Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [25]
Once again he suppressed a shiver a fear, knowing without understanding that fear was a strange emotion to him.
After the iron stairs there were more corridors, and a room where there was water. He stopped here, grateful for the drink, and took the time to fill both of his water-skins. He remembered that, beyond this ruined labyrinth, he would find very little water.
But how could he know this and not know where here was?
Finally he emerged beneath the muted blue of a clear sky fading softly after the sunset. He was not surprised that the great edifice behind him rose so high, nor that it was cast so perfectly into the shape of a great skull. Now he knew that this place was called Skullcap.
And then he had another vivid impression as the skull that he had left underground seemed to rise into his mind. He stared into those black, empty sockets and shivered under the feeling that it was still watching him.
“But who am I?”
He found the answer when he collapsed for rest in a shallow ditch.
Under the fading light of day, he pulled out the contents of his pack. There was the hardtack-he remembered exactly what it tasted like, but he didn’t know where it had come from. He found a soft fur cloak and knew that it would be useful on a colder night than this.
And he found an ivory scroll tube that was certainly one of his prized possessions. Within the cylindrical container, he found several maps and pieces of parchment with strange symbols and indecipherable notes scrawled across them.
At the top of several of the sheets, he discerned two words: Emilo Haversack. Taking a stick, he scribed the symbols into the sand, and he recognized that the words on the parchment had been written by his own hand.
“My name is Emilo Haversack,” he declared, as if the repeating of the words would make the truth that much more evident.
But still, how had he come to be here?
And where were the rest of his memories?
CHAPTER 9
From Black to Life
259 AC
For a long time he had done nothing, been no one. This was his protection as it had been in ages past, a tactic for use when those who sought his life for crimes real and imagined became too powerful. And so he had escaped the vengeful, had given pitiful humankind the false notion that he was finally and irrevocably slain.
He recalled the fateful casting, the mighty spell that should have yielded passage to the Abyss, allowed him to challenge the Dark Queen herself. Instead, the enchantment had erupted in violent convulsion, tearing him to pieces, destroying him.
Indeed, by now the whole world must believe that he had been killed.
But he had only been hiding.
How long had he lurked here, so far beyond the ken of humankind? He didn’t know, really didn’t care. As ever, he trusted to certain truths, knowing that the nature of human, dwarf, or ogre would eventually accomplish his task. The folk of Krynn tended to be violent peoples, and he needed their violence to give him flesh and blood and life.
Finally violence had been done, and the gift had been given. Again his essence was cloaked in flesh, the blood pulsing through a brain that, while it was not his, had been given to him to use. He could not discern immediately whether it was a human or perhaps a dwarf or even an ogre that had bestowed this gift upon him. Nor did he particularly care. He could make any of these peoples his tool, use whichever body was offered him until he could exert full control, reclaim his rightful place in the world.
So he had been content for a measureless time merely to rest within this mortal shell, to absorb the life and vitality of the body that gave him home.
He did not need to take control, at least not yet, for he was still weak, still unready to reveal himself to the enemies who, experience had shown him, always lurked in the eddies of time’s great river, waiting for his reappearance, for a chance to hurt or kill him.
Such enemies waited with vengeance and treachery