Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

Of course it would!

Straightening her back and setting her shoulders squarely, she strode along the road, projecting an air of self-confidence that she didn’t really feel. She walked ten steps, ten more, and finally felt better and could chide herself on merely a girlish case of nerves.

Then she heard the sharp snap of a breaking stick, like a brittle branch on the ground that had just been broken by a heavy footfall.

“Hello!” she called, brightly she hoped. “Who’s there?”

“Hello, my sweet Crystal.”

The rasping voice emerged from the shadowy foliage, and she felt a sick feeling growing in her gut. Her first impulse was to flee, to run headlong down the road, but she forced that thought away. Better to be brave, confident … wait, the watcher knew her name!

“Who are you?” she demanded, a hint of royal anger creeping into her voice.

“You know me, my queen,” came the answer, and the pine boughs rustled as someone edged forward.

The first thing she saw was a pair of eyes: wide, bloodshot, and staring, with rims of white surrounding dark pupils. The eyes were centered in a bearded face, a dwarf’s, with bristling hair extending down over his forehead. He was filthy and wearing a tattered cloak and boots that were torn and broken, revealing his blistered, swollen toes.

Only when the breeze shifted slightly, bearing a scent of sweat and damp straw reminiscent of the Tharkadan dungeon, did she recognize the dwarf.

“Garn?” she asked as the ball of sickness churned and thickened in her gut. “What are you doing here?”

“Why, coming with you, of course,” the mad Klar said, unsuccessfully trying to stifle a cackle of delight. “That’s why you let me out of my cell, isn’t it? So that I could follow you home?”

“But-I didn’t-it wasn’t me-” She bit back the denial, not certain what approach to take with her husband’s former captain. It was strange enough that some mysterious person had freed him, but to encounter him on the trail! She knew from her conversations with him that Garn was suspicious to the point of paranoia, and Crystal didn’t want to risk antagonizing him to a state of agitation any more intense than his normal existence. “That is, have you been following me all along? Since I left Pax Tharkas?”

“All along!” he crowed with a sense of glee that chilled her even more. “But too high and too rough on the hills. Now I follow you on the road!”

He stepped closer, and it was too late for her to flee. She stared in horror as he reached out with a surprisingly strong hand and seized her wrist. Recoiling, she pulled and twisted.

But she couldn’t break away.

“Which way go army?” Gus asked, standing on the boulder and scratching his head.

“That way!” Slooshy declared confidently, pointing toward a narrow valley that twisted away to the east.

“No, that way!” Berta insisted, pointing at the mouth of a gorge that climbed steeply toward the west.

To the south, a haze of dust lingered in the air, fine particles kicked up by the passing of some five thousand dwarves along a dry dirt road. Only moments before, the tail end of the column had vanished from view around a bend in the valley toward Thorbardin. The signs of that march would linger in the air, slowly settling over the next hour or so.

But observation skills had never been a strong component of the gully dwarf intellect, and so it was that Gus was left to glare and stare and stomp his feet, finally regarding his two girlfriends with a look of unconcealed contempt-beneath which lay genuine concern. Where was Gretchan? Where had she gone? And why had she not taken Gus with her?

Miserably, he slumped down on the rock and took a long moment to pick his nose. The girls were bickering down below, but he didn’t really pay much attention. One called the other a “bluphsplunging doofar” while the second retorted with an even gamier insult. Meanwhile, the army was gone and-it just occurred to Gus-so was their food supply.

Not very hopefully, he looked around again. There wasn’t so much as a fruit tree or berry patch in sight; even the small oak grove along the stream had been picked clean of acorns by the large army camped there. Gus’s stomach growled loudly, and he thought wistfully of the splendid tunnels of Agharhome beneath Pax Tharkas. Those passages were practically teeming with plump rats and offered many deep pools crowded with tender cave-carp. What he wouldn’t give for even the fin of one of those meaty fish.

Fish! He remembered there was a stream nearby, and without another word, he hopped down from his rock and made his way over to the narrow, shallow waterway. But the creek that had been clear and speckled with lively trout the previous night was a muddy mess, ruined by the passage of ten thousand boots through a shallow ford just upstream. All them fish gone, he thought glumly.

He wondered idly where all those dwarves had marched off to. The road to the north, he remembered, led back to Pax Tharkas. But the fortress was many miles away. And he was certain that Gretchan would not have gone that way. He looked toward where the army had disappeared, wondering if the dwarf soldiers were trying some tricky plan, trying to fool him and others from following. Why would they go to Pax Tharkas anyway? So instead he looked toward the two valleys and the gorge.

At that moment, a waft of breeze came down from the west, and it carried on its breath the faint smell of a cookfire. In that instant, Gus made up his mind.

“We go that way,” he declared, pointing firmly toward the source of the smell.

“See. I told you!” Berta said, glaring at Slooshy. “Barflooming little sloot say wrong way! Berta knows.”

“Be quiet! Alla girls be quiet!” Gus demanded, starting to walk and not much caring whether his two consorts chose to accompany him or not.

But of course they did. The three gully dwarves scrambled over some large rocks at the foot of the gorge and pulled themselves up with their stubby, little fingers as they scaled the cliff steps blocking access to the gorge. Soon the floor of the steep-walled draw leveled out into a winding track that the Aghar, at least, could walk along.

For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, Gus and his girls climbed higher and higher into the foothills, leaving the road behind and meandering far from the track that had been taken by the mountain dwarf army. All the while, Gus’s stomach rumbled from emptiness, and his misery wrapped itself around him like a cloud. After the first few hours, Berta and Slooshy had even stopped complaining; indeed they stopped talking altogether.

By the time the long shadows of afternoon stretched around them, they still hadn’t come upon any sign of the missing army. Nor had they discovered anything that even vaguely resembled food (and, being Aghar, their definition of food was a broad one, naturally). When night settled around them, it was too dark to go any farther, and the unhappy trio was forced to huddle together in a makeshift shelter between two rocks. They had no fire, and the night was cold, so they spent most of the night shivering, snuggling close, then elbowing each other in irritation whenever one of them shifted position.

The next morning they continued on their way, and at least they were fortunate enough to come upon a berry bush that still bore a few shriveled fruits. So they feasted enough to keep them going then climbed out of the ridge and into the next. But they saw only many more ridges and no sign of any dwarf army.

Brandon didn’t sleep much, and though he knew dawn was hours away, he finally crawled out of his bedroll, pulled on his boots, and started getting ready for the upcoming battle. His restlessness was widely shared as, all around him, dwarves stirred and grumbled, stomping their feet in the chill and kindling small fires for warmth and to heat water.