She sucked on bones, humming happily to herself, and she didn't know herself caught until she felt a cage of bones close around her.
The skeletal hand grasped. Flesh hung in shreds from long-lifeless fingers. The gully dwarf squealed, looking right into eyes that flamed with fire the same color as lightning. Unfleshed jaws gaped wide, and yellow teeth snapped. In an eerie, voice, like that of stormwind, the undead creature lifted the gully dwarf and listened to her screech and scream for a while, then ripped off her head and flung the corpse against the wall.
It did this not because it disliked gully dwarves. It did this because if it and the others of its fellows who slumbered behind the many closed doors of this hall had a commandment, it would have been to kill as often as it could.
When it was finished with the gully dwarf, the undead thing, clothed in the last rags of its own flesh, hung in the rotting silk and leather of a warrior's funeral gear, looked around for more to kill. Finding none, it went back to where it had been sleeping. It entered the crypt behind the opened door, lay down upon its bier, and fell into a dark well of dreamlessness. All around it, in other crypts, behind other doors, more of its kind lay undreaming, unaware. Some had been elves in life. Some had been human. Some had been dwarves, and they all lay in stillness until something living, smelling of blood and flesh, came into the chamber. Then one or another of the creatures would sense the presence of something that needed killing. The urge that guided it, the killing urge, would rise up to wake the sleeper, to send it looking for the living thing that must not be allowed to live.
They had been the honor guard of a king, a long time ago when Pax Tharkas was new and Kith-Kanan came often to stay there. Upon his death, he was buried here, and each of his beloved guard was awarded a crypt outside the great king's burial chamber, one and another to take up their charge in death as they had in life: to guard the king. Their place had been only ceremonial, an honored burial for those who had served faithfully. But in these after days, when gods had turned their faces from the world, when the races of Krynn had turned their faces from each other, dark magics crept and crawled, and the corpses of elves and dwarves and humans, who had lived by shining codes of honor and faith, became corrupted into beings made to kill.
In the shadow of the rising hill they rested. Beneath a broad shoulder of the Kharolis Mountains, Kethrenan stopped and gave thanks to gods for the water they found there. A shallow stream darkened the stone, barely managing to pass the rocks. It ran from nowhere. Rather it sprang. Even as he thought so, Kethrenan decided that was too strong a word for it. The water seeped, oozing up from the earth. The weary horses dipped their muzzles into the thin stream, and the gulping sounds of their drinking echoed against the rocks. Bridles and bits jingled, and Demlin’s mount shook its head and drank again.
Demlin took the water bottles, his and Kethrenan’s, and filled them. It was a slow process, the trickle of water seeping in. One filled, he stopped it with great care and handed it to the prince. Patient, he began the next. They'd found little water in these days past. Kethrenan looked at the dark horizon, the pall of smoke hanging in the west. He shaded his eyes against the glaring of noon's sun.
"My lord prince, there’s a great burning out there. How close to our forest, I wonder?"
How close? Kethrenan couldn't guess. The wind spread the smoke all over the sky, saving the darkest pall for the distance. There, he saw the work of the hobgoblin Gnash. In the night they'd seen the ruddy glow of fire on the sky, and Ithk said he reckoned Gnash was marching up and down the borderland. "Making goblin towns. He does that best."
Making goblin towns and manning them with his army. Kethrenan didn't bother to ask if the army increased in proportion to the goblin towns. He knew it did. He'd been fighting goblins off his border for many long years. They liked fighting, and they would be drawn to a powerful leader like Gnash as steel is to a lodestone.
His eyes on the pall hanging over the west, Kethrenan knew it wouldn't be long before that army would turn upon itself… unless it had a purpose. Lindenlea would keep them off Qualinesti’s borders, and they would flow south, or north into Abanasinia to rampage among the humans.
Kethrenan shrugged. That wasn't his problem.
Wind moaned across the stonelands, raising grit and biting cold. Even so, it had the smell of spring on its chill breath. Somewhere in the forest surely the first blush of a kinder season quickened, the stirring of buds still furled, not green yet, no-red, and only faintly so. There in the forest, Kethrenan thought, the air must smell like hope, and the birds must be more active. There, it had snowed well in winter, and the grasses in the meadows would soon begin to thicken. Here, in the borderland, they had not felt rain in all the while they'd been riding south. Ithk looked withered, puckered, and weary. Demlin was like skin stretched over bones, and it seemed they spent most of their searching looking for water. Kethrenan, though, was a knife, gleaming and sharp, and he would not rest until he had spilled the outlaws’ blood.
Kethrenan’s horse snorted, dancing a little, restless. The best of Qualinost’s stables, this one did not weary though they had been long days quartering the rocky land, searching for sign of the outlaws. The prince took up the reins and looked at the goblin, still on his knees drinking.
"You," he said. Ithk looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. They hadn't kept him tethered in days. He never showed sign of wanting to leave them. "How far to the last cache?"
"Not far." Ithk pointed east, and high up the slope. "In there. Do we go?"
Kethrenan said they would, and they tethered the horses and climbed. Wind dragged at them, and their fingers grew numb on the cold stone. The cave’s entrance hid beneath an overhang of stone, a small slit in the mountain no one could see from below. They had to tum sideways to thread it, even the goblin. The elves had to duck, going bent into a small passage. When they could stand again, Demlin lit a torch, using flint and steel to ignite rags soaked in fat. It wasn't a good torch. It sputtered and stank, but it gave light. The cache lay far back, not in the first cave but in a smaller one beyond. Weapons, the keg of dwarf spirits, all were covered in oily rags.
Demlin’s lip curled in disgust, and he toed the rags from the pile of swords and axes. This was a smaller cache, the last of what had been dragged here. By the sputtering light, Kethrenan took the count of what Brand had stolen.
"Do we destroy them?" Demlin asked.
The prince considered it. The weapons were of finest elven make, the steel more treasured than gold or jewels in these hard days. In the weeks past, he'd caused so many of their like to be broken, the blades made useless, the arrows shattered and axe heads broken. And this hoard, this last one, lay untouched. Brand had not been here.
Neither had he shown himself in the world outside the mountain. The elves had quartered the ground between the caches, like hounds searching after game. They'd seen no sign, not even a cast-off boot or the dark mark of a campfire. He'd kept within the mountain. Yet how had he hunted? How had he fared? He had a dozen men at last count. How did he feed them?
"Where is he going?" Demlin asked. He looked around at the slick cave walls, the dust on the floor. Tracks marked the dust-booted feet had passed here but not lately, not in a very long time. "He has to know all his other caches are broken, but he hasn't come here."
Kethrenan nodded, and he thought of the map he'd had Ithk make. The point of the triangle had looked south, right to Pax Tharkas. Could he get there? Kethrenan didn't know. Would he try? And why?