She took a long breath. It hurt to do that, and yet the breath strengthened her. She breathed in a place known to her oldest kin, and it seemed to her that some of their strength yet lingered here for their distant daughter to borrow. She moved away from Brand, standing on her own. He let her go, and the look he bent on her was that same complicated look he'd given her on the night he'd shown her the sapphire phoenix.
Now, as then, she couldn't interpret it.
Turning, he shouted, "Hey! Char, where’d you bring us?"
He asked, knowing the answer. He asked so others could hear the dwarf’s reply and acknowledge the feat he had performed.
"We are in a fastness of kings," Char said, his voice gone formal. The heavy gray sullenness fell from him, and his face lighted as Elansa had never seen it, graced by wonder and pride.
"What fastness is that?" Arawn asked, his voice thin with disbelief. "Ain't no king in the mountain, Char. Ain't no dwarf king. Ain't no elf king." Some of the others muttered agreement, Bruin and Loris. Ballu shifted a glance at Pragol, then away. Arawn’s lips twisted in a sneer as he glanced at Brand. "Ain't no king at all."
Ley stopped pacing. His hand rested on the grip of his sheathed sword, then he looked at Brand and let his hand fall.
As though Arawn hadn't spoken, Char swept his arm wide, taking in all around. "We're in the ancient smelting cavern of Pax Tharkas." He pointed to the shaft rising high at the far end. "There is where the ore from the famous Tharkadan Mines was dumped into here. See the vats—" He sniffed deeply. "You can still smell the ore melting."
Char grinned, and he walked across the stony floor, not looking at his companions as they stepped aside for him, never looking at Arawn who stood in sulking silence apart from the others. The dwarf stood before Brand, his friend, and he winked his one good eye. Then he slid a glance at Elansa and nodded.
"There's a prettier place to rest than here, though, ain't there, missy?"
She stood there, a moment silent, and Char nodded, just once to say he didn't mock.
"Yes," she said. "There is a better place to rest than smelting caves." She lifted her head and stood as tall as aching bones and groaning muscles would allow. It had been a long time, a long time since she'd stood in elven precincts, a long and sorry season. "Make ready to enter Pax Tharkas," she said, as though granting permission.
Brand quirked a smile, but Char didn't. The dwarf nodded again, for he knew that none here had a better right to grant that permission than a princess of the Qualinesti House Royal, she whose ancient kinsman-by-marriage had caused this place to be built, Kith-Kanan who slept the long sleep in one of the deepest chambers of Pax Tharkas.
In a dark chamber of Pax Tharkas, a high hall and many-columned, in a place now long unlit and home to creatures no dwarf or elf or human who lived in the time of the Peace of Friendship had ever dreamed existed, two things stirred.
One was a gully dwarf, one of that lice ridden, flea-infested tribe of dwarves known as the Aghar. People down the ages knew about these pests, beings regarded by most of Krynn as no more than vermin, held in contempt by all clans of dwarves as disgusting two-legged rats.
This gully dwarf’s name was Ygtha, and she was part of the plague of gully dwarves—"colony" she might have said had she known the word—who inhabited the ancient fortress. She'd been separated from her fellows, and in the space of moments utterly forgotten that she had, in fact, had companions at all. She'd come into this dark hall through a crack in the walls, momentarily thought she'd stumbled into a forest of stone whose trees either grew up from the floor or down from the roof. Then she saw the columns made a long aisle from one end of the vaulted hall to the other. A mile of an aisle, she thought, though she had no way of measuring that. The words just sounded good, and in her head they ran more like "aisle-mile," the rhyme jogging in and out of her mind.
Then she forgot the rhyme or the distance, for she became aware of high, wide doors on either side of the aisle. She pattered through the dust on ‘the floor, and then forgot the doors, for the dust bore the marks of small creatures—the little dark piles of rat dung and the tracks of the rats themselves. Ygtha decided she'd come into a treasure hall, for what greater treasure could there be than food, and she saw sign of that—fat delicious rat!—all around her. Alas, she saw only sign, no matter how hard she looked, and a few little skeletons from which the flesh had long ago fallen.
She picked up a bone and sat down on the floor, soothing her disappointment by sucking the brittle bones for marrow. Though she sat in near darkness, she wasn't unhappy about that or disturbed. Ygtha had learned that sooner or later light comes back again, either because it comes to you, or you wander out to it. One or the other thing would surely happen again, the coming or the wandering, and so she settled into the darkness of the mile of aisle, with all the doors around her, and sucked on rat bones.
When she heard the second thing stirring, she didn't give it consideration. She was eating, and if Aghar society had any commandment—that is, of course, assuming such a thing as Aghar society could exist at all—it would be that no one stops eating, no matter what.
And so the second thing that stirred, one of the doors along the far wall creaking, inching open, didn't trouble the gully dwarf’s feast. She didn't hear the click or scrape of brittle feet on the marble floor. She didn't hear the tall thing sigh through very lean jaws, or notice its breath, cold though that was and filling the hall with winter's breath.
She sucked on bones, humming happily to herself, and she didn't know herself caught until she felt a cage of bones close around her.
The skeletal hand grasped. Flesh hung in shreds from long-lifeless fingers. The gully dwarf squealed, looking right into eyes that flamed with fire the same color as lightning. Unfleshed jaws gaped wide, and yellow teeth snapped. In an eerie, voice, like that of stormwind, the undead creature lifted the gully dwarf and listened to her screech and scream for a while, then ripped off her head and flung the corpse against the wall.
It did this not because it disliked gully dwarves. It did this because if it and the others of its fellows who slumbered behind the many closed doors of this hall had a commandment, it would have been to kill as often as it could.
When it was finished with the gully dwarf, the undead thing, clothed in the last rags of its own flesh, hung in the rotting silk and leather of a warrior's funeral gear, looked around for more to kill. Finding none, it went back to where it had been sleeping. It entered the crypt behind the opened door, lay down upon its bier, and fell into a dark well of dreamlessness. All around it, in other crypts, behind other doors, more of its kind lay undreaming, unaware. Some had been elves in life. Some had been human. Some had been dwarves, and they all lay in stillness until something living, smelling of blood and flesh, came into the chamber. Then one or another of the creatures would sense the presence of something that needed killing. The urge that guided it, the killing urge, would rise up to wake the sleeper, to send it looking for the living thing that must not be allowed to live.
They had been the honor guard of a king, a long time ago when Pax Tharkas was new and Kith-Kanan came often to stay there. Upon his death, he was buried here, and each of his beloved guard was awarded a crypt outside the great king's burial chamber, one and another to take up their charge in death as they had in life: to guard the king. Their place had been only ceremonial, an honored burial for those who had served faithfully. But in these after days, when gods had turned their faces from the world, when the races of Krynn had turned their faces from each other, dark magics crept and crawled, and the corpses of elves and dwarves and humans, who had lived by shining codes of honor and faith, became corrupted into beings made to kill.
In the shadow of the rising hill they rested. Beneath a broad shoulder of the Kharolis Mountains, Kethrenan stopped and gave thanks to gods for the water they found there. A shallow stream darkened the stone, barely managing to pass the rocks. It ran from nowhere. Rather it sprang. Even as he though
t so, Kethrenan decided that was too strong a word for it. The water seeped, oozing up from the earth. The weary horses dipped their muzzles into the thin stream, and the gulping sounds of their drinking echoed against the rocks. Bridles and bits jingled, and Demlin’s mount shook its head and drank again.
Demlin took the water bottles, his and Kethrenan’s, and filled them. It was a slow process, the trickle of water seeping in. One filled, he stopped it with great care and handed it to the prince. Patient, he began the next. They'd found little water in these days past. Kethrenan looked at the dark horizon, the pall of smoke hanging in the west. He shaded his eyes against the glaring of noon's sun.
"My lord prince, there’s a great burning out there. How close to our forest, I wonder?"
How close? Kethrenan couldn't guess. The wind spread the smoke all over the sky, saving the darkest pall for the distance. There, he saw the work of the hobgoblin Gnash. In the night they'd seen the ruddy glow of fire on the sky, and Ithk said he reckoned Gnash was marching up and down the borderland. "Making goblin towns. He does that best."
Making goblin towns and manning them with his army. Kethrenan didn't bother to ask if the army increased in proportion to the goblin towns. He knew it did. He'd been fighting goblins off his border for many long years. They liked fighting, and they would be drawn to a powerful leader like Gnash as steel is to a lodestone.
His eyes on the pall hanging over the west, Kethrenan knew it wouldn't be long before that army would turn upon itself… unless it had a purpose. Lindenlea would keep them off Qualinesti’s borders, and they would flow south, or north into Abanasinia to rampage among the humans.
Kethrenan shrugged. That wasn't his problem.
Wind moaned across the stonelands, raising grit and biting cold. Even so, it had the smell of spring on its chill breath. Somewhere in the forest surely the first blush of a kinder season quickened, the stirring of buds still furled, not green yet, no—red, and only faintly so. There in the forest, Kethrenan thought, the air must smell like hope, and the birds must be more active. There, it had snowed well in winter, and the grasses in the meadows would soon begin to thicken. Here, in the borderland, they had not felt rain in all the while they'd been riding south. Ithk looked withered, puckered, and weary. Demlin was like skin stretched over bones, and it seemed they spent most of their searching looking for water. Kethrenan, though, was a knife, gleaming and sharp, and he would not rest until he had spilled the outlaws’ blood.
Kethrenan’s horse snorted, dancing a little, restless. The best of Qualinost’s stables, this one did not weary though they had been long days quartering the rocky land, searching for sign of the outlaws. The prince took up the reins and looked at the goblin, still on his knees drinking.
"You," he said. Ithk looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. They hadn't kept him tethered in days. He never showed sign of wanting to leave them. "How far to the last cache?"
"Not far." Ithk pointed east, and high up the slope. "In there. Do we go?"
Kethrenan said they would, and they tethered the horses and climbed. Wind dragged at them, and their fingers grew numb on the cold stone. The cave’s entrance hid beneath an overhang of stone, a small slit in the mountain no one could see from below. They had to tum sideways to thread it, even the goblin. The elves had to duck, going bent into a small passage. When they could stand again, Demlin lit a torch, using flint and steel to ignite rags soaked in fat. It wasn't a good torch. It sputtered and stank, but it gave light. The cache lay far back, not in the first cave but in a smaller one beyond. Weapons, the keg of dwarf spirits, all were covered in oily rags.
Demlin’s lip curled in disgust, and he toed the rags from the pile of swords and axes. This was a smaller cache, the last of what had been dragged here. By the sputtering light, Kethrenan took the count of what Brand had stolen.
"Do we destroy them?" Demlin asked.
The prince considered it. The weapons were of finest elven make, the steel more treasured than gold or jewels in these hard days. In the weeks past, he'd caused so many of their like to be broken, the blades made useless, the arrows shattered and axe heads broken. And this hoard, this last one, lay untouched. Brand had not been here.
Neither had he shown himself in the world outside the mountain. The elves had quartered the ground between the caches, like hounds searching after game. They'd seen no sign, not even a cast—off boot or the dark mark of a campfire. He'd kept within the mountain. Yet how had he hunted? How had he fared? He had a dozen men at last count. How did he feed them?
"Where is he going?" Demlin asked. He looked around at the slick cave walls, the dust on the floor. Tracks marked the dust—booted feet had passed here but not lately, not in a very long time. "He has to know all his other caches are broken, but he hasn't come here."
Kethrenan nodded, and he thought of the map he'd had Ithk make. The point of the triangle had looked south, right to Pax Tharkas. Could he get there? Kethrenan didn't know. Would he try? And why?
In the flickering light, the eyes of his servant and the shifting glance of a goblin on him, Kethrenan closed his eyes, considering his questions and receiving his answer.
Brand would try for Pax Tharkas. Kethrenan knew it, because he knew that if he were in the same position, beset by enemies, he would try for a place like Pax Tharkas. He would run there because there was no way to keep alive in the caverns, even if he knew all the ins and the outs. Sooner or later, he'd have to hunt, and the risk of that was too great. Brand wouldn't know who'd destroyed his weapons, goblins or elves. Outside, he was a hunted man. Wherever he turned, he was beset and outnumbered.
Kethrenan smiled. This one, this outlaw, knew the outnumbered man on the high ground still had a chance.
"Demlin, douse the torch and follow me."
They went out into the cold and stood on the highest part of the slope, a flat place above the mouth of the cave. Wind whipped their hair, and the goblin clutched his bearskin tight as the elves looked south across the stoneland, shading their eyes. The arms of the Kharolis Mountains reached out into the plain, dark and long. Because he knew his history, Kethrenan knew the fortress of Pax Tharkas spanned the gap between those reaching arms.
"Tell me," the elf prince said to the goblin. "Tell me all the ways you know to Pax Tharkas."
But Ithk shook his head, seemingly puzzled. "None, none. Go south, I only know that. Ain't never been to the Fortress of Ghosts. Don't go there. No one does."
The goblin wore the deepest look of sincerity, yet Kethrenan believed him not at all. Ithk knew ways-maybe secret roads through the borderland, maybe dark paths through the heart of the mountain itself. He could be forced, Kethrenan knew. He began to consider ways of doing that, of bending the goblin to his will, when Demlin’s cry rang out.
"Prince!" He pointed north and a little west. Something bright ran along the stony earth, a swift horse on a stretch of an old road long forgotten. Sunlight leaped from a shining helm and a bright shield. "A rider. It's one of ours, my prince!"
The rider ran against the wind, bright against a pall of dark smoke. Kethrenan nodded to his servant, and Demlin went bounding down the hillside, nimble as a mountain goat, leaping from stone to stone until he reached the low ground and the horses.
On the high place, the goblin shifted from foot to foot, and the elf prince watched his servant ride to meet the warrior. He heard him call out in their native language, shouting, "Friend!" He saw them meet, and he saw them confer. Demlin pointed upward and back to the prince where he stood overlooking the borderland. They turned their horses and rode to the little stream.
Kethrenan felt something on the air. He felt something like a shift in the wind, a change in fortune. He was not superstitious. He was not so devoted to the tending of gods as his lost wife was. Still, he felt something moving, luck or fate.
He went down the hill and kept the goblin at his side. When the messenger said he had word from Lindenlea, Kethrenan tethered Ithk and moved out of earsh
ot. This he did because Demlin reminded him to.
"You think he's one of us, like us in his need for vengeance. He isn't, my lord prince. He's a goblin. I know what your cousin said about how the Stone in the temple showed him to be a liar about something. Don't mistake him, he isn't serving you."
Kethrenan didn't mistake the goblin. He tethered him and went aside to hear the warrior’s message. It was from Lindenlea.
"Have a care, cousin. The hob Gnash is taking his army to Pax Tharkas, all of them burning along the way. If you go much farther south, you'll be caught between the fortress and him."
Kethrenan heard, and he looked once at Demlin, maimed Demlin who had ridden this quest beside him since the first snow broke the grip of the killing cold. "I know," said the servant to his master. "We must go back to the army."
They had to, for they must stop the hobgoblin before he reached Pax Tharkas.
Chapter 14
Ithk’s every thought and plan was inspired by one passion: vengeance.
They didn't think so, the elves. The bastard elves thought he was driven by some kind of treachery, some kind of Gnash-inspired betrayal. He wasn't. Vengeance inspired him, the only true passion he knew. The elves didn't think goblins had hearts. Some few said they had lean hearts. Well, maybe there they were right. Lean hearts, hard hearts, the kind of hearts that liked to kill and take and grab. But their passion, that was vengeance, and they considered it a noble passion.
That was Gnash’s shame and weakness, that he'd put aside the long feud with Brand for ambition. Now ambition was good, and greed was better, but vengeance—well, if goblins had poets, they'd be singing of revenges taken. Gnash would get no song of a goblin poet. Gnash thought of his own glory and let feuds fall. Ithk knew this wasn't the case with feuds. A feud, once lifted, must never be put down unless upon the corpse of the enemy.
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