The Cataclysm Read online

  The Cataclysm

  ( Dragonlance - Tales 05 )

  edited by Margaret Weis and

  Tracy Hickman

  Introduction

  The world was forged upon three pillars: good, evil, neutrality. In order to progress, a balance between the three must be maintained. But there came a time in Krynn when the balance tilted. Believing himself to be the equal to the gods in knowledge and in wisdom, the Kingpriest of Istar sought the gods in arrogance and pride and demanded that they do his bidding.

  Having viewed with sorrow the tilting of the scales of balance, resulting in hatred, prejudice, race divided against race, the gods determined to restore the balance of the world. They cast a fiery mountain upon Ansalon, then withdrew their power, hoping those intelligent races who dwelt upon Krynn would once again find their faith — in the gods, in themselves, and in each other.

  This catastrophe became known as the Cataclysm.

  Michael Williams tells a tale of vengeance in his epic poem, "The Word and the Silence." He and his wife, Teri, continue the tale and turn it into a mystery, as the accused murderer's son seeks to end the curse on his family in "Mark of the Flame, Mark of the Word."

  Matya, a very cunning trader, stumbles onto the bargain of her life — literally — in Mark Anthony's "The Bargain Driver."

  In Todd Fahnestock's story, "Seekers," a young orphan boy embarks on a perilous journey to ask the gods a question.

  For most people, the Cataclysm meant sorrow, death, ruination. For the entrepreneurs in Nick O'Donohoe's story, "No Gods, No Heroes," the Cataclysm means opportunity.

  Richard A. Knaak tells the tale of Rennard, known to readers of THE LEGEND OF HUMA. Now a ghost, doomed to torment in the Abyss, Rennard finds himself transported back to Ansalon during the Cataclysm. Is it an accident, or has he been brought back for a reason?

  Dan Parkinson continues the adventures of the Bulp clan of gully dwarves. Led by their valiant leader, Gorge III, the Bulps leave Istar in search of the Promised Place. What they find instead is certainly not what they expected, in "Ogre Unaware."

  Roger E. Moore reveals why Astinus never hires kender to be scribes, in his story, "The Cobbler's Son."

  A ship bound for Istar may be making its final voyage, in Paul B. Thompson and Tonya R. Carter's story, "The Voyage of the Sunchaser."

  Doug Niles continues the adventures of his scribe, Foryth Teal, as that intrepid historian sets out to investigate a priest's claim that he can perform miracles, in "The High Priest of Halcyon."

  In "True Knight," we continue the story of the cleric of Mishakal, Brother Michael, and Nikol, daughter of a Solamnic Knight. The two survive the Cataclysm, but now they want answers. Their search leads them to an encounter with the knight who, so rumor has it, could have prevented the Cataclysm.

  Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

  THE WORD AND THE SILENCE

  Michael Williams

  I

  On Solamnia's castles ravens alight, dark and unnumbered like a year of deaths, and dreamt on the battlements, fixed and holy, are the signs of the Order

  Kingfisher and Rose -

  Kingfisher and Rose and a sword that is bleeding forever over the covering mountains, the shires perpetually damaged, and the blade itself is an unhealed wound, convergence of blood and memory, its dark rain masking the arrangement of stars, and below it the ravens gather.

  Below it forever the woman is telling the story, telling it softly as the past collapses into a breathing light, and I am repeating her story then and now in a willful dusk at the turn of the year in the flickering halls of the keep.

  The story ascends and spirals, descends on itself and circles through time through effacing event and continuing vengeance down to the time

  I am telling her telling you this.

  But bent by the fire like a doubling memory, the woman recounts and dwells in a dead man's story, harsh in the ears of his fledgling son, who nods, and listens again, and descends to a dodging country of tears and remembrance, where the memories of others fashion his bent recollections, assemble his father from mirrors and smoke and history's hearsay twines and repeats, and the wavering country,

  Solamnia, muses and listens.

  Out on the plains, orestes,

  the woman is saying, out among fires

  Which the bard's voice ignited

  In rumor and calumny,

  There they are burning your father,

  His name and our blood

  Forever from Caergoth

  To harboring Kalaman

  And out in the dying

  Bays of the north:

  All for a word, my son,

  A word masked as history

  Shielding a nest of adders.

  With words are we poisoned,

  Orestes, my son, she repeats in the fragmenting darkness, the firelight fixed on her hair, on the ivory glove of her hand and the tilted goblet.

  And always Orestes listened and practiced his harp for the journey approaching, and the world contracted, fierce and impermeable, caged in the wheeling words of his mother, caged in a custom of deaths.

  II

  Three things are lost in the long night of words: history's edge the heart's long appeasement the eye of the prophet.

  But the story born of impossible fragments is this: that Lord Pyrrhus Alecto light of the coast arm of Caergoth father to dreaming and to vengeful Orestes fell to the peasants in the time of the Rending fell in the vanguard of his glittering armies and over his lapsing eye wheeled constellations the scale of Hiddukel riding west to the garrisoned city.

  It is there that the edge of history ends: the rest is a song that followed on song the story involved in its own devising tied in devolving circles until truth was a word in the bardic night and the husk of event was a dim mathematics lost in the matrix of stars.

  III

  But this is the story as Arion told it,

  Arion Corvus, Branchala's bard the singer of mysteries light on the wing string of the harp.

  Unhoused by the Rending, traveling west, his map a memory of hearth and castle, unhoused, he sounded forever the hymns of comet and fire perpetual sounded the Time of the Rending, betrayals and uprisings spanning the breadth of the harper's hand, and history rode on the harp incanting the implausible music of breath.

  His was the song I remember, his song and my mother's retelling.

  O sing the ravens perpetually wronged to the ears of my children,

  O sing to them, Arion Stormcrow:

  Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

  Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight of the night of betrayals

  Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,

  The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.

  Forever and ever the villages burn in his passage,

  And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies

  That harried him back to the keep of the castle

  Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world

  Beneath the denial of battlements,

  Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.

  For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

  Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,

  A barren of shires and hamlets,

  And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.

  IV

  Look around you, my son for the fire in Arion's singing:

  For where in this country, in forgotten Caergoth, where does a single village burn?

  Where does a peasant suffer and starve by the fire of your father?

  Somewhere to the east before a white arras, gilded with laurel and gold adulation, the bard sings a lie in a listening house, and Caergoth burns in t
he world's imagining, while the bard holds something back from his singing, something resembling the truth.

  But let not the breath of the fire touch your father,

  Orestes, my son, my arm in the dwindling world, my own truth my prophecy, soothed the effacing mother, and darkly and silently

  Orestes listened, the deadly harp poised in his hand circuitous.

  And the word turned to deed and the song to a journey by night, and the listening years to a cloak and a borrowed name, as the boy matured in his mother's word, and the harp strings droned in the facing wind as he rode out alone, seeking Arion.

  V

  High on the battlements of Vingaard Keep as the wind plunged over the snow-covered walls,

  Orestes perched in a dark cloak huddled, the window below him gabled in light, and he muttered and listened, his honored impatience grown loud at the song of the bard by the fire.

  Melodiously, Arion sang of the world's beginning, the shape of us all retrieved by the hands of the gods from chaos, the oceans inscribing the dream of the plains, the sun and the moons appointing the country with light and the passage of summer to winter, the bright land's corners lovely with trees, the leaves quick with life with nations of kestrel with immaculate navies of doves, with the first plainsong of the summer sparrow and the song from the bard sustaining it all, breathing the phase of the moon's awakening, singing the births and the deaths of the heroes, all of it rising to the ears of Orestes.

  And rising beyond him it peopled the winter stars with a light that hovered and stilled above him, as nightly in song the old constellations resumed their imagined shapes, breathing the fire of the first creation over the years to the time that the song descends in a rain of light today on your shoulder with a frail incandescence of music and memory and the last fading green of a garden that never and always invented itself.

  For the bard's song is a distant belief, a belief in the shape of distance.

  All the while as the singing arose from the hearth and the hall, alone in the suffering wind, Orestes crouched and listened slowly, reluctantly beginning to sing, his dreams of murder quiet in the rapture of harp strings.

  VI

  Hieronymo he called himself,

  Hieronymo when down from the battlements he came, supplanted and nameless entering the hall in the wake of the wind and darkness.

  Arion dreamt by the fire, and his words were a low, shaping melody: the tongue of the flame inclined in the hall of his breath and the heart of the burning was a map in the eye of Orestes, who crouched by the hearth and offered his harp to his father's slanderer, smiling and smiling his villainous rubric,

  Teach me your singing, Arion, he said, adopting the voice and the eye of imagined Hieronymo deep in disguises, and none in the court knew Alecto's son -

  Teach me your singing, memorable bard,

  The light in the heart of winter,

  Singer of origins, framer of history,

  Drive my dead thoughts over the winter plains

  Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

  Old Arion smiled at the boy's supplication at the fracture of coals, at the bright hearth's flutter at the nothing that swirled at the heart of the fire: for something had passed in his distant imagining, dark as a wing on the snow-settled battlements, a step on a grave he could only imagine there in the warmth of the keep where the thoughts were of song and of music and memory, where something still darker was enjoining the bard to take on the lad who knelt in the firelight.

  Some things, he said,

  The poet brings forth.

  Others the poet holds back:

  For words and the silence

  Defining each other

  In spaces of holiness.

  Softly the old hand rose and descended, the harp-handling fingers at rest on the brow of the bold and mysterious boy.

  The apprenticeship was sealed in Orestes's bravado, the name of HIERONYMO fixed to the terms of indenture, all in the luck of an hour, and depth of a season, but somewhere within it a darker invention that sprawled in the depths of the heart and the dwindling earth.

  VII

  So masked in intention, in a sacred name for a year and a day

  Orestes surrendered his anger to music and wind, apprenticeship honed on the laddered wires of a harp that the gods whispered over, of a wandering in lore and the cloudy geographies tied to the fractured past, and he dwelt by the poet and traveled to Dargaard to the heart of Solanthus, to imperiled Thelgaard, to nameless castles of memory where the knights abided in yearning for something that moved in the channels of history, redeeming the damaged blood of the rose, while the story that Arion sang, his back to the dream and incredulous fire, discovered the years and the fading arm of the sword.

  Seven songs of instruction arose from the fire and the dreaming: the spiral of Quen love's first geometry the wing of Habbakuk brooding above the world the circle of Solin rash and recurrent heart the arc of Jolith dividing intention from deed the white fire of Paladine perfected song of the dragon the prayer of Matheri merciful grammar of thought and the last one the high one light of Branchala that measures all song in the shape of words

  Alone in the margin of darkness, Orestes surrendered and listened singing reluctantly, joyfully, as the gods and the planets and the cycle of years devolved in a long dream of murder and the cleansing of harp strings.

  VIII

  A year and a day the seasons encircled, according to fable and ancient decrees of enchantment, as the gnats' choir of autumn surrendered to ice and the turn of the year approached like a death and the listening castles mislaid under snow.

  Orestes's apprenticeship led to a circle of fire, where the harp he had mastered and the seven songs and the fourteen modes of incalculable magic circled him back to the night and the keep and the wintry eyes of the bard singing memory into flesh, into stone, into dreaming and wind, and

  Arion, he said, and Arion, tell me of time

  Of the rending of Krynn and betrayals.

  The bard took the harp in the foreseen night: for his memory darkened the edge of the past when knowing devises the shape of creation, and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing on the glittering domes and spires of Istar the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes and Arion told us that night by the hearth that hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet, as Arion told us, and Orestes leaned closer and ARION, he said, and

  Arion, teach me of time

  Of the famine and plague and Pyrrhus Alecto.

  Arion stroked the harp and began, his white hair cascading across the gold arm of the harp as though he were falling through song into sleep and the winter stilled at the touch of the string, and he sang the last verses as hidden Orestes reclined and remembered and listened:

  Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

  Pyrrhus Alecto, The knight of the night of betrayals

  Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,

  The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.

  Forever and ever the villages burn in his passage,

  And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies

  That harried him back to the keep of the castle

  Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world

  Beneath the denial of battlements,

  Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.

  For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

  Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,

  A barren of shires and hamlets,

  And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.

  Orestes listened, as honor and song, as blood and adoption warred in the cell of his thoughts, his father redeemed by poison, by
blade by the song of the harp string rendered a garrotte, closing the eloquent throat of Arion silencing song, reclaiming his father, and transforming Caergoth from desert to garden: yet the hand of Orestes stilled in the arc of reprisal, and into the night he warred and remembered, and as I tell you this, memory wars with him still.

  IX

  The mourning began when the doves circled Vingaard: the poison had passed through the veins like imagined fires: and alone in his quarters, the poet's apprentice abided the funerals, settled accounts, awaited the search of the Order through ravaged Solamnia for rivals and villains, for the trails of assassins, and late on the fifth night after the burning, when the ashes had settled on Arion's pyre, only then did Hieronymo bring forth the harp

  (though some there were curious, who late in the night had heard, or had thought they heard, the apprentice weeping and playing the sonorous mode of the Rending), and late on the fifth night after the burning

  Hieronymo sang for the host at the Vingaard Keep and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing on the glittering domes and spires of Istar the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes as Hieronymo told them that night by the hearth that hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of