R. Salvatore: The Bear

Yeslnik cleared his throat and forced himself to stand tall. "Yes, well, the more of the dwarves he kills, the better it is for us all," he said.

Grand Dame Olym slid into her berth a short while later, the crack crew working fast to tie her off. Captain Juront led the procession from the ship, the royal guard spreading out quick marching to the docks to prepare the way for the king and queen. One of the staked powries hung just to the side of the gangplank. Yeslnik and Olym moved past and could hear the wretch groan and wheeze. A drop of blood splattered on the planks beside Queen Olym. The woman gasped, and King Yeslnik pulled her a bit to the side.

She wasn't horrified, however, as she revealed when she whispered into her husband's ear, "You must erect bigger stakes!"

A not-so-subtle growl, a promise of passion to come, reverberated behind those words. Yeslnik got her message and privately resolved to fell a forest of Honce's tallest trees. Hold quiet," Shiknickel implored his barrelboat crew. The small powrie boat bobbed on the waves of many crossing wakes, for they dared not put their strong legs to the pedals and drive the craft along. A fleet of tall-masted Delaval warships sliced through the water all about them, churning the river with the power of their passing.

Bloody-cap powries rarely ran from a fight, any fight. But if they revealed themselves in the midst of this fleet, Shiknickel and all the others knew, it wouldn't really be much of a fight. They might use their submerged battering ram to punch a hole in one ship, of course, but to what end? Typically, the ferocious dwarves would scramble to the deck as the ship listed and toppled, so that they could pull the sailors from the waters and cut them open to redden the powries' magical berets with more human blood. But even if they hit a ship now and tried to crawl out onto the deck, the archers from several other warships would cut them down in short order.

So they sat quiet, hoping their low profile-for the bulk of a barrelboat lay below the water-would allow them to remain unnoticed as the Delaval warships sailed past.

At the front of the seated crew, Mcwigik and Bikelbrin exchanged looks, at once wistful, resigned, concerned, and excited. They had spent one hundred years with a small group of powries trapped on the islands of a steamy northern lake, fed by hot springs, a place of teeming life amidst the harsh Alpinadoran tundra. Circumstance, unexpected friendships, and unusual happenstance had freed this pair and subsequently their kin from that soft prison only recently. Now fate had put them in this predicament on a river far to the west of the open sea that would take them to the Weathered Isles and their old homes, surrounded by enemies, surrounded by victims.

This, on the edge of disaster, was the rightful life of a powrie, the pair agreed with shared grins and nods, eagerness for battle overcoming any nostalgia for the safety of the island life.

"They're gone, one and all," Shiknickel announced to the crew.

"Fast for Palmaristown," one of the crew replied. He chuckled. "What's left o' Palmaristown!"

That brought a cheer across the ranks, for this group had been among the six crews who had quietly landed on the riverbank near the great human city and had gone in to lay waste, to let blood, and to stoke fires. Three of the six boats had gone back in for a second strike, unable to resist the seemingly endless supply of easy victims. Shiknickel, more comfortable on the water than on land and more conservative in his risk taking, had decided against that course.

"We really stung 'em good," Mcwigik remarked. "They're callin' to all the land for help, and all their misery's from just six crews."

His words brought more cheering.

"Aye, and if we can muster ten more crews we could take over the whole o' the place called Honce, I'm thinking!" another dwarf in the back blustered.

"Me cap'd get so thick and fat with blood it'd buckle me knees!" said another.

The backslapping and self-congratulating went on for a long, long while, each of the crew snickering and telling of his own mighty adventures in the night of carnage he had inflicted upon the unsuspecting folk of Palmaristown. Of course, since these were powries, each retelling spoke of grander battles, of more desperate struggles against legions of organized enemies, and of far greater kill counts.

It got so exaggerated that at one point, Mcwigik chimed in above the din with, "Bah, but if ye killed to death as many as ye say ye killed to death, and he killed half what he's saying, and him just half o' his, then I'm knowing them boats that just floated past us to be ghost ships or floatin' strays, because sure that there aren't any left alive in the whole damned place o' Honce!"

That pronouncement brought the greatest laughter and cheers of all, but it didn't slow the stories, which grew more outrageous as the barrelboat moved steadily northward, now far behind the north-sailing Delaval fleet, toward the mouth of the Masur Delaval and the open waters of the Gulf of Corona.

"Practice yer tales well, boys," Shiknickel said to them. "For ye'll be tellin' them to our mates on the Weathered Isles in just two weeks' time."

Yet another rousing cheer ensued, as loud as the dwarves dared with so many hostile warships not so far ahead of them in the river, followed by an old song of the rocky shores of the Weathered Isles.

Captain Shiknickel, however, did not join in. He looked back out the low conning tower of the barrelboat, then almost immediately turned to the crew, his shocked expression speaking volumes.

"What d'ye know?" Mcwigik asked and came out of his seat.

Shiknickel slammed his fist against the hard wall of the boat, shifting aside to give Mcwigik access.

"By a dead fish's stink!" Mcwigik yelled a moment later, and all remaining traces of the song died away, and more than half the dwarves jumped up from their seats.

"Staked them," Shiknickel explained.

"Aye, and at least the two nearest us're still alive," Mcwigik called. He spat on the floor and moved out of the way, allowing Bikelbrin to lead a procession of dwarves to view the gruesome sight of Palmaristown's dock, where a line of staked powries hung on tall poles. Every crew member spat after the viewing and grumbled all the way back to his seat, with most echoing the sentiment, "We got to go get 'em down and take their hearts for burying."

"Got friends there," one grumbled. "And I'll be seeing their kids born o' their hearts, don't ye doubt!"

Similar sentiments echoed up and down the line until Shiknickel finally hushed them with a reminder that they were very near to their enemies now and by pointing out that the humans likely had more stakes.

"Bah, but I ain't running!" one of the crew growled. "Not now."

"So that's how they're wanting to play it, are they?" Mcwigik said.

"I'm bettin' we can make a human scream louder than any of them boys up there when they got the stake," Bikelbrin added.

"And what are ye thinking?" Mcwigik demanded of the captain.

"I'm thinking that we're not to be seeing our home anytime soon," Shiknickel shot back. "Not now," he added, looking to the crewman who had earlier proclaimed the same.

"And not anytime soon," Mcwigik growled back at him.

"Aye, and we'll put word to them that's ahead of us, a line o' messages all the way to the Weathered Isles, and we'll put every boat we got into the water," Shiknickel proclaimed. "We'll take the gulf, we'll take the coast, and we're going ashore every time we see the chance to make the dogs pay."

"I'm thinking we're going back into Palmaristown in short order to take our boys down," said Mcwigik. Shiknickel nodded determinedly. "Get yer blood up, boys, and think o' ways we can make them hurt."

"I'm thinking that more than a few stakes'll be empty and waiting for us to put 'em to new use," said Bikelbrin.