The Branchalan mode. The mode of remembrance.

Perhaps he was already too late.

"Hurry, Northstar," he muttered through clenched teeth, and the young man quickened their pace.

"Five sentries are dead," Northstar explained, as the sound of the drum grew louder. "Gormion sur shy;vived, and Larken, and three of the bandits."

The drum droned on, and a clear voice rose on the rhythm, the melody doleful and lonely.

"Poor Larken," Northstar murmured. "A widow's weeds though never wed."

Stormlight stood upright, stepped away from the young man's support. The memory, elusive in fire and battle.

Tanila.

"The woman, Northstar!" he shouted, his strong hands grasping the guide's shoulders. "What hap shy;pened to Tanila?"

Northstar shook his head.

"Vanished. No sign of her at the dunes or amid the slag. There's a chance the eruption swallowed her, or…"

"Or?" Stormlight was insistent, shrill.

"I stepped to the edge of the salt flats, where she was headed when Larken's song began, when the monster descended. There was nothing there but the faint outline of a woman's body, already half-vanished in the shifted sand."

"An outline? No tracks leading away?"

"None. Nothing but a smaller pile of rubble … a heap of black crystal and salt."

Chapter 12

They had been forest at one time, these ranging caverns beneath the city of Istar. A hundred thousand years ago, or two hundred, the volcanoes, now dormant and lying beneath the great Istarian lake, erupted in the last of the great geologic disasters, before the All Saints War of the ancient Age of Dreams. It had buried this landscape beneath lava and ash, and the caverns had formed slowly, inexorably, beneath the rise and fall of a hundred civilizations. The five races stepped forth onto the face of the planet, the House of Silvanos rose in the young forest to the south, the gnomes were born, and the Graystone formed in the divine forges of Reorx. It was then that the strange process of opalescence began in the petrified trunks and limbs of the buried trees, and water from the new lake hollowed passages through the porous volcanic rock.

Now, after thousands of years, living eyes mar shy;veled at the immemorial forest, and twenty years of pick and shovel had not yet spoiled its eerie, unearthly beauty. In the smokeless torches of the elven miners, the fossilized landscape glittered as though touched with an ancient, frozen dew.

Three elves descended the long, narrow passage between petrified oaks, glowing amber lamps in their hands. They were masked against the dust, and their green eyes flashed like stars in their ash-blackened faces.

This night, they were not searching for opals. Despite the Kingpriest's orders, all mining had been set aside to search for the child.

They had imagined her dead, along with her mother and three other elves, when this part of the cavern collapsed two nights earlier. They had sent out runners and scouts into the midst of the rubble, clambering and crawling back into the darkness until they could clamber and crawl no more, calling the names of the five missing miners.

Tessera and Parian. Gleam. Cabuchon.

Little Taglio. Only a child, but old enough to hold a lamp while the others worked.

Just this afternoon they had heard her crying. Now, having combed the most accessible regions of the mines, the Lucanesti had secretly sent several of their strongest and best into more perilous depths, the realm of cave-in and rockslide, and of the spirit naga-the serpentine monsters with the tranquil human faces, whose spellcraft dried the opalescent bodies of the Lucanesti and left them dust and brittle bone in the deep, forgotten corridors.

Dangerous territory indeed, and the sound of the elf-child's crying had haunted them for hours, as the three gaunt miners dug and scrabbled toward the source of the sound.

The oldest of the searchers, Spinel, held the lamp above the younger, stronger elves. Seventeen hun shy;dred years had dulled the sharpness of his eyes, the power and resilience of his arms, but the old elf was shrewd, tunnelwise, just as aligned to the dark shift of corridor and passage as the dwarves he had fought for centuries under the earth.

He held the light in hopes of finding one of his vanishing people.

Once a noble, if minor, branch of the Dimernesti elves, the Lucanesti had roamed the grasslands south of Istar, their keen woodsense transformed by their travels into an uncanny discernment of hidden underground springs.

Water in rock. It called to them from its tomb in the dry earth. The Lucanesti had become essential to the early caravans and migrations crossing the face of evolving Krynn. "Dowsers," the wanderers had called them, and hired them at great expense as guides and augurers.

Dowsers.

But they were paid well, and the insulting name had become a badge of curious pride. Over the years, though, water had become taken for granted by the wood elf and high elf, native to river lands and watery forests. The scant influence of the Lucanesti dwindled. They were ignored at the high council of the elves, mocked as vagabonds and ruffians.

The old names returned. "Dowsers." "Hedge elves."

In the midst of such scorn and contempt, the opals came to them like a favor from the gods.

Water and rock, it was again, for those stones were formed over thousands of years in which water and rock commingled beneath the Istarian mountains. What it was that led the Lucanesti underground had been forgotten under the tide of centuries, but the maze of cubicles in the opal caverns beneath Istar were evidence that they had mined the roots of the city for ages.

And yet they remained a people of open country, of fresh winds and the high arrangement of stars. Their sojourns underground were brief and efficient, the white lucerna of their eyes attuned to the water in the opals, their digging precise. The mining took its toll and changed them, their skin hardening with age and silica and water, until the old elves were translucent, shimmering, opalescent like the stones they hunted. They used the change to their advan shy;tage, masking their presence against intruder and predator, fading into the rubble where they stood breathless, indistinguishable from surrounding stone.

When they were old enough-two thousand years, or maybe less-the opalescence had its inevitable way, and they entered the stonesleep, unable to return from the dark, encrusted dream.

But while they were young, there were opals to mine and riches to gather. And the Lucanesti mined and gathered, bringing the stones back to the sur shy;face. Soon what had been a poor and marginal tribe flourished with disproportionate wealth.

A wealth that drew the attention of cities, of the Kingpriest.

Of the venatica, the hunters and spies in the hire of Istarian clergy.

Soon the Lucanesti were observed. Then accompa shy;nied-in what the venatica called "the interest of geologic science," though it was really an armed surveillance. Observation and accompaniment changed slowly, like a stone in the swim of under shy;ground water, and the elves found more and more of the red-robed Istarians as companions, advisors . . .

The "cooperative" venture turned into slavery one day when Spinel and a party of followers made for the surface, for fresh air and light, but were stopped by a squadron of Istarian swordsmen.

The mining Lucanesti never saw the surface again.

Still, the Kingpriest's request surprised none of them, really. After all, relocation had been the death sentence for a thousand innocent peoples since the dawn of the planet, and the mountains and plains around the spreading, marbled city were littered with abandoned villages, burned hamlets, and the moldering relics of swallowed civilizations.