“Who is she, divinity?” Mors asked.
Her name is Di An.
“My little eyes! An Di-” He started to rise, but the goddess spoke one final time to him, and the strength of her voice drove him back to his knees.
Let this place become sacred again. Keep my laws, and the bounty of health and healing shall be yours. This woman shall be my priestess, and through her I will make myself known to all your people.
Mors bowed his head. “It shall be done,” he vowed.
“Thank you, divinity, for restoring my sight.” But the goddess was gone.
The blue aura vanished next, leaving Di An standing on the floor. Finally, the sapphire staff disappeared, too. Di An wavered like a sleepwalker. Mors moved quickly to her side and braced her up.
Her eyes opened slowly. “Mors? Is that you?” she asked weakly.
“It is. You have changed, little digger.”
“I've grown up. Are you… angry that I went away?”
“I was, but no longer.”
Di An thought that it was strange to feel Mors's arm around her waist. Strange, but good. She asked, “Did you hear the words of the goddess, too? Did you see her sacred staff?” When Mors nodded, she added, “I dwelled in the realm of the gods. For how long, I don't know. Riverwind and I were trying to escape from the dragon, and there were men like lizards-”
“Dragon!” Mors exclaimed. “Men like lizards? Are you sure your head is clear?”
Di An fixed him with a startling stare. Her formerly dark eyes were now a brilliant blue, the same color as the staff of Quenesti Pah. “My head is quite clear, Mors.” She thought of poor Catchflea, dead at the hands of the draconians. She saw Riverwind burning with fever-was he safe? “And my heart is quite heavy.”
Mors and Di An went out to the waiting warriors. He could hardly believe this cool, ethereal woman was the barren child who had led him around during his darkest days.
“I shall always try to lead you well,” Di An said in a confidential tone. Mors blinked. She'd read his thoughts. “After all, I would not be here now if I hadn't followed you-even as I led you.”
Mors presented Di An to the warriors, and they saluted her by raising their spears high. That done, Mors was at a loss. He asked Di An what she wanted to do.
She looked out over the smoky, poisoned cavern. She thought of all the barren children laboring in the fields and mines. Though she could now remember the surface world without fear, she knew she belonged in Hest, with her own people. As her bright gaze took in the hazy vista, Di An said, “I want to heal this place. And, perhaps, heal myself.”
Somehow Riverwind managed to make it to the base of the mountains. One foot after the other, he plodded through a day and a night and a day. His decision to throw himself down the shaft drove him. Though other methods of death threatened him-hunger and thirst among them-he was obsessed with the notion that he must die in the shaft. Somehow that would be right.
Riverwind felt baked hard from the fever heat inside him, so the discovery of a spring of sweet water in a cleft of the rocks was as great a gift as he ever thought to receive.
His thirst slaked, the hunger that tightened his belly into a knot returned. Riverwind had no bow and hardly expected to take any game with his bare hands. He found some pine nuts growing in clusters around some of the taller boulders. He ate hundreds of the tiny, thready seeds. That helped a little, but he couldn't live on them. As night fell again, he lay atop a gently rounded boulder, the peaks of the mountains looming over him. He would never make it up the mountainside in his weakened condition. He would fail in his resolve to die in the shaft. I can't even carry that quest through, he thought bitterly.
The stars came out. He saw the broken scales of Hiddu-kel, the bison head of Kiri-Jolith, the black hood of Mor-gion. Beside Morgion, just peeking over the tops of the mountains, was the constellation Mishakal. Like the steel amulet he'd given Goldmoon, the stars of Mishakal formed two joined circles. “The Endless Chase,” his father had called it. If you traced the loop with your finger, you never reached the end.
“What does it mean?” the boy Riverwind had asked.
“It means, no matter where you wander, the goddess is always with you,” his father had replied.
Always with you-like the face of Goldmoon, which was never long out of his thoughts. Riverwind closed his eyes and conjured up her image. The silver-golden hair, the flashing eyes, the soft, red lips… The sight caused tears to trickle from under his closed eyelids. She was so beautiful. His quest having failed, she would marry another. Ar-rowthorn would insist. He had never approved of Riverwind anyway.
The idea of Goldmoon as another man's wife sent a surge of anger through Riverwind. Despair had not completely consumed him. He would never permit Arrowthorn to marry her to another! He would steal her away first-
His eyes snapped open. How stupid! How selfish! He'd forgotten his other vital task, to warn everyone of the dra-conians and their plans for conquest. That alone should be reason enough to return to Que-Shu. And his courting quest was not a failure. While he lived, the quest would go on. And if it took ten years or a hundred, Goldmoon would wait for him. He knew how strong her spirit and her will were. She would never be forced into marriage.
Riverwind got up from the boulder and started climbing. Every mountain begins the same way, he thought grimly. From the bottom, going up. And that's the way, ill or hearty, he had to take them.
It was a nightmare climb. The plainsman's legs shivered in the cooling mountain air, and more than a few times they failed, buckling and throwing him to the ground. When that happened, Riverwind clawed his way along with his fingers. Never mind that blood flowed from his torn nails. Never mind the blurring of his sight by the still-raging fever. He had to continue his journey.
He reached a small plateau and rolled over on his back to catch his breath. It streamed out, a thin white vapor in the night air. Only a moment to rest, just a short moment.
The Blue Crystal Staff materialized in the air above him. He moaned, thinking it was a feverish delusion, but when Riverwind put out a hand to grasp the floating staff, his fingers closed around smooth, hard sapphire. The staff had returned. It was cold and bright in his hand. The magic aura subsided, and Riverwind felt the rough, dark wood.
“Thank you, Mishakal,” he said. “Thank you!” The mountain rang with his cry.
He wondered what had happened to Di An, where she was. The goddess must have helped her. She must have. He said a silent prayer for the elf woman.
Riverwind resumed his climb. He leaned heavily on the five-foot-long rod, and it supported him on the long ascent.
In the days that followed, Riverwind's fortunes waxed and waned. In the high, narrow valleys of the Forsaken Mountains, he found wild berries and roots to eat, but no game he could catch bare-handed. The swamp fever would fade for an hour, or a day, only to strike him again, reducing the plainsman to a huddled, shivering wreck. During these periods, Riverwind wandered aimlessly off his chosen path, sometimes three or four leagues in the wrong direction. His mind grew dull with the heat and pain. He cut his hands and feet, stumbling over sharp stones. He wandered for three days, delirious, only to be brought to his senses by a sudden downpour of ice-cold rain. It was then that he discovered how lost he was. The peaks around him were unfamiliar, and the forest unlike any he'd entered before.
While Riverwind stood in the cold rain, marshaling his thoughts, he heard a young man's voice say, “What do you want, vagabond?”
He turned and saw he had stumbled into the open near a camp. Two stout wagons were set axle to axle, a canvas tent spread out before them. A fire burned fitfully under the sodden tarp. Standing between Riverwind and the camp was a young man in a dripping cape and rain-soaked hat. He held a slim-bladed sword. The point faced Riverwind.