Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

Once again Willim picked up Gretchan’s staff, and when he touched the wooden rod, she felt a stab of pain penetrate right through her chest.

“What are you doing?” she demanded angrily.

He chuckled. “To you, this pathetic stick is a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of your god. But to me, it is much, much more. You see, when you faced Gorathian and used the power of Reorx to defeat it, all of that power, that unspeakable, chaotic, destructive force, was absorbed by your staff, for it had no place else to go. If Reorx hadn’t claimed it, it would have been unleashed in an explosion powerful enough to destroy the whole city. And of course your god-excuse me, our god-would never allow that to happen.” He smirked and lifted the staff as he stepped over to the dragon teeth.

“But now,” he explained. “I give that monstrous power back to its rightful owner-three of its rightful owners, to be more precise.”

With that, he touched the butt of the staff to the tip of one of the teeth. Light flashed briefly, and Gretchan retched loudly, crippled by a sudden wave of nausea.

When Willim moved the staff away, the black tooth looked unchanged except for a faint reflection, like a glow that seemed to lie deep within it. The priestess, blinded by tears, watched him with dread.

Quickly he repeated the process with the other two teeth, each casting compounding Gretchan’s agony by an order of magnitude. Finally, he handed the staff to Sadie. “Go put this away,” he ordered. While she was gone, he removed two small bottles of potion from a pocket in his cloak. The crone returned a minute later, and the black wizard extended one of the bottles to her and handed the other to her husband.

“Now drink those,” Willim ordered.

“What for?” Peat asked suspiciously, studying the murky liquid in the unlabeled bottle.

“Because we have a job to do, and you will have to be able to fly to do it. And if we do it quickly, this potion will even give you enough time to come back down to land safely before the enchantment wears off!”

Not surprisingly, neither of the elder Theiwar seemed inclined to argue with their evil master. Each pulled the stopper from his or her bottle and quickly quaffed the contents.

“Good,” Willim said approvingly. “Now each of you take one of the teeth.”

Again, they obeyed.

“Now we fly!” the black wizard declared. Clutching one of the teeth, he rose from the ground, slowly ascending higher and looking back to make sure his elderly assistants followed his instructions.

And so they did, each of them stooping awkwardly to pick up a tooth then using the magic of flight to rise from the hilltop. In another minute, the three magic-users had disappeared into the dark air, soaring far above the Urkhan Sea, rising quickly toward the ceiling of the large, domed cavern.

Left behind, Gretchen clutched herself, still in pain, and moaned.

Acutely conscious of the need to work silently, Brandon raced as quickly as he could up the irregular surface of the steeply sloping hill. Nevertheless, since the Isle of the Dead was in reality simply a mound of loose rock that had piled up over the years as more and more stone had broken free from the ceiling of the Urkhan Sea’s cavern, it was impossible to avoid sliding on gravel or kicking small boulders with almost every step. It seemed to him he was making a cacophony of sound, that each footstep certainly would attract the attention of the black wizard or one of his minions.

The need for haste overrode caution, however, and as the seconds ticked past, he moved faster and faster until he was sprinting madly upward, holding his axe in his right hand while he used the left to aid his balance. In places where the slope was unusually steep, he needed his free hand just to pull himself along, and he clawed and scrambled for height.

Otaxx Shortbeard climbed with him at first, but the old general lacked Brandon’s speed and strength, and the Kayolin dwarf couldn’t force himself to wait. He sprinted on, knowing that Otaxx would arrive at the summit as quickly as he could. Brandon’s whole focus was on Gretchan, on the powerful, abiding hope that he would find her up above.

Finally he made out the crest, and as he came up to the lip there, he spotted the shape of a cage, silhouetted against the broader darkness beyond. He scrambled up the last distance, a sloping slab of intact rock that carried him right to the top of the hill.

His heart thudded as he spotted a dwarf maid in the cage. She was kneeling, with her back to him, and seemed to be staring upward into the vault of the cavern. There was not a sliver of doubt in Brandon’s mind that the figure was Gretchan, but he was afraid to shout her name or otherwise attract her attention. Perhaps there was someone else, someone unfriendly, around.

Instead, he squatted at the lip of the slab, one hand braced on the top, while he allowed his breathing and heart rate to slow to normal levels. At the same time, he looked around carefully, eyeing the surrounding rocky landscape, looking for some sign of the black wizard.

When he saw nothing of his enemy and he could breathe normally again, he crept over the edge of the rock and moved toward the cage. His foot crunched into a patch of gravel, and the prisoner turned, gasping and pressing a hand to her mouth. The shining reflection of her eyes, full of love and terror, proved she recognized him, and he sprinted the last distance to the cage.

They embraced through the bars, both of them silently cursing the metal barrier that separated them. Brandon pressed his face close, inhaling the scent of her hair and her skin, as his hands clutched at her shoulders, her back, and he felt her own arms reaching as far as they could around him.

“Hurry!” she whispered. “The wizards are gone for now, but I don’t know when they’ll be back.”

Brandon looked at the bars of the cage. They seemed to be made of steel, each as thick as his thumb and spaced only six inches or so apart. “Maybe I can smash them with my axe,” he said hopefully.

She shook her head. “They’re enchanted. And the noise would surely attract Willim’s attention.”

“What can I do, then?” he whispered, hoarse with frustration and despair.

“My staff!” she said. “It’s down below, somewhere. If you can find it and bring it to me, I might be able to use the power of Reorx.”

“Down below where?” he wondered, thinking of the whole massive, irregular surface of the island. There were thousands, probably millions of places where a rod of wood could be concealed.

“I think there’s some kind of space hollowed out on the hilltop, not too far down,” she told him, her voice whispering but urgent. “Like a network of caves or a series of rooms. There are at least two entrances, and I think he would keep it in there.”

Once he was holding her, Brandon wanted nothing to do with leaving Gretchan alone again in her cage, but he could understand the rationale of her plan. “Your father came here with me; he’s still climbing the hill. I’ll have him help me look!”

“Yes, yes-but please, hurry!”

The Kayolin dwarf scuttled back to the edge of the hilltop and slipped off the crest. Otaxx was a dozen feet below, red faced and puffing, but still laboring upward. Quickly, Brandon told him what they were looking for. “You go around that way,” he said. “I’ll take the other direction. If you find an entrance, go inside and start looking.”

The old Daewar nodded and immediately moved off to the left on a lateral search. Brandon went the opposite way, dropping down to peer under an overhanging boulder, scrambling sideways and up to investigate a shadowy niche.

In only a few minutes, miraculously, he found it: a flat, smooth floor beneath a square mantel of doorway. Without hesitation, he plunged into the dark space. His eyes, already attuned to the almost lightless vault of the Urkhan Sea, quickly adjusted, and he saw that there were several arched corridors leading out of the entryway.