"We'll take the coins and the horses. Leave the rest," said the robbers' human master.

"What about da swords?" said Scarface. "Dese is good irun." He held out Sturm's sword for his leader to see.

"Yes, too good for you. Bring it. It will fetch good money at Trader Lovo's. Get the woman's, too."

Warty hopped over to Kitiara. He kicked her arm aside and bent over to draw the sword, which lay under her. As he did, her hand clamped around the goblin's ankle.

"Wha?" said the wart-faced goblin.

Kitiara yanked his leg out from under him, and the goblin went down with a thud. In the next instant, she was up, sword in hand. Warty groped for his dagger, but never drew it. With one cut, Kitiara sent his ugly head bouncing away.

"Get her! Get her, you miserable wretches! It's three against one!" yelled the man from the shadows.

Scarface pulled a hook-bladed bill off his shoulder and attacked. Kitiara knocked the clumsy weapon away repeat- edly. The other two goblins tried to circle behind her. She turned so that the fire was at her back.

Sturm raged against the spell that kept him helpless. A goblin's foot passed within easy reach of his right hand, but he couldn't even flex a finger to help Kitiara.

Not that she needed any help. When Scarface lunged with his bill, she lopped the hook off. The goblin stared stupidly at his shortened shaft. Kitiara thrust through him. "Now it's two to one!" she said. She leaped over the campfire, landing between the last two robbers. They screeched in terror and dropped their daggers. She cut one down as he stood there.

The last goblin ran to the edge of the clearing. Sturm heard him die among the oaks. There were a few other sounds -- feet running, loud breathing, and a howl of pain.

"Thought you could get away, eh?" Kitiara said. She had caught the hidden magic-user and brought him back into the firelight. He was a gaunt fellow twice Sturm's age, dressed in a shabby gray robe. Tools of his art dangled from a rope tied around his waist: a wand, a bag of herbs, amulets wrought in lead and copper. Kitiara kicked the magician's legs out from under him, and he sprawled in the dirt beside Sturm.

"Take the spell off my friend," Kitiara demanded.

"I-I can't."

"You mean you won't!" She poked him with her sword.

"No, no! I don't know how! I don't know how to take it off." He seemed ashamed. "I never had to take a paralysis spell off before. The goblins always cut their throats."

"Because you ordered them to!"

"No! No!"

Kitiara spat. "The only thing worse than a thief is a fool weakling of a thief."

She raised her blade to her shoulder. "There's only one way to break the spell that I know of." She was right, and when the magic-user was dead, the leaden feeling vanished from Sturm's limbs. He sat up, rubbing his stiff neck.

"By all the gods, Kitiara, you're ruthless!" he said. He looked around the campsite, now a bloody battlefield. "Didyou have to kill them all?"

"There's gratitude for you," she said. She wiped her blade on the tail of the dead magician's robe. "They would have cheerfully cut our throats. Sometimes I don't understand you, Sturm."

He remembered the goblin's fork-bladed dagger and said, "You have a point. Still, killing that scruffy magician was no honorable deed."

She slid her blade into its sheath. "I didn't do it for honor,"

she said. "I was just being practical."

They gathered their belongings from where the robbers had scattered them. Sturm saw Kitiara pick up the amethyst necklace. "Look," she said. "It's clear."

In the light from the fire, Sturm saw that the once-purple stone was now ordinary, transparent quartz. "That explains it," he said. "You were able to move when the amethyst fell into your hand, yes?"

The light dawned on her. "That's right. I was wearing it over my blouse and under my mail --"

"When it touched your skin, the paralysis spell was bro- ken. The dissipation of the spell bled all the color from the stone. It's just an arrowhead-shaped piece of quartz now."

Kitiara slipped the loop over her head. "I'll keep it, just the same. Tirolan probably never realized he was saving our lives when he gave me the stone."

Their baggage recovered, Sturm began to gather dead wood from the circle of oaks and heaped it on the fire. The flames leaped up. "Why are you doing that?" asked Kitiara.

"I'm making a pyre," said Sturm. "We can't leave these corpses lying about."

"Let the vultures have them."

"It's not out of respect that I do this. Evil magicians, even one as lowly as this one, have the unhappy habit of return- ing undead to prey on the living. Help me put them on:he pyre, and their menace will truly be over."

She agreed, and the goblins and their master were con- signed to the flames. Sturm flung dirt on the embers, then he and Kit mounted their horses.

"How do you know so much about magic?" asked Kiti- ara. "I thought you despised it in all forms."

"I do," Sturm replied. "Magic is the greatest underminer of order in the world. It's difficult enough to live with virtue and honor without the temptation of magical power. But magic exists, and we all must learn to deal with it. For myself, 1 have had many talks with your brother, and I've learned some things I've needed to defend myself."

"You mean Raistlin?" she asked, and Sturm nodded. "His lectures on magic always put me to sleep," she said.

"I know," said Sturm. "You go to sleep awfully easily."

They turned the horses toward the new morning's sun and rode away.

Chapter 5.

Cloudmaster.

The day after the robbers' attack was oppressively humid. Tallfox and Pira needed frequent watering, for their heads would sag and their gait falter. They entered a district of orchards and farms, with a good view from the road on all sides. Kitiara and Sturm discarded their mail for shirt-sleeves, and by noon Kitiara had pulled her blouse loose and tied the tails together around her waist. Thus cooled, they paused in a fig grove for lunch.

"Too bad they're green," said Kitiara, pinching an imma- ture fig between her thumb and forefinger. "I like figs."

"I doubt that the orchard's keeper would share your enthusiasm unless you paid for what you ate," said Sturm.

He hollowed a large biscuit and filled the hole with chopped, dried fruit and cheese.

"Oh, come on. Haven't you ever snitched apples or pears? Stolen a chicken and roasted it over a bark fire, while the farmer hunted for you with a pitchfork?"

"No, never."

"I have. And few things in life taste as sweet as the food you season with wit." She dropped the fig branch and joined Sturm under the tree.

"You never considered what your witty little thefts might do to the farmer, did you, Kit? That he or his family might go hungry for a night because of your filched meal?"

She bristled. "A fine one you are to talk, Master Bright- blade. Since when did you ever work for the food that went into your belly? It's very easy for a lord's son to speak of jus- tice for the poor, never having been poor himself."

Sturm counted silently until his anger subsided. "I worked," he said simply. "When my mother, her handmaid Carin, and I first arrived in Solace twelve years ago, we had some money that we'd brought with us. But soon it ran out, and we were in dire straits. My mother was an intensely proud woman and would not take charity. Mistress Carin and I did odd jobs around Solace to put food on the table.

We never told my mother."

Kitiara's prickly demeanor softened. "What did you do?"

He shrugged. "Because I was able to read and write, I got a job with Derimius the Scribe, copying scrolls and manu- scripts. Not only was I able to earn five silver pieces a week, but I got to read all sorts of things."

-I never knew that.- "In fact, I met Tanis at Derimius's shop. He brought in a ledger that he kept for Flint. Tanis had spilled some ink on the last pages and wanted Derimius to replace them with new parchment. Tanis saw a sixteen-year-old boy scribbling away with a gray goose quill and inquired about me. We talked and became friends."

This statement was punctuated by a roll of far-off thun- der. The sultry air had collected in a mass of blue-black thunderheads piling up in the western sky. They were mov- ing quickly eastward, so Sturm crammed the last of his lunch in his mouth and jumped to his feet. He mumbled something through bread and cheese.

"What?" said Kitiara.

"-- horses. Must secure the horses!"

Lightning lanced down from the clouds to the hills where the robbers had been vanquished. Wind blew out of the upper air, swirling dust into Sturm and Kitiara's eyes. They tied Tallfox and Pira to a fig tree, and hastily rigged their blankets as a shelter to keep the rain off. Down the road Kit- iara could see a wall of rain advancing toward them. "Here it comes!" she said. The storm broke over the fig grove with all its fury. Rain hammered the skimpy screen of blankets down on their heads. In seconds, Sturm and Kitiara were completely soaked. Rain collected between the rows of trees and filled the low places. Water climbed over Kitiara's toes.

Tallfox couldn't bear it. A nervous beast by nature, he reared and neighed as the storm played around him. His ter- ror infected the usually stolid Pira, and both horses started straining against their tethers. A bolt of lightning hit the tall- est tree in the orchard and blasted it into a million burning fragments. The horses, driven beyond terror, tore free and galloped away, Tallfox fleeing east and Pira veering north.

"After them!" Sturm cried above the din.

He and Kitiara splashed off after their respective mounts.

Tallfox was a long-legged sprinter, and he galloped in a straight line. Pira was a hard-cornering dodger. She wove among the leafy fig trees, changing direction a dozen times in twenty places. Kitiara stumbled after her, cursing her favorite's agility.

The orchard ended in a gully. Kitiara slid down the mud- dy bank and into calf-deep water. "Pira!" she called. "Pira, you pea-brained nag, where are you?" All she got for her shouting was a mouth full of water. She scanned both sides of the gully for tracks. In the lightning's glare Kitiara saw a strange thing. An angular black shape, like a warrior's shield, was silhouetted against the clouds, some forty feet overhead. The dazzling glow faded, but not before she saw a long line trailing below the shield to the ground. Kitiara slogged forward, not knowing what she would find.

Tallfox easily outran his master, but Sturm was able to follow the chestnut's prints in the mud. A wall of closely growing cedar saplings blocked the end of the orchard.

There was only one gap wide enough for a horse to pass through, and sure enough, Sturm found Tallfox's trail there.

He plunged into the dense tangle of evergreen. Broken sap- lings told well which way his horse had gone.

The lightning was unusually active overhead. It crackled and pulsed from cloud to cloud. One prolonged stroke illu- minated a wonder to Sturm's eyes: an enormous bird flut- tered in the storm wind. The bird wobbled from side to side, but never flew off. Another bolt of lightning crackled, and he saw why. Someone had tied cords to the bird's feet.

Kitiara climbed a hill of solid mud. Her hair was plastered to her head, and her clothing felt as if it had absorbed a ton of water. At the top of the hill, she could see down into a wide clearing. There was no sign of Pira. There was, how- ever, plenty to see.

In the center of the clearing was a thing such as Kitiara had never seen. It was like a huge boat with large leather sails furled along each side. There were no masts, but the prow was long and pointed, like a bird's beak, and there were wheels on the underside of the hull. Above the boat, tied to it by a rope netting, was a big canvas bag. A huge egg-shaped bag squirmed and writhed in the wind like a liv- ing thing. A swarm of little men surrounded the boat-thing.

Beyond them, a couple of tall poles rose straight up from the ground. From the tops of these four poles, long ropes whipped about, and at the end of the ropes were more of the 'warrior's shields' that Kitiara had seen.At the same time, Sturm emerged from the cedars on the opposite side of the same clearing. He gaped at the thing.

Wordlessly, he headed toward it.

A little man in a shiny hat and long coat greeted Sturm.

"G-greetings and felicit-tationsl" he said cheerily.

"Hello," said a bewildered Sturm. "What is going on here?" Even as he spoke, a bolt of lightning struck one of the 'birds' tethered on a pole (the same thing Kitiara had mis- taken for a shield). Blue-white fire coursed down the line to the pole. From the pole, it flashed along another line a foot off the ground, until it reached the boat-thing, where it van- ished. The boat swayed on its wheels, then settled back.

"D-Doing? Well, charging up, as you c-can see," said the little man. When he flipped the wide brim of his hat back, Sturm saw his pale eyes and bushy white brows and realized that he was a gnome. "It really is a w-wonderful storm.

We're so l-lucky!"

Kitiara wandered around the odd-looking craft, warily keeping her distance. By one especially vivid bolt of light- ning, she saw Sturm talking to the little fellow. She cupped her hands around her lips and yelled, "Sturm!"

"Kit!"

She joined him. "Did you find the horses?"

"No, I was hoping they ran to you."

She waved her arms in great circles. "I fell in a ditch!"

"So I see. What are we going to do?"

"Ahem," said the gnome. "D-do I understand that you t-two have lost your m-means of transportation'"

"That's right," said Sturm and Kitiara in unison.

"Fortuitous f-fate! Perhaps we can help one another." He flipped the brim of his hat down again. A tiny torrent of water spilled down his coat. "Will you c-come with me?"

"Where are we going?" asked Sturm.

"For n-now, out of the w-weather," said the gnome.

"I'm for that!" said Kitiara.

- The gnome led them up a ramp into the left side of the boat. The interior was brightly lit, warm, and dry. Their guide removed his hat and coat. He was a mature male of his race, with a fine white beard and bald pink head. He gave Sturm and Kitiara each a towel -- which, being sized for gnomes, was no bigger than a hand-towel. Sturm dried his hands and face. Kitiara loosened some of the mud from hers, wrung out the towel, and tied it scarf-fashion around her head.

"F-follow me," said the gnome. "My c-colleagues will join us l-later. They're busy now g-gathering the lightning."

With this amazing statement, he led them down a long, narrow passage between two banks of machinery of unfath- omable purpose. All the rods, cranks, and gears were skill- fully wrought in iron or brass and carefully hollowed out.

Their guide came to a small ladder, which he ascended. The upper deck they entered was subdivided into small cabins.

Hammocks were slung from hooks, and all sorts of boxes, crates, and great glass demijohns were packed on every inch of floor space. Only a narrow track down the center of the passage was clear for walking.

They climbed a second ladder and were in a house built in the center of the deck. There were portholes in the walls,and Sturm could see that rain still lashed at them. The deck- house was split into two large rooms. The forward room, where they entered, was fitted like a ship's wheelhouse. A steering wheel was set at the bow end, which was extensive- ly glazed with many glass panels. All sorts of levers sprout- ed from the floor and ceiling, and there were mysterious gauges labeled Altitude, Indicated Air Speed, and Density of Raisins in Breakfast Muffins.

Kitiara introduced them. The gnome's eyes widened, and he smiled benignly when he learned that Sturm was the son of an ancient Solamnic family. Ever curious, he inquired after Kitiara's antecedents. She turned his query aside and described their journey so far, their goal, and their general frustration at having lost their horses.