kender jack-knifed over, nearly wrapping himself around the thief's ankle. He was furious, but not so furious that he didn't take good aim when he bit. His teeth clamped on the man's leg above his boot and it took Staag to pull him off.
Tigo roared. 'Hold him while I rip the belly out of him!'
Keli screamed protest, struggling against his bonds.
'Go on,' Tas taunted. 'Where will you be then, you brain-sizzled, hook-handed ass? Stranded, that's where you'll be! You haven't a drunk's idea where you are now!'
Tigo would happily have crimsoned the earth with the kender's blood, but Staag had no appetite for killing their guide. Moving faster than Keli thought any goblin could, he whisked the kender away and threw him down next to Keli.
'Keep your mouth shut, kender,' he hissed. 'I won't be able to keep him off you next time.'
Tas choked, gasped for air, and coughed. Keli shrugged himself closer to the kender and nudged him with his shoulder.
'You all right?'
Tas muttered something into the dirt.
'What?'
'I want my dagger, my hoopak, a rock, anything!'
Keli braced his own shoulder against the kender's, offering companionship, commiseration, comfort. 'Maybe,' he whispered, more for Tas's sake than because he believed, 'maybe your friends will find us soon.'
Merciless summer sun glared from the hard blue sky, baked the ground, radiated from the humped clusters of rocks. Tanis wiped sweat from his eyes with the heel of his hand and bent to retrieve the one thing Flint had missed: a fog-colored wing feather from one of the gray swans of Cristyne.
Because a cut through the forest from Long Ridge would take a day off their journey to Karsa, the half-elf and his friends had bidden the bride and her new husband farewell the night before and struck south and east at first light. Runne would have kept them longer, but Flint pleaded business and promised her that he would see her again on his way back north.
'I don't think,' he told Tanis wryly, 'that she's going to miss me or anyone for a time.'
Tanis, remembering the hard poke in the ribs Caramon had earned for himself with a similar remark, had offered only a noncommittal smile. It seemed that where Runne was concerned some things could only be said avuncularly.
Now, the darkness bordering the edges of those memories, the half-elf absently stroked the edge of the large gray feather with his thumb. Tas had been here recently.
Or his pouches had. And those had been ruthlessly emptied, their contents carelessly scattered. The hot breeze carried Caramon's deep voice from up the trail and Sturm's answer. Tanis knew by their tones that they had found no sign of either struggle or a body. He left the underbrush and joined Flint where he knelt in the path.
'One more thing, Flint.'
The old dwarf took the feather without looking and added it to the pile of oddly assorted objects to be stuffed with hard, angry motions into Tas's pouches.
A blade-broken dagger, a blue earthenware ink pot, a little carved tinderbox, a copper belt buckle that Caramon had lost somehow and which Tas would swear he'd always meant to return, a soft cloth the color of dawn's rose, a bundle of the stiff green feathers Tanis liked best for fletching his arrows… all of these kender- treasures and more had been discarded as so much junk.
Flint's anger might seem, from his tight-lipped muttering, to be directed against a packrat of a kender. Tanis knew the old dwarf better than that.
'We'll find him, Flint.'
Flint still did not look up, but drew the thong tight on the last of the kender's pouches. 'Did you find his map case?'
'No.'
'Good. I wish whoever took it the joy of trying to find his way with those maps! Hardly one of them is worth the parchment it's penned on.'
Tanis found a smile. Few of Tas's maps were any good at all without his interpretation and translation. And those were never the same twice.
'We'll not make Karsa any time soon now, Flint.'
'Aye,' Flint grumbled. 'And you can be sure that I'll take it out of that rascally kender's hide when we finally catch up with him, too.'
Tanis thought the threat lacked conviction.
Silent as a shadow moving in the breeze, Raistlin came up beside them. 'If someone took the map case, and there is nothing to show that the kender was killed here, it would not be amiss to consider that the case, Tas, and whoever waylaid him are still together. The trail is rocky up ahead, Tanis.'
'Tracks?'
'None. But there is something else.' Raistlin nodded toward a small grouping of boulders. 'Camp signs. Perhaps you should see them.'
Tanis moved as though to signal Flint to join them, but the young mage shook his head. Fear, like a dark thread of night, crawled through Tanis's belly.
The campfire had been small, ringed by rocks. Several yards beyond them was a flat-sided boulder. On the near side of the boulder, a handspan from the ground, was amark no larger than a kender's fist. Though it was rough sketched in blood, Tanis recognized the sign at once: a stylized anvil bisected by a dwarven F rune. Flint's plate mark.
'Tas?'
'Who else would leave that mark?' Raistlin touched the rusty brown blood. 'It was fresh not long ago.'
Both turned at the sound of an approach. Flint stood at Tanis's elbow.
'Wretched kender!' The old dwarf clenched his fist. 'Vanishing out from under our noses and getting himself into Reorx only knows what kind of trouble!' He stared for a long time at the device which had always marked his best and most beautiful work, sketched now in dark blood on the stone. It was as though he'd never seen the mark before and sought now to memorize it.
Tanis said nothing, did not want to speculate at all now. Raistlin it was who spoke, and when he moved his shadow fell between Flint and the mark.
'The blood is fresh, Flint, not a day old. He's still alive.' The young mage looked from one of his friends to the other. 'And, by the look of this, hoping that we're on his trail. We'd best waste no time in wondering now.'
Tanis did wonder: He wondered if they were too late.
The sound of the waterfall might have been the angry roar of some outraged god. Racing and tumbling, the river threw itself from the cliff nearly two hundred feet above and slid in foaming white sheets only to vanish a third of the way down. Then, like some conjurer's trick, the falling river reappeared from a spout after twenty-five feet of sheer, burnished cliff face and finished its headlong dash into the narrow lake.
The mist was as thick as rain on the shore and as drenching. Though Keli and Tas were tied to the base of a thin spire of rock, all the thirst and heat of the day seemed to vanish beneath the soothing kiss of the vapor.
Keli sidled as close to Tas as he could. He sent a quick glance over his shoulder, assured himself that Tigo and Staag were well occupied refilling their water flasks, and let a long, gusty breath speak of the almost solemn wonder that filled him at the sight of this wild and glorious falls.
'You knew,' he whispered, 'you knew this was here.'
'Oh, yes. I've been here before.' Tas frowned a little, then shrugged. 'Although it's not exactly where it's supposed to be.'
'What?'
'Well — it isn't the place Flint knows. The trail looked like the one to there. But I guess it wasn't. This must be' — he squinted at the setting sun — 'sort of east of it. Or north. Or — »
Keli's heart sank and with it any hope he might have nourished for rescue. 'They're not coming,' he said bleakly.
'Oh, yes, they are. It — just might take them a little longer to get here. But that's all right. Things will work out if you stick with me.' Tas winked, something Keli was beginning to recognize as a sign that more trouble was
