He felt his neck. Yes, the iron collar was still there—the collar they had put on him when he was sold as a slave. Continuing to grope around in the darkness, Tas tripped over something. Reaching down, he cut himself on a something sharp.
“Caramon’s sword!” he said, feeling the hilt. “I remember. I found it on the floor. And that means,” said Tas with growing outrage, “that they didn’t even bury me! They just left my body where it was! I’m in the basement of a ruined Temple.” Brooding, he sucked his bleeding finger. A sudden thought occurred to him. “And I suppose they intend for me to walk to wherever it is I’m going in the Afterlife. They don’t even provide transportation! This is really the last straw!”
He raised his voice to a shout. “Look!” he said, shaking his small fist. “I want to talk to whoever’s in charge!”
But there was no sound.
“No light,” Tas grumbled, falling over something else. “Stuck down in the bottom of a ruined temple—dead! Probably at the bottom of the Blood Sea of Istar... . Say,” he said, pausing to think, “maybe I’ll meet some sea elves, like Tanis told me about. But, no, I forgot”—he sighed—“I’m dead, and you can’t, as far as I’m able to understand, meet people after you’re dead. Unless you’re an undead, like Lord Soth.” The kender cheered up considerably. “I wonder how you get that job? I’ll ask. Being a death knight must be quite exciting. But, first, I’ve got to find out where I’m supposed to be and why I’m not there!”
Picking himself up again, Tas managed to make his way to what he figured was probably the front of the room beneath the Temple. He was thinking about the Blood Sea of Istar and wondering why there wasn’t more water about when something else suddenly occurred to him.
“Oh, dear!” he muttered. “The Temple didn’t go into the Blood Sea! It went to Neraka! I was in the Temple, in fact, when I defeated the Queen of Darkness.”
Tas came to a doorway—he could tell by feeling the frame and peered out into the darkness that was so very dark.
“Neraka, huh,” he said, wondering if that was better or worse than being at the bottom of an ocean.
Cautiously, he took a step forward and felt something beneath his foot. Reaching down, his small hand closed over—“A torch! It must have been the one over the doorway. Now, somewhere in here, I’ve got a tinderbox—” Rummaging through several pouches, he came up with it at last.
“Strange,” he said, glancing about the corridor as the torch flared to light. “It looks just like it did when I left it—all broken and crumbled after the earthquake. You’d think the Queen would have tidied up a bit by now. I don’t remember it being in such a mess when I was in it in Neraka. I wonder which is the way out.”
He looked back toward the stairs he had come down in his search for Crysania and Raistlin. Vivid memories of the walls cracking and columns falling came to his mind. “That’s no good, that’s for sure,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Ouch, that hurts.” He put his hand to his forehead. “But that was the only way out, I seem to recall.” He sighed, feeling a bit low for a moment. But his kender cheerfulness soon surfaced. “There sure are a lot of cracks in the walls, though. Perhaps something’s opened up.”
Walking slowly, mindful of the pain in his head and his ribs, Tas stepped out into the corridor. He carefully checked out each wall without seeing anything promising until he reached the very end of the hall. Here he discovered a very large crack in the marble that, unlike the others, made an opening deeper than Tas’s torchlight could illuminate.
No one but a kender could have squeezed into that crack, and, even for Tas, it was a tight fit, forcing him to rearrange all his pouches and slide through sideways.
“All I can say is—being dead is certainly a lot of bother!” he muttered, squeezing through the crack and ripping a hole in his blue leggings.
Matters didn’t improve. One of his pouches got hung up on a rock, and he had to stop and tug at it until it was finally freed. Then the crack got so very narrow he wasn’t at all certain he would make it. Taking off all his pouches, he held them and the torch over his head and, after holding his breath and tearing his shirt, he gave a final wiggle and managed to pop through. By this time, however, he was aching, hot, sweaty, and in a bad mood.
“I always wondered why people objected to dying,” he said, wiping his face. “Now I know!”
Pausing to catch his breath and rearrange his pouches, the kender was immensely cheered to see light at the far end of the crack. Flashing his torch around, he discovered that the crack was getting wider, so—after a moment—he went on his way and soon reached the end—the source of the light.
Reaching the opening, Tas peered out, drew a deep breath, and said, “Now this is more what I had in mind!”
The landscape was certainly like nothing he had ever seen before in his life. It was flat and barren, stretching on and on into a vast, empty sky that was lit with a strange glow, as if the sun had just set or a fire burned in the distance. But the whole sky was that strange color, even above him. And yet, for all the brightness, things around him were very dark. The land seemed to have been cut out of black paper and pasted down over the eerie-looking sky. And the sky itself was empty—no sun, no moons, no stars. Nothing.
Tas took a cautious step or two forward. The ground felt no different from any other ground, even though—as he walked on it—he noticed that it took on the same color as the sky. Looking up, he saw that, in the distance, it turned black again. After a few more steps, he stopped to look behind him at the ruins of the great Temple.
“Great Reorx’s beard!” Tas gasped, nearly dropping his torch.
There was nothing behind him! Wherever it was he had come from was gone! The kender turned around in a complete circle. Nothing ahead of him, nothing behind him, nothing in any direction he looked.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot’s heart sank right down to the bottom of his green shoes and stayed there, refusing to be comforted. This was, without a doubt, the most boring place he’d ever seen in his entire existence)
“This can’t be the Afterlife,” the kender said miserably. “This can’t be right) There must be some mistake. Hey, wait a minute! I’m supposed to meet Flint here! Fizban said so and Fizban may have been a bit muddled about other things, but he didn’t sound muddled about that!
“Let’s see—how did that go? There was a big tree, a beautiful tree, and beneath it sat a grumbling, old dwarf, carving wood and—Hey! There’s the tree) Now, where did that come from?”
The kender blinked in astonishment. Right ahead of him, where nothing had been just a moment before, he now saw a large tree.
“Not exactly my idea of a beautiful tree,” Tas muttered, walking toward it, noticing-as he did so—that the ground had developed a curious habit of trying to slide out from under his feet. “But then, Fizban had odd taste and so, come to think of it, did Flint.”
He drew nearer the tree, which was black—like everything else—and twisted and hunched over like a witch he’d seen once. It had no leaves on it. “That thing’s been dead at least a hundred years!”
Tas sniffed. “If Flint thinks I’m going to spend my After-life sitting under a dead tree with him, he’s got another think coming. I—Hey, Flint!” The kender cried out, coming up to the tree and peering around. “Flint? Where are you? I—Oh, there you are,” he said, seeing a short, bearded figure sitting on the ground on the other side of the tree. “Fizban told me I’d find you here. I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me! I—”
The kender came round the tree, then stopped short. “Say,” he cried angrily, “you’re not Flint! Who—Arack!”
Tas staggered backward as the dwarf who had been the Master of the Games in Istar suddenly turned his head and looked at him with such an evil grin on his twisted face that the kender felt his blood run cold—an unusual sensation; he couldn’t remember ever experiencing it before. But before he had time to enjoy it, the dwarf leaped to his feet and, with a vicious snarl, rushed at the kender.