Chapter 25

Moonsong groaned loudly and stumbled, nearly falling, as she dashed down Tornado Alley. Stagheart, running beside her, caught her arm. She doubled over, gasping desperately for breath that wouldn’t come. Her face grew deathly pale, seeming to age before Stagheart’s eyes. Kender surged all around them, fleeing from the toppled walls toward the center of Kendermore.

Nervously, Stagheart looked over his shoulder. The ogres’ bloodthirsty shouts were growing louder all around as they swarmed into the city He tightened his grip on Moonsong’s wrist. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Brightdawn…” Moonsong sobbed, her shoulders heaving. She looked up at him, her blue eyes brimming with anguish. “Stagheart, she’s dead. My sister’s dead.”

He swayed on his feet, his chest tightening, then forced himself to swallow the acid taste in his mouth. “You’re sure?” he asked gently.

“I know!” she cried. “Stagheart. She’s gone.”

The roars of the ogres were very near now; the mobs of running kender were thinning.

“And your father?” Stagheart pressed urgently.

Moonsong shook her head. “I don’t know. Oh, goddess. What if they’ve failed?” She sucked a shuddering breath through her teeth, shivering convulsively.

Stagheart could see the ogres now, at the far end of the broad, straight street. They were moving swiftly, chasing a mob of shouting kender. He drew his sabre and pulled her away. “Come on,” he told her. “We have to keep moving. Paxina’s waiting for us.”

The sharpness of his voice reached her. Swallowing her grief, she started to run.

The Black-Gazer’s horde spread into the streets of Kendermore, pursuing the retreating kender. Their quarry led them on, running hard to gain ground, then waiting for the ogres to catch up, always keeping maddeningly just out of reach. Each time they stopped, the kender turned around to mock their foes, pointing and laughing, their voices rising in a chorus of sweet-sounding derision.

“Do the lice ever complain about how bad you smell?” they shouted gleefully.

“What are you, nine feet tall?” asked others. “I didn’t know they piled dung that high!”

“Do ogre women really like men whose teeth look like smutty corn cobs?”

“Say, you’ve got a great big boil right—oh, sorry that’s your face.”

“Wow! A five-hundred-pound walking wart!”

“Hey, liver-brain! I’ve seen things living under rocks that could outwit you!”

“So, when did you find out your sister and your grandmother were the same person?”

“Great Reorx, you’re ugly. One look at you would make Lord Soth cry for his mother! What are you, part troll or something?”

“Scumlickers!”

“Pigspawn!”

“Overgrown, dimwitted, bandy-legged, slack-jawed, dirt-sucking heaps of rotten goblin excrement!”

Already enraged by the deaths of their comrades, the ogres went utterly berserk. Howling with mindless fury, they charged blindly down the streets after the jeering kender. The kender ran onward, shouting a constant stream of insults as they led the ogres through the confusion of Kendermore’s streets.

Gradually, deliberately, the kender broke up the horde. They split at each fork or intersection, drawing their pursuers in every direction. The ogres surged along the tangled avenues, running as fast as their tree-trunk legs would carry them.

The kender knew where the trip wires were. They saw them as they ran, and hurdled nimbly over them. The ogres, however, could see little but their own crimson rage. They hit the wires, stumbling and falling headlong onto the cobblestones. All over Kendermore, the same thing happened. Hundreds of ogres died, their bodies crushed by the weight of those who came after them.

Many of the trip wires did no more than that; others, however, set off all sorts of booby traps. On Tallowwax Way, a tall rowhouse collapsed, crashing down on the charging ogres and choking the street with broken stone. Across town, on Applebloom Trail, countless caltrops poured from roofs and rainspouts, clattering onto the street like barbed hailstones and crippling anyone who stepped on them. On Tornado Alley, in Moonsong and Stagheart’s wake, a series of wires caused the strings of two hundred carefully arranged crossbows to thrum. Scores of ogres collapsed, their bodies riddled with quarrels. All across the town, pits and snares and rockfalls slaughtered Kendermore’s attackers without mercy.

On Greentwig Avenue, the ogres swarmed over their comrades’ trampled corpses as they continued to chase the kender. They ran with all the speed they could muster, and even caught some of their quarry seizing several unlucky kender and tearing them apart in mindless rage. Still the surviving kender ran, their taunts growing more vicious. As the street twisted and turned, they ducked down alleys or into narrow doorways, their numbers diminishing until only eight remained, pursued by a hundred raging ogres.

Two lagged behind, and the ogres caught them, snapping their necks with their bare hands.

Then, suddenly, they rounded a corner and reached the dead end. A brand-new, twenty-foot stone wall blocked the road, stretching between two four-storey rowhouses.

The remaining six kender didn’t stop, however; in front of them, less than a dozen yards before the wall, were several catapults. They sprinted to the devices and leapt onto their arms. As the ogres rounded the corner behind them, the kender released the catapults’ catches.

The machines’ arms sprung, launching the kender aloft. Behind and below them, the ogres skidded to a halt, staring in astonishment as their quarry flew high into the air, vaulting up and over the wall.

On the wall’s far side, Greentwig Avenue was heaped with loose straw. The kender landed in it, rolled, then leapt up and ran onward, laughing with reckless glee. Back in the dead end, the ogres gawked at the abandoned catapults. Their prey suddenly out of reach, they snarled savagely, shaking their weapons in angry impotence.

When the low, whirring sound first began, the ogres’ eyes narrowed, and they peered about in confusion. The noise seemed to come from all around them, an irritating drone that slowly grew into a loud, high-pitched scream—the shriek of dozens of hoopaks, swinging in unison.

Then the ogres’ confusion gave way to panic as slingstones began to rain down on them from above. Kender appeared on the rooftops of the tall row houses, flinging rocks down into the street. The ogres dropped in waves, filling the air with cries of pain. Those who didn’t fall at first tried to flee, scrambling back away from the wall in a desperate attempt to escape the ambush. More ogres kept coming around the corner from the other direction, however, trapping their fellows and leaving them exposed to the hail of stones. When the last handful of surviving ogres finally broke and ran, they left more than a hundred of their comrades’ battered bodies behind.

So it went throughout the city. Kender led ogres along, dividing them, trapping them and leading them to their deaths in Kendermore’s twisting, mazelike streets. But there were still hundreds of ogres, and there was no stopping them all. Whenever one fell, another stepped over its body to take its place. Though a great many died, they continued to push deeper into the city, down Strawberry Boulevard, up winding Straight Street, along Whitehare Lane and Horsetail Avenue. Hundreds of unlucky kender perished when they stumbled as they ran or tarried too long to taunt their foes.

Inexorably, the ogres overwhelmed Kendermore, pressing inward on all sides, toward the middle of town. In the end, barely two thousand ogres remained—but they had conquered the kender capital.

Which was just what the kender wanted.

The glow of the magma pool faded behind Riverwind and Kronn as they marched onward, following the sinuous, obsidian tunnel. They walked for an hour in silence, pausing only long enough for the kender to light another torch when the shadows grew too deep to see. From time to time, Kronn looked up at the old Plainsman, a question on his lips, then looked away when he saw the fierce scowl that twisted Riverwind’s face.

The passage began to wind upward, like a snake rising to strike. The floor’s glossy surface gave their feet little to grip, slowing them considerably as they fought to keep from slipping. They gripped the walls, pressing their hands against the smooth stone to keep themselves upright. Their legs burned with pain at every faltering step, and the tunnel’s slope grew ever steeper. Once Kronn’s right foot slid out from beneath him, and he stumbled, grunting with pain as his knee struck the floor. He slipped back several feet, scrabbling to stop himself, before Riverwind’s strong hand caught his sleeve. Straining, the Plainsman pulled Kronn back to his feet.

At last the tunnel leveled out, its slope becoming more and more gentle, until finally they could rest without fear of falling. They sank to the ground, panting as they leaned back against the walls. Riverwind groaned, holding a hand against his belly, then leaned over sideways and retched, his chest heaving violently. When the spasm passed, he sat back upright, wiping his mouth with a weak, shaking hand. He smeared blood across his lips.

“Riverwind?” Kronn asked.

The old Plainsman’s eyes rolled toward the kender. A moment passed before they lit with recognition. “Kronn.”

“How long have you known you are dying?” Kronn asked.

“Many months. That’s why I was in Solace when you and Catt arrived—to say goodbye to my friends.”

“And you still came with us?” the kender asked, astounded. “Why?”

“Because I knew no one else would,” Riverwind replied softly.

After another ten minutes of walking, a light glimmered before them once more. The air grew warm, and a sound rose—a slow rhythm of rushing air, like the pumping of elephantine bellows.

Kronn doused his torch, and they crept stealthily onward through the gloom. The light before them brightened. The passage wound sharply to the left, then arrowed straight for nearly a hundred yards. At its end, they could see, it opened into another chamber.

They traveled that last hundred yards on their bellies, listening to the steady whoosh of the dragon’s breath. Finally, they reached the end of the tunnel.

It opened out into a vast, vaulted cavern, even larger than the magma chamber. Orange firelight danced upon the walls, casting shifting shadows that seemed somehow alive. Looking up, they saw the wide shaft in the nest’s ceiling and the telltale clawmarks in the stone at its edges. Swallowing, the kender and the Plainsman shifted their gazes down, to the floor of the cavern a hundred feet below. Riverwind sucked in a sharp breath.

Malystryx covered the floor of the cave, her wings tucked in at her sides, her head held low to the ground. Her scaly, scarlet sides moved in and out as she breathed. Her body was coiled, wrapped around something in the middle of the chamber. They couldn’t see what she encircled, but they guessed.

The dragonfear that rose from her motionless form crushed Kronn and Riverwind into the ground, paralyzing them where they lay even as their minds screamed at them to flee. Madness clawed at them, and they quivered with terror and dread.

“Blessed goddess,” Riverwind hissed. Kronn whimpered softly beside him.

They lay upon the ledge at the tunnel’s mouth for what seemed like hours, listening to Malys’s breathing, waiting for her head to snap up and her golden eyes to fix upon them. The dragon, however, took no notice of them. Her attention was elsewhere, many leagues away.

Malystryx’s presence was a white-hot cinder in Kurthak’s mind as he and Tragor strode down Elbowpoke Way, toward the center of Kendermore. The street was littered with corpses from both sides of the battle, but there were three slain ogres for every kender who lay broken upon the ground.

The dragon’s voice swelled within him. Black-Gazer, it whispered, menacing. What has happened?

“My people,” Kurthak answered. “Slaughtered…”

Slaughtered? the voice shrieked, forging a stabbing pain behind the hetman’s eyes. By the kender? How?

“Trickery,” he replied. He spat angrily on the ground.

Then you are beaten?

“No!” he snarled. He raised his spiked club, which was stained with kender blood. “We have them cornered now. We will destroy them.”

“There, my lord!” Tragor said suddenly, pointing with his sword. Kurthak looked past the red-dripping blade and saw what his champion had spotted. A group of kender—he counted ten—had stepped out from a side street onto Elbowpoke Way. They froze, staring at the hetman and his champion.

Kurthak glared back at them balefully. “Wait,” he said as Tragor started forward. “It could be another trap.”

Obediently, his champion stopped, waiting tensely. Kurthak’s brow furrowed as he regarded the kender. Seeing the unfeigned fear on their faces, he smiled. This was no trick. The kender were caught, paralyzed by the sight of the two ogres. He charged, his club held high. Tragor ran with him.

The kender faltered, too surprised to react before the ogres struck. Kurthak brought his club down on a female kender’s head, crushing her where she stood. Tragor waded into the battle a heartbeat later. He swung his sword low, cutting a male in half across the stomach. He reversed the stroke, sending another kender’s head skipping away across the cobblestones. Kurthak savagely smashed a fourth. It crumpled, its back broken.

Panicking, the remaining kender tried to flee. Tragor slashed two of them in half with one sweep of his sword. Kurthak swatted a third into the air. The kender flew across the width of Elbowpoke Way, its neck flopping limply, and struck the side of a house before sliding to the ground. The two ogres turned to face their remaining opponents. Two warriors faced them, one armed with a hoopak and the other wielding a battak. Just behind them was an old, unarmed male, quivering with fright as he squinted through a pair of bottle-thick spectacles.

“Run, Arlie!” the hoopak-wielder shouted. He glanced over his shoulder at the old man. “We’ll try and hold—”

Before he could finish, Tragor drove his sword through the kender’s body. The other warrior charged toward Kurthak, swinging his battak. The hetman batted aside the desperate blow with his club, then lashed out in response, crushing his attacker’s skull.

Arlie Longfinger backed away, terrified. Kurthak strode forward, snarling, and slammed his club down on the old herbalist’s head. The Black-Gazer pounded Arlie’s body until nothing remained but a lifeless pulp.

Enough, Malys’s voice said within his mind. He is dead. Where are your followers, Black-Gazer?

His nostrils flaring angrily, Kurthak turned away from Arlie’s battered corpse and stalked off down Elbowpoke Way. Tragor followed, teeth bared in a feral snarl.

Soon they caught up with a bedraggled group of a hundred ogres, most of them wounded. The group, which was all that remained of a band three times that number, pursued one group of jeering kender.

“Hey!” the kender taunted. “Do you smear yourselves with filth on purpose, or does it just happen naturally?”

Kurthak and Tragor added their voices to the chorus of roars that erupted from the ogre band. They chased the kender around bend after bend in the road, yearning for slaughter. Then, suddenly, they rounded a corner and stepped into the cleared quadrangle in Kendermore’s midst.

A pitched battle was raging, all across the yard. A thousand ogres pressed toward the quadrangle’s midst from all sides, hacking and stabbing madly at a cluster of a few hundred kender. The kender fought back desperately, their weapons clashing and clattering. Many of their number lay sprawled in pools of blood, but somehow the survivors held their own, keeping the remnants of the horde at bay. In their midst stood three figures Kurthak recognized. Two were Plainsfolk—a young man and woman—and the third was the silver-haired kender who had stood atop the merlons that morning. With them were several dozen archers, who clustered around glowing braziers, arrows nocked on their bowstrings.

The kender fought valiantly, but they were clearly doomed. More and more ogres staggered into the yard, bloody and bruised from the gauntlet they had run through Kendermore’s streets. Every time one of Kurthak’s troops fell to the kender’s whirling hoopaks, another stepped forward to take its place. The battlefront began to constrict as the ogres slowly pressed inward.

Paxina Thistleknot turned and met the Black-Gazer’s hateful glare. Her lips curled into a tight, vulpine smile, then she said something to the archers.

Sensing something was wrong, Kurthak cast about wildly. He sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling. A pungent reek hung over the quadrangle, thick enough to bring tears to the hetman’s good eye. Casting about, he quickly spotted the source of the smell. The walls of the tall houses and shops surrounding the yard were covered with thick, black grease.

“What is that?” he asked.

Tragor looked, frowning, then reached out, brushing the nearest wall with his fingertips. They came away smeared with grime. He rubbed them together, held them up to his nose. Then he turned back toward Kurthak “It’s pitch,” he said.

“Ready!” shouted Paxina.

As one, the archers touched the tips of their arrows to the smoldering braziers. The shafts’ tips, wrapped in oily rags, burst aflame. The archers pulled their bowstrings back to their cheeks, aiming high. Kurthak’s eyes widened with understanding.

“Fire!” Paxina cried.

A multitude of twangs rang out. The arrows flew high, arcing above the seething battle, then dropped toward the houses at the quadrangle’s edges. A blazing shaft whizzed past Tragor’s head, embedding itself in the wall before him. He stared at it, blinking in surprise.

The wall exploded with fire. Tragor screamed as flames flared out around him, enveloping his body. Kurthak could do nothing but stare in horror as his champion became a living, howling torch. Tragor staggered back from the building, dropping his sword and beating wildly at the sheath of fire that surrounded him. He shrieked in agony, fell to his knees, then crashed face forward onto the ground. His burning body twitched violently, then was still.

The building he had been standing before rapidly became an inferno. It wasn’t the only one. The archers’ flaming arrows struck dozens of other houses, setting them alight as well. The fire spread with shocking speed, leaping from one pitch-soaked building to the next. In moments, the quadrangle was surrounded by a ring of flame.

Through the heat-shimmering air, Kurthak saw plumes of black smoke rise where other blazes were breaking out all over Kendermore. The crackling of burning wood grew deafening, drowning out the clamor of battle.

“What are they doing?” the Black-Gazer shouted. “They’re burning their own city!”

The ogres panicked, searching vainly for a way out of the trap. In that moment, the tide of the battle turned. The kender in the quadrangle’s midst pushed forward, slashing and stabbing. Many of the ogres died; others broke and ran, screaming as they sought to escape the conflagration.

But the kender knew their home. They knew which streets to block, which buildings to set alight. Most of them managed to escape, running out of the city ahead of the flames; others dove down tunnel entrances, scattering in all directions through the passages. For Kurthak’s horde, however, there was no escape. Sheets of flame blocked their way; burning buildings collapsed, filling the streets with fiery rubble. Ogres perished by the score, overcome by fire and choking smoke.

Kurthak stood amidst it all, hewing about him with his club. He spotted a group of four taunting kender, who had just killed two ogres and were trying to escape through the smoke. They saw him as he charged toward them, and turned to run. One of them, a tow-headed boy in bright blue trousers, lagged behind his fellows: Kurthak knocked him flat, then smashed his cudgel down, spattering the young kender’s blood on the cobblestones. The other three glanced back, horrified, but did not slow their pace: they ran onward, through a roiling wall of smoke. He gave chase, but when he cleared the other side of the pall, they were nowhere to be seen. He cast about, growling in frustration, but the kender were gone. Enraged he lashed out with his club at the nearest available target: a stack of water barrels, piled high against the wall of a burning blacksmith’s shop. The barrels shattered, splinters of wood flying everywhere. He began to turn away, then stopped, confused. Where was the water?

Looking down, he confirmed his suspicions: the barrels had been bone-dry, empty. He kicked at the broken staves, pushing them aside, and saw the hole in the ground.

It was dark and small, too tight for him to squeeze through, but large enough to admit a kender… or three. It led down into the ground, its earthen stairs freshly scuffed by passing feet. He gawked at it, dumbfounded. Then his mouth dropped open with sudden comprehension. All at once, he knew—how the kender had eluded his people at Myrtledew, how they had fled the inexorable advance of the horde toward Kendermore, how, even now, they were escaping the inferno they had made of their city. He reeled, nausea twisting his stomach as he stared into the tunnel entrance.

Off to his left, a burning house collapsed, littering the ground with stone and blazing timbers. The deafening crash roused him, bringing him back to his senses. He glanced back into the quadrangle, through the billowing smoke. The remaining kender were making short work of his people, then melting away into the shadows—fleeing, he realized, into the safety of their subterranean passages. At that moment, Kurthak the Black-Gazer knew his horde was utterly beaten and that he would die here with his people if he didn’t get help soon.

He sought that help in the only place left to him: his mind. Concentrating, he focused on the presence that simmered within him, seeking the other who dwelt in his thoughts. “Malystryx!” he begged, speaking the words aloud even as he thought them. “Mistress, hear me.”

I am here, Black-Gazer, Malys’s voice growled. What is happening?

“We are betrayed!” he shouted. “The kender have tricked us! They destroy their own city and flee through tunnels, under the ground! We are doomed!”

For several heartbeats, Malystryx didn’t respond. Then a white-hot star exploded inside Kurthak’s head as she forced her way into his brain, ripping into his memories, seeing what had happened, how the ogres had been fooled. Her disgust flooded his mind, and he doubled over, gagging.

Imbecile, her voice snapped in his mind. They set a trap for you, and you charged right into the middle. And I had such hopes for you.

“Help me, Mistress,” the Black-Gazer begged, his throat so tight he nearly strangled on the words. “Please…”

She laughed, then, a cruel, hissing sound that made ice of Kurthak’s heart.

Help you? she echoed mockingly. Whatever for? You have earned your fate, fool.

“I have served you,” Kurthak whimpered. “I’ve done your bidding. You owe me—”

The pain in his mind grew even stronger than before, blinding him, driving him to his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut, his voice giving way to a silent, agonized scream as the dragon tore his mind apart.

“Owe you?” he shrieked, but it was Malystryx’s voice that issued from his mouth, not his own. “I owe you nothing! You have failed, and you will pay. I will see to it! I will burn everything: the forest, the kender in their tunnels, and yes, Kurthak, you and your pathetic horde. I will burn you all until nothing remains!”

Then, in an eyeblink, she was gone from his tattered mind. Kurthak knelt on the stones for a time, retching. Smoke and screaming surrounded him. Then, roaring with senseless rage, he lunged to his feet again and charged back into the quadrangle. He swung his spiked club wildly, lashing out on all sides. Kender and ogres alike fell around him as he cut a bloody swath across the yard. He sought neither escape nor vengeance; such things were beyond him now. Abandoned by his mistress, unable to stop his horde from falling to pieces around him, Kurthak the Black-Gazer went mad.

A wave of smoke blew in his face, stinging his eyes, but he kept on going, a juggernaut of insane wrath. He only stopped when he reached the far side of the yard and saw the burning buildings before him, barring his way. Crying out in impotent anger, he started to turn around, to charge back into the fray.

He did not see Paxina. She ran toward him on his left, his blind side. He only realized she was there when the spiked butt of her hoopak plunged into his flank. Using her own momentum, the Lord Mayor drove four feet of ironwood through his bowels.

He spun, his left arm lashing out. The back of his hand caught Paxina square in her chest, lifting her off the ground and hurling her away. She struck the ground hard, landing in a motionless heap at the foot of a burning house. He started to turn toward her, but staggered, his head spinning. Hot blood coursed from the wound in his side. His world began to grow dark.

“Malys,” he wheezed. He took two faltering steps, then stumbled to his knees. “Help me.”

Stagheart came out of the smoke, his sabre flashing. Kurthak tried to block the vicious slash, but he no longer had the strength to raise his club. The Plainsman’s sword opened his throat. Choking, Kurthak the Black-Gazer died.

Malystryx’s eyes flared wide, blazing with rage. Above her, Riverwind and Kronn drew back from the rim of the ledge, shaking with fear. She didn’t see them; her wrath consumed her.

“No, my precious kender,” she hissed in a voice as deep and dark as an ossuary. “You may think the game is done, but it is not. You will not escape. Your tunnels will not save you. My flames will find you, even far beneath the earth.”

With unnerving speed, she uncoiled herself, rose on her hind legs, and leapt into the air. Her gargantuan form streaked past Kronn and Riverwind, up toward the rift in the ceiling. With a scraping of scales against stone, she pulled herself through the shaft. Her sinuous tail flicked with anger, then vanished from sight as she crawled out of her lair.

Riverwind and Kronn stared at the ceiling, watching chips of stone rattle down from the shaft and listening to the echoes of the dragon’s passage fade away. Even when the cavern was silent again, they continued to gaze upward, as if waiting for the enormous crimson head to reappear. At last, though, they let out their long-held breaths, and looked down at the floor of the nest.

The egg was loathsome, a leathery abomination six feet long and nearly half as high. It nestled in the middle of the floor, half-buried in a wide bed of warm, white ash. Orange firelight flickered across its rust-red shell, though there were no flames to be seen. Riverwind and Kronn beheld it with silent revulsion.

Wordlessly, the kender unscrewed the cap on the butt of his chapak’s haft. He unspooled the long silk rope from the weapon, slung the axe across his back again, and lashed one end of the line soundly around a rock outcropping at the ledge’s lip. He yanked it hard, testing it, then checked the knot and nodded with satisfaction.

“It’ll hold,” he declared, grabbing the rope with both hands and swinging a leg over the edge.

“No,” Riverwind said, catching his arm before he could go farther. “I will go first.”

Kronn met the old Plainsman’s firm, unwavering gaze. Seeing the resolve there, he hoisted himself back onto the ledge and handed the rope to Riverwind.

“Watch your step,” he said.

Gripping the rope with strong hands, Riverwind lowered himself toward the distant cavern floor.

Moonsong fought her way through the smoke and the press of bodies. The ogres ignored her, trying to flee or hewing wildly at the kender. She saw Stagheart, standing over the body of the ogres’ hetman. She saw Paxina’s hoopak, lodged in Kurthak’s gut. Then, turning, she saw the Lord Mayor sprawled on the ground like a discarded doll. The house Paxina lay beside groaned loudly, its flame-eaten walls starting to buckle. Blazing cinders rained down around the Lord Mayor’s body.

Moonsong ran, dropping to her knees beside Paxina’s unmoving form. As gently as she could, she turned the Lord Mayor over. Paxina’s face was pale beneath the war paint and soot. Checking furtively, Moonsong found the lifebeat in the kender’s throat. She whispered a prayer of thanks, not caring that Mishakal wasn’t there to hear.

“Paxina?” she asked urgently. “Can you hear me?”

The Lord Mayor groaned, her eyelids fluttering open. She looked up at Moonsong and grinned weakly. “Wow,” she said. “Those ogres can sure pack a wallop when they want to.”

A loud creaking sounded above them. Moonsong glanced up and saw the house shift slightly, leaning over them like a smith’s hammer above the anvil. Shards of pitch-soaked plaster broke off the walls, shattered against the cobbles all around them. Cold with fear, Moonsong grabbed Paxina’s hands and dragged her to her feet. The Lord Mayor was still stunned by Kurthak’s blow, however, and her knees buckled limply beneath her. The house continued to crumple, beams and timbers protesting loudly as they gave way.

There were tears in Moonsong’s eyes as she dragged Paxina along with her. “Come on,” she pleaded. “You have to help me. I can’t carry you—you’ve got to walk.”

“I can’t,” Paxina replied. “I can’t feel my legs, Moonsong.” She glanced up at the sagging building. Slate shingles slid from its roof, smashing to finders as they struck the ground. Her eyes hardened. “You’d better leave me.”

Moonsong paled, her eyes widening. “What?”

“You heard me,” Paxina replied firmly. “Find Stagheart, and get out of Kendermore, through the tunnels. I’ll only slow you down. Tell Kronn and Catt I’m sorry …”

Moonsong ignored her. She grabbed Paxina and tried to drag her away from the burning house. The kender’s weight was too much for her, though. They had scarcely gone ten feet when a loud crack split the air. Looking up, Moonsong saw the house’s flaming wall begin to topple.

“Go!” Paxina shouted. Somehow, she twisted free of Moonsong’s grasp. Before the Plainswoman could do anything, the kender shoved her with all her might, sending her stumbling away from the toppling building.

As she staggered, Moonsong saw Stagheart running toward her from Kurthak’s corpse. Then she tripped, crashing headlong to the ground. As she rolled to a stop, she caught a glimpse of Paxina lying on her back, a smile on her face.

“Oh, well,” the Lord Mayor said, unafraid. “It was fun while it lasted.”

Then the house fell on them both, and the world crashed down in fire and darkness. Moonsong smelled hair and flesh burning. Then nothing.

Stagheart shouted in incoherent anguish, reaching out for Moonsong as she collapsed. Then, with a deafening roar, a deluge of blazing plaster and smoldering timbers poured down on her, and she disappeared.

“No!” he roared.

Recklessly he surged forward into the burning rubble. Muscles straining, he lifted pieces of smoldering wood and heaved them aside. He burnt both his hands as he dug, but he didn’t care. Tears washed Kurthak’s blood from his face. He called Moonsong’s name again and again.

When he lifted a charred board and saw her hand, he let out a ragged cry of relief and dread. Working quickly, he picked up debris and heaved it aside. He grabbed beams he should not have been able to lift; desperation fueled his strength, however, and he tossed them away like twigs. At last, he uncovered Moonsong’s body.

Burning pitch covered half her face, searing her flesh. Sobbing, he clawed it away, not noticing as blisters rose on his fingers. Underneath the tar, Moonsong’s skin was bright red. He ignored the sight of it and put aside the sweet stench of seared skin as he lifted her up and carried her out of the wreckage.

He didn’t go back for Paxina; there was nothing more he could do for her. The house’s upper floors, which had fallen on Moonsong, had been made of wood and plaster, but the lowest, the one that had buried the Lord Mayor, had been hewn of fitted stone. Where Paxina had been, moments before, there was only a crude cairn of jagged rubble.

Stagheart glanced around. The yard was all but empty: the ogres were all dead, and most of the kender were gone. Buildings were crashing to the ground everywhere, sending storms of cinders shooting up into the smoke-darkened sky. The heat of the burning city made it hard to breathe.

Holding Moonsong’s limp form close to him, trying not to jostle her, he began to run. He sprinted through pools of blood, skirted around huge and small bodies, then came to a halt at the edge of a dark shaft that led down beneath the ground. A pile of corpses marked where the kender had made a stand, holding off the ogres while their fellows fled. Stagheart stared at them a moment with raw, red eyes, then dashed down the stairs, out of the shambles of Kendermore.

Of the ten thousand kender who had stayed behind to defend their city nearly half perished in the battle. Those who fled through the tunnels emerged several leagues to the west and quickly caught up with the far greater numbers who had escaped through Kendermore’s sundered walls. They struggled wearily onward through the dead forest, straining toward the distant fields of Balifor. Word of Paxina Thistleknot’s death spread quickly, and the kender wept for her, but they did not slow their pace. There was still a long way to go.

Less than an hour after the last survivors escaped Kendermore, however, one young kender glanced back at the plume of black smoke rising from the city’s ruins and cried out in terror. The fleeing kender stopped, turned, then echoed his exclamation with sobs and screams of their own.

In the distance, too small yet to see clearly but growing steadily larger, a red, winged form streaked across the sky.