“No!” This was fairly a shriek. “This must not, will not be allowed to happen! Or perhaps... ” A thought. “What if I were to seduce her? Would that not put her even more in my power?” The thought was more than tempting, it brought such a rush of desire to the young man that his entire body shook.
But the cold and calculating, logical part of Raistlin’s mind took over. “What do you know of lovemaking?” he asked himself with a sneer. “Of seduction? In this, you are a child, more stupid than your behemoth of a brother.”
Memories of his youth came back to him in a flood. Frail and sickly, noted for his biting sarcasm and his sly ways, Raistlin had certainly never attracted the attention of women, not like his handsome brother. Absorbed, obsessed by his studies of magic, he had not felt the loss—much. Oh, once he had experimented. One of Caramon’s girlfriends, bored by easy con quest, thought the big man’s twin brother might prove more interesting. Goaded by his brother’s gibes and those of his fellows, Raistlin had given way to her coarse overtures. It had been a disappointing experience for both of them. The girl returned gratefully to Caramon’s arms. For Raistlin, it had simply proved what he had long suspected—that he found true ecstasy only in his magic.
But this body—younger, stronger, more like his brother’s—ached with a passion he had never before experienced. Yet he could not give way to it. “I would end up destroying myself”—he saw with cold clarity—“and, far from furthering my objective, might well harm it. She is virgin, pure in mind and body. That purity is her strength. I need it tarnished, but I need it intact.”
Having firmly resolved this and being long experienced in the practice of exerting strict mental control over his emotions, the young mage relaxed and sat back in his chair, letting weariness sweep over him. The fire died low, his eyes closed in the rest that would renew his flagging power.
But, before he drifted off to sleep, still sitting in the chair, he saw once more, with unwanted vividness, a single tear glistening in the moonlight.
The Night of Doom continued. An acolyte was awakened from a sound sleep and told to report to Quarath. He found the elven cleric sitting in his chambers.
“Did you send for me, my lord?” the acolyte asked, attempting to stifle a yawn. He looked sleepy and rumpled. Indeed, his outer robes had been put on backward in his haste to answer the summons that had come so late in the night.
“What is the meaning of this report?” Quarath demanded, tapping at a piece of paper on his desk.
The acolyte bent over to look, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes enough to make the writing coherent.
“Oh, that,” he said after a moment. “Just what it says, my lord.”
“That Fistandantilus was not responsible for the death of my slave? I find that very difficult to believe.”
“Nonetheless, my lord, you may question the dwarf yourself. He confessed—after a great deal of monetary persuasion—that he had in reality been hired by the lord named there, who was apparently incensed at the church’s takeover of his holdings on the outskirts of the city.”
“I know what he’s incensed about!” Quarath snapped. “And killing my slave would be just like Onygion—sneaky and underhanded. He doesn’t dare face me directly.”
Quarath sat, musing. “Then why did that big slave commit the deed?” he asked suddenly, giving the acolyte a shrewd glance.
“The dwarf stated that this was something arranged privately between himself and Fistandantilus. Apparently the first ‘job’ of this nature that came his way was to be given to the slave, Caramon.”
“That wasn’t in the report,” Quarath said, eyeing the young man sternly.
“No,” the acolyte admitted, flushing. “I-I really don’t like putting anything about... the magic-user... down in writing. Anything like that, where he might read it—”
“No, I don’t suppose I blame you,” Quarath muttered. “Very well, you may go.”
The acolyte nodded, bowed, and returned thankfully to his bed.
Quarath did not go to his bed for long hours, however, but sat in his study, going over and over the report. Then, he sighed. “I am becoming as bad as the Kingpriest, jumping at shadows that aren’t there. If Fistandantilus wanted to do away with me, he could manage it within seconds. I should have realized—this is not his style.” He rose to his feet, finally. “Still, he was with her tonight. I wonder what that means? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the man is more human than I would have supposed. Certainly the body he has appeared in this time is better than those he usually dredges up.”
The elf smiled grimly to himself as he straightened his desk and filed the report away carefully. ‘Yule is approaching. I will put this from my mind until the holiday season is past. After all, the time is fast coming when the Kingpriest will call upon the gods to eradicate evil from the face of Krynn. That will sweep this Fistandantilus and those who follow him back into the darkness which spawned them.”
He yawned, then, and stretched. “But I’ll take care of Lord Onygion first.”
The Night of Doom was nearly ended. Morning lit the sky as Caramon lay in his cell, staring into the gray light. Tomorrow was another game, his first since the “accident.”
Life had not been pleasant for the big warrior these last few days. Nothing had changed outwardly. The other gladiators were old campaigners, most of them, long accustomed to the ways of the Game.
“It is not a bad system,” Pheragas said with a shrug when Caramon confronted him the day after his return from the Temple. “Certainly better than a thousand men killing each other on the fields of battle. Here, if one nobleman feels offended by another, their feud is handled secretly, in private, to the satisfaction of all.”
“Except the innocent man who dies for a cause he doesn’t care about or understand!” Caramon said angrily.
“Don’t be such a baby!” Kiiri snorted, polishing one of her collapsible daggers. “By your own account, you did some mercenary work. Did you understand or care about the cause then? Didn’t you fight and kill because you were being well paid? Would you have fought if you weren’t? I don’t see the difference.”
“The difference is I had a choice!” Caramon responded, scowling. “And I knew the cause I fought for! I never would have fought for anyone I didn’t believe was in the right! No matter how much money they paid me! My brother felt the same. He and I—” Caramon abruptly fell silent.
Kiiri looked at him strangely, then shook her head with a grin. “Besides,” she added lightly, “it adds spice, an edge of real tension. You’ll fight better from now on. You’ll see.”
Thinking of this conversation as he lay in the darkness, Caramon tried to reason it out in his slow, methodical fashion.
Maybe Kiiri and Pheragas were correct, maybe he was being a baby, crying because the bright, glittering toy he had enjoyed playing with suddenly cut him. But—looking at it every way possible—he still couldn’t believe it was right. A man deserved a choice, to choose his own way to live, his own way to die. No one else had the right to determine that for him.
And then, in the predawn, a crushing weight seemed to fall on Caramon. He sat up, leaning on one elbow, staring unseeing into the gray cell. If that was true, if every man deserved a choice, then what about his brother’? Raistlin had made his choice—to walk the ways of night instead of day. Did Caramon have the right to drag his brother from those paths?
His mind went back to those days he had unwittingly recalled when talking to Kiiri and Pheragas—those days right before the Test, those days that had been the happiest in his life—the days of mercenary work with his brother.