The Gates of Thorbardin h2-5

by Dan Parkinson

  Upside down and frantic, Bobbin shot over the heads of the goblin troops, raining raisins down upon them. By the time he managed to turn the soarwagon right side up, he was four miles south and climbing, again coming about in a wide right-hand turn.

  Bobbin clung to his lines, pounded his wicker rail with a frustrated fist. "Gearslip!" he cursed. "Threadbind and metal fatigue! You misassembled piece of junk, can't you behave yourself just once? Stress analysis and critical path i If I ever get my feet on solid ground again,

  I'm going to take you apart and make camel davits out of you!" At a half-mile relative altitude, the soarwagon soared serenly over the scattered force of goblins, over the intervening forests, over the ice field where humans and dwarves worked to gather old weapons. Finally, it passed over the huddled encampment beyond, where refugees tended their children and wounded companions, then raised its nose and climbed. Bobbin closed his eyes and shook his head. Things were bad before. Now he was out of raisins. High above the ridge that separated two wilderness valleys, and miles north of the pass, the gnome repaired and rerouted his control lines and prepared to come about one more time. At least now he had controls again, after a fashion. He could turn east, then south, and possibly find the people he had lost at the mountain crossing.

  Then movement of an entirely different sort caught Bobbin's eye, and he raised himself high in his wicker to peer dead ahead. Something was coming from the north, coming toward him, a speck against the horizon but definitely coming his way… and flying. Where exasperation had been, hope surged forward, brightening the gnome's gaze.

  Flying! Someone else is up here in another flying machine, Bobbin thought gleefully. I'm not alone. Grinning eagerly, he settled into his wicker seat and lowered the nose of the soarwagon gently, aiming for the approaching flier. Someone to compare notes with! Someone who might have an answer to my dilemma! Someone else in the sky!

  At a mile's distance, the gnome studied the stranger. Red in color — bright, crimson red — with movable wings that flapped rhythmically, and a long, trailing appendage of some sort. And legs? Yes, definitely legs. Not wheels or runners, but jointed legs, like an animal's. And who was flying it? Bobbin could not see a cockpit or basket, not even someone mounted on a bench.

  Closer still, Bobbin moved. Then his eyes began to widen in incredulous astonishment. The thing looked — he would have sworn it — like a flying dragon. Ridiculous, he told himself. There are no dragons on Krynn. There were dragons once, they said. Ages ago. But not now. Not in the memory of anyone living had there been reports of dragons.

  Closer and closer the two fliers came, and more and more Bobbin had to admit that it did look like a dragon. A huge, red, flying dragon, coming along the line of peaks, coming directly toward him.

  Fear washed up and down the gnome's spine, a compelling, sweating fear that was like cold fingers gripped him. Then a voice spoke to him. "Who are you?" it asked, seeming to be right there beside him. Bobbin gasped and looked around, this way and that, trying to see who had spoken. The dragon was a halfmile away now, and there was no doubt in the gnome's mind that it was, indeed, a dragon. Again the voice at the gnome's shoulder asked, "Who are you?"

  "Who are you?" the gnome shouted. "Where are you?"

  "You're looking at me," the voice said. "Yes. Me. And yes, little creature, I am what you think I am. Now, calm down and tell me who you are?"

  "Bobbin," Bobbin said. "I… I'm a gnome. Are you really a… But of course you are. You wouldn't say so if you weren't, would you?"

  "Bobbin," the voice seemed to purr in his ear. "Just keep coming,

  Bobbin. You will have no further doubts, in a moment or so."

  Whether it was Bobbin's own numb hands trembling at the control strings, or some vagrant current of air, the soarwagon chose that instant to slip to the right, stall, and go into a nosedive. Suddenly the gnome saw spinning mountaintops straight ahead, and somewhere behind him the air crackled with fire.

  "Oh, gearslip?" he muttered, struggling with his controls.

  "Aha," the voice at his shoulder chuckled. "A fine dodge, gnome. You were lucky that time. But you won't be so lucky again. I can't let you live, you know."

  "Why not?" Bobbin tugged strings, wrestling the plunging soarwagon out of its spin.

  "Because you have seen me," the calm voice said.

  "That is your misfortune. None who see me must live to tell of it… not yet, anyway. You see, that could spoil the Highlord's plan."

  "I wouldn't want to do that, I suppose." Bobbin hauled on his lines, and the soarwagon's nose edged a few degrees down. Bobbin glanced back and gasped. The red dragon was less than a hundred yards back, wings folded, gaping jaws displaying ranks of glittering teeth. The soarwagon screamed into a dive, strained its fabrics, and flattened out of the descent, its wake currents spewing a small snowstorm from the icy top of a rock peak.

  Behind the contraption the dragon spread great wings and dodged the pinnacle.

  "That was a nice stunt," the deep voice said in Bobbin's mind. "But awfully chancy."

  "I'm insane," the gnome explained.

  "What a shame," the dragon voice purred. "Well, you won't have to worry about that much longer."

  Bobbin glanced around again. He had gained some lead, but now the dragon was winging around, making for him in a flanking attack. The creature was huge, far larger in both length and wingspan than Bobbin's soarwagon. It fairly radiated power and dominance and a mastery of the air. Its very presence was enough to inspire an awful fear, like nothing the gnome had felt before.

  "I don't suppose we could come to some… ah… less terminal agreement?" Bobbin suggested, throwing the soarwagon into a side slip that plunged it directly below the dragon. He soared into a climb beyond his pursuer.

  "Don't be ridiculous," the dragon voice was tinged with anger now… and something else that tingled just beyond the gnome's understanding. "You might as well stop this dancing around. You don't have a chance of escaping, you know."

  "I'm sorry," Bobbin said. "No offense intended, of course, but self-preservation is a difficult habit to break." He increased the soarwagon's pitch and reached for the sky. Behind him, the red dragon beat great wings, powerful in full pursuit. Yet, somehow, the beast seemed a trifle sluggish.

  Could the creature be tired? the gnome wondered. The hint in the voice, that subtle something… could it be fatigue?

  "Stop this, now!" the dragon commanded. "I don't have all day."

  "I'm wrestling with my instincts," Bobbin assured it. "I suppose you've come quite a long way."

  "Nearly five hundred miles," the dragon snapped.

  "Not that it's any of your business."

  "Aerodynamics," Bobbin muttered. "Mass and energy coefficients."

  "Stop babbling and come back here!"

  "You certainly are big," the gnome remarked, his mind racing. "I'll bet you weigh a ton."

  "Closer to three," the dragon voice sneered.

  "Five hundred miles, you said?" He dug out a carbon marker and did rapid calculations on the trailing edge of his wing. "At say… twenty knots?

  That means you've been in the air for more than twenty-four hours. That's a long time. Do you have far to go?"

  "Not much farther. Now let's get this over with. Turn around?"

  "I'm still having problems with my autonomic responses," the gnome apologized. Glancing around one more time, he readjusted his lines, dropping the craft's nose in a sudden forty-five degree dive. He wondered how much longer he could stay out of the dragon's reach.

  Chapter 25

  Camber Meld and Fleece Ironhill stood at the center of a ragged, determined line of refugees, watching goblins advance across the ice.

  Twenty-eight fighters formed the motley line, dwarves and humans, most of them male but with a few females among them. A few held weapons of recent make, but most were armed with ancient blades, hammers, axes, and shields broken from the smoking ice — weapons that had been dropped or cast aside b
y those still under the ice. The two chieftains looked each way along their ragged battle line, then glanced at each other. There was nothing more to say, and nothing now to do except wait for the attack and hold the line for as long as possible while the helpless ones — those in the refugee camps — made their escape.

  It was all they could do. The refugees were outnumbered four to one, poorly armed and poorly equipped, a handful of herders and planters against a force of goblins. They all knew that the best they might achieve would be a little time.

  The refugees had been exploring the ice field when they saw the goblins coming from the south, no more than a mile away. There had been time to do no more than send a runner to warn the camps, and break out as many weapons and shields as they could find under the shallow ice. Wisps of ancient dark smoke, trapped from trees and grasses caught blazing by the ice, had drifted from the breaks with each new crack.

  Now they waited as grinning goblins, a hobgoblin leading them, surged across the ice, eager for slaughter. Crossbows were aimed, and a deadly rain of bronze darts lashed out at the defenders. Shields took most of the missiles, but two dwarves and a gray-haired man fell. The goblins shouted as they slung their bows, raised swords and pikes, and charged.

  All along the line, blades struck from behind shields as the foes closed, and goblin blood steamed and stank on the ice, mingling here and there with the crimson blood of humans and dwarves.

  The little line of defenders took the first assault and turned it back, then closed ranks and retreated slowly, drawing the barely disciplined goblins out of their formation and into single — or more often double or triple — combat. For long minutes, the skill and sheer desperation of the defending line held the field. But the goblins were too many, and the refugee army retreated again… and again. Camber Meld and Fleece Ironhill found themselves fighting side by side, and knew that this would be the final strategy. Hold and retreat, hold and retreat, until none were left to face the goblins. It was, simply, a buying of time.

  At the edge of the ice field they retreated yet again, no more than a dozen of them now against at least seventy goblins. The goblins formed another charge, then halted. Goblin mouths dropped open, and goblin eyes stared aloft, beyond and above the line of defenders.

  Fleece Ironhill glanced around just as something very fast skimmed over his head and swept upward on wide, pale wings. He didn't see what it was, nor did he try to follow it with his eyes. Instead he stared at the second flying thing, plunging down from above. A huge red dragon, its mouth opened wide and a rush of fire coming from it. The dragon flared its wings and soared over the line of battle.

  Without warning, the dragon's fire-breath smote the ice field behind the goblins.

  Bobbin was in trouble. For a brief time, he had held his distance ahead of the dragon, the soarwagon diving earthward on rippling wings. But he had waited too long, gone too low, and lost his edge. The dragon had managed to get above him, and now was closing with deadly speed. The gnome heard the long, deep rumble of in-drawn breath and knew what it meant.

  "Thermodynamics," the gnome muttered, praying that his final calculation was correct, that the same ground effect that had been his undoing might just this once work to his advantage. How many times since he had gone aloft had the soarwagon abruptly shot skyward in a screaming climb, propelled by the extra buoyancy of the near-ground air?

  "Don't change your ways just yet," Bobbin muttered, taking a firm hold on his lateral controls. The ice field sped by just a few yards below.

  Closing his eyes, he pulled the strings. Behind and beneath the soarwagon's tail, a torrent of terrible flame seared the air and flowed in waves of heat across the ice field, which seemed to explode in great clouds of steam and soot.

  The soarwagon went nearly straight up, a pale sliver flung by its own dynamics and given added speed by uprushing air currents ahead of the rising clouds of steam. Bobbin opened his eyes and looked around. Behind him was a tiny, distant landscape, where finger ridges of mountains lay like furrows in a field. And barely visible, far below, was the red dragon, just coming out of its dive and beginning to circle to the east.

  "How did you do that?" The dragon voice in his ears seemed genuinely impressed.

  "I bounced off the ground effect," the gnome explained. "It's nothing especially new. I've been bouncing off it for weeks."

  "Ground effect?" The voice seemed fainter now.

  "That's what I call it. The air near the ground is denser than the air higher up. It's why I can't land."

  "You can't land? You mean you can't get down?"

  "No, blast it! I can get near the ground, but I can't quite reach it.

  Uh… are you coming after me again? I'd rather you didn't. I have enough troubles without you." The diminishing voice in Bobbin's ear seemed to chuckle. "I've heard of gnomes being standoffish, but you're the first one

  I've found who was actually stuck up!

  But I have no more time for you, so I suppose this is your lucky day.

  Goodbye, Bobbin." Again there was a fading chuckle, then the voice was gone.

  The gnome had managed to level out his climb, and he looked over the wicker rail. In the distance below, the red dragon was winging for the mountains east of Waykeep. Bobbin circled and watched until the mythical beast cleared the peaks there and descended into the smoky mists beyond.

  Then he sighed and tugged on his descent strings. He was cold and hungry, and ready to go down. Apparently the soarwagon was, too. At the slightest pressure on its vanes, it dropped its nose and plummeted straight down, its wings rippling and whining.

  "Stress and derailment!" the gnome swore, and began another adjustment on his controls.

  When dragonfire rolled over the frozen battlefield, the effects were instantaneous. Ice splintered and fell away, becoming great spreading clouds of steam mixed with ancient smoke. Gray mist roiled outward, obscuring the goblins and the defenders beyond, then drifted upward on heated drafts. A wide, thick cloud shadowed a foreshortened land where everything seemed to writhe and rumble. Goblins retreated, wide-eyed, then turned and retreated again when the blades of the handful of human and dwarf refugees drew blood.

  The evil minions fell back, turned again, and stopped in confusion. From the rolling clouds came dwarves, hundreds of dwarves. Dwarves armed and armored. Mountain dwarves and hill dwarves with dead eyes in frozen faces that had not known change in more than two centuries — faces that grimaced and twisted in the exact ways they had when they fought against one another in a burning forest at the instant the spell of ice had been cast by an archmage.

  But they were not fighting among themselves now. Mountain dwarves and hill dwarves stood shoulder to shoulder, spread out beneath the dark plume of choking steam. They were silent and relentless, and fell on the panicked goblins without a hesitation or a sound. The hobgoblin leader screamed, turned to run, and fell, his helm pierced by Fleece Ironhill's spiked hammer. Two jibbering goblins following him died under the sword of

  Camber Meld. The cooling cloud of dark steam above was descending now, settling as a dense fog streaked with ash, slanting before a wind that came across the old battlefield, carrying the dry scent of ages. For long minutes there was only silence and the blinding mist. Then, slowly, the cloud thinned. Five humans and six hill dwarves, the last of the combined fighting force led by Camber Meld and Fleece Ironhill, stood alone at the edge of a great, blackened plain littered with bodies, dropped arms and ancient burned stumps. Most of the strewn bodies were goblins, many of them still pierced by the weapons that had killed them. And everywhere, among and around them, were little heaps of clothing and armor — all that remained of the dwarves of Waykeep, fighters released from an ancient spell for one last cut, one last thrust, at an enemy.

  The refugees looked around in awe. Nothing moved except the wind… the wind, and a sliver of white far to the east, something that flew like a bird with still wings, riding on the air. Something going away.

  On a fores
t-shrouded knoll in the Vale of Respite, some distance south of the encampments of the goblins, a red dragon burrowed into leaf-mold and slept the sleep of exhaustion. Even the most powerful of creatures had its limits, and this one had been in flight for nearly thirty hours and more than five hundred miles. It had flown from a lair deep in the

  Khalkist Mountains to a secret place near Sanction, then had spanned the entire width of Newsea, past Pax Tharkas, and now lay in the wilderness ranges between Qualinost and Thorbardin, in the Kharolis Mountains of western Ansalon.

  It had chosen the knoll, sent a mind-call northward, then burrowed in and slept. Through the remainder of that day it rested, and through the night and most of the next day. The sleep restored its strength, and the dragon dreamed the comfortable dreams of one who by birthright can be absolute lord over anyone or anything that it cares to dominate… except others like itself, and one beyond, the one the dragon called the Dark

  Queen. The dragon slept for twenty-eight hours, then awoke briefly to be aware of its surroundings.

  The one it had called was there, waiting. The dragon went back to sleep and dozed for another three hours. Finally, when it was rested, the red dragon stirred, shook away the forest leaves, and lifted its huge head.

  Its long, sinuous body moved, and the beast stretched its wings deliciously. The dragon felt renewed, restored. Nearby, a small fire burned, and the person beside it came to her feet. "Have you slept enough?" she asked sourly.

  "I always sleep enough," the dragon said. "It is you who should worry about sleep. The Highlord would be displeased if you should fail in your mission."

  "I have not failed," the woman said. "All of the lands between Pax

  Tharkas and Thorbardin are in my control…or will be by the coming of spring. My goblins are in place, and all that remains is the gathering of slaves to build some decent fortifications."

  The dragon's gaze was mocking. "If that is all that remains, why are you aligning your troops to cross over into the Plains of Dergoth beyond the mountains?"