Fate of Thorbardin

FIFTEEN

General Darkstone crawled out from under the slab of stone that had nearly crushed him flat. He stood shakily and looked around, dazed, but not so dazed that he failed to realize that the slab, caught as it was between two boulders, had actually saved his life by acting as shield against the piles of stone and debris that had rained down into the chasm when the mountain had split. Willim’s army commander had fallen into that chasm, but by some miracle, General Darkstone had been spared.

He saw one of his men nearby and reached down to check on the dwarf, only to recoil when he realized it was only the head and upper torso of the soldier. The rest of his body had been crushed beneath a massive boulder. Looking up, Darkstone spotted the yawning ledges of a deep chasm. Where he had stood upon a solid floor, within a sturdily fortified gatehouse, the rock had split asunder. Some massive force had cleaved right through that immortal barrier, shattering the barrier to Thorbardin’s world.

Even more shocking was the bright daylight spilling in through the wide gap that had somehow been smashed into the side of the mountain. Beams of sunlight stabbed through the murk overhead, highlighting soot and dust floating in the air. Darkstone could smell the fresh mountain air, a scent he had not known for more than a decade.

He also smelled a heavy, bitter smoke, like the residue of a dense coal or oil fire.

“What in the name of Reorx?” he muttered the question aloud as he checked his limbs, somewhat surprised to find he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. His stomach lurched when he tried to stand, but he leaned against a shattered stone wall and drew a few deep breaths until the heaving in his guts subsided. “How did they do such a thing?”

Groggily, he massaged a lump on his forehead, conscious of a deep, throbbing pain in his skull. He tried to think-what should he be doing? One answer seemed to be that he should be sending a prayer of thanks to Reorx, simply for being alive. He drew a deep breath and swallowed the bile rising in his throat.

“Move, damn it!” he croaked to himself. “Do something!”

Only then did he begin to take stock of the situation. He heard shouts, battle cries, and the loud clashing of steel against steel coming from high above him. A dwarf screamed loudly, in a obvious pain. Moments later a body came tumbling down, bouncing from the ledges and outcrops, armor clanging and breaking apart, until the corpse smashed to the stone floor half a dozen paces away from Darkstone. The soft plop of the body itself was accompanied by a clattering rain of debris from the fellow’s broken equipment. The dwarf, his breastplate broken away, was clad in a blue tunic that bore an insignia of a crown on the chest; it was a uniform unknown to the general, who had served in virtually all of the military units within Thorbardin.

If he’d had any doubts before, that cleared it up: invaders had indeed breached Thorbardin. He could still hear the sounds of battle, though the noises seemed to be receding from the gatehouse above him. But he took heart from the fact that his garrison dwarves were clearly putting up a valiant defense.

He had to find some way to climb up from that pit and aid his men, but both sides of the crevasse seemed to form sheer cliffs with ledges and outcroppings few and far between. Rubble was piled irregularly in the bottom, but even when he scrambled up and over some of those loose boulders, he could climb only a dozen feet or so above the floor. The apparent ledge where the gatehouse had been remained more than a hundred feet over his head, well out of reach.

So instead, he started moving along the narrow floor of the chasm, stepping over slabs of stone and fallen boulders. Everywhere he looked he saw dead dwarves, many twisted and shattered from the terrible force of a long fall. Nearly all of the soldiers wore the black uniforms of his own garrison, and he suspected that most of them had met their deaths before they even knew that an attacker was upon them.

Darkstone crawled over more rocks, climbing up and over a mound of rubble at least twenty feet high, but when he descended to the lowest level of the chasm, his path was blocked. When he got down on his knees, however, he discerned an opening underneath a large slab of stone, and by crawling on his belly, he was able to push himself along, advancing away from the outer gate, toward the interior of Thorbardin.

Water flowed over his legs and hands; the surface below him proved to be very slimy. From the unpleasant stench, he judged it was an ancient remnant of an old sewer pipe, smashed open by the same brutal force that had split the mountain.

But there was no other way to go. Grimacing, forcing himself to breathe only through his mouth, the general squeezed into the old sewer pipe, which was barely large enough to allow him to squirm along. Still, he never considered halting or turning back.

His men were at war, and it was his duty, his honor, to press onward until he could join them.

“More fire!” Brandon shouted. “Burn them out!”

He stood beside the Firespitter and watched a dozen Theiwar, some of Willim’s palace guards, writhe in the throes of death as oily flames crackled in the street, burning away beards and hair, charring the leather boots and heavy gloves of the fighters. The crew chief had just spewed the liquid fire against a makeshift fortification. Even before the flames had died away, vengeful dwarves of the Kayolin First Legion swarmed over the barrier, stabbing and hacking at any defenders who still showed signs of life.

“We need to bring up more oil, General!” protested the crew chief, a soot-stained former miner named Stoker Coalman. “I only have enough fuel for one more shot, and then the tank’ll be drained.”

“Use it up!” snarled Brandon. He spotted movement through the doorway of a nearby building, an inn carved from the bedrock of Norbardin’s main level. Several of Willim’s dwarves had piled benches and chairs in the open doorway. One fired a crossbow, the bolt striking a Kayolin dwarf in the neck. “Fire it right in there!”

The chief obliged, calling out his commands in a loud but surprisingly unemotional voice.

“Pressure up, there, in the boiler! All right, you men, shift us around here, thirty degrees to the right. Hop to it now!”

Six gunners set their shoulders to the handles on the side of the big machine, and the Firespitter slowly rotated in place until the long snout of the barrel was lined up on the door of the target building.

“Up the furnace, now-full draft!” Stoker barked, and another operator pulled open the vents on the firebox. That container was already a dull red from the fire held within it, but the roar of the increased heat was audible and made the crimson glow even brighter.

“Fire!”

Another gout of churning flame spewed from the machine, streaking through the open door before blossoming like a fireball, filling the inn so thoroughly with fire that tongues of orange flame licked out from the upper room onto a balcony overlooking the street. Screaming dwarves, afire from head to foot, came bursting out of the place to sprawl on the roadway, dying in a horrific stench of burned hair and flesh. In moments the massacre was over, the corpses lying in grotesque, blackened shapes. To Brandon they looked more like gnarled old tree stumps than the bodies of dwarves.

“Move out!” demanded the general. He pointed at the captain of a company of light infantry. “You! Take your men down that street to the right. Check every building-kill every dwarf that offers any resistance. The rest of you, follow me!”

Raising the Bluestone Axe, Brandon uttered a guttural battle cry and charged through the still-smoldering corpses of the slain defenders. Hundreds of Tankard Hacksaw’s men followed him, echoing his battle cry with hoarse challenges and vengeful shouts. All had heard of their legion commander’s death at the hands of the black wizard himself, and they intended to show no mercy toward any of Willim’s dwarves.

A pair of dwarves, hiding behind a stack of kegs outside of a tavern, were flushed from cover and bloodily butchered before they could take more than a few halting steps. A little farther on, a detachment of six or eight or Willim’s defenders tried to form a shield wall across the mouth of a narrow alley. The Kayolin dwarves smashed into them with a sharp, brutal charge, the weight of thirty attackers breaking apart the wall so each of the defenders could be quickly cut down from either side or from behind.

More and more, however, the invading troops seemed to be advancing without meeting any organized opposition. The enemy was dwindling somehow. Brandon smashed down the stone door to another inn, shattering the portal with a single blow of the Bluestone Axe. He rushed inside, followed by a dozen of his men, to find a score of dwarf maids and youngsters cowering against the rear wall.

“Where are your warriors?” he demanded, his voice a growl.

“None here, my lord!” cried one of the women, an elderly matron who nonetheless pushed herself to her feet and faced Brandon boldly. “They have all fled to the great plaza or the roadway down to the Urkhan Sea.”

“And good riddance to them!” shouted another, younger maid. “And when you find that bastard, the black wizard, may you cleave his skull with that blue axe!”

Brandon nodded vehemently. His rage still possessed him, a fury of frustration and vengefulness demanding release. But through that haze, he forced himself to remember that the dwarves before him were not his enemies; indeed, their words gave him some hope for the future of the kingdom.

Lowering his head, Brandon turned and ran from the inn, joining the charge that continued down the road. He could tell from the widening street, the vista broadening into a vast cavern before him, that they were nearing the plaza the woman had indicated. His troops were converging from all directions, and they would meet there with a powerful force. Their victory could not be denied.

But all of that paled against the truth of the questions tearing at his heart, his soul, his mind: Where was Gretchan?

And could he possibly find her in time?

Awakened by the violence and killing, Gorathian rose from the magma-fueled furnace of the underworld, once again seeking the vitality of the dwarf world. The beast hungered for blood, for the sheer joy of killing. It had languished long enough in the lava lake of the deep caverns. So once more the rock melted away in the face of the fire dragon’s advance as the creature of Chaos bored a passageway through the bedrock of Krynn.

As it rose, it was drawn to the ongoing battle as a moth is drawn to a flame. It remembered war, and it craved war.

But, too, it remembered the lure of the wizard’s magic, and that caused it to hesitate in its destructive course. It came to a halt in the midst of the solid stone, probing with its nostrils, with all of its senses, seeking that alluring power, that fundamentally throbbing sorcery that had driven it for the past long intervals of its existence.

The wizard was there, somewhere, in the midst of that violent war. That much the fire dragon realized. But where he would be found and how he could be killed before he used his magic to flee remained the great and frustrating questions of the Chaos creature’s awareness. So it sniffed and it pondered and it craved.

And in the midst of its seething meditation, it became aware of another power, a fresh source of great magic, even if it was not the magic of sorcery. Of course, it was warded by the power of a dangerous god, and Gorathian wanted nothing to do with any god.

Still, it was pure, arcane might, and there was nothing that would feed the fire dragon’s hunger more satisfyingly than such power. So Gorathian probed with its senses, wishing to learn more about that new magical presence.

“Why you goin’ to Hillhome?” Gus asked Crystal as they strode along a rocky trail between a pair of rough ridges in the foothills.

“Because it’s my home,” she declared simply. “I haven’t been there for a while, but I’ve decided to go back.”

Ignoring his two girlfriends, who stomped along behind them and repeatedly shot dirty looks at the back of Crystal Heathstone’s fur traveling cloak, Gus strolled along and pondered the situation. In truth, his new companion reminded him a lot of Gretchan, at least insofar as she didn’t try to bash him with a club or stab him with a sword just because he happened to be nearby. Yet, unlike Gretchan, Gus sensed a kind of wistful sadness in Crystal, and he wished he could do something about that. He was glad that he had killed the Klar in order to save her, but he knew that captivity in the hands of the mad dwarf was not the sole problem that had afflicted the gracious dwarf maid.

Of course, his affections had been considerably enhanced that morning, when their new companion had led them to a comfortable roadside inn, only an hour or so from her hidden camp in the woods. There she had produced a steel coin, and the innkeeper, who had at first looked askance at the trio of gully dwarves, had been persuaded to produce a loaf of bread, a pitcher of creamy milk, and even some cooked eggs that Crystal had willingly shared with the three Aghar who had rescued her in the woods.

Apparently she was still kind of lonely, for she made no attempt to shoo the gully dwarves away. Neither did she invite them to keep her close company, but that didn’t stop Gus-and, by extension, the two females who had attached themselves to him like mountain ticks-from traveling along at her heels. The word Hillhome had triggered a vague memory, and Gus scratched his head, trying to tickle out the thought.

It wasn’t until hours later, when they were descending toward a wooded valley, that the connection was finally made. “Hillhome! Gus know Hillhome dwarf!”

“Oh?” Crystal seemed surprised, even a little amused by his revelation. “And who would that be?” she asked.

“Slut Fireforge!” Gus proclaimed proudly. “Him and me was at Patharkas for Big War! Gus won Big War, but Slut help too.”

“Slut Fireforge?” she repeated. “That doesn’t sound-wait, do you mean Slate Fireforge?”

Gus frowned. He didn’t like to be corrected. “Mebbe so,” he admitted. “But Gus call him Slut.”

Oddly, Crystal was laughing. “I’m sure you did,” she said, shaking her head. “But I know Slate, and I imagine he was fairly amused. Would you like to see him again?”

“Sure! Slut big, nice guy. Even share beer with Gus.”

“Well, I think you’ll get your wish,” the hill dwarf maid replied, gesturing to a town that was just coming into view around a bend in the forest road. “Because we’ll be in Hillhome in about ten more minutes.”