Lambert - Warring the Good Warfare

DRAGONLANCE TALES II Volume Three THE WAR OF THE LANCE TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. OCR'ed by Alligator croc@aha.ru Introduction The queen of Darkness SEEKS TO REENTER the world. Her minions of evil once more grow strong and powerful. Dragons return to Krynn as war sweeps across the land. Every person is called upon to face the evil.

Some rise to the challenge. Some fall. But each is, in his or her own way, a hero. Michael Williams delves into the soul of the tortured king of Silvanesti in the epic poem, "Lorac." "Raistlin and the Knight of Solamnia" by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman tells how the young mage helped a stern knight learn a hard lesson. (Originally published in DRAGON(R) Magazine, Issue 154, February 1990.) Roger Moore writes about the vengeful quest of a revenant in "Dead on Target." Mara, Queen of Thieves, sneaks into Mountain Nevermind in search of "War Machines" by Nick O'Donohoe. Dan Parkinson continues the misadventures of the Bulp clan, as those intrepid gully dwarves search for "The Promised Place." Jeff Grubb relates (be warned!) a gnome story in "Clockwork Hero." "The Night Wolf" by Nancy Varian Berberick is a tale of three friends who share a dark and deadly secret.

Mark Anthony's "The Potion Sellers" have a bitter pill of their own to swallow when the wrong people come to believe in their fake cure-alls. Richard Knaak writes the story of an evil priest of Chemosh, trying to recover dread magical artifacts from beneath the Blood Sea, in "The Hand That Feeds." Foryth Teal, valiant scribe of Astinus, returns to pro vide us with an exciting account of "The Vingaard Campaign" by Douglas Niles. And finally, Tasslehoff Burrfoot tells "The Story That Tasslehoff Promised He Would Never, Ever, Ever Tell" to the kender's good friends, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. We hope you are enjoying our return to Krynn as much as we are. Thanks to all of you for your support. You are the ones who have made this return journey pos sible.

We look forward to traveling with you again in the future. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman Lorac Michael Williams The country of thought is a pathless forest, is an intricate night of redoubling green, where the best and the worst entangle and scatter like distant light on the face of an emerald like a spark on the breast of the fallen seas. And yes, it is always like this, for that country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter your stories, no matter the rumors of legend and magic that illumine you through the curtain of years, you come to believe in the web of yourself that history twines in the veins of your fingers, that it knits all purpose, all pardon and injury, recovers the lapsed and plausible blood, until finally, in the midst of believing, you contrive the story out of the rumors, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, and then you will say, beyond truth and belief, THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS, FOR ONCE AND AT LAST WHAT IT ALWAYS MEANT, NO MORE THAN I KNEW FROM THE WORLD'S BEGINNING IS ALL THAT IT MEANS FOREVER. Perhaps it was love in the towers of thought, in the haunts of High Sorcery, in the towering doctrine of moon and spell and convergence: where the dragons dispersed and the Kingpriest hovered in the blind riots of dogma and piety. Perhaps it was love in the breathing radius, in the forest of crystal where thought tunneled into five vanishing countries, forging the five stones at Istar, at Wayreth, in lofted Palanthas. Perhaps it was love but more likely thought in the two vanished towers, as the rioting stones dwindled to four, then three, three like the moons in a fracturing orbit, and the towers at Istar and gabled Palanthas echoed and shuddered in the forgotten language, hollow and cold with ancient departures, as high on their turrets the spiders walked, and the moth and the rust corrupted the dream of days.

II But before the towers fell to abandonment, before the fire, the incense of destruction, when the Tower at Istar blossomed in magic and durable light, the parapets shone in the lonely notions of Lorac Caladon, Speaker of Stars. Restless in Silvanost, drawn by cold light, by the intricate forest of magic, to the North he came, to glittering Istar where the tests of High Sorcery awaited his judgment, his ordained mathematics, and the first test past, and the second surmounted, he stood as if satisfied high on the parapets in doubtful, striated light, the vaunt of his intellect over the globe of the city, where the green luminescence of the dangered orb called to him out of the Tower's heart. In the pathless forest at the end of all centuries, he would hear the song as it tumbled from thought into faceted memory, singing, perpetually singing, AFTER THE SECOND THERE IS NO OTHER. O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU SPEAKER OF SUNS AND THE SONG OF THE ORB IS THE SONG OF YOUR MIND IN THIS ANCIENT TOWER HOLLOW AND LOVELESS WITH LONG DEPARTURES. O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU SPEAKER OF SUNS BUT I SHALL LIE HERE the orb said, shimmering AS HISTORY FOLDS IN THESE FLOURISHING WALLS AS THE TOWER CRUMBLES AND WITH IT THE MIND THE FIRST HIGH BATTLEMENTS THE HOUSE OF THE GODS BUT I SHALL LIE HERE AS THE FOREST WITHERS AS THE PLAINS DESCEND INTO WINTER AND NOTHING UNLESS THE SONG OF YOUR THOUGHTS WHICH IS EVERYTHING, IS THE WORLD, CONTROLS AND SUBDUES AND INFORMS THE MYSTERY. TAKE ME TO SILVANOST SPEAKER OF SUNS, TAKE ME TO FREEDOM TO THE COUNTRY OF GREEN ON GREEN.

Perhaps it was love in the crystal heart, in the refraction of light and beguiling light, love meeting love in his long belief, in dire mathematics, in the mapped parabola of the trining moons, but there in the Tower six reasons converged the hand of the prophet the nesting heart of his will the hurdling thought the summoning crystal and always the ruinous moment, all of them settling in grim alignment, the orb the sixth like a heart in his hand, like a fluttering light a firebrand he carried to ignited Silvanost in the numbered days. I AM BRINGING THEM FIRE, he said to himself, I AM BRINGING THEM LIGHT IN THE OLD GODS' STORY. I AM THE FIRST I WILL SAVE THEM IN THE RISING EARTH I WILL SAVE THEM AND THE OLD WORLD PIVOTS AWAY FROM MY GUIDING HAND. So he said to himself, and the shapeless horizon shaded to green and redoubling green as out of his last dreams arose Silvanesti, tangible, fractured in light. III And outside the forest the world collapsed, a mountain of fire crashed like a comet through jewelled Istar, through the endless city, and the Tower, unmanned and unhouseled, split like a dry stalk in the midst of the ruinous flames, and out of the valleys the mountains erupted, the seas poured forever into the graves of mountains, the long deserts sighed on abandoned floors of the seas, and the highways of Krynn descended into the paths of the dead. As hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, as the mountains were burning, as the sea became blood as above and below us the heavens were scattered, as locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet, Silvanost floated on islands of thought, immaculate memory gabled in cloud and dreaming, untouched by the fire, by the shocks of the Rending, and from tower to tower from the Tower of Sorcery down to the Tower of Stars, drowsy in thinking, Lorac imagined an impossible dream of salvation, a country bartered in magic, renewed in his mind to a paradise won in a ranging study.

And so it appeared in the orb, in the waking hours, in the suddenly secret lodging of light as the globe lay buried, masked and unfabled in the Tower of Stars, the ancestral tower of Speakers, of Silvanost, buried for centuries. While the continent burned and the people of Qualinost wandered through ash and the outer darkness, Silvanost floated at the edge of their sight, absent and glorious, down to the edge of their dreams. Lorac watched from the Tower of Stars, from the heart of the crystal, his eye on the face of the damaged world like a rumor of history he was forgetting lost in the fathomless maze of the orb. But often at night when the senses faltered and the polished country altered and coiled, the shape of the dream was the Speaker's reflection: The estranging trees were nests of daggers, the streams black and clotted under a silent moon that mourned for the day and the fierce definition of sunlight and knowledge where the trees and towns were named and numbered and always, implacably intended and purposed, far from the tangle of nightmare, the shadow and weave of the forest that wrangled to light in the dreams of Lorac, invading the day with the glitter of flint, subverting the pale and anonymous sun. IV Then to the North an evil arose in the cloud-wracked skies, for the Dragon Highlords sent sword and messenger, firebrand and word to the Tower of Stars, to rapt Silvanesti, to the dwindling porches of the elf king's ear, promising peace and the forest's asylum in the discord of armies, promising Silvanost free in exchange for the promise of silence, inaction, for a nodding head on the Green Throne. And Lorac agreed, his eye on the hooded orb, where miraculous silence promised a blessing of spears, an end to all promise, the dragons by summer.