The Messenger

you have any luck in your hunt?”

The elf was flabbergasted and for a moment couldn’t even muster a reply. “You mean you were here all along?” he finally sputtered. “You were sleeping? While I was captured? While we carried seventy-five people across the bay? And raced away from the Highlanders and broke through the ice?” He shook his head in utter disbelief.

“I dreamed that it got kind of loud there,” the kender said cheerfully. “I suppose if you carry seventy-five passengers you have to expect they’re going to do some talking. Not very polite of them, though, when I was trying to get a little nap.”

“A little nap? I haven’t seen you for a week!”

“I was tired.”

“How could you sleep that long? By Zivilyn, I looked for you. I was worried! Where in Krynn were you? I hunted all over the boat!”

Coraltop waved dismissively. “I didn’t want to be a bother. I lay down on one of your spare sails in the hold and pulled the other one over me.”

“For seven days?” sputtered the elf.

“It was probably this sleeping potion,” the kender said brightly, producing a small, silver flask. “I traded a gnome for it in Tarsis. I had, oh, I don’t know, something pretty valuable, and I gave it to a gnome who brewed this potion. He said it would help me rest real good. I guess he was right.”

Kerrick swore an old sailor’s oath. “Let me see that,” he declared, snatching the flask out of Coraltop’s hand. Cautiously he removed the stopper and sniffed a seductively sweet aroma.

“Careful,” warned the kender. “All I did was wet my fingertip and lick it.”

The elf quickly stoppered the flask and handed it back. “Your timing was terrible. While you napped I got beaten up, tied up, chased by bearded barbarians. I carried a tribe of different barbarians across this strait, on three trips, fought through a storm, and found a harbor on a barren shore!”

Indignantly he remembered the kender’s earlier question. “No, I didn’t have any luck hunting. You were going to be fishing while I was gone, right? I don’t suppose you even remember that.”

“Well, I was going to do some fishing, after I slept, but I just woke up now. Speaking of impolite, I think it’s a little rude for you to do all this yelling when I still barely have my eyes open!”

Kerrick groaned in exasperation. In any event, he had bigger problems than an extra passenger, and his mind quickly returned to those concerns.

Most significantly, he had all three sails deployed, and yet Cutter barely moved through the water. The waters of the gulf were unnaturally still, barely shifting with an almost imperceptible swell, so dark gray they were almost black. Snowflakes fell, making a rasping hiss as they touched the still water.

Against this placid stillness it was hard to imagine the violent Sturmwall described by Moreen, yet Kerrick had often know periods of almost miraculous calm to lie across the ocean a mere hour or two before the onset of a savage gale. Even if the brutal blizzard didn’t come, he pictured the ice encroaching, slowly but inexorably, until Cutter was locked in a frozen grasp. The ice would tighten, pressure expanding, smashing against itself, inevitably crushing anything so frail as the hull of a sailboat.

“Can’t you go a little faster?” asked Coraltop, frowning over the water. “This is kind of pointless, don’t you think? I mean, I know you’re doing the best you can-of course you are! — but I like it better when we go shooting up the waves and stuff.”

“Do you see any waves?” the elf asked tersely.

“Well, it’s morning, at least. Maybe that will help.”

The kender was right. A vague illumination suffused the white-gray sky and the gray-white sea. The increasing light brought no corresponding increase in wind. If anything, the sails hung even more slackly than before. Such air as did move came listlessly out of the north, from the exact wrong direction, if Kerrick were to have any hope of getting away from the Sturmfrost.

In the spreading light, which brightened to no more than a twilit murk, he stared across the gulf, looking southward, wondering about the winter’s violence stewing there.

Knowing they would never be able to sail out of its path.

“There it is-Brackenrock!” Moreen couldn’t keep the delight from her voice. After the dangerous trek, the escape from the Highlanders, and finally a perilous climb up a steep, twisting pathway, her hopes were confirmed.

The place was a ruin, clearly, but it was the ruin of what had once been a mighty citadel. High, smooth walls merged into the cliff top, blocking a view of the interior of the place, except for several towers that jutted into view. The tops of these were crumbled and eroded, denoting long decades of disuse. A wide gateway at the upper terminus of this path yawned open and dark. Whatever slabs of wood or stone that had once blocked that entrance were now gone. Steam swirled in front of the place and rose from within, a clear indication that the hot springs for which Brackenrock had once been fabled were still warm.

This path seemed to be the only approach, for the fortress stood atop a steep-sided crag. Before it the cliff plunged hundreds of feet straight down to the gray waters of the sea. Behind it towered a peak streaked with snow and ice, flanked by impassable cliff. Only the narrow trail, which wound its way along a narrow ridge crest, allowed access.

“What a fortress,” Tildey said under her breath. “I can see how it stood against the ogres for so long. There’s no other way to get in, and two dozen skilled archers could make sure any enemy coming along the trail never made it to the gates.”

Moreen looked at her warriors. She had made this ascent, which had required more than two hours, with twenty Arktos, all veterans of the Battle of the Black Whale, as they had come to call their skirmish with the thanoi. Now each held a spear or a stone-headed axe and turned a face of grim purpose toward the chiefwoman.

The rest of the tribe remained in the seaside cave, which had proved to be a spacious and, because of a surging hot spring, surprisingly warm shelter. It lacked comforts, and the gaping mouth allowed the wintery wind to penetrate with cruel persistence, but Moreen was confident that the rest of her tribe was safe enough for the time being. Once they explored the ruin, the whole tribe could come up here.

“Why don’t I go ahead and have a look,” Tildey suggested. “If it’s clear, I’ll wave the rest of you forward.”

“No,” Moreen said, shaking her head firmly. “We’ll go together-if we find some ice bear making a den in there, it will be better to have twenty spears than one bow and arrow.”

No one dissented, so the chiefwoman led them over the crest of the little pass where they had stopped to make their observation. She looked up at the citadel, now rising to fill the whole view before them, and felt a vague sense of misgiving. There were dark holes all along the walls, and she couldn’t shake the feeling of menace, that something was staring down at them, watching, waiting. She wished that Dinekki was here to cast the spell of blessing she had bestowed before they attacked the thanoi, but the chiefwoman had decided that speed was important, and despite the shaman’s sturdy legs, it would have taken her much longer to make the climb to this elevation. Now, at least, they still had a little daylight.

Her misgivings were just nerves, she told herself. It was important to remember what this place offered to them: a real home, defensible against Highlanders or ogres, a place where her little tribe could not just survive but perhaps, one day, return to a life of peace and prosperity. Furthermore, after her conversation with the elf, her worries about dragons were finally laid completely to rest.

The path turned sharply to approach that great, gaping gate. They could see an empty courtyard, walls, and buildings rising beyond. A great stairway rose from the ground, providing access to the ramparts atop the wall and to a whole row of compartments-merely vacant doors and windows-that had apparently been excavated directly out of the mountainside.

Tildey and Nangrid carried bows and arrows and now, as if responding to an unseen command, each nocked and readied an arrow. Moreen’s hand tightened around her harpoon, while she checked to insure that the two extra weapons strapped to her back were still there, and easily accessible. She picked up her pace, trotting through the aperture of the gates and moving toward the center of the large courtyard. The walls rose on all sides, except for that gate, giving her a sense of being down in a well, looking upward for a glimpse of gray, leaden sky.

A few snowflakes scudded past, driven by the rising breeze. She sniffed, smelling the onset of winter, tainted