Douglas Niles: Fate of Thorbardin

The oracle laughed, as if the cleric’s pronouncement were utterly predictable. Something was strange about the confrontation and Gretchan struggled to understand what was happening. The old woman wasn’t threatening her, not directly anyway, nor did she seem the least bit concerned about the power wielded by the dwarf priestess. It was as if she were content to talk, to torment and agitate Gretchan, simply holding her attention … to distract her!

The realization came with a sudden burst of insight, but it was almost too late. Gretchan spun around, instinctively crouching, grasping her staff in both hands as the light instantly faded to a pale glow.

At the same time, Kondike uttered a bestial snarl and hurled his big body toward the woods but not at the place where the oracle stood. Instead, the dog charged into the dark place between two trees as Gretchan lifted the staff, casting a beam of light into that area with cold, unerring accuracy.

A beautiful dwarf maid stood there, black-haired and pale-skinned, with full lips outlined in ruby, as shiny as if they were covered in a sheen of fresh blood. She wore a black robe, supple material hanging smoothly over the lush curves of her body. Her finger was extended, pointing directly at Gretchan, and as the spill of light revealed her, she uttered a single, sharp bark of sound.

But Kondike was there first. The dog barreled into the dwarf wizard, knocking her off balance. A burst of magic, like a searing bolt of lightning, erupted from her finger, crackling through the air over the cleric’s head, bursting and burning in the tops of the dried pine trees across the campsite. The dog snapped at the magic-user’s face and she screamed. Gretchan saw a flash of shiny steel in the dwarf’s hand then heard a yelp as Kondike’s skin was pierced. The dog flinched away, still growling, as the female Black Robe climbed to her feet.

Only then did the cleric remember the oracle. She spun back to see that the old woman had produced a slender stick from within her shawl. She held it in one hand, a wand pointed straight at Gretchan as she chanted to words to an unknown but clearly deadly spell.

The priestess whipped her staff over her head, calling out the name of Reorx as magic exploded from the tip of the wand. A bolt of lethal power shot toward Gretchan, but it was deflected by the swirling vortex of the glowing staff. Instead of striking the priestess, the oracle’s spell rebounded, arrowing back against the caster. It struck her in the face and, with a single, splitting scream, the old crone toppled backward and lay still.

Kondike barked furiously, lunging again at the black-robed wizard. Gretchan sprang to help the dog, already glimpsing defeat in that pallid but beautiful face. The female’s porcelain-doll features twisted in rage, but apparently she recognized that the fight had turned against her. She uttered a single, guttural word, and vanished from sight.

Only then did Gretchan notice that the forest was on fire all around her, the tinder-dry pines having been ignited by the magic-user’s misfired lightning bolt. She trotted over to the oracle, determining at once that the old woman was dead. After a shiver of revulsion, Gretchan picked up the wand, prying it from the oracle’s stiff fingers, and stuffed it into her own pack.

Kondike was limping, blood pooling at the base of his foreleg. She knelt, tracing her fingers over the knife wound and murmuring the incantation to a gentle healing spell. At once the dog shook off the injury, staring around with ears upraised and hackles still bristling.

“Yes, I agree. I think we need to get out of here. Let’s go,” Gretchan said, staring as the flames leaped from tree to tree, the forest fire roaring into life on the far side of the camp.

The dog and the dwarf maid jogged away from the blaze that ignited the once-pastoral camp. She didn’t know how the servants of dark magic had found her, though she knew that there was no warning intended: their mission had been to kill her, and they had very nearly succeeded.

Whatever the source of the threat, whatever the means at its disposal, one thing was clear: Gretchan couldn’t get to Pax Tharkas too soon.

The king’s bedroom was cold, far colder than it should be that temperate, late-autumn evening. Tarn Bellowgranite looked out the window, reluctant to draw the shutters even against the chill.

For the icy grip that had settled around his heart was an even more oppressive frost, like a glacier that had settled over his whole spirit, his being.

“Father?”

Tor was there, speaking to the king’s rigid back. Tarn winced, almost as if physically wounded. Then he clenched his jaw and turned to look at the boy.

“Yes, son. What is it?”

As he spoke, he appraised the sturdy, young dwarf, clearly more than a boy, though not yet quite a man. Tor stood nearly as tall as his father, but his long, brown hair had the softness of youth, and his beard was merely a foreshadowing of maturity, tufts of whiskers that dusted the sides of his face, just in front of his ears.

“Mother is down in the dungeon again, isn’t she?” Tor said, his tone halfway between wounded and challenging. “Talking to Garn Bloodfist.”

“I don’t know where she is,” the exiled king retorted, a half truth-though he hadn’t seen her go down the stairs, he knew her habits and knew that his son was right.

“Why does she do that?” Tor said. “He’s the one who wanted to kill all the hill dwarves! And now she’s the only one who visits him in his cell! Has she forgotten that she’s a Neidar herself?”

Tarn shook his head ruefully, turning back to look out the window at the darkness gathering through the foothills and the deep mountain valley. “Your mother will never forget that she’s a hill dwarf!” he snapped, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“Then why? Why even listen to Garn Bloodfist, give him the comfort of her presence?”

“Your mother is a very sympathetic person,” Tarn replied evenly. “She remembers Garn as a loyal lieutenant to me-wild and unpredictable as any Klar, but a fierce warrior and a good guardian of Pax Tharkas when we needed that protection.”

“But you’re the one who threw Garn in prison!” their son said, confused.

“Because he disobeyed my direct order!” the former monarch declared hotly. “If he’d succeeded, Pax Tharkas would be a tomb, and neither side would have emerged from the war with anything other than deep, incurable wounds.”

“Do you think she’s helping Garn to see that?” pressed Tor, rather insolently in his father’s mind.

“We’ll have to talk about that, your mother and I,” Tarn replied.

Even as he replied in vague terms, his mind, his heart, focused on the real reason Crystal went down there, the reason she spent as much time away from him as she could within the constricting environment of the fortress. She was trying to forget about Tara, and Tarn and Tor were constant reminders of her loss.

Of their loss, damn it! Did she think that he hadn’t lost a daughter as well? Tarn and Crystal both had watched their child, their beloved and beautiful girl, get taken by the fever last winter, the disease so cruel that it seemed to eat her away from the inside out.

Why, Reorx? Why did you take her?

For the thousandth time, Tarn voiced the question to the unanswering sky. The bitterness rose within him, the anger and bile that it seemed he would never escape. She had been too young, younger even than Tor. And she had been innocent of everything! Yet the illness had claimed her and not him, not Crystal, not even a deserving soul such as Garn Bloodfist, trapped in the moldering dankness of the dungeon so far below!