Chapter 22

Cathan saw the burning mountain often now, for there was little else to see in a world that was darkness, silence, and chill—a small room with stone walls and rushes on the floor, its arched ceiling low enough that he scraped his head on it whenever he stood up. There was a cot, a blanket, a chamberpot. There were no windows. The door was thick and heavy, admitting no light except for quick blinding stabs when his keepers appeared to give him food and water. That was the only way to mark the passing of time. Cathan soon lost count of the days.

Not that he cared about time any more. He was ruined. He knew he would dwell here, in the darkness and the silence and the cold, for the rest of his life.

Few in Istar knew of the imperial dungeons, hidden far below the Great Temple. Yet Cathan was one of those few, for he had often come here when he was part of the Divine Hammer. This was where the church brought its worst undesirables, the villains it did not burn… or sell into slavery, these days. The ones Cathan himself had imprisoned included leaders of death-cults, prelates of the dark gods, traitors against the empire. Some were probably still here, somewhere… moldering and mad from the unending solitude. He could hear their cries, sometimes, through the walls. His fate would be no different: No one ever left these dungeons except on a bier.

It hurt to think of Rath and Tancred—their bodies burnt by the Hammer along with Idar and his men, then scattered without ceremony as he watched. It hurt worse to think of Wentha, marched out of her home and through the Lordcity in shame, directly to the slave market. She was someone’s property, now—dwelling, if Tithian kept his promise, somewhere far away. That was Cathan’s only solace. When the Kingpriest brought down the gods’ wrath, his sister might survive.

But I will not, he thought I will be here when the hammer falls.

They’d brought him out of the cell once only, blindfolded. He’d known he was bound for the Gapo Furpribon, the Chamber of Interrogation. It was an open, empty room with a dais at one end where three large, gilded chairs looked down upon a pit with iron chains to bind a man to the floor. In the time before the Kingpriests, this had been the supreme place of torture, with all manner of horrific mechanisms and implements to inflict punishment. The church had outlawed such practices when it assumed power; now it belonged to the inquisitors.

When the guards finished shackling him and tore off his blindfold he was greeted by a trio of high priests in robes fringed with crimson. The church no longer had any need for torture. The inquisitors worked in subtler ways, plying him with tainted wine and vapors from a censer they placed at his feet. He didn’t know what drugs they gave him, but they sat there in stony silence, watching him for more than an hour after the guards brought him in. Then they set to work.

“We know about Revando,” they told him. “He is dead. You cannot protect him now. Tell us, who else in the church was a part of this conspiracy?”

“Your sister had many friends in Lattakay. Did she ever speak of others who chose to betray the Lightbringer?”

“What of the magic you used? Where did Revando meet with the wizards?”

“Were there any in the knighthood who belonged to your cause?”

Despite the drags, despite their inuring:, honeyed voices, Cathan did all he could to resist them. He laughed like a madman, sang hymns and children’s songs, spat and cursed and fought his bonds. Even as he did this, he knew it was pointless. He would break; people always broke. He’d seen it many times before. Sometimes it would take a day, even two. Once, a high priest of Morgion had lasted a full week before he lay half-dead and sobbing before the inquisitors—but he bad still answered their questions in the end. The man had died the next day.

Still Cathan fought, though every fiber of his body ached to crumble, to tell them everything they wanted to know. They would break him, but he wouldn’t make it two more. He resisted well, and soon lines of annoyance marked the inquisitors’ stony faces.

“You must tell us what we need to know,” they said.

Cathan spat on the floor.

“Very well,” they said.

A door opened. A figure stepped into the room. He was a tall man, hawk-faced with a shaven head, cloaked completely in red. A large, white eye had been painted on his forehead. Cathan stiffened at the sight of him: He knew at once that the man was an Araifo, and a powerful one at that. He reflexively reached to his chest for the malachite amulet, but it was long gone, taken from him. His mind was open, unguarded. Every single notion in his head lay bare.

The man never said a word, simply looked at him, Cathan pressed his lips together, squeezed his eyes shut, beat his head against the ground, but could not keep out the thought-reader. His stare bored into Cathan; he gazed not just at him but through him. The man’s mind plunged in, pushing through memories and desire, fears and regrets, shoving them aside with no effort. There was no pain, though Cathan screamed anyway.

Then it was over. The Araifo’s gaze shifted to the inquisitors. The man shook his head. “He knows nothing important,” he murmured. Then he turned and left.

Cathan lay curled into a ball, whimpering and trembling. The inquisitors regarded him with cold curiosity, like scholars studying an insect.

“By order of the Kingpriest, you are Foripon, cast out of the sight of Paladine and the other gods of light,” they informed him. “No one will have you as a slave, and you are too dangerous for the Games, so you will remain here, in our care. Your life will be hard and joyless, but it will be nothing beside what comes after. The Abyss awaits your soul, Cathan Twice-Born.”

He’d passed out then, and awoken back in the black stillness of his cell.

And then the dreams came, more vivid than ever, in sleep and waking alike now.

He saw the Lordcity lying like a hoard of jewels on Lake Istar’s northern shore, the air ringing with the sound of voices—thousands of them, raised in prayer, and above them the Kingpriest’s own, calling out from within the crystal dome of the Temple. Calling upon the gods to do his bidding.

The hammer was their answer. It streaked down toward the city, wreathed in flame. The sky above Istar rained fire. The rain fell upon the city, and it burned. The people’s songs turned to shrieks of terror and agony. Cathan watched as walls crumbled, parapets fell, pleasant gardens turned into infernos. Men and women were thrown through the air like broken dolls, ran burning through the streets. The basilica of the Temple burst, flinging shards of crystal into the air. The Lordcity disappeared, utterly destroyed.

The destruction spread, moving across the empire—first the heartland, then the protectorates and provinces. Wave after wave of ruin rippled outward, tearing the land to shreds. Cathan screamed until his throat felt rough as a whetstone, and then his voice splintered and failed him. But no one heard him.

He tried to tell the guards about his dream, those rare times they opened the door. He grabbed at them, babbling about the hammer and the rain of fire and the cracking of the world, but they paid him no heed. The dungeons were full of lunatics, raving that they were Huma Dragonbane resurrected, or foretelling the world’s ending in endlessly imaginative ways. What was one more madman?

“In time, Cathan gave up, and most of the time lay still and silent, even when the guards visited with food. Despair took him. The hammer would fall, and that would be the end. There was nothing left but to wait for death.

“Palado,” he murmured in the dark, over and over, “me paripud.”

Forgive me.

That’s strange, he thought one day. A visitor.

He was lying on his cot, curled up. He was awake but his eyes were closed, so at first he didn’t see the presence within his cell. Still, he felt the unmistakable sense of another, one who wasn’t a guard. There was light, too—a glimmer that showed red through his eyelids—and an odor, one he’d never expected to smell again. It was so strange, it took him a moment to recognize the attar of roses, sweet and heady, so different from the familiar dankness of the dungeon. And, if anything, the air was warmer than before. A frown worked its way onto his face. Was this some new trick of Fistandantilus?

He let his eyelids crack open. The cell was lit as bright as day, by something akin to the steady gold of sunlight. It stung his eyes, making him draw back against the wall and throw up an arm to ward it off. Slowly, his eyes began to adjust. There was… a tall, slender figure, either human or elf. Blinking, he forced himself to focus, to make out features.

His visitor was a woman of middle age, perhaps ten years younger than him. She wore clerical robes, but in a style that had been outdated for decades: white with purple trim, an amethyst circlet on her brow. Her face was kindly, but at the same time cool, like a marble statue. Her iron-gray hair was pulled back into a tight bun. He recognized her immediately, for he had once known her.

“Efisa?” he breathed.

Lady Ilista smiled sadly. “Young Cathan. Only not so young any more, I see.”

Cathan had seen ghosts before. They walked the ruins of Losarcum, sometimes, and the shade of Pradian, a long-dead would-be Kingpriest, had helped him recover the Miceram beneath Govinna. But this was Ilista, once First Daughter of Paladine, and she seemed solid flesh. She looked exactly the same as she had forty years ago, when she had died defending the Lightbringer from a demon. If Cathan hadn’t known better, he would have thought her a living being.

“What is this?” he whispered, lest the guards hear. “Are you returned from the afterworld?”

“Not exactly,” Ilista replied, and shook her head. “Not all of us can cheat death as you did, Twice-Born.”

“Is this… is this the end? Has the god sent you to take me back?”

Her smile disappeared. Her eyes shining, she reached out to touch his cheek. Her hand felt warm and real against his flesh. “Poor man,” she said gently. “The torments you must have known, and to speak of your death with such hope in your voice… but no, Cathan. It is not time. Paladine sent me, but not to claim you. Your part in this is still not played out.”

“I should have known,” he muttered, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He looked away from her, his mouth twisting. “What do you want of me, Efisa? There’s nothing I can do, not down here in the dark.”

“So you will not remain here,” she replied. “I will take you from this place, so you may perform one last task before Istar meets its doom.”

Again Cathan saw the burning hammer before him, ablaze as it streaked down upon the Lordcity. “Then it’s true. The end is near?”

Ilista nodded. “The Kingpriest’s hubris has grown too insidious, the people’s idolatry of him too great. The Balance is shifting. Any more, and it will collapse. The gods will not let that happen. If Beldinas continues to ignore the warnings they send, the hammer will fall.”

“But what can I do?” he repeated, his voice cracking. “He won’t listen to me, not after I betrayed him. I cannot stop him!”

“You are not meant to,” she said. “This you must understand: Even if you were to kill the Kingpriest, it would not stop the hammer. Istar must be destroyed.”

He stared at her. She looked back, regarding him with maddening sympathy. He boiled with anger, suddenly. “God’s blood Efisa!” he snapped. “How many thousands of innocents will die because of this? For what?”

“For the world,” she said. Tears broke free, running down her cheeks. “If Beldinas destroys the darkness, light will die with it Krynn needs the Balance to sustain it, or it will fall back into the formlessness of chaos. It nearly happened once already, a thousand years ago. Then, the Queen of Darkness and her minions nearly destroyed Krynn with their evil, and only Hums Dragonbane saved it.

“Now, it is good that threatens the Balance. Beldinas must not triumph, Twice-Born. Fear and power have corrupted him. He never should have become Kingpriest.”

Cathan blinked, his mouth working a moment before any words came out. “But you were the one who discovered him. You wanted him on the throne!”

“Not at first,” she answered. “He believed he was destined to rule Istar, and he made me believe, as well. After all, I thought, better him than Kurnos. But I was wrong, Cathan—Paladine showed me how wrong I was, after I died. Yes, he wanted me to find Beldyn, but not to put him on the throne. He was not meant to rule. Better someone else should wear the Crown, rather than him.”

For a moment Cathan saw himself as a young man, back beneath Govinna, in the fane where the Miceram had been hidden for so long. Only he—and the gods—knew that Pradian had offered the Crown to him, but he had turned it down—and then turned it down again three days later, when the enemy laid siege to the city walls. All out of loyalty to Beldinas. He slumped back onto his cot.

“I know,” Ilista said tenderly. “At first I despaired too, when I realized the truth. He was so good, so pure, it seemed… but he was also susceptible to power. The temptations were too great, and he was too naive. Now, all Istar must pay the price, if the world is to be saved. But there is something you must do, to make sure the light survives what is to come.”

He only stared, not comprehending her. He was too numb with shock. I could have been Kingpriest, he thought. If I had donned, the Miceram, none of this would have happened. Paladine, how was I to know?

Ilista stepped toward him, reaching out with her slender hands. He started to draw back out of trepidation, then stopped. This has to be, a voice within him said—the same kindly voice he’d heard in the Vault. Let it happen.

Gentle as falling snow, she set her fingers upon his brow.

He awoke with a cry, in darkness once more. He stumbled and fell to his knees, retching. The world spun around him.

The images were a whirl and a blur, smeared across his mind like a fresco whose colors had run. He could remember little clearly, but something inside, some deeper part of him, understood what Ilista had shown him. One thing stood out: the Disks. He needed to find the Peripas. No matter what, the teachings of the good gods had to survive Istar’s destruction.

No matter what.

The disorientation passed. The nausea went away, the pounding in his head settled down to a dull ache. He sat up, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth, and gazed around. “Ilista?” he asked. “Efisa, are you there?”

She was not.

Perhaps I imagined her, he thought. Perhaps I’ve gone mad. She had seemed so real, standing here in the cell… the cell…

The cell was gone. The floor beneath him was marble, the walls paneled in snowwood. A cool breeze blew through an open window, carrying silver moonlight. Stunned, he got to his feet and looked out—onto the Temple gardens, far below.

“Palado Calib,” he breathed, offering a quick prayer of thanks. He was free of the dungeon, in some empty room within the Temple’s many cloisters. Ilista had rescued him; now, standing in the shadows, he swore he wouldn’t let her down.

He looked out the window. It was autumn now. He’d been in the dungeon for over half a year. He saw himself clearly in the starlight: He was gaunt; his time in the dungeons had wasted his muscles, leaving skin and bones. He looked older than his years. His beard was long and shaggy, much of his hair had fallen out. But there was still strength left in him, and he knew it came from the god.

His face grim, Cathan turned away from the window. He had a job to do, and there was little time left.