Handil turned and hesitated. Beside him, Jinna Rockreave spun her sling and released it. The stone — the size of a fist — sang across the arena and took a bearded man full in the face. He fell backward, carrying others with him.
“Jinna, come on!” Handil shouted.
“All right,” the girl nodded. “Just one more …” And then she was on her back on the stone floor, an arrow standing from her breast.
Handil dropped to his knees beside her. “Jinna!”
At the touch of his hands she shuddered and gasped. “Don’t … don’t move me, Handil. The pain …”
With a cry of agony, Handil the Drum crouched over his beloved and raised stricken eyes toward the far portal. His father was there, beckoning to him, and workers were chipping out the stone at each side, where the stops of the inner gate were concealed.
“Handil,” Jinna whispered, “go now. Leave me. You must. The humans …” Gasping with pain, she held out her hand and dropped something into his.
Tears misted his eyes as he saw what it was — an exquisite ring, embedded and twined in the elven style. The gift from Cale Greeneye. Arrows whisked around him, and a thrown axe hummed past his head as he slipped the ring on, then drew its mate from his belt and placed it carefully on Jinna’s finger.
“For as long as we live,” he murmured, gazing into her stricken eyes, seeing the blood that seeped from her nose and mouth. “For as long as we live.”
Humans were rushing toward him now, weapons raised for the kill. In the distance he heard his father’s voice, calling his name, and then a crash like thunder. He glanced around. Where there had been a portal — had always been a portal, opening onto the great concourse of Thorin — now was solid stone, twenty feet thick. The inner gate had worked. Thorin was safe behind a wall of stone that no human could penetrate.
Jinna no longer moved, and he realized that she had stopped breathing. Distractedly, barely aware of the howling tide of murderous humans sweeping down on him, Handil the Drum stood, swung his vibrar under his arm, and stripped away its wraps. An arrow buried itself in his thigh as he drew forth his mallets, but he hardly felt it.
The nearest humans were only yards away now, rushing at him, but when he turned to them, they slowed, stunned at what they saw in his eyes. In that instant, a few of them may have realized that they were looking at their own deaths. Unhurriedly, standing over the body of his beloved, Handil raised his mallets and brought them down, and the Thunderer began to sing.
No Call to Balladine was this, no glad song of the high peaks. The rhythm of the big vibrar was a dirge, and it filled the great hall of Grand Gather with sound so intense that humans reeled back from it, many dropping their weapons to clap hands to their ears.
Another arrow struck Handil, and then another, but they meant nothing to him. The mallets increased their tempo, and the vibrar thundered.
And all around — above where the sun-tunnelled ceiling arched away, around every wall and in every rise and ramp of Grand Gather — hewn stone took up the vibrations and began to disintegrate. The cavern roared and bellowed, and huge chunks of broken stone showered down from above, crushing everyone and everything beneath them. An entire sun-tunnel slipped free of its collar somewhere and plummeted to the arena floor, shattering into bright, piercing shards which flew in all directions. Humans milled and screamed, many turning back the way they had come. But the entryway had collapsed, and there was nowhere to go.
A raging human, crazed by fear, ran at Handil with a raised sword and impaled himself upon the lance of another human trying to get away. An axe struck Handil in the hip, and he fell, then raised himself on one knee, never missing a beat.
The song of the vibrar built upon itself like contained thunders rolling back and back, echoes becoming great choruses of echoes.
“As long as we live,” Handil the Drum muttered to himself, building his beat to a crescendo. And the entire roof of Grand Gather collapsed inward, millions of tons of cold stone filling and forever sealing what was now only a silent tomb.
Clouds of dust and debris rose from the mountainside above Thorin Keep as a chasm opened there. The great monolith called First Sentinel, standing just at the edge of the collapse, teetered and swayed, then disintegrated and fell into the hole, raising more clouds of stone-dust.
And above it all the sun of Krynn approached the zenith of its solstice day.
Just as no human had ever guessed the magnitude of Thorin, neither had any human ever known — or even suspected — about the inner gates. Most of the Calnar themselves were only vaguely aware that, suspended unseen in a hall-sized slot above the east portal of Grand Gather, was a gigantic hanging wall of solid granite held in place by cable-braced props. Old Mistral Thrax might have remembered the tremendous task of creating this massive deadfall, had he ever had cause to think about it, but few others beyond the leaders of the Calnar had known it was there. It was plastered over and unseen, and had never been used because once released it was unlikely that it could ever be raised again.
But now, in their last moments, the invaders in Grand Gather had learned of it. And now all those beyond, in Thorin proper, knew of it. Where had stood the door to Grand Gather, now was an impenetrable wall. As Wight Anvil’s-Cap had said, Thorin would never again be the same. The keep, the outer tunnels, even Grand Gather, had always been a facade. Now they — or what was left of them — were cut off forever from the city beneath the crag.
The Calnar had removed themselves from invasion by sealing the only entry that any but themselves knew about. Within Thorin now were only Calnar — except one. Raging and unseen, one walked among them who was human … or had once been human, before encountering a dwarf imbued with wild magic from the Graystone itself.
Grayfen stalked the great concourse of Thorin, unseen as long as he shielded his eyes. Only he, of all the human forces, had got past the inner gate before it came crashing down, and the rage that boiled within him was a burning, insane fire. The dinks had tricked them! Long years of planning and intrigue had come to nothing. He was in Thorin, but not as a conqueror. He was a shadow among those he hated most, trapped with no way out.
The glowing orbs that were his only eyes burned in his head, their presence a pounding pain that never relented. He longed to remove them, even for a few minutes, but without them his magic would not work, and he would be seen and killed.
In his rage he struck out around him. A dozen times in as many minutes he touched some passing dwarf, then did the magic he had learned and watched, unseen, as the dwarf died in agony, clawing at its throat.
But that only tired him, and did no good. He could not kill them all.
The magic! He knew there was more that it would do, more than he had learned. Too often, when he had tried to devise spells, they had turned on him with painful results. Yet now, in his rage, he knew there was a thing he could do, and the magic itself seemed to tell him how. Revenge! The magic whispered it. Revenge upon Colin Stonetooth, whose fault it was that he was trapped.
The rage boiled and coalesced within him and became arcane words that molded themselves to his tongue. “In morit deis Calnaris,” he whispered. “Refeist ot atium dactas ot destis!”
As though the magic itself instructed him, he spoke the spell and knew what it meant. To the leader of the dwarves, exile. To his seed, death!
It was all he could do. Yet, somewhere ahead must lie the fabulous treasure that everyone knew the dwarves had. The subterranean city was far bigger than he had suspected, and far brighter. The radiance of the place seemed to increase with each passing second, and to eyes that could not close, that could never not see, it was intensely painful. And the place was incredibly hot. He felt as though he were in a furnace. Despite the pain, he went toward the brightness. That must be where the treasure was.