Downfall

Dhamon cocked his head. "You've a plan?"

The big man nodded. "Oh, yes."

Dhamon's dark eyes glimmered. "Whatever it is, we'll need to move quickly."

"Aye."

The half-elf made a sound, rolling onto her back as her thin arms moved like the wings of a butterfly.

"So this plan…" Dhamon prompted, when he was certain Rikali was still asleep.

"Will bring us great wealth. Gems, my friend. Some as big as my fist." Maldred grinned, showing a wide mouth filled with pearly, even teeth. "We're not terribly far from a valley in Thoradin, to the north and west, cradled by the high spires."

"A mine?"

"So to speak. It will take us a week to reach it. Less, perhaps, as these horses are fine ones. We'll take that trail." His finger indicated a line that ribboned through the hills. He arranged the skins on his belt and adjusted the two-handed sword on his back. "We'll get enough to purchase what you want, and we'll likely have a good bit left over."

"That's a merchant road up there," Dhamon observed.

"Where hopefully we'll find a merchant wagon," the big man added, a gleam in his hazel eyes. "We're going to need something to haul all of our riches in."

CHAPTER THREE Windfalls

"I'd prefer not to kill you." Maldred stood in the center of a well-beaten trail that cut through the heart of the Kalkhist Mountains. He was bare-chested, with his deerskin shirt tied about his waist. The midday sun was baking his already-tanned skin and had brought out beads of sweat that slowly ran down his chest and gathered at the waistband of his trousers. The steady breeze that teased his short ginger hair spun the dirt around his boots into dust devils. He gripped his two-handed sword in damp hands, wielding it as if it were no heavier than a twig and pointing it in the direction of a stoop-shouldered grizzled man who sat on the driver's platform of a bulging covered wagon. "Your death would not profit me, old one."

The man sputtered but said nothing, gripped the reins even tighter and stared in disbelief at Maldred. He blinked rapidly, as if doing so might make the big man go away.

"Now," Maldred warned.

"By all the vanished gods, no," the man said-not in response to Maldred's command, but to the unthinkable and very real situation he found himself in. "This cannot be real."

"It's as real as this damnable, rainless summer. Get down off the wagon. Now. Before I lose my patience."

"Gran'papa, don't listen to him!" A gangly youth poked his head through a slit in the canvas and climbed up front. "He's only one man."

"He should listen to him, son." Dhamon stepped from behind a boulder, broadsword in hand, blade catching the sun and reflecting it so brightly that the old man squinted. The skin was red and peeling on his shoulders, cheeks, and nose, the rest of his sweaty skin so darkened from the sun that it looked like he was carved from oiled cedar. He looked unkempt and primitive, with his feet bare, remnants of thin scab lines across his naked chest, dressed only in the shredded remains of his trousers- which did little to hide the strange-looking scale on his leg. He'd not shaved since Rikali tended to him, so his jaw looked shadowed, clouded by his new beard. When he curled his lip upward in a snarl and narrowed his black eyes, the youth quivered.

Rikali slid from behind an outcropping on the other side of the pass, long knife outstretched and pointed at the dark-skinned man sitting atop the second wagon. Fetch was at her side, growling and clawing at the air in a reasonable effort to appear menacing.

"Get down, old man, and raise your hands," Maldred's voice was steady and commanding. "And tell the others to do the same. Your lives are worth more than whatever it is you're hauling. We need your cooperation. I don't want to have to say it again."

There were three wagons stopped in the pass, each heavy and each pulled by several large draft horses. A "sumptuous find," Rikali eagerly pronounced it when she spotted the small procession on her scouting trip.

The old man swallowed hard, dropping the reins. He whispered something to the boy and shakily climbed down from the wagon, trembling from fear and casting his eyes back and forth between Maldred and the weird kobold creature. The youth followed him down, glaring at Maldred and casting worried looks Dhamon's way.

"Brigands," the old man wheezed when he'd found his voice again. "Never been robbed in all my life. Never." Louder, he said. "Better do what they say, son. Everybody out!" To Maldred he added, "Don't you hurt none of my people. Not a one! You hear me?"

"Hands away from your sides," Maldred continued, nodding to Dhamon. In response, Dhamon crept forward, taking a thin knife from the old man's belt, tossing it to the far side of the trail, cautiously eyeing the youth for weapons.