Dragons of Winter Night - Margaret Weis [155]
In the end, of course, Laurana agreed to go to Palanthas, as Gunthar had known she must. As the time of her departure drew nearer, she began to dream almost nightly of Tanis arriving on the island just hours after she left. More than once she was on the verge of refusing to go, but then she thought of facing Tanis, of having to tell him she had refused to go to Sturm to warn him of this peril. This kept her from changing her mind. This—and her regard for Sturm.
It was during the lonely nights, when her heart and her arms ached for Tanis and she had visions of him holding that human woman with the dark, curly hair, flashing brown eyes, and the charming, crooked smile, that her soul was in turmoil.
Her friends could give her little comfort. One of them, Elistan, left when a messenger arrived from the elves, requesting the cleric’s presence, and asking that an emissary from the knights accompany him. There was little time for farewells. Within a day of the arrival of the elven messenger, Elistan and Lord Alfred’s son, a solemn, serious young man named Douglas, began their journey back to Southern Ergoth. Laurana had never felt so alone as she bid her mentor good-bye.
Tasslehoff faced a sad parting as well.
In the midst of the excitement over the dragonlance, everyone forgot poor Gnosh and his Life Quest, which lay in a thousand sparkling pieces on the grass. Everyone but Fizban. The old magician rose from where he lay cowering on the ground before the shattered Whitestone and went to the stricken gnome, who was staring woefully at the shattered dragon orb.
“There, there, my boy,” said Fizban, “this isn’t the end of everything!”
“It isn’t?” asked Gnosh, so miserable he finished a sentence.
“No, of course not! You’ve got to look at this from the proper perspective. Why, now you’ve got a chance to study a dragon orb from the inside out!”
Gnosh’s eyes brightened. “You’re right,” he said after a short pause, “and, in fact, I bet I could glue—”
“Yes, yes,” Fizban said hurriedly, but Gnosh lunged forward, his speech growing faster and faster.
“We could tag the pieces, don’t you see, and then draw a diagram of where each piece was lying on the ground, which—”
“Quite, quite,” Fizban muttered.
“Step aside, step aside,” Gnosh said importantly, shooing people away from the orb. “Mind where you walk, Lord Gunthar, and, yes, we’re going to study it from the inside out now, and I should have a report in a matter of weeks—”
Gnosh and Fizban cordoned off the area and set to work. For the next two days, Fizban stood on the broken Whitestone making diagrams, supposedly marking the exact location of each piece before it was picked up. (One of Fizban’s diagrams accidentally ended up in the kender’s pouch. Tas discovered later that it was actually a game known as “x’s and zeroes” which the mage had been playing against himself and apparently—lost.)
Gnosh, meanwhile, crawled happily around on the grass, sticking bits of parchment adorned with numbers on pieces of glass smaller than the bits of parchment. He and Fizban finally collected the 2,687 pieces of dragon orb in a basket and transported them back to Mount Nevermind.
Tasslehoff had been offered the choice of staying with Fizban or going to Palanthas with Laurana and Flint. The choice was simple. The kender knew two such innocents as the elfmaid and the dwarf could not survive without him. But it was hard leaving his old friend. Two days before the ship sailed, he paid a final visit to the gnomes and to Fizban.
After an exhilarating ride in the catapult, he found Gnosh in the Examination Room. The pieces of the broken dragon orb—tagged and numbered—were spread out across two tables.
“Absolutely fascinating,” Gnosh spoke so fast he stuttered, “because we have analyzed the glass, curious material, unlike nothing we’ve ever seen, greatest discovery, this century—”
“So your Life Quest is over?”