with pain as his knee struck the floor. He slipped back several feet, scrabbling to stop himself, before Riverwind’s strong hand caught his sleeve. Straining, the Plainsman pulled Kronn back to his feet.
At last the tunnel leveled out, its slope becoming more and more gentle, until finally they could rest without fear of falling. They sank to the ground, panting as they leaned back against the walls. Riverwind groaned, holding a hand against his belly, then leaned over sideways and retched, his chest heaving violently. When the spasm passed, he sat back upright, wiping his mouth with a weak, shaking hand. He smeared blood across his lips.
“Riverwind?” Kronn asked.
The old Plainsman’s eyes rolled toward the kender. A moment passed before they lit with recognition. “Kronn.”
“How long have you known you are dying?” Kronn asked.
“Many months. That’s why I was in Solace when you and Catt arrived-to say goodbye to my friends.”
“And you still came with us?” the kender asked, astounded. “Why?”
“Because I knew no one else would,” Riverwind replied softly.
After another ten minutes of walking, a light glimmered before them once more. The air grew warm, and a sound rose-a slow rhythm of rushing air, like the pumping of elephantine bellows.
Kronn doused his torch, and they crept stealthily onward through the gloom. The light before them brightened. The passage wound sharply to the left, then arrowed straight for nearly a hundred yards. At its end, they could see, it opened into another chamber.
They traveled that last hundred yards on their bellies, listening to the steady whoosh of the dragon’s breath. Finally, they reached the end of the tunnel.
It opened out into a vast, vaulted cavern, even larger than the magma chamber. Orange firelight danced upon the walls, casting shifting shadows that seemed somehow alive. Looking up, they saw the wide shaft in the nest’s ceiling and the telltale clawmarks in the stone at its edges. Swallowing, the kender and the Plainsman shifted their gazes down, to the floor of the cavern a hundred feet below. Riverwind sucked in a sharp breath.
Malystryx covered the floor of the cave, her wings tucked in at her sides, her head held low to the ground. Her scaly, scarlet sides moved in and out as she breathed. Her body was coiled, wrapped around something in the middle of the chamber. They couldn’t see what she encircled, but they guessed.
The dragonfear that rose from her motionless form crushed Kronn and Riverwind into the ground, paralyzing them where they lay even as their minds screamed at them to flee. Madness clawed at them, and they quivered with terror and dread.
“Blessed goddess,” Riverwind hissed. Kronn whimpered softly beside him.
They lay upon the ledge at the tunnel’s mouth for what seemed like hours, listening to Malys’s breathing, waiting for her head to snap up and her golden eyes to fix upon them. The dragon, however, took no notice of them. Her attention was elsewhere, many leagues away.
Malystryx’s presence was a white-hot cinder in Kurthak’s mind as he and Tragor strode down Elbowpoke Way, toward the center of Kendermore. The street was littered with corpses from both sides of the battle, but there were three slain ogres for every kender who lay broken upon the ground.
The dragon’s voice swelled within him.
“My people,” Kurthak answered. “Slaughtered…”
“Trickery,” he replied. He spat angrily on the ground.
“No!” he snarled. He raised his spiked club, which was stained with kender blood. “We have them cornered now. We will destroy them.”
“There, my lord!” Tragor said suddenly, pointing with his sword. Kurthak looked past the red-dripping blade and saw what his champion had spotted. A group of kender-he counted ten-had stepped out from a side street onto Elbowpoke Way. They froze, staring at the hetman and his champion.
Kurthak glared back at them balefully. “Wait,” he said as Tragor started forward. “It could be another trap.”
Obediently, his champion stopped, waiting tensely. Kurthak’s brow furrowed as he regarded the kender. Seeing the unfeigned fear on their faces, he smiled. This was no trick. The kender were caught, paralyzed by the sight of the two ogres. He charged, his club held high. Tragor ran with him.
The kender faltered, too surprised to react before the ogres struck. Kurthak brought his club down on a female kender’s head, crushing her where she stood. Tragor waded into the battle a heartbeat later. He swung his sword low, cutting a male in half across the stomach. He reversed the stroke, sending another kender’s head skipping away across the cobblestones. Kurthak savagely smashed a fourth. It crumpled, its back broken.
Panicking, the remaining kender tried to flee. Tragor slashed two of them in half with one sweep of his sword. Kurthak swatted a third into the air. The kender flew across the width of Elbowpoke Way, its neck flopping limply, and struck the side of a house before sliding to the ground. The two ogres turned to face their remaining opponents. Two warriors faced them, one armed with a hoopak and the other wielding a battak. Just behind them was an old, unarmed male, quivering with fright as he squinted through a pair of bottle-thick spectacles.
“Run, Arlie!” the hoopak-wielder shouted. He glanced over his shoulder at the old man. “We’ll try and hold-”
Before he could finish, Tragor drove his sword through the kender’s body. The other warrior charged toward Kurthak, swinging his battak. The hetman batted aside the desperate blow with his club, then lashed out in response, crushing his attacker’s skull.
Arlie Longfinger backed away, terrified. Kurthak strode forward, snarling, and slammed his club down on the old herbalist’s head. The Black-Gazer pounded Arlie’s body until nothing remained but a lifeless pulp.
His nostrils flaring angrily, Kurthak turned away from Arlie’s battered corpse and stalked off down Elbowpoke Way. Tragor followed, teeth bared in a feral snarl.
Soon they caught up with a bedraggled group of a hundred ogres, most of them wounded. The group, which was all that remained of a band three times that number, pursued one group of jeering kender.
“Hey!” the kender taunted. “Do you smear yourselves with filth on purpose, or does it just happen naturally?”
Kurthak and Tragor added their voices to the chorus of roars that erupted from the ogre band. They chased the kender around bend after bend in the road, yearning for slaughter. Then, suddenly, they rounded a corner and stepped into the cleared quadrangle in Kendermore’s midst.
A pitched battle was raging, all across the yard. A thousand ogres pressed toward the quadrangle’s midst from all sides, hacking and stabbing madly at a cluster of a few hundred kender. The kender fought back desperately, their weapons clashing and clattering. Many of their number lay sprawled in pools of blood, but somehow the survivors held their own, keeping the remnants of the horde at bay. In their midst stood three figures Kurthak recognized. Two were Plainsfolk-a young man and woman-and the third was the silver-haired kender who had stood atop the merlons that morning. With them were several dozen archers, who clustered around glowing braziers, arrows nocked on their bowstrings.
The kender fought valiantly, but they were clearly doomed. More and more ogres staggered into the yard, bloody and bruised from the gauntlet they had run through Kendermore’s streets. Every time one of Kurthak’s troops fell to the kender’s whirling hoopaks, another stepped forward to take its place. The battlefront began to constrict as the ogres slowly pressed inward.
Paxina Thistleknot turned and met the Black-Gazer’s hateful glare. Her lips curled into a tight, vulpine smile, then she said something to the archers.
Sensing something was wrong, Kurthak cast about wildly. He sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling. A pungent reek hung over the quadrangle, thick enough to bring tears to the hetman’s good eye. Casting about, he quickly spotted the source of the smell. The walls of the tall houses and shops surrounding the yard were covered with thick, black grease.
