A bronze Istarian breastplate rocked pitifully on the hard ground, a helmet and a pair of white gloves not a dozen feet away.
Inanely, the sergeant reached for his sword.
A lone nightbird wheeled above, the moonlight silver on its extended wings.
Poison. Delicious poison.
The venom of ten thousand years flowed through the Dark Queen as, in her faceted, crystalline body, she stalked across the desert's edge toward the dis shy;tant fires of the Plainsmen.
She thought of the dead cavalryman with glee and relish.
Such to all, Plainsman or Istarian, who crossed her purposes. Especially the one who escaped her springjaw minion.
Such to the gods themselves who stood in her way.
In the starlit dome of the desert sky, the son of the goddess tilted into view, still invisible to the mun shy;dane eye-to human and elf, to dwarf and kender. Even the most powerful sorceries would strain to locate the black moon, for Nuitari awaited his time, eluding eye and glass and augury, the deluded fore shy;casts of Istarian astrologers.
But Takhisis could see him, of course, as he glided high overhead, obscuring bright Sirrion and Shinare in his passage.
Her son. Her dark pride.
From his birth, Nuitari had been the wedge between her and her consort, the black incident in the Age of Starbirth that drove apart Takhisis and Sargonnas before the world began.
Oh, I won that battle at the waking of time, Takhi shy;sis thought. And I shall win all battles hence.
The dark moon had been her oath, her promise to the other gods. To seal their agreement to never again make war on the face of the planet, each fam shy;ily of gods had agreed to create a child who would become blood-brother to the children created by the other families. Bound in kinship and in covenant, they would bless the world of Krynn with magic.
The silver child of Paladine and Mishakal, bright Solinari, was the first to ascend into the heavens. This eldest child showered forth a warm, beneficent magic, and the people of Paladine, the highborn elves, had lifted their arms to the descending moon shy;light. And the humans, the Youngest Born, had lifted their arms as well to the red light of Lunitari, the child born of Gilean the Book, chief god of the neu shy;tral pantheon.
Both of them sailed through the heavens now, aloft in an egg of silver and an egg of scarlet. When they hatched, the moons-husks of the gods, the ancient philosophers would call them-sailed through the skies of Krynn as refuge and home for the godlings …
And, in the binding age of the Kingpriest, their prisons.
But this was long before Istar, long before the Age of Might.
In the void above the whirling planet, Takhisis and Sargonnas had created the child. Their coupling was joyless, loveless, for already both gods had fallen away from one another into the dark abyss of themselves. In a dark cloud above the swelling Courrain, the goddess had overwhelmed her con shy;sort with a powerful magic, and forced Sargonnas to bear the child.
For a day and a night, the great scavenging god had lingered in the cloud of steam and volcanic ash, the miasma hovering sullenly over the ocean sur shy;face. Takhisis, watchful in her strange motherhood, circled the cloud and waited, as deafening cries of labor and rage burst forth from the eddying dark shy;ness.
For a day and a night and another day, she circled and waited, her hidden consort bellowing and vow shy;ing vengeance.
'Let it come,' Takhisis taunted. 'Oh, let your worst return to me, Sargonnas. I shall forego the pain and the labor, and when you have fulfilled your part…
'The spirit of the child will be mine alone.'
At sunset on the second day, as the ocean waters flamed with the setting sun, the golden egg of the Condor sailed from the cloud.
The third moon. Nuitari the gold.
She remembered it well. How the great Condor, steaming and reeking with volcanic fire, had circled over the golden egg, menacing and boding.
'No, Takhisis!' Sargonnas had challenged, for the first time defying her, setting his contemptible, smoldering form against her will and desire. 'I have borne this thing through magic and darkness and searing pain! I shall foster it, and it will be my emis shy;sary in the night sky of Krynn.'
She had not expected the rage that rose up and nearly choked her. The eastern sands of the Ansalon coastline, those rocky beaches that would in time become Mithas and Kothas, islands of minotaurs, blackened in the heat of her passing wings as she swooped and circled the despicable rebel, the trai shy;torous god and his bright, golden trophy.
'Nuitari is mine!' she shrieked in reply, and the Worldscap Mountains erupted with the first volca shy;noes. 'Mine, do you hear?' Lightning riddled the evening sky, and for the first time the forest crack shy;led, struck by the kindling heat from the heavens. 'Or I shall destroy the thing. Shell and godling and all!'
The two gods circled the golden oval, the black batwings of Takhisis whirling in narrowing circles about the matted, smoking feathers of the scavenger, who fanned the ocean air with the stench of carrion.
'You would not destroy the godling,' Sargonnas croaked, fire and sunlight brindling over his mottled apterium. 'Not when you could master him!'
'You contemptible parasite!' spat the goddess. 'You gem-hoarding adjunct] You sniveling, emulous,
dunghill fowl'
Fire raced through the salty air and scattered, and Sargonnas perched atop the sailing golden egg, mantling his wings above the bright treasure.
' 'Would not destroy the godling,' you say?' Takhisis rumbled. 'I will show you all my compas shy;sion, Sargonnas. I will show you the abundance of my heart.'
Arching in the sky, her black wings shadowing the older moons, Takhisis drew the ocean wind into her lungs and belched forth a column of black fire. For a moment the condor and his glittering prize van shy;ished in the dark blaze, and the heavens fluttered and extinguished. Deprived of sunlight and star, the planet cooled and frosted, and the deepest winter settled on Ansalon, unnatural in the month of Sum shy;mer Run. But slowly, because the goddess was not the only force on Krynn, the stars returned one by one, the first ones rising in the constellation of the Dragon, then the surrounding luminaries and, finally, the planets and the moons.
A dark shape hung in the heavens, its burnt wings still brooding above the egg, above the blackened shell and the seared godling within.
Nuitari was never the same after that. Dark-haired and sickly, suffering a fiery malady in the depths of his lungs and throat, he spoke in hoarse whispers from the first days, from his hatching time.
So Takhisis remembered as she passed over the unsettled sands. Above her the dark moon drifted furtively between the stars, and she looked up approvingly at the twisted path of her son.
Sargonnas had been right.
Why destroy the child you can bend to your will completely?
She thought of the Kingpriest in his high tower, counting the opals that would bring her to the sur shy;face of Krynn.
She glided toward the lights of campfires, and a solitary bird, circling over her cautiously, called softly and sped away.
The same bird shrieked again as it sailed over For-dus, who knelt on the floor of the kanaji.
Exhausted and much the worse for his struggle with the springjaw, his grazed ankle swelling with a trace of the creature's poison, Fordus had struggled to the edge of the Tears of Mishakal. There he found the kanaji, and there he waited for the glyphs amid the strange, chiming music of the wind over the salt crystals, the lights of the camp a mile away glowing on the other side of the Tears.
Fordus closed his eyes. Clutching his ankle, he stared at the windswept sand in the open, circular chamber. For a terrifying moment, he confused it with the springjaw's lair and then remembered where he was. But his ankle had been touched by a plume of the acid that was the clumsy springjaw's other defense.
'Come forth,' he muttered finally, teeth clenched.
And then, the new glyphs formed in the eddying sand.
