The Fate of Thorbardin Read online

  “That’s what I would have recommended,” Dram replied approvingly. “No dwarf likes to have water under his feet—and to spend six days at anchor, waiting for your comrades to get rowed out to their ships, would give even the most hearty warrior a bad case of the nerves.”

  “Right! So then I thought your ships could put us ashore on the coast, just south of Xak Tsaroth,” Brandon continued. “That puts us within a short week’s march of Pax Tharkas, with Thorbardin’s North Gate not too far beyond.”

  “Aye …”

  Dram seemed to assent, but his tone, his quizzical expression, conveyed his skepticism.

  “I know what you’re thinking: ‘The North Gate is a narrow tunnel, set high up in a cliff wall. No army could even reach it, much less attack,’” Brandon said.

  Dram chuckled. “That’s pretty close to the mark.”

  “Well, I think we’ve found a way to breach the mountain itself,” the younger Bluestone continued. “It has to do with an artifact of Reorx, which consists of three parts or smaller artifacts, actually. We have now come into possession of the third and final part, which is being carried to Pax Tharkas. And with the army of Kayolin, Tarn Bellowgranite’s brigade, an army of hill dwarves, and this artifact of Reorx on our side, I think we will prevail.”

  “Hill dwarves?” Dram looked pained. “Now I’ve heard it all.”

  “They are pledged by pact with Tarn Bellowgranite to aid him in this attempt,” Brandon said. “I was there at the signing. All the exiled king need do is ask for their help.”

  “And of course, we are willing to pay for the sea passage,” Garren said.

  After a long, suspenseful pause, Dram nodded, accepting the offer. “Emperor Markham appreciates the wealth of Kayolin, as well as your friendship and, in this matter, the needs of the dwarves. He has instructed me to tell you that your army will be transported at the expense of the Solamnic Navy. He wishes you to see this as the gesture of enduring friendship and trust that it is. The ships will be dispatched upon my return to Palanthas, and they should be gathered in Caergoth within four weeks’ time.”

  “We are humbled by his generosity,” Garren said sincerely.

  The emissary from Solamnia stood and cleared his throat. “Good luck to you,” was all he said.

  In a dark cell in the dungeons far below the fortress of Pax Tharkas, a bitter dwarf slowly yielded to the insanity that had ever lurked just below the surface of his awareness. He pulled at the hair that still bristled from his head, though his scalp was marred by bloody, bare patches which he had previously violated. His eyes, always wide and startled looking, like any Klar’s, darted wildly around the cell, swinging from the barred door to the ceiling, the walls, the floor, as if wary of an enemy or seeking some avenue of escape, in any direction.

  “I’m mad!” his whispered, careful to keep his voice low so the turnkey couldn’t hear him. He also worried about listeners in the adjacent cells, though through his long year of imprisonment, he had discerned no evidence of any other prisoner down there. Still, he wouldn’t put it past the king to trick him, to post some scum eavesdropper right next door, listening for the prisoner to make a damning confession.

  Garn Bloodfist had never been exceptionally well-balanced, even by the standards of the volatile and impetuous Klar. For most of his adult life, he had been a leader of that clan and a more or less loyal follower of the king in exile. But still he was a Klar.

  The king had never fully recognized the threat posed by the hateful, deceitful hill dwarves who lived all around the area near Pax Tharkas. Garn had known! Garn had seen the danger and had led his valiant Klar on campaigns against the Neidar, up to—and sometimes even beyond—the limits imposed by his monarch.

  Then, with the moment of his greatest triumph at hand, with the teeming mass of the enemy army funneled within the walls of the fortress, caught within a perfect trap—many thousands of tons of crushing rock, ready to be released, ready to kill all the hill dwarves—the king had finally lost his nerve. He had ordered Garn to hold his hand, to not release the trap.

  But Garn had seen the truth! Garn knew what to do! He had disobeyed his king and pulled the lever to release the trap, and the killing mechanism had failed to release!

  An idiot of a gully dwarf had, all unwittingly, ruined the trap’s release. For Garn, his life had all but ended on that day, when the exiled king made peace with the hill dwarves, and the once-loyal Klar captain had been clapped in irons and hauled off to the dungeon.

  He languished there, slowly going mad, or madder. He chewed on his lip, shivering, until he tasted blood. He smashed his fist into his temple and stopped his chewing, though he still shivered. He huddled on the floor, rocking back and forth. He wanted to whimper, to shriek, but he wouldn’t give his imagined eavesdropper the satisfaction.

  He wished that she would come back but knew that it was too soon since her last visit. She was the only bright spot in his life—odd, since she was a hill dwarf. Her visits were the only thing that kept him from falling utterly into despair. She listened to him, and he was careful to mask his insanity when he talked back to her in reasonable, calm tones. She spoke to him, offering comfort and hope, not so much through her words—which he frequently didn’t understand—but merely from her presence and the soothing sounds she made.

  Suddenly Garn Bloodfist stiffened. He’d heard a noise in the outer hall—something he recognized as a real noise, not the imagined sounds triggered by his paranoia.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded. I’m not mad! She must not know that I’m mad!

  “It’s me,” came the whispered reply.

  But it was not the cherished lady’s voice that responded. Instead, the speaker sounded like a youngster, a dwarf male whose voice had not fully deepened into manhood. Garn shrewdly remained silent, listening, and the mystery was soon resolved.

  “I’m Tor Bellowgranite. My mother is Crystal Heathstone. She comes here sometimes … to talk to you. Doesn’t she?”

  What to say? What to do? Garn’s tongue froze in his mouth, and he felt a suffocating pressure close around his throat. He opened his mouth, but for seconds he could force only a hoarse croak to emerge.

  “Yes,” he finally articulated. “She talks to me. She is a kind woman, your mother.”

  “But she’s a hill dwarf!” the lad replied, his voice an accusatory hiss. Even through his madness, Garn realized that his visitor was speaking in a harsh whisper and was no more interested in being overheard by eavesdroppers than was the Klar himself. “And you spent your life making war against the hill dwarves!”

  “That war—that war is over,” Garn said, somehow forcing his voice to be calm even as the lie spilled forth. That war would never end! “I … I care for her. She is good to me.”

  “You aren’t trying to harm her?” asked the young dwarf.

  “No!” wailed Garn, forgetting the need for discretion, forgetting everything in the searing hurt of the question. “No! I would never hurt her! I would never do her wrong!”

  “My father thinks you’re dangerous,” Tor declared.

  “But I’m not dangerous!” Garn replied, calming himself, putting all of his imagined sincerity into the denial.

  He held that thought close to his heart as the young dwarf finally padded quietly away, back to his royal apartments, to his life of sunlight and family and good food.

  I’m not dangerous! Garn argued with himself, persuasive, convincing, settling himself into a corner of the cell and repeating the truth like a mantra.

  Not dangerous at all.

  Er, Your Majesty,” said General Blade Darkstone tentatively. “Could I have a word?”

  King Willim of Thorbardin glared at his military commander—glaring, at least, as much as a dwarf with no eyes could glare. He could see Darkstone clearly enough because of the spell of true-seeing that the monarch cast upon himself at all times, but he knew that the image of his face, with eye sockets stitched shut and scars irregularly marking his faci
al features, presented a horrific sight to those who dared to look at him. And he liked that.

  “What is it?” he asked petulantly. His mind was already wandering, bored with whatever matters his chief general wished to discuss.

  “It’s the security situation throughout the city. I strongly suggest we reform Norbardin’s militia and resume patrols. There are unruly elements, criminals and gangs organized along clan lines, that are beginning to claim control of their neighborhoods.”

  Willim the Black sighed. He was an accomplished magic-user and master wizard in the Order of the Black Robes. He had vanquished countless enemies, including the captors who had gouged out his eyes and scarred his face, not to mention the recent king who had made him an outlaw. He had killed more victims than he could possibly count. He had killed for vengeance, for practical gain, for power, and for the simple pleasure of inflicting death. He relished killing and violence, and he craved power.

  At the same time, he had grown increasingly restless in his new role as high king of Thorbardin. In truth, it seemed as though the pursuit of the crown and the destruction of its previous holder had constituted a far more exciting endeavor than did actually ruling the place. He spent much of his time stalking around the capital city, terrifying his subjects and surveying a shockingly damaged and battle-scarred domain. When he sat on the rocky chair that served as his throne and looked out—quite literally since the palace walls remained broken and pockmarked, the aftermath of the war that had brought him to the throne—over his capital city, he saw a wasteland. And that wasteland held very little real interest for him.

  That city, Norbardin, was indeed shattered. A pall of smoke lingered in the air, a layer of sooty murk that seemed to remain suspended a dozen feet above the ground. Neither did it reach to the lofty ceiling of the subterranean city; instead, it hung there like a stratus, a layer of gritty foulness in the cake that had once been Thorbardin’s greatest city.

  He tried to force himself to think about Darkstone’s suggestion. There was clear danger in letting the clans organize around distinct power bases. His own clan, the Theiwar, had long been oppressed by the others—most notably the Hylar and Daergar—who feared the Theiwars’ skill at magic. For the first time in modern history, one of their own had gained the throne of Thorbardin, and that certainly created an opportunity for the Theiwar to advance their status throughout the city of Norbardin and, indeed, within the entire great nation.

  But Willim really didn’t care that much about the fortunes of his clan or any other clan. For a moment he thought wistfully about his chief apprentice, the voluptuous Facet. She was gone from Thorbardin, sent by the wizard on an important mission. Yet even that crucial task seemed to pale in comparison to his immediate desires. He missed Facet and wished she would return to him soon.

  His head remained down, but his spell of true-seeing allowed him to inspect the wasteland that was Norbardin, to scrutinize the vast plaza—still covered with the wrack and ruin of war—where his army had at last prevailed over the forces of the late king, Jungor Stonespringer. He remembered a bitter truth: it was not Willim’s army that had prevailed, but his creature of Chaos, the fire dragon named Gorathian. The wizard had unleashed the monster from its magical bonds, and it had embarked upon an orgy of destruction, boring through the solid rock of Thorbardin’s foundation, incinerating anything combustible, burning to death countless dwarves. It was Gorathian that had had most of the fun.

  One of those victims had been the former king, and his death had sealed Willim’s victory. Yet it was the fire dragon, not the victory, that most occupied Willim’s attentions.

  “What was that?” the wizard demanded, springing up from his chair, tense and trembling. He probed the murky distance with every fiber of his mind, injecting the spell of true-seeing into shadowy crevices, around corners, even under slabs of heavy rock.

  “I didn’t see anything, lord,” Darkstone said firmly.

  “There!” cried Willim, his voice cracking. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel it?”

  The great cavern seemed warmer already and was growing hotter by the second. Willim felt sick to his stomach, picturing the vicious, treacherous beast approaching from any direction. Indeed, Gorathian could fly through stone, could melt the very bedrock of the world. It was Willim’s sincere belief that Gorathian would appear someday without warning, bursting from the floor—or the ceiling, or the walls—to devour the powerful wizard in one lethal, incinerating bite. Willim feared only one thing: the return of Gorathian.

  “It comes!” croaked Willim. “It is near!”

  “I presume you refer to the fire dragon,” the general replied. “But I am sorry to say I detect no sign of the cursed beast’s presence.”

  “It’s coming!” shrieked the wizard king. “It’s coming; it’s here!”

  And with a word of magic, Willim teleported away to the safety of his dark, cold lair.

  Yes, the creature of Chaos had a name: Gorathian; and it had a form: fire dragon.

  And it had a hunger that gnawed and ached and burned within. It was a being of dark power, chaos fueled by the magic that thrummed and lurked and seethed in the very bowels of the world. And magic was the only thing that could infuse it with more power, that could soothe the ache, ease the hunger.

  Willim guessed right. There was one target the fire dragon sought more than any other: the former master who had imprisoned it, taunted it, and finally released it to, he had dared to hope, serve his will.

  But the fire dragon was not a subservient being nor did it willingly forgive those whom it hated. So it stalked the underworld darkness of Thorbardin, relentlessly seeking the spoor of the wizard whom it hated and that, someday, would consume. True, Willim the Black’s powerful spells made him an elusive target, for he could teleport away at the first hint of danger. But the dark wizard must sleep and eat and slake his other mortal needs. Those needs could not help but distract him in the end, and the end would come; if Gorathian could strike when the wizard was distracted, the wizard would surely die.

  Each narrow escape only served to fuel the fire dragon’s hunger. Soon, it would feed.

  Gorathian swept through the bedrock of Thorbardin, flying through solid stone with little more effort than a fish needed to pass through water. Behind it, the fire dragon left a wake of smoldering stone, a wormhole passage of melted rock and acrid, bitter smoke. The nation of the dwarves was permeated by such passages, nearly all of them created during the Chaos War, when scores of dragons like Gorathian had scourged the cities and warrens of the ancient nation.

  Many of the cities had been so weakened by those boreholes that they had collapsed, in part or in total, heavy layers of pavement and stone buildings crumbling downward to crush the lower environs in cities such as Theibardin, Daebardin, and other vaunted clan homes.

  The most violent destruction had been wrought upon the greatest city of all: Hybardin, the Life-Tree of the Hylar, which had tumbled and collapsed and fallen into a mass of rubble. Once the great community had been one of the wonders of the world, rising as a pillar from the middle of the Urkhan Sea, extending all the way to the ceiling of the vast cavern holding the sea, and serving as Life-Tree to so many of Thorbardin’s great cities. Wracked by war, weakened by the onslaught of Chaos, the Life-Tree had collapsed, and with it had fallen the Hylar-inspired dreams of a prosperous and peaceful future for all dwarfkind.

  The scar of the place where the Life-Tree had been rooted was called the Isle of the Dead. It rose from the still waters of the Urkhan Sea as a pile of loose rock, with an occasional section of shattered column or ruined facade discernible amid the broken stone.

  For many years after the Chaos War, the Isle of the Dead had been truly that, a place where broken shards of rock, some of them bigger than a house, had frequently snapped free from the cracked and jagged upper tier, where the city had once supported the vast cavern ceiling. The deadly missiles had fallen steadily and relentlessly, ensuring than any dwarf—or
other creature—who sought to remain upon the isle would eventually be crushed by falling stone.

  Almost unnoticed by most of Thorbardin, however, that bombardment had slowed and virtually ceased over the past decade. Nearly all of the broken stones had finally broken loose, so the ceiling that remained was relatively, if not perfectly, intact.

  It was on the Isle of the Dead that Gorathian came to rest, to contemplate, and to wait. The wizard had a lair and a palace and other places that he frequented, and the fire dragon knew all of those places. It could go to any of them, at will, and it frequently did, sallying from the island to wherever it wanted to go in Thorbardin, killing dwarves with thoughtless abandon—often they died merely from proximity to its incendiary transit—and further eroding the bedrock of the undermountain realm.

  Sooner or later it would catch its prey. It would feed.

  And at last its hunger would be sated.

  The Great Gate of Kayolin yawned wide, opening the underground kingdom to the frosty, dry air. It was a crisp morning, early in the winter, in the Garnet Mountains. Snow formed heavy cornices on the highest ridges of Garnet Peak itself, but the lesser mountains were merely dusted with a coating of white powder.

  The scene outside the gate was a festive one, with a thousand or more citizens having gathered under the sky to bid their warriors good fortune on their march to war. Vendors had set up stalls, selling everything from roasted sausages and fried mushrooms to beer, ale, and dwarf spirits. To judge from the raucous cheering that erupted when the vanguard of the army marched out of the darkness and into the sun, the vendors of strong drink had been doing a brisk business over the past several hours.

  Brandon was neither surprised nor displeased. He marched at the head of the army, his mighty axe held casually on his shoulder in his left hand as he raised his right in salute, responding to the swelling cheers that came from both sides of the road. The track followed the bed of a mountain valley, with thick pine forests to both sides. Near the gates the woods had been cleared back a dozen paces or more from each banked ditch, and that clearing was the scene of festive celebration and hope.