The Gates of Thorbardin h2-5

by Dan Parkinson

  "How many times do I have to tell you, I promised no such thing?" He stood and put his map away, handing Jilian's back to her. "You know, your father probably has people out looking for you by now… or does he even know you're gone?"

  "He knows I've gone to look for Chane," Jilian snapped. "I told him I was going to."

  "And he didn't stop you? Somehow I can't imagine that, unless — " He looked down at the wide, pretty face, a suspicion dawning. "Where does he think you are looking?"

  Jilian looked at her feet. "All over Thorbardin, I suppose. I didn't tell him I had talked to his ruffian."

  "Ye gods," Wingover breathed. "And Rogar Goldbuckle?" "Well… I told him that I had told my father I was going to look for Chane Feldstone, and that my father said, 'Go right ahead. Look all you want to.' I suppose he might have taken that to mean that it was all right for me go to outside.

  But what difference does that make? Now that we know where Chane is, all we have to do is go and find him. That valley might be where Chane is, but how will you know for sure if we don't have a good look at it?"

  Wingover sighed. "Because of those cats. No one in his right mind would

  — "

  "Oh, rust! Will you stop harping about cats? If that's where Chane went, then I'm sure he has attended to any cats that might be there, so you don't need to worry."

  Wingover gritted his teeth. "Talking to you is like talking to a wall!

  Can't you understand, Button? If one of those cats found your dwarf…"

  Jilian turned away, then paused. "I see people," she whispered, gesturing toward the edge of the clearing where the mountain fell away.

  Excitement glowed in her eyes. She pointed again, and Wingover sprinted toward the ledge and dropped flat just short of it, to crawl forward to where he could see beyond. Jilian was right behind him, and he saw at a glance that Garon had spotted the activity and shifted his position to where he could see up and down the trail.

  At first, there was nothing in sight below, only steep mountainside dropping away toward the hazy depths of a canyon between slopes. Then he saw movement, and focused on it.

  Far below, tiny with distance, a line of creatures moved along a faint trail, going southward. Sunlight flashed on armor, and Wingover's breath became a hiss. Goblins. A small party of them, with a taller figure leading them — a figure wearing dark, glistening armor and what seemed to be a horned helmet. Human? Elf? He couldn't tell. Reaching for his pouch,

  Wingover brushed an elbow against a stone, which in turn rolled over, balanced for a moment on the shelf's edge, then fell, bouncing down the slope. The human muttered a curse, then found his spyglass and brought it to his eye. Dwarven-made, it was a brass tube with lenses and a quartz prism — not as precise or as delicate as some elven glasses he had seen, but well-crafted and adequate for his purposes.

  Adjusting its focus-ring, he sighted on the company below and frowned, trying to count them. Not all of the goblins were in sight at one time since parts of the faint trail were hidden by ridges and features in the mountainside. But there were a dozen or so. And these were better armed and more heavily armored than the ones Wingover and Garon had encountered north of Barter. They moved with a discipline and precision he would not have expected of goblins.

  Easing his glass along the line of goblins, Wingover studied the taller figure in front. Dark armor, richly made: lacquered steel breastplate; epaulettes emblazoned in gold; oiled, fine chain; shin-and armguards of polished bronze; a plain black oval shield; embellished sword hilt exposed from bejeweled sheath. The figure carried a light footman's lance or javelin, as well; Wingover could not tell which.

  The helmet was multiply horned, and bore a strange and unique mask that was fashioned to resemble an animal's face, but like no animal Wingover had ever seen.

  As he looked, the figure halted, raised a hand to halt the goblins following, and turned. The hideous mask turned to watch a pebble bound across the path, then looked up — directly at Wingover.

  With a shock, he realized that the being below saw him clearly, that the shadowed eyes behind the grotesque horned-lizard mask were staring at him intently, as though his spyglass worked both ways. Wingover lowered the glass and edged back, away from the ledge, making the girl retreat with him.

  "What is it?" Jilian whispered. "Who are those people?"

  Garon came and knelt beside him, leaning out just once for a glance down at the lower path. "Goblins?"

  Wingover nodded. "And someone else leading them. Someone taller. We had better be on our way."

  The elf glanced down again. "Out of sight now," he said. "Did they see us?"

  "The leader did. But it would take a day to get from there to here. That leader… I've never seen a face-plate designed like that."

  "Describe it," the elf said.

  Wingover described it, and the elf listened in thoughtful silence, then nodded. "A dragonmask," he said. "The mask, the helm… the face of a dragon."

  "There are no dragons," Wingover said. 'That's just old legend."

  "There were dragons on Krynn," Garon corrected. "Not legends. They were real. And somewhere, I suppose, they still are real."

  "Well, that was no dragon down there." The man headed for his horse, gathering pack and saddle as he went. "But whoever it was knows we're up here, and those were real goblins. So it's time to move out."

  They made camp that night on a mountainside miles away, north and a little east of where they had rested. Wingover made good use of his maps and his skills to put distance behind them, and they were exhausted when finally he called a stop. But it was a good place to rest — a sheltered cove between broken ridges, where a small cookfire would not be seen, but where a guard on the ridgetop above could see for miles in any direction.

  Wingover and the elf took turns standing guard. Wingover was not ready yet to trust Jilian Firestoke with such a responsibility.

  Morning's sun found the travelers awake, packed, and on their way, threading a narrow ledge-trail. When they stood atop the next pass,

  Wingover halted them and pointed. 'There's your second X, Button. Off there where the peaks still shadow the land between. Just about where those mists begin. That's where Chane Feldstone was seen last, if your armsman was right. A mile or two beyond should be where that valley begins… the one with the cats."

  "Good," the dwarf said happily. "We can be there in time for lunch."

  Wingover started to argue, then stopped. Jilian was standing, hands on hips, gazing up at him with determined bright eyes that held not a hint of compromise.

  He sighed. "Oh, all right. We'll go to where the valley begins. You can take a look from there, then we'll circle and search the ridges. But if we see so much as a catwhisker along the way, we turn back."

  "I've never met anyone so obsessed with cats," Jilian scoffed. "I think they're sort of cute."

  "You haven't seen these cats," Wingover snapped. He took up the horse's reins and led off. When they had covered a mile, the trail pitched steeply downward, dividing just ahead into two faint trails. One ran straight ahead, the other branched off to the right. Wingover glanced at his map.

  "That goes to the Vale of Repsite," he said, pointing to the right-hand path. "Two or three days' travel from here. If I were your dwarf, that's where I would be." Probably resting his sore feet in some village over there, the human thought, but did not say it. Probably cozying up to some hill dwarf's daughters… if he's still alive.

  Garon Wendesthalas stood in thought, looking at the forked trail, then back the way they had come. "I think I'll leave you here, Wingover," he said finally.

  "Why?"

  "Oh, just to sit and watch the traffic. Maybe we'll meet farther along, somewhere."

  Wingover scratched his bearded chin. "It's those goblins, isn't it?"

  "They might be coming along here." Garon shrugged, then a cold smile spread across his elven face. "I still have plenty of arrows, and nothing better to do."

  "That's
why you came, isn't it?" the man said, perhaps a bit sadly. "You said there might be more goblins."

  "Have a nice outing, Wingover." The elf turned away. "Maybe we'll meet again." In the somber elven eyes, just as they turned from him, Wingover saw something cold and determined. Something deadly. This elf had a pure hatred for goblins.

  "I hope we do meet again," he said.

  Another mile down the trail, Wingover turned to look back. There was no sign of the elf… but then, there wouldn't be. No one was likely to know he was there until he was ready to show himself.

  Distant movement caught Wingover's eye then, and he peered westward. The man shaded his eyes. Far in the distance, something was moving.

  As Wingover's eyes adjusted to the distance the object grew from a small speck of white to a bigger speck of white. It was coming rapidly in their direction. Wingover stared, then saw a shadow below the thing and realized that it wasn't on the ground. It was in the air, flying.

  It took shape, and its shape was that of a spreadwinged gull, soaring aloft on air currents.

  'Ye gods," Wingover muttered. "It's that crazy gnome."

  Within moments the soarwagon was abreast of Wingover and Jilian, coming about in a wide, graceful turn fifty feet above the trail and a few hundred yards ahead. As it turned it settled and slowed, until it seemed almost to hang in air, fifteen feet above the surface. In that position it crept upslope toward them, rocking gently from side to side. When it was near, they could see the white hair and irritable-looking face of the gnome sitting in its basket.

  He peered out at them and raised an arm to wave. "Ho, there! It's me!

  Bobbin! Do you have anything to eat?"

  "We know who you are!" Wingover shouted. 'What are you doing way out here?"

  "I got caught in a crosswind!" the gnome responded. "I don't know where

  I am, but I'm hungry! Do you have food?"

  "I can make you a nice sandwich!" Jilian called. "Do you like cold roast elk?"

  "Did you ever get that thing to land?" Wingover shouted.

  The gnome glared at him, fighting to control his rocking craft, now just fifty feet away and no more than twenty feet above. "If I had come down, do you think I'd still be up here? A roast elk sandwich would be just fine, thank you. With raisins, preferably. And I could use some cider, but water will do if that's all you have. I'll drop a line, and you can send it up. Where are you going?"

  "We're going to see if Chane Feldstone is in that valley ahead," Jilian told him, pulling food from the travel pack.

  "We are not," Wingover snapped. "We're just going to the rim of it.

  That's all."

  "He thinks there are cats in there," Jilian explained to the flying gnome. "He worries all the time about cats."

  "Do they have wings, like the innkeeper's pigs?" the gnome wondered.

  Jilian giggled. "Of course not. They're just cats."

  "Very big cats," Wingover added.

  "Seems to me you need a scouting service," the gnome said. "After I eat,

  I guess I could go fly over the valley and look around for you, if you'll tell me what you're looking for."

  "Chane Feldstone," Jilian said. "He's a dwarf, about this tall and very handsome — "

  "Cats," Wingover said. "We're on the lookout for cats."

  For a moment the gnome didn't answer. An air current had caught his soarwagon, and he was struggling to hold it in place. His controls seemed to consist mostly of strings that ran from the basket to the fabric panels of the thing's boxy nose, strings that controlled the angle and pitch of the panels. The soarwagon rocked, bucked, and settled into position again, twenty feet above them. Bobbin peered down, his gnome-face ridged with irritation.

  "I don't mind looking around," he said. "It isn't as though I had anything better to do right now."

  Chapter 13

  "I'll bet you never saw anything like this before," Chestal Thicketsway said happily, turning full circle to scan the breadth of the ice field with its jumbled, vague shapes, frozen in combat. "Just look at this!

  Didn't I tell you? Bumps! Ice-bumps, everywhere you look. And inside every bump are frozen dwarves… still fighting, except they don't move any more."

  Chane Feldstone didn't answer. With haunted eyes he looked around, needing to see what was here but not wanting to. To one raised in the sheltered delves of Thorbardin, the Dwarfgate Wars were just old legend stories of the defense of Thorbardin's gates in a time of great crisis, tales of heroes who had manned the gates and the pathways beyond, who had fought at King Duncan's order so that Thorbardin could live.

  These are some of them, Chane thought, approaching a great, jumbled mound of ice rising from the ice field — a chaotic feature, like a miniature mountain range twice his height and fifty to a hundred feet across in any direction. Within the ice, dark shadows hinted at shapes. He knelt in front of a sheer plane of ice and rubbed at it, smoothing and clearing its face. Polished, the ice was transparent.

  The dwarf leaned close, peering within. Just inside, only a few feet away, two dwarves were locked together in combat, hammer against sword, shield to shield, straining each against the other — violence captured just as it had been the instant the ice had covered the combatants. Beyond these two were others, receding into vague translucence. A dwarf on the ground held a shield above him, desperately fending against a slicing blade frozen in descent. Another, arms outspread, flailed motionless for balance, frozen in the act of falling over the body of a dwarf cleft from shoulder to midriff by some lucky blow. Within the ice, the spilled blood remained crimson on the black ash beneath.

  These are some of those who went out to defend Thorbardin's gates, the dwarf thought. And these are who they fought. Which are which, though? Did even they know? There might be a hundred or more locked in combat, just within this one mound of ice — dwarves who came out from Thorbardin, and dwarves who fought to go within. All dwarves, and all alike now in frozen silence.

  No one ever returned to Thorbardin to tell of this battle, he realized.

  No one ever went anywhere from here. They are all still here. Encased in ice, with ashes underfoot.

  Three spells did Fistandantilus cast. The words echoed in Chane's mind.

  The first was fire, the second ice…

  Fire and ice. Chane turned away from the ice window, feeling very cold.

  "Isn't this great?" The kender hurried past, chattering his enthusiasm.

  "Dwarfcicles! Imagine! There's one over there you should look at. That little tall lump… there are four dwarves really going at it. One of them has an axe and he's fighting the other three. Better hurry… but then again, I suppose he'll last as long as the ice lasts, won't he? Wow, this is like a museum of statues, with frosty windows!"

  The dwarf turned to glare at the kender, but Chess was already heading off to look at more lumps.

  Chane growled, and the growl became a sigh. I don't want to be here, he told himself. I don't want to look at this. And yet, he went on, from mound to mound in the field of frozen death, peering here, kneeling there for a better view within the ice, searching. And through it all he felt the faint tingling of the little red spot on his forehead — the mark of the red moon — driving him on.

  None who were on this field when those spells were cast ever left here,

  Chane thought glumly. They're here still. Yet, according to the old stories, Grallen did not die in this place. The son of King Duncan died in this ancient war, but not here. Somewhere else, sometime later. Another battlefield, somewhere. The place where Fistandantilus cast his last and greatest spell, they said. Chane tried to remember all he had heard of the old legends. Where had that final battle been? He wasn't sure… except that it was somewhere other than here. East of here, he seemed to recall.

  A place called Skullcap.

  Grallen, warrior prince of the Hylar, who had learned a secret in his final hours, had learned of a secret way into Thorbardin, too late to find and defend it.

 
; Had Grallen been here, then?

  The red spot on Chane's forehead tingled. Yes, he felt, Grallen had been here… and gone on. But to where?

  Again in his mind he saw the image, of a face not unlike his own, the face that the dream — or the red moon had shown him. Grallen, son of

  Duncan. Chane's own ancestor. Could that be true?

  Everywhere, ice. Ice whose convoluted shapes contained dwarves frozen in combat. In some of them, the frozen shapes struggled amid dark swirls of smoke that were kept as still as they were. What kind of mage had he been, this Fistandantilus? What kind of sorcery had availed him, that he could have done this? Yet, the legends said, what he had done later was far worse.

  The kender skipped past again, as happy as a child with a roomful of new toys. "See anybody you know?" he asked Chane. "Wonder what they were fighting about…" He hurried on, toward a new mound that he hadn't yet explored. Then he paused, thoughtfully, and turned back. "Have you thought about taking that hammer and breaking some of them out of the ice? I mean, just to see if they'd go on fighting?"

  Chane rounded on him, furious. "I wish you'd just shut up! You might at least show a little respect."

  "Then don't break them out." The kender shrugged. "It was just a thought, anyway." He went on his way.

  "That kender would rob a graveyard and not think twice about it," the dwarf muttered. Still, the question was intriguing. Were they really dead in there? Or were they only suspended? He thought about it and decided he didn't want to know.

  Chane went on, searching this way and that, not sure what he was looking for except that the tingle on his forehead became more pronounced as he worked his way eastward. Something here, it suggested, would tell him where Grallen had gone all those long years ago.

  As he knelt beside another clustered mound — inside, dwarves with pikes held their ground against dwarves with swords and axes — the kender appeared again from somewhere and stopped beside him. "Find anything yet?"

  Chess asked.

  "More of the same. I don't know what I'm supposed to find. I almost wish that wizard had stayed around. Maybe he would have had an idea."