Dragons of the Dwarven Depths

by Margaret Weis

  Sturm gave a stiff nod. Raistlin smiled to himself from within the darkness of his cowl. He had won a victory over the virtuous knight, knocking him off his lofty pedestal. In the future, whenever Sturm’s lectures on morality grew too tedious, all Raistlin would have to do would be to murmur, “The Hammer of Kharas.”

  “I will draw Tanis aside. You talk to Flint.”

  Tanis had recovered Flint’s whittling knife and sent Tasslehoff off to investigate a strange sound he claimed to have heard in the back of the building. He and Flint were discussing the journey; that is, Tanis was discussing it, and Flint wasn’t saying a word, when Raistlin asked Tanis if he could speak to him.

  “I am concerned about Caramon’s health,” Raistlin said gravely. “He is not well this morning.”

  “He just drank too much, that’s all,” said Tanis. “He has a hang-over. This isn’t the first time. I should think you’d be used to it, by now.”

  “I think it is more serious than that,” Raistlin persisted. “Some sickness. Please come look at him.”

  “You know more about illness than I do, Raistlin—”

  “I would like your opinion, Half-Elven,” Raistlin said. “You know how much I respect you.”

  Tanis didn’t, not really, but on the off-chance that Caramon had truly fallen ill, Tanis accompanied Raistlin over to the bed where Caramon lay with a cold rag over his eyes.

  Raistlin hovered solicitously near his brother as Tanis looked Caramon over. Raistlin’s gaze focused on Sturm and Flint. Raistlin could not hear their conversation, but he did not need to. He knew exactly when Sturm told the dwarf about switching the hammers, for Flint’s jaw dropped. He stared at Sturm in astonishment, then, frowning, he gave a violent shake of his head.

  Sturm continued to talk, pressing harder. The knight was earnest, serious. He was talking about the innocents. Flint shook his head again, but less forcefully. Sturm kept talking, and now Flint was starting to listen. He was thinking it over. Flint glanced at Arman, then glanced at the false hammer. His brow furrowed. He looked at Raistlin, who regarded him with an unblinking, unwavering stare. Flint averted his gaze. He said something to Sturm, who turned away and walked in studied nonchalance back to Raistlin.

  “How is poor Caramon?” Sturm asked in the somber tones of one keeping watch at a deathbed.

  Raistlin shook his head and sighed.

  “He drank too much, that’s all,” said Tanis, exasperated.

  “Perhaps it was the worm meat,” Raistlin suggested.

  “Oh, gods!” Caramon groaned. Clutching his gut, he rolled out of bed, dashed over to the corner, and threw up in the slop bucket.

  “You see, Tanis,” said Raistlin reproachfully. “My brother is gravely ill! I leave him in your care. I must have a word with Flint before he departs.”

  “And I would like a word with you, Raistlin,” said Sturm. “If you could spare me a moment.”

  The two walked off, leaving Tanis staring after them in wonder, scratching his beard. “What are those two up to? Ganging up on Flint, I suppose. Well, good luck to them.”

  He went over to assure Caramon that he had not been fed worms.

  “Flint has promised to at least consider it,” said Sturm.

  “He must consider quickly, then,” Raistlin said. “I need time to cast the spell, and our young friend grows impatient to be gone.”

  Arman stood in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. Every so often he would frown deeply, heave a loud sigh, and tap the toe of his boot on the floor. “Once we send it, we are to take the Hammer to the Temple of the Stars,” Arman declared. “I told my father we would be there by sunset, if not before.”

  Flint stared at him. “What do you think? That we’re going to just stroll into the tomb, pick up the Hammer, and stroll back out?”

  “I do not know,” Arman replied coldly. “You are the one who knows how to find it.”

  Flint grunted and shook his head. He closed his pack, lifted it off the floor, and slung it over his shoulder. His eyes met Raistlin’s. Flint gave a very slight nod.

  “He’ll do it!” Raistlin said exultantly to Sturm. “There is one problem. The spell I am going to cast is a transmutation spell. It is designed to shrink an object.”

  “Shrink?” Sturm repeated, aghast. “We don’t want to shrink the hammer!”

  “I am aware of that,” Raistlin said irritably. “I plan to modify the spell so it will reduce the hammer’s weight but not the size. There is a small chance that I might make a mistake. If so, our plot will be discovered.”

  Sturm glowered. “Then we should not proceed.”

  “A small chance, I said,” Raistlin remarked. “Very small.”

  He went over to Flint, who gave him a dark glance from beneath lowered brows.

  “This replica is an object of fine craftsmanship,” said Raistlin. “Could I hold it to examine it more closely?”

  Flint looked around. Arman had left off haunting the doorway and gone outside to try to walk off his mounting frustration. Tanis was across the room talking to Caramon. Slowly, Flint reached for the hammer. He drew it awkwardly from the harness and handed it over.

  “It’s heavy,” he said pointedly.

  Raistlin took the hammer, hefted it to test the weight, then affected to study the runes.

  “It would be easier to carry,” Flint said, fidgeting nervously with the straps on his armor, “if it was lighter in weight.”

  “Anyone watching?” Raistlin murmured.

  “No,” said Sturm, smoothing his mustaches. “Arman is outside. Tanis is with your brother.”

  Raistlin closed his eyes. He gripped the hammer with one hand, running the other over the rune-etched metal. He drew in a soft breath, then whispered strange words that Flint thought sounded like it feels when a bug crawls up your leg. He regretted his decision and started to reach for the hammer, to take it away.

  Then Raistlin gave a sigh and opened his eyes.

  “It is heavy,” he said, as he handed it back. “Remember to be careful when you use it.”

  Obviously, the spell had failed. Flint was relieved. He grabbed hold of the hammer and nearly went over backward. The hammer was as light as the kender’s chicken feather.

  Raistlin’s eyes glittered. He slid his hands inside the sleeves of his robes.

  Flint looked the hammer up and down, but he could not see any change. He started to put it back into the harness, then he caught Raistlin’s eye and remembered just in time that the hammer was heavy. Flint wasn’t very good at play-acting. He was doubly sorry he’d agreed to go along with this scheme, but it was too late now.

  “Well, I’m away,” he announced. He stood hunched over, as if bowed down by the weight of the hammer, which was, in truth, weighing on him.

  “I wish you would reconsider,” said Tanis, walking over to say good-bye. “You still have time to change your mind.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Flint rubbed his nose. He paused, cleared his throat, then said gruffly, “Do this old dwarf a favor, will you, Tanis? Give him a chance to find glory at least once in his dull life. I know it sounds foolish—”

  “No,” said Tanis, and he laid his hand on Flint’s shoulder. “It is far from foolish. Walk with Reorx.”

  “Don’t go praying to gods you don’t believe in, halfelf,” Flint returned, glowering. “It’s bad luck.”

  Straightening his shoulders, Flint walked out to join Arman Kharas, who told him in no uncertain terms it was time to depart. The two walked off, escorted by Hylar soldiers. Two Hylar guards remained behind, taking up their posts outside the inn’s door.

  “I hope they haven’t forgotten breakfast,” said Caramon, sitting up in bed.

  “I thought you weren’t feeling well,” said Raistlin in withering tones.

  “I feel better now that I threw up. Hey!” Caramon walked over, opened the door, and stuck his head out. “When do we eat?”

  Tasslehoff stared out the window until Flint had disappeared around the
corner of a building. Then the kender plunked down on a chair.

  “Flint promised me I could go with him to the Floating Tomb,” Tas said, kicking the rungs.

  Tanis knew it would be hopeless to try to convince the kender that Flint had made no such promise, so Tanis left Tas alone, confident that he would forget all about going in another five minutes, once he found something else of interest.

  Sturm was also staring out the window. “We could handle the guards at the door. Tanis. There are only two of them.”

  “Then what?” Raistlin demanded caustically. “How do we slip through Thorbardin unnoticed? Pass ourselves off as dwarves? The kender might do it, but the rest of us would have to put on false beards and walk on our knees.”

  Sturm’s face flushed at the mage’s sarcasm. “We could at least speak to Hornfel. Tell him of our concern for our friend. He might reconsider.”

  “I suppose we could request an audience,” said Tanis, “but I doubt we’d succeed. He made it very clear that only dwarves can enter the sacred tomb.”

  Sturm continued to stare gloomily out the window.

  “Flint is on his way to the Valley of Thanes,” said Tanis, “the Kingdom of the Dead, with a mad dwarf to watch his back and the spirit of a dead prince to guide him. Fretting over him won’t help.”

  “Praying for him will,” said Sturm, and the knight went down on his knees.

  Raistlin shrugged. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “At least ’til breakfast comes,” said Caramon.

  There was nothing else to do. Tanis went to his bed, lay down and stared at the ceiling.

  Sturm began to pray silently. “I know what I did was wrong, but I did it for the greater good,” he told Paladine. He closed his hands and clenched his hands. “As I have always done …”

  Tasslehoff stopped kicking the rungs of the chair. He waited until Sturm was caught up in the rapture of his communion with the god, waited until Tanis’s eyes closed and his breathing evened out, waited until he heard Caramon’s loud snore and Raistlin’s rasping coughing cease.

  “Flint promised I could go,” Tas muttered. “‘I’d sooner take the kender.’ That’s what he said. Tanis is worried about him, and he wouldn’t worry half so much if I was with him.”

  Tasslehoff divested himself of his pouches. Leaving them behind was a wrench. He felt positively naked without them, but he would make this sacrifice for his friend. Sliding off the chair, moving silently as only a kender can move when he puts his mind to it, Tas opened the door and slipped quietly outside.

  The two soldiers had their backs to him. They were talking and didn’t hear him.

  “Hullo!” Tas said loudly.

  The guards drew their swords and whipped around a lot faster than Tas would have given dwarves credit for. He did not know dwarves were so agile, especially decked out in all the metal.

  “What do you want?” snarled the soldier.

  “Get back in there!” said his friend, and pointed at the inn.

  Tas spoke a few words in Dwarvish. He spoke a few words of many languages, since it’s always handy to be able to say, “But you dropped it!” to strangers you might meet along the way.

  “I want my hoopak,” said Tas politely.

  The dwarves stared at him and one made a threatening gesture with his blade.

  “Not ‘sword’,” said Tas, misunderstanding the nature of the gesture. “Hoopak. That’s spelled ‘hoo’ and ‘pak’ and in kender it means ‘hoopak’.”

  The soldiers still didn’t get it. They were starting to grow annoyed, but then so was Tasslehoff.

  “Hoopak!” he repeated loudly. “That’s it, standing there beside you.”

  He pointed to Sturm’s sword. The soldiers turned to look.

  “Oops! My mistake,” said Tasslehoff. “This is what I meant.” A leap, a bound, and a grab, and he had hold of his hoopak. A leap and a thwack, and he’d cracked one of the guards in the face with the butt end of the staff, then used the pronged end to jab the other guard in his gut.

  Tas rapped each of them over the head, just to make sure they weren’t going to be getting up too soon and be a bother. Choosing the smaller of the two, he plucked the helm off the dwarf.

  “That was a good idea Raistlin had. I’ll disguise myself as a dwarf!”

  The helm was too big and wobbled around on his head. The dwarf’s chain mail nearly swallowed the kender, and it weighed at least six tons. He ditched the chain mail and put on the dwarf’s leather vest instead. He considered the false beard idea a good one, and he gazed thoughtfully at the dwarf’s beard, but he didn’t have anything to use to cut it. Tas took off the helm, shook out his top knot, dragged his hair in front of his face, and put on the helm again. His long hair flowed out from underneath.

  Unfortunately, all the hair that was bunched up in front of his eyes was a little troublesome because he couldn’t see through it all that well, and it kept tickling his nose, so that he had to stop every so often to sneeze. Any sacrifice for a friend, however.

  Tasslehoff paused to admire himself in a cracked window. He was quite taken with the results. He didn’t see how any one could possibly tell the difference between him and a dwarf. He set off quickly down the street. Flint and Arman Kharas had a pretty good head start, but Tas was confident he’d catch up.

  After all, Flint had promised.

  14

  Three hundred years of hate.

  The Valley of the Thanes.

  lint had hoped to be able to make his way to the Kalil S’rith, the Valley of the Thanes, quietly and quickly, avoiding fuss, bother and gawking crowds. But the Thanes had not kept quiet. Word had spread throughout the dwarven realms that a Neidar was going to seek the Hammer of Kharas.

  Flint, Arman, and their escorts left the city of the Talls and walked into a hostile mob. At the sight of Flint, dwarves shook their fists and shouted insults, yelling at him to go back to his hills or take himself off to other places not so nice. Arman came in for his share of abuse, the dwarves calling him traitor and the old insulting nickname, “Mad Arman.”

  Flint’s ears burned, and so did his hatred. He was suddenly glad Raistlin had come up with the idea of sneaking the true Hammer out of Thorbardin and leaving the dwarves the false. He would take the Hammer with him and let his loathsome cousins remained sealed up inside their mountain forever.

  The mob was so incensed that Flint and Arman might have ended up in the Valley of the Thanes as permanent residents, but Hornfel, receiving word of the near riot, sent his soldiers out in force. The soldiers ordered the crowds to disperse and used their spears and the flats of their swords to enforce their commands. They closed and sealed off the Eighth Road that led to the Valley. This took some time. Arman and Flint had to wait while the soldiers cleared the road of pedestrians and ordered passengers out of the wagons. If Flint had been paying attention, he would have noticed a very odd-looking dwarf pushing and shoving his way through the crowd: a dwarf of slender (one might say anemic) build, whose helm wobbled about on his head and whose beard poked out of the helm’s eye slits. Flint was nearly blind with rage, however. He held the hammer in his hand, longing to use it to bash in a few mountain dwarf heads.

  Just when the odd-looking dwarf had almost caught up with them, the soldiers announced that the Eighth Road was clear. Arman Kharas and Flint climbed inside the lead wagon. Flint was taking his seat when he thought he heard a familiar voice cry out in shrill tones, “Hey, Flint! Wait for me!”

  Flint’s head jerked up. He turned around, but the wagon rattled away before he could see anything.

  Tasslehoff fought, pushed, shoved, kicked, and slithered his way through the angry crowds of dwarves. He had just managed to get near enough to Flint to yell at him to wait up, when the wagon carrying his friend gave a lurch and began to roll down the rails. Tas thought he’d failed.

  Then Tas remembered he was on a Mission. His friends were all worried about Flint going off alone. Sturm was even praying over it. Th
ey would be sorely disappointed in him—Tasslehoff—if he let a small thing like a regiment of dwarves armed with spears stop him.

  Arman and Flint had entered the first wagon in a series of six wagons hooked together; the soldiers in Arman’s escort had been going to accompany him. Arman ordered them to stay behind, however, which left the other five wagons empty.

  The wagons were gathering speed. The dwarven soldiers stood arm-in-arm, their feet planted wide apart, forming a human barricade to keep the mob from rushing the mechanism that controlled the wagons. Tas saw an opening. He dropped down on all fours and crawled between the legs of a guard, who was so preoccupied with forcing back the heaving press of bodies that he never noticed the kender.

  Tas sprinted down the rail line and caught up with the last wagon. He threw his hoopak inside, then he leapt onto the back of the wagon and clung there as tight as a tick.

  After a tense moment when he nearly lost his grip, Tas hoisted one leg up over the side. The rest of him followed, and he tumbled down to join his hoopak at the bottom of the wagon. Tasslehoff lay on his back, admiring the view of passing stalactites on his way to the Valley and thinking how pleased Flint was going to be to see him.

  The Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Roads led to the Kalil S’rith, the Valley of the Thanes. Each road ended at an entrance known as Guardian Hall, though no dwarves ever stood guard there. There was no need. Reverence and respect were the guardians of the Valley. Dwarves coming to bury their dead were the only ones who ever entered, and they stayed only long enough to pay their homage to the fallen.

  It was not like that in the old days, at least so Flint had heard. Before the Cataclysm, the priests of Reorx tended the Valley, keeping all neat and trim. Dwarves came to celebrate family anniversaries with their ancestors. Pilgrims came to visit the resting places of ancient Thanes.