my end on my shoulders, since Fizban’s shoulders are
higher than mine. But I held my end up in the air and
Fizban managed the butt-end. We lifted up two of the
lances and ran off with them.
And while we were running, Fizban said some more
of those spider-foot words and the next thing I knew I was
running straight into . . .
You guessed it. Huma’s Tomb.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Oh, now, really!” I began, quite put out. But I didn’t get
the rest of my sentence finished, which was probably just
as well, since it would have most likely made Fizban
angry and he might have sent my topknot to join my
eyebrows.
The reason I didn’t get the rest of my sentence
finished was that we weren’t alone in Huma’s Tomb
anymore. A knight was there. A knight in full battle armor
and he was kneeling beside the bier in the silver
moonlight, with tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Thank you, Paladine!” he was saying, over and over
again in a tone that made me feel I’d like to go off
somewhere and be very, very quiet for a long time.
But the lances were growing extremely heavy, and
I’m afraid I dropped my end, which caused Fizban to
overbalance and nearly tumble over backward, and he
dropped his butt-end. Which meant we both dropped the
middles. The lances fell to the stone floor with quite a
remarkable-sounding clatter.
The knight nearly leapt out of his armor. Jumping to
his feet, he drew his sword and whipped right around and
glared at us.
He had taken off his helmet to pray. He was older,
about thirty, I guess. His hair was dark red and he wore it
in two long braids. His eyes were green as the vallenwood
leaves in Solace, where I live when I’m not out
adventuring or residing in jails. Only his eyes didn’t look
green as leaves just at the moment. They looked hard and
cold as the ice in Ice Wall.
I don’t know what the knight expected – maybe a
dragon or at least a draconian, or possibly a goblin or two.
What he obviously didn’t expect was Fizban and me.
The knight’s face, when he saw us, slipped from fierce
into muddled and puzzled, but it hardened again right off.
“A wizard,” he said in the same tone of voice he
might have said “ogre dung.” “And a kender.” (I won’t tell
you what THAT sounded like!) “What are you two doing
here? How dare you defile this sacred place?”
He was getting himself all worked up and waving his
sword around in a way that was quite careless and might
have hurt somebody – namely me, because I was suddenly
closest, Fizban having reached out and pulled me in front
of him.
“Now wait just a minute, Sir Knight,” said Fizban,
quite bravely, I thought, especially since he was using me
for a shield, and my small body wouldn’t have done much
to stop that knight’s sharp sword, “we’re not defiling
anything. We came in here to pay our respects, same as
you, only Huma was out. Not in, you see,” the wizard
added, gesturing vaguely to the empty bier. “So we … er
… decided to wait a bit, give him a chance to come back.”
The knight stared at us for quite a long time. He
would have stroked his moustaches, I thought, like Sturm
did when he was thinking hard, except that this knight
didn’t have any moustaches, yet. Only the beginnings of
some, like he was just starting to grow them out. He
lowered the sword a little, little bit.
“You are a white-robed wizard?” he asked.
Fizban held out his sleeve. “White as snow.” Actually
it wasn’t, having been draggled through the mud and
spotted with blood from my nose and slobber from both
of us and ashes from the burning tree and some soot we’d
picked up in the dragonlance forge.
Fizban’s robes didn’t impress the knight. He raised his
sword again and his face was extremely grim. “I don’t
trust wizards of any color robe. And I don’t like kender.”
Well, I was just about to express my opinion of