Secret of Pax Tharkas

ELEVEN

The High Kharolis is the loftiest, most extensive mountain range upon the continent of Ansalon. The summits are grand and numerous, and while they are not so craggy as some of the Khalkist Mountains and they are not fiery volcanoes like the Lords of Doom, their majesty is apparent to anyone within fifty miles of the foothills of the range. They cap the great subterranean city of Thorbardin and have long been a fastness of the dwarf race. The mountain dwarves preferred to live under the mountains themselves, while the hill dwarves populated the outer valleys, their towns and villages too numerous to count, spreading out over nearly all of the habitable space below the range’s timberline.

Late at night those communities mostly slumbered. Here and there sounds of raucous celebration-punches landing on noses, curses exchanged, crockery smashed over heads, kicks bouncing off kneecaps-indicated not all the hill dwarves had turned in for the night. Mostly those revelries were confined to the village inns and taverns, though in a few cases the sounds arose from private homes, part of the sweet togetherness that was the typical dwarf marriage. In most of the houses, a fire ebbed on the hearth or a candle glimmered in a window, giving a pastoral illumination to the simple villages in the Kharolis valleys.

Of course, in the great undermountain realm, there was no night, no day. Forges smoked and smiths banged away throughout the great city of Norbardin. Farmers worked the great food warrens, some using the mighty Urkhan worms to pull their implements through the moist loam, others harvesting fungus in a hundred varieties or fish from their breeding ponds for hauling the next morning to the city’s famed market. But those activities occurred out of sight of the world and, for most, out of awareness.

The highest summit of the Kharolis was the mountain known as Cloudseeker. Eternally shrouded in snow and glacier, it was a massive peak made even more monumental by the fact it was not completely surrounded by cliffs. Instead, it rose from the bedrock with broad shoulders, long, sinuous ridges connecting to the lower summits, and slopes leading down to the valleys with their forests and lakes. It was one of the loftiest mountains in the world, but because of those long, gradual slopes, it was not impossible to climb. Still, the thin air, cold temperatures, and constant winds made the climb inhospitable.

Right then the summit was occupied by a very solitary, very frightened, and very confused gully dwarf.

Gus huddled on the ground, clutching his knees to his chest, shivering and getting colder by the second. He tried to worm his way deeper into the soft surface, but that didn’t seem to be warming him up. His rump and legs were not only cold, he realized, but wet! With a yelp, he bounced to his feet and took a closer look at the surface under his feet.

“What kind of bluphsplunging rock are you?” he demanded of that surface.

It was not stone, he realized (almost) at once. It was soft and, yes, wet and oddly pale in color, like a cave carp’s belly. He had seen white stone before, but that was just like the black or gray or any other color of stone-hard and bruising. The white stuff under his feet was slushy, more like extremely cold mud, which he sank in up to his knees. He could kick through it, though when it clumped in through the holes in his boots, it made his feet very cold. When he picked some up, it packed into a solid sphere in his hand, cold and wet.

Maybe it was some kind of food, he thought, as his belly rumbled. He tasted it and was surprised when it seemed to turn to water in his mouth.

All in all, the stuff was not very promising. Still, it was more comforting to look down than to look up. When he did turn his face toward the top of the world, he saw those countless specks of light and nothing else. It was as if a multitude of candles burned in the loftiest reaches of that place, but even their light was not enough for him to make out whatever kind of ceiling it was that vaulted over his head. How the many candles could simply float in the air and not light up the roof was a riddle beyond his comprehension.

When he looked to the sides, he saw massive piles of rock, many of them covered with the same whiteness that was currently numbing his feet and legs. They were countless, those monstrous mounds, and seemed to stretch into a distance that was so vast he couldn’t even begin to comprehend it. He could count well for an Aghar-all the way up to two-and as regarding distance, he knew two miles was a vast length of space. However, his best guess was that the neighboring pile of rock was at least two miles away, and there were many other such obelisks beyond that, by extension another two miles away.

The one he was standing on, he reckoned, was the biggest one of them all. His mind whirled. Where was he? And how could the place be so large that he couldn’t even make out the ceiling over his head?

Another bout of shivering wracked him, and despite his many questions, Gus was forced to accept one unpleasant truth: if he stayed there, he would die. But where should he go? In every direction, the ground sloped downward, so it didn’t seem to make much difference except that, when he started walking, he noticed the ground in front of him seemed to drop away steeper and steeper until, with frightening abruptness, it just seemed to vanish.

He stood at the lip of a precipice. Far below he could see the faint outlines of lakes, and those, at last, were features that looked familiar to him. In his experience, lakes were a promising source of food, so he decided to go down there. But he couldn’t take a straight path unless he wanted to fall all the way to his destination. So he started along the edge of the cliff, slipping and shivering in the cold, white slush, looking for some way down. He walked for a long two minutes until he saw a ridge descending from this auspicious height. That, at least, seemed to promise a possible route, so he made his way onto that ramp and, still slipping occasionally, started to climb down off the massive pile of rock.

He had not gone very far when some sixth sense prickled the hairs on his neck. Gulping, he turned around, looking back toward the summit he had just vacated. A shadow stretched black across the whiteness, hampering his view. He shrank down and tried to make himself invisible as he stared, eyes agog, at that shadow that had such an air of menace.

It was not merely a shadow, but some sort of creature: something terrible that was lurking there. He made out the shape of a being with large black wings and a gaunt, nearly skeletal body. It turned its face this way and that, and when that visage swiveled in the gully dwarf’s direction, Gus froze, caught by a pair of fiery, crimson eyes.

Immediately those eyes seemed to bore into him, and the mighty wings pulsed, giving flight to the ghastly shape. Shrieking, Gus turned and ran, quickly falling on his face as his feet got caught in the slushy white stuff. Clawing his way upright again, he cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that the flying beast had already covered half the distance to him and, as he feared, the gully dwarf was clearly its quarry.

Gus trudged and tromped and struggled through the clinging whiteness, which seemed to be much deeper on the steep-sided ridge than it had been near the top of the rock pile. He didn’t squander another look behind him, but he could feel the creature coming closer, and when that feeling became terrifyingly imminent, he darted to the side, plunging face-first into the icy material and burrowing into the chill wetness.

He felt a terrible pain in his shoulder as one talon dragged across his body, tearing through his ragged shirt. But his face-down plunge had saved him, at least for the moment, as the flying monster couldn’t quite get a grip on him and, thus, swept past, spreading those wings again as it came around to make a long, banking turn. Those red eyes sought, and found, the hapless gully dwarf, and the flying creature dived close again.

On his knees, Gus quaked and trembled. He was too exhausted to rise to his feet, to try to flee farther. There was something hypnotic in that evil gaze; a compulsion seemed to root him to the spot. Wide-eyed, blubbering in terror, he could feel the creature’s awful presence as it swept closer. When it was almost upon him, he threw himself facedown again onto the chilly whiteness, burrowing like a grub into the soft material.

Once again, his last-minute plunge caused the monster to miss its grab. Gus scrambled to his feet, feeling his doom descending. He tried to run in two directions at once, but that only caused him to stumble again. In its rage, the monster opened a beaklike maw and uttered a harsh, penetrating screech as it dived once more.

But when that sound struck the white-crested ridge, all of that whiteness-and the gully dwarf clawing his way into it-suddenly broke free and began to crumble. Gus was immediately swallowed in the churning, frosty mix that was not rock and not mud. There were infinite grains of it, like powder, flooding against his skin, and the sensation of falling was muted by the fact he was trapped within a great, thundering avalanche; he was falling as part of a big slide, not like a pebble bouncing down an otherwise solid slope.

Down became up, and up became down. He inhaled and coughed out bits of whiteness. Those bits he didn’t cough out became water in his mouth. He was thirsty, Gus realized as he tumbled through a succession of somersaults, and the water felt cold and refreshing. Still, it was hard to drink while falling. Come to think of it, it was hard to do much while falling-except fall.

He flailed with his hands and feet but couldn’t make contact with anything solid. Once, he bounced to the very top of the avalanche and saw that the whole mountainside seemed to be sliding toward the valley. The Aghar whirled crazily atop it for a moment, thinking, Whee! This is not so bad. He spied the black flyer in the sky, hunting for him. It was far away, for the moment.

Then the whiteness swallowed him again, and he could see nothing. The sense of movement rumbled and grew into an implacable force, gaining momentum, carrying the little Aghar along in its irresistible sweep. Once Gus smacked into something that felt like a real rock, not the soft, white, wet kind, and that blow stunned him. Still he kept falling.

Gradually, the momentum of the avalanche faded away. He was sliding a little; then he was still. He tried to move his arms and legs, but they were immobile, trapped by the white stuff packed tightly all around him. Gus’s head throbbed, but he couldn’t see the flying monster-he couldn’t see anything, truth be told-and that, at least, was a relief.

In fact, his recent adventures had drained him more than he had realized. It felt strangely safe there in his icy prison, and he was very, very tired.

It seemed only natural to simply go to sleep.

Gus could feel the talons reaching, scratching for him. It was that terrible sensation that woke him up, at which time he quickly realized he was still imprisoned in the icy pack of white stuff. He felt numb from the cold and utterly helpless. He heard terrible clawing, relentlessly scraping away at the surface above his face, the sounds of the talons coming closer, increasingly closer. He struggled, gasped, groaned, and kicked, but he might as well have been encased in stone for all the movement he could manage.

Still the noise came closer. He saw a burning brightness-he was lying on his back-and he presumed he was experiencing the fiery fury of the winged monster’s eyes. Even so, those eyes seemed impossibly brilliant, as if the creature’s eyes were a mighty bonfire, the kind of pyre that could light up the whole of the Urkhan Sea.

Then one talon penetrated all the way through the white slush, scraping painfully across Gus’s face, and the light swelled to a truly excruciating brightness. It was as though a huge fire had surged right in front of the Aghar’s eyes, and he was virtually blinded. In that, Gus actually found some comfort since he was utterly helpless to escape, at least his blindness would spare him the horror of watching the monster devour him. Again, those talons clawed across his face, and he shuddered at the thought that his flesh was being ripped away, perhaps his eyes torn out, his bulbous nose severed.

Yet those claws did not seem so sharp as before-nor did the monster seem intent on savagely rending his flesh. No, it seemed more like it was merely tormenting him.

The blindness began to ease slightly as his eyes adjusted to the brightness. He could make out a few details-most prominent, a set of white, curving fangs, drooling eagerly between widespread jaws. Again those talons raked at him, but he realized they were clawing at the icy stuff imprisoning Gus, not at the Aghar himself. Probably, he thought, the monster wanted to have a snack of white stuff before getting down to the main meal.

The mouth above him gaped wide, and Gus tried to recoil, deciding that the creature had unleashed some form of foul breath weapon. He held his breath as long as he could; then he had no choice but to inhale the stench of its fetid exhalation, and he almost snorted in derision. As a gully dwarf, he had smelled many vile odors; it would take more than the creature’s stale breath to choke and kill him.

But his elation was short lived. The jaws spread wide again, fangs yawning to either side of his face as that horrible maw, still panting its tainted breath, lowered to his face.

Yet what he felt wasn’t sharp teeth, but a long, coarse, and surprisingly warm tongue. He felt the tongue slurp across his face, clearing away the icy bits that coated his skin, bringing a sweet tingling back to the flesh that had been all but frozen. Gus coughed and sputtered and tried to move, and the creature set to work digging again, raking those powerful paws around the Aghar’s arms. When one arm finally jerked free, Gus reached up to ward off the horrible attacker, but instead of a skeletal, chill minion of darkness, his hand came into contact with a shaggy coat of hair.

Gradually, Gus understood that, despite the talons and fangs and fetid breath, it was not the creature that had chased him on the mountaintop. Nor was it the source of that blinding brightness, the intense light that had all but robbed him of vision. Blinking, the gully dwarf saw that the fiery brilliance came from much farther away, from a yellow spot somewhere high above on the lofty ceiling of that place. Somehow, that ceiling, which previously had been a black expanse speckled with tiny lights, had turned a pale blue in color. One single, incredibly brilliant, orange-yellow light shined down upon him.

“Kondike? What did you find there?”

Gus heard the words, spoken in a female voice that didn’t sound terribly menacing, and he wondered how the monster had learned to speak such expert Dwarvish. Only when the fanged head, with its drooping jowls and incredible tongue, lifted away and the creature uttered a deep, guttural “woof,” did he realize that the speaker was not the shaggy beast, but some other individual off in the near distance that he couldn’t see.

Realizing that even melodious and gentle female dwarves had been known to pound the stuffing out of hapless Aghar, he struggled to rise and flee. Turning his head, Gus saw the female dwarf, approaching through the snow, carrying a stout staff in one hand, marching straight toward him with a curious expression on her face.

She looked like a dwarf, but Gus knew he was-he must be-in the presence of a goddess.

Her hair was as bright yellow as spun gold and cascaded around a full-cheeked, wide-mouthed face. She wore a fur cape, open in the front to reveal a blue tunic flowing over a pair of perfect, swelling breasts. Her leggings were blue as well, tight-fitting like the tunic, and her boots were white fur and came as high as her knees. When she looked down at Gus, he saw that her eyes were as blue as the ceiling of that place, and when she smiled her lovely smile, he knew that he was in the presence of immortal grace.

“Well, what happened to you, little fellow?” she asked cheerily. She raised her face, looking up the mountainside toward the lofty ridge, and she whistled as her eyes followed the path of the thunderous avalanche. “Looks like, whatever your problems, Reorx was looking out for you. And Kondike, of course.”

“G-G-Gus!” he croaked worshipfully. “I’m Gus!”

“What a nice name,” she said sweetly. “I am called Gretchan Pax, and I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. Now let’s see about getting you out of there. Then perhaps you’d like a bowl of hot soup?”

She knelt down beside him and, with the monster Kondike energetically assisting, quickly freed him from the white stuff. Gus, however, did not even realize when he was free.

In fact, he had completely swooned away.

The soup was the most exquisite food Gus had ever tasted, up to and including cave grubs. There were bits of red things and green things and white things in it, and the liquid itself was a pleasant brown color, aromatic and comforting. Gretchan had led Gus to the edge of the white ground-she called it “snow”-and effortlessly kindled a fire from some sticks and twigs she scooped up right off the ground. Now the Aghar’s teeth had finally stopped chattering, and he slurped down a second bowl as soon as he finished the first.

“Good!” he declared, licking out the metal dish. “What kind food?”

The brightness was still painfully intense, but his eyes had become accustomed to the constant glare enough that his headache was waning. She had explained to him that the blue ceiling was called the “sky,” and the fiery orb was the “sun.” Gretchan leaned back, puffing on a small pipe she had loaded with some kind of dried plant. The smoke that emerged from her nose was pleasantly aromatic, though when Gus leaned in to take a big sniff, he had been unable to suppress a wet sneeze that spattered her pretty thoroughly. With a grimace of distaste, she blotted off her face and bodice.

“Stay away from my pipe… and my face,” she chided him. “This stuff isn’t good for you.”

She was a genius besides a beauty, Gus thought. When she frowned, he wanted to do whatever he could to obey her, to cheer her up. And when she laughed, that jolly sound made his heart pound with delight. “I take it you’ve never been on the surface before,” she said. “Those are vegetables-carrots, peppers, onions. They’re fairly common up here. Did you come from under the mountain?”

“No!” Gus declared. “I come from Thorbardin!”

With his words, he was assaulted by memories of that sunless place: the terrifying wizard and his cave, the drain-plunge where Slooshy had lost her life, the Theiwar bunty hunters who cut off gully dwarf heads, his prisoner cage, all that. He sniffled miserably. “Not go back, though. Not ever!”

“Well, I don’t think they grow vegetables in Thorbardin.” She grew serious for a moment, looking into the distance. “Someday, I’d like to find out for myself,” she admitted.

“Thorbardin? I can tell you all about Thorbardin!” Gus boasted, eager to impress his rescuer. “It’s big!”

She laughed again. “So I’ve heard,” Gretchan replied. “And how does a little fellow like you get out of Thorbardin? Surely you know that the gates have long been sealed?”

“Get out?” Gus hadn’t really processed that idea yet. He shrugged, trying to think; then he remembered. “I took drink from bad wizard’s bottle. Strong drink, fizz my throat. Then I was out!”

Thinking more, he reached into his pocket, and pulled out Willim’s bottle of elixir, the bottle from the Midwarren Pale spirits distillery. “Bottle kind of like this. But drink different.”

Gretchan looked rather alarmed. She reached for the bottle, and Gus let her take it in her hands, noticing that she shivered as she touched it. Holding it up to the light, she studied the bottle, shook it so the potion swirled around inside, and set it down while she cradled her perfect chin in her graceful, surprisingly long-fingered hands.

“Good thing, if you ask me, that you didn’t drink from that bottle,” she said softly. Turning those blue eyes to the gully dwarf, she asked, “Would you mind if I carried it for you?”

Gus would have given her his right arm, or any portion of his body, if she had asked him, and he didn’t want any dwarf spirits anyway. So he nodded his assent. She wrapped the bottle very carefully in some sort of cloth and gingerly set it into her backpack.

“Hmm. It is a mystery how you got here,” she said. “A mystery worth pondering. But now what am I going to do with you?” she added pensively. “I can’t very well send you home-of course, if I knew how to enter Thorbardin, I’d take you there myself!”

The thought of going home to Agharbardin suddenly seemed like a bleak and hopeless prospect to the forlorn gully dwarf. “Maybe I stay with you? Here in snow place?” he asked eagerly. “Gus big help! Finds lotsa food! Fight bad dwarves!”

She smiled gently, and his heart melted. “Well, I guess you can come along for now. I have some work to do, but I don’t think you’ll get in the way. And sooner or later we’ll meet some other gully dwarves. There are plenty of them out here in the real world too, you know. I bet you’ll be quite a hero to them, with all you’ve gone through.”

“Yes! Me hero gully dwarf. Spit in eye of him say not!” Gus crowed.

Delightedly, he hopped to his feet as Gretchan turned to go, striding beside the female dwarf and Kondike, who was not a monster but a “dog,” he had learned.

Kondike was a very big dog: his head was higher off the ground than Gus’s, and even underneath the heavy coat of shaggy black hair, there was a body of powerful sinew and long, graceful legs. Gus was grateful that Kondike seemed to consider him a friend.

Only once, as they crested a snowy ridge and started into the next valley, did Gus have a shuddering memory of the horrible minion that had stalked him the night before. He wondered where it had gone and whether it would be coming back to chase him.

But he decided it was better not to say anything about the ghastly fiend to his new friend. After all, he didn’t want to worry her.