Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

“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.