The Gates of Thorbardin

Chapter 3

The blackstone path wound and curved as it wandered deeper into the

Valley of Waykeep. It twisted and turned oddly, often for no apparent reason. Sometimes it nearly doubled back on itself, so that the travelers found themselves walking southward within easy reach — sometimes even within sight — of where they had just passed going northward. Then again, it would straighten for a time, only to abruptly veer off to the east or west, as though circling around some obstacle that neither the dwarf nor the kender could see. At times the path narrowed, becoming only six or eight feet wide. In these places the big cats gathered along its edges — sometimes a dozen or more, rumbling and purring in feral anticipation — and the two were forced to go in single file, running a gauntlet of swatting, searching claws as the animals balanced just at the borders of the path and strained forward, trying to reach them.

"These creatures are most decidedly unfriendly," Chess mentioned as he dodged a huge, needle-clawed paw. As it whipped past him, he rapped it sharply with his hoopak. "Bad kitty!" he snapped. The cat's responding growl was thunderous.

Just behind him, Chane ducked as a cat swatted at him. "Stop stirring them up," he ordered the kender. "You're just making matters worse."

"I don't know why they have to be so surly." The kender shrugged. "Maybe they don't get fed regularly. I wonder why this path twists and turns so much. Doesn't it seem odd to you that a path should go to so much trouble to go aroun'd things, if there aren't any things to go around? I'll bet we've walked ten miles so far, and haven't gained more than a mile or two.

You see, there it goes again." He pointed with his hoopak. Ahead, the black road turned abruptly to the left and disappeared into forest. "Do you see any reason why we shouldn't just go straight ahead?"

"I see about a dozen very good reasons," Chane snapped, counting cats.

"I mean besides them. What do you suppose is ahead there, that this path doesn't want us to see?"

Chane felt an extended claw graze his boot-top and skipped away from it, then ducked as a cat on the other side tried to knock off his head. He spun, lost his balance, and sprawled, pellets of black gravel sheeting ahead of him. The cats there dodged aside, retreating. Chane got to his knees and scraped at the gravel with his hand. The gravel was spread evenly over a smooth surface, as though it had been swept. It was only inches deep, with bare dirt below. He gathered a handful of gravel and tossed it toward a cat. The cat veered aside, as though panicked.

"They don't like this stuff," Chane muttered. "I think they're afraid of it."

Chess had come back to watch. "Well, then, that's easy," he said. "All we need to do is move the road."

"Move it how?" Chanc's brows lowered in disgust.

"I don't know," Chess shrugged. "You're a dwarf. You're supposed to know about things like moving gravel. How would you do it?"

"If I wanted to, I'd use a skid. Something flat and heavy to drag it from one place to another. But we don't have a skid."

"Then maybe you could build one," Chess suggested. "There are all sorts of things around here to use."

Chane sighed, looking off into the forest beyond the path. Yes, there were plenty of materials, readily available. There also were plenty of giant black cats just itching for one of them to step off the path and within reach. "Sure," he said. "That deadfall log over there could be a dragsled, with vines attached. But it's over there, not here."

"Then go get it," the kender said. "Just a minute, though. I'll see if I can give you a little space." Without hesitating, he stepped to the edge of the path, lifted his staff and brought it down between the ears of a cat. While that one still was recoiling, Chess thumped two more of them, prodded a fourth one in the ribs, then moved away along the path, his feet flying, swerving on and off of the carpet of black gravel. All of the cats on that side bounded after him, snarling and spitting. "Hurry'" he shouted.

For a moment, Chane stood stunned, staring after the departing chase.

"Rust and tarnish!" he muttered. "That kender is crazy." Then he hurried off the path to gather materials for a dragsled skid. "I don't know why

I'm doing this," he grumped as he dragged things back to safety. "It wasn't my idea to change the road. It was his."

Still, when the kender reappeared at the curve in the path, strolling along with a pack of angry cats pacing him, Chane was already binding vines to a log and weighting it with stones. Chess came to watch him work, peering over his shoulder. "Do you think it will work?" he asked.

"Of course not," Chane snapped. "I'm just doing this for practice."

"What's wrong with it?"

"To start with, in order for a skid to move gravel, somebody has to get out in front of it and pull it. And whoever does that is going to be eight feet past the edge of the path before the gravel load gets there."

"That could be a little chancy," Chess admitted, looking around at the patrolling cats. "But if you don't pull too fast, I can come along behind you and…"

"Me pull?"

"It's your skid," the kender pointed out. "Besides, you're bigger than me. Anyway, I can follow along and throw gravel out ahead of you, enough to keep the cats back while you reroute the road."

"I don't see anything wrong with just leaving the blasted road where it is!"

"We've already been over that," the kender said.

Considering the circumstances of its construction, the skid worked fairly well. The black gravel on the path was only a few inches deep, with ordinary clay below, and when Chane put his shoulders to the tow-vines and dragged the sled, it plowed up a growing mound of black pebbles in front, and left bare clay behind.

'That's perfect," Chess grinned. "Just head for the curve, and keep going straight ahead when you get there. I'm right behind you."

"That's comforting to know," the dwarf growled.

When he came to the curve, Chane was barely moving. The load of gravel ahead of the skid had grown so that it took all his strength to move it.

He hesitated at the edge of the path, confronted by cats. Then showers of black gravel began to fly over his shoulders, some of it pelting him from behind as the kender flung enthusiastic handfuls as fast as he could. The cats snarled and snapped, but backed away. "Take the weights off the skid," the dwarf called.

"Why?" Another handful of gravel flew, one fair-sized pebble catching

Chane on the cheek as he turned.

"So it will spread the gravel instead of scooping it! Don't argue, just do it!"

Chess removed the weights, then resumed showering gravel as Chane took up his harness again.

By the time the skid was exhausted, the pathway south of the curve had a bare clay stripe angling from its center to the turning edge, and a new black path the width of the strip extended fifty feet into the forest.

Chess scampered back and forth along the new path, peering off into the forest. "Nothing interesting yet," he said, finally. "We'd better go back for another load."

The second stripe taken from the main path extended the new road another fifty feet, and the third stripe put them well into the forest, almost out of sight of the road where they had been. Poised at the very end of the gravel, the kender peered and squinted, looking ahead. "There is something over there," he pointed. "But I can't see what it is. It's something big, though. Another load, and we should be there."

"Another load and we'll have wiped out the original path back there,"

Chane pointed out.

"Oh, come on. Where's your spirit of adventure? Just one more haul."

They started back, and Chane was almost at the clearing when he stopped.

"Now see what we've done," he grunted. Ahead, black cats were crossing the main road freely. Whatever the black gravel did to stop them, there wasn't enough left on the skidded section to work.

The kender studied the problem solemnly, pursing his lips as his pointed ears twitched slightly in thought. Then he shrugged. "It's all right. We weren't going that way, anyway."

"We can't go back, either," the dwarf pointed out. "We might want to, you know. We…" He paused, then caught the kender by the shoulder.."That business you did before, leading the cats off… can you do that again?"

"I suppose so. Won't be as much fun the second time, though. Things like that get to be routine after a while."

"I don't care," the dwarf said. "Just do it."

The kender shrugged. "I guess one more time won't hurt. Come along, kitties. Time for another run." Poking and prodding at snarling predators,

Chess circled the stump of the road, gathering more than a dozen cats on the far side. With a final swat of his staff, he took off around the curve, great cats bounding after him. Left alone, Chane wrapped his harness over his shoulders and set about replacing gravel on the main road. Some time passed before the kender returned, a long line of irritated cats slinking along abreast of him. When he saw what the dwarf was doing, Chess shouted and ran toward him. "What are you doing?" he demanded. "We need that gravel. Why are you putting it back?"

Panting, Chane slipped out of his vine harness and inspected his work.

The road here was not as neatly graded as it had been, but it was black again and hemmed in the cats. "Because we don't need it any longer," the dwarf said. Picking up his pack, he strode to the east verge of the road and walked off into the forest. Behind him, across the road, the cat pack snarled and rumbled, unable to cross.

"Well, come on," Chane glanced back. "Let's see what it was that you wanted to look at."

It might once have been a machine, in some incredibly ancient time. Or it might have been a building. Perhaps even both. Now it was a great heap of rubble and broken metal things, slowly surrendering to the landscape.

Trees hundreds of years old grew from its crest, vines and brush obscured its slopes, and a carpeting of forest leaves and grassy loam was well along toward burying it.

Chane and Chess wandered over and around it, peering, poking, and prying.

"This looks like part of a wheel," the kender chattered. "But why would anybody make a wheel fifteen feet across? Wow! Look at those things sticking out of the mess. What are they, drills? They're as big around as and here's some old, rusty chain. Must have weighed a ton per link when it was still good iron. I wonder what this was, over here. A furnace of some kind? Did you notice that all these stones scattered over here are square?

They might have been paving blocks. What do you suppose this thing was when it was something?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea." Chane was digging through a reddish heap of vaguely-shaped rust tumbles, raising a cloud of thin red dust that settled on his black furs like rust-colored snow. After several minutes he straightened, holding up a long, slim object to have a better look at it.

It was a rod, nearly six feet long, gnarly and misshapen from centuries of rust. He knew by its heft, though, that there was good metal within it. He set it aside and began digging again.

For some time the kender explored the ancient heap, his bright eyes shining in wonder at each new mystery. He moved things here and there, on the thought that whatever all this was the outside of might also have an inside, and somewhere there might be an entrance. Finding none, he scampered here and there over the surface of the thing, tugging and pushing at everything that protruded, seeing what would move. Where a broken shaft of heavily corroded metal angled upward, he cleared away broken stone, then braced his feet and pulled at the stub. Deep beneath him, something groaned and large parts of the mound shifted slightly.

Beyond the crest, the dwarf shouted, then appeared at the top.

"Sorry about that." Chess waved at him. "I guess whatever this was, it doesn't work any more."

With a warning scowl, the dwarf went back to what he was doing. Chess continued his exploration. Near one edge of the mound, tugging away a rock, he found a thick, ragged sheet of green-black stuff that might once have been bronze. Wiping it with his tunic, he saw letters on its surface and sat down to read them aloud. Most were corroded beyond recognition, but here and there a few words could be partially deciphered:

"… velous Wallbreacher, equipped with secondary ar… iple-geared self-propel… ba… not included…"

And elsewhere, "… Model one of — "

"Gnomes," Chess said, nodding at the revelation. He climbed to the top of the mound. Beyond, Chane was moving stones around, arranging them in a circle. Chess cupped his hands and shouted, "Gnomes!"

The dwarf raised his head. "What?"

"Gnomes!" the kender repeated. "This was a gnomish machine of some kind.

I found its label."

"What was it supposed to do?"

"I don't know. But gnomes built it, so it probably didn't do anything right."

Chane turned away and resumed the moving of stones.

For a bit longer, Chess explored the ancient wreckage, then he brushed down his tunic, shouldered his pouch, picked up his staff, and went to find the dwarf. "This was interesting," he said. "Now let's go on, and see what else there is to find."

"I'm busy," Chess grunted, setting a block of stone atop another.

"What are you doing?"

"I found some usable metal. I'm setting up a forge to work it."

"Oh." The kender walked all the way around the circle of stone, wide-eyed. "What do you want to make?"

"A hammer, of course. The only thing I know of that can be made without a hammer is a hammer, though it won't be a very good one, without a hammer to work with."

"A hammer," Chess nodded, taken with the logic of it.

"Then what?"

"What?"

"What are you going to make once you've made your hammer?"

"Another hammer. Once I have a rough hammer to use, I can make a perfectly good hammer with it. Then, if that rod there will stew out and take a temper, I'll make a sword."

"Is this part of your plan for becoming rich and famous?"

"I don't have any such plan," the dwarf growled. "I don't have a hammer or sword, either, so first things first."

"I have a feeling this is going to take a while."

"It will take as long as it takes."

For the rest of the day, Chestal Thicketsway prowled about, exploring the silent forest, becoming more and more impatient. At nightfall he returned to the wreckage heap, took fire from Chane's now-operating forge and made a meal of cured cat meat and bark tea, then went to sleep to the sound of dwarven craft echoing in the night.

At first light of morning, the kender awakened, stretched, and strolled over to watch the dwarf again. Chane now had a serviceable — if crude — hammer, and was using it to make a better hammer from a chunk of iron he had found.

Finally the kender had seen enough. "I'm going on ahead," he said. "I want to see what else is interesting around here."

"Have a nice trip," Chane said without looking up.

"Yourself, as well," Chess replied. He started off, northward, then turned back and made several trips back and forth between the mound and the black road where great cats prowled the far border.

Chane was thoroughly engrossed in what he was doing. The good hammer was taking shape nicely, and he had scraped away enough age from the long rod to see the metal beneath, and to taste it. It was good steel. It would make a blade… maybe more than one.

The kender paused once more beside the forge. "Luck with your quest," he said.

"You, too," Chane glanced up. "See you."

"Sure," Chess waved and headed north. Long after he had gone, the dwarf looked up from his work and his eyes went thoughtful. Entirely ringing him and his forge was a circle of black gravel scattered on the ground. The kender had left a shield for him, in case any of the hunting cats found a way to cross the road or to go around it.