Dark Thane

By feeling their way along the wall, they discovered that they had entered a tunnel, roughly circular, with smooth walls that seared their fingers. Both knew immediately that no dwarf had delved this tunnel. Some more elemental force must have burned its way through the rock. Guessing that the tunnel was not very wide, Tarn pushed off from the wall and moved blindly ahead. Almost immediately, he stumbled over something on the floor. The sickly sweet odor of cooked flesh assaulted his nostrils.

He and Ghash found six more dwarf bodies lying in the immediate area. They didn't need to see to know that all of them were horribly burned. But the last body that they found stirred when Tarn touched it. "Here he is!" Tarn cried to Ghash.

"I can't see!" the injured dwarf moaned. "My eyes! My eyes are gone!"

"Lie still and quiet," Tarn said as soothingly as he could. "We've come to rescue you."

He and Ghash each took the injured dwarf by one arm and tried to lift the poor fellow to his feet, but as they stood, his skin slipped loose from the flesh of his arms and he toppled to the floor again, groaning pitifully.

"This is hopeless!" Ghash cried in horror as he shook the loose folds of skin from his fingers. "He's as good as dead already We must leave, my king."

"King!" the dying dwarf shouted deliriously. "Must warn… !"

"Warn of what?" Tarn demanded. "What happened to you down here?"

A gurgling sigh was his only answer.

"He's dead, m'lord. We must go now," Ghash insisted. He began to pull at Tarn's arm, dragging him away from the bodies.

Tarn lashed out and struck the Klar's hands aside. "We'll go when I say," he shouted angrily. But almost as soon as he said it, Tarn regretted having not listened to his captain.

For behind them, a great red glow began to swell. A hot rising wind scorched their faces and started their beards to smoking as they turned toward the light. Now they saw this was no tunnel. It was a vast subterranean chamber, many times larger than the new Council Hall, but of similar proportions. It was like a great bowl that had somehow been burned out of the rock. The walls and floors were smooth as glass, except where the crack above their heads broke through, forming this tiny ledge high up the wall of the chamber. Had they not tripped over the bodies of the dwarves, they might have walked blindly over the edge and fallen hundreds of feet to their certain deaths.

But even this was preferable to the horror filling the bowl of the chamber below them. A vast winged serpentine form, seemingly composed of molten rock yet somehow alive and stirring, came into view. Its sinuous, catlike movements appeared to stoke the fires of its flesh, for it began to glow even hotter and brighter as they watched, abruptly heedless of the smelting furnace heat that assaulted their flesh. The two dwarves felt suddenly very naked and small. A deep, rumbling purr trembled through the stone beneath their feet as the dragon settled back to its slumber. And its fire began to dim.

By their dying flames, Tarn saw ropes dangling over the ledge, still tied to several pitons hammered into the stone. As he backed away from the ledge, he began to understand what must have happened to the engineers. They must have discovered the ledge and tried to descend into the chamber beyond, only to be overcome by the heat of the slumbering dragon's body.

For this was no ordinary dragon, nor one of the feared dragon overloads, like Beryl and Malys, who had appeared after the Chaos War. This was a chaos dragon, a creature of living fire, maybe even one of the very chaos dragons that had attacked Thorbardin during the Chaos War. Tarn had thought them all banished or destroyed when the gods defeated Chaos. But apparently, one had survived, spending the past decades slumbering away unsuspected in the heart of their mountain. Or had Chaos returned, and with him his minions? Either way, Thorbardin was in grave danger. The gods were no longer here to save them from Chaos, and all the dwarves in Thorbardin couldn't hope to defeat one of his fire dragons.

A terrified-looking Tarn, battered, scorched, and pale with fear, burst into the nursery, nearly frightening Aunt Needlebone half out of her frowsy, moth-eaten nightgown. "Where is Crystal?" he demanded.

"In the next room with your son. He just finished his breakfast. You're lucky Tor wasn't asleep. You come storming in here with your beard all in a knot, looking half crazy and dead, demanding this and ordering that at the top of your voice," Tor's nanny scolded the king.

"Shut up, old woman! Start packing Tor's things. Take only the essentials," Tarn ordered as he crossed the floor toward the door Auntie had indicated.

The humor vanished from the old hill dwarfs face. "So it has begun, has it? The beginning of the end? We're under attack?"

"No. Worse than that," Tarn said as he jerked the door open.

"What could be worse?" she asked after him. "And what happened to your face? You look all sunburned."