The Gully Dwarves

Chapter 15

Accompanied by her bodyguard-a matched dozen frost bearded giants from the Ice Mountains-and by her Gelnian officers, Chatara Kral strode through her encampment. Tall, lithe and statuesque, with eyes as black as night and a great mane of raven hair that curled and flowed from the base of her lacquered helm, she was a striking figure. Everywhere she passed, men turned to stare in awe, then lowered their eyes. It was known that Chatara Kral brooked no insolence, and no man in his right mind was ready to face the wrath of the tundra giants who flanked her as she walked. Even an ogre, it was said, was no match for such men in combat.

New sunlight sparkled on the gems encrusting the ward-regent’s sword and visor, and cast patterns of reflection from her mirror-bright armor. Her flowing cloak was rich with color, all the heraldry of the royal house of Gelnia emblazoned in its weave. As ward-regent, Chatara Kral had proclaimed herself the voice and the will of the infant Prince Quarls, last survivor of Gelnia’s last great house.

In Gelnia, Chatara Kral’s word, even her slightest gesture and whim, was law.

After making the rounds of the encampment, where men labored to prepare an attack on the Tarmite stronghold, the regent led her assemblage to a log-walled little stockade at the western perimeter. Along its final hundred yards, the path was lined with gruesome trophies-the still, dangling forms of crucified men, and here and there tall, upright poles crowned by the severed heads of decapitated prisoners.

Some of these unfortunates were Tarmish warriors, captured in the hills. Others might have been spies, traitors or saboteurs, or simply Tarmish farmers caught in their fields when the Gelnians advanced. Most of them, in fact, were guilty of no greater offense than having displeased Chatara Kral. Nevertheless, at the hands of the regent’s Nerakan inquisitors they had gladly confessed to any and all crimes suggested to them.

Chatara Kral barely glanced at the trophies as she passed. She went directly to the little stockade and was admitted by bowing guardsmen. Inside the gate, the chief inquisitor bowed low. “Have you come to see the old spy, Excellence?” he asked.

“I have,” she said. “What have you learned from him?”

“Considerable,” the chief inquisitor said, grinning. “He is very old and has little strength. He required only the slightest prompting to talk to us.”

“And is he truly a spy?”

“Oh, indeed he is, Excellence. His name is Clonogh, and he was sent directly by the Lord Vulpin, in search of some relic that has been lost.”

“Relic?”

“Something he calls the Fang of Orm. It seems this Clonogh attempted to deliver the thing to Lord Vulpin, but he somehow lost it, instead. He claims it is a thing of magic, Excellence.”

Chatara Kral’s dark eyes glittered beneath her visor. It was almost too good to believe. Vulpin did not have the Fang of Orm.

The chief inquisitor led her to a reeking cell and gestured. “That is the spy, Excellence.”

Chatara Kral looked at the feeble, old body stretched between the timber arms of a torture rack. “That man is ancient!” she rasped.

The chief inquisitor chuckled. “He swears his true age is thirty-seven,” he said. “He says he has been aged by magic.”

“He looks dead,” the regent observed.

“Very nearly so, Excellence. We are a bit surprised. A man so feeble should have perished an hour ago, yet he still lives. I inquired about that the last time he was conscious. He says he cannot die because the Lord Vulpin holds his life in contract.”

“My brother is still up to his old tricks, it seems,” Chatara Kral muttered. “Very well. Put this Clonogh into the cellar. If he can’t die, then he can rot there. But tend his wounds. He might be a handy pawn to play when we take the castle.”

She watched as burly Nerakans freed the bonds from the old man’s wrists and ankles, threw a noisome blanket over him and carried him out of the stockade. The “cellar” was a hole in the ground, a hundred yards away from the stockade. It was covered by slabs of stone, and its only access was a hinged iron grate in the top.

Outside the stockade, the ward-regent of Gelnia felt as though a weight had been lifted from her. Throughout her preparations for the siege of Tarmish, there had been the foreboding sense that Vulpin might turn the tables at any moment. With the Fang of Orm in his possession, there was magic he could use.

Her best advisors had been able to tell her little about the Fang of Orm, except that it was extremely dangerous. All of them had agreed that the person who possessed it had the power to win wars. And her spies had alerted her that it was on its way to Vulpin at Tarmish.

But now, it seemed, Vulpin did not have the relic. The thing had been lost before it could be delivered.

She turned to her coterie of officers. “Complete all preparations before the sun sets. Tomorrow we attack Tarmish.”

Nearby, an armored lancer had paused. Dismounting, he made various adjustments in the fittings of his armor while his “squire” inspected the trappings of his great war-horse. A knight-errant preparing for combat, the little group fit right in with their surroundings. But of the three, the only one concentrating on preparedness was the horse.

“That was Clonogh,” Graywing said. “He’s older than I thought, and he’s a mess with all that blood on him, but I’m certain it was him.”

“Then maybe he knows where the Fang of Orm is,” Dartimien suggested. “Maybe we should talk to him.”

“We can’t,” Graywing growled. “Didn’t you see? He’s dead.”

“Look around you, plainsman,” the Cat purred. “Those wretches on those poles are dead, and those in that pile out there behind the stockade. When people die in that place, they either display them or throw them out. They don’t lock them in cellars, with Nerakan guards at the grate.”

“You could be right,” Graywing admitted, gruffly. “Well, then, if Clonogh isn’t dead, let’s go talk to him.”

“Easy enough to say,” Dartimien squinted, studying the bleak, open area around the cellar hole. “But how do we do it?”

“We just do it,” Graywing said, gritting his teeth. Dressed in three hundred pounds of armor, even a shrug was an effort. He wondered, as he had wondered many times before, what kind of people Solamnians were, that so many of them could choose to spend their lives in such fetters.

He had fought with Solamnian knights in the past, sometimes against them and sometimes alongside them, and still he wondered what made them tick. When he was much younger, he had thought of the armored knights on their armored horses as “clanking churls.” But that was before he first saw a charge of heavy cavalry, lances aligned and hooves a’thunder.

He had discovered that those “clanking churls,” with their massive armor and their great, battle-trained mounts, were as efficient and formidable a war machine as anything human and horse could be.

Still, he would be glad to get rid of these massive trappings as soon as possible, though right now they served a purpose. It would be hard to find a better disguise for rummaging about a hostile encampment. Everyone expected to see knights, but few men had the temerity to ever stop and question one of them.

Atop the stone-slab dome of the “cellar,” two burly Nerakan guards squatted on their heels, playing a round of bones. During the regent’s inspection, the two had remained at rigid attention. But now boredom was setting in. Their task as guards wasn’t to keep anyone out of the hole. No one in his right mind would want to get into the hole. Their purpose was to guard against escape by those inside, and at the moment there was only one prisoner-a feeble old man so tormented that he was nearly dead.

The two didn’t even notice the approaching knight until morning sun cast his shadow across them, and then they only glanced up, squinting. “Wha’dya want?” one of them growled.

“Oh, all sorts of things,” the knight said, cheerfully. “I want fame and fortune, beautiful women and fine horses, and maybe even a quiet little kingdom somewhere to call my own. What do you want?”

The bones stopped rolling. Both of the guards shaded their eyes, squinting up at him as though he had lost his mind. Slowly, they rose to their feet and hefted their axes, their eyes flicking here and there over the armored juggernaut before them. The trouble with knights was that it was hard to tell where to hit them, if one needed to do that. “State your business here!” one of them demanded.

“I want you to open that grate,” Graywing said. “Otherwise I’ll have to do it myself.”

“You want us to-” the Nerakan’s voice ceased abruptly and his eyes rolled upward in their sockets. Beside him, almost simultaneously, the other guard twitched violently and blood gushed from his mouth. Then they both crumpled, facedown and unmoving on the stone. In the back of each of them stood a businesslike dagger, sunk to the hilt.

“I never did care for Nerakans,” Dartimien said, kneeling to recover his weapons.

In the reeking hold beneath the grate they found Clonogh, more dead than alive but still breathing. Again Graywing was struck by how old the mage seemed, far older than he had only days before.

“Wrap that tarp around him,” he told the Cat. “We’ll get him on my horse, behind the saddle, then look for a hiding place until he recovers his wits.”

“I thought we were after gully dwarves,” Dartimien muttered.

“We’re after the Fang of Orm,” the plainsman rumbled, his voice sounding hollow within his unaccustomed armor. “He knows more about it than I do.”

Fortune seemed to be with them for a time. No alarm was raised as they brought Clonogh out of the cellar, wrapped him like a roll of bedding and slung him across the war-horse’s rump. Graywing climbed aboard and they started eastward, toward the bushy draws where they might find some cover.

Ranks of pikers marched past, yards away, and a drumroll of hooves arose nearby where a company of hired Solamnians maneuvered. People came and went about them, stepping aside to allow the “knight” passage. Then, halfway to the draw, a patrol of Gelnian guard broke stride and veered toward them as its commander shouted, “You. there! Halt and identify yourselves!”

Before Graywing could react, Dartimien dodged around the horse and swatted its haunch, behind its armored skirt. “Break for cover!” The Cat shouted. “I’ll join you when I can!”

It was almost noon, and the armies of Gelnia were moving in on Tarmish, when a great shadow swept over the landscape. Everywhere men looked upward, then turned and ran in blind fear. Years had passed since the great war, when dragons had ruled the skies, and for most people it was years since they had even seen a dragon. But the sight of a dragon in flight had lost none of its impact. Nothing else in the world could inspire such bone-chilling fear in every living thing. Now in the sky above the Vale of Sunder, great wings flapped lazily, and struck cold terror into the hearts of all who glanced aloft.

Verden Leafglow had been asleep for a time, snugly ensconced in a high mountain cavern. In the way of her kind, she sought solitude when there was nothing to do, and finding it, she slept. This sleep amounted almost to an intermittent hibernation, broken only by occasional forages for food. A dragon’s nap could last for many seasons, and for one such as Verden Leafglow, who had died once and been reborn from her own egg, and whose memories were of supreme betrayal, sleep was an alluring alternative to unpleasant reveries.

But now she was awake, though she wasn’t sure why. In her dreams it had seemed that she was being summoned-as though a voice that wasn’t a voice at all kept telling her that she had a duty to attend to, an obligation to be met. And when she swam from the oblivion of sleep into harsh wakefulness, the urgency of it lingered. Somewhere, out there below the mountains, a destiny was nearing full flower, and she must play a part in it.

Now she swept across the breezes above a wide valley, her great, amber-green eyes searching the puny sights below. High sunlight glistened on a huge, bright-scaled body that once had been as green as a spring leaf but now was rich with rosy highlights. She was aware of the changes that had occurred during her hibernation, and in a way she understood why they had come about. Once the servant of an evil goddess, she had borne the colors of that deity. But she had been rejected by her god, and in rejection had accepted another-a puzzling, almost reticent sort of god, but one not so harsh, not so driven to vent his powers upon the world below him.

Among the lowest of the low, Verden Leafglow had taken control of her own destiny, and regained her honor. And in doing so, she had accepted an obligation to the god Reorx, to do … something … when the time came. Something about helping a hero, who would rise among, of all creatures, the Aghar. The bumbling, dull-witted gully dwarves.

Such a thing was absurd, of course. No gully dwarf could ever be heroic. Still, Verden had worn the shield of Reorx in battle, and had felt gratitude in a way. And now her breast tingled in the area between her massive shoulders where that shield had once clung. Deep within her exquisite consciousness, she could feel the shield calling to her.

And the call was like a god’s voiceless voice. The small one will need assistance soon, it said. Find him and be ready.

Assistance? Verden suppressed a hiss of irritation. She and her kind were the most powerful creatures ever to live on this world of Krynn. Yet, through fate and the whims of a fickle god, Verden Leafglow had found herself subservient to the most doltish of the sentient races-the gully dwarves-not once, but twice, in two separate lives. And now she remained beholden to, of all things, a gully dwarf!

In a former, more evil incarnation, she would have simply rejected the thought. No one less than a god could force a dragon to honor any obligation if she didn’t feel like it. And the god Reorx, the god she now grudgingly accepted as her god, seemed not inclined to force his subjects to do his will. Rather, he simply expected of them that they would do the right thing, by choice.

A part of her sneered at the concept. She was, after all, a green dragon. Every instinct of her kind told her to hold all other creatures in contempt, to seek her own satisfactions and never concern herself with others. Yet another part of her was aware of the debt of service she owed, and accepted it. It was that same part of her that had been at work over the years, altering her color, warming the cold green of her scales with tinges of rosy bronze.

Now I’m arguing with myself, she thought, her eyes narrowing in a sneer of contempt. A waste of time. When I know what is asked of me, then I can decide. For now I need only see what is here.

The valley below her was wide, a fertile basin surrounded by forested crests. Tilled fields lay like a tapestry on its floor, and near the center of it, on a barren rise, was a solid, massive fortress of stone.

On the flats around the fortress were large encampments, and armies were on the move, surrounding the fortress, their units moving up for attack as great siege engines were trundled into place behind them.

The contestants were humans, of course. Of all the races on Krynn, many engaged in combat now and then, but it was only humans who truly started wars, wars that too often engulfed the other races around them.

Spiraling beneath the high sun, Verden swept over the fortress for a closer look. The place was packed with people, all scrambling about now in panic at the sight of her. She saw the walls, the battlements, the tower … and there her senses detected the presence of magic. But it was no magic of this world.

Circling closer, her eyes followed the sense of magic to a garlanded balcony halfway up the tower keep. There were gully dwarves there. Her eyes focused on one of them-a gaping, wide-shouldered little dolt with a stick in his hand. But the stick was no stick. Though it seemed only an artifact of carved ivory, it radiated an intense, cold taste of deadly, latent magic. Beside and slightly behind the gully dwarf was a young human female. She was half again as tall as the little Aghar, but he seemed to be trying to shield her by his stance. And though he was quaking visibly with abject fear, the hand with the stick was raised in ridiculous challenge.

So that is our “hero,” Verden thought, almost chuckling at the absurdity of it.

Then the distant, voiceless voice came to her again. Heroism isn’t in appearance or stature, Verden, it said. Heroism is in the heart. One who is willing to try to be a hero, is a hero. It is the intent that counts.

“Reorx?” Verden said aloud. “Do you speak to me?”

You understand about heroes, Verden, the voice said within her. You didn’t have to come, but you are here.

Swerving, she sped toward the source of the soundless voice, a gully near the center of the largest human encampment. Below her, people scattered like fallen leaves in a breeze, but she ignored them. She concentrated on the brush-covered ravine, and then she saw them. More gully dwarves. A whole tribe of them, hiding amidst humans!

With a hiss, she recognized a face, a bewhiskered, pudgy little face that combined arrogance and idiocy in its rough features. The little creature even had the old crown she remembered, a crown of rat’s teeth, askew on its graying head.

“Glitch!” Verden hissed aloud. “You little twit, I thought you’d be dead by now.”

Beside the old Highbulp a female gawked upward at her, then blinked and waved a cautious hand. It was Lidda.

“I don’t know if I can stand this,” Verden muttered.

It’s your choice, Verden, the soundless god-voice said. Stay, or go, as you wish.

Now she saw where the voice came from. Among the pathetic belongings of the tribe of Bulp lay a rusty old iron bowl, with a strap across its rim. It lay facedown, but she knew what it was. Somehow, after all these, years, the little dolts still had the shield of Reorx.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Verden asked the voice within her.

Your presence has begun it, the silent voice of the old shield said. Rest now, and wait. You will know when you are needed.

A craggy hillside to the west beckoned her, and she soared toward it on mighty wings. A small herd of elk grazed there in a hidden clearing, and just above was a cozy cavern overlooking the Vale of Sunder. Verden ate her fill of elk, then crept into the cavern and curled herself for sleep. But even with her eyes closed, she could still see every movement of the creatures below, as though she were there among them.

Now that the dragon was out of sight, the humans had reorganized their forces and the battle of Tarmish had begun.

I could put a stop to all that, she thought, sleepily. It would be easy. I could …

Of course you could, the silent voice within her agreed. But then nothing would be resolved, only interrupted. Only through their free will, unfettered, will they fulfill their destinies.

Even as Verden dozed, the scanning image in her mind roved the valley below, showing her detail after detail of the puny doings of the lesser creatures. Twice she was roused by surprise, and bitter old memories, memories almost forgotten, came to life again. When the vision scanned the tower keep of Tarmish, she saw the face of Lord Vulpin. And again, when her view roved the trundling ranks approaching the fortress, there was another face, that of Chatara Kral. Thus Verden understood the darkness of the evil that had befallen this embattled realm.

Both of those faces were familiar. Though she had never seen them before, she knew them. Faces of evil reincarnate, they bore the features of their common sire.

“Verminaard!” the dragon hissed.

The dire memories were so livid, it was as though no time had passed at all, as though the dread days of the War of the Lance lived again, and Verden was part of it, as she had been then. Verminaard! Dragon Highlord, liege lord of all the forces of the Dark Queen, next to her the very symbol of evil.

Chatara Kral and Vulpin, the heirs of that evil. But there could be only one heir supreme. So that was what this puny conflict was all about. The children were in contest on this field, to determine which of them should don the mantle of their father. One would live and one would die, and from the victor would spring new evils yet unimagined.

Verden was fully awake now, and in her dragon mind an idea grew. It would be fitting, almost poetic, if both betrayers succeeded, and in succeeding, failed.

Destiny, the voice within her whispered. You have a destiny, too, Verden Leafglow.

Rested now, she studied again the armies in the valley below, and the castle that was their objective.

Infiltration and subversion, she mused, her great, green eyes glowing slightly. Throughout her service to the Dark Queen, these had been the skills of her specialty. In a dozen campaigns with the Dragon Highlords, Verden had become adept at the furtive talents. She had become something of a specialist in infiltration. She had served as a saboteur.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, she mused. And a voice within her-a voice not her own, repeated, destiny.