Tanis shook his head. "Nowhere," he whispered. He turned away from the lake and saw Raistlin standing above him, looking into the rainbow dance of the falls' mist. The young mage smiled, his light eyes eager and sharp.
"Raistlin, can you help him?"
The mage nodded slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes still on the jeweled mist and the last shafts of sunlight. "I think I can. He has a mountain climber's skill, our little friend, and it is a good thing he does: he's going to need it."
Stone bit sharply into Keli's hands. Stalled and frozen in the middle of the narrow rock span, he dared not look down, could not look back.
Across the arch Tigo crouched, a lean and hungry predator waiting for his prey to realize that it was trapped, caught. There was no need for him to venture on the bridge, no need to pursue farther. At last he would have his murderous revenge!
Across the bridge, his back to the spray-soaked wall, Tas shouted, "Keli! Come on!"
"I–I can't — I can't — " Keli could not move, it was all he could do to speak.
"You have to! You can't stay there! Pretend you're a spider! Spiders don't ever fall! Come on! It'll be fun!"
Fun! Keli swallowed dryly and tried hard to be a spider, wishing all the while he were a bird instead. Hand over hand, he crawled across the slick stone bridge, swearing futile boy's oaths under his breath. Fun!
"That's it!" Tas called. "I told you it would be fun!"
Tigo, across the span, laughed. His laughter was ghostly, only faintly heard above the roar of the water. Keli ignored him, concentrated on Tas and the bridge.
"Come on, Keli, a little more! You've almost got it! Ever do anything as much fun as this?"
Keli groaned and shook his head. He regretted that at once. The bridge seemed to sway and rock under him. "No," he panted, staring at his white knuckles. "Nothing like this!"
Hand to hand, knee to knee, Keli crept, trying not to give in to black-winged vertigo, wishing it weren't so hard to breathe.
After what seemed a lifetime of crawling, Keli's fingers touched the kender's, cold and slick. Tas leaned a little forward to grasp a wrist, then an arm. "Up now, on your feet. I've got you."
Keli gained his feet, wobbled a little, and then straightened.
"That's right. Now just edge over here. We can both fit on this ledge. Probably."
Probably! "Crazy as a kender" was an expression Keli had heard from time to time. He used to think he knew what it meant. Now he was certain. Keli dragged up every bit of strength he had and lurched hard against the wall. He pressed his face to the wet, black stone, shuddering. "Now where?"
Tas attacked the answer obliquely. "We can't go back, but he's not coming on, either."
"What, then?"
"We can always wait."
Out over the lake the jeweled and dazzling mists of sunset were gone. On the far shore twilight's purple shadows gathered, the outriders of the night.
"It would be nice," Keli said tightly, "if we could fly."
"Sure would," Tas agreed, "and a lot better than being stuck up here"
Keli wanted to wail. He clamped his back teeth hard and whispered, "Then — but — why are we out here? I thought you knew a way OUT of this mess!"
Tas shrugged. "I didn't think he'd follow us. I thought he was drowned in the lake. Twice."
Across the arch Tigo sat, his back against the stone, patient as inevitable doom. Keli couldn't look at him without feeling sick, without feeling, in imagination, the rip of his grapnel hand and the long, shattering fall to the water below.
Light, the faint and fading gold of sunset, the silver of approaching twilight, danced up from the black surface of the lake and came together, shining in the gloaming like hope promised.
Far below, the red-haired bowman Tas called Tanis and one of the young men who had been in the lake stood on the shore. The other was in the water again and swimming hard toward the falls. The dwarf and the slim young man moved quickly to the north.
"Tas, what are they doing?"
"Something, they're up to something. Look! Tanis sees us! He's pointing." The kender leaned so far out to see that Keli had to catch him back by his belt.
"Don't do that!"
Clearly the fact that he'd almost tumbled to his death didn't bother the kender at all. He laughed, and the sound of his glee skirled high above the roar of the falls.
"Look, Keli! Raistlin's doing something to the air!" Tas thumped the boy's shoulder joyfully, nearly knocking him from his tenuous perch. "I don't know what he's up to, I usually don't, hardly anyone ever does. But it's always magic, and it's always worth waiting for."
Clinging like a soaked bat to the wall, Keli swallowed his nausea. Whether or not what the mage was up to was indeed worth waiting for the boy couldn't say, but he didn't see that they had much choice.
Raistlin's hands moved, deft and certain, in magic's dance. He gathered translucent rainbows and gemmed mist, separated their shimmering strands, and wove them swiftly, one around the other, into a rope of gleaming enchantment.
It grew quickly, the magic rope, and leaped away from the young mage's hands, directed and sped upon its way by will and spell. Out across the black surface of the water it flew, with the grace of a hawk rising, with the certainty of one of Tanis's well-drawn arrows speeding to its mark.
Sturm leaped into the lake, cutting through the icy water with powerful strokes. By the time he reached Caramon, the shining line had passed well over their heads, flying toward the arch and Tas's outstretched hand. On the shore Flint shouted, his voice rising high in triumph, ending on an oddly broken note, a cry of warning.
Tigo was halfway across the bridge, the hook that passed for a hand glittering balefully in the fading light.
Tas stepped in front of Keli and wound the shimmering rope around the boy's hands. "We'll go together. It'll hold, I swear it. Just slide right down. It won't burn your hands — you can hardly feel it."
Keli eyed the water, then Tigo advancing slowly across the arch. "Tas, it's not a rope — it's LIGHT AND AIR! It can't hold us!"
"Oh, sure it will. It's Raistlin's magic." Tas cocked his head as though he'd had a sudden thought. "You're worrying again, are you?"
"Worrying?" Keli gasped. "Tas, I'm so afraid I can't even think!"
"But it'll hold. I told you: it's magic. And Raistlin does the best magic I've ever seen. He'd never let you fall."
"Tas, the rope's not real!"
"It IS real! But — well — look! Down in the lake. There's Caramon and Sturm — Did I tell you that Sturm wants to be a knight? Like your father. He'll be a good one, too. He knows that solemn old Code and Measure like he made 'em up himself, and — "
"Tas!"
"Well, right. So if you do fall — which you won't — they will get you. You'll be all right. Now let's go or we're going to have an appointment with Tigo real soon!"
That last, more than any of Tas's assurances, decided Keli. He grasped the rope, silver and gold, woven of magic and light. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, sucked in a lungful of air, and left the ledge.
Tas followed.
Behind them Tigo raged, a beast whose prey had flown, wingless, from his reach, abandoning him to his impotent anger.
The air was cool and shivery by the night-dark lake. Far over the water's black surface stars reflected and, Keli thought, as he hunched closer to the fire, something else did too. Ghostly light and shimmer, faintly rainbowed and silver. A residue of Raistlin's magic? The boy thought so.
None sat waking now in night's darkest hour but Keli and Tas, the half-elf Tanis, and the dwarf Flint. The young mage had been the first asleep. Keli knew nothing of magicor its tolls, but it was clear to him that Raistlin's light weaving had left him drained. It seemed to Keli that the thin young man was hardly strong enough to exert such effort often. Or, the boy thought as he stole a covert glance at the sleeping mage, maybe he is. Even in exhaustion something of power and strength had lighted the mage's eyes.