His departure left his parents alone.
“Tor was asking me why you spend so much time with Garn Bloodfist,” Tarn barked. “It’s come to this: even the child is talking about it! Have you no sense of propriety?”
“There’s nothing improper about it. He’s in his cell; I’m outside. And the turnkey is right there, watching, at the foot of the stairs,” Crystal replied, perhaps a little too casually.
She crossed the apartment to the small kitchen, pulled a piece of cheese from the chillbox, and started to carve thin slices. “I brought a loaf of bread from the baker. Do you want a sandwich?” she asked.
“Don’t change the subject!” he snapped, though his stomach rumbled in spite of himself as the rich, pungent odor of the cheese spread through the room. “I think you should stop going down there,” he said, his bristling chin jutting belligerently.
Crystal cut two more slices, the knife thunking solidly into the wooden cutting block with each stroke. When she turned around to face him, Tarn was surprised to see tears in her eyes.
His immediate reaction to her distress was anger. “Does he really mean that much to you?” he challenged. “I should think a dwarf who tried to exterminate a thousand of your kinfolk would be somewhat less attractive than, say, your own husband!”
“Stop it!” she hissed, shaking her head, setting her graying hair-still long and silky-shaking around her shoulders. “Don’t you see that I’m trying to understand his hate? Trying to see how he could contemplate such an atrocity? How any dwarf, present company included, could cling to such ancient and outmoded hatreds!”
“I don’t hate hill dwarves!” Tarn spluttered, surprised by her retort.
“But you still don’t trust them, do you?” Crystal said. “Even though you signed a treaty with them, pledging an alliance for the future. You’re doing everything you can to see that the agreement is never completed.”
“How can I trust the cursed Neidar!” the exiled king shouted, nearly exploding. “They almost destroyed us-destroyed you too!”
“You know that was sorcery!” she replied. “And Gretchan Pax showed you, and my own people, the power of Reorx. It is his will that we learn to get along!”
“Sometimes I think you long to return to your own people,” Tarn said, suddenly losing his energy for the fight. “I don’t know why you’ve stayed with me, and my people, for so long.”
She looked at him coldly. “Perhaps I stayed for the children,” she said.
And there it was again, out there for both of them to feel as a fresh wound, a cut that would never heal. Tara was gone, dead … and with her had gone so much hope for the future.
He stared out the window again. He heard Crystal sob, choking on an inarticulate final word. In the mountain valleys, the shadows had grown thick and oppressive. Darkness was almost upon them.
The creature of Chaos did not so much live as it existed. Yet even in its primitive subsistence, it posed an almost immeasurable threat against every form of living being on, or within, the world of Krynn. It was made of consuming fire, an eternal flame that swelled from within the mighty, serpentine form, and it destroyed life, right down to the bare mineral foundations of the world, by its very presence.
For long years-perhaps decades, perhaps eons, for the mind of the creature did not acknowledge the existence of anything so ordinary as time-the being had been a prisoner, constrained by magic so powerful that even its unimaginable power had been thwarted. And for all that existence, it had remembered, recalling in vivid detail, a previous state of unbridled freedom, when the creature of Chaos had been accompanied by many others of its kind, had been followed by legions of deadly shadow wights, had born a mighty daemon warrior upon its broad shoulders as they embarked upon an orgy of destruction.
Their violence had been unleashed by a war between the very gods, when the deities of Krynn had faced their ultimate nightmare in the person of Chaos, himself. And while the gods battled, the armies of Chaos wreaked their gleeful destruction upon the world.
The creature and its daemon lord master had swept into an underground world peopled by dwarves. They had bored through the bedrock; mere granite simply melted away in the face of the monsters’ incredible heat, and even metal barriers soon glowed red, yellow, then white before they flowed like water out of the way. The army of Chaos had swept through the subterranean nation like a hurricane assaulting a flatland shore, collapsing great cities, searing the waters of a mighty sea into clouds of suffocating steam, exterminating the pathetic dwarves wherever the foolish mortals thought to offer resistance.
The creature of Chaos had come from nothingness, knew naught of its previous existence in the Abyss. It had been called forth by the command of its immortal master, and in that summons it had taken form, learned flight, and brought flame and destruction into the world.
That freedom had been a fleeting moment in time, but it had been the formative experience of the Chaos creature’s existence. Too soon, the lord of Chaos had been defeated by the gods of Krynn, and the army of Chaos had scattered back to the nothingness from whence it had emerged.
That was, all except that lone, surviving serpent. The Chaos creature had languished and burned in the depths beneath the mountain, trapped first by the weight of the mountains themselves then ultimately by the power of the black wizard. Always it had strived and struggled and fought for freedom, but for too long the magic chains had held it at bay.
Until, finally, those chains had been broken, shattered by the magic of the very wizard who had created them. The creature of Chaos had flown free again, bringing fire and death and massive destruction to the underground nation yet again. But such spurious killing seemed unworthy, pointless, after its long imprisonment.
It would seek a worthy goal. It would feast on magic, for magic was power, and magic was also an enemy. It was not an enemy to be feared. Unlike the almighty gods, magic could be mastered, magic could be tamed and used.
The gods were to be feared, the creature knew. That was a great lesson learned, one even the tangled mind of the fiery serpent could understand. It feared the power of the gods, but it hungered for the power of magic.
For the Chaos creature had learned to hate. It hated the one who had so wrongly trapped it. It hated magic and those who wielded magic.
And the Chaos creature would have its revenge.
THREE
The file of Kayolin dwarves emerged from the horax caverns into the deep levels of their great nation, where their kinsmen struggled and strived and labored to carve out a world under the mountains. The victorious warriors climbed past the mines and smelting plants, through the coal yards and the sturdy pillars supporting the city of Garnet Thax. They beat their drums and chanted the news of their triumph, so by the time they reached the city’s midlevels, the whole population of Kayolin had turned out to welcome the returning heroes.
“Bluestone! Bluestone!” The sound of his name was a proud roar in Brandon’s ears, and he practically felt his chest swelling from the thundering accolades. He led the column, the Bluestone Axe slung easily over his shoulder, and though he tried to deflect some of the praise, to spread it to the sturdy shoulders of his lieutenants and foot soldiers, his men didn’t begrudge him the honor.
Indeed, as they moved onto a large ramp, one of the avenues circling steadily upward through the vertical city of Garnet Thax, Tankard Hacksaw and Fister Morewood themselves stepped forward and bodily lifted their captain onto their shoulders without missing a step in their rhythmic marching.