Beyond the stream was rainy darkness.
"I'll go first." Chane took a deep breath, drawing himself up. "I'm the only one who might get a look at the other side before he's spotted."
Without waiting for argument, the dwarf trotted down the streaming bank, waded through knee-deep water to the bridge's ramp, and disappeared in pouring darkness. He was back a short time later, appearing out of the darkness like a black-furred shadow with a glinting hammer in its hand.
"The bridge is sound," he told them. "There have been goblins on the path beyond, but they aren't there now. I took a good look around. Maybe the rain drove them to shelter."
"I've heard that goblins have no love of clean water," Wingover noted.
With Chane leading, pale but clear-eyed, they started across. The bridge shivered with the force of the torrent below it, and creaked and groaned when the horse was led onto it, but it seemed secure. The searchers were halfway across when they noticed that the wind had died and the pouring rain was letting up. The storm was dissolving as quickly as it had begun, and through clouds above, the visible moons could be seen in crescent.
"Our shine is outlasting our shield," Wingover growled, not looking at the wizard. In a way, he felt the blame had to be shared. The mage had at least tried to give them cover.
Jilian stopped and raised a hand, pointing upstream.
"Look," she said.
Far up the stream, a greenness glowed — a widening point of light that sparkled the torrent's surface and glimmered along both banks. Even as they watched, the green glow grew, coming toward them rapidly.
"The kender?" Chane wondered.
"Oh, rust," Jilian said. "I hope it isn't the poor little thing's corpse."
"He's still shining," Wingover reassured her.
As Wingover made that hopeful statement, the approaching green light winked out and there was only darkness on the stream. Jilian gasped. And gasped again as her own rosy glow dimmed and failed.
"We're losing our glow," Jilian said.
Wingover's gold radiance held for a moment more, then blinked off abruptly. Now they were only huddled shadows on a dark bridge, highlighted by a glowing horse and a radiant red wizard. The horse's light dimmed, lingered for a moment, and was gone.
The dark torrent raged beneath the footbridge, and now there were specks of light upstream. A blaze of torches was coming along the bank, on the side they had left. Wingover pointed. "They were following the kender."
"I think it would be a good idea if you doused yourself," Jilian
Firestoke told Glenshadow. Still the wizard shone with a bright ruby glow.
"Come on," Chane urged. "Let's get across. They're coming."
"How about somebody giving me a hand?" The voice that came from below the bridge was highpitched and excited. Chane and Wingover hurried to the edge and peered down into dark, rushing water. They quickly stepped across to the other side. Just below, barely visible, Chestal Thicketsway clung to a hoopak jammed between bridge pilings.
"Give us some light here," Wingover ordered, pulling Glenshadow to the edge of the bridge. Ruby glow lit rushing dark waters and the childlike face, grinning up at them. Chane Feldstone started to crouch above the kender, then winced as his wounded arm took his weight.
"Get back," Wingover snapped, pushing the dwarf aside. "I'll get him."
Kneeling, clinging to a bridge support, the man reached down and lifted the drenched kender, hoopak and all, to set him on his feet on the structure. The others stared at Chess. His hair falling around him, the kender looked like nothing more than a dark mushroom with a forked stick.
He pulled back long, soggy hair, shook it aside, and grinned at them.
"Hello," he said cheerfully, water cascading from him. "Did you know there are just a heck of a lot of goblins out there I I'm glad we stopped shining." He looked at the wizard critically. "If you intend to go on doing that, maybe you should go somewhere else."
After watching the torches come closer for a moment, Chane and his allies could see goblins… and creatures that were taller. Dragging the glowing wizard with them, trying to keep him shielded behind the horse, the searchers scurried for the far end of the bridge and the darkness beyond. When they were clear, Wingover waved the rest ahead, except for
Glenshadow. "Your phosphors gave me an idea," he told the wizard. "I think it's time to try it." Wingover dug into one of his packs and brought out a pair of hand-length cylinders that glowed silvery in the faint, murky moonlight. "Phosphor flares," he explained. "I got them from a Qualinesti traveler, Garon Wendesthalas." He dug deeper into the pack. "I still can't find my oil striker. Can you light these with that phosphor thing?"
"I can try. What do I light?"
"This thing here, on each one. It's a fuse." Wingover hurried to the foot of the bridge and placed a flare on each side, at the main supports.
"Hurry," he said.
The wizard knelt at first one and then the other of the flares, preparing the wicks. His glow was dimming slightly, and he squinted in the gloom.
"Will this help?" It was Chess, coming back to see what they were doing.
The kender held a small metal object, which he manipulated with his thumb.
A merry little fire appeared above his hand. But the wizard set the flares then. Harsh, bright sparks spewed forth, and Wingover said. "All right, get back!"
They retreated a dozen paces, then several more as bronze bolts sang past them from beyond the stream. Suddenly the flares erupted in furious blinding brilliance, beyond which a flood of armed goblins were running up the far ramp, onto the bridge.
Another bronze dart flew past, and Wingover snapped, "Put out that light." Then he turned to the kender as the little flame went out. "Where did you get that?"
Chess shrugged. "I don't know. Found it somewhere. What is it?"
"It's my oil striker!" Wingover growled.
"Is that what it is? Why do I have it, then?"
"I don't know why you have it. Give it back!"
Chess handed the thing over. "You must have dropped it along the way.
Lucky I found it for you. Looks a lot handier than flint and steel."
"It is flint and steel. With a wick. And oil. I — " Wingover stopped and stared. The flares on the bridge had done their job. The bridge blazed merrily now, a wall of fire from edge to edge, barring passage from the other side. A few wooden planks were even falling away to hiss in the dark waters below. But on the other side, a person had pushed through the clamoring crowd of goblins — a taller person, wearing gleaming black, ornamented armor and a horned helmet with a beaten mask. As Wingover, and now the others, stared across the fire, the person removed the mask. The wilderness man caught his breath. For the first time, he saw the face of
Kolanda Darkmoor. The hideous mask across the bridge was lowered, and the woman behind it was — no, might have been — stunningly beautiful. But she was something else instead. Wingover sensed absolute evil there. She only glanced at him, though, for her gaze swiftly locked on Chane Feldstone.
She put her hand to her throat and lifted something from her breastplate.
Chapter 24
"How could you let them get away?" the woman shouted. "I set a net across this valley, and you… you sniveling excuse for a troopleader… you let them slip through!"
Thog,aparticularly ugly hobgoblin, and six goblins cowered before the
Commander, afraid to respond. "Two platoons dead or missing!" The horned helmet turned from one to another of them, its dragon facemask seeming to boom with each syllable. "Did any of you even see them clearly? Do you know how many there were?"
Thog scuffed his toe and raised hiseyes. "Fiveof the lighted ones,
Commander… but one of them was a horse."
Furious eyes blazed at the hobgoblin from behind the mask. "Five, but one was a horse. There were six! Counting the horse. I counted them. Why couldn't you?" When there was no answer, the Commander paused a moment, shaking with fury.
/>
"Double shifts!" she said then. "Double shifts for everyone until further ordered. Now, get out of my sight!" The hobgoblin and the goblins turned and hurried away, almost scrambling in their haste. When they were gone, she muttered, "And you… I found the dwarf for you. All you had to do was destroy him. Why didn't you?"
A dry, twisted voice that seemed to come from within the Commander's armor said, "Ah… she questions me? Does she dare?"
"I dare question you, yes," Kolanda hissed. "Why didn't you strike down that dwarf? Why didn't you strike them all down? I gave you the chance!"
"Magic failed," the voice said. "But there will be another chance.
Glenshadow knows."
"Glenshadow?"
"Glenshadow," the thin voice repeated bitterly. "He knows I will kill him when next we meet." Kolanda Darkmoor walked to a high, clear ridge to oversee the reorganization of her troops. Though it was unthinkable that the dwarf with the knowledge of Thorbardin's secret — and his companions
— had somehow managed to get past all her defenses, she let her fury subside somewhat and resumed her planning. The dwarf had to be stopped.
She turned and looked at the range of mountains to the east.
Goblin trackers had reported at morning's first light.
The group had gone almost straight east across the valley… at least as far as they had been able to track them. Someone with the group, it seemed, was skilled at covering trail. But they had gone east, and due east lay the soaring peak of Sky's End. Kolanda knew from her scouts that there was an old, climbing trail that curved around the mountain's slopes, but it would be a tedious and difficult journey. It would have been far better for them to take the pass road, farther north. It crossed heights more scalable than giant Sky's End, and there was a bridge beyond that crossed the chasm and led toward the Plains of Dergoth. And it was to those plains that the dwarf must be going, because it was there that
Grallen fell.
Kolanda smiled. Several of the captured humans and dwarves had died in the process of their inquisition, but she had a serviceable map and a great deal of information as a result.
The northern pass would place her on Dergoth well ahead of the fleeing group.
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 spi
ral.
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.
The Gates of Thorbardin h2-5 Page 21