"You contemptible parasite!" spat the goddess. "You gem-hoarding adjunct] You sniveling, emulous,

dunghill fowl\"

Fire raced through the salty air and scattered, and Sargonnas perched atop the sailing golden egg, mantling his wings above the bright treasure.

" 'Would not destroy the godling,' you say?" Takhisis rumbled. "I will show you all my compas shy;sion, Sargonnas. I will show you the abundance of my heart."

Arching in the sky, her black wings shadowing the older moons, Takhisis drew the ocean wind into her lungs and belched forth a column of black fire. For a moment the condor and his glittering prize van shy;ished in the dark blaze, and the heavens fluttered and extinguished. Deprived of sunlight and star, the planet cooled and frosted, and the deepest winter settled on Ansalon, unnatural in the month of Sum shy;mer Run. But slowly, because the goddess was not the only force on Krynn, the stars returned one by one, the first ones rising in the constellation of the Dragon, then the surrounding luminaries and, finally, the planets and the moons.

A dark shape hung in the heavens, its burnt wings still brooding above the egg, above the blackened shell and the seared godling within.

Nuitari was never the same after that. Dark-haired and sickly, suffering a fiery malady in the depths of his lungs and throat, he spoke in hoarse whispers from the first days, from his hatching time.

So Takhisis remembered as she passed over the unsettled sands. Above her the dark moon drifted furtively between the stars, and she looked up approvingly at the twisted path of her son.

Sargonnas had been right.

Why destroy the child you can bend to your will completely?

She thought of the Kingpriest in his high tower, counting the opals that would bring her to the sur shy;face of Krynn.

She glided toward the lights of campfires, and a solitary bird, circling over her cautiously, called softly and sped away.

The same bird shrieked again as it sailed over For-dus, who knelt on the floor of the kanaji.

Exhausted and much the worse for his struggle with the springjaw, his grazed ankle swelling with a trace of the creature's poison, Fordus had struggled to the edge of the Tears of Mishakal. There he found the kanaji, and there he waited for the glyphs amid the strange, chiming music of the wind over the salt crystals, the lights of the camp a mile away glowing on the other side of the Tears.

Fordus closed his eyes. Clutching his ankle, he stared at the windswept sand in the open, circular chamber. For a terrifying moment, he confused it with the springjaw's lair and then remembered where he was. But his ankle had been touched by a plume of the acid that was the clumsy springjaw's other defense.

"Come forth," he muttered finally, teeth clenched.

And then, the new glyphs formed in the eddying sand.

The Tine. The sign for water. Of that he was sure.

Third day of Solinari.

That was more puzzling. But when he gave it voice in the midst of his people, when Stormlight heard the prophecy and interpreted it in the com shy;mon language, his mind would know what his heart now sensed here in the kanaji.

No Wind.

It was a mystery to him, an obscure arrangement of shape and line and half-resemblance. And then, emerging from the pristine, level sand, came a fourth, extraordinary glyph.

Springjaw.

Fordus blinked in confusion. But it had already happened! The funnel, the ground giving way beneath him …

This fiery sting in his ankle and the rising fever.

Slowly he set his thoughts aside-this time with more difficulty, as the pain in his foot and his leg thrust him again and again into the labyrinth of his mind, into doubts and fears that the words would not come, that Stormlight and Larken would not find him, that the gods themselves had turned away.

Instead, he stared at the symbols, closed his eyes. There. He had it. The four glyphs were committed to memory, and then as always, they vanished immedi shy;ately, leaving the floor of the pit clean and unruffled.

Fordus tightened the neck of his robe, his opal col shy;lar hot and constricting. He could not remove the tore. Long ago the glyphs had warned of dire conse shy;quence if he did so. But he was pained and uncom shy;fortable. His fever made the desert chill almost unbearable.

Fordus tried to stand, and suddenly the kanaji rocked with a red light, throwing him back to his knees. He closed his eyes and saw the acid spurt again, eating relentlessly into the flesh of his booted ankle.

Leaning against the limestone wall, he pulled himself up on his feet again.

Have to get out of here, he thought. Into the light. Into the air.

Get home. Get warm.

Painfully, his skin hurting with every touch of his robe, he crawled out of the pit and rested-for a minute, ten minutes, an hour?-on the baked earth at its rim. Dimly his fevered mind registered the faint music of the salt crystals, and for a while, he slept or tried to sleep.

Again the dream came to him. The lake of fire. The spindle bridge. The dark, winged form, the flattery and coaxing . . . the promise of finding out who he was.

Briefly, in the flitting fashion of delirium, it seemed like Racer stepped into his dream. Grizzled and venomous, his wrinkled face a sinkhole of mal shy;ice, Racer shuffled onto the narrow bridge and into the winged shadow, his spindly ancient form com shy;mingling with the strange, birdlike cloud until Racer became the condor, the condor Racer.

No. No unexpected dreams.

Fordus woke and stood, drunkenly lurching toward the shimmering stones and the camp and safety. Not a hundred yards into his desperate effort, the cracked earth seemed to rise, to trip him, and he fell to his hands and knees, clambering over the ground like a scorpion, like a monstrous crab.

He reached the level top of the small rise. Ahead, the Tears of Mishakal seemed hazy, even more dis shy;tant, as though in trying to run toward them he had in fact run in the opposite direction.

Fordus looked back, toward the kanaji.

A wide expanse of desert land lay between him and the standing rock and baked, cracked earth, its red-brown surface scored with an intricate webbing of lines.

For a moment, on the horizon, Fordus thought he saw Kestrel. He raised his hand, shouted or thought he shouted …

Then he remembered that his foster father was two years dead, buried at the ancient dry fork of the Tine.

Then who . . . ?

Kestrel's form wavered at the edge of his sight, like a rain cloud. Slowly another form took shape inside it-another man, dressed in brilliant white, his robes dispelling the shadow like smoke in the wind.

Fordus stared at the man until his eyes hurt. A midsized man, balding, with sky-blue . . .

No, sea-blue eyes . . .

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the image was gone, leaving the bare desert bathed in the eerie moonlight, a desolate flatland that stretched for as far as Fordus could see.

His fever still torrid, the Water Prophet stared absently at the cracked earth until the cracks them shy;selves began to take shape.

A glyph. Then another.

The whole desert has become my kanaji, Fordus thought incoherently, triumphantly. He began to read the wavering lines on the earth.

One resembled a tower. The other a chair.

In swift hallucinatory fashion, Fordus put a mean shy;ing together.

"I shall sit on the throne of Istar," he breathed. "I have waited for this summons.

"The rule of empire awaits me. The world has become my kanaji, my ground of visions. I shall lift the tyranny of the Kingpriest…

"And I shall rule in his stead. I know who I am. I am the Kingpriest."

All messages of water forgotten, Fordus rolled exultantly onto his back, staring up at the reeling heavens. The earth had spoken, naming him rightful Kingpriest of Istar.