head down, fighting the nausea, the sudden heat that swept over his body.
Finally, the star bursts cleared from his vision. The pain eased somewhat. Holding his injured left arm close to his body, Silvan staggered to his feet. The wind had died. He could no longer feel its guiding touch upon his face. He could not see the sun itself for the pearl gray clouds, but the light shone brightest in one portion of the sky, which meant that way must be east. Silvan put his back to the light and looked to the west.
He did not remember his fall or what had occurred just prior to the fall. He began to talk to himself, finding the sound of his voice comforting.
“The last thing I remember, I was within sight of the road I needed to take to reach Sithelnost,” he said. He spoke in Silvanesti, the language of his childhood, the language his mother favored.
A hill rose up above him. He was standing in the bottom of a ravine, a ravine he vaguely remembered from the night before.
“Someone either climbed or fell down into the ravine,” he said, eyeing a crooked trail left in the gray ash that covered the hillside. He smiled ruefully. “My guess would be that someone was me. I must have taken a misstep in the darkness, tumbled down the ravine. Which means,” he added, heartened, “the road must lie right up there. I do not have far to go.”