"That goes to the Vale of Repsite," he said, pointing to the right-hand path. "Two or three days' travel from here. If I were your dwarf, that's where I would be." Probably resting his sore feet in some village over there, the human thought, but did not say it. Probably cozying up to some hill dwarf's daughters… if he's still alive.
Garon Wendesthalas stood in thought, looking at the forked trail, then back the way they had come. "I think I'll leave you here, Wingover," he said finally.
"Why?"
"Oh, just to sit and watch the traffic. Maybe we'll meet farther along, somewhere."
Wingover scratched his bearded chin. "It's those goblins, isn't it?"
"They might be coming along here." Garon shrugged, then a cold smile spread across his elven face. "I still have plenty of arrows, and nothing better to do."
"That's why you came, isn't it?" the man said, perhaps a bit sadly. "You said there might be more goblins."
"Have a nice outing, Wingover." The elf turned away. "Maybe we'll meet again." In the somber elven eyes, just as they turned from him, Wingover saw something cold and determined. Something deadly. This elf had a pure hatred for goblins.
"I hope we do meet again," he said.
Another mile down the trail, Wingover turned to look back. There was no sign of the elf… but then, there wouldn't be. No one was likely to know he was there until he was ready to show himself.
Distant movement caught Wingover's eye then, and he peered westward. The man shaded his eyes. Far in the distance, something was moving.
As Wingover's eyes adjusted to the distance the object grew from a small speck of white to a bigger speck of white. It was coming rapidly in their direction. Wingover stared, then saw a shadow below the thing and realized that it wasn't on the ground. It was in the air, flying.
It took shape, and its shape was that of a spreadwinged gull, soaring aloft on air currents.
'Ye gods," Wingover muttered. "It's that crazy gnome."
Within moments the soarwagon was abreast of Wingover and Jilian, coming about in a wide, graceful turn fifty feet above the trail and a few hundred yards ahead. As it turned it settled and slowed, until it seemed almost to hang in air, fifteen feet above the surface. In that position it crept upslope toward them, rocking gently from side to side. When it was near, they could see the white hair and irritable-looking face of the gnome sitting in its basket.
He peered out at them and raised an arm to wave. "Ho, there! It's me!
Bobbin! Do you have anything to eat?"
"We know who you are!" Wingover shouted. 'What are you doing way out here?"
"I got caught in a crosswind!" the gnome responded. "I don't know where
I am, but I'm hungry! Do you have food?"
"I can make you a nice sandwich!" Jilian called. "Do you like cold roast elk?"
"Did you ever get that thing to land?" Wingover shouted.
The gnome glared at him, fighting to control his rocking craft, now just fifty feet away and no more than twenty feet above. "If I had come down, do you think I'd still be up here? A roast elk sandwich would be just fine, thank you. With raisins, preferably. And I could use some cider, but water will do if that's all you have. I'll drop a line, and you can send it up. Where are you going?"
"We're going to see if Chane Feldstone is in that valley ahead," Jilian told him, pulling food from the travel pack.
"We are not," Wingover snapped. "We're just going to the rim of it.
That's all."
"He thinks there are cats in there," Jilian explained to the flying gnome. "He worries all the time about cats."
"Do they have wings, like the innkeeper's pigs?" the gnome wondered.
Jilian giggled. "Of course not. They're just cats."
"Very big cats," Wingover added.
"Seems to me you need a scouting service," the gnome said. "After I eat,
I guess I could go fly over the valley and look around for you, if you'll tell me what you're looking for."
"Chane Feldstone," Jilian said. "He's a dwarf, about this tall and very handsome -"
"Cats," Wingover said. "We're on the lookout for cats."
For a moment the gnome didn't answer. An air current had caught his soarwagon, and he was struggling to hold it in place. His controls seemed to consist mostly of strings that ran from the basket to the fabric panels of the thing's boxy nose, strings that controlled the angle and pitch of the panels. The soarwagon rocked, bucked, and settled into position again, twenty feet above them. Bobbin peered down, his gnome-face ridged with irritation.
"I don't mind looking around," he said. "It isn't as though I had anything better to do right now."
Chapter 13
"I'll bet you never saw anything like this before," Chestal Thicketsway said happily, turning full circle to scan the breadth of the ice field with its jumbled, vague shapes, frozen in combat. "Just look at this!
Didn't I tell you? Bumps! Ice-bumps, everywhere you look. And inside every bump are frozen dwarves… still fighting, except they don't move any more."
Chane Feldstone didn't answer. With haunted eyes he looked around, needing to see what was here but not wanting to. To one raised in the sheltered delves of Thorbardin, the Dwarfgate Wars were just old legend stories of the defense of Thorbardin's gates in a time of great crisis, tales of heroes who had manned the gates and the pathways beyond, who had fought at King Duncan's order so that Thorbardin could live.
These are some of them, Chane thought, approaching a great, jumbled mound of ice rising from the ice field – a chaotic feature, like a miniature mountain range twice his height and fifty to a hundred feet across in any direction. Within the ice, dark shadows hinted at shapes. He knelt in front of a sheer plane of ice and rubbed at it, smoothing and clearing its face. Polished, the ice was transparent.
The dwarf leaned close, peering within. Just inside, only a few feet away, two dwarves were locked together in combat, hammer against sword, shield to shield, straining each against the other – violence captured just as it had been the instant the ice had covered the combatants. Beyond these two were others, receding into vague translucence. A dwarf on the ground held a shield above him, desperately fending against a slicing blade frozen in descent. Another, arms outspread, flailed motionless for balance, frozen in the act of falling over the body of a dwarf cleft from shoulder to midriff by some lucky blow. Within the ice, the spilled blood remained crimson on the black ash beneath.
These are some of those who went out to defend Thorbardin's gates, the dwarf thought. And these are who they fought. Which are which, though? Did even they know? There might be a hundred or more locked in combat, just within this one mound of ice – dwarves who came out from Thorbardin, and dwarves who fought to go within. All dwarves, and all alike now in frozen silence.
No one ever returned to Thorbardin to tell of this battle, he realized.
No one ever went anywhere from here. They are all still here. Encased in ice, with ashes underfoot.
Three spells did Fistandantilus cast. The words echoed in Chane's mind.
The first was fire, the second ice…
Fire and ice. Chane turned away from the ice window, feeling very cold.
"Isn't this great?" The kender hurried past, chattering his enthusiasm.
"Dwarfcicles! Imagine! There's one over there you should look at. That little tall lump… there are four dwarves really going at it. One of them has an axe and he's fighting the other three. Better hurry… but then again, I suppose he'll last as long as the ice lasts, won't he? Wow, this is like a museum of statues, with frosty windows!"