Lines of smoke wavered in the icy air, dark scars across the face of the sky. Flights of ravens marred the blue, sailing toward the smoke as though toward home. Beneath them on the stony ground, wolves loped down from the hills in the stonelands. Outriders of death, they ran and they soared. In the days when gods had walked on Krynn, when people had believed because they had felt the nearness of deity, those who had worshiped dark gods knew these creatures as the minions of those gods who most loved destruction. They used to say, those who believed in the times when it was easy to believe, "You can hear Takhisis in the raven’s cry. You can smell Morgion on the wolf's breath and see Chemosh in the beast’s cold eyes."
Those beasts of battle fed full in the border between the kingdom of the elves and the kingdom of the dwarves. They gorged on goblin flesh, and they feasted on the marrow cracked from the bones of elves. They followed in the wake of a war where the burning of villages had ceased, where the making of goblin towns was no longer on the mind of the hobgoblin Gnash. What was on his mind now, each time he stopped letting the elves chase him and turned to fight, was how much he hated those pale-eyed wretches out of Qualinesti. He fought with fire, wielding his staff, the weapon that looked like an old bent stick. He flung fire, and he went with the stink of burning flesh clinging to him like a cloak.
He fought at night, whenever he could, sweeping down from the hills. He had known how to make fists of his fire when first he began to use his staff. He had known how to reach out and grab his enemies in a flaming grip, sizzling their flesh and blackening their bones while their blood boiled. In the time since then, harried by the elf prince across the lands no king owned and no one ruled, Gnash had learned more and better skills.
One night, when the two moons hung like sickles over the reaching arms of the Kharolis Mountains, he'd not set an army of goblins down on the elves. He'd sent an army of fire, creatures man-tall and made of flame. He had seen the brave soldiers of Qualinesti break and run, in shame take to their heels.
Turning from that battleground, he had gone south again, and he didn't think any could stop him from reaching his goal now. He dreamed of Pax Tharkas, that Fortress of Ghosts, and he dreamed it was filled with weapons and magic to make his fire-staff seem like a child's toy.
Each history of Pax Tharkas, written in Qualinost or composed in Thorbardin, sung in the cities of humans, studied in the libraries of Palanthas or Tarsis, will tell that the mighty fortress withstood the incursions of goblins, ogres, and even, for a time, the vast army of the evil mage Fistandantilus. For centuries the mighty fastness rang with the voices of dwarves and elves and humans. It hosted kings and, now and then, an emperor. Armies manned the battlements, dwarven warriors and soldiers out of Qualinesti. The great elf king Kith-Kanan slept the long sleep in a crypt below the fortress, and a royal guard attended him in the long sleep, his loyal warriors in a crypt of their own.
Yet storms will blow and wars will rage. The treaties made on one day are burned to ash on another. Great Pax Tharkas, the monument to friendship between the races, fell from its fabled glory after the Cataclysm and the bloody Dwarfgate War. Abandoned by those who'd made it, Pax Tharkas, the Peace of Friendship, was taken by time, by wind and storm, by summer’s heat and, finally, by gully dwarves.
"It’s like they own the place," Nigh-toothless Kerin growled, his nose wrinkling as the breeze blew into the bedchamber of kings from the corridor outside where he'd been setting watches. "You never see the things, you just hear ‘em squalling in the shadows"-he grimaced-"doing gods know what. There are so damned many of them. And you smell 'em."
Elansa covered her own nose, agreeing. She'd seen one or two of the gully dwarves-small creatures scurrying in and out of shadows. They stood no higher than her own knee. Known as Aghar and disowned by all tribes of dwarves, they didn't bear much more resemblance to dwarves than they did to humans or elves. Two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, a head, and probably a heart, she thought as she closed the door to the corridor. As Nigh-toothless Kerin had suggested, the vast numbers of them proclaimed that they had their reproductive parts in good working order.
The hallway didn't always reek of gully dwarf, of creatures long unwashed and garbed in rags and castoffs that hadn't seen soap since the wash day before the gully dwarf wearing them got hold of them. Some days the air smelled of the breezes coming cold off the mountains, fresh as the sky and only a little of whatever mustiness drifted out of chambers too long closed up and only lately thrown open. Other days it smelled of smoke, and on those days the outlaws who walked on the Tharkadan-as much to keep watch as to stretch their legs and see a wide sky-reported seeing the signs of battle and burning out in the stonelands. This day, however, only the faintest wind blew, the sky was still, and so the reek of every one of the innumerable vermin lurking in the cellars and dungeons seeped into the chambers of the ancient fortress.
Watchers on the Tharkadan… Elansa shook her head and crossed to the unshuttered window. She looked out, watching the guards walk. Dell and Pragol and Bruin and Tianna, they kept no orderly march. Used to seeing warriors on the silvery spans around Qualinost, Elansa hardly recognized these as watchers at all. They lounged at the parapet talking or sharpening steel arrowheads against the stone. They looked out, but not with any kind of keen glance. They seemed bored and restless.
With these, she thought, Brand thinks to hold a fortress.
She turned from the window and watched Brand sitting with his back to the warm western wall of the chamber. Sunlight sent blue gleams darting from the sapphire phoenix in his hand as he turned it this way and that as though it were a box whose key he'd lost. She knew his thought by looking at his face: How does it work?
How does it work, wondered the man who now claimed possession of Pax Tharkas and thought he actually held it because he had a handful of ragged outlaws, a few swords, some arrows, and a throwing axe in the possession of a dwarf whose hand wasn't so steady now as it was when he was drinking. Brand looked up, twirling the phoenix on the chain round his finger.
"Come here, girl."
Girl he named her. It used to be she had no name at all, only "you," in the days when the dogs ate before she did. She crossed the chamber, walking as though across the stony floor of one of the caves, stepping round little fires. Because they must have heated with braziers here-braziers long gone-by necessity the beautiful mosaic floor of this once-royal chamber now bore the dark scars of cooking fires. For fuel they had the arms and legs and backs of ancient oaken chairs, the planks of the broad tables found in the mess and barracks of the opposite tower. What time hadn't broken in Pax Tharkas, these outlaws had shattered.
Elansa stepped around sleepers, for those who didn't hunt or walk on the wall slept. Little changed in their lives. They moved in the rounds of need. Only Char didn't sleep. He sat alone in a far corner, away from the door, away from the windows, wrapped in shadow. If he missed his hound Fang, he'd said nothing to anyone about it, but no one doubted that he missed his drink; his hands were unsteady, and his mood was not good.
"Sit," Brand said, and though he looked where she did, he didn't mention the dwarf. He twirled the phoenix again, watching it catch the light.
She sat, but gingerly. She was a mass of aching muscles and bruised flesh. She slid down the wall, bracing against the floor with her hands to lower herself carefully. He watched her, the phoenix still flying round his finger.
"I've heard it said that warriors in mail shirts who get whacked in battle have to peel the links out of their skin after. Good thing you had only your little rag of silk when the ogre hugged you, eh?"