“In the very air I breathe.”
“Yes.”
“No. That isn’t enough.” Goldmoon tilted her head upward, drifted toward the ceiling, through the domed roof. Riverwind followed her, his arguments lost amid the heated words still audible from the chamber below. Again they were surrounded by the pale mist. “I’m not going back, husband. Only forward—to wherever spirits are destined to go. To see Tanis, Tasslehoff, dear Flint—wherever they are. My daughter Brightdawn. My mother. Perhaps finally to reconcile with my father. It is long past my time to join them all. And to join you.”
“That may be what I wish, too,” he offered. “But it is not what was meant to be. There are powerful dragons to consider.”
“Ansalon always has dragons.” She placed a finger to his lips, then drew him close. “Precious Riverwind, Krynn does not need this old woman any longer. Nor do I need Krynn. I need you. We are together again—finally and forever. Complete. One old woman will make no difference against the dragon overlords.”
“Goldmoon, one person can always make a difference.”
1
After the Storm
Pain raced up the dragon overlord’s claw and into his massive blue body.
“This damnable lance,” he hissed in a zephyr-like voice. He threw back his great, horned head, opened his maw, and spewed a bolt of lightning into the belly of a thick cloud high above. The sky thundered its response, and what had begun as a steady rain deepened into a driving storm. The night was intermittently brightened by the lightning that danced down to his indigo-scaled back, a sensation he normally found pleasing. The wind keened fiercely, and the rain hammered obligingly against his thick hide. But no element of the storm was enough to assuage his suffering.
The powerful lance burned the dragon, was continuing to burn him with every beat of his enormous wings, with each mile that he crossed. He had been carrying it for the past several hours, ever since he claimed it from the heroes he slew. Yet he refused to let it go, refused to let Fissure, his dark huldrefolk ally, carry it for him. No doubt the goodness of the lance would harm Fissure, too, the dragon thought. It would burn anything evil.
Khellendros clutched the lance in one claw—Huma’s lance, which the pitiful associates of the sorcerer Palin Majere had worked so hard to retrieve from the frigid realm of Gellidus, the great white dragon who ruled Southern Ergoth. Hooked about a talon was Goldmoon’s Medallion of Faith, also filled with the energy of righteousness, but not so powerful as the lance. Fissure was gingerly grasped in Khellendros’s other claw. A second medallion, a seeming twin of the first, was about the huldre’s neck. Three artifacts from the Age of Dreams. Three the dragon had acquired. There was one more at his lair, a ring of crystal keys. Four should be enough, he remembered Fissure saying.
“The lance is filled with god-magic! That’s why it burns you so!” the gray-skinned huldre offered, shouting above the gale. “It was crafted to slay dragons, after all!” The tiny man, drenched, hairless, and looking as if he were freshly-sculpted from smooth clay, craned his bald head around so he could look into Khellendros’s flashing eyes. “That lance is the most powerful of these three artifacts—and certainly more powerful than the keys the Knights of Takhisis gained for you.”
The most powerful and the most painful, Khellendros thought. The dragon growled and tried futilely to thrust the pain to the back of his mind. The lance could do more than simply cause him discomfort. It would scar him certainly. But it could not kill him—probably not even if it plunged into his flesh. He was, after all, a supreme overlord, one of a handful of Krynn’s most awesome dragons, and he would use this hurtful, hateful lance—and the other three artifacts—to open a portal to The Gray.
The spirit of Kitiara, his long-ago partner in the Dark Queen’s army, wandered somewhere in that dusky dimension. And he would snare her spirit, as he had snared this lance, and by that act return Kitiara to Krynn. Four artifacts ought to be enough.
But first he had to craft a new body for her spirit.
He had one, a fine blue spawn—muscular, elegant, perfect. It had been birthed in part from one of his rare tears. But Palin and his conspirators had unknowingly killed the blue spawn, along with dozens of others, when they destroyed his favorite lair in the desert of the Northern Wastes. That he had slaughtered Palin and his companions less than an hour ago was some small consolation. He should have seen to that task earlier, not so much out of revenge—a human motivation that was beneath him—but as a tribute to Kitiara, who in life had been vexed by Palin’s father and uncle, Caramon and Raistlin Majere. The Majeres had plagued her life, and now they haunted her in death.
For a time, Palin and his fellows had proved useful to Khellendros. On the advice of one of the dragon’s planted spies, an old sycophant who had managed to pass himself off as a scholar, the wizard’s party had unwittingly gathered these artifacts for him.
On a stretch of ground on the island of Schallsea, not far from the Citadel of Light, they had placed the artifacts. The fake scholar had advised shattering them, claiming that the energy released would increase the level of magic in the world. They had had no idea that it was all a ruse, that Khellendros had been alerted and intended to steal their precious artifacts.
Their usefulness was at an end. Palin and the others had realized too late that the blue dragon overlord had cornered them. As Khellendros slew them, Fissure killed the sycophant to tidy up loose ends.
However, Khellendros hadn’t known that holding this damnable lance would be so agonizing. Still, any amount of pain was worth bearing if it meant Kitiara could be welcomed back to Krynn. She had to return, had to be made whole. Khellendros had made a pledge to her—out of loyalty and respect—long ago when she was his partner. He had promised that he would keep her safe. Then one day, when she strayed from his side, she was slain. A grieving Khellendros searched and searched for her spirit, eventually finding it in The Gray. He would keep his pledge by rescuing her from that faraway dimension. There was no one to stop him—Palin and his friends were now dead. And, best of all, Malystryx the Red and the other overlords were oblivious to his ultimate goal.
He and Kitiara would be reunited. Soon. But first Khellendros had to endure this hellish pain all the way back to his lair.
“Khellendros thinks we’re dead,” Rig said. The dark-skinned mariner glanced up, peering in the direction in which the great blue overlord had disappeared. He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and breathed a sigh of relief.
“I certainly hope he thinks that. Otherwise he’ll come back and try again. And I wouldn’t want him to try again ’cause I don’t think there’d be any trying about it.” The strained, high-pitched voice belonged to Blister, a middle-aged kender who was ambling toward the mariner. “Nope. No trying to it at all in my opinion.” Her gnarled hands were busy—one tugging at Jasper’s sleeve, the other fiddling with her frazzled blonde braid. “Y’see, if he did come back and try again... well... I just have this feeling that he’d be pretty darn successful. I’m kind of surprised to be living and breathing. He’s certainly a very big dragon. I never saw one so big. Did you see his teeth? Big teeth, too.” She paused, her face contorting into a puzzled expression. “So what happened? How’d we escape?”
“Palin,” Rig supplied the answer.
“Oh. What did you do?” Blister turned her attention on Palin Majere.
The sorcerer brushed a long strand of graying hair out of his eyes. “A spell,” he said softly. He hadn’t the energy to speak louder. His shoulders stooped, he leaned against Rig, and sucked a deep breath of damp air into his lungs. The climactic enchantment had taken the last of his resources. He was the most powerful sorcerer on Krynn and one of the few survivors of the Battle of the Rift in the Abyss. But at the moment he felt far from mighty. He was weak, vulnerable, his spirit as ravaged as his mud-stained tunic and torn leggings.