Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

The blue circle glowed brightly on the wall, establishing that clear ring of color with the dark hole, snaking away like the mouth of a narrow tunnel, at its center. Almost immediately the two dwarves stepped through the wall. One was an old male; the other, a much younger female, and they both recoiled when Gus bounced to his feet and came striding forward.

“Hi,” he said. “This Pax Tharkas. That Thorbardin, right?” he asked, pointing at the glowing blue door.

“Er, yes,” stammered the male dwarf, ignoring Gus’s outstretched hand. He edged away from the magical aperture.

“Hey, wait for me!” Berta called, bouncing to her feet, stomping after Gus. “You go to Thorbardin? I go too!”

“All right!” beamed the highbulp of Pax Tharkas, once more in command. “Come now!”

The magic opening still shimmered in the wall. Berta drew a deep breath and put her stubby little fingers into Gus’s outstretched hand. Together they stepped into the blue doorway, Berta cringing while Gus blinked slightly, briefly wondering-it was a very deep thought for him-if he was really doing a smart thing.

But then it was too late to change their minds. The blue light grew very bright and warm around them as they seemed to be drawn along and inside and up and whirling through the winding tunnel. Gus took one step, which seemed to travel a very long way. Then, suddenly, they tumbled through another round hole and found themselves in an underground room, some kind of workshop crowded with shelves and benches, with boxes and barrels lining the walls. The blue circle, which they could see lingering on the wall behind them, quickly faded away.

The chests on the floor, many with lids open because they were overflowing with interesting objects, seemed rather promising to Gus-even though nothing exactly looked like food. Still, he was in Thorbardin, and plenty of food was lying around somewhere. Before he could saunter over for a look, however, he heard a strangled, gagging sound.

He turned and looked up to see a pair of elderly Theiwar dwarves, staring at them in horror. The old woman was making the noise, her eyes bulging out and her nearly toothless gums smacking and flexing as she tried to talk. The old male had swooned into a faint, collapsing on the floor. Recovering her wits, the female glowered and pointed a bony finger while she started chanting something that sounded very much like a spell.

Gus knew spells were bad things, to be avoided at all costs. “Come on!” Gus said, tugging on Berta’s hand, sprinting toward the door that led out of the room. A magic missile zinged into the stone floor behind them, sending up a spray of sparks, but by then they were into the next room and moving fast. A few seconds later, Gus had found his way out onto the street and was swaggering along the walkway with Berta beside him, gawking this way and that while the female Theiwar’s shrieks and curses echoed behind him.

“Ah,” Gus sighed, all regrets behind him. It was Thorbardin, all right.

Home sweet home.

Brandon felt a dizzying sensation of weightlessness as he and Gretchan plunged into the Atrium of Garnet Thax. The walls of the massive shaft seemed to fly upward, and his stomach surged with disorienting nausea. He wondered, for the briefest of moments, if the shaft really was bottomless since it seemed the only way they might survive the ultimate plunge would be if they could keep falling and never smash into the ground.

But that was a hopeless notion: the glowing crimson lava down below pretty much guaranteed that they’d burn up even if they somehow managed to survive the long fall. The wind stung his eyes as they dropped and dropped through space. Brandon kicked and thrashed helplessly, barely sensing the levels of the city flying past.

Still, he clung to the two corners of the cloak as the priestess had instructed him. He stared at her, noting that she was holding tightly to the square of fabric. At some point she had thrust her staff through her belt. She wasn’t looking at him, or anything, it seemed, for her eyes were tightly closed. Her lips were moving, however; she was casting a spell. After she quickly chanted a short phrase, Brandon felt a tug from above.

He looked up in surprise to see that the cape had somehow expanded in size so that it was eight or ten times larger than it had been a moment before. Not only that, but the supple fabric had inflated from the pressure of the air they fell through. As he tightened his grip on the corners of the magically enhanced cloak, he could tell that it was dramatically slowing their descent-an impression that was confirmed when he glanced at the nearby wall and saw that, while they were still falling, they were descending slowly enough that he could watch the startled expressions on the faces of the dwarves who happened to be looking into the Atrium from the balconies on the deep-levels as the fugitives floated past.

“Stop them! Arrest them, in the name of Lord Heelspur!” came frantic commands from far above, the Enforcer captain’s squeaky voice echoing through the deep shaft.

Brandon couldn’t see the fellow because the large cloak blocked his upward view, but he wasn’t surprised that none of the Enforcers plunged after the pair, who continued to float down deeper and deeper into the stone-walled chimney. Brandon was surprised at how warm it was getting; the temperature seemed to be climbing rapidly as they descended.

They drifted past a wide gap in the wall, and he saw a number of dwarves shoveling coal from large piles into the metal carts that carried the fuel to the smelters and smithies in the lowest levels of the city. One of the diggers dropped his shovel in startlement as he happened to look out and catch a glimpse of the two dwarves riding their makeshift parachute down the Atrium. By the time he shouted to attract the attention of his coworkers, Brandon and Gretchan had passed from sight, but they heard a clatter and scramble as the entire workforce raced to the edge of the pit to gawk.

He spotted the Deepshelf Inn as it swept up from below; then they passed by it too. He met the eyes of a waitress who was carrying a tray crowded with full mugs; by the time he heard her scream, followed by the loud crash of crockery, they were already gone.

“Um, this was a pretty good idea,” Brandon admitted, relaxing a little and twisting to try to look around. “But that was the last of the deep-levels we just passed. Do you have any idea how to stop us before we get down to the fires of the Abyss?”

“I have a sort of idea, but I’m not sure how it will work. Look, can you swing your legs like this? Let’s try to shift ourselves closer to the wall.”

Following her lead, he kicked his feet at the same time as Gretchan, starting a pendulum motion toward the cliff then back to the middle of the shaft-which was growing steadily narrower as they continued their rapid descent. They swung sideways again, and he felt a sickening dizziness, momentarily wondering if they would tip the cloak so much that they would lose buoyancy and plummet into the fiery depths. Instead, he found that they were indeed edging closer and closer to the rough stone wall.

Here and there the precipice was scarred by cave mouths and broad, shelflike ledges. All of a sudden Brandon realized her plan: if they could swing into one of those openings or land on a ledge, they might have a chance to arrest their fall. He didn’t even begin to think about their prospects of climbing back up to Garnet Thax undetected.

“Look, there’s a spot!” the priestess said, pointing with her toe. Brandon saw it too: a wide cave hole, gaping like a mouth in the cliff wall. A narrow ledge jutted from the floor of the cave out and into the Atrium. “Let’s swing and drop … on ‘three!’ ”