Chapter 23

Time became meaningless for Riverwind, Kronn, and Brightdawn as they traveled toward Blood Watch. There was no day or night in the tunnels; there was only walking, constant and endless. Occasionally, they would reach a fork or intersection in the passage, and they would have to stop while Kronn consulted an old, yellowed map of the tunnels and determine which direction to take. Other times, their torches would begin to gutter out, and they would pluck new ones from the wall sconces and light them with the charred stubs of their dying brands. For the most part, however, the catacombs stretched arrow-straight ahead of them, a long throat of stone leading to the dragon’s belly. Minutes melted into hours, hours pooled into days.

Then, after what seemed like years—but was actually only several long days—the tunnel began to change.

It was barely noticeable at first—a slight warping of the walls, a twisting of the floor—so no one spoke of it, each assuming it was simply a trick of the imagination. After several more miles, however, the passage’s deformity grew more pronounced. The stone was cracked in some places, and in others it ran like melted wax. The stench of hot metal mixed with the old, familiar tang of brimstone. Faint wisps of black smoke hung in the air, writhing as they passed. It grew steadily warmer, and soon the three travelers were slick with sweat, panting for breath as they struggled on.

“This is Malystryx’s doing,” Riverwind said, his voice hoarse from hours of disuse.

“No kidding,” Kronn answered. “Actually, I’m not too surprised—we must be almost to the Hollowlands by now. She’s been using her magic to shape the land above us—it only stands to reason that the tunnels would have been warped too.”

“How bad do you think it’ll get?” Brightdawn asked.

The kender shrugged. “You tell me. I haven’t been down this way in years.”

Suddenly Riverwind began to cough, choking and gasping in the smoky air. His steps slowed, then he stopped, doubling over and hacking violently. Brightdawn ran to his side and grabbed his shoulders. “Father?” she asked, her voice rising with alarm. His face was dark red, and contorted with pain with every wracking cough. “What’s wrong? What can I do to help?”

He fell to one knee, wheezing. “Water…“ he croaked, his voice tight and strained. Sweat ran down his face in rivers.

Quickly, she pulled her waterskin from her belt, unstopped it, and held it to his lips. He took a gulp of water, sputtered it out when another spasm seized him, then tried again. He swallowed several mouthfuls, and the paroxysm passed. Relaxing, he sat down heavily and took several long, deep breaths of the foul air. “Give me… a moment,” he puffed. “I’ll be fine…”

Brightdawn nodded, then started to close her waterskin again. She stopped, though, when she saw that its neck was flecked with blood. She looked at Riverwind in alarm. His lips gleamed red; seeing her stare, he quickly wiped his mouth.

“Father?” Brightdawn asked quietly.

“I said I’m fine!” the old Plainsman snapped. Glowering, he heaved himself to his feet and started to stumble down the passage again. “Come on,” he said. “We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

Brightdawn and Kronn exchanged worried glances, then followed.

The tunnel grew steadily worse, becoming more deformed. The air became smokier and closer, the heat like an oven. After several more leagues, the tremors began.

The first was little more than a dull rumble, shaking dust from the ceiling. They looked around, worried, but the stones around them soon stopped trembling, so they carried on. Only a few minutes later, though, a loud crack resounded through the tunnel. The floor seemed to fall away beneath their feet as the whole passage shook, and they fought to keep their balance, groping at the shuddering walls. Pieces of stone—some of them several inches across—clattered down around them. The quake lasted nearly a minute before it subsided, leaving them lying, gasping and wide-eyed, on the ground.

“Trapspringer’s boots,” Kronn muttered, standing shakily. “I didn’t like that very much.”

Riverwind looked up and down the passage as he rose. “I have a feeling things will only get worse, the closer we get to Blood Watch.”

Brightdawn lay sprawled on her back, looking up above them. “Father…” she murmured. “Look at the ceiling!”

They looked up. Above them, the shoring timbers that lined the ceiling had buckled and splintered. The wood continued to crackle as the rocks above them bulged slowly downward.

“Run!” Riverwind shouted. Grabbing his daughter’s arm and dragging her after him, he turned and dashed down the tunnel back the way they’d come. Kronn sprinted at their heels, his short legs pumping.

The ceiling groaned loudly. Then there was a terrible, snapping sound as the timbers gave way. Behind them, where they had been standing, the ceiling caved in, filling the tunnel with thundering stones. A blast of dust surged past them, caking their skin and clothes. Then, echoing dully, the crash faded to silence.

They slowed, then came to a halt and looked back, breathing heavily. Through the settling dust they saw that the tunnel was gone, choked with jagged rubble.

Kronn was the first to find his voice. “I guess that’s that,” he declared.

“What do we do now?” Brightdawn panted.

The kender pulled out his map and studied it for a moment. “Unless I’m wrong, we passed a way up to the surface about half a mile back.” Nodding firmly, he folded the parchment up again, stuffed it in a pocket, and began to walk. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here before the rest of it comes down.”

Lifesbreath, the kender had called the hills south of Blood Watch, and not without reason. Wedged between the thornbush-dotted Somber Coast and the grey, barren Hollowlands, it had been a green, vibrant place. The Heartsblood River had burbled noisily through its midst, flowing among drooping cottonwood trees. Clover and wildflowers had dotted the verdant slopes. Butterflies had danced on the breeze.

No more. The cottonwoods and butterflies were gone, the Heartsblood dried up and forgotten. The wildflowers would never bloom again. Lifesbreath had yielded to the Desolation.

Kronn stared around him, his eyes wide as he surveyed the dry, blasted wastelands. The ground, which had once rolled smoothly north to the sea, was riven with jagged cracks that hissed ash and steam. Mud and tar bubbled in wide, unclean pools. The wind was scorching, merciless. To the north, jagged, rust-colored peaks jutted skyward like serpent’s teeth. And beyond, at the rim of the angry ocean, a tall spire rose toward the black, hazy sky. The top of that mountain burned brightly, like a candle atop some unholy altar. All three travelers knew, with a gnawing in their guts, that they looked upon Blood Watch.

“This is what she’s doing to the Kenderwood,” Kronn said numbly.

“Kronn,” Riverwind said softly. He was ashen with horror at what he beheld, but he fought to keep his voice from trembling. “We need to keep moving. We’re running out of time.”

The kender hesitated a moment longer, crouching down and scooping up a handful of dry, gravelly soil. He held it up and let it sift through his fingers. Then, a harsh look in his eyes, he rose and started walking north, toward the smoldering volcano. Riverwind and Brightdawn followed at a distance, leaving the kender to his thoughts.

The journey across the mountains was slow and grueling, but not impossible. There were many passes among the peaks, and though he had no map to guide him, Kronn moved surely, always keeping the looming shape of Blood Watch before him. Riverwind and Brightdawn watched the slopes around them as they walked, wary of rockslides or worse, unnamable dangers. Once, they had to use Kronn’s chapak as a grappling hook to climb over a house-sized boulder that had fallen in their path, but most of the journey was mercifully without event.

Finally, two days after leaving Lifesbreath, as Mark Year Day faded into night, they crested a low, jagged ridge and stopped.

They stood at the edge of a broad, bleak valley. On the far side, directly across them, loomed Blood Watch. It towered impossibly high on the edge of the red sea, dwarfing the craggy peaks that surrounded it. In the darkness that had settled over the Desolation, the fires that burned on the mountaintop outshone even the full, pale moon, lighting the land all around. Glowing red lava snaked down the sides of the spire, and a cloud of black smoke roiled above it. Ash fell like snow from the sky, swathing the land in a blanket of gray. The air stank of sulfur and soot.

“Mishakal have mercy,” Brightdawn whispered, trembling at the sight of the volcano. “How do we get in there?”

Shading his eyes, Riverwind peered across the valley. After a moment, his gaze fixed on something. “There,” he said and pointed.

The others followed the gesture and saw what he had spotted. A low cavern mouth nestled at the foot of the mountain. Even from nearly a league away, they could see the hulking shapes of several ogres standing before the cave.

“Six of them,” Kronn said grimly. “Two each.”

A shower of pebbles slid down the rocky hillside as they scrambled down into the valley. They stopped at the bottom, watching to see if the ogres had heard, but the creatures didn’t move. Blood pounded in their ears, echoing the rumbling of the ground below their feet, as they glanced warily at the fiery mountaintop.

“I don’t mind telling you,” Kronn said unhappily, “I’m starting to feel a little bit of that fear everybody’s been talking about.”

The Plainsfolk regarded him a moment. Then Riverwind rested a sympathetic hand on the kender’s arm. “So am I,” he said.

Stealthily, they snuck across the valley floor, moving from shadow to shadow in the gathering twilight. As they went, they got a better view of the ogres. Two of them were crouched down on their haunches, apparently asleep, and the others stared into space or absently scuffed the stony ground with the toes of their boots. With nothing to guard against, they were anything but watchful. Riverwind and Kronn exchanged satisfied looks as they crept closer.

A hundred paces from the cavern mouth, they stopped and hunkered down behind a sharp outcropping of stone. Silently, Riverwind strung his bow and readied an arrow; Kronn grabbed a rock from the ground and fitted it into the sling-pouch of his chapak. Brightdawn readied her mace, keeping low.

A silent signal passed between Kronn and Riverwind. As one, they rose, the Plainsman drawing back his bowstring and the kender holding his chapak poised. Then arrow and stone flashed across the distance to the cave mouth. Two ogres dropped, pierced and pummeled.

Their death cries woke the two sleeping ogres and stirred the others to action. The four spotted Riverwind and Kronn and charged.

Riverwind feathered one of them in the chest as it ran, and it crashed to the ground, rolling to a stop in a tangle of arms and legs. Kronn’s second shot hit another in the knee, slowing it, but it didn’t fall. He cursed and shifted his chapak in his hand, readying it to use as an axe. Riverwind dropped his bow and yanked his sabre from its scabbard. Then the ogres were upon them.

The old Plainsman traded blows with a wart-covered brute who wielded a great iron-headed mace; Kronn faced off with a smaller beast wielding a spear. The wounded ogre loped onward, dragging its injured leg behind it.

Steel clashed, but the kender and the Plainsman drove back their foes, dodging and parrying, then lunging in to draw blood—a nick on one ogre’s shoulder, a gash on the other’s thigh. The ogres were strong, though. Handpicked by Kurthak the Black-Gazer to guard Malystryx’s lair, they did not fall easily.

Brightdawn didn’t immediately enter the fray. She continued to crouch out of sight, watching the third ogre’s halting approach. It never saw her coming. As it rounded the outcropping, she leaped out in front of it, swinging her mace with both hands. Her weapon struck the ogre squarely in the face, and there was blood everywhere as its suddenly lifeless weight crashed down on top of her.

She wriggled out from beneath the corpse just in time to see her father slide his sabre through his opponent’s chest. Before that ogre hit the ground, Kronn buried his chapak in his own foe’s belly. It doubled over as he jerked the axe free, and he brought his weapon down on the back of his head.

Panting, the three of them paused and leaned against the outcropping while they gathered their strength. They looked around, half-expecting to see the gigantic form of the dragon watching them from above, but there was nothing. They appeared to be alone in the valley.

“That was easy enough,” Kronn said wryly. He wiped his bloody axe on a dead ogre’s sleeve. Then the three of them crossed the last, short distance to the cavern mouth.

It was dark in the cave, so Kronn pulled a torch from his pack, struck his axe against the rocky side of the volcano to light it, and shone the brand inside. The cavern was wide and deep, narrowing at the back to a tunnel that led into the heart of the volcano. The passage’s walls were rounded and glassy, reflecting the glimmer of the torchlight. In the distance, there was a dull, ruddy lambency coming from somewhere far inside the mountain. The three companions looked at one another, resolved, then entered the cavern and started down the long, snaking tunnel.

They did not see the lithe, black-cloaked figure emerge from the shadows and steal after them.

The last of the Kender Flight had to be out of the city by dawn that morning. The streets lay empty waiting, as the final kender whose lots had been drawn bade farewell to those who would stay behind, then walked down the stairs into the dark, ancient catacombs. When they were gone, Catt Thistleknot and Giffel Birdwhistle stood at the same entrance where Riverwind and his companions had departed a week before, and looked out over Kendermore.

“Strange,” Catt said. “It doesn’t really feel like home anymore.”

Paxina faced them, ready for war. She had shed her purple mayoral robes, leaving them in the audience chamber of City Hall. In their place she wore a breastplate and greaves of boiled leather. Her arms were bare, save for a pair of metal bracers. Her face was daubed with red paint—a fanciful touch she had picked up in her youth, among the Kagonesti in Ergoth. In her hand she held her hoopak; on her hip was a sack of slingstones. She wore no other pouches.

With her were Moonsong and Stagheart, similarly clad for battle. The Plainswoman held a staff in her hands, while her companion wore his sword and bow. There was also Arlie Longfinger, who had neither armor nor weapon despite his friends’ insistence.

“You take care of that arm of yours, now,” the old herbalist said, squinting at Catt through his thick spectacles. The sling had finally come off just a few days ago, and she still held her arm tenderly.

Paxina glanced at the eastern horizon, which was brightening from black to deep blue. “You should go,” she said. “It won’t be long now.”

Catt stepped forward and kissed her sister on the cheek. “I’ll see you in a few days,” she said.

“Sure thing,” Paxina said, grinning. She pulled a dagger from her belt and cut off her cheek braids. She held the locks of hair for a moment, then handed them to her sister.

Catt nodded, understanding, and kicked the braids into a small doeskin pouch. Returning Paxina’s smile, she turned and walked to the top of the stairs. Giffel took her hand, and together they descended into the tunnels.

Paxina listened to them go until the sound of their footsteps faded away. Then she turned to the others, her war-painted face hard with determination, and nodded.

“Let’s get ready,” she said.

On the second day of the new year, and Kendermore’s last, Kurthak stood just within the tree line, watching the sun rise. He shifted his gaze to the city across the meadow. Apart from a few sentries atop her walls, the town slumbered complacently. The Black-Gazer’s mouth curled into a malicious smile.

“Send out messengers,” he said. “Wake the horde.”

Tragor looked up. He was sitting on a tree stump behind Kurthak, scraping a whetstone alone the blade of his massive sword. He dropped the stone immediately, rising from his seat. “Is it time?”

“Not yet,” the Black-Gazer answered. “But I want everyone ready when Malystryx gives the order. Move.”

Grunting, Tragor headed off into the woods. A few minutes later he was back at Kurthak’s side, and a dozen ogres ran around the edges of the meadow, spreading the word to prepare for the attack. Kurthak watched in satisfaction as his army came to life.

They gathered at the edge of the barren, parched waste that had once been the meadow surrounding Kendermore, buckling on armor of leather and bronze and slamming crude iron helmets onto their heads. Their massive fists clenched the hafts of axes and clubs, spear shafts and sword hilts. Others gathered armfuls of javelins and handed them to their fellows. They gnawed cold, gristly meat from the bones of last night’s meal and took deep swigs from skins of skunky ale. Here and there they raised their voices in droning war chants, accompanied by the rumble of massive drums. Standard-bearers appeared at the tree line, raising the emblems of their war bands—crude leather flags, poles hung with bones and animal skulls, and stakes mounted with the severed, withered heads of kender, around which buzzed clouds of black, stinging, flies. A great cheer went up as these gruesome trophies appeared, and the standard-bearers shook them wildly, the sallow, foul-smelling heads knocking against one another as they swung by their topknots.

As the sun cleared the eastern horizon, a low, angry rumble began to build among the ogres, swiftly growing into a chorus of furious roars and vicious snarls. A forest of weapons and horny fists raised in the air, pumping up and down in time with the clamor. Those from the more savage war bands slashed their flesh with stone knives, smearing themselves with their own blood as they whipped themselves into a frenzy of battlelust. In many places, Kurthak’s officers had to physically restrain the shrieking, frothing ogres to keep them from charging onto the field. Ogres from rival tribes growled and spat on one another. The horde—nearly ten thousand ogres in all, completely encircling the clearing and the city within—grew more and more rabid as Kurthak watched. If the signal to attack didn’t come soon, he knew, the crazed brutes would turn on one another in their rage. Despite this, however, he did nothing—only waited as his horde seethed around him. Anticipation scorched the air.

Time passed. The shadows of the city walls grew steadily shorter. Then, an hour after dawn, Kurthak felt a dark stirring inside his mind. Recognizing the feeling, he fought back the instinct to resist. His eyes lost focus as the stirring became a presence, and the presence became a voice.

Black-Gazer, it said.

“Malystryx,” he whispered. Tragor looked at him sharply. “Your egg?”

Is safe. Are your people ready?

“Yes.”

Good. It is time.

The voice faded, but the presence remained. Kurthak looked at Tragor and nodded. “Sound the attack,” he said.

With a sanguine leer, the Black-Gazer’s champion pulled a long, curving horn from his belt. He raised it to his lips and blew a single, blaring note.