Dan Parkinson - The Gates of Thorbardin

There was still one other matter to attend to here. The refugees who had crossed the ridge into the next valley to the west were still at large, and she wanted them. Only a small force would be necessary for that.

When the troops were assembled, Kolanda Darkmoor sent a group to find the fugitives from Harvest and Herdlinger, and bring back all those fit to be put to work. The unfit would simply be killed.

"Go south a few miles," she told them, "then cross over into Waykeep and turn northward. Trap them, subdue them, and bring back slaves."

Bobbin was growing more and more irritated as the days passed. He was irritated with himself, irritated with his soarwagon, and irritated with the world in general. And much of his irritation came of being bored.

Except for sightseeing, there was hardly anything to do when one was stuck aloft in a contrivance powered by the very air currents on which it floated. And the soarwagon was far more responsive to the wind's vagaries than to the feeble controls the gnome had managed to build into its structure.

For the past day or so, there hadn't even been anyone to talk to. Since leaving the pass between Waykeep and Respite, Bobbin had tried any number of times to return, but the soarwagon wouldn't go. He kept winding up in other places, or over familiar places but too high in the sky to make contact with anyone. And he was running low on raisins.

In a way, that could be a blessing, he realized, because it was the half-bushel of raisins that had caused his present set of problems. The raisin basket — resting just in front of him in the soarwagon's wicker cab — had shifted and fouled his control lines, and so far he had been unable to correct them. His lateral and pitch pulls were crisscrossed in some fashion, somewhere beyond his reach. The result was that he could gain altitude more or less at will. To descend, however, he had to wait for the air currents to make proper adjustments on the vehicle's forward foils, and hope that the positioning would hold long enough to get near the ground again before it reversed itself and climbed. Worse still, he could not turn left. Only right.

The dilemma was symptomatic of the basic control problem in the soarwagon's design. In building it, Bobbin had underestimated the craft's buoyancy and misjudged the sensitivity of its control surfaces.

The other gnomes were right, he told himself. I am insane. Had this contrivance been built in proper gnomish fashion — designed by a committee, sublet out among several guilds, and then assembled by a task force, it wouldn't have these problems. But then, it wouldn't fly at all.

The problem of the airfoils and their controls wasn't insoluble. Within the first week of his plight, Bobbin had deduced what was wrong and how it could be corrected.

Part of it was the result of something unforeseen, a phenomenon that

Bobbin simply had not known existed. The air near the ground was denser and more turbulent than that higher up, and all drafts within twenty or thirty feet of the ground were updrafts.

Obvious enough, now that he understood it. But he hadn't known about such things when he had designed the soarwagon. His assumption had been that air was air, anywhere.

He had even named the phenomenon of the nearsurface currents. Ground effect, he called it. And he had worked out the control requirements to correct for it. Only one problem remained. The soarwagon couldn't be repaired in flight. He would have to land first. And he couldn't land until it was repaired.

Feeling grumpier by the minute, Bobbin tugged his strings and helped himself to some more raisins. He wished he had some cider to go with them.

Raisins without cider were like a sundial without a pointer. Adequate, but hardly timely.

Through a long morning he had been drifting in wide right-hand circles, while the soarwagon descended from an abrupt, screaming climb to an estimated twenty thousand feet — a maneuver executed entirely without

Bobbin's assistance. Once at that lofty altitude, the device had seemed satisfied to begin a slow, languid descent. Bobbin had set the soarwagon in an easy right-hand pitch and spent the intervening hours dozing, fuming, and eating raisins.

After Bobbin finished his breakfast and washed it down with rainwater collected during the previous night's storm, he looked over the side of his wicker cab to see if he could identify where he was. He frowned and shook his head in disgust. A half-mile below was that same valley he had been trying to leave when his raisins shifted: the long, wooded valley between ridges, the one those people had called Waykeep. The place with the winding black road.

Off to Bobbin's left was the smoke of the refugee camps, the people who had come across from the next valley, fleeing an invasion of goblins.

Ahead, just a few miles, was the textured ice-field where he had first met the kender, Chestal Thicketsway. An old battleground, the creature had said. The lumps of ice on the field contained fighting dwarves, frozen in place. Bobbin saw no reason to doubt it, though why it mattered was beyond him.

There were people out there now, on the ice. People moving around. He squinted. Dwarves… and either humans or elves. From such a distance, it was hard to tell, except that some of them seemed to have beards.

Humans, then, he decided. Elves don't have beards. Other movement caught the gnome's attention then, far off to his right, to the south. He squinted, trying to see details. A large group of… something… crossing a clearing between stands of forest, coming north. Sunlight glinted on metal. Armor?

The soarwagon's lazy circle brought it over the edge of the ice field, and Bobbin leaned out to wave. "Somebody'scomingyourway!" he shouted excitedly, waving his arms and pointing. But he was ton high. The people down there, dwarves and humans, obviously from the refugee camps, were intent on the ice itself, and what was under it. No one looked up, and within moments the soarwagon was past them, continuing its descending spiral.

Long minutes passed, then the other group was in sight again below, now dead ahead. The gnome leaned out to squint at them. He saw them clearly now. Armored goblins, a company of them marching in rough phalanx order, with a slightly larger figure in the lead — a waddling, greenish-colored thing in bright misfitting armor. Bobbin had never seen a hobgoblin before, though he knew what they were. If anything, he decided, hobgoblins were even uglier than ordinary goblins. Without its bright garb, the thing would have resembled a big, misshapen frog.

The soarwagon closed on the marching company below, lower now, only a few hundred yards up. Well, Bobbin told himself, I'll circle over those other people again pretty soon. I can tell them then that there are goblins coming. None of my business, I suppose, but then nobody needs goblins.

As he sailed over the marching goblins, Bobbin heard their shouts and leaned out to look down at them. Crossbows and blades were brandished at him, and guttural taunts drifted upward. On impulse, the gnome looked around for something unpleasant that he could drop on them. The only thing that came to hand was an empty line-spool wedged between the raisin basket and the lateral courses. He gripped it, pulled it loose… then grabbed the rails of his cab and hung on for dear life as the snagged tilt controls of the soarwagon suddenly broke free and the vehicle responded.

The left wing dipped sharply, the nose went up, and Bobbin's contrivance came around in a hard turn, climbing. Righting itself, the soarwagon pointed its nose at the sky and shot straight up, then completed a perfect roll and reversed itself in a blistering dive, directly at the goblins below. They stared, shouted, and began to run in all directions. Bobbin cursed as he fought his lines and eased the dive. But the craft had a mind of its own and responded with a neat half-roll.