And so he'd hunted in the stonelands all through the winter, hunted for Brand when no one else dared the cold or the wind. He'd sheltered in caves, he'd sneaked and he'd skulked, and he'd seen the outlaws at their work of hiding stolen weapons. One goblin against all of them was no chance Ithk would take, and so he'd made a plan. He went to the elves, who had good reason to hate Brand, and promised to lead them to him, the only fee required was that he alone be allowed to kill the outlaw. Kethrenan had agreed. Maybe it had sounded like a good bargain to him, and would have been if Ithk had been minded to keep it. Ithk had other ideas, and he didn't intend that Kethrenan should come back from this venture alive or with his woman. The elf would do the hard work for him, stripping Brand of all his weapons, closing up his hiding holes, then Ithk would be rid of Kethrenan and his servant at the gates of Pax Tharkas. He'd have help at that. He'd thought it might be a good idea to have a way back to Gnash. He hadn't liked what had happened to poor Golch the Beheaded, but the idea of imitating the deed and returning to Gnash with an elf prince's head in a sack seemed like a good one to keep in reserve.
But the damn elf broke the bargain before Ithk could, riding off to his army to stop Gnash from reaching Pax Tharkas. Damn Gnash.
But he had a single mind, did Ithk. He cursed, and he reworked his plan. It was, for him, all about vengeance. Jogging along beside the maimed elf, tethered again, he regretted the lost chance of killing them. He hated the smell of them, the forest-stink clinging to their clothing, their hair, their gear. They reeked of temple incense and scented candles, and they reeked of—Ithk almost gagged--perfumes, soap, and other vile scents. But as he ran along beside the tall horse, he knew that killing would have been pleasure-killing, after all. What he really wanted was to kill for revenge. More than anything he wanted to kill Brand.
Brand had done great slaughter of goblins in his time, and he'd made no secret that he'd liked that killing. He'd killed Ithk’s brother, his father, and his… well, they were probably his cousins, those orange-skinned idiots who'd got in Brand's way up around the Notch last year. Cousins, or close enough, and Brand had killed them. He hadn't hacked off their heads like Golch the Beheaded, but he'd killed them just the same. Wasn't anyone, Ithk thought, in all of Golch’s army—or, Gnash’s now—who couldn't say the same thing about Brand. And he laughed, doing it, the killing.
Ithk hated him, and he'd been happy to trot along after the bastard elves as long as he thought that would get him to Brand and the slaking of his vengeance. Now it looked like that wasn't going to happen. Now it looked like they had other things to do, or other ways to get the woman back. Ithk didn't know. He wasn't privy to their talk, tethered and running and keeping his eye out for stones and gullies and ruts for fear of falling and being dragged.
Something about Gnash, something about armies, something about Pax Tharkas, but they weren't talking about getting in there the quick way. They were talking about throwing themselves against the walls in crashing battle waves.
Idiots. Like his cousins, idiots.
Ithk ran. Sometimes he had to hold onto the tether to keep from falling, but he ran. When they stopped at night, still far short of their goal, the elves untied him and let him collapse where he stood. They made camp around him. The maimed elf, the prince, and the warrior set their fires, tended their horses, and talked about great armies in the south. Ithk listened, pretending to sleep, and he heard what he needed to know.
In the darkest hour of night, when the two scythe-thin moons had set and a scud of clouds obscured the stars, he rose. Two of the elves slept, the fire between them, wrapped in their cloaks. The other, the prince, stood looking south. Ithk glanced his way and saw past him to where a thin glittering line of campfires gleamed. One army or another.
A shadow, he slipped away, but not before he took the little knife from his belt that he used for eating and skinning. He slid it between the ribs of one of the elves with such deft swiftness that the sleeper made no sound as he died between one breath and the next.
A horse snorted, another stamped. Not one of the elves who lived so much as looked around as Ithk slid away into the night, a dark ghost savoring the smell of blood as he wiped his blade clean on his and ran away south to find his way around two armies.
He knew ways into the Fortress of Ghosts. He had been long around these mountains. He knew the way in, and it didn't involve running into walls. He had friends waiting, and maybe he would be a little late, but he didn't doubt they'd wait.
O blessed light!
It rained down into the spacious bed chamber off the Hall of Thanes like gold pouring in, leaping through tall windows whose iron shutters were thrown wide. The sunbeams danced with glittering dust motes.
O blessed air, unfettered by tunnels of stone!
Elansa breathed it as though it were blown down to her from alpine meadows. To her, it smelled not of a musty closed room, not of the woven wall hangings falling to rot beneath a burden of mildew, nor did it smell of gully dwarf, that rank odor of filth and sweat that would have warned of the presence of the vermin if little footprints on the dusty floors had not. Others swore the place smelled of this, but Elansa smelled only air, free and clear and moving.
They had left the smelting caverns and walked out into a purple twilight, the first star pricking the sky, the moons but little crescents above the two tall towers of Pax Tharkas. Ley stopped to stare, his face turned up to marvel at the towers. hi the courtyard stretching between, they were a dozen, and they felt small as sparrows before the great wall spanning the towers.
"I’ve never seen anything like it," Tianna whispered. She was a child of the stoneland and the mountains but had not dreamed that such a wonder as this could exist.
"It’s called the Tharkadan," her father said, "and it’s seen better days."
It was so. Even as she marveled, Elansa admitted that. Time had not dealt kindly with the fortress. The courtyard stone was cracked and heaved, the towers themselves had felt the digging fingers of frost. The broad high gate in the wall had slipped on its great hinges.
"We'll get in through there," Brand had said, nodding to the gap between gate and wall.
After the low cramped tunnels, after caves whose ceilings were not always high, whose way in and out were seldom broad, the space between the unhinged gate and the stone wall seemed broad as the door to a king’s feast hall. They went in single file from habit, but they need not have. Once inside they found that the state of the inner court was the same as the outer-heaved stone, cracked stone, broken stone.
In good time Char found a way into the eastern tower, out of the wind and cold, but not out of the light. Once inside he did not hesitate, nor did Elansa question him. From legend, the elf woman and the dwarf had learned much about this place. They knew, the two of them, where they'd find the best place to keep from the night and the cold. Outlaws and their prisoner, wind-whipped and filthy, ragged in broken boots, they went to the Hall of Thanes and felt they had made a good choice.
"Used to be someone’s bedroom," Dell said, turning from the window.
Elansa nodded. "A king's—elf or dwarf or one of the human kings from Ergoth. Now and then, even the Ergothian emperor. In the old times one or another of them came here often."
Arawn stood alone at a far window, his eyes on the sky or the tower across the courtyard. He had his back to the room, his back to his friends. Outside, far below, Brand and Char were scouting the broad courtyard. Within this chamber, this place where dwarven thanes had entertained kings, the rest of the outlaws had staked out their places, much as if they were setting camp in a cold cave.
They have drawn a line, Elansa thought, seeing what Brand had hoped to prevent. In the far part of the chamber, away from the dais where a bed had once stood, Arawn looked out. Bruin, Loris, Ballu, and Pragol had spread out their sleeping furs close by. The clack of the bones, shaken in Pragol's hand, sounded familiar to her now, as familiar as their rough voices, their conversations couched in cursi
ng and hard laughter.
Near the window, the one with the shutters flung wide, Dell stood. Nigh-toothless Kerin crouched nearby, his back to the stone and his head on his chest, asleep. Ley stood not far from him, draped in the long shadows, and sighted down the length of an arrow’s shaft. He turned it this way and that, judging whether it was straight and true or if it must be abandoned. Tianna lay wrapped in her cloak, the ragged hem of it muddy and so discolored that the original hue could not be guessed. She had her back to the wall, and Elansa didn't think she was sleeping.
"They sleep, but they must be hungry," she said to Dell.
Dell nodded. "I think there must be hares in the hills. Failing that, we could scare up some rats. I'll take a few men and see what we can find." She looked around at her companions, head cocked as she listened to their voices. "Char says this fortress was always manned. That means there must be armories in one of these towers."
Elansa nodded. "But nothing you find will be in very good condition."
"Don’t doubt that. Still, I'd like to see. I can't get into much trouble. It’s just us and the gully dwarves, after all."
At the door leading out from this mined chamber that once hosted kings, Char's voice and Brand's mingled in echo, low and earnest. They came into the chamber with two helms filled with water, talking about a well in the courtyard with a spring still bubbling up pure and cold.
"Got to use old helmets for buckets," Char said, "but that's not too hard. The water's high enough for reaching down."
He said more, but Elansa didn't hear. She closed her eyes and sank down to the floor. She was thirsty, but she knew better than to look for a drink before anyone else. In the dark silence, she nodded, almost sleeping. A hand touched her arm, she jerked, startled, and Brand stood with an old helm in his two hands. He took a long drink, and offered the rest to her.
"Go on," he said. "You did good, girl. You did all right against the ogres. You held up on the way." He moved closer. In the dimming light, she saw the silver links of the chain around his neck. The sapphire phoenix slid against his chest.
She reached to touch it. He let her, and the pulse of power against her fingertips beat as the pulse of blood beneath her own skin. "I… I was going to Bianost with that phoenix. I was going to heal…"
Brand shrugged, and he repeated his offer. "Have a drink."
He didn't smile. He never did, but he looked at her with a kind of earnestness that made her throat close up with tears.
Lines of smoke wavered in the icy air, dark scars across the face of the sky. Flights of ravens marred the blue, sailing toward the smoke as though toward home. Beneath them on the stony ground, wolves loped down from the hills in the stonelands. Outriders of death, they ran and they soared. In the days when gods had walked on Krynn, when people had believed because they had felt the nearness of deity, those who had worshiped dark gods knew these creatures as the minions of those gods who most loved destruction. They used to say, those who believed in the times when it was easy to believe, "You can hear Takhisis in the raven’s cry. You can smell Morgion on the wolf's breath and see Chemosh in the beast’s cold eyes."
Those beasts of battle fed full in the border between the kingdom of the elves and the kingdom of the dwarves. They gorged on goblin flesh, and they feasted on the marrow cracked from the bones of elves. They followed in the wake of a war where the burning of villages had ceased, where the making of goblin towns was no longer on the mind of the hobgoblin Gnash. What was on his mind now, each time he stopped letting the elves chase him and turned to fight, was how much he hated those pale-eyed wretches out of Qualinesti. He fought with fire, wielding his staff, the weapon that looked like an old bent stick. He flung fire, and he went with the stink of burning flesh clinging to him like a cloak.
He fought at night, whenever he could, sweeping down from the hills. He had known how to make fists of his fire when first he began to use his staff. He had known how to reach out and grab his enemies in a flaming grip, sizzling their flesh and blackening their bones while their blood boiled. In the time since then, harried by the elf prince across the lands no king owned and no one ruled, Gnash had learned more and better skills.
One night, when the two moons hung like sickles over the reaching arms of the Kharolis Mountains, he'd not set an army of goblins down on the elves. He'd sent an army of fire, creatures man-tall and made of flame. He had seen the brave soldiers of Qualinesti break and run, in shame take to their heels.
Turning from that battleground, he had gone south again, and he didn't think any could stop him from reaching his goal now. He dreamed of Pax Tharkas, that Fortress of Ghosts, and he dreamed it was filled with weapons and magic to make his fire-staff seem like a child's toy.
Each history of Pax Tharkas, written in Qualinost or composed in Thorbardin, sung in the cities of humans, studied in the libraries of Palanthas or Tarsis, will tell that the mighty fortress withstood the incursions of goblins, ogres, and even, for a time, the vast army of the evil mage Fistandantilus. For centuries the mighty fastness rang with the voices of dwarves and elves and humans. It hosted kings and, now and then, an emperor. Armies manned the battlements, dwarven warriors and soldiers out of Qualinesti. The great elf king Kith-Kanan slept the long sleep in a crypt below the fortress, and a royal guard attended him in the long sleep, his loyal warriors in a crypt of their own.
Yet storms will blow and wars will rage. The treaties made on one day are burned to ash on another. Great Pax Tharkas, the monument to friendship between the races, fell from its fabled glory after the Cataclysm and the bloody Dwarfgate War. Abandoned by those who'd made it, Pax Tharkas, the Peace of Friendship, was taken by time, by wind and storm, by summer’s heat and, finally, by gully dwarves.
"It’s like they own the place," Nigh-toothless Kerin growled, his nose wrinkling as the breeze blew into the bedchamber of kings from the corridor outside where he'd been setting watches. "You never see the things, you just hear ‘em squalling in the shadows"—he grimaced—"doing gods know what. There are so damned many of them. And you smell 'em."
Elansa covered her own nose, agreeing. She'd seen one or two of the gully dwarves—small creatures scurrying in and out of shadows. They stood no higher than her own knee. Known as Aghar and disowned by all tribes of dwarves, they didn't bear much more resemblance to dwarves than they did to humans or elves. Two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, a head, and probably a heart, she thought as she closed the door to the corridor. As Nigh—toothless Kerin had suggested, the vast numbers of them proclaimed that they had their reproductive parts in good working order.
The hallway didn't always reek of gully dwarf, of creatures long unwashed and garbed in rags and castoffs that hadn't seen soap since the wash day before the gully dwarf wearing them got hold of them. Some days the air smelled of the breezes coming cold off the mountains, fresh as the sky and only a little of whatever mustiness drifted out of chambers too long closed up and only lately thrown open. Other days it smelled of smoke, and on those days the outlaws who walked on the Tharkadan—as much to keep watch as to stretch their legs and see a wide sky—reported seeing the signs of battle and burning out in the stonelands. This day, however, only the faintest wind blew, the sky was still, and so the reek of every one of the innumerable vermin lurking in the cellars and dungeons seeped into the chambers of the ancient fortress.
Watchers on the Tharkadan… Elansa shook her head and crossed to the unshuttered window. She looked out, watching the guards walk. Dell and Pragol and Bruin and Tianna, they kept no orderly march. Used to seeing warriors on the silvery spans around Qualinost, Elansa hardly recognized these as watchers at all. They lounged at the parapet talking or sharpening steel arrowheads against the stone. They looked out, but not with any kind of keen glance. They seemed bored and restless.
With these, she thought, Brand thinks to hold a fortress.
She turned from the window and watched Brand sitting with his back to the warm western wall of the chamber. Su
nlight sent blue gleams darting from the sapphire phoenix in his hand as he turned it this way and that as though it were a box whose key he'd lost. She knew his thought by looking at his face: How does it work?
How does it work, wondered the man who now claimed possession of Pax Tharkas and thought he actually held it because he had a handful of ragged outlaws, a few swords, some arrows, and a throwing axe in the possession of a dwarf whose hand wasn't so steady now as it was when he was drinking. Brand looked up, twirling the phoenix on the chain round his finger.
"Come here, girl."
Girl he named her. It used to be she had no name at all, only "you," in the days when the dogs ate before she did. She crossed the chamber, walking as though across the stony floor of one of the caves, stepping round little fires. Because they must have heated with braziers here—braziers long gone—by necessity the beautiful mosaic floor of this once-royal chamber now bore the dark scars of cooking fires. For fuel they had the arms and legs and backs of ancient oaken chairs, the planks of the broad tables found in the mess and barracks of the opposite tower. What time hadn't broken in Pax Tharkas, these outlaws had shattered.
Elansa stepped around sleepers, for those who didn't hunt or walk on the wall slept. Little changed in their lives. They moved in the rounds of need. Only Char didn't sleep. He sat alone in a far corner, away from the door, away from the windows, wrapped in shadow. If he missed his hound Fang, he'd said nothing to anyone about it, but no one doubted that he missed his drink; his hands were unsteady, and his mood was not good.
"Sit," Brand said, and though he looked where she did, he didn't mention the dwarf. He twirled the phoenix again, watching it catch the light.
She sat, but gingerly. She was a mass of aching muscles and bruised flesh. She slid down the wall, bracing against the floor with her hands to lower herself carefully. He watched her, the phoenix still flying round his finger.
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