Beams of brilliant sunlight shot downward, penetrating the dome of the mountaintop in three places. The light reflected off the water, dazzling in the waves that were slowly settling back to the usual placid surface. There was a big pillar of rock in the middle of the lake, and Gus was pretty sure that hadn’t been there before either.
He didn’t know about the fire dragon teeth placed by the black wizard, of course, but even to a gully dwarf, the trio of holes seemed nicely spaced, the points of an equilateral triangle having a symmetry all its own. They were like splendid skylights, openings in the mountaintop that allowed light and fresh air into the undermountain kingdom. The three Aghar squealed in delight as they spied a bird, probably the first one ever to come to Thorbardin, swoop down through one of the holes, fly across the lake, then wing its way upward to fly out another one of the new openings.
“This way. We go to fine Agharhome,” he boasted, following his memory as they made their way along the steep, cliff-lined shore. “Plenty good town for gully dwarves,” he said. (Given recent events, he might be forgiven if his memory was a little sketchy on the latter point.)
Finally they reached a familiar spot, where several sewers from the ancient dwarf cities converged to run down toward the lake.
“Come down here,” he told his girls, sliding down the ravine, ducking beneath the low-hanging shelf of a familiar tunnel. Already he could smell it: rotten cave carp, freshly hauled up from the spawning shelf!
Unerringly he made his way back to the Fishbiter house, a doorless hovel along a shelf of rock, one of many doorless hovels where unknown numbers of gully dwarves had tried to eke out an existence over the years.
“Girls wait here,” he whispered conspiratorially as he stood outside the entrance. Reluctantly, they agreed, and so he strode inside.
“Mam!” he cried. “Pap! It’s me, Gus! Me come home!”
“Huh?” Pap said, looking up in irritation from the flat rock that was the only piece of furniture in the Fish-biter house. “This my seat!”
“Gus?” Mam said. “You still alive?”
She looked rather confused.
“And this my carp!” declared his big brothers Ooz and Birt, elbowing each other as they hovered over the decaying scrap of fish. They glowered at Gus, though for some reason they weren’t glowering down at him as much as they used to. In fact, if he didn’t know any better, Gus would have thought that they were glowering up.
In fact, they were.
With an easy cuff, Gus knocked his bullying siblings out of the way and picked up the skeletal remains of the fish.
“Hey, Berta, Slooshy!” he said, calling to the girls who were still waiting out in the sewer trough. “Come here, see! Gus got food!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas Niles has written more than 40 novels in genres including science fiction and alternate history. He has written extensively for the shared worlds of Wizards of the Coast. He has written more fiction and novels for DRAGONLANCE® than any author except the series creators, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Niles is also the author of the very first FORGOTTEN REALMS® novel (Darkwalker on Moonshae) and in all contributed nine novels to the FORGOTTEN REALMS line.
He lives in Wisconsin.
Dwarf Home, Volume Three
FATE OF THORBARDIN
©2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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eISBN: 978-0-7869-5641-8
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