Douglas Niles - Goddess Worldweaver

Her first instinct was to thank the goddess for this small bit of good fortune, but when she lowered her head to murmur the small prayer, she found that the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she lifted the heavy satchel, balancing it on her hip as she pushed her arms through the straps.

It felt like the heaviest thing she had ever carried, and once again her despair seemed to double her burden. It would have been easy to simply collapse, to cry to the point of exhaustion, then to lie here until she died. Only the memory of Shandira and the guilty knowledge that it was Miradel who had brought her here forced her to turn her attention upward again.

She looked at the sweeping slope, remembered the pain of her initial ascent, and knew it would be doubled in this next stage of her journey. Her vision extended beyond the walled roadway that had been their goal, all the way to the top of the vast citadel, where the gargoyle was now visible on its lofty perch.

The sight of that beast sent a stab of fear through her, for the stony guardian had changed. It remained in the same place, the same pose as it had been before, but now its eyes were opened, red and glowing like fire, and they seemed to be fixed intently upon the lone druid so far below.

“Wake up!” shrieked Roodcleaver, delivering a sharp kick to Awfulbark’s belly.

“What you want?” growled the king of the forest trolls, instinctively squirming away to put the trunk of the oak tree between himself and his wife’s next attack.

“The world!” she cried, her stark terror penetrating the fog of Awfulbark’s ever-slow awakening.

“What about the world?” he grumbled, covering his own alarm with a veneer of irritation.

“It’s breaking!” Roodcleaver declared. “Breaking right around us! Here, under my feet, under you fat butt and thick head! It’s breaking!”

For the first time, the troll king realized that he was clutching the trunk of the oak tree simply to keep his balance. The ground heaved and pitched underfoot. Trees throughout the grove of oaks, which was just back from the Swansleep River, were whipping back and forth. Several venerable wooden giants cracked apart with lumber-ripping shrieks, massive trunks falling among trolls who were waking up to a world of chaos and panic.

“Go tell Natac!” Awfulbark blurted the first thought that came into his mind. Surely the general would know what to do!

Roodcleaver threw a chunk of wood at him, a near miss that bounced from the trunk a few inches from the king’s eye. “You think he knows, maybe?” she screamed. “Do something! Save trolls! Save me!”

“Okay,” Awfulbark agreed, groping for an idea, a plan. He seized upon the first thing that came to mind. “Everybody run!” he roared. “Get away from here!”

The river, with the numberless horde of the ghost warriors on the far side, formed a barrier in the direction of metal, but every other route seemed better to the terror-stricken trolls than staying where they were. Most of them instinctively started away from the river, from the enemy, from the war. Lurching and stumbling, Awfulbark let go of the tree, took Roodcleaver’s hand, and tugged her along with the fleeing horde of trolls.

A huge tree smashed down nearby, trapping a young troll beneath a splintered limb. The king reached down, pulled the howling victim free, and left him on the ground. With luck, the wretch’s shattered legs would knit before another oak came down on top of him. Awfulbark and his wife held each other up as the jolting ground pushed them this way and that. He was aware of other trolls all around-and in fact they frequently careened into him. But they were all moving in the same direction, and though many fell and others were trampled, the army of the forest trolls inevitably made a stumbling exodus from the position they had held for four days.

Borand came around the base of the hill with Aurand, both dwarves straining and sweating as they carried the large bundles formed by their saddles and gear. The brothers hauled the loads to the lakeshore, where Darann and Konnar had just finished pulling the boat onto a flat section of stony beach.

“What about the ferr’ells?” she asked.

“We turned them loose,” Borand explained. “We’ll whistle for them if we come back here; with any luck, they’ll be within hearing range.”

“Good. But we won’t have room in the boat for the saddles,” the dwarfmaid declared. “Can you find a place to hide them here?”

“Sure, and we probably don’t need all of this food we have left. Dried trail bread and saltshrooms mostly. We can do better than that in the city, I’m thinkin’.”

“Well, let’s take what we can,” Darann said. She looked across the water at the brightly lit sprawl that was Axial. The six great towers, outlined in coolfyre, rose to the very summit of the world, proud symbols of Seer might. One-quarter of the city, low against the water and to the far right from where they stood, was conspicuously dark. That was the goblin ghetto, she knew. “If we have extra food, I know there’s one place in the city where it will be appreciated.”

“Right, of course,” Borand agreed.

She took her place in the stern, while the other three stowed their bundles in the center of the boat. The three males slid the boat into the shallows, hopping in one by one as the hull began to float. They took seats on the low benches. The brothers Houseguard each carried his weapon at the ready, while Konnor faced backward to man the oars. Darann held the tiller and tried to muster some sense of hopefulness.

In fact, she felt much better now that she had trusted companions. She allowed herself one moment of wistfulness-if Karkald was here, she would not have had even an iota of doubt-but then turned to the task before them.

“We can try to enter the city near the low quarter,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Nayfal is having our house watched. He knows I got away and that you will be returning here eventually. And once we get close to shore, we can decide if we want to come ashore in the ghetto or land in the Fishers’ Quarter and come through the gates on foot. Then we have to find Hiyram and hope he can put us in touch with the pailslopper who has the proof about Lord Nayfal.”

“Right. And in the meantime, I think we should not let anyone else know we’re here,” Aurand agreed.

For an hour Konnor rowed them in silence. Darann studied the lights of the city, the coolfyre beacons blazing from the six towers, the ring of watch stations glittering close to the shore around Axial’s periphery. She remembered her first watch station, Karkald’s post of some four centuries earlier. It lay far from the city, so far across the water that Axial had been merely a bright spot on the horizon. The station had been a lonely place but very peaceful as well, though at the time she thought she hated it. Now, she would have given anything to be stranded alone somewhere with Karkald again.

Those outer stations were abandoned now, cold and dark in the distant reaches of the Darksea. The dwarves were looking inward these days, and she grimaced at the awareness of the cowardice that seemed to have taken over her nation, her people. She made a silent vow, in her father’s memory, to try and redeem that failing.

She wondered, then, about how she would find Hiyram. She had never approached the ghetto by water, though it seemed to her that this might be a safer route than trying to pass the guards posted at every gate into the rank goblin quarter. Looking at the beacons of the watchtowers, she saw the cones of white light play across the water, trying to pick a route that would take her up to the ghetto wharf without being detected.