Chapter 3

He hadn’t had the dream in years.

It had first come to him a lifetime ago, during his vigil the night before the Lightbringer made him a knight. He’d been kneeling before the moonstone obelisks in the Great Temple’s Garden of Martyrs—and it had struck him as a vision, brought on by a fat monk named Brother Jendle. He had never seen the monk before that night, nor had he seen him since. He was no longer sure the man had even been real, rather than a figment of his sleep-deprived mind.

That one dream had changed the world. When he began his vigil, it had been in preparation to join the Knights of Solamnia, the ancient and honor-bound brotherhood that had served Istar since before the first Kingpriest’s crowning. When he told Beldinas of what he’d seen, however, the plans had changed. Rather than a Solamnic order, he had joined a new knighthood entirely. In the years since, the Divine Hammer had grown strong, ridding the holy empire of evil. He himself had risen to Grand Marshal, the highest post of all…

And then Cathan MarSevrin had fallen from grace.

It was because of, of all things, a woman. Leciane do Cirica had come to the Kingpriest’s court as envoy from the Orders of High Sorcery. She had worn the Red Robes, not the expected White, demonstrating that she followed the path of neutrality rather than good. That caused a scandal in the Temple, but Beldinas had welcomed her, and assigned Cathan to watch her. That was Cathan’s undoing.

Cathan still wasn’t sure if what he’d felt for Leciane had been love; perhaps, if times had been simpler, that might have been clear. When the treacherous Black Robes struck out against the throne, however, slaughtering his men, nearly murdering the Lightbringer as the empire tumbled toward war with the wizards, Cathan’s closeness to Leciane had cast doubt on his loyalties. As a last chance of regaining his standing with Beldinas, he had ridden south at the head of a force to strike at the sorcerers’ Tower at Losarcum.

And she had been there too—whether by design or chance, he didn’t know. But the morning he was to attack, Leciane had found him. She had told him of the wizards’ plans to destroy the Tower—they had already done so in Daltigoth, rather than yielding their secrets to the unschooled, and they would do it again. But the warning came too late; the attack could not be stopped, and the doom she’d spoken of came to pass.

Moments before the Tower destroyed itself and all of Losarcum, Leciane had cast a spell to spirit the two of them to safety, along with Tithian. But she was badly wounded, and did not survive. Maddened by grief, both for her and for the city that had died, he had returned to Istar and renounced the Lightbringer and the knighthood. It was a hard thing, among the hardest he’d ever done, but the dream, which had troubled him throughout his tenure in the Divine Hammer, had not come to him since. In fact, he hadn’t dreamed at all since that day.

Now it was happening again.

He recognized it at once, though it had been so long. There was no mistaking the feeling that came with it, the dreadful anticipation. It began where he slept, in the utterly lightless cave that had become his home. He felt himself hovering, and despite the dark he could sense his own body lying asleep beneath him. He hovered for a time, wondering at himself: gods, he’d grown so old. He was only in his fifties—the passing of years had been hard to track, so he no longer knew his true age—but the physical form below seemed at least twenty years older. Life in exile had been cruel.

Cathan remembered what would happen next in the dream, but the suddenness of it still took him by surprise. One moment he was still, floating maybe a dozen feet off the ground; the next he was rising, falling upward toward the cave’s ceiling. There was no sense of acceleration, no rush of air: it was as though someone had pulled the ground away from him. When he struck the ceiling—or it struck him—there was no impact, no pain. He simply slid through it, like the ghost men said he was.

There was even deeper darkness, for a time, as he passed through solid stone—then he was out in the night, staring at a fissure-ridden jumble of rock and glass that glinted in the light of the red and silver moons. Once, the rubble had been the hollowed-out mesa where Losarcum stood; now it was a mad broken heap, the empire’s largest tomb. The Tears of Mishakal stretched out around it, rocky and barren, threaded with baffling, meandering canyons.

Now he found himself hundreds of feet up in the air.

Now thousands, and there was the Sea of Shifting Sands, its dunes rippling with shadow all around the Tears. There, picked out in sprays of lamplight, were Dravinaar’s surviving cities: Yandol, with its vast, seven-walled bazaar; spike-turreted Attrika, impregnable atop a pinnacle of sandstone; Micah, the City of Glass, its great furnaces white-hot even in the middle of night.

Still he rose higher, and the rest of the empire came into view. In the west, the sight of hilly Taol brought back faint memories of his youth, and his early days in the Lightbringer’s service. In the east, misty Seldjuk evoked darker thoughts, of Lattakay where slaughter had first visited his brother knights. To the north, the golden fields of Gather and the dark jungles of Falthana stretched out to kiss the blue of the ocean. And in the middle, glittering like a fallen star, was the place he had sworn never to look upon again.

The Great Temple winked at him, a jewel set amid the golden domes of the Lordcity. A deep yearning opened within him as he stared at the basilica. He wanted to reach out, seize it, pluck it in his fingers. But he had no fingers to touch with, and could only watch the Great Temple recede as he climbed higher still, through the clouds and into the sky. The other kingdoms stretched out around Istar now—Solamnia, Kharolis, Ergoth. The forests of the elves, the dwarven mountain-halls, the frozen isles of Icereach… all fell away from him. Krynn itself began to shrink, becoming a turquoise orb amid the velvet black of night.

Then he was turning, as he had so many times before, so long ago. Slowly, he rotated away from the world, looking out toward the star-scattered sky, diamonds and sapphires and rubies beyond counting. The moons were there: Solinari, glowing silver to his left, three-quarters full, and Lunitari low above, gnawed down to a scarlet sliver. The third moon was out there, too, he knew: black Nuitari, visible only to those who walked in darkness. He had beheld it once before, in this very dream, and now he spied it as an empty hole in the void. He shivered at the sight of it—and also in anticipation. There was worse to come.

He didn’t have to wait long; he never had. Soon he spied something moving among the stars—not the slow-gliding specks of the planets, but something fast, glowing orange as it moved soundlessly toward him. Bit by bit, it revealed itself to him: a huge chunk of stone, shaped like a hammer and wreathed with flame that trailed behind it. This was the Divine Hammer, after which the Kingpriest had named his knighthood. He had described it as a sign from Paladine that holy wrath must be visited upon the world’s evils.

In his youth, Cathan had believed it. Now, the old man was no longer sure.

Helpless, he watched it approach, flashing across the sky with a soundless roar. It went right past, the flames licking at him as it passed, but he felt nothing; he had no flesh to singe. He turned to follow as it spun toward Krynn, diving down, down toward it, as it always had before.

Toward Istar, the Lordcity, the Temple.

Cathan screamed…

… and then he woke, shaking, back in the darkness, the echoes of a sound like ten thousand thunderclaps ringing in his ears.

For a lurching moment, he had no idea where he was. Flashes of the dream, of the places he’d had it before—Istar, and Lattakay, and nameless spots where he’d camped with his fellow knights—muddled his wits. Past mingled with present, and he had to concentrate to figure out which was which.

Losarcum. Of course.

Sitting up, Cathan kicked off his blankets and winced at the deep ache in his leg. The sell-sword had done that, the first real wound he’d had in more years than he could count. Sloppy… he’d fought better warriors and emerged without a scratch. He’d done what he could for the injury, but he was no Mishakite, and knew only what healing arts were necessary for the field. He’d cleaned the wound with wine, then—a strap of leather clamped between his teeth—seared it with a fire-heated dagger. The pain had been incredible, but it had done the job: the bleeding stopped, and with care he’d kept it from fouling. Even so, the ache lingered, and would make protecting this place all the harder.

So would the scholar.

Men had escaped him before. Tomb-robbers tended toward cowardice, and he was only one man. Sometimes they broke and fled, and even he could not chase them all down. That was fine—none had ever returned, and the tales they spread surely kept many others away. The Staring Ghost was a fearsome legend in these parts, and most men did not care to face him. But this time, it was different. The scholar had been learned enough to see through the superstition, and recognize him for who he was.

Cathan started to swallow a curse, then remembered he was alone here and let it out aloud instead. It echoed off distant walls, ringing in the gloom. Word would spread that the Twice-Born was alive and hiding in Losarcum. They would come for him—it was only a matter of time.

The blackness felt physical, smothering him. He needed light. He reached to his right, fingers probing. First they found a hilt of smooth metal, set with shards of porcelain where other weapons had gems: Ebonbane, his sword he’d wielded as a knight. He always slept with the blade close by. Now his fingers passed by, and found the smooth glass of a lantern, a chip of flint, and a steel knife beside it. He worked with this, practiced movements in the dark, and after a few tries made a spark. A moment later the lantern was glowing, a dull glimmer that grew steadily brighter, revealing the room around him.

This place had been part of Losarcum’s public baths once, though its pools and tubs had dried up long ago. Vast and cavernous, its edges lost in darkness, it had collapsed into rubble at one end where what looked like a small temple had smashed into it. The surviving walls, and the parts of the ceiling that hadn’t given way, were tiled with a menagerie of fanciful beasts carved out of golden sandstone: laughing, fish-tailed mermaids and one-horned whales, coiling sea serpents and many-tentacled krakens. Glass sparkled amid the rubble. A few furnishings, scavenged from forays deeper into the ruined city, lay here and there: more lamps, some wine jugs and casks of oil, a few urns of spices. The remains of a cooking fire blackened what had once been the bottom of a cold-water pool, its tiles painted with fish and waterfowl. The bones of his last meal, a dog-sized lizard he’d caught out in the Tears, lay cracked in a heap nearby. Cathan surveyed it all: this was his kingdom, his hermitage, where he’d lived apart from the rest of the world for… how many years? Fifteen? Twenty? He’d long since lost count.

Not for much longer; his days of solitude were already as good as over. If the scholar’s escape hadn’t been enough to convince him of that yet, the dream’s return had.

He struggled to his feet—gods, his leg hurt!—and found a tattered, dirty robe and wrapped it around himself, then took a slug of sour wine from a nearby jug. His stomach growled, but he ignored it; one could find enough to eat in the Tears to keep from starving, as long as one didn’t mind eating giant spiders and such, and he had learned to accept hunger as a constant companion. He started toward a crack in the floor to make water—then stopped halfway there, his whole body suddenly tensing, the hairs on the back of his neck standing erect.

Danger. He wasn’t alone here.

He wasn’t sure, at first, what sort of danger; he could see nothing unusual in the half-light, could hear nothing but his own breathing. There was no strange scent on the air. But Cathan was a warrior—or had been one once—and he still trusted his instincts. Someone… or something… was here in the cave with him. After a moment, he knew what was amiss: the air had changed, the temperature dropping. The baths were ordinarily cool—but this was different. It was a bitter chill that put him in mind of the winters in the hills where he’d spent his youth. That never happened here, in the heart of the desert.

Instinct—the same instinct that had alerted him in the first place—turned him around, got him moving back toward the heap of blankets that was his bed. He grabbed Ebonbane, the hilt familiar in his grasp. He brought it up, turning this way and that, looking for the source of the cold and saw it, a pool of deeper darkness amid the gloom, over by the vents where the Losarcines had once bathed in steam. He knew it was no ordinary shadow, even before the figure emerged from its heart, turning his blood to ice: tall and broad, shrouded in robes the color of midnight, the tip of a long gray beard emerging from the blackness of its hood.

Cathan backed up a pace, his eyes wide. Ebonbane trembled in his grasp, and his heart pounded with terror. I’m dreaming again, he thought. This is another nightmare.

Watching him from across the cavern, Fistandantilus the Dark chuckled. “No, Twice-Born,” he said. “You are very much awake.”