“Well, you needn’t be ru—” Tas began. Then he saw Caramon s face and quickly hushed.
They had come to a halt, slipping in the mud, halfway down the trail. The hot wind blew about them, sending Tas’s topknot streaming out from his head like a banner and whipping Caramon’s cloak out. The big warrior was staring at the lake—the same lake Tas had noticed. Caramon’s face was pale, his eyes troubled. After a moment, he began walking again, trudging grimly down the trail. With a sigh, Tas squished along after him. He had reached a decision.
“Caramon,” he said, “let’s get out of here. Let’s leave this place. Even if it is a moon like Uncle Trapspringer must have visited before the goblins ate him, it isn’t much fun. The moon, I mean, not being eaten by goblins which I suppose wouldn’t be much fun either, come to think of it. To tell you the truth, this moon’s just about as boring as the Abyss and it certainly smells as bad.
Besides, there I wasn’t thirsty... . Not that I’m thirsty now,” he added hastily, remembering too late that he wasn’t supposed to talk about it, “but my tongue’s sort of dried out, if you know what I mean, which makes it hard to talk. We’ve got the magical device.” He held the jewel encrusted sceptre-shaped object up in his hand, just in case Caramon had forgotten in the last half-hour what it looked like. “And I promise... I solemnly vow... that I’ll think of Solace with all my brain this time, Caramon. I—Caramon?”
“Hush, Tas,” Caramon said.
They had reached the valley floor, where the mud was ankle-deep on Caramon, which made it about shin-deep on Tas. Caramon had begun to limp again from when he’d fallen and wrenched his knee back in the magical fortress of Zhaman. Now, in addition to worry, there was a look of pain on his face.
There was another look, too. A look that made Tas feel all prickly inside—a look of true fear. Tas, startled, glanced about quickly, wondering what Caramon saw. It seemed pretty much the same at the bottom as it had at the top, he thought—gray and yucky and horrible. Nothing had changed, except that it was growing darker. The storm clouds had obliterated the sun again, rather to Tas’s relief, since it was an unwholesome-looking sun that made the bleak, gray landscape appear worse than ever. The rain was falling harder as the storm clouds drew nearer. Other than that, there certainly didn’t appear to be anything frightening.
The kender tried his best to keep silent, but the words just sort of leaped out of his mouth before he could stop them. “What’s the matter, Caramon? I don’t see anything. Is your knee bothering you? I—”
“Be quiet, Tas!” Caramon ordered in a strained, tight voice. He was staring around him, his eyes wide, his hands clenching and unclenching nervously.
Tas sighed and clapped his hand over his mouth to bottle up the words, determined to keep quiet if it killed him. When he was quiet, it suddenly occurred to him that it was so very quiet around here. There was no sound at all when the thunder wasn’t thundering, not even the usual sounds he was used to hearing when it rained—water dripping from tree leaves and plopping onto the ground, the wind rustling in the branches, birds singing their rain songs, complaining about their wet feathers...
Tas had a strange, quaking feeling inside. He looked at the stumps of the burned trees more closely. Even burned, they were huge, easily the largest trees he had ever seen in his life except for Tas gulped. Leaves, autumn colors, the smoke of cooking fires curling up from the valley, the lake—blue and smooth as crystal...
Blinking, he rubbed his eyes to clear them of the gummy film of mud and rain. He stared around him, looking back up at the trail, at that huge boulder... . He stared at the lake that he could see quite clearly through the burned tree stumps. He stared at the mountains with their sharp, jagged peaks. It wasn’t Uncle Trapspringer who’d been here before... Oh, Caramon!” he whispered in horror.
2
“What is it?” Caramon turned, looking at Tas so strangely that the kender felt his inside prickly feeling spread to his outside. Little bumps appeared all up and down his arms.
“N-nothing,” Tas stammered. “Just my imagination. Caramon,” he added urgently, “let’s leave! Right now. We can go anywhere we want to! We can go back in time to when we were all together, to when we were all happy! We can go back to when Flint and Sturm were alive, to when Raistlin still wore the red robes and Tika—”
“Shut up, Tas,” snapped Caramon warningly, his words accented by a flash of lightning that made even the kender flinch.
The wind was rising, whistling through the dead tree stumps with an eerie sound, like someone drawing a shivering breath through clenched teeth. The warm, slimy rain had ceased. The clouds above them swirled past, revealing the pale sun shimmering in the gray sky. But on the horizon, the clouds continued to mass, continued to grow blacker and blacker. Multicolored lightning flickered among them, giving them a distant, deadly beauty.
Caramon started walking along the muddy trail, gritting his teeth against the pain of his injured leg. But Tas, looking down that trail that he now knew so well—even though it was appallingly different—could see to where it rounded a bend. Knowing what lay beyond that bend, he stood where he was, planted firmly in the middle of the road, staring at Caramon’s back.
After a few moments of unusual silence, Caramon realized something was wrong and glanced around. He stopped, his face drawn with pain and fatigue.
“C’mon, Tas!” he said irritably.
Twisting his topknot of hair around his finger, Tas shook his head.
Caramon glared at him.
Tas finally burst out, “Those are vallenwood trees, Caramon!”
The big man’s stern expression softened. “I know, Tas,” he said wearily. “This is Solace.”
“No, it isn’t!” Tas cried. “It—it’s just some place that has vallenwoods! There must be lots of places that have vallenwoods—”
“And are there lots of places that have Crystalmir Lake, Tas, or the Kharolis Mountains or that boulder up where you and I’ve both seen Flint sitting, carving his wood, or this road that leads to the—”
“You don’t know!” Tas yelled angrily. “It’s possible!” Suddenly, he ran forward, or he tried to run forward, dragging his feet through the oozing, clinging mud as fast as possible. Stumbling into Caramon, he grabbed the big maxis hand and tugged on it. “Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” Once again, he held up the time-traveling device. “We—we can go back to Tarsis! Where the dragons toppled a building down on top of me! That was a fun time, very interesting. Remember?” His shrill voice screeched through the burned-out trees.
Reaching out, his face grim, Caramon grabbed the magical device from the kender’s hand. Ignoring Tas’s frantic protests, he took the device and began twisting and turning the jewels, gradually transforming it from a sparkling sceptre into a plain, nondescript pendant. Tas watched him miserably.
“Why won’t we go, Caramon? This place is horrible. We don’t have any food or water and, from what I’ve seen, there’s not much likelihood of us finding either. Plus, we’re liable to get blasted right out of our shoes if one of those lightning bolts hits us, and that storm’s getting closer and closer and you know this isn’t Solace—”
“I don’t know, Tas,” Caramon said quietly. “But I’m going to find out. What’s the matter? Aren’t you curious? Since when did a kender ever turn down the chance for an adventure?” He began to limp down the trail again.
“I’m just as curious as the next kender,” Tas mumbled, hanging his head and trudging along after Caramon. “But it’s one thing to be curious about some place you’ve never been before, and quite another to be curious about home. You’re not supposed to be curious about home! Home isn’t supposed to change. It just stays there, waiting for you to come back. Home is someplace you say ‘My, this looks just like it did when I left!’ not ‘My, this looks like six million dragons flew in and wrecked the joint!’ Home is not a place for adventures, Caramon!”