“That’s a lie!” shouted Brandon. “You know it is!”
“You think I don’t know about your secret mission? The maps you were supposed to make for your mountain dwarf king?”
The captive struggled vainly for a second, his tongue as tied as his arms and legs, fury dropping a red haze across his vision. The two executioners looked at Poleaxe expectantly, though one of them cast an uneasy glance at Fireforge.
Brandon understood that the latter, for whatever reason he was defending him, represented his only chance at survival. “He stole my father’s life-fortune with his treachery,” he protested desperately. “I come from Kayolin. Why would my governor, who is no king, have interest in provoking an attack on the hill dwarves of Kharolis?”
“Good questions,” Fireforge noted. His hand still rested on his axe, though he had made no move to draw the weapon. “At the very least, they deserve to be settled in trial. You might be the clan chief, Harn, and we all know your reputation and your courage in battle, but I won’t stand for a cold-blooded execution, not here and now.”
Poleaxe flushed, grinding his teeth behind the tangle of his beard. He took a step toward Fireforge, towering over the other dwarf, as he did every one of the other members of the band.
But there was something in the grim determination of his opponent’s steady, and eerily calm, gaze that held his hand. Poleaxe turned and spit in Brandon’s direction, the spittle hitting the mountain dwarf’s outstretched boot. Finally he shrugged, a gesture of casual, if insincere, acquiescence.
“Have it your way,” he said sullenly. He glared at the two dwarves he had ordered to kill Brandon. “Untie his feet and pick him up. But watch him carefully. He’s a snake, that one.”
Then he turned to the prisoner, and again his face was transformed by that mocking smile. “You’ve got a lot of walking to do,” he declared before turning and mounting his horse.
FOURTEEN
The Kharolis mountain range sprawled over an immense distance beyond the lofty ground of the High Kharolis, from its center around Cloudseeker. The prominent ridges ran generally north to south, with a slight lean toward the east in the north and the west in the south. Some of the escarpments extended into Abanasinia, reaching almost to the Newsea at the northern end of the range, while others, in the south, formed frowning bluffs overlooking Ice Mountain Bay and the cold waters of the southern ocean. In their whole extent, the mountains of the Kharolis presented a formidable barrier between south central Ansalon and southwest Ansalon.
In between those great ridges existed many different types of terrain. A wide lowland, generally flat but scored with gullies and ravines and steep, rocky ridges, extended for dozens of miles north of Thorbardin. Called the Plains of Dergoth, the lowland was flooded extensively during the depredations of dragon overlords and the forces of chaos. The southern portion of the former desert was called, simply, the “Bog” and was crossable by only a single, narrow track, and even that during only the dry season.
The ancient fortress of Zhaman, ruined during the Dwarfgate War of the post-Cataclysm dark age, dominated the plain, with its high bluff, scarred into the eerie image of a death’s-head. The humans, and many dwarves, called the place Skullcap, and most avoided it completely under the not-unbelievable impression that it was dangerously haunted.
North of Skullcap and the plain, another great tangle of mountains arose. These summits were not so high as Cloudseeker, but they were manifold and featured extremely steep crags and sheer ridges. Trees and streams marked the valleys, which could often be traversed-to a certain extent. Eventually, even the most promising routes terminated against the impassable barrier of the sheer wall. Those heights were so formidable, they could be crossed only on foot, and even then the precipitous paths were limited to the hardiest of climbers, traveling light.
The one exception was the Tharkadan Pass, a long and winding vale that cut generally southeast to northwest through the mountain barrier. A good road followed the pass, and for years it was the lone land route connecting not just Qualinesti and Thorbardin, but the two large sections of the continent wherein those two nations coexisted.
Firmly astride that road, right in the middle of the long pass, stood the fortress known as Pax Tharkas.
Built as an impervious barricade across the pass, the fortress was essentially a great wall flanked by two massive towers. Oriented to defend primarily against attack from the north, two additional curtain walls barred approach from that direction. Each of the curtain walls was pierced by a single gate, and the roadway approached each gate via a long, utterly exposed upward ramp. An attacker would have to penetrate both of those lesser defenses just to reach the formidable bastion itself, and the whole route was exposed to view-and to barrage with arrows, rocks, flaming oil, or even garbage-from the heights of the walls and towers.
Despite its strong orientation against northern attack, the fortress was no easy objective to an attacker coming from the south. Though it lacked the two curtain walls to delay an approach, both the main wall and the two towers loomed high over the floor of the pass, and any army coming from that direction would likewise be exposed to a ruthless barrage as it set to work against the massive stone gates that allowed access to the interior of the Tharkadan Wall.
The twin spires of Pax Tharkas, immense and blocky, mountainlike in their appearance, rose to either side of the long, broad battlement that connected the pair of lofty eminences. The Tharkadan Wall itself was a defensive battlement unmatched anywhere on Krynn. The two towers that flanked it to the right and left were joined, at their bases, to the sheer cliffs that flanked the valley, ensuring that anyone who was not a mountain goat had to pass through the fortress to travel north or south along the road.
Each of those square-walled spires was a fortress in its own right, with walls forty feet thick formed of tightly wedged stone blocks. They were divided into levels and contained the living quarters for, at that time, some one thousand inhabitants. The interior of the Tharkadan Wall, while also a huge and enclosed space, was not used for anything except as a training room for the military garrison.
Despite its appearance, so square and blocky, so suggestive of dwarven stolidity, the fortress was in fact a cooperative work of both the dwarf and elf peoples. Constructed shortly after the great elf king Kith-Kanan had formed his new nation of Qualinesti, Pax Tharkas had become a testament to the long peace between those two ancient peoples and the nations of Thorbardin and Qualinesti. It was only during later years, after the Cataclysm had set dwarf against dwarf and elf against human, that the fortress had fulfilled its promise as a bastion of war. Even when-due to the utter obliteration of the elven realm-the race war was a far distant memory, Pax Tharkas stood as a monument to dwarf implacability.
Tarn Bellowgranite knew the exalted history of the place, and he thought of those stories often as he walked the top of the Tharkadan Wall alone, as he did at the start of every day. He had read the tales of the builders who had labored so hard and so diligently to create Pax Tharkas. The staunch masonry was a testament to dwarf skill, but the location and the design had been the work of elves. The two races had worked together to create the mighty fortress, and all had regarded it as a symbol of amity. For a millennium and a half, the two nations had garrisoned Pax Tharkas together, elf and dwarf soldiers rubbing shoulders as they manned the battlements and watched the pass, ready to meet any potential enemy, sharing the belief that a foe to one race was a foe to both.
Then the gods had hurled their wrath upon the world in the form of the Cataclysm. The elves had fled to the depths of their forest home, and Pax Tharkas had become the gateway-very stoutly barred-to Thorbardin. Internecine warfare had rocked the dwarf world as the mountain dwarves refused to shelter their hill dwarf cousins under their mountain. Pax Tharkas was manned by the mountain dwarves, but it had been carried by storm when the wizard Fistandantilus and his army had attacked Thorbardin during the Dwarfgate War. That war had ended in disaster for both sides and left the two kin clans of dwarfkind licking deep wounds and nursing even deeper grudges.