Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

He was vaguely aware of the two chattering girls coming behind him, but his growling stomach would brook no delay. Instead, he scrambled and crawled and climbed upward to move himself through the water and over the rocks. Finally he saw a glint of light through the woods and knew he had found the source of the blaze!

Leaping out of the stream, he pressed through another bramble on the bank and saw a small clearing where a large fire crackled cheerfully and warmly.

Then he froze, noticing something else. Two big dwarves were in that clearing. One was a male, a Klar to judge from his unkempt hair and wildly staring eyes. The other, a female, was fighting him. She lay on the ground, her face and most of her body concealed by that violent-looking Klar.

Then she screamed, and the urgent fear in her voice set Gus’s heart to pounding. He blinked and rubbed his eyes and saw strands of light-colored hair flying around, illuminated by the fire. His mind focused, and he could think of only one thing.

“Gretchan!” he shouted, charging forward without another thought. The two combatants were so fiercely engaged that neither seemed to notice him at first, but the Aghar advanced resolutely. “Leave Gretchan alone!” he shouted at the Klar.

The only answer was an inarticulate growl as the male reared back and fastened his powerful hands around the female’s throat. Her next scream was choked into a gagging cough by the Klar’s suffocating grip.

“You let go!” Gus cried again. He reached down, picking up a large, jagged-edged rock that was right under his feet. With an impetuous spring, he leaped forward, lifting the rock over his head in both of his hands. With stunningly accurate force, he brought it crashing down on the Klar’s skull.

The attacker groaned and immediately collapsed on the female, who grunted and struggled to push the inert form away.

“Gretchan! Gus save you!” cried the gully dwarf, grabbing the insensate Klar by one hand and pulling him off to the side. The victim, still coughing and choking, pushed herself into a sitting position and struggled to regain her breath.

“Hey! You not Gretchan!” Gus declared indignantly.

“No, I’m not,” she said when she finally found her voice. She wiped a hand across her face and looked at Gus with considerable relief. “But I’m very grateful to you for saving my life.”

“Oh, well, all right,” Gus replied, warmed by the praise-even if the dwarf maid was an impostor.

Abruptly his arms were seized by firm, small hands, one pair pulling to each side of him.

“Hey, you big dwarf sister!” declared Berta in a voice full of menace. “You stay away!”

“Yeah!” added Slooshy, tugging hard at Gus’s other side. “This my guy!”

“Um, don’t worry,” said the dwarf maid whom Gus had mistaken for Gretchan. “I won’t take him away. But thanks for letting him come to my rescue.”

Gus, meanwhile, was thinking about other things while the three females conversed warily. “Hey,” he said after a minute, addressing the dwarf he had rescued. “You got any food?”

The courier found Brandon in the ruined mess hall, sitting with Tankard and Gretchan as the priestess worked her healing magic on the captain’s deep but not lethal wound. He sprinted up and clapped his fist to his chest in salute.

“General Bluestone! Captain Morewood said to tell you that we’ve got the Firespitter up to the gate!”

“Bring it forward at once!” Brandon replied, seizing on the news as if it were a lifeline on a stormy sea.

And indeed, he felt direly in need of a lifeline. He’d heard from the Redshirts that General Watchler’s men had fared no better against the interior hallways than had Hacksaw’s. The toll was more than a hundred dead, and though both forces had tried to use battering rams against the stone doors, the men had not been able to protect themselves from the deadly crossbows long enough to use them.

But perhaps their luck was about to change.

It took another hour for the laboring crews to maneuver the first of the massive devices through the shattered gate and into the Theiwar barracks. Tankard’s men worked to clear the benches and other debris out of the way, while the crewmen used levers and pulleys to winch the giant weapon along the ledge and right into the interior of the bloodstained gatehouse.

In the meantime, several lookouts kept an eye on the corridors down which the attackers would have to advance. The balconies overhead were darkened by shadows, but they knew that Theiwar defenders lurked there and that the deadly crossbows could be brought forward again within mere seconds.

Brandon and his officers anxiously watched the progress of the Firespitter as the crew pushed it into position. The weapon was large and unwieldy but not so big that it couldn’t be maneuvered through the tight spaces of a subterranean battlefield. The spout of the machine was a long nozzle, a tube of steel, that extended more than a dozen feet from the round body. A portable furnace was attached to the bottom of the snout, and it was capped with a door that one of the crew-members could open by pulling on a lever at the rear of the machine. When the furnace door was opened and pressurized oil shot down the spout, the coals incinerated the vaporous oil, and the result was the lethal incendiary attack that had proved so effective against the horax.

The mighty weapon would be turned against dwarves, something they never imagined. Brandon was suddenly acutely aware that much, perhaps too much, depended on the success of the Firespitter.

“Open fire as soon as you’re ready,” he instructed the crew chief. That scowling, short-bearded sergeant looked more like a mechanic than a soldier, which was probably appropriate.

“Aye aye, sir,” the chief replied. “Open up the boiler,” he called to one of his men, who turned a valve on a large secondary tank at the rear of the Firespitter. “Bring up the pressure.”

The hissing of steam was audible in the close space. Two hundred or more Kayolin dwarves watched hopefully as the war machine rumbled and slowly came to life.

“Push ‘er forward a dozen feet, no more,” ordered the chief, and six of his crewmen worked levers and ratchets, clicking each wheel in unison. With each click, the Firespitter advanced another foot until the spout with its dangling furnace jutted into the hallway.

Brandon thought, with sudden regret, of all those slain dwarves in there-his dwarves. Their bodies would be burned beyond recognition, he knew. But it would cost even more lives to send in troops to bring out the dead, and that was not a sacrifice he could afford to make.

“Open the hatch,” ordered the chief, and yet another crewman pulled the lever that would expose the burning coal to the vaporized oil. The sergeant glanced over at Brandon one last time, and the general nodded.

“Let ’er rip!” came the command.

Many things seemed to happen at once. Two dwarves turned valves that allowed the pressurized oil to spew out of the reservoir while another cranked up the steam pressure. The crew chief sat in his seat atop the machine and sighted down the barrel while the hissing of the pressurized steam grew to a shrieking crescendo.

Then the mist of oil shot down the long spout of the nozzle, passed over the glowing coals, and burst into flame. A billowing cloud of liquid fire spewed into the hallway, roaring like a fierce windstorm, while a wave of heat blasted back into the mess hall where the dwarves of the First Legion were gathered.

From within that long corridor, Brandon thought he heard screams of pain and fear, sounds of chaos and destruction. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the noises echoed on and on in his ears, and he knew they would haunt his dreams for a long time. Gretchan, he realized, had disappeared; she had apparently gone back out to the gatehouse to avoid witnessing the carnage.