Dan Parkinson - The Gates of Thorbardin

"We're going to see if Chane Feldstone is in that valley ahead," Jilian told him, pulling food from the travel pack.

"We are not," Wingover snapped. "We're just going to the rim of it.

That's all."

"He thinks there are cats in there," Jilian explained to the flying gnome. "He worries all the time about cats."

"Do they have wings, like the innkeeper's pigs?" the gnome wondered.

Jilian giggled. "Of course not. They're just cats."

"Very big cats," Wingover added.

"Seems to me you need a scouting service," the gnome said. "After I eat,

I guess I could go fly over the valley and look around for you, if you'll tell me what you're looking for."

"Chane Feldstone," Jilian said. "He's a dwarf, about this tall and very handsome — "

"Cats," Wingover said. "We're on the lookout for cats."

For a moment the gnome didn't answer. An air current had caught his soarwagon, and he was struggling to hold it in place. His controls seemed to consist mostly of strings that ran from the basket to the fabric panels of the thing's boxy nose, strings that controlled the angle and pitch of the panels. The soarwagon rocked, bucked, and settled into position again, twenty feet above them. Bobbin peered down, his gnome-face ridged with irritation.

"I don't mind looking around," he said. "It isn't as though I had anything better to do right now."

"I'll bet you never saw anything like this before," Chestal Thicketsway said happily, turning full circle to scan the breadth of the ice field with its jumbled, vague shapes, frozen in combat. "Just look at this!

Didn't I tell you? Bumps! Ice-bumps, everywhere you look. And inside every bump are frozen dwarves… still fighting, except they don't move any more."

Chane Feldstone didn't answer. With haunted eyes he looked around, needing to see what was here but not wanting to. To one raised in the sheltered delves of Thorbardin, the Dwarfgate Wars were just old legend stories of the defense of Thorbardin's gates in a time of great crisis, tales of heroes who had manned the gates and the pathways beyond, who had fought at King Duncan's order so that Thorbardin could live.

These are some of them, Chane thought, approaching a great, jumbled mound of ice rising from the ice field — a chaotic feature, like a miniature mountain range twice his height and fifty to a hundred feet across in any direction. Within the ice, dark shadows hinted at shapes. He knelt in front of a sheer plane of ice and rubbed at it, smoothing and clearing its face. Polished, the ice was transparent.

The dwarf leaned close, peering within. Just inside, only a few feet away, two dwarves were locked together in combat, hammer against sword, shield to shield, straining each against the other — violence captured just as it had been the instant the ice had covered the combatants. Beyond these two were others, receding into vague translucence. A dwarf on the ground held a shield above him, desperately fending against a slicing blade frozen in descent. Another, arms outspread, flailed motionless for balance, frozen in the act of falling over the body of a dwarf cleft from shoulder to midriff by some lucky blow. Within the ice, the spilled blood remained crimson on the black ash beneath.

These are some of those who went out to defend Thorbardin's gates, the dwarf thought. And these are who they fought. Which are which, though? Did even they know? There might be a hundred or more locked in combat, just within this one mound of ice — dwarves who came out from Thorbardin, and dwarves who fought to go within. All dwarves, and all alike now in frozen silence.

No one ever returned to Thorbardin to tell of this battle, he realized.

No one ever went anywhere from here. They are all still here. Encased in ice, with ashes underfoot.

Three spells did Fistandantilus cast. The words echoed in Chane's mind.

The first was fire, the second ice…

Fire and ice. Chane turned away from the ice window, feeling very cold.

"Isn't this great?" The kender hurried past, chattering his enthusiasm.

"Dwarfcicles! Imagine! There's one over there you should look at. That little tall lump… there are four dwarves really going at it. One of them has an axe and he's fighting the other three. Better hurry… but then again, I suppose he'll last as long as the ice lasts, won't he? Wow, this is like a museum of statues, with frosty windows!"

The dwarf turned to glare at the kender, but Chess was already heading off to look at more lumps.

Chane growled, and the growl became a sigh. I don't want to be here, he told himself. I don't want to look at this. And yet, he went on, from mound to mound in the field of frozen death, peering here, kneeling there for a better view within the ice, searching. And through it all he felt the faint tingling of the little red spot on his forehead — the mark of the red moon — driving him on.

None who were on this field when those spells were cast ever left here,

Chane thought glumly. They're here still. Yet, according to the old stories, Grallen did not die in this place. The son of King Duncan died in this ancient war, but not here. Somewhere else, sometime later. Another battlefield, somewhere. The place where Fistandantilus cast his last and greatest spell, they said. Chane tried to remember all he had heard of the old legends. Where had that final battle been? He wasn't sure… except that it was somewhere other than here. East of here, he seemed to recall.

A place called Skullcap.

Grallen, warrior prince of the Hylar, who had learned a secret in his final hours, had learned of a secret way into Thorbardin, too late to find and defend it.

Had Grallen been here, then?

The red spot on Chane's forehead tingled. Yes, he felt, Grallen had been here… and gone on. But to where?

Again in his mind he saw the image, of a face not unlike his own, the face that the dream — or the red moon had shown him. Grallen, son of

Duncan. Chane's own ancestor. Could that be true?

Everywhere, ice. Ice whose convoluted shapes contained dwarves frozen in combat. In some of them, the frozen shapes struggled amid dark swirls of smoke that were kept as still as they were. What kind of mage had he been, this Fistandantilus? What kind of sorcery had availed him, that he could have done this? Yet, the legends said, what he had done later was far worse.

The kender skipped past again, as happy as a child with a roomful of new toys. "See anybody you know?" he asked Chane. "Wonder what they were fighting about…" He hurried on, toward a new mound that he hadn't yet explored. Then he paused, thoughtfully, and turned back. "Have you thought about taking that hammer and breaking some of them out of the ice? I mean, just to see if they'd go on fighting?"

Chane rounded on him, furious. "I wish you'd just shut up! You might at least show a little respect."

"Then don't break them out." The kender shrugged. "It was just a thought, anyway." He went on his way.

"That kender would rob a graveyard and not think twice about it," the dwarf muttered. Still, the question was intriguing. Were they really dead in there? Or were they only suspended? He thought about it and decided he didn't want to know.

Chane went on, searching this way and that, not sure what he was looking for except that the tingle on his forehead became more pronounced as he worked his way eastward. Something here, it suggested, would tell him where Grallen had gone all those long years ago.

As he knelt beside another clustered mound — inside, dwarves with pikes held their ground against dwarves with swords and axes — the kender appeared again from somewhere and stopped beside him. "Find anything yet?"

Chess asked.

"More of the same. I don't know what I'm supposed to find. I almost wish that wizard had stayed around. Maybe he would have had an idea."