Margaret Weis - Dragons of The Dwarven Depths

Remembering that Arman might show up at any moment. Flint took the false hammer from his harness—thinking, as he did so, how cheap and shoddy it looked in comparison to the true. He slid the Hammer of Kharas into the harness on his back, tied the false hammer onto the end of the rope then, pulling back the rope as far as it would go, he let loose of the hammer and set it swinging again.

The false hammer swung back and forth as its momentum carried it. But then, slowly, it came to a stop and hung motionless from the ceiling. Flint experienced a moment of panic. Now that it had quit swinging, the hammer might well be out of reach!

He lay down and extended the hoopak. He couldn’t touch it, and for a moment he despaired. Then he remembered that Arman’s arms were far longer than his, and Flint breathed easier. This was actually good, for it provided him with an excuse for why he’d failed.

Flint walked over to the double doors and opened one and peeped out into the vestibule. No sign of Arman. Just the body of Kharas. The empty eyes seemed to stare at him accusingly. Flint didn’t like that, so he shut the door and went to sit down on the ledge. The Hammer of Kharas pressed against his spine, sending a glow of warmth through his body that eased his aches and pains.

Flint waited.

After Flint had so very rudely banished him from the Ruby Chamber, Tasslehoff wasted several moments trying every trick he knew to open the doors, with no result. He then spent a few moments lamenting the loss of his hoopak, the crankiness of dwarves, and the general unfairness of life. Then, seeing as how the doors were not going to open, Tas decided he’d do as Flint had told him and go off to find Arman.

The kender did not have far to look. He had only to turn around, in fact, and there was Arman emerging from a tower to the kender’s right.

“Arman!” Tas greeted him with joy.

“Kender,” said Arman.

Tas sighed. Liking Arman was hard work.

“Where is Flint?” Arman demanded.

“He’s in there,” said Tas, pointing at the doors. “We’ve made the most wonderful discovery! The Hammer of Kharas is inside.”

“And Flint is in there?” Arman asked, alarmed.

“Yes, but—”

“Get out of my way!” Arman gave the kender a shove that sent him sprawling on the flagstones.

“He must not get the Hammer! It is mine!”

Tas stood up grumpily, rubbing a bruised elbow.

“There’s a body in there, too,” he said. “The body of Kharas !” He laid emphasis on that. “Kharas is dead. Quite dead. Been dead a long time, I should imagine.”

Arman either wasn’t paying attention, or he didn’t catch the connection, or maybe it didn’t bother him that he’d been hobnobbing with a Kharas who was lying in a mummified state in the vestibule. Arman walked up to the double doors and put his hand on the handle.

“They’re locked,” Tas started to tell him.

Arman flung the doors open wide and walked in.

“How do they keep doing that?” Tas demanded, frustrated.

He made a spring at the door, just as Arman Kharas shut it in his face.

Tasslehoff gave a dismal wail and pulled on the handles and pushed on the doors. They wouldn’t budge. He slumped down disconsolately on the door stoop and sulked. Dwarves opening doors left and right, and he, a kender, shut out. Tas vowed from then on that he would carry his lock picks in his smalls if he had to.

After a moment, he realized that even if he couldn’t be present, he could at least see what was happening inside the chamber. He ran over to the roof and pressed his nose against the ruby glass. There was Arman and there was Flint, standing off to one side, and there was the hammer hanging from the rope that wasn’t swinging anymore. Arman had something in his hand.

“My hoopak!” Tas cried indignantly. He beat on the glass. “Hey! You put that down!”

“I don’t think he can hear you,” said Kharas.

Kender are not subject to fear, so it couldn’t have been fear that made Tasslehoff leap several feet into the air. It must have been because he felt like leaping. He gave a few more light-hearted leaps after that, just to prove it.

Tas turned to confront the white-haired, white-bearded, stooped-shouldered dwarf. The kender raised a scolding finger. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings when I say this, but I don’t believe you are Kharas. He’s dead inside that vestibule. I saw his corpse. He was stung to death by a scorpion, and it’s been my experience that a person can’t be alive here and dead there at the same time.”

“Perhaps I’m the ghost of Kharas,” suggested the dwarf.

“I thought you might be, at first,” Tas poked his finger into the dwarf’s arm, “but ghosts are insubstantial, and you’re substantial.”

He was quite proud of those long words. They ranked right up there with Ramification and Speculation.

That gave him an idea. His glasses! The ruby glasses had let him read writing he couldn’t read and see through a wall that wasn’t there. Perhaps they would reveal the truth about this mysterious dwarf.

“Hey! Look behind you! What’s that?” Tas cried, and pointed past the dwarf’s left shoulder. The dwarf turned to look.

Tas whipped out his spectacles and put them on his nose and stared through the ruby glass. He was so amazed by what he saw that he forgot to take them off again. He stood staring, his body going limp, his mind stumbling about in a foggy daze.

“You’re…” he began weakly. “You’re a…” He swallowed hard, and the word came out.

“Dragon.”

The dragon was an enormous dragon, the biggest Tasslehoff had ever seen, bigger even than the horrible red dragon of Pax Tharkas. This dragon was also the most beautiful. His scales glittered gold in the sunlight. He held his head proudly, his body was powerful, yet his movements were made with studied grace. He didn’t appear to be a ferocious dragon, the kind who considered kender a toothsome midday snack. Although Tas had a feeling this dragon could look very fierce when he wanted to. Right now the dragon only looked troubled and disturbed.

“Ah,” said the dragon, his gaze fixed on the ruby spectacles perched on the kender’s nose, “I wondered where I’d put those.”

“I found them,” said Tas immediately. “I think you must have dropped them. Are you going to kill me?”

Tas wasn’t really afraid. He just needed to be informed. While he didn’t want to be killed by a dragon, if he was going to, he didn’t want to miss it.

“I should kill you, you know,” the golden dragon said sternly. “You’ve seen what you’re not meant to see. There’ll be hell to pay over this, I suppose.”

The dragon’s expression hardened. “Still, I don’t much care. Queen Takhisis and her foul minions have returned to the world, haven’t they?”

“Does this mean that you’re not a foul minion?” Tas asked.

“You could say that,” said the dragon, with the hint of smile in his wise, shining eyes.

“Then I will say that.” Tas was relieved. “Yes, the Dark Queen is back, and she’s causing a great deal of trouble. She’s driven the poor elves out of their beautiful homeland and killed a lot of them, and she and her dragons killed Goldmoon’s family and all her people, even the little children. That was really sad.” The kender’s eyes filled with tears. “And there are these creatures called draconians who look like dragons except they don’t, because they walk on two legs like people, but they have wings, tails, and scales like dragons and they’re really nasty. There are red dragons who set people on fire, and black dragons who boil the flesh off your bones, and I don’t know how many other kinds.”