Love And War (14 page)

Then after a time, when the sun was nearly gone and they were still waiting - for
something - he heard the old dwarf draw a sharp, hard breath. “He's lost his mind.” The words hardly matched the breathless awe, the chilled amazement, of Flint's tone. “By Reorx's forge, if that kender
ever had a mind to lose, he's lost it now. Tanis! Look!”

Tanis raised his head from his drawn-up knees, looked to where Flint pointed. Impossible,
the half-elf thought dully, he's dead, drowned.

“Impossible” was not a word one could apply to a kender's resourcefulness with any hope of
accuracy. Tas - topknot flying in the wind from the falls, arms spread for balance -
negotiated a natural bridge no wider than the span of two hands across the cascade's spout
high above the lake. Even as Tanis watched, the kender turned his head as though speaking
to the one who followed him on hands and knees.

Tanis scrambled to his feet and ran out to the edge of the shore. Sturm and Caramon joined
him, squinting up into the last light of the day.

“Aye,” Sturm muttered. “And there's that hook-handed villain who escaped me in the lake!
How did they GET there?” He looked around wildly as though seeking a way to get to the
arch above the falls. There was only the lake, and he would have made that swim again.

- Tanis held him back. “You'd never get there in time, Sturm.”

“Where does he go after he gets across? There's nothing but cliff and rock!”

Tanis shook his head. “Nowhere,” he whispered. He turned away from the lake and saw
Raistlin standing above him, looking into the rainbow dance of the falls' mist. The young
mage smiled, his light eyes eager and sharp.

“Raistlin, can you help him?”

The mage nodded slowly, thoughtfully, his eyes still on the jeweled mist and the last
shafts of sunlight. “I think I can. He has a mountain climber's skill, our little friend,
and it is a good thing he does: he's going to need it.”

Stone bit sharply into Keli's hands. Stalled and frozen in the middle of the narrow rock
span, he dared not look down, could not look back.

Across the arch Tigo crouched, a lean and hungry predator waiting for his prey to realize
that it was trapped, caught. There was no need for him to venture on the bridge, no need
to pursue farther. At last he would have his murderous revenge!

Across the bridge, his back to the spray-soaked wall Tas shouted, “Keli! Come on!” “I - I can't - I can't - ” Keli could not move, it was all he could do to speak. “You have to! You can't stay there! Pretend you're a spider! Spiders don't ever fall! Come on! It'll be fun!” Fun! Keli swallowed dryly and
tried hard to be a spider, wishing all the while he were a bird instead. Hand over hand, he crawled across
the slick stone bridge, swearing futile boy's oaths under his breath. Fun!

“That's it!” Tas called. “I told you it would be fun!”

Tigo, across the span, laughed. His laughter was ghostly, only faintly heard above the
roar of the water. Keli ignored him, concentrated on Tas and the bridge.

“Come on, Keli, a little more! You've almost got it! Ever do anything as much fun as this?”

Keli groaned and shook his head. He regretted that at once. The bridge seemed to sway and
rock under him. “No,” he panted, staring at his white knuckles. “Nothing like this!”

Hand to hand, knee to knee, Keli crept, trying not to give in to black-winged vertigo,
wishing it weren't so hard to breathe.

After what seemed a lifetime of crawling, Keli's fingers touched the kender's, cold and
slick. Tas leaned a little forward to grasp a wrist, then an arm. “Up now, on your feet.
I've got you.”

Keli gained his feet, wobbled a little, and then straightened.

“That's right. Now just edge over here. We can both fit on this ledge. Probably.”

Probably! “Crazy as a kender” was an expression Keli had heard from time to time. He used
to think he knew what it meant. Now he was certain. Keli dragged up every bit of strength
he had and lurched hard against the wall. He pressed his face to the wet, black stone,
shuddering. “Now where?”

Tas attacked the answer obliquely. “We can't go back, but he's not coming on, either.”

“What, then?” “We can always wait.” Out over the lake the jeweled and dazzling mists of sunset were gone. On the far shore twilight's purple shadows gathered, the outriders of
the night.

“It would be nice,” Keli said tightly, “if we could fly.”

“Sure would,” Tas agreed, “and a lot better than being stuck up here”

Keli wanted to wail. He clamped his back teeth hard and whispered, “Then - but - why are we out here? I thought you knew a way OUT of this
mess!”

Tas shrugged. “I didn't think he'd follow us. I thought he was drowned in the lake. Twice.”

Across the arch Tigo sat, his back against the stone, patient as inevitable doom. Keli
couldn't look at him without feeling sick, without feeling, in imagination, the rip of his
grapnel hand and the long, shattering fall to the water below.

Light, the faint and fading gold of sunset, the silver of approaching twilight, danced up
from the black surface of the lake and came together, shining in the gloaming like hope
promised.

Far below, the red-haired bowman Tas called Tanis and one of the young men who had been in
the lake stood on the shore. The other was in the water again and swimming hard toward the
falls. The dwarf and the slim young man moved quickly to the north.

“Tas, what are they doing?”

“Something, they're up to something. Look! Tanis sees us! He's pointing.” The kender
leaned so far out to see that Keli had to catch him back by his belt.

“Don't DO that!”

Clearly the fact that he'd almost tumbled to his death didn't bother the kender at all. He
laughed, and the sound of his glee skirled high above the roar of the falls.

“Look, Keli! Raistlin's doing something to the air!” Tas thumped the boy's shoulder
joyfully, nearly knocking him from his tenuous perch. “I don't know what he's up to, I
usually don't, hardly anyone ever does. But it's always magic, and it's always worth
waiting for.”

Clinging like a soaked bat to the wall, Keli swallowed his nausea. Whether or not what the
mage was up to was indeed worth waiting for the boy couldn't say, but he didn't see that
they had much choice.

Raistlin's hands moved, deft and certain, in magic's dance. He gathered translucent
rainbows and gemmed mist, separated their shimmering strands, and wove them swiftly, one
around the other, into a rope of gleaming enchantment.

It grew quickly, the magic rope, and leaped away from the young mage's hands, directed and
sped upon its way by will and spell. Out across the black surface of the water it flew,
with the grace of a hawk rising, with the certainty of one of Tanis's well-drawn arrows
speeding to its mark.

Sturm leaped into the lake, cutting through the icy water with powerful strokes. By the time he reached Caramon, the shining line had passed
well over their heads, flying toward the arch and Tas's outstretched hand. On the shore
Flint shouted, his voice rising high in triumph, ending on an oddly broken note, a cry of
warning.

Tigo was halfway across the bridge, the hook that passed for a hand glittering balefully
in the fading light.

Tas stepped in front of Keli and wound the shimmering rope around the boy's hands. “We'll
go together. It'll hold, I swear it. Just slide right down. It won't burn your hands - you
can hardly feel it.”

Keli eyed the water, then Tigo advancing slowly across the arch. “Tas, it's not a rope -
it's LIGHT AND AIR! It can't hold us!”

“Oh, sure it will. It's Raistlin's magic.” Tas cocked his head as though he'd had a sudden
thought. “You're worrying again, are you?”

“Worrying?” Keli gasped. “Tas, I'm so afraid I can't even think!”

“But it'll hold. I TOLD you: it's magic. And Raistlin does the best magic I've ever seen.
He'd never let you fall.”

“Tas, the rope's not real!”

“It IS real! But - well - look! Down in the lake. There's Caramon and Sturm - Did I tell
you that Sturm wants to be a knight? Like your father. He'll be a good one, too. He knows
that solemn old Code and Measure like he made 'em up himself, and - ”

“TAS!”

“Well, right. So if you do fall - which you won't - they will get you. You'll be all
right. Now let's go or we're going to have an appointment with Tigo real soon!”

That last, more than any of Tas's assurances, decided Keli. He grasped the rope, silver
and gold, woven of magic and light. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, sucked in a lungful
of air, and left the ledge.

Tas followed.

Behind them Tigo raged, a beast whose prey had flown, wingless, from his reach, abandoning
him to his impotent anger.

*****

The air was cool and shivery by the night-dark lake. Far over the water's black surface
stars reflected and, Keli thought, as he hunched closer to the fire, something else did too. Ghostly light and shimmer, faintly rainbowed and silver. A residue of Raistlin's
magic? The boy thought so.

None sat waking now in night's darkest hour but Keli and Tas, the half-elf Tanis, and the
dwarf Flint. The young mage had been the first asleep. Keli knew nothing of magic or its
tolls, but it was clear to him that Raistlin's light- weaving had left him drained. It
seemed to Keli that the thin young man was hardly strong enough to exert such effort
often. Or, the boy thought as he stole a covert glance at the sleeping mage, maybe he is.
Even in exhaustion something of power and strength had lighted the mage's eyes.

The mage's brother was Caramon, warrior big, with mischief dancing in his brown eyes, a
kind of magic of his own. He slept so soon after his brother that the difference could
hardly be measured. His snoring was like low thunder.

“Asleep between one bite of rabbit and the next,” Flint had growled. “We could be
witnessing the dawn of a new age of miracles.” Keli had wanted to laugh at that, but he
didn't. The old dwarf bore a forbidding look in his eyes, scowled easily and grumbled
often. Here was one who would need a wide berth.

For a time it looked as though Sturm would stay awake long enough to make good his claim
on the first watch of the night. He didn't. Likely, Keli realized, his friends knew him
well enough not to argue the point. And well enough to know that Sturm's exertions in the
lake would put him quickly to sleep.

Tanis - his red hair the color of copper in the firelight, his long elven eyes sometimes
the gray-green of leaves turned to an approaching storm, more often emerald bright -
divided his time between smoothing Flint's grumbling and listening to the endless stream
of Tas's chatter. This he did with the air of one who knows that a storm will not end
until all the thunder has rolled and all the rain has fallen.

These, then, were Tas's friends of whom he'd been so certain. Of all of them only Tanis
and Flint remained awake to hear the tale of capture and escape told in odd tandem by Keli
and Tas. Though neither, Keli thought indignantly, seemed to want to credit Tas with the
heroics Keli stoutly attributed to him. His back propped against a rock, his feet as close
to the fire as he dared put them, Keli now looked first at Flint, then at Tanis.

“If it hadn't been for Tas, Tigo would have killed me. He's a real hero.”

“Hero!” Flint laughed. “That one? Aye, lad, and I'm Reorx's forgemaster!“ ”He IS,” Keli declared stoutly. Tanis tried, for the sake of Keli's
rising anger, to swallow his own laughter. He glanced at Tas crouched before the fire. The kenders dignity
was not in the least disturbed by Flint's customary derision.

“He saved my life,” Keli insisted. “He got those two good and lost, found the caves behind
the falls, and the stairs that led up to the top. I'D never have known about the caves or
the stairs or the bridge.”

Flint shook his head. “I don't suppose Tanis's tracking or Raistlin's light-weaving had
anything to do with the fact that you're here and safe, lad?”

Keli did not quail before the dwarf's gruff question, but defended his friend. “They did,
and I thank you all for what you've done. But - but you were almost too late. And - ” Keli
foundered, looking from one to the other. They were still amused, and Keli could not
understand what was so funny. “And - Tas DID save my life.”

“Risked your neck about a half a dozen more times than you remember or know about is more
like it,” Flint growled. "It's lucky you are that you're here to tell us the tale.

“Look at you, lad, you're half-starved despite eating a rabbit and a half, and dead tired.
Get some sleep now, you'll see the right of the matter in the morning.”

“I know the right of it,” Keli maintained. He looked to Tas, who only shrugged.

“They're a little slow,” the kender drawled. He grinned then, suddenly, and that grin was
like the flash of a comet across a midnight sky. “But they always manage to catch up.” He
stretched and yawned hugely. He shot one quick look at Flint and then winked at Keli. That
wink, always trouble for someone, sparked Keli's smile. Flint started to protest, but Tas
only grinned again. He waved an off-hand goodnight and went to find a place to sleep. As
tired as he was, Keli knew he wouldn't be able to sleep yet. He settled down more
comfortably near the fire and sighed.

After a moment Tanis said, “We'll have to get you home somehow, Keli.”

“Just back to Seven Wells would be fine,” Keli murmured. “I'm sure my horse is still there
and there is the message to be delivered to my father's friend.”

“Oh, no,” Flint rumbled. “If we let you out of our sight now, who knows what you'll get
yourself into next? Home lad, and the message can be delivered along the way.” He reached into his pack, pulled out
a block of wood, and applied his dagger's blade silently for a time. Keli would have
offered his thanks, but Tanis caught his eye and stilled him with a smile and a shake of
his head.

When Flint looked up again, he spoke not to Keli but to Tanis.