Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [84]
“What do you remember of where you were, what you were doing, last winter?” Foryth took over the interview. “Were you and Mirabeth traveling together then?”
“Well…” Suddenly Emilo looked frightened. He cast a worried glance at the kendermaid and asked, “I didn’t know you then, did I?”
“No,” she said.
“But-but why can’t I remember? When did I meet you? How long ago?”
“It was just a few days ago, actually,” Mirabeth said. She turned her head, including the two humans in her explanation. “I was wandering on my own-that is, I’d been by myself for a little while. I was having some trouble, I guess you could say, and Emilo came along and helped me out.”
“Did he rescue you from bandits, too?” Danyal asked, only half teasing.
“No,” she replied with a soft laugh. The lad decided that he liked that sound a lot. “I was trying to camp, but my lean-to had fallen over and my bedroll was soaked with rain. I couldn’t get a fire going, and I was sitting in the woods, teeth chattering, feeling sorry for myself. He almost scared me out of my skin when he walked up and said-“
“Emilo Haversack, at your service?” guessed Danyal.
Mirabeth grinned at him. “The same thing he said to you, I presume.”
“And he was-at our service, I mean. Really, you saved our lives,” declared the young human. “I guess I haven’t told you that, but you did.”
“Oh, now, tsk,” interjected Foryth Teel. “I admit that business of being tied up was unpleasant, but I hardly think Kelryn was going to do us in.”
“Then you weren’t paying attention! Do you remember Zack-the way he liked to play with his knife?” Danyal shuddered at the memory. “He wasn’t ever going to let us get away, despite what Kelryn said.”
Still, he admitted privately, it was Kelryn Darewind himself who was the scariest of all the bandits.
“You mentioned that wizard, Fistandantilus,” Emilo said, drawing the historian’s attention away from Dan. “It seems to me I’ve heard a lot about him. I just can’t remember any of it.”
“There’s a lot to know,” declared Foryth enthusiastically. “He was the Master of Past and Present, you know. The first wizard-and one of only a very small number-who learned how to travel through time. An arch-mage who manipulated history by altering his own position in the River of Time. He had an influence on ages of elves and men, in an era before the Cataclysm-“
“And in Skullcap and Dergoth afterward,” noted the kender, bobbing his head.
“He must have been awfully old. Was he human, or perhaps an elf?” asked Danyal.
“Oh, absolutely human-in a way, human many times over,” Foryth said with a grim chuckle. “You see, he absorbed the spiritual essence of other humans, for the most part young men who were gifted with magic.
These sacrificial lambs were destroyed, and the power of the archmage was maintained and increased with the passing of years. Eventually he had consumed the essence of many men, and his power had become greater than any other mage’s in the history of Krynn.”
“How?” The lad had a hard time imagining the magical power, the bizarre consumption, that the historian described.
“It’s said that he used a gem-a bloodstone. That’s one of the things I wondered about, but Kelryn Darewind wouldn’t discuss it.”
“I saw a bloodstone once,” Emilo said.
Danyal looked at the kender and gasped in shock. Emilo’s eyes had gone blank and lifeless, devoid of expression or awareness. His jaw hung slack and he sighed sorrowfully, shoulders slumping as if the air had all gone out of him.
“A bloodstone?” Foryth was apparently unaware of the kender’s sudden alteration, for he pressed forward with obvious excitement. “They’re very rare, you know! Where was it? Could it have been-“
“It pulsed… hot, hot blood…” Emilo spoke sharply, visibly straining to push out the words. His lips stretched taut over his teeth, and he grimaced between each quick, bursting phrase. The voice was deep and rasping, very unlike the high-pitched chatter of the kender’s normal speech.
“Yes, I remember the stone.