Darkness and Light

Chapter 24

The drnagon, with Kitiara clinging to his neck, dropped like a stone from his lair, flaring out his wings to ease his landing. Kitiara discarded her cloak and reached the notch-shaped doorway just as the Micones bearing Sturm and the gnomes appeared.

"It's about time you got back!" she yelled. "Stand to arms, all of you — the Lunitarians are forming to attack!"

A barrage of glass javelins arced through the doorway to shatter on the marble floor. The gnomes, though curious, retreated under a shower of red glass splinters. The Lunitar ians were hooting wildly.

"They mean to have you," Cupelix said. "They're calling for your blood."

"Surely they can't get in?" Rainspot said.

"The tree-men are beyond reason," the dragon replied.

"So they're coming," Sturm said grimly."He shucked off his outer garb and made ready his armor and helmet. Kiti ara marched recklessly back and forth before the door, drawing the tree-men's attention.

"Shall we sting them a little?" she said to Sturm.

"It does seem necessary to discourage them," he admitted.

To the dragon, he said, "Can you lend us some Micones?

They would even the odds for us."

"They would be of little use," said Cupelix. A glass hatchet whistled in and thumped against his scaly belly. It bounced off harmlessly and broke on the floor. Cupelix regarded the ruined weapon idly. "The Micones are almost totally blind in daylight," he said. "If I unleashed them, they would as likely cut you two to pieces as any tree-man."

"Enough talk," Kitiara barked. She hitched her shield up on her forearm. "I'm going to swing some steel!"

Sturm cinched his sword belt tighter. "Kit, wait for me!"

He was shieldless, but his mail was heavier than Kit's. He drew his sword and ran to the door.

The tree-men had scaled the earthen rampart turned up by the Micones and were using its height to gain velocity for their spear casts. Kitiara held her shield to her face as missile after missile crashed against it. "C'mon, you bark-covered devils!" she shouted. "Throw on! Kitiara Uth Matar is com ing for you!"

She started up the slope. It was hard going, what with the steep angle and the loose soil. Sturm, more circumspect, worked his way around the obelisk to where the rampart was not so steep. He gained the top at nearly the same time

Kitiara did, though there were forty yards and twenty-odd tree-men between them.

Sturm had to fence with the Lunitarians on the mound and dodge spears hurled from the ground below. The Luni tarians were hooting at the top of their voices, and it didn't take much imagination to see the anger distorting their sim ple faces.

Kitiara plowed into a trio of tree-men, all of whom tow ered over her. She did little more than inflict deep chips on them with her sword. She did catch one tree-man with his arm down, and lopped it off with a single stroke. The sev ered limb hit the ground and crawled about, seeking its former owner. It got tangled up in Kitiara's legs, and she tripped, falling backward amid a flurry of spear thrusts.

The tree-men converged on the fallen woman, and Sturm could only think that she'd been wounded. He roared at the foe and cut at their backs. Unable to strike through a heart and kill them, he concentrated on their stumpy legs. A glass blade swept over his face. The hot line it left dripped blood.

He ignored it. Lunitarians toppled off the dirt wall, rolling down to bowl over their fellows on the ground.

There was a terrible tearing sensation in Sturm's right leg.

He looked back and saw a spear embedded in the back of his thigh, blood welling around the already crimson shaft. He swung his sword back, snapping the spear shaft off and leaving the head in his leg. He couldn't see Kitiara at all. He went down, weak from the pain and loss of blood. He slid down the rampart on the side nearest the obelisk. Whoop ing tree-men skidded after him, shouting their version of his name.

Finished, he thought. This is how it ends -

The expected spear points did not descend on his unar mored face and neck. The sounds of battle raged over him, though he fancied that he heard high-pitched cries of delight and triumph. The gnomes? Surely they hadn't ventured forth. They'd be slaughtered!

The hooting of the berserk Lunitarians receded. Sturm lifted his head with great effort and tried to see what was happening. A tree-man stood atop the rampart, waving his sword before him, trying to ward off some unseen foe. A dark object whipped into view and hit the tree-man in the face, thunk! The Lunitarian disappeared over the rampart amid shouts of gnomish laughter.

Someone turned Sturm over. The red dirt was dusted from his eyes. Kitiara.

"Looks like you caught one," she said in a friendly way.

Her face was scratched and her hands cut up, but she was otherwise unhurt.

"Are you well?" he asked weakly. Kitiara nodded and put the neck of her water bottle to his lips. The trickle of rainwa ter was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted.

"Ho, Master Sturm! Mistress Kitiara! We have won!"

Stutts declared. He stuck his thumbs under his suspenders and threw out his chest. "The Improvised Trouser Flail

Mark I was a success!"

"The what?"

"Never mind," Kitiara said. "Let's get you inside." She scooped him up as easily as Sturm would pick up an infant and carried him into the obelisk.

The gnomes were pounding each other on the back and talking as fast and as loudly as they could. Sturm saw a weird contraption to one side of the passage: an upright col lection of posts and gears, from which dangled three pairs of gnome-sized pants, stuffed tightly with something heavy, probably dirt. Cupelix was on his lowest perch, watching intently. When he saw that Sturm was wounded, he offered to help treat the injury.

"No magic," Sturm said stubbornly. His whole leg was achingly numb. It was cold, very cold. The dragon's broad brass face swooped down close to his.

"No magic, even if it means your life?" said the polished reptilian voice.

"No magic," Sturm insisted.

Rainspot turned Sturm's face away and put a bitter tasting root in his mouth. The gnome said, "Chew, please."

Confident that he was in the thoroughly non-magical care of the gnomes, Sturm did as he was told. Numbness spread through his body.

He didn't fall asleep. Sturm quite distinctly heard the gnomes consulting over his wound, heard rather than felt the glass spear tip being removed from his flesh, heard the dragon offering advice on how best to close the gaping hole.

Then he was lying on his stomach, the numbness gone.

Sturm's leg throbbed unmercifully. He lifted himself up on his hands.

"If you say 'where am I?' I'll hit you," said Kitiara genially.

"What happened?" he said.

"You were injured," said Sighter, who was squatting near

Sturm's head.

"That I recall well. Who repelled the tree-folk?"

"I wish I could say that I did," Kitiara said.

"We did it," Stutts declared, coming up behind Sighter.

Cupelix rumbled something that Sturm couldn't make out.

Stutts blanched and said, "With help from the dragon, that is."

"We adapted a gnomeflinger design," Wingover said. He knelt alongside Stutts and peeked over Sighter's shoulder.

"We used Cutwood's pants, filled with dirt, as a test subject for flinging. Birdcall suggested hurling the pants at the Luni tarians, but that would have sufficed for only one shot — "

"So me and Roperig gave up ours," said Fitter, who squirmed into view. His striped long johns were eloquent proof of the truth of his statement. "We filled 'em with dirt and tied 'em to the throwing arms — "

"— and used the gear system to pummel the enemy off the wall," Roperig finished for his apprentice.

"Very clever," Sturm admitted. "But why should fiercely angry tree-folk flee when thumped with a few pairs of pants? Why didn't they swarm all over you?"

"That was my doing," said Cupelix modestly. "I wove a spell of illusion over the gnomes and their machine. The

Lunitarians saw a huge, flame-breathing red dragon attack ing them, its terrible claws snatching them one by one from the rampart. The physical effect, combined with the vivid illusion, was quite effective. The tree-men have fled."

"What's to prevent them from recovering their nerve and coming back?" said Kitiara.

"At sunset, I shall send the Micones to harry them back to their village once and for all."

Their story told, the gnomes dispersed. Sturm called

Stutts back to him.

"Yes?" said the senior gnome.

"Have you inspected the repairs on the Cloudmaster?"

"Not yet."

"Urge your colleagues forward, my friend. We must be off this world soon," said Sturm.

Stutts stroked his short, silky beard. "What's the hurry?

The new engine components ought to be tested first."

Sturm lowered his voice. "The dragon may believe the tree-men will not come back, but I don't want to take the chance of being besieged in here again. Besides Cupelix will — " He closed his mouth when he saw Kitiara coming.

"We'll speak later," Sturm finished. Stutts nodded and strolled back to the Cloudmaster, his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets. Kitiara paid no attention to his exaggerated nonchalance.

Kitiara dropped down beside Sturm. "Does it hurt much'"

"Only when I dance," he said uncharacteristically.

She snorted. 'You'll live," she said. She poked around the bandaged area and added, "Probably won't even have a limp. What made you charge into those tree-men? You weren't carrying a shield or wearing leg armor."

"I saw you go down," he said. "I was going to help you."

Kitiara was silent for a moment. "Thank you."

Sturm gingerly eased himself onto his good side and sat up. "That's better! I was getting a headache lying like that."

'You know what the most unforgivable thing is, don't you? That you and I, two fighters soundly trained in the warrior arts, should fall to a bunch of savages and be saved by a band of nutty gnomes using pants full of dirt as flails!"

Kitiara started to laugh. All the tensions and suspicions sur faced and flew away in her laughter. Tears welled in her eyes, and she couldn't stop.

"Little Fitter's pants," Sturm said, feeling the guffaws building deep inside. "Little Fitter's pants disguised as the claws of a red dragon!" Kitiara nodded helplessly, her face contorted with hysterical mirth. Great rolling laughs boomed out of Sturm. His shaking jounced painfully his tightly wrapped wound, but he couldn't stop. When he tried to speak, all he could gasp was "Trouser Flail!" before erupt ing into fresh gales.

Kitiara leaned against him, forcing herself to breathe in the too-short intervals between new merry convulsions.

Her head rested on Sturm's shoulder; she draped an arm around his neck.

Above them, Cupelix perched in a shadowed corner of the tower, a shaft of amber sunlight falling across the enfolding tips of his leathery wings. Illuminated from behind, the brass dragon's skin shone like gold.

Despite his earlier protests, when Kitiara had brought

Sturm a bowl of venison stew that Cupelix had made, he ate without a second glance. There was something more; he accepted her offer to make a backres out of her fur cloak and blanket. Ordinarily, Sturm would have stoically reject ed such treatment.

The gnomes ate heartily, as usual, under the gentle glow of the four Micones who remained behind when the bulk of them went out to chase the Lunitarians away. The ants hung overhead by their forelegs like grotesque paper lanterns, the ominous barbed stingers the only threatening aspect of their otherwise benign posture.

"The new parts showed no sign of cracking or fatigue,"

Flash said, ladling gravy over his roast. "If we can get a decent charge of lightning, I don't see why we couldn't fly home right away." He tried to set the metal ladle back in its bowl, but it clung to his magnetic hands. Cutwood plucked it off for him.

"You know," Sighter said, stirring his pudding idly, "with the proper angle of flight, we could very likely fly from here to one of the other moons." This option was greeted with thunderous silence. "Solinari or the dark moon. What do you think?"

Birdcall answered for all of them. He put two fingers to his lips and made a very rude noise.

Sighter grumbled, "No need to be insulting."

"The important thing is to return to Mt. Nevermind and announce our success," said Stutts. "Aerial navigation is now a fact, and the gnomish people must not delay in exploring all the possibilities it presents."

Sturm, reclining on the floor by the dinner table, spoke up: "What possibilities do you foresee?"

"Exploring and mapping can be done easily from the air.

These would be a boon to navigation. All the heavy work of transport now done by ships could be more efficiently done in the skies. I can see a time when great aerial galleons, with six or eight pairs of wings, ply trade routes in the clouds, bringing goods to and from every corner of Krynn…"

Stutts got quite lost in the grandness of his conception.

"Then there's war," said Sighter ominously.

"What war?" asked Kitiara.

"Any war. There's always a war someplace, isn't there?

Can you see the cavalry of the clouds, swooping down to destroy field and farm, town, temple, and castle alike? It would be easy, yes, very easy to fling down fire and stone on the heads of the foe. In the workshops of Mt. Nevermind there are stranger things still. Weapons that require no mag ic power to destroy the entire world."

His morose vision quelled all conversation. Then, from above, Cupelix said, "It sounds as though you gnomes are planning to create your own race of dragons — mechanical dragons, completely obedient to their master's hand. All those things Master Sighter describes happened a thousand or more years ago, when dragons served in the great wars."

"Perhaps we shouldn't share the secret of aerial naviga tion," Fitter said hesitantly.

"Knowledge must be shared," Stutts declared. "There is no evil in pure knowledge. It's how it's put to use that deter mines what good or ill comes of it."

"Knowledge is power," said the dragon, catching Kitiara's eye. She buried her nose in her cup. When it was empty, she set it down on the table with a loud thump.

"We're forgetting one important thing," she said, wiping her lips on the back of her hand. "We owe a debt here. We oughtn't leave without paying it."

"Debt?" said Cutwood. "To whom?"

"Our host," Kitiara replied. "The excellent dragon, Cupe lix." The gnomes broke into polite applause.

"Thank you, you're very kind," said the dragon.

"We would long ago have fallen into the hands of the

Lunitarians, had it not been for the intervention of Cupelix,"

Kitiara went on. "Now we're safe, the flying ship is repaired, and we have a debt to pay. How shall we do it?"

"Would you care for some fresh water?" asked Rainspot.

"Kind, but unnecessary," said the dragon. "The Micones bring me water from the cavern depths."

"Do you have any machines to be repaired?" asked Flash thoughtfully.

"None whatsoever."

The remaining gnomes all tried suggestions, which the dragon politely dismissed as unneeded or inapplicable.

"What can we do?" said Wingover, frustrated.

Cupelix launched into a compressed description of his sit uation inside the obelisk, and how he very much wanted to escape it. The gnomes just looked up at him and blinked.

"Is that all?" said Roperig.

"Nothing else?" added Birdcall by translation.

"Just this one simple task," answered the dragon.

Sturm pushed himself up to a seated position, mindful of the pressure this put on his injured leg. "Have you consid ered, dragon, that a higher power intended for you to live out your life within these walls? Would we be committing an act of impiety by releasing you?"

"The gods raised these walls and brought these many eggs here, but in all the thousands of years I've been resident in the obelisk, no god, demigod, or spirit has deigned to reveal any such divine plan to me," said Cupelix. He shifted from one massive foot to the other. "You seem to think my being kept here like a rooster in a coop is a good thing; can you not see it as I do, that I am in fact a prisoner? Is it an evil deed to free an innocent captive?"

"What will happen to all the dragon eggs if you leave?" asked Roperig.

"The Micones will tend them and guard the caverns for ever. No egg will hatch without deliberate inducement. At this point, I am totally superfluous."

"I say we help him," said Kitiara with conviction. She leaned forward to the table and gave each gnome a piercing look. "Who can honestly say the dragon hasn't earned our help?"

All was silent until Sturm said, "I will agree if the dragon answers one question: What will he do once he is free?"

"Revel in my liberty, of course. I shall travel thereafter, wherever the winds of heaven carry me."

Sturm folded his arms. "To Krynn?" he said sharply.

"Why not? Is there a fairer land betwixt here and the stars?"

"Dragons were driven out of Krynn long ago because their power was used to scheme and control the affairs of mortals. You cannot return to Krynn," Sturm said.

"Cupelix is not an evil dragon," Kitiara argued. "Do you think he could live so long on the moon of neutral magic and not be moderated by its influence?"

"And what if," Sturm said slowly, "Cupelix is no danger to

Krynn. He is still a dragon. My ancestors fought and died to rid our world of dragons. How can I dishonor them by aid ing a dragon — even a benign one — to return?"

Kitiara stood so suddenly that her chair fell over. "Suffer ing gods! Who do you think you are, Sturm Brightblade?

My ancestors fought in the Dragon Wars, too. It was a dif ferent time and different circumstances." She turned to the gnomes. "I put it to you. Shall we repay the dragon's hospi tality with indifference? Will we fill our bellies with his food and drink, fix the ship with his help, and depart without so much as attempting to help him be free?"

She had them now. All nine little faces, paler in the short, faint days of Lunitari, were rapt with attention. Kitiara raised her hand to the silent Cupelix, who contrived to look forlorn and desolate atop his marble perch. "Put yourself in his place," she said grandly.

"Which one of us?" asked Cutwood.

"It doesn't matter — any or all of you. Think of how you'd feel, spending all your life inside this tower, unable to even walk outdoors. And consider that a dragon's life is not fifty years, or two hundred years, but twenty times two hun dred! How would you feel, imprisoned in a lonely tower, with no one to talk to and no tools either?"

Roperig and Fitter gasped. "No tools?"

'Yes, and no wood or metal to work with. No gears or valves or pulleys."

"Horrible!" said Flash. Birdcall seconded him with a steady descending note.

"And we — you — have the chance to correct this wrong.

You have the inventive powers to devise some way to allow

Cupelix to fly free. Will you do it?" she asked.

Wingover leaped to his feet. "We will! We will!" Rainspot and Fitter wept for the injustice inflicted on the dragon, while Stutts and Sighter were already bombarding each oth er with first schemes to open the obelisk. Wingover got up on his chair and then on the table, pointing dramatically to the wingless hull of the Cloudmaster.

"To the ship!" he cried. "We must make plans!"

"Yes, yes, the tools are there," said Cutwood.

"And parchment and pencils!"

"Chemicals and crucibles!"

"Rope and rigging!"

"Raisins!"

The gnomes surged away from the table, a tiny tide of boisterous idealism and ramshackle ingenuity. When the last gnome had disappeared up the ramp, Kitiara turned, smiling, to Sturm.

"Very clever," he said at last. "You did that well."

"Did what?" she replied guilelessly.

"We both know how impulsive the gnomes are. Between your passionate call for freedom and the prospect of a major engineering project, the obelisk hasn't got a chance."

"I hope you're right," said Cupelix. It was uncanny how easy it was to forget him when he stayed quiet above their line of sight. Sturm frowned. "Don't be so suspicious!" chid ed the dragon. "If my intentions were black, do you think I would have resorted to banquets and cajoling? My Micones could have held the ship indefinitely until you agreed to help, or I could have left you to the tree-men."

"No one ever said you were evil, Cupelix," Sturm persist ed. "Subtle, you are, and very much concerned with getting your way. If you could have gotten out of your prison by sacrificing Kit, myself, or the gnomes, I don't think you would have dallied long in giving us up."

Cupelix spread his wings and coiled his legs to spring into the air. "Be at ease, Master Brightblade. No one need be sac rificed. We shall all see Krynn again, I promise."