Dan Parkinson - The Gates of Thorbardin

"Well, don't just hang there gawking! Come up here and help me. You can hand me my tools."

"How do I get up there?" Chess asked.

"Just a minute. When I get my hands free, I'll winch you up. Don't go away."

"I wouldn't dream of it," the kender assured him.

Moments passed, then Chess felt the rope inching upward toward the belly of the gnome's invention. Winchteeth rattled above, and the great, shadowy wings seemed to close down on the kender like storm clouds descending. He rotated slowly as he rose, and suddenly there was a wickerwork surface before him.

"Climb in," Bobbin ordered. "Then hand me that wobble-wrench. I have to readjust the nose attitude."

Chess climbed into the basket, found and handed over a strange-looking tool, then resumed his sightseeing. "Where are we going?"

"I don't know," the gnome snapped. "How should I know? I never know where I'm going from one minute to the next. I spend all my time just trying to get from where I didn't want to go back to where I shouldn't have been in the first place. Hand me the washer-pull."

An hour passed, and then another, while the gnome did things to his controls and the kender passed tools. Rising mountainscapes crept by below, cliffs and crags, moonlit steeps and shadowy canyons. Then high peaks appeared to either side. Finally, another landscape, which fell away toward a distant wide valley where fires burned and smoke clung like fog in the lower reaches, spread below them.

"I'll bet that's where all those goblins are," Chess said.

"I'll bet that's the Vale of Respite."

The gnome paused to look. "Is there danger there?"

"From what I hear, there is."

"Then I'd better tell Wingover about it — ah! There, now. Here, Chess, you hold these two strings. Just hang on to them, and don't let them slip.

I think I can turn around now."

Bobbin drew a pair of strings and let several others slacken. The soarwagon tipped its wings and soared into a wide turn, spanning several miles of valley below in the process.

"Can we go down for a better look?" Chess wondered aloud.

"What do you want to look at?"

"Whatever's down there. Let's go see." In his excitement the kender eased his hold on the two strings, and the soarwagon's nose pitched downward. Abruptly they were in a screaming dive, straight down, with terrain rising to meet them.

"Oh, let me have those!" Bobbin leaned over, took the strings away from the kender, and pulled on them. The dive flattened out, and the flying machine raced over the tops of leafless trees toward a pall of smoke just ahead.

"This is a lot better," Chess observed, leaning far out from the basket for a better view.

The smoke was a thick darkness underlit by the flames of many fires — burning houses, burning sheds, huts ablaze, and haystacks smoldering. An entire village was burning, and in the distance another lay in ash and embers. As the flying machine swept over the fires, Chess saw dozens of goblins below, tending the fires and bringing things to throw upon them. A few slit-mouthed faces turned upward as the soarwagon passed, and gaped at the contrivance sailing through the smokes. Something struck the soarwagon's frame and glanced away. The basket twanged, and Chess glanced around to find a bronze dart protruding through the wicker, inches from his thigh.

"Do you suppose we've seen enough?" he asked Bobbin.

A flaming bolt arced upward ahead of them, and the gnome veered his machine to the right. "If those people set my wings afire — "

"Those aren't people. Those are goblins."

Another bolt whisked by. Without hesitation, Chess unslung his hoopak, dug a pebble from his tunic, and twisted around in the basket to send the stone zinging on its way. Below and behind them, a goblin howled in pain.

Bobbin glanced at the hoopak thoughtfully. "I wish I'd thought to mount something like that on the soarwagon," he said.

The kender shrugged. "It's just a hoopak."

They were past the burning village then, and closing on the second village, which was little more than glowing sparks wafting from piles of ash. Chess pointed ahead. "Aha!" he said. "Ogres."

"Where?" Bobbin leaned to look, and the soarwagon executed a barrel roll at treetop level. The kender clung to the basket as the gnome worked frantically to get the contrivance right side up again. When finally it was flying upright and level, Bobbin said, "Sorry about that."

Chess shook his head. "I have an idea… You tend to the navigation, and I'll do the sightseeing."

"How many ogres did you see?"

"Three, I think. Can you turn around and go over again? I'll count them."

"Never mind," the gnome said. "In certain circumstances an informed estimate is as acceptable as quantitative data. I'm going to try to — "

The soarwagon's nose lofted, and the Vale of Respite fell away behind them as the machine headed for the sky. Bobbin wrestled with his control strings and muttered to himself: "Don't know why it does that… only trying for a reasonable rate of ascent… something about the angle of trim on the horizontal vanes, I suppose."

When he succeeded in leveling the soarwagon out, it was approaching the peaks again, heading more or less west.

"Would you classify what we saw back there as danger?" Bobbin asked.

"It certainly looked dangerous to me," Chess said brightly.

"Then I expect I should tell Wingover about it. I agreed to do that, you know."

"Do you suppose you can drop me off on the way?"

"I'll try." The gnome manipulated strings, and the soarwagon sailed over moonlit ridgetops, then down toward the refugee camps a few miles beyond the slopes. "I think we can — "

A crosswind fluttered the box-kite nose of the contrivance, and it veered aside, then nosed up and headed for the sky again, straight up and gaining speed. "Oh, no. Link failure!" the gnome cursed.

"This is Chane's," Jilian stated, turning the rough hammer over in her hands. "I'm positive it is." It was a crude tool, obviously wrought by someone who had almost nothing to work with. Wingover crouched beside the primitive stone forge and brushed his hand across the cold ashes in its firepit, then turned his attention to a mudstone thing beside it, puzzling over what it might be. A piece of rock — tough, flaky mudstone that had been shaped into a rough oval with a flat top — its sides were bound with sapling withes. Wingover glanced at the firepit forge again, then realized that the mudstone thing, bound as it was atop a fallen log, had served as an anvil. A contrivance beside the forge might have served as a bellows.

Flakes of stone fallen around the makeshift anvil indicated that someone had done something here recently.

"Interesting," the man muttered. "Whoever was here certainly made do with what was at hand. But how can you be sure it was Chane?"

"He made this hammer," Jilian said cheerfully. "See, it has his mark on it. CF. Just like on his nickeliron dagger."

She handed the tool back to Wingover, and he studied it. "I thought it might be a hammer," he said. "So we can suppose that Chane Feldstone did stop here and make himself a hammer. Why would he have gone off and left it?"

"Oh, Chane wouldn't have wanted anything as crude as that," the girl explained, wondering again at the vagaries of the human mind. This human seemed quite intelligent in many ways, but there were some things he just didn't seem to grasp. Things any dwarf would understand immediately.

The man stood and frowned at her. "Well, if he made it and didn't want to keep it, what did he do with it?"

"He used it to make another hammer, of course."

Wingover sighed and shook his head. Jilian was probably right, he decided. It sounded like good dwarven logic.

"The inscription is right there." She pointed. "Right on top. Here…"