Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

Which way? He almost groaned but then he felt a conviction, a thought insinuating itself into his subconscious: go to the right! He obeyed the instinct and found himself in a small room. Next to one wall was an array of scrolls and books scattered across the floor. It was not there, but he spun around and saw what he sought almost immediately.

The Staff of Reorx leaned against the wall in a niche between two stones. Quickly Brandon grabbed it and raced back outside. Holding the shaft in one hand and his axe in the other, he picked his way carefully back up to the summit. He saw Gretchan watching for him with wide, perfect eyes. She gestured him toward her, and he broke into a run.

Then he heard something soaring through the air, something that was flying but didn’t have any wings.

Gus and his girls mingled as much as possible in the celebration currently sweeping across the great plaza of Norbardin. They couldn’t locate any of their friends in the chaotic, frenzied throng, and naturally the strangers were less than enthusiastic about sharing their food and drink with mere gully dwarves, so in the end, the trio was forced to revert to time-honored Aghar tactics: stealth; theft; and speedy, panic-fueled flight.

Surprisingly, they were able to stick together (loosely speaking) and gather at the appointed meeting place, a niche under the palace wall, with an assortment of bread crusts; cheese rinds; one large, marinated mushroom; and several mugs that still had some tasty ale, not much tainted with backwash, sloshing in the bottom. There, relatively safe from discovery, they settled down to share, with no more than the usual bickering.

“Dwarf folk pretty happy,” Slooshy said.

“Big party!” Berta agreed.

“Thorbardin always happy place,” Gus intoned knowingly. “Lotsa big party here, alla day, every day.”

“Gus bluphsplunging stoopar!” Berta retorted. “Last time come here, alla time killing and fire. Big dragon try to eat Berta!”

“Yeah!” Slooshy remembered. “We runnin’ from big, kill’em dwarf too. Wanna stick Slooshy and Gus with spear! No party, two times! Not dat day!”

In truth, Gus did have a vague memory of the events the two females were recalling. When he stopped to think about it, he also recalled being a prisoner in a cage in the black wizard’s laboratory and running for his life from the Theiwar bounty hunters that stalked around the shore of the Urkhan Sea, looking for gully dwarves so they could kill them and cut off their heads. That was all pretty long past, he thought, scratching himself.

Then he remembered finding the Redstone, almost in that very spot. The fire dragon had tried to kill the old king, who had been holding it. Then he sneaked through the magical blue door in the old magic-users’ shop. Those two Theiwar, Peat and Sadie had been their names, had sure been surprised when three gully dwarves came strolling into the back room of their little store! Gus still remembered his adroit duck and dodge as Sadie had hurled unmentionable things at him while he fled out the door.

“Ah, those was days,” he sighed, leaning back on a jagged pile of bricks and sighing contentedly. Contented to a point, that was, until he remembered they had drained the last of their partial ale mugs.

“Hey,” he said, kicking a bit of cheese out of Berta’s hands. “Girls get Gus more beer. Who gets biggest glass get to rub Gus’s feet!”

Surprisingly, that enticing bit of persuasion didn’t result in any takers. Instead, the girls actually laughed at him and went right back to chewing. Gus sulked for a little while, listening as the celebration in the plaza grew ever more raucous. There were certainly two dwarves, and maybe two more, out there, whooping and singing and cheering the new king. Everyone seemed to want Tarn Bellowgranite to live a long time-at least, they kept yelling that he should do that.

Finally, Gus realized that if he were going to get more beer, he would have to do it himself. He’d had plenty to eat and drink already but wasn’t so bloated that he couldn’t move, so he pushed himself to his feet and climbed up over the lip of the hole where he had been hiding.

The plaza truly was a scene of chaos and delight. Large fires burned here and there, and dwarves were dancing and singing wildly. The Kayolin drummers were moving through the crowd, pounding out different beats, so the whole mingling of sound was a rousing thunder, a steady rumble that seemed to underscore the shared joy of the celebrating, liberated Thorbardin.

“Hey, Gus no sneak off!”

One of the girls-he didn’t even bother to see which one-tugged at his right arm, and the other tugged at his left. He smiled contentedly, realizing that, at last, he had come back to where he belonged.

That thought triggered an even stronger one, a memory of a little house off of a sewer pipe, on the steep cliff face above the Urkhan Sea. He remembered the affectionate wallops his pap used to give him, the way his big brothers would always steal his food and his mam would kick him out of the house to find more. A tear surprised him by welling up in his eye, and he felt a strange urge, something he’d never known before.

“Come this way,” he said, striding across the plaza, toward one of the tunnels leading down to the lake.

Perhaps there was an unusual pleading tone in his voice, for his order was greeted with not bickering and argument, but meek compliance. The two females accompanied him, hurrying along in silence for a full two minutes, until Berta spoke.

“Where Gus goin’? Where we goin’?”

“This way,” he said, pointing a stubby finger. “Gus going home!”

Floating in the air, Willim admired his handiwork: he had taken one of the fire dragon’s teeth and punched it into the solid rock in the vast ceiling of stone spanning the Urkhan Sea. It was almost invisible stuck there, except for the faint glow it emitted, the merest suggestion of the power lurking within that potent artifact.

Satisfied, he flew along under the ceiling, first to Sadie, who had done as he had instructed and sank her tooth into a different part of the ceiling, then to Peat, who had done the same thing. The three fire dragon teeth, each infused with the power stored within the Staff of Reorx-the power that once had been Gorathian-formed a triangle on the top of the cavern with equal sides nearly a quarter mile apart.

“Why are we doing this?” Peat whispered to Sadie, loudly enough for the black wizard to hear. The old female merely shrugged and pointed to her master. Willim had already determined that the two assistants didn’t need to know the purpose of the exercise.

“Come-we fly back to the Isle of the Dead now,” he said.

Their task completed, Willim, Sadie, and Peat glided downward on the wings of the flying spells that had borne them aloft-Willim through his own casting, and the two elderly Theiwar by dint of the potion he had given them to drink. The black wizard was satisfied that, soon enough, he would leave his mark on Thorbardin in a way that history would never forget.

He wondered for a moment where he would choose to go after his task was done. He didn’t have a place in mind, but he knew that his power would carry him anywhere, allow him to become the master of any place he chose to reside. He considered, briefly, visiting the Tower of High Sorcery in Wayreth Forest. Willim the Black, together with Dalamar the Dark and a host of other wizards of all three orders, had been instrumental in reclaiming that enchanted spire from the powers of corruption that had seized it earlier in the Fifth Age.

But there were likely to be other wizards there, strangers, powerful wizards, and Willim was not inclined to share his time with the likes of them.

Perhaps he would go east. He’d heard that many changes were occurring there, including a new wave of minotaur invasion. That would surely result in some nicely chaotic circumstances, just the sort of thing that was appealing to Willim.