The Heir of Kayolin

by Douglas Niles

  The cry grew to a swelling chorus as more and more fighters, on both sides of the civil war, gathered around the palace, begging and pleading for the king to allow them to leave.

  “Open the North Gate!” wailed many in the crowd. “Let us get out of here!”

  “Cowards!” Stonespringer screamed at them from the smoldering wreckage of his medium-high rampart. “Stay and fight! You shall not leave Thorbardin; no one leaves Thorbardin! Stay and do the bidding of your king! Stay, or die!”

  But his words had little effect on the frenzied mob. The fire dragon, after searing past the palace, had flown on, plunging into the bedrock that formed the city’s wall, moving vaguely in the direction of the Urkhan Sea.

  “Your majesty!” The words were repeated, again and again, but so intense was the king’s focus that it took him a long time to realize that someone was speaking to him, was even tugging on his robe.

  He spun in fury, his good eye flashing as he saw a dwarf recoil in terror. The fellow was wearing the uniform of a general, Jungor saw, but only gradually did he recognize Ragat, the commander of his most elite troops and of the entire castle garrison.

  “What do you want?” snarled the monarch.

  Ragat, surprisingly enough, stood boldly in the face of his ruler’s fury. “You command the troops to fight the monster,” he declared. “But you offer them no hope! Our weapons are useless against the fire dragon. Our defenses crumble in its presence. We are brave, O king, but we are not fools. How are we to fight that which cannot be fought?”

  “Faith!” cried the king, his voice a howl. “Fight with our faith, with the courage of our righteous god!”

  His eye flashed again, and his mouth curled into a wicked grin. “The eye of Reorx!” he crowed. “The red stone will give us the means to defeat the monster!”

  Ragat could only watch impotently as the monarch hastened back into his quarters on the high palace level. Moments later Stonespringer returned, clutching the wedge of red rock that he called the eye of Reorx. The general watched skeptically as the king strode to the edge of the rampart and held the stone up for all of the teeming, panicked dwarves to see.

  “Behold!” the king cried, his voice shrill and cracking. He held up the Redstone. “Behold the eye of Reorx. The Master of the Forge is watching us! He will protect us!

  “Witness the power of our god!” he continued shouting. “Here is the talisman of his own self! Here is the means to defeat the fire dragon! Have faith, my people—”

  He did not finish, for at that moment the fire dragon returned, dropping right through the ceiling of the vast cavern of Norbardin. Ragat felt the searing heat of the monster’s approach and saw blisters rising on the skin of his hands as he held them up in a futile attempt to defend himself.

  Then those crushing wings came down, and the fire enveloped him. The high rampart of the palace collapsed, sending the king, the general, and the vaunted Redstone tumbling into the smoldering ruins of the palace’s courtyard.

  Gorathian flew on, a being of pure Chaos. The fire dragon had no goal, no objective, no destination. It exulted in its flight, relished the sweep of destruction, reveled in killing, inflicting pain, and causing terror among the pathetic dwarves.

  But it also understood that it had a very powerful enemy. For long years it had languished in the chasm below the wizard’s laboratory, imprisoned and taunted by Willim the Black. The mage had exerted powerful controls through his sorcery, occasionally rewarding the fire dragon with morsels of flesh or promises of imminent freedom. Yet always, when Gorathian strained to rise, the wizard’s magic had forced it back. A powerful barrier of sorcery had pressed the serpent down, and the bedrock of the cavern—a strata of ore heavily infused with iron—had prevented the creature of Chaos from burrowing to either side, effectively blocking it from any potential path of escape.

  Gorathian had been trapped since the Chaos War, when, as one of the great legion of destructive beings, it had roared through Thorbardin, laying waste to cities and lives and everything else in its path. It had dived into the chasm, deep within the mountain, and found itself confined by the heavily metallic rock. By the time Gorathian had twisted around to seek an escape, its fellows, the whole army of Chaos, had been borne away from Krynn by the intervention of the gods.

  Only Gorathian remained, sealed away in the depths of the mountain’s footings.

  But the dwarves, ever industrious, had excavated great blocks of stone away from the fire dragon’s prison, carving out the chamber that was to be the new council hall for the ruling thanes. Fortunately, just before Gorathian would have been freed, the dwarves had realized it was the prison of the lethal and destructive beast. They had hastily resealed the chamber and withdrawn, leaving the monster to languish for the rest of eternity.

  Then the wizard had come.

  Willim the Black had been drawn to the lair in part because of the deadly monster, and he had used spells of powerful sorcery to tantalize the fire dragon, allowing it to sense freedom even as he tamped it down and kept it imprisoned in the deep crevasse.

  For that the dragon feared and hated the black wizard, even as it sensed that Willim was the reason the creature had been, at long last, released from its entrapping chasm. As Gorathian felt the containing magic ease, the beast understood that the wizard was relaxing his control and aiming the fire dragon at the dwarf’s enemies. Since it had gained flight, it would never, ever, return to that stone-walled prison. Gorathian embraced the release but remained vigilant against the wizard’s control.

  The dragon flew on, wings spread as it soared higher. The great dwarf nation of Thorbardin beckoned: thousands of lives, all quailing in terror at Gorathian’s approach. The fire dragon roared in exultation, fiery breath engulfing a whole block of small houses. The monster sliced through the rock, causing an entire section of Anvil’s Echo to collapse, crushing a hundred dwarves under many tons of rubble.

  The fire dragon flew and it slew. It roared in the pure joy of destruction. And it knew that, for the first time in countless ages, it was free.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE REDSTONE

  Shrieking in terror, Gus ran from the eyeless wizard who was flying so swiftly through the air, seemingly straight toward him. The magic-user’s black robe flapped around his skinny legs, and he swooped like a bird toward the palace wall, very near to where the three gully dwarves had been cowering. Too many terrifying memories surged through the little gully dwarf’s brain, and he was desperate to get away.

  Gus well remembered that horrible, eyeless face from his first encounter, a long time—two months, or two years, at least—ago. Gus had been a quivering, terrified captive in a small cage in the laboratory deep underneath Thorbardin. He could still hear the wicked laughter as the black-robed Theiwar had ordered him to drink an obviously lethal potion. The wizard had used a magic spell to compel Gus to drink the potion. It was only good luck that had given the gully dwarf a life-saving option: the magic-user had failed to notice that he had left a second bottle on the table, near the poison, and he failed to tell Gus which potion he was supposed to drink.

  So the gully dwarf prisoner had drunk the wrong potion and—much to his surprise—had magically teleported himself out of Thorbardin instead of dying a prolonged and agonizing death as the wizard had intended. His lucky escape had gotten even luckier when he had met—and fallen madly in love with—the priestess of Reorx Gretchan Pax. He had shared fascinating adventures with her, strolling along beside her and her mighty dog, Kondike. He saw wonders he had never imagined, went to places he didn’t even know existed. In a way, that was why and how he became a highbulp.

  As he recalled all of those dizzying events, Gus couldn’t really remember why he’d been so eager to get back to Thorbardin. Sure, it was maybe a little more interesting than Pax Tharkas, but it was also a lot more dangerous! It seemed like every time he turned around, the place was finding a new way to try to kill him.

  He ducked again as he heard a
large crash and spotted the fiery dragon smashing through the high wall of the king’s fortress. The wizard, he was relieved to see, flew after the dragon; he had not been pursuing the gully dwarf after all. Still, that was little consolation for Gus as another avalanche of rubble plunged down from the heights, stones smashing and bouncing all around him in a pounding, destructive barrage.

  Gus heard shouts of terror and saw two dwarves tumble down with the breaking wall. One was dressed in silver armor; the other wore a robe, and when his face momentarily turned toward the gully dwarf, Gus saw that the other dwarf had a bright golden eye in one of his sockets. The two plunged to the ground and vanished into the cloud of dust, still shouting and cursing.

  More flames trailed through the air, sparks falling like rain across the plaza as the dragon flew past again. Gus screamed and ducked, covering his scalp with his arms. He saw Berta crouching nearby and tried to pull her over his head for added protection, but she bopped him on the skull with a fist that was as hard as stone. Feeling miserable, forlorn, and friendless, the Aghar pressed his face downward, burrowing into the pile of rubble that had tumbled from the palace tower. He could still hear the two dwarves who had fallen there, one of them shrieking hysterically, the other trying to calm his frantic companion.

  In the darkness of the piled boulders, Gus spotted the gleam of something red on the ground amid all the gray and black stones. It looked vaguely familiar, and when he reached down between two blocks of the fallen wall to pick it up, he recognized it—at least, recognized it as resembling wedges of stone he had seen before.

  In that instant the dragon, the wizard, and the chaotic destruction surrounding him were all forgotten.

  “Hey!” he cried, sitting back and hoisting the stone, which was smooth and heavy. “This Redstone! Matches Bluestone and Greenstone!”

  “So what?” huffed Slooshy, huddled nearby. Still, she looked up, glaring crossly, to study the wedge of rock he held to his chest. “Who care ’bout stupid bluphsplunging rock?”

  “My friend do!” Gus retorted. “In Pax Tharkas. Got two stones, blue one and green one. Her want this stone!”

  He well remembered Gretchan Pax’s delight when the dwarves had produced the two stones, matching them together to make … well, something interesting, anyway. He remembered that it was, or at least had seemed to be, very important. He also recalled them talking about another stone that was also important, and he guessed—with some uncharacteristically shrewd intuition—that he had just discovered that other stone.

  And in that flash of insight, he got another idea.

  Peat and Sadie, still bound and gagged, had been dumped unceremoniously into a tiny, windowless room. The door slammed behind them, a sturdy lock clicked, and they were stuck in the darkness. Through the uncounted hours since then, Peat had finally managed to work his gag free and began to work on his wife’s. After great effort, he had just bitten through the last of the strings tying Sadie’s cloth tightly against her mouth.

  And he was already regretting the accomplishment.

  “Why did you have to be so damned greedy?” she hissed at him quietly, apparently still concerned about not attracting the attention of the guards they could hear pacing back and forth in the outer hall.

  “Me?” he whispered back indignantly. “I wanted to get out of Thorbardin a week ago!”

  “Don’t lie to me!” she spat, her voice cracking as it grew louder in spite of herself. “Why, if I could only—”

  The rest of her threat was drowned in a chaotic explosion of sound coming from beyond their cell. They heard stones crashing to the ground and felt the vibrations of massive destruction. An eerie red glow flared in the corridor beyond the dungeon door, and they heard guards screaming in terror. The voice of one quickly faded into the distance as he fled, while the other’s cries, right outside the door, grew weaker and weaker.

  Another violent convulsion shook the palace, knocking stones loose from the ceiling. A large beam snapped, swinging perilously close to Peat’s head and smashing into the side of the cell near the door. Peat cursed as a rock struck a glancing blow against his shoulder. He tried to roll away, to shelter under the narrow bunk along the wall, but there was too much rubble for him to move. They were surrounded by heat, a radiance so intense that Peat could only imagine they had been tossed into some kind of oven.

  He was surprised to see that Sadie was sitting up. Somehow she had wriggled her hands free of the bonds, and was using them to pull the coils of rope off of her arms. Once she was done, she knelt beside her husband and worked on his ropes with her stiff, arthritic fingers. After a second she gave up, pointed one of those fingers, and snapped out a word of magic.

  Peat yelped as the magic missile shot past his skin, ricocheting from the floor into the wall, trailing sparks. He was about to shout his objections when he noticed that the spell, in addition to burning him, had ripped through the ropes that had been binding his hands together.

  “Um, thanks,” he said, blinking in astonishment before looking blurrily around.

  He noticed the red glow still brightening the corridor behind the dungeon, but only when Sadie started toward that firelight did he realize he was seeing a lot more illumination than he should have been able to observe through the narrow dungeon window.

  “The door’s gone!” he exclaimed.

  Sadie shot him an exasperated look as she passed through that empty doorway with Peat hastening after her. They saw one of the guards, a stout Hylar warrior, gesturing weakly to them from the floor. He was pinned under a large flat rock; the weight of that stone was obviously crushing the life from him.

  The two Theiwar wasted no time on mercy, however, instead hobbling away from the dungeon cell as fast as their bony legs could carry them. The room beyond was full of smoke, the floor coated with rubble. It had been staffed by a dozen guards when they had been brought to their cell; it was empty when they entered again. They started up the stairs toward the palace’s main floor, pushing small stones out of the way and scrambling over the rocks that were too large to move.

  A minute later they had reached the top of the long stairway and found, once again, that a stout door had been torn from its hinges. And not just the door: when they stepped into the great hall, they saw that half of one wall was simply gone, smashed away by some unspeakable force, leaving an outline of smoking blocks, charred timbers, and dangling arches. There were dwarves in the great hall, covered with soot, all of them looking dazed and shocked. Some helped others who had been buried in the collapse, while many simply fled toward the doorways or leaped out through the hole that had been knocked in the wall. No one seemed to pay any attention to the two elderly Theiwar hobbling up from the dungeons.

  “Come on!” Sadie urged, gesturing as her nearsighted husband hesitated. He couldn’t see any place that looked safer than any place else, so he simply followed her, trusting her better eyes—and sharp instincts—to lead him to safety.

  The old crone clawed her way up a sloping rock to the edge of the gap that had been torn in the wall. Peat scrambled up behind her, just in time to see her slip through that opening and tumble onto the stones of the courtyard beyond. Wincing, he tumbled after, landing hard on an irregular chunk and knocking the breath from his lungs.

  Wheezing, he slowly drew a painful breath, forcing himself to hands and knees and, gradually, to his feet. He was moderately surprised to see that his wife, hands on her hips, was still standing nearby, waiting for him.

  Together the two Guilders made their way across the smoking, rubble-strewn courtyard. They heard dwarves shouting in terror and pain, saw soldiers and citizens alike running this way and that, and once Peat even caught a glimpse of a burning shape gliding overhead, like a massive, soaring fireball with flaming wings. His knees turned to jelly and he almost fell, but when Sadie determinedly kept plodding ahead, he put down his head and followed her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked plaintively, catching up to her and trying unsuccessf
ully to reach her hand or to catch the hem of her robe.

  Whether or not she heard his question, Sadie didn’t deign to answer. Instead, she continued to press forward, finally reaching back to grasp his hand when Peat staggered and hesitated at a particularly broken stretch of ground.

  If any palace guards were present, they apparently had more pressing matters to concern them than the escape of two elderly prisoners. In any event, no one even spoke to the pair as they dodged around the larger piles of debris and crawled through the holes and trenches that seemed strategically placed to block their path. The palace wall loomed here and there, but in many places deep notches cut into that barrier, some extending all the way to the ground.

  Soon they were across the courtyard and out of the palace, using one of the gaps in the outer wall to make good their escape. The great square of Norbardin was obscured by smoke, apparently coming from dozens of individual fires, but they knew where they were going.

  Still, they had to skirt many obstacles: a spear-lined battlement stretched across their path, manned by only the dead, but they had to climb over the treacherous debris. Beyond, more debris smoldered as the wreckage from the shattered shops and stalls continued to burn. It took them a half an hour to make their way to First Street. Once they were there, however, they found the path clear of rubble, the few dwarves on the streets all scurrying, like them, away from the plaza. The two Guilders skulked down the road, ducking behind the piles of rubble whenever they came upon a detachment of soldiers. Both the rebel and royal troops had abandoned any pretense of making war and had started simply to loot and plunder.

  They halted for a moment, warily watching Abercrumb’s shop, which was dark with no sign of the occupant. “I’d like to go in there and feed that weasel a few spells!” Sadie muttered.

  “No!” Peat said in panic. “There’s no time! Come on!”