The Fate of Thorbardin

by Douglas Niles

  “Well, it looks like you hurt yourself again. Can’t you be a little more careful?” Gretchan chided good-naturedly. “Rest assured that I’ll do what I can for the rest of your men. But you’re a legion commander. We can’t have you losing blood like that. Sets a bad example.” She smiled lightly. “You’ll scare the recruits.”

  “Ah, all right,” Tankard said. His knees nearly buckled as he sank down on the bench, and Brandon saw that he was more seriously injured than he’d been letting on. But the cleric pressed her palm against the bleeding cut and murmured a prayer to Reorx. After several moments she pulled her hand away, and her palm and Tankard’s forehead were both cleansed of blood.

  “That’s a small miracle right there,” admitted the captain, wiping his own hand over his face and looking at it in amazement. “Praise be to Reorx!”

  “And praise be to you too,” Brandon added sincerely. “That was a masterful job of leading your legion through the barracks.”

  “The hardest part was getting over my astonishment, when Bardic Stonehammer broke the mountain open with that three-colored piece of rock! It was the most astounding thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “I’ll grant you that,” the Bluestone dwarf replied. “I couldn’t quite believe it myself.”

  “Now you both need to get some rest,” clucked Gretchan maternally. “The war will still be going strong when you wake up, I’ll warrant.”

  “Only if you agree to get some sleep as well,” Brandon said. His eyes narrowed in concern as he noted the weariness in Gretchan’s face, the glaze of exhaustion that had suddenly seemed to settle over her eyes.

  At first, she looked ready to argue, but apparently she took stock of his words and realized that his advice was sensible. She nodded and leaned on her staff as they looked around for a likely place to stretch out for a few hours.

  For the moment, there were only the three of them on that high balcony, though hundreds of dwarves—all from their own army—were in sight on the streets and plaza below. The barracks hall connecting to the balcony was already home to dozens of sleeping dwarves, weary survivors of the First Legion, but Brandon reasoned that there’d be an office or storeroom nearby where Gretchan, at least, could have some privacy.

  “You’ll be safe here, far behind the battle lines,” Tankard said. “And now that I feel a lot better, I think I’ll go check on my men.”

  “Aye, old friend,” Brandon said, clapping him on the shoulder. “And once again, well done.”

  “You too, General,” Tankard said. Brandon turned to Gretchan as Tank took a step toward the door into the barracks. That was when the captain abruptly halted and cried out in alarm.

  “Look out!”

  The words were barely uttered when Tank flew backward and past Brandon, propelled by some unseen force that blasted him right over the railing and toward the street two dozen feet below.

  Brandon was already reaching for his axe when another blast of force knocked him over, battering him like a falling wall. He heard Gretchan scream, and he struggled to turn around and go to her aid, battling a great weight that seemed to press him to the floor.

  Gretchan cried out again; then he saw her, bound by some kind of web that had simply materialized in the air. But no! There were dwarves there, two of them. They were dressed in black robes. One was a strikingly attractive female, with blood red lips and flowing black hair. The other was a sturdy Theiwar male who had his back to Brandon. The web seemed to be exploding from the Theiwar’s hands, wrapping Gretchan around and around until she might as well have been secured in a cocoon.

  “No!” Brandon cried, pushing himself to his knees.

  The black-robed Theiwar turned, flashing a wicked smile, and Brandon was shocked by his scarred visage, a hideous face with the eye sockets sewn shut. Even so, as he took in that cruel, gloating expression, he knew that the villainous dwarf could see him!

  Then, in a flash of magic, the two black-robed wizards disappeared. With a sickening lurch of fear, Brandon saw that Gretchan had vanished too. They had taken the priestess with them.

  “I don’t have any food to speak of,” the rescued dwarf maid admitted to the trio of rapt gully dwarves who had fixated on the word food. “But I’ll take you to some first thing in the morning. Eggs, bacon, milk, cheese … I’ll treat you to a real feast.”

  “Sound good,” Gus admitted. “All right. We eat morningtime.” Suddenly he had another thought and turned to glare at the female dwarf he had rescued. “Who you, anyway?” he demanded belligerently, planting his hands on his hips. “Where you go?”

  “My name is Crystal Heathstone,” she said. “And I’m going to a town called Hillhome. I was, at least, on my way there, until this Klar attacked me.”

  She nudged the lifeless form of Garn Bloodfist with a toe and shuddered. Gus and his girls had checked out the dwarf, determining that the blow to his head had been hard enough to crush the life out of him. Gus had preened and boasted a bit, while Slooshy and Berta had cooed and awed over his bravery—until he had remembered his hunger.

  “Hillhome, huh?” he said. “We go Thorbardin instead. Make war on bad wizard!”

  “Oh?” Crystal said, frowning. “There was a time when I thought I was going to Thorbardin too. I was going to bring my people there to help wage that war.”

  “Why you not come with, then?” Gus asked. “After we eats, I mean. We go to help Gretchan,” he added.

  “Huh! I know Gretchan very well,” Crystal said. “Now I know who you are! You must be Gus. You’re quite famous, you know. Even Garn Bloodfist”—she gestured to indicate the dead Klar—“knew enough about you to hate you. You’re the gully dwarf who broke the big trap before he could drop it on all the hill dwarves.”

  “Yep. Me do that,” Gus agreed proudly, though even to that day he wasn’t sure exactly what he had done to make everyone so happy with him. But he was pretty famous, that was for sure, and he was content to bask in all the accolades.

  “You go Hillhome?” he said again. “Where hill dwarves be?”

  “Yes,” Crystal agreed with a laugh that reminded Gus of Gretchan. “Lots of hill dwarves be there.”

  “Well,” said Gus, his scrunched-up face indicating that he was doing something rare and perhaps even historic; the little fellow was thinking. “I got idea. Let’s go get and take ’em Thorbardin. We find Gretchan and Brandon and everyone there.”

  “You know,” the dwarf maid said with a pensive expression. “You might just have a notion there. Anyway, I agree. Let’s go to Hillhome, and I’ll tell my friends all about you and maybe they’ll decide to follow you and me and all of us to Thorbardin.”

  “That be fine!” Gus declared expansively. Then he remembered something with a scowl. “But first we eat, right?”

  “Where did she go?” Brandon cried, spinning on his heel, holding the Bluestone Axe in one hand while he reached out to brace himself against a column with the other. He threw back his head and raged. “Where is she, by Reorx?”

  Dwarves of the First Legion raced to the rescue from all directions, some stumbling out of their sleep in the adjacent barracks and strapping on weapons and others, dusty and bloody from the fight, rushing up the steps to the landing. By the time the first of his men arrived on the scene, Brandon had calmed enough to realize that they would find neither Gretchan nor any of her attackers in the immediate area.

  “What is it, General?” gasped one of the first to arrive, a swordsman who rushed up to Brandon and whirled to position himself as a barrier for any fresh attacker.

  “Wizards! Dark magic,” growled Brandon, lowering his weapon only slightly. “They came and took Gretchan Pax away … by sorcery. And,” he added in a choked voice, looking over his shoulder as he suddenly remembered with a stab of guilt, “They might have killed my brave Commander Tankard!”

  Even as more dwarves arrived on the landing, calling out in alarm, demanding information, Brandon was reaching the only logical conclusion. “It was Willim the Black
himself,” he groaned, stunned and near despair. “She could be a thousand miles away by now! We must find her!”

  He had reached the balcony and was looking down into the street below, where several dwarves knelt around the motionless form of Tankard Hacksaw.

  “Does he live?” Brandon asked with a catch in his throat.

  The slumped shoulders and slowly shaking heads of the witnesses confirmed his worst fears. An overwhelming sense of despair suddenly weighed him down. The Bluestone Axe fell from his fingers, clanging unnoticed on the floor at his feet. His hands gripped the stone railing as if they could crush it, and if it had been Willim’s neck, they would have done so.

  But it wasn’t. Angrily he pushed himself away from the brink. He turned to see two score or more dwarves surrounding him, with more arriving every second. Those who had heard Brandon’s news murmured angrily, informing the newcomers. To a man, the soldiers of the First Legion looked murderous, grim, and determined.

  “What are your orders, General?” asked one, a gray-beard who wore the epaulets of sergeant on his shoulder.

  “Resume the attack,” Brandon declared. “We’re going to clean out every corner of this rat-infested den. And when we find the black wizard, I’m going to kill him with my bare hands!”

  The dwarves moved out immediately, rousting their comrades who still slept and gathering up those who had paused to eat or drink. They vowed to follow Brandon’s orders; they would kill and search and sooner or later they would find the wizard’s lair.

  But would Gretchan still be alive by the time they did?

  Gretchan Pax, her face encased in gummy strands of web, could barely breathe. She tried to move her arms, but they were pinned to her sides by the same material. Her staff, too, was imprisoned, pressed tightly against her chest, so she couldn’t even wrap a hand around it. The instinctive scream that tried to explode from her throat was muffled by the all-encasing netting.

  She felt a sickening sensation, as if she were falling; suddenly there was no floor under her feet, and the dizzying sense of motion caused her stomach to lurch. Darkness enveloped her, and her thrashing only seemed to draw the web around her more tightly. An instant later she found herself standing on a stone floor again, but her struggles unbalanced her, and she fell heavily on her side.

  Harsh sounds assailed her ears, and she recognized the sound of a magic spell being cast, spoken in a guttural, male voice. In the next instant, the web was gone, completely evaporated. Her staff clattered to the floor beside her, but before she could grab it, another dwarf, a black-robed female, snatched it away. A hideous-looking Theiwar, eyeless and grotesque and wearing the robes of a black wizard, pointed a finger at her and spit the command to another spell.

  Gretchan opened her mouth to voice a spell of protection, a plea to her god for a shield, but the wizard’s casting was too fast. The priestess found that her throat, her lips, her tongue could form the words normally, but no sounds emerged. She thrashed around wildly and tried to sit up, and that movement, too, was completely soundless.

  Even as she pushed herself up, a loop of rope, mundane and coarse and very strong, dropped around her neck, and she was pulled roughly up but off balance, teetering in every direction. She realized that a third dwarf was behind her, and it was she who had dropped the noose around her neck. With a heaving lunge, her abductors pushed her through the door of an iron-barred cage. The door slammed shut with a metallic clang, and when Gretchan grabbed the bars and shook them, the thing rattled like a drum. But when she again cried out a challenge, a protest, the sound of her voice was swallowed entirely before it could even escape her lips.

  She slumped back, realizing that she had been enchanted by a spell of silence, no doubt in an attempt to make sure that she couldn’t call upon her Reorx-based powers for any help. It was a simple but utterly effective tactic.

  Still, she was not about to give up or plead for mercy. Instead, she let go of the bars and backed warily away, taking stock of her captors. The young, beautiful wizard had picked her staff up from the floor and handed it to the grotesque Theiwar with obvious deference. Her gorge rose as the wizard stroked her cherished staff with obvious sensual pleasure, his cracked lips splitting into a smile, his eyeless face turning upward in apparent bliss.

  Only after he had set the staff aside did he turn to regard her more closely. The smile disappeared then as his face wrinkled into a mask of pure hate. Even the two females, the old hag and the voluptuous maid, stepped away from him with expressions of wariness. But they might have been far away, for all the notice the wizard gave to them.

  Gretchan could feel the full weight of his attention pitilessly focused on her. The wizard might be eyeless, but she felt as though he were stripping her with his gaze. She recoiled in horror, wrapping her arms around her breasts.

  And the wizard opened his mouth and uttered a cackle of pure, vicious glee.

  General Darkstone crawled out from under the slab of stone that had nearly crushed him flat. He stood shakily and looked around, dazed, but not so dazed that he failed to realize that the slab, caught as it was between two boulders, had actually saved his life by acting as shield against the piles of stone and debris that had rained down into the chasm when the mountain had split. Willim’s army commander had fallen into that chasm, but by some miracle, General Darkstone had been spared.

  He saw one of his men nearby and reached down to check on the dwarf, only to recoil when he realized it was only the head and upper torso of the soldier. The rest of his body had been crushed beneath a massive boulder. Looking up, Darkstone spotted the yawning ledges of a deep chasm. Where he had stood upon a solid floor, within a sturdily fortified gatehouse, the rock had split asunder. Some massive force had cleaved right through that immortal barrier, shattering the barrier to Thorbardin’s world.

  Even more shocking was the bright daylight spilling in through the wide gap that had somehow been smashed into the side of the mountain. Beams of sunlight stabbed through the murk overhead, highlighting soot and dust floating in the air. Darkstone could smell the fresh mountain air, a scent he had not known for more than a decade.

  He also smelled a heavy, bitter smoke, like the residue of a dense coal or oil fire.

  “What in the name of Reorx?” he muttered the question aloud as he checked his limbs, somewhat surprised to find he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. His stomach lurched when he tried to stand, but he leaned against a shattered stone wall and drew a few deep breaths until the heaving in his guts subsided. “How did they do such a thing?”

  Groggily, he massaged a lump on his forehead, conscious of a deep, throbbing pain in his skull. He tried to think—what should he be doing? One answer seemed to be that he should be sending a prayer of thanks to Reorx, simply for being alive. He drew a deep breath and swallowed the bile rising in his throat.

  “Move, damn it!” he croaked to himself. “Do something!”

  Only then did he begin to take stock of the situation. He heard shouts, battle cries, and the loud clashing of steel against steel coming from high above him. A dwarf screamed loudly, in a obvious pain. Moments later a body came tumbling down, bouncing from the ledges and outcrops, armor clanging and breaking apart, until the corpse smashed to the stone floor half a dozen paces away from Darkstone. The soft plop of the body itself was accompanied by a clattering rain of debris from the fellow’s broken equipment. The dwarf, his breastplate broken away, was clad in a blue tunic that bore an insignia of a crown on the chest; it was a uniform unknown to the general, who had served in virtually all of the military units within Thorbardin.

  If he’d had any doubts before, that cleared it up: invaders had indeed breached Thorbardin. He could still hear the sounds of battle, though the noises seemed to be receding from the gatehouse above him. But he took heart from the fact that his garrison dwarves were clearly putting up a valiant defense.

  He had to find some way to climb up from that pit and aid his men, but both sides of the creva
sse seemed to form sheer cliffs with ledges and outcroppings few and far between. Rubble was piled irregularly in the bottom, but even when he scrambled up and over some of those loose boulders, he could climb only a dozen feet or so above the floor. The apparent ledge where the gatehouse had been remained more than a hundred feet over his head, well out of reach.

  So instead, he started moving along the narrow floor of the chasm, stepping over slabs of stone and fallen boulders. Everywhere he looked he saw dead dwarves, many twisted and shattered from the terrible force of a long fall. Nearly all of the soldiers wore the black uniforms of his own garrison, and he suspected that most of them had met their deaths before they even knew that an attacker was upon them.

  Darkstone crawled over more rocks, climbing up and over a mound of rubble at least twenty feet high, but when he descended to the lowest level of the chasm, his path was blocked. When he got down on his knees, however, he discerned an opening underneath a large slab of stone, and by crawling on his belly, he was able to push himself along, advancing away from the outer gate, toward the interior of Thorbardin.

  Water flowed over his legs and hands; the surface below him proved to be very slimy. From the unpleasant stench, he judged it was an ancient remnant of an old sewer pipe, smashed open by the same brutal force that had split the mountain.

  But there was no other way to go. Grimacing, forcing himself to breathe only through his mouth, the general squeezed into the old sewer pipe, which was barely large enough to allow him to squirm along. Still, he never considered halting or turning back.

  His men were at war, and it was his duty, his honor, to press onward until he could join them.

  “More fire!” Brandon shouted. “Burn them out!”

  He stood beside the Firespitter and watched a dozen Theiwar, some of Willim’s palace guards, writhe in the throes of death as oily flames crackled in the street, burning away beards and hair, charring the leather boots and heavy gloves of the fighters. The crew chief had just spewed the liquid fire against a makeshift fortification. Even before the flames had died away, vengeful dwarves of the Kayolin First Legion swarmed over the barrier, stabbing and hacking at any defenders who still showed signs of life.