The Fate of Thorbardin

by Douglas Niles

  Willing to enjoy one of the perquisites of command, Brandon invited General Watchler and Captains Hacksaw and Morewood to join him for a council—and first crack at the choicest rib steaks being grilled to rare perfection by the army’s most senior cook, Cruster Flatiron. Flatiron was an innkeeper in private life back in Kayolin and presided over an establishment that was prized throughout the dwarf nation for its succulent beef dishes. When the call to arms had been passed around Garnet Thax, Cruster had signed up immediately, and Brandon had, just as quickly, placed him in charge of the army’s brigade of cooks. Not unimportantly, he would supervise the staff that would cook for the general and his officers for the duration of the campaign.

  The rotund Flatiron, his face beaming with pride, personally brought over the evening meal for the quartet of commanders. Each of the dwarves was presented with a slab of meat served on a metal plate, red juice still trickling from the steaks as the aroma of wood-fired meat tickled their nostrils.

  “Ah, beautiful, Cruster,” Brandon declared sincerely, taking his plate and inhaling deeply the pleasurable aroma of the perfectly cooked steak. The others mirrored his satisfaction as each, in turn, was presented with a splendid piece of meat.

  Understandably, there was little talking for the next few minutes as each of the four carved off and gobbled a series of generous morsels.

  Brandon had intended to discuss specific procedures for embarking the army when they arrived at Caergoth, but he and the others were distracted by a raucous squalling and squealing coming from the nearby kitchen tent. He leaped to his feet in alarm and, still holding his beef-blooded knife, raced toward the tent with his co-commanders and a number of soldiers who were similarly drawn by the commotion.

  Only as he drew closer to the tent did he slow down and utter a short, surprised yelp of laughter. His reaction caused the other dwarves to stop and regard him with expressions ranging from mingled suspicion to surprise.

  “Listen!” Brandon said, holding up his hands.

  A shrill voice penetrated the smoke-filled air of the camp. “Put me down, bluphsplunging bully! Who you think are? Me fight two times, tell you dat! You put down me! Hey, that my meat!”

  “You rotten, thieving little Aghar!” roared a much deeper voice, one that they recognized as belonging to Cruster Flatiron. “I oughta stick you on a spit and roast you till dawn!”

  “You let him go, big doofar cooker dwarf!” squeaked a new combatant, clearly an agitated female. “You gots plenty meats! Share some with hungry army!”

  “You’re not in this army, damn your grubby fingers!” the cook retorted. Brandon heard multiple screams and hastily pushed his way into the tent, determined to avoid bloodshed—no matter how richly deserved such bloodshed might be.

  He was just in time. Cruster held a little gully dwarf up off the ground, the burly chef’s hand clasped firmly around the fellow’s neck. In his other hand, Flatiron held a large butcher knife, poised as if ready to clean and gut the Aghar in preparation for running him through with the threatened spit. Two other gully dwarves, both female, screamed and pummeled the cook around his waist, but he was, for the moment at least, ignoring them.

  “General!” the cook said, looking up to see Brandon entering. “I just caught this little wretch up to his elbows in my prime rib!”

  Proof of the crime was visible in the red juices streaking the gully dwarf’s arms and running down his jowls and chin. The culprit was staring at the butcher knife, his eyes wide, while his jaw flapped soundlessly.

  “Gus!” Brandon snapped, holding up his hand in wordless command to Cruster. Scowling, the cook held back on the lethal blow, though if his eyes had been daggers, the gully dwarf’s blood would already have been gushing onto the ground.

  “What in the name of Reorx are you doing here?” the general finished.

  When the gully dwarf’s jaw flapped some more, Brandon gestured again, and Cruster, very reluctantly, released his grip around the thief’s neck, dropping him unceremoniously onto the ground. “Tell me!”

  Gus Fishbiter was well known to Brandon, and in fact, the Kayolin general owed more than a small debt of gratitude for accomplishments that the little Aghar, however unwittingly, had made to his and Gretchan’s list of heroic deeds. Still, he was surprised and dismayed to see him.

  With a typically stubborn and petulant look, Gus crossed his arms over his skinny chest and glared right back at Brandon. “What you do here?” he demanded.

  “Why, you impudent little wretch! I’ll beat some manners into ya—” Tankard Hacksaw stepped forward, his fist raised for a punch.

  “Hold on there, Tank,” Brandon said, laying a hand on his captain’s shoulder. “Let’s talk about this. Now, Gus, you need to answer my question first.”

  “Me here for same reason you here!”

  “I’m here because I’m leading this army south,” Brandon said impatiently. “I don’t see how that—”

  “You here cuz for go see Gretchan!” Gus challenged, pointing a stubby and accusing finger until he noticed the shreds of meat caught under his fingernail and popped the digit into his mouth, noisily sucking off the residue of his raid.

  Brandon blinked. “Well, that’s just a part—that’s not really—”

  He was spared the burden of further explanation as the two female Aghar, who had been watching the exchange warily, suddenly rounded on Gus, meting out a barrage of punches and kicks.

  “You big doofus liar!” one screamed, delivering a sharp kick to Gus’s knee.

  “Two times big booger liar!” shouted the other, landing a punch in the hapless Aghar’s eye. “No say ‘Gretchan’! Say ‘Go Patharkas’! Highbulp go home!”

  By that time several guards had arrived, and they, with expressions ranging from distaste to revulsion, separated the three gully dwarves, each sentry holding one of the outraged, filthy little figures.

  “Should we turn ’em out into the night, General?” one asked. “Or would ye like a more, er, permanent solution?” He concluded the question with a decidedly hopeful expression.

  “No! We go Patharkas!” shouted Gus insistently. “Gretchan my friend too!”

  “Yes, she is,” Brandon admitted. “And I fear she’d never forgive me if I gave you the punishment you deserve. So I take it that you’ve been marching along with us all the way from Kayolin?”

  “Right out big gate!” Gus proclaimed proudly. “But you marches too fast. So we ride on fire wagon.”

  Brandon laughed in spite of himself and shook his head in defeat. “All right. You can come with us to, er, ‘Patharkas.’ And you can have a scrap or two of beef to eat, but stay away from the prime rib, or I’ll order Cruster to put you on the spit he was talking about. Most important, stay out of trouble. Can you promise me that?”

  Gus looked ready to argue, but the ring of looming dwarves, all of them armed and angry, apparently began to sink through even his thick layer of belligerence. “All right. Gus promise. Gus’s girls promise too. Right?”

  He glared at the two females, and each of them reluctantly nodded her head. “Now we eat?” one of them asked plaintively.

  “Give them something tough to chew on,” Brandon told Cruster. Already the other dwarves were dispersing, heading back to their campfires and their evening meals. Brandon thought of his perfectly grilled steak and hoped it hadn’t gotten too cold.

  And he hoped, even more fervently, that he hadn’t just made a very bad decision.

  Pax Tharkas loomed before Gretchan like a mountain, a massif straddling the winding road, barring all passage along the canyonlike gorge, except through the great gate itself. Kondike barked in recognition when the huge edifice gradually came into view of the two weary travelers rounding a bend in the rough, ascending trail. The dog bounded forward along the road, his large tail waving.

  He finally paused, twenty or thirty paces in front of Gretchan, and turned to look back at her expectantly. As usual, she understood the question “What’s taking you so long?
” expressed in the upraised ears, the eager, panting tongue, and the proud flag of the fur-feathered tail.

  “Just hold up for a second,” she called cheerfully. “I keep telling you, you’ve got twice as many legs as I do!”

  Even so, she shared the dog’s enthusiasm and couldn’t help but pick up her pace as she saw her destination so close in front of her. The great wall that was the fortress’s main feature stood as lofty as a cliff, sheer and smooth, broken only by the massive gate in the center of the vast expanse of chiseled stone. To the right and left rose the high West and East Towers, each a bastion in its own right, which anchored the barrier of the fortification to the precipitous canyon walls that channeled all traffic right to the huge gate. When that gate was closed, nothing could pass from north to south, or vice versa, through that part of the mountain range.

  Pax Tharkas had been built in a long-past age of Krynn. Despite its martial bearing and purpose, it had initially been created as a symbol of peace between the dwarves of Thorbardin and the elves of Qualinesti. Yet it was, at heart, an edifice built for war. Pax Tharkas straddled a very strategic pass in the Kharolis Mountains, a pass that provided the only practical land route between a wide array of southern and northern realms.

  Gretchan knew the key to that protection was a great, unique trap concealed within the high walls. Pax Tharkas was built to provide a roadway through the mountains in times of peace, but in times of war, the trap could be released, dropping thousands of tons of rock into the interior of the vast, hollow chamber between the two high walls. That trap had been dropped, many years earlier, to block the advance of the Dark Queen’s army during the War of the Lance.

  In the recent decade, Tarn Bellowgranite had become the new master of the place, and he had made it his exiled subjects’ task to carry that rubble up and out of the hall, reloading the trap for a potential future use, and in the meantime, reopening the pass to ease transit for trade and migration.

  Most recently, Gretchan and Brandon helped fight a battle to hold that pass against an army of hill dwarves. The attackers had spilled through one of the gates that had been intentionally left open and found themselves packed shoulder to shoulder in the great hall. One of Tarn’s captains, a Klar named Garn Bloodfist, had attempted to release the trap, unleashing a crushing onslaught on the attacking Neidar; only good fortune, or as Gretchan preferred to think, the beneficence of Reorx, had prevented that catastrophe. By rallying the mountain dwarves who garrisoned the place, she and Brandon turned aside the onslaught and exposed the enemy captain, Harn Poleaxe, as a tool of unvarnished evil and blatant sorcery. With the obvious and dramatic assistance of her powerful god, Gretchan the priestess had banished Harn’s dark master and, with Brandon’s help, convinced the hill and mountain dwarves to agree to an uneasy truce.

  It seemed that the truce was working. As she approached Pax Tharkas, she saw dwarves working the fields, harvesting the hops, wheat, and barley that ripened early in the high country. One sturdy, white-bearded farmer was hoeing a field near the road, and he gave Gretchan a cheerful wave and a “Howdy, stranger!” welcome. Kondike barked a reply, and a moment later the fellow blinked and let out a whoop of delighted recognition.

  “No stranger at all, are you?” he chortled. “It’s Gretchan Pax, come home to her poppa’s fortress!”

  Gretchan didn’t recognize the farmer, but that was not surprising; as a high priestess of Reorx, she had been something of a celebrity in the small community for the year before her departure. But at the same time, she was warmed by the greeting, for it reminded her of the unexpected treasure she had discovered there upon her first visit. Otaxx Shortbeard, the father she had not known while she grew to adulthood, still served as Tarn’s chief adviser. She had met him after the battle, and when the two of them had realized their connection, they had both been overcome by a powerful sense of love and destiny.

  Invigorated by the memory, she waved cheerfully to the farmer and continued up the steeply climbing road.

  The gates of Pax Tharkas, as always except in times of active warfare, stood open, one to the south and one to the north, allowing travelers on the road to stroll right through the great structure. As Gretchan approached, her view revealed the long, lofty hall of the central chamber in the partial shadows of the vaulted ceiling. Her eyes turned upward to the dwarves on the rampart far above her. Dozens of them waved and shouted greetings, apparently alerted to her approach by some unseen word-of-mouth network that carried the news ahead of her, even though she still moved at a brisk walk.

  Kondike bounded forward into the hall to be greeted by a butcher with a fresh haunch of pork. The dog woofed appreciation and settled down to gnaw on the bloody morsel. Moments later Gretchan entered and was surrounded by well-wishers and cheerful dwarves. They clapped her on the shoulders and shouted their greetings until, like magic, the crowd parted to allow two old and familiar figures to approach.

  “Father!” she cried, welcoming the embrace of Otaxx Shortbeard. He was trembling, she realized, but there was no frailty in his sturdy frame, his muscular arms, his bowed and stocky legs. It was the power of his emotion, she knew, as her own eyes grew moist and she clung to him for an extra few heartbeats, burying her head in the comforting scratchiness of his beard.

  The second gray-bearded dwarf approached and held out his arms. Gretchan hugged him then stepped back and curtsied. “And King Bellowgranite,” she said, smiling broadly. “You’re looking well indeed!”

  “Oh, posh with this ‘king’ business,” Tarn Bellowgranite replied. “That’s too lofty of a title for the leader of this little mountain outpost. But I must say, I’m glad to see you, child!”

  “And I’m glad to be back here, but it’s not just a homecoming. I have wonderful news, so much to tell you all! Can we go somewhere to talk?”

  “Reorx knows we could use some positive news,” Tarn said with a sudden, dour look, prompting a stab of concern from Gretchan. What had gone wrong there in the time since she’d left for Kayolin?

  But the expression vanished from the king’s face as quickly as it had appeared, and just as quickly he threw an avuncular arm around her shoulders. “Surely all the news can wait,” he said. “You must be famished! I’ll have the kitchen get an early start on the evening meal. We can eat and then we can talk.”

  “Really, I’m fine,” Gretchan said. “And just so excited to let you know what’s happening.” At the same time, another burly dwarf, grinning broadly and wearing a metal breastplate, approached. Behind him was a younger fellow, and it took Gretchan a moment to recognize him.

  “Oh, hi, Mason!” she said, greeting the king’s garrison captain. She pecked him on the cheek then smiled broadly at the younger dwarf. “And Tor—you’ve grown a foot in the time since I’ve been gone!”

  “Uh, not really,” Tor said, awkwardly looking away. Gretchan frowned in puzzlement and not a little concern since the youthful Bellowgranite had always been outgoing and friendly during her previous time in Pax Tharkas.

  “Where’s your sister?” the priestess asked cheerfully, and in the sudden silence and with the stricken looks of the gathered dwarves, she understood at least a part of the strange, somber mood.

  “She died last winter,” Otaxx explained gently, his voice gruff with emotion. “The fever came through here and took her and several other youngsters.”

  “I’m so … so sorry,” she said, clasping Tarn’s hand in both of her own, feeling the hollowness of the words.

  He sighed and shook his head sadly. “I guess it’s sunk in now, though we’re still grieving. For a time there, Crystal couldn’t even get out of bed. But Reorx calls only the best to him at an early age.”

  “I know that verse,” she replied, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. She had never believed it, and it angered her to hear others place the blame for random tragedy at the feet of her ever-just god. Yet if Tarn wanted to believe that it was the will of Reorx, she did not have the heart to contradict him.r />
  “Are you sure you don’t want a hearty meal? Our kitchen does very well for us, you know,” Tarn pressed, changing the subject with forced heartiness.

  “Oh, I remember,” she said with a weary smile. Suddenly the import of her great news seemed to have paled. But still, she forced herself to remember that her mission was both important and urgent. “I’ll look forward to joining your meal at the usual time, really I will,” she said. “But I think you should hear my news. All of you—your wife too. Where is Crystal? Is she well?”

  Tarn ignored the question, though that scowl flashed on his face again, fleetingly, before he clapped his hands. “Very well—we’ll hear your news in my council chamber. Otaxx, Mason, come along with us. Tor, you too.”

  “Um, Father … there’s something I have to do. Can you tell me about it later?” said Tor.

  Tarn shrugged as though it were no matter to him. “Very well,” he replied. “Now come this way,” he concluded, taking Gretchan by the arm and leading her toward the official chambers at the base of the West Tower.

  The mad dwarf huddled in his cell, chewing on his lip, which was worn bloody by the relentless assault of his teeth. The salty blood was like nectar to him, and he could feel it sinking into his gullet, restoring his strength, clearing his mind, helping as always to focus his thoughts.

  It had been a long time since the queen had come to speak with him, and Garn Bloodfist’s thoughts had grown darker and more tormented in that interval. He hated so many things that it was getting hard to keep them straight. But he would try.

  He hated the king, his former master, who had ordered him locked away there.

  He hated Mason Axeblade, his former comrade, who had affixed the shackles to his wrists and brought him there.