His plan was simple. He would tie one end of the rope around one of the pinnacles, leaving the other end tied around his waist. Then he would lower himself down the cliff, to where he could count Zephros’s men, maybe even their weapons. He might even be lucky enough to overhear something they said.
The rope would keep him from falling all the way down, and let Whistletrot help pull him back up again. (If Whistletrot wasn’t angry enough to leave him dangling, but that didn’t worry Elderdrake. It takes a good deal to worry a young kender on his first journey, and besides, kender are very strong for their size, and Elderdrake was large for a kender.)
The only thing Elderdrake overlooked was a crack in the base of the pinnacle he used for his rope. Perhaps not quite the only thing-he also overlooked a patch of loose scree some fifty paces down the cliff.
The moment he put his foot on the scree, he slipped and began to slide. The slide turned into a fall as the cliff steepened. His shout warned both his friend above and the humans below-just as his weight came on the rope.
The crack in the pinnacle was so placed that the wind did not enlarge it. Elderdrake’s weight, however, exerted strain from the opposite direction. The rock groaned as the crack widened. The pinnacle swayed, then split off along the line of the crack.
“Oops,” Imsaffor Whistletrot said.
Now, when a kender with human companions says this, the humans normally shake in their boots, or else put them to the ground and run as fast as possible. It is not well known that kender will say that to one another. That can upset even a kender.
Both kender, however, were too busy to be upset. Elderdrake was trying to stop his fall without stopping in the path of the pinnacle. Whistletrot was trying to hook his friend’s rope with his own whippik, also without leaving him in the way of all the falling rock.
The pinnacle took care of the matter itself. It jerked Elderdrake’s rope across the base of another pinnacle. The rope wound itself firmly around the second pinnacle-then snapped as the first pinnacle continued its downward plunge.
Imsaffor Whistletrot had just time to grab his friend’s rope and cut it loose before the second pinnacle was hit by a third, dislodged by the fall of the first. Nor were those three pinnacles the last to go.
As the two kender watched, the entire face of the cliff and all the pinnacles on it split, crumbled, and fell into the mouth of the pass with a noise like the return of Chaos and enough dust to hide the whole city of Istar. Thousands of tons of rock poured like a waterfall onto the trail.
Like a waterfall, too, the rock splashed. A wave of boulders, each the size of a kender hut or larger, roared across the valley and struck the base of the cliffs on the other side. The hammer blow was too much for the fissured base of the cliffs. Like a curtain whose rod has pulled loose from the wall, the other cliffs also fell.
The two kender tried hard to see how much damage the falling rock did to Zephros’s men. But so much dust billowed up, they might as well have been trying to spy on the Dargonesti, a hundred fathoms below the waves.
Long after the crash, clatter, and rumble of falling rock had mostly died away, the dust remained suspended in the still air of the desert afternoon. By the time a breeze rose to thin out the dust, Zephros’s men were far out on the desert. It looked as if they were running, and the two kender half hoped they would run themselves to death.
That was about the best the men could hope for, too. The two falling cliffs had completely blocked the mouth of the pass with a pile of rock easier to fly over than climb. Nobody was going to be taking an army through this pass for a good many years, and neither kender intended to wait here that long.
“I suppose we can still go to Belkuthas,” Elderdrake said. He sounded rather subdued. He was also short of breath, and his ribs and stomach were aching where the rope had tightened around them.
“What for, you son-of-a-gnome?” Whistletrot snapped. Then he had a fit of coughing that kept him speechless, if not silent, for quite a while. There was still a lot of dust in the air.
“I am not a gnome,” Elderdrake finally said with dignity. “This is my first journey. I’ve never been in desert before, and anyway, if I could have seen that crack, so could you.”
“It was on your side of the pinnacle, and I wasn’t foolish enough to go down on the cliff in the first place.”
“Who was foolish? I knocked down more rocks than all the dwarves in this land ever did.”
“Yes, and you wasted them all because they didn’t fall on Zephros’s men!”
“Well, maybe I wasted them and maybe I didn’t. We don’t know how many of Zephros’s men tripped over their own feet or choked on the dust!”
“No, and we never will, unless they come back or we climb over that pile of rocks and go after them.”
“That’s why I think we ought to go to Belkuthas. Besides, Hallie Pinesweet said she was going to stop there. Maybe she is still-”
“Hallie Pinesweet never thought you were worth a bag of dried nuts.”
“I’m older now.”
“Five years. You think she’ll have sat waiting for you at Belkuthas for that long? Your brains are dried nuts, too!”
“Well, I’m going to Belkuthas. If we can’t catch Zephros ourselves, maybe we should ask for help from some people who can. I think Hallie said there were humans who kept horses at Belkuthas, or maybe it was centaurs who lived in the forest-”
Imsaffor Whistletrot threw up his hands in disgust and despair. It was either go to Belkuthas with Elderdrake or go somewhere else alone, and he wasn’t quite curious enough about this land to roam it alone.
Besides, once Elderdrake saw that Hallie Pinesweet was long gone on her way, he would stop thinking Belkuthas was so wonderful. Then they could go on their way-and, Whistletrot hoped, homeward as soon as possible.
He had much more traveling to do. Elderdrake was right; he had spent too long with Waydol. A kender as young as he was shouldn’t remain in one place. But he would rather live among gully dwarves than travel with a kender who behaved like a gnome-and then boasted about it!
Listening to the little council’s plan, Redthorn and Skytoucher displayed an elaborate courtesy that, to Pirvan, smelled of impatience to end the rituals and mount up. He hoped so. The Gryphons, by his own lowest estimate, could put a thousand armed riders on the march. With such a force standing before Belkuthas, it would be safe not only from Zephros but from any force than Aurhinius himself could field without warning.
“We cannot send more than a hundred fighters,” Redthorn said at last.
Skytoucher nodded. “You may be the changebringer, Sir Pirvan, or you may be merely one who comes before the changebringer, whom we must prepare to meet. Also, it does not take the whole strength of the Gryphons to carry a warning to anyone, let alone to folk the Silvanesti would not thank us for warning.”
Pirvan had rude thoughts about what the Silvanesti could do with their thanks, starting with putting it on the points of their arrows and going on from there in painful and grotesque ways. Outwardly, he kept the self-command of a Knight of Solamnia and bowed.
“I see both wisdom and honor in this. I ask only one question. Who commands?”
All four Free Riders-father, sons, and seer-looked at one another. Then Skytoucher spoke.
“We shall be two to your one, so Threehands will lead when he is present. When he is not, you shall. Your folk as well as ours will swear oath to obey either commander as they would their own fathers.”
Unless the Free Riders took oaths far more lightly than Pirvan guessed, that would be enough. The Gryphons knew this land, anyway, and were friends with half the other clans, which was better than none.