several thousand riders. How often he had fantasized about striking them with his compact, powerful army. Their only hope would be to mount their ponies and flee, since they would never be able to stand up to his offensive.
For fifty years, of course, the yawning gulf of Riven Deep had prevented that fantasy from even approaching fruition. But now there was a sense, carried through his dakali and also growing within his own mind, that the gulf might, somehow, cease to be an impassable obstacle. So he had stood with his dwarves and waited.
As the first tremors rumbled through the rock, he heard the panicked cries, sensed the fear of his dwarves. The ground shifted and pitched underfoot. He felt the rumbling in his belly, a terrifying sensation of disturbance. But he clenched his jaw and planted his feet a little bit farther apart, determined not to flinch.
“The world falls away! We are doomed!” All around him the troops were murmuring or shouting, but then they seemed to draw strength from their leader’s example. As the arcane remained still and aloof, the cries of distress lessened, until the troops were standing firm as well.
Zystyl remained silent as he felt the ground, solid bedrock, heave with the convulsion of a major quake. Indeed, the effect was quite unsettling, but he was determined to display no fear. He had faith in his god… faith in his dakali. He would stand still and show naught but courage.
More convulsions rocked the ground, and a slab at the edge of the Deep broke free and tumbled away, carrying twoscore dwarves to their doom. More discouraging, one of the beautiful iron giants was caught at the brink; the golem turned awkwardly, trying to take a step onto solid ground, but it, too, vanished.
Yet the mass of ground, despite the crumbling base, did not seem inclined to fall. Great fissures ripped through the ground, scoring more or less between the gathered regiments, though these gaps, too, were imprecise, and hundreds more Delvers plunged, screaming, into these seemingly bottomless crevasses. He could see daylight through the nearest gap, knew for certain that the ground supporting this bedrock was gone. It was as though the stone under his feet was a platform floating freely in the air.
But still he felt no fear, did not imagine that they would fall. He grinned, then laughed aloud as he felt the slab of stone begin to rise. The effect was gradual-it was easier to see than to feel-but when they moved out from the edge, drifting over the yawning space of the chasm, he knew that his god’s power had been made real and that his enemies were being delivered into his hands.
“Please, Shandira… wake up! Can you hear me?”
Miradel was close to utter despair. There was no healing magic in her touch, and nothing but cold fear in her heart. Her companion, this strong, proud woman who had come here at Miradel’s own suggestion, had not regained consciousness since her hard fall nearly an hour before.
The best Miradel had been able to do was to roll her companion onto a reasonably flat patch of ground, no larger than a small bed, that happened to be right next to where she had landed. She had folded the extra cloak from the other druid’s pack to serve as a pillow, replacing the bulky pack. Then she placed her cloak over the woolen garment Shandira was already wearing in the hopes of keeping the unconscious woman warm.
But there was no wood with which to build a fire, even if she would have dared to attract such attention; no way to give her hot broth or warm bread, anything but the dried trail rations they had brought with them. She had trickled a little water through Shandira’s lips, but the woman had not swallowed. The only encouraging sign, and it was a small one, was that she continued to draw long, deep breaths.
Finally Miradel returned her attention to her own pack, which had tumbled quite a ways down the slope when she had dropped it in the moments after Shandira’s fall. Her muscles rebelled at the thought of a long descent and a climb repeated over the steep incline, but there were too many valuables, objects that might mean the difference between life and death, in the heavy sack. So, after one last check of the black woman’s pulse and respiration, the elder druid started down the slope she had so laboriously climbed an hour earlier.
The descent, naturally, was a lot easier than the climb, and within ten minutes she had dropped so far that she couldn’t even see the place where she had left Shandira. Her legs were still cramping and sore, and she limped with each jolting step. Still, she tried to ignore her discomfort and despair, scanning the slope below her, looking for some indication of where her pack had ended up.
She spotted it shortly, saw that it had tumbled onto a flat shoulder of the mountainside, halting its tumble a foot short of the precipitous drop on the other side of the small, flat space. Casting aside her caution, she hastened downward, sending a cascade of loose pebbles skidding into the abyss. When she reached the backpack, she quickly saw that it had remained closed and that, in fact, if it had rolled a little farther it would have plummeted another five hundred feet.
Her first instinct was to thank the goddess for this small bit of good fortune, but when she lowered her head to murmur the small prayer, she found that the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she lifted the heavy satchel, balancing it on her hip as she pushed her arms through the straps.
It felt like the heaviest thing she had ever carried, and once again her despair seemed to double her burden. It would have been easy to simply collapse, to cry to the point of exhaustion, then to lie here until she died. Only the memory of Shandira and the guilty knowledge that it was Miradel who had brought her here forced her to turn her attention upward again.
She looked at the sweeping slope, remembered the pain of her initial ascent, and knew it would be doubled in this next stage of her journey. Her vision extended beyond the walled roadway that had been their goal, all the way to the top of the vast citadel, where the gargoyle was now visible on its lofty perch.
The sight of that beast sent a stab of fear through her, for the stony guardian had changed. It remained in the same place, the same pose as it had been before, but now its eyes were opened, red and glowing like fire, and they seemed to be fixed intently upon the lone druid so far below.
“Wake up!” shrieked Roodcleaver, delivering a sharp kick to Awfulbark’s belly.
“What you want?” growled the king of the forest trolls, instinctively squirming away to put the trunk of the oak tree between himself and his wife’s next attack.
“The world!” she cried, her stark terror penetrating the fog of Awfulbark’s ever-slow awakening.
“What about the world?” he grumbled, covering his own alarm with a veneer of irritation.
“It’s breaking!” Roodcleaver declared. “Breaking right around us! Here, under my feet, under you fat butt and thick head! It’s breaking!”
For the first time, the troll king realized that he was clutching the trunk of the oak tree simply to keep his balance. The ground heaved and pitched underfoot. Trees throughout the grove of oaks, which was just back from the Swansleep River, were whipping back and forth. Several venerable wooden giants cracked apart with lumber- ripping shrieks, massive trunks falling among trolls who were waking up to a world of chaos and panic.
“Go tell Natac!” Awfulbark blurted the first thought that came into his mind. Surely the general would know what to do!
Roodcleaver threw a chunk of wood at him, a near miss that bounced from the trunk a few inches from the king’s eye. “You think he knows, maybe?” she screamed. “Do something! Save trolls! Save me!”
“Okay,” Awfulbark agreed, groping for an idea, a plan. He seized upon the first thing that came to mind. “Everybody run!” he roared. “Get away from here!”
The river, with the numberless horde of the ghost warriors on the far side, formed a barrier in the direction of metal, but every other route seemed better to the terror-stricken trolls than staying where they were. Most of them instinctively started away from the river, from the enemy, from the war. Lurching and stumbling, Awfulbark let go of the tree, took Roodcleaver’s hand, and tugged her along with the fleeing horde of trolls.
A huge tree smashed down nearby, trapping a young troll beneath a splintered limb. The king reached down, pulled the howling victim free, and left him on the ground. With luck, the wretch’s shattered legs would knit before another oak came down on top of him. Awfulbark and his wife held each other up as the jolting ground pushed them this way and that. He was aware of other trolls all around-and in fact they frequently careened into him. But they were all moving in the same direction, and though many fell and others were trampled, the army of the forest trolls inevitably made a stumbling exodus from the position they had held for four days.
13
Fire in the Ghetto
