Now, the darkness bordering the edges of those
memories, the half-elf absently stroked the edge of the large
gray feather with his thumb. Tas had been here recently.
Or his pouches had. And those had been ruthlessly
emptied, their contents carelessly scattered. The hot breeze
carried Caramon’s deep voice from up the trail and Sturm’s
answer. Tanis knew by their tones that they had found no
sign of either struggle or a body. He left the underbrush and
joined Flint where he knelt in the path.
“One more thing, Flint.”
The old dwarf took the feather without looking and
added it to the pile of oddly assorted objects to be stuffed
with hard, angry motions into Tas’s pouches.
A blade-broken dagger, a blue earthenware ink pot, a
little carved tinderbox, a copper belt buckle that Caramon
had lost somehow and which Tas would swear he’d always
meant to return, a soft cloth the color of dawn’s rose, a
bundle of the stiff green feathers Tanis liked best for
fletching his arrows … all of these kender-treasures and
more had been discarded as so much junk.
Flint’s anger might seem, from his tight-lipped
muttering, to be directed against a packrat of a kender.
Tanis knew the old dwarf better than that.
“We’ll find him, Flint.”
Flint still did not look up, but drew the thong tight on
the last of the kender’s pouches. “Did you find his map
case?”
“No.”
“Good. I wish whoever took it the joy of trying to find
his way with those maps! Hardly one of them is worth the
parchment it’s penned on.”
Tanis found a smile. Few of Tas’s maps were any good
at all without his interpretation and translation. And those
were never the same twice.
“We’ll not make Karsa any time soon now, Flint.”
“AYE,” Flint grumbled. “And you can be sure that I’ll
take it out of that rascally kender’s hide when we finally
catch up with him, too.”
Tanis thought the threat lacked conviction.
Silent as a shadow moving in the breeze, Raistlin came
up beside them. “If someone took the map case, and there is
nothing to show that the kender was killed here, it would
not be amiss to consider that the case, Tas, and whoever
waylaid him are still together. The trail is rocky up ahead,
Tanis.”
“Tracks?”
“None. But there is something else.” Raistlin nodded
toward a small grouping of boulders. “Camp signs. Perhaps
you should see them.”
Tanis moved as though to signal Flint to join them, but
the young mage shook his head. Fear, like a dark thread of
night, crawled through Tanis’s belly.
The campfire had been small, ringed by rocks. Several
yards beyond them was a flat-sided boulder. On the near
side of the boulder, a handspan from the ground, was a
mark no larger than a kender’s fist. Though it was rough-
sketched in blood, Tanis recognized the sign at once: a
stylized anvil bisected by a dwarven F rune. Flint’s plate
mark.
“Tas?”
“Who else would leave that mark?” Raistlin touched the
rusty brown blood. “It was fresh not long ago.”
Both turned at the sound of an approach. Flint stood at
Tanis’s elbow.
“Wretched kender!” The old dwarf clenched his fist.
“Vanishing out from under our noses and getting himself
into Reorx only knows what kind of trouble!” He stared for
a long time at the device which had always marked his best
and most beautiful work, sketched now in dark blood on the
stone. It was as though he’d never seen the mark before and
sought now to memorize it.
Tanis said nothing, did not want to speculate at all now.
Raistlin it was who spoke, and when he moved his shadow
fell between Flint and the mark.
“The blood is fresh, Flint, not a day old. He’s still
alive.” The young mage looked from one of his friends to
the other. “And, by the look of this, hoping that we’re on his
trail. We’d best waste no time in wondering now.”
Tanis did wonder: He wondered if they were too late.
The sound of the waterfall might have been the angry
roar of some outraged god. Racing and tumbling, the river