Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

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 crevasse 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.

“We need to bring up more oil, General!” protested the crew chief, a soot-stained former miner named Stoker Coalman. “I only have enough fuel for one more shot, and then the tank’ll be drained.”

“Use it up!” snarled Brandon. He spotted movement through the doorway of a nearby building, an inn carved from the bedrock of Norbardin’s main level. Several of Willim’s dwarves had piled benches and chairs in the open doorway. One fired a crossbow, the bolt striking a Kayolin dwarf in the neck. “Fire it right in there!”

The chief obliged, calling out his commands in a loud but surprisingly unemotional voice.

“Pressure up, there, in the boiler! All right, you men, shift us around here, thirty degrees to the right. Hop to it now!”

Six gunners set their shoulders to the handles on the side of the big machine, and the Firespitter slowly rotated in place until the long snout of the barrel was lined up on the door of the target building.

“Up the furnace, now-full draft!” Stoker barked, and another operator pulled open the vents on the firebox. That container was already a dull red from the fire held within it, but the roar of the increased heat was audible and made the crimson glow even brighter.