Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

More flames trailed through the air, sparks falling like rain across the plaza as the dragon flew past again. Gus screamed and ducked, covering his scalp with his arms. He saw Berta crouching nearby and tried to pull her over his head for added protection, but she bopped him on the skull with a fist that was as hard as stone. Feeling miserable, forlorn, and friendless, the Aghar pressed his face downward, burrowing into the pile of rubble that had tumbled from the palace tower. He could still hear the two dwarves who had fallen there, one of them shrieking hysterically, the other trying to calm his frantic companion.

In the darkness of the piled boulders, Gus spotted the gleam of something red on the ground amid all the gray and black stones. It looked vaguely familiar, and when he reached down between two blocks of the fallen wall to pick it up, he recognized it-at least, recognized it as resembling wedges of stone he had seen before.

In that instant the dragon, the wizard, and the chaotic destruction surrounding him were all forgotten.

“Hey!” he cried, sitting back and hoisting the stone, which was smooth and heavy. “This Redstone! Matches Bluestone and Greenstone!”

“So what?” huffed Slooshy, huddled nearby. Still, she looked up, glaring crossly, to study the wedge of rock he held to his chest. “Who care ’bout stupid bluphsplunging rock?”

“My friend do!” Gus retorted. “In Pax Tharkas. Got two stones, blue one and green one. Her want this stone!”

He well remembered Gretchan Pax’s delight when the dwarves had produced the two stones, matching them together to make … well, something interesting, anyway. He remembered that it was, or at least had seemed to be, very important. He also recalled them talking about another stone that was also important, and he guessed-with some uncharacteristically shrewd intuition-that he had just discovered that other stone.

And in that flash of insight, he got another idea.

Peat and Sadie, still bound and gagged, had been dumped unceremoniously into a tiny, windowless room. The door slammed behind them, a sturdy lock clicked, and they were stuck in the darkness. Through the uncounted hours since then, Peat had finally managed to work his gag free and began to work on his wife’s. After great effort, he had just bitten through the last of the strings tying Sadie’s cloth tightly against her mouth.

And he was already regretting the accomplishment.

“Why did you have to be so damned greedy?” she hissed at him quietly, apparently still concerned about not attracting the attention of the guards they could hear pacing back and forth in the outer hall.

“Me?” he whispered back indignantly. “I wanted to get out of Thorbardin a week ago!”

“Don’t lie to me!” she spat, her voice cracking as it grew louder in spite of herself. “Why, if I could only-”

The rest of her threat was drowned in a chaotic explosion of sound coming from beyond their cell. They heard stones crashing to the ground and felt the vibrations of massive destruction. An eerie red glow flared in the corridor beyond the dungeon door, and they heard guards screaming in terror. The voice of one quickly faded into the distance as he fled, while the other’s cries, right outside the door, grew weaker and weaker.

Another violent convulsion shook the palace, knocking stones loose from the ceiling. A large beam snapped, swinging perilously close to Peat’s head and smashing into the side of the cell near the door. Peat cursed as a rock struck a glancing blow against his shoulder. He tried to roll away, to shelter under the narrow bunk along the wall, but there was too much rubble for him to move. They were surrounded by heat, a radiance so intense that Peat could only imagine they had been tossed into some kind of oven.

He was surprised to see that Sadie was sitting up. Somehow she had wriggled her hands free of the bonds, and was using them to pull the coils of rope off of her arms. Once she was done, she knelt beside her husband and worked on his ropes with her stiff, arthritic fingers. After a second she gave up, pointed one of those fingers, and snapped out a word of magic.

Peat yelped as the magic missile shot past his skin, ricocheting from the floor into the wall, trailing sparks. He was about to shout his objections when he noticed that the spell, in addition to burning him, had ripped through the ropes that had been binding his hands together.

“Um, thanks,” he said, blinking in astonishment before looking blurrily around.

He noticed the red glow still brightening the corridor behind the dungeon, but only when Sadie started toward that firelight did he realize he was seeing a lot more illumination than he should have been able to observe through the narrow dungeon window.

“The door’s gone!” he exclaimed.

Sadie shot him an exasperated look as she passed through that empty doorway with Peat hastening after her. They saw one of the guards, a stout Hylar warrior, gesturing weakly to them from the floor. He was pinned under a large flat rock; the weight of that stone was obviously crushing the life from him.

The two Theiwar wasted no time on mercy, however, instead hobbling away from the dungeon cell as fast as their bony legs could carry them. The room beyond was full of smoke, the floor coated with rubble. It had been staffed by a dozen guards when they had been brought to their cell; it was empty when they entered again. They started up the stairs toward the palace’s main floor, pushing small stones out of the way and scrambling over the rocks that were too large to move.

A minute later they had reached the top of the long stairway and found, once again, that a stout door had been torn from its hinges. And not just the door: when they stepped into the great hall, they saw that half of one wall was simply gone, smashed away by some unspeakable force, leaving an outline of smoking blocks, charred timbers, and dangling arches. There were dwarves in the great hall, covered with soot, all of them looking dazed and shocked. Some helped others who had been buried in the collapse, while many simply fled toward the doorways or leaped out through the hole that had been knocked in the wall. No one seemed to pay any attention to the two elderly Theiwar hobbling up from the dungeons.

“Come on!” Sadie urged, gesturing as her nearsighted husband hesitated. He couldn’t see any place that looked safer than any place else, so he simply followed her, trusting her better eyes-and sharp instincts-to lead him to safety.

The old crone clawed her way up a sloping rock to the edge of the gap that had been torn in the wall. Peat scrambled up behind her, just in time to see her slip through that opening and tumble onto the stones of the courtyard beyond. Wincing, he tumbled after, landing hard on an irregular chunk and knocking the breath from his lungs.

Wheezing, he slowly drew a painful breath, forcing himself to hands and knees and, gradually, to his feet. He was moderately surprised to see that his wife, hands on her hips, was still standing nearby, waiting for him.

Together the two Guilders made their way across the smoking, rubble-strewn courtyard. They heard dwarves shouting in terror and pain, saw soldiers and citizens alike running this way and that, and once Peat even caught a glimpse of a burning shape gliding overhead, like a massive, soaring fireball with flaming wings. His knees turned to jelly and he almost fell, but when Sadie determinedly kept plodding ahead, he put down his head and followed her.

“What’s going on?” he asked plaintively, catching up to her and trying unsuccessfully to reach her hand or to catch the hem of her robe.

Whether or not she heard his question, Sadie didn’t deign to answer. Instead, she continued to press forward, finally reaching back to grasp his hand when Peat staggered and hesitated at a particularly broken stretch of ground.