"Their names will be sung around the throne of Istar, when I ascend to the lordship of the great Imperial City. We will sing them in glory when I am Kingpriest, set to the music of drum and passing bell. For the glyphs and the signs and my own dreams have told me that the rule of Istar is mine.

"You have followed my dream through four hard seasons. We have sown seed in the bitter ground of the desert, in obscurity and distance and sand, where all ambition was water. We have watered the plains with our blood, and tilled in the storm-furrowed mountain passes. Now Istar stands open to bandit and Plainsmen. My worthy rival-the kin shy;dred warrior and prophet in the Kingpriest's Tower-has met his adversary in the southern fields! The season has come! Set your hand to the harvest!"

For a moment the rebels fell into complete, aston shy;ished silence. All eyes were riveted on the Water Prophet, all ears turned to his feverish, wild pro shy;nouncements.

"Hear the word of the Prophet!" Northstar shouted.

A pathetic tap-tap, late and halfhearted, accompa shy;nied his cry.

"The word of the Prophet King!" the young man continued, unfazed and triumphant, and to the sur shy;prise of the elders and the Namers, a voice deep in the milling rebels took up the call-a dark voice, nei shy;ther masculine nor feminine, but a voice that seemed to rise up within the hearts of all assembled. Another cried in response, and another, and soon the young men, chanting "The Prophet King! The Prophet King!" lifted Fordus atop their shoulders and bore him through the wreckage, through the wide path that the wind had cut over rock and rubble and undergrowth.

At the mouth of the pass, Larken, Vincus, and a score of Que-Nara remained, as Fordus's compan shy;ions hastened toward the lakeside road and the plains and city beyond. Her dark eyes distant and mournful, Larken watched as the Prophet's banner was hoisted into the air, and the walls of the moun shy;tain pass resounded with this new and alien cheer.

"The Prophet King!"

As the cry carried down the column, Fordus's rebels picked up their pace. The weary trudge became a brisk, revitalized march, as a strange, per shy;fumed wind rolled through the pass, bearing upon it the smell of jasmine and juniper, of attar of roses and spice and old wine.

Istar the temptress was calling them. Soft and fem shy;inine, conniving and poisonous, at sunset she cast her nets of beguilement.

As Fordus and his followers ranged through the treacherous passes, the seeds of another insurrection were being sown in the depths of the mines.

Deep below the city, their dead mourned and placed reverently in porous pockets of volcanic rock, the elves resumed their digging.

Exhausted, the sounds of little Taglio's cries still echoing in his thoughts, Spinel guided his work-numbed crew into the dark recesses beneath the shores of Lake Istar.

These were the newest mines. No sooner had the mourning ceased than word came down from the Kingpriest's tower to open them. Obviously, some event above had changed the nature of the labor, brought a new urgency to this mysterious need for the glain opals.

By lamplight, Spinel examined the most recently discovered stones. Judging from the veins of opal the diggers had found, the glain themselves were young-younger by far than any he had mined in his thousand years of subterranean labor.

The stones looked oddly familiar-as though in a shape-a formation-the old elf should recognize.

He knelt, examined more closely.

There was something deep and important he was forgetting.

It was time for the Anlage.

The lucerna closed over the old elf's eyes as he entered the deep recollection of his people. Abstractly, he fingered the gems.

He remembered the years of mining beneath the city. The bright eyes of the Kingpriest's guards, the serpentine, human-faced nagas, with their enchant shy;ments that dried and paralyzed the Lucanesti, the wanderings in the Age of Might.

Remembered the Age of Light, of Dreams, his thoughts tunneling back into Starbirth, into the God-time …

Then he looked at the stones in his hands, and cried out in horror.

"Bones," Spinel told the assembled miners. "The glain opals, the special black ones the Kingpriest covets, are the bones of our deepest ancestors."

Tourmalin frowned in disbelief, but her gaze fal shy;tered under the withering stare of the ancient elf.

"No, neither your fathers nor your grandfathers, nor the bones of any in five generations of Lucanesti. But the eldest of the race-those who entered the company of Branchala in the years before the ward and the wanderings. How could we have been so blinded?"

He extended his pale, encrusted hands.

"Istar has blinded us!" someone shouted from the borders of the torchlight, but Spinel shook his head.

"Istar has used our blindness," he insisted. "Used our greed and our cowardice for its own dark strategies. All the while, the Anlage was there for us, bear shy;ing this terrible secret. Why did we never consult it?"

His words tumbled into a long silence. Spinel leaned against the rock and gazed out over the torches and lamps, over the glittering eyes of his people.

"Blame and punishment are not the answer," he insisted, and others-the oldest of the company- nodded in eager assent. "For years we have com shy;plied, have knelt in submission to the Kingpriest and his minions. Now we must redress our wrong shy;doing. Regardless of the guards and venatica, one road remains for our people. We must reclaim and rebury our ancient dead."

The rebels reached the shores of the lake at mid shy;night.

Barely three hundred of Fordus's followers remained. In early evening, Larken and Stormlight, who had been following at an unfriendly distance, had taken a sloping path into the sunset, headed for the Western Pass and a safe route back to the desert.

Fordus did not acknowledge them. With North-star and three of the younger bandits, he approached the lapping waters of Lake Istar, dark and spangled with the reflections of a thousand stars. He knelt, recovered his breath, and stirred the waters with his hand.

The surface of the lake glittered with starlight and torchlight, for the bandits had brought fire with them, the better to burn the city.

"With neither glyph nor interpreter, he finds the greatest of all waters," Fordus pronounced, an eerie

laughter underscoring his voice. Resolutely, he stepped into the water, took another step, and waded waist-deep into the lake. Pensively he traced his finger across the glittering surface.

"I had thought to run to Istar," he murmured cryptically. "Perhaps my steps would skip over the water, or the lake itself would buoy me …"

"But we must travel like mortals," he conceded with a smile. "For all of you are my charges, my min shy;ions, my . . . celebrants. And though to cross the water would be more swift, I would have to do it alone-to leave you here to plod in your brave little paths."

He stepped forward, sank to his chest.

"I choose not to travel alone," he declared. "At least not yet."

The drama that played out in the mountains was small, insignificant compared to the large struggles among the pantheon of Krynn.

Deep in the Abyss, the dark gods felt the absence of the Lady. In the dark unfathomable void they waited-Zeboim and Morgion, Hiddukel and Chemosh, the dark moon Nuitari hovering over them all. It was strangely restful, this respite from her chaos and torment. Oh, there would be time to gather and turn on one another-to intrigue and rend and divide and wrestle for power. But for now they were content to recline and bask on the dark currents, to recover and regroup their failing energies.

All except one: the most devious of all the evil pantheon. Sargonnas circled the void in a thousand pieces, his fragmented thoughts on the War Prophet whose campaigns he had inspired and nurtured. He had been foolish, trying to break into the world through the sands of the desert, but the knowledge that Takhisis walked the earth and spoke to his min shy;ions, his Prophet, was too galling, too frightening for silence and inaction.