by Doug Niles
“Kiss Caning elf king?” asked the gully dwarf, shaking his head in confusion. “In dwarf fort?”
“Yes,” Gretchan said gently. “Kith-Kanan,” she said, emphasizing the pronunciation, “lived in a time when elves and dwarves worked together for the greater good of Krynn.” She couldn’t help the bitterness that seeped into her voice. “Now, it seems, even the different clans of dwarfkind are not content unless they are trying to kill each other every day.”
“Not kill you!” Gus said fiercely, reaching up to take one of her hands in his grubby paws. “Gus not let them!”
“Thank you, my friend. I know you speak the truth from your heart, and that means a lot to me. I’m glad I could show you this place too. Now let’s get going.”
They left the corpse and statues and ghosts behind, proceeding through the darkened halls of the Sla-Mori. With her staff lighting the way, Gretchan found herself walking faster and faster, propelled by an eagerness even she didn’t understand. Kondike loped along at her side. They came to a place where the cavern once had been blocked by a cave-in, but they were able to keep going since Tarn’s laborers had obviously cleared the passage some years before. Other corridors and smaller passages branched off to the right and left, but Gretchan knew where she was headed. Her feet carried her rapidly along, around more twists and turns, and finally she reached an apparent dead end—a solid wall of stone.
Only then did she notice that Gus was missing. He must have fallen behind. She sighed in exasperation, trying to reconstruct when the intrepid Aghar had struck off on his own, until she realized she hadn’t heard a sound from him for the better part of an hour.
“Hmm, that’s not good. I hope you can stay out of trouble, little friend,” she whispered to herself. More to the point, she hoped he wouldn’t get into any trouble that would lead to her discovery. She was not ready to present herself to the lords of Pax Tharkas, not yet.
But she didn’t intend to turn back and look for him. More eager than before, Gretchan pressed forward. She probed along the dusty wall and felt the outlines of an ancient carving, like a wheel with deep spokes engraved into the stone surface. Pushing her fingers into those grooves, she strained to move the mechanism. For a moment she feared that she wouldn’t be strong enough, but suddenly it jerked and something broke free. The wheel in the wall rotated a quarter turn, and the great slab of stone blocking the passageway slipped to the side, opening the way into Pax Tharkas proper.
With a searching backward look, she determined that Gus hadn’t caught up to her yet. She decided to leave the door open for the moment with the expectation that the gully dwarf was not far behind. Indeed, as the air deep within the fortress wafted past her nose, carrying the scent of garbage and miscellaneous refuse, she realized he probably wasn’t the only Aghar in the place. Like most dwarven cities and fortresses of any size, Pax Tharkas no doubt hosted a thriving community of the little wretches, deep within the dungeons and tunnels where they were not—much of—a bother to the prevalent hard-working dwarves.
With her dog still shadowing her, Gretchan entered the dim corridors of the deep dungeons underneath what she knew was the East Tower of Pax Tharkas. Moving quietly, she slipped past dark, empty cells, climbed a narrow stairway to an upper floor, and continued to move farther into the fortress. She was approaching the next stairway leading up when she heard a key rattle in the lock overhead, and a door opened to reveal flickering torchlight.
Silently the dwarf maid and the shaggy, black dog shrank back into the darkness, a whispered word extinguishing the light glowing on the end of her staff. They drew deeper into a narrow side corridor off of the main dungeon hall. They would be almost impossible to see back there, even with strong dwarf eyes.
Sure enough, a small party of dwarves clumped by, ten paces away from her, but none of them even glanced her way. Two of the guards were escorting a prisoner, and she wasn’t too surprised to recognize Brandon Bluestone, once again a prisoner.
Gretchan had spent much of the past two weeks watching the Kayolin dwarf’s suffering. She had seen him captured by Garn Bloodfist’s Klar the morning after she visited the mountain dwarf camp, and had observed him locked in chains, and dragged roughly along by his uncaring captors. She had followed closely, observing the company’s progress all the way to Pax Tharkas. She knew he couldn’t expect any better treatment from the hard-headed Hylar and Klar who lived there.
And Daewar, she reminded herself curtly. After her conversation with Garn Bloodfist, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was at least one Daewar there.
She waited in the silent darkness as she heard a metal door open, followed by the coarse laughter of the two guards as they tossed their prisoner into his cell.
“Don’t worry,” one of them taunted. “We’ll be along with some food by next week at the latest.”
“Until then,” chortled the other, “you can always snack on the rats.”
Gretchan frowned but held her tongue as the guards again clomped past her hiding place and climbed the stairs toward the next-higher level. Only when she heard the door slam behind them did she emerge, Kondike quietly trailing, to move into the main corridor.
There was only one cell with a closed door, so that must be where Brandon was being held. There was a small grid of bars in the door, providing a window into the cell, and she pressed her face to that opening before speaking in a whisper.
“Brandon? Brandon Bluestone of Kayolin?” she asked.
Seated on the bench that doubled as a bunk, he looked up with an expression that mingled consternation and pleasure. Their eyes met and even in the lightless conditions—she did not want to risk illuminating her staff again—they could recognize each other. She braced herself, preparing for another angry outburst, but instead the prisoner threw back his head and laughed heartily.
“Do you make a habit of visiting every prisoner in every dungeon?” he said, still chuckling. “Or is it just me?”
“Actually, it’s just you,” she admitted. “I saw you get taken by Garn’s men, and then I saw them leading you into the dungeon and I followed you here. I wanted to, uh, see how you are doing. I hope they haven’t beaten you—too badly. Have you had anything to eat?”
He shrugged from his seat on the bench. “So far, my survey of Neidar versus Klar hospitality has failed to arrive at any conclusion. But my research—as you can see—continues.” Brandon’s voice took on an edge of sarcasm. “I’ll share the final result with you, for your book, if you want.”
She bit her tongue on a sharp reply, as always sensitive to the progress—or lack thereof—of her book. “I’m sorry this happened to you again. I … I wish there was something I could do. About your bad luck, I mean. And I wasn’t too nice to you last time we spoke; I wanted to apologize for that too.”
Say something, she screamed silently. For a long heartbeat, he only sat there, studying her.
Finally, he rose and came over to the door, leaning his face close to the bars. He was really quite handsome, she told herself, even if he was still dressed in the same filthy garb he had been wearing for two weeks of marching through the mountains. His hair was uncombed but rich and thick and a pleasant shade of brown. It was draped low on his forehead, almost covering one eye with a rakish, very intriguing effect. His beard, once neatly trimmed, was unkempt, but it parted to reveal a neat set of white teeth.
“Uh, actually, I’d been wishing for the chance to say the same thing to you. I could have been more pleasant when you visited me in the brig,” he admitted.
She was taken aback by his frank statement. It seemed almost un-dwarf-like! She realized that, when she first had met him, she had wanted to get him talking about his homeland, to learn about Kayolin from a dwarf who had lived there; then, it was only her research, her book, that mattered. At that moment, though, she found herself just wanting to get to know him, to understand him.
“You really are from Kayolin, aren’t you?” she said. “I should have believed
you.”
“All my life,” he replied. “Until the last few months.”
“How did you come to be in the south hills?”
“It’s a very long story,” he said with a bitter chuckle.
“I have plenty of time,” she replied.
And so he told her the long story. He told her all about the vein of gold he had discovered and about his brother’s murder and Ham’s murderous betrayal. He discussed his father’s grief and his hopes, the treasure he had sent south with his son, and about Poleaxe’s treachery in stealing it from him.
“That’s where you found me, in the Hillhome brig. Waiting for execution, it turns out,” he concluded.
“Wait. You mean, you think Harn Poleaxe intended to have you killed?” she asked.
“Intended, tried, almost did,” Brandon said bitterly. He described his sham trial and his perilous predicament when he’d been shackled to the timber frame with tinder and firewood piled around his feet as the Klar attack began. “If the Klar hadn’t attacked when they did, I’d have been cooked to a cinder in the next hour.”
“That Poleaxe! He’s even worse than I thought,” Gretchan said. She told him all about Poleaxe’s attack on her and fleeing Hillhome.
“The bastard!” Brandon spit, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the bars of his cell door.
All of a sudden Gretchan felt terribly weary and discouraged. She slumped against the door. “It’s not just Poleaxe. There’s Garn Bloodfist and Tarn Bellowgranite—and the high king in Thorbardin. All they can think about, it seems, is how they can make war against their fellow dwarves.”
“Wait. You’ve been to Thorbardin?” Brandon said. “Is that your home?”
“No. I come from … far away from here,” she said. “But all my life I’ve studied Thorbardin, talked to dwarves who lived there—even some who want to go back.”
“But it remains sealed against the world, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. And when I finally accepted that I’d never be able to visit the place, I decided to come to Pax Tharkas, to meet the dwarves here, who left Thorbardin only a decade ago. That’s the closest I can get to chronicling Thorbardin, for now.”
“I see. And where will all this research and chronicling lead?”
She sighed. “My great ambition is to go to the Great Library, in Palanthas. I want to ask them to take me in as an aesthetic or a student. I just want to read, to study, to learn about the dwarves of the past.”
“All this talk of the past!” he challenged her, shaking his head. “What about the present or the future?”
Gretchan looked at him through the narrow bars and shook her head. “You’ve seen the present,” she admitted sadly. “War and false trials and treachery and theft. What kind of future do you think the dwarf race has?”
“Oh, it can’t be as bad as all that, can it?” he objected.
She couldn’t help but place her own hands over his, and when his fingers clutched at hers, she felt a giddiness she had never felt before. It was as if he would never let her go.
And she would never want him to release her.
Gus was busy wandering through the tunnels of the Sla-Mori. He strolled into one room full of crypts, and when one of the coffin doors started to squeak open, he fled, dashing at top speed through the darkness. He scrambled over piles of loose stones, investigated shadowy niches, and discovered a chamber where a massive chain emerged from the ceiling to be fastened to a heavy iron bracket sunk right into the stone of the floor.
Once or twice he tried looking around for Gretchan, but he felt certain she was just a few steps ahead of him, and there was simply so much to see, he couldn’t be bothered to worry about her. Little insect critters scurried out of his path, too fast for him to catch even one, but they reminded him he was getting hungry. Luckily he found a piece of old, rotten timber with a sumptuous yellow mold growing along one crumbled edge. He feasted on that rarity, spitting out the larger pieces of wood, until he felt sated. He got up to start walking again until, finally, he realized that he was very, very much alone.
He hastened down the darkened hallways, tripping and falling over many a loose rock, anxiously seeking the dwarf maid who had become his companion, his rescuer, his best friend—his goddess! He wanted to call out to her but didn’t dare risk attracting attention to himself. So he trekked on, moving as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him.
He came to a door that was standing open. The other side of the door smelled refreshingly like Agharhome, the gully dwarf slum where he had lived nearly all of his life. He slowed to an easy stroll, wandering down a winding corridor with wet, slimy walls that reminded him of home. Then he caught an especially familiar, favorite scent, the stink of wet fur and a fleshy body.
Rat! He saw the creature scampering to the side, scuttling underneath a low shelf. Instantly Gus dropped to his hands and knees, clawing after the creature, reaching his stubby fingers under the shelf. He felt its naked tail, squeezed hard, and pulled only to feel it yanked away from his grip by an even more forceful tug. “Hey! Rat mine!”
The protest came from a female gully dwarf who popped into view on the other side of the shelf. She held the wriggling rat in her hands and deftly twisted its body, snapping its neck.
“No, rat mine!” Gus retorted, planting his fists on his hips and glaring at the female. He had been startled by her abrupt appearance but managed to overcome his instinct of flight to stand in place and face her down.
She glared back at him, stubbornly clutching the rat. Her nose, Gus saw, was impressively large, swelling out from between two round cheeks. Her hair was reddish brown, tangled, and long, straggling over her round shoulders except where her large ears caused the matted tresses to extend almost straight out to the sides.
In that moment he remembered Slooshy and how they, too, had fought over a rat on their first meeting. He had claimed the rat and taken it away from Slooshy then lost it when it slipped out of his hand. Then Slooshy died. The memory made him feel terribly sad.
“Me Gus,” he said, pointing a pudgy thumb at his chest. “You keep rat,” he added graciously.
The female Aghar scowled suspiciously, looking him carefully up and down. “Berta,” she said finally. Reconsidering her first impression, she gave the rat another twist, wrenching the little body into two parts.
“Here,” she said, extending the hindquarters toward Gus.
Wide eyed, he took the morsel, and for two minutes the pair of them sat companionably on the ground, tearing off bits of the still-warm meat, chewing, and spitting as they discarded the larger bones, the feet, and the tail.
“This your big house?” Gus asked after a satisfied belch. He gestured to the yawning caverns, the dungeon passages and the shadowy stairwell around them.
“No,” Berta said. “Me live Agharhome, over there two steps.” She pointed into the distance. “Come into Paxhouse for food sometimes, though.”
“You have Agharhome here?” asked Gus, amazed and delighted. “With highbulp? And clans?”
Berta seemed to think about that before she shrugged. “Got clans,” she said. “But no highbulp right now. Him killed by big bluphsplunging doofar dwarf.”
“Oh,” Gus said, slumping sadly. Life for the gully dwarves seemed to be pretty much the same from one Agharhome to the next.
Berta flashed a grin, pivoting around to kneel on the floor and look him over carefully. She reached out and touched his arm, nodding in satisfaction. “Hey, you be new highbulp?” she asked. “Highbulp Gus!”
Gus gaped at her in astonishment. He couldn’t be a highbulp! Highbulps were smart! Highbulps were powerful! Highbulps were masters of the Aghar, and he wasn’t the master of anything.
“Gus make good highbulp,” Berta pressed. “You brave, but no bully—not take rat from me like old highbulp would.”
The little Aghar’s mind was reeling. His new friend had presented him with an astounding idea, and even though it was unthinkable, she made him feel very
strong and brave. Maybe he would make a good highbulp.
Only then did he think of his other friend, Gretchan. Immediately he bounced to his feet, suddenly panicked by the thought she had been gone for a long time. “I gotta go!” he cried. “Now!”
He sprinted away, leaving Berta staring open-mouthed after him. Where was the highbulp going? she must have wondered.
The highbulp was miserable about Gretchan. How could he have been so careless as to lose her? He lost his goddess, best friend, the most beautiful person ever to speak to him or show him an ounce of kindness.
Distraught, he wandered through darkened dungeon halls. He was weary and despairing, but he wouldn’t give up. And finally his efforts were rewarded, as after many miles of walking—at least two, he figured—he came upon Kondike, lying on the floor of the dungeon, his head sleepily resting on his forepaws. At Gus’s approach, the big dog raised his head, and his tail thumped against the floor in greeting.
Gus knew Gretchan wouldn’t be far away from her beloved dog, and indeed, he promptly spotted the historian. She was leaning against the door of a dungeon cell, talking to another dwarf in hushed tones. Then, before the Aghar’s disbelieving—and horrified—eyes she leaned in and kissed the other dwarf full upon the lips.
TWENTY-THREE
STORM CLOUDS GATHER
After another meeting with the Mother Oracle, only two days after the Klar raiders had been repulsed, Harn Poleaxe had taken the next step in his increasingly detailed and ambitious scheme. Following the ancient one’s instructions, he had kindled her fire, brewed her tea, and stood back, drinking from his jug of spirits and scratching at the multiple sores across his face and arms, as she cast the liquid onto the floor to watch it puddle and melt in the midst of the sticky debris. She studied its signs and meditated. When she finally spoke, it was with great authority and conviction.
