Dragonlance Tales II, Vol. 2 – The Cataclysm

spirit of the dead, then knelt beside the corpse.

The steel armor alone would be worth a fortune, but it

was terribly heavy, and Matya was not entirely certain she

would be able to remove it. However, the knight wore a

leather purse at his belt, and that boded well for Matya’s

fortunes. Deftly, she undid the strings, peered inside, and

gasped in wonder.

A woman’s face gazed out of the purse at her. The tiny

face was so lifelike that, for a moment, Matya almost

fancied it was real – a small, perfect maiden hidden within

the pouch.

“Why, it’s a doll,” she realized after a heartbeat had

passed.

The doll was exquisitely made, fashioned of delicate

bone-white porcelain. The young maiden’s eyes were two

glowing sapphires, and her cheeks and lips were touched

with a blush of pink. It was a treasure fit for a lord’s house,

and Matya’s eyes glimmered like gems themselves as she

reached to lift it from the purse.

A hand gripped her arm, halting her. Matya froze, biting

her lip to stifle a scream. It was the dead man. His fingers,

sticky with dried blood, dug into the flesh of her arm, and

he gazed at her with pale, fey eyes.

The knight was very much alive.

*****

“Tambor . . .” the knight whispered. He lay slumped

against the wheel of Matya’s wagon, his eyes shut. “She

sings . . . Tambor . . .” His mumbling faded, and he drifted

deeper into a feverish sleep.

Matya sat near the small fire, sipping a cup of rose hip

tea and watching the knight carefully. Twilight had

descended on the grove of aspen trees where she had made

camp, transforming all the colors of the world to muted

shades of gray.

Tambor, Matya thought. There’s that word again. She had

heard it several times in the knight’s fevered rambling, but

she did not know what it meant, or even whether it was the

name of a place or a person. Whatever it was, it was

important to him. As important as that doll, she thought.

Even now, in his sleep, the knight clutched tightly at the

purse that held the small porcelain figurine. It had to be

valuable indeed.

While Matya was not one to go out of her way to help

others when it was unclear what – if any – reward she might

gain from it, neither was she without a heart. The knight

would have died had she left him there by the road, and she

would not have wanted that weighing on her conscience to

the end of her days. Besides, she suspected there was a good

chance the knight would die regardless of her aid, in which

case the doll would be hers, free and clear. Either way, it

was worth her while to help.

Getting the knight into her wagon had been no simple

task. Fortunately, Matya was a strong woman, and the

knight had roused himself enough to stumble most of the

way with her help. She had hoped to make Garnet by

nightfall, but she had tarried too long at the crossroads.

Shadows were lengthening, and the town still lay many

leagues ahead. Knowing night was not far off, fearful of

Rabbit stumbling into a hole or missing the trail in the dark,

she had made camp in the grove of aspen by the road.

She had tended to the knight’s wounds as best she

could. The cut on his scalp was shallow, but he had lost a

good deal of blood from it. More troubling had been the

wound in the knight’s leg. She had found the broken shaft of

an arrow embedded in the flesh behind his knee. Goblin

arrows were wickedly barbed, Matya knew, and there was

only one way for her to remove the arrow tip. Steeling her

will, she had pushed the broken shaft completely through

the flesh of his leg. Mercifully, the knight had not

awakened. Blood flowed freely from the wound, which she

had deftly bound with a dean cloth. The bleeding soon

stopped.

The night deepened, and the stars came out, one by one,

like tiny jewels in the sky above. Matya sat by the fire to eat