Ariakas resisted the urge to answer. 'Tell me more about the lady.'
'She's a princess, or a queen, or something,' Keppli piped up. 'I know that she's rich-or she was before the ogres got her and put her up in that tower!'
'Where does she come from?' the warrior pressed.
The two kender looked at each other and shrugged. 'Go and ask her,' Cornsilk Tethersmeet said, impatience registering in his voice. 'Now, if you'll be kind enough to be on your way….'
'One more question,' stalled Ariakas, the hilt of his sword nestling comfortably in his palm. 'Where is this tower, this place where the lady is imprisoned?'
'Over there,' declared the kender. 'About three days travel, I should say. It's on the border of Bloten, but I think the ogres who live there are just some kind of rene shy;gade band. They have their own warlord-the one they call Oberon.'
'How is it that you know so much about them?' in shy;quired Ariakas. He remembered Oberon's name with growing interest since Habbar-Akuk had mentioned the same brutal monster.
'Oh, we stayed there for a week last winter. They gave us a nice room, up near the lady's, where we could see for miles-all the way to the Lords of Doom, on a clear day.'
'But then,' Keppli interjected, 'we heard them talking about us and, well, it wasn't very pleasant-'
'And we never did get to meet Oberon!' asserted the male.
'… not very pleasant at all,' Keppli continued with a firm shake of her head.
'So we left,' concluded Cornsilk. 'As if those locks could hold anyone!'
'They hold the lady?' pressed Ariakas.
'Well, yes,' admitted the kender, though he seemed prepared to argue the point. Then he shook his head. 'So you see, you can't have her locket. If you'll just put it down-'
'I'm taking it. Nothing you've told me changes the fact that you're a thief-the worst kind of pilfering rogue, to sneak through the darkness and threaten a man while he sleeps!'
'Why, I-'
'Quiet!' Ariakas's voice became a roar, and the kender's mouth clamped shut in surprise. Cornsilk's dark, surprisingly mature eyes studied the warrior ap-praisingly-and with a total absence of fear. For some reason the kender's refusal to be afraid enraged the human. 'Here's your justice, thief!' he barked, thrusting sharply with the sword.
Cornsilk was prepared for the move, but he hadn't anticipated the warrior's speed. The kender dropped and rolled to the side, but not before the tip of the sword ripped into the exposed side of his neck.
'Hey!' shouted Cornsilk, clapping a hand to the wound and staring in confusion at the bright, arterial blood spurting between his fingers. Then his eyes closed, and he sprawled to the ground.
'I will spare you,' Ariakas said to Keppli, clasping the locket in his left hand as he held his sword at the ready.
Warily he eyed the female kender. 'But pray remember this lesson before you steal again.'
The fury in Keppli's eyes astonished him. She could not have blasted him harder by unleashing bolts of fire. In a steady, uncompromising voice, she taunted him. 'Hail the human warrior, brave enough to murder! The goat who was his father would be proud! The sow that gave birth to him would squeal in delight!'
'Would you face your companion's fate?' he demanded, flushing angrily.
'It's nothing beside the fate in store for you!' she cried, her voice tinged with an edge of laughter. 'Before the gods are done with you, raven wings will beat around your bones-lizards will crawl between your legs!'
'You're mad!' he snarled, slashing wildly at her, furi shy;ous as she skipped beyond range of his sword.
'Madness is a thing you should know!' she sang, fierce triumph ringing in every word, biting into Ariakas like the sting of a poisoned blade. 'Blood of insanity flows through your veins-only the shade of a heart beats within you. Oh, yes-madness is a thing you know too well!'
Ariakas lost all vestige of control. He lunged through the dying campfire, hacking at the nimble form. Some shy;where in the back of his mind a voice of reason, of cau shy;tion, told him that this was dangerous.
Even so, he dived after Keppli, darting the tip of his blade across her heel, drawing a squeak of pain as she tumbled to the ground. He leapt, but she rolled away from him, and as he skidded to one knee, she bounced to her feet.
Cold steel gleamed in her hand.
Raw instinct took hold of the warrior's arm, bringing his blade through a desperate arc as he toppled back shy;ward, striving to avoid the blade that snicked past his throat. Somehow he raised his sword.
Thrusting, he drove the weapon through the kender's body, cursing as her dagger sliced his chin and lip. Kep-pli spoke no words-she simply collapsed and died. Ari-akas let his blade fall with its victim, clasping both hands to the blood that jetted from the long wound across his face.
Chapter 3
It took nearly a week to find the tower, but when he did, no doubt lingered: before him loomed the dour keep where the lady pictured in the locket was held prisoner.
The lofty structure rose into the sky like a massive, weather-beaten tree trunk. Upthrust from a craggy sum shy;mit of dark stone, the high, cylindrical tower seemed to defy gravity, to defy all worldly constraint as it soared above the peaks of the Khalkists. Clouds whipped past the parapets of its upper ramparts while mist shrouded the valleys-gorges actually-that lay a long plummet to all sides.
The fortress itself was taller than it was wide, and it seemed to perch like some serene vulture on its lofty pinnacle. Its black stone walls rose flush with the cliffs, soaring to narrow parapets. Near the top, six flanking spires jutted outward from the central tower and en shy;circled the upper ramparts. A cone-shaped roof capped the main structure, though the surrounding spires were topped with the notched rims of stone parapets.
For the most part, the keep and its unassailable sum shy;mit stood apart from other mountains, separated from them by wide chasms and gorges. Yet one mountain, equally lofty, rose close beside the fortress. A steep, treacherous pathway led to the summit of this adjoining peak. A drawbridge raised almost flush with the tower's wall could be lowered to span the gap between the pin shy;nacles, giving the winding trail access to the keep's only door. Still, with the drawbridge raised, it seemed to the warrior that the fortress was as well protected as a castle floating on a cloud.
Groaning in weariness, Ariakas slumped against a boulder. The stone was hard, angular in shape, and so cold that it sapped the heat from his body despite the fur cloak he had made from the kender bedroll. Yet even now, in the shadow of an obstacle that loomed as impreg shy;nable as anything he had ever faced, he hadn't consid shy;ered turning away. The temperature continued to drop, and an icy wind drove bits of snow like stinging needles against the exposed skin of his face. But no notion to seek a lower elevation entered his mind.
Instead, he looked about for a place to make his camp. The primary attribute of this camp, he knew, would not be shelter, though of course that was desirable. More importantly, however, he looked for a place from which he could observe the tower while remaining concealed. In time, he found a narrow niche in a steep slope, a dozen feet above the winding trail that approached the drawbridge. Here he was protected from the wind, and two large boulders screened his tiny camp from the tower's observation. He could lie prone, exposing just the top of his head between those two stones, and gain a good view of the lofty fortress-from its low gate to the soaring pinnacles of its six spires.
Making himself as comfortable as possible, Ariakas settled onto the ground to study his objective. In the hours since he had discovered the tower, he had seen no sign of movement nor any life within or atop the structure.
He stared for a time at the high gates, visible behind the drawbridge. They seemed to be a pair of narrow doors, rising together to a point. Before those doors stood the tall, plank roadway of the drawbridge, now raised almost to a vertical elevation by chains that emerged from slits in the tower's wall, forty feet above the entrance.
