Dragonlance - Preludes 2 Vol 2 - Flint the King, DragonLance, Dragon Lance
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PRELUDES II
VOLUME TWO
Flint
- the-
King
Mary Kirchoff and
Douglas Niles
PDF by Ashamael
As always, this book is for
Steve and Alex for their
unlimited help, patience, and
midnight snacks;
And to Bruce Johnson and
Peter Fritzell, teachers/
mentors who knew when to
encourage and when to
laugh.
- MK
For Lou Niles,
My mother and first fan.
- DN
Prologue
The hammer fell rhyththmically against the anvil, oven
and over, gradually returning the wheelrim to its circular
shape. A sheen of perspiration glistened on the dwarven
smith's skin when the fire rose, but then he fell into shadows
as the blaze sank into the coals. The smithy around him was
empty, dark but for the forge fire.
As the hill dwarf's body labored, so did his mind, franti-
cally. He thought about the secret he had learned, scarce
minutes before. Again and again his hammer fell on the rim
as he pushed himself past the point of exhaustion. Sparks
exploded from each contact, hissing through the air before
settling to the earthen floor of the shed.
Indecision tormented him. Should he remain silent?
Should he speak out? The hammer continued pounding.
Immersed in his task, the dwarf did not see the grotesque
figure moving through the shadowy doorway. For a mo-
ment the fire flared, outlining a black, misshapen figure
shorter even than the dwarven smith.
This dark one shuffled forward, and again the blaze rose,
revealing a hump of flesh that twisted the stunted body half
sideways. Still the smith hammered, eyes focused on the
wheel, unaware of the one who slowly limped toward him
from behind.
The hunchbacked figure raised a hand to his chest and
wrapped his blunt fingers around a small object that hung
suspended from his neck by a chain.
Blue light glowed between those fingers as the amulet
sparked to life. His other hand gestured toward the smith.
Softly, the blue light spread outward, advancing slowly like
an oily, penetrating mist. It reached forward in uneven tend-
rils, closer and closer to the smith.
For the first time, the hammer faltered slightly in its blow.
Reflexively, the dwarf raised it again, ready to strike. Sud-
denly his face distorted in a grimace of unimaginable agony,
and his body convulsed with a violent spasm. For a moment
his movement ceased, as if he had been frozen in a grip of ex-
cruciating pain.
The hammer remained poised above him as his body stiff-
ened, wracked within the blue glow that outlined him. The
gentle, almost beautiful cocoon belied the supernatural grip
of its power. Only the dwarf's eyes moved, growing wider
and more desperate with the slowly increasing, inevitably
fatal pressure of dark sorcery.
Abruptly the light vanished, and the hunchback shuffled
backward, melting into the darkness.
The dwarven smith's hammer finally slid from his gloved
hand with a loud clang to the anvil. Slowly, the corpse top-
pled forward, the stocky body splaying across the anvil and
the nearly straightened wheel. It slipped silently to the cold
ground.
Chapter 1
Autumn Winds
Watching dead leaves swirl into his windowss, Flint
Fireforge threw back his mug and swallowed the last of his
draught. A satisfied belch ruffled his thick mustache. For
cheap ale, it wasn't half bad, he concluded. But it was gone.
He held the empty bottle - his last - up to the light of the
fire. The dwarf stroked his salt-and-pepper beard out of
habit. After considering his empty larder, Flint decided that
it was time to see if his ale order was in at the greengrocer's.
He was going to have to leave the comfort of his home and
fire for only the third time in the month since his friends had
left the treetop village of Solace.
The dwarf and his companions - Tanis Half-Elven, Tas-
slehoff Burrfoot, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, Kitiara
Uth-Matar, and Sturm Brightblade - had parted ways to
discover what they could of the rumors concerning the true
clerics, agreeing to meet again in exactly five years. Flint
had spent much of his time in the last few years adventuring
with his much younger friends or traveling to fairs to sell his
metalsmithing and woodcarvings. Truly he missed them,
now that they were gone. But the truth of the matter was, at
one hundred forty years, the middle-aged dwarf was just
plain tired. So, being reclusive by nature, he had stayed at
home and done little more than eat, drink, sleep, stoke the
fire, and whittle in the month since their departure.
Flint's stomach rumbled. Patting the noisy complainer, he
reluctantly eased his bulk from his overstuffed chair near
the fire, brushing wood shavings from his lap as he stood.
He pulled his woolly vest closer and looked about his home
for his leather boots.
The house was small by the measure of the human-sized
buildings up in the trees. But his home, built in the base of
an old, hollowed-out vallenwood, was quite large by dwar-
ven standards - opulent even, he reflected, with not a little
pride. Sure, it didn't have the large nooks and crannies
found in the caves-turned-houses of his native foothills near
the Kharolis Mountains, nor was there the ever-present
homey scent only a white-hot forge could produce. But he
had carved every inch of the inside of his tree into shelves or
friezes depicting vivid and nostalgic scenes from his home- '
land. These included a forging contest, dwarven miners at
work, and the simple skyline of his boyhood village. Such
carvings were not easily done on the stone walls of the
homes of most hill dwarves.
The stroke of his knife over a firm piece of wood was
Flint's greatest joy, though the gruff hill dwarf would never
have admitted such a sentiment. Idly, he raised his hand to
one of the friezes, touching his fingers to the carved crest of
a jagged ridge, following the dips and summits. He dropped
his hand to the carvings of the dark pine forests below the
crest, admiring the precise bladework that had marked each
tree in individual relief on the wall.
With a large, shuddering sigh, Flint took his heavy, well-
worn leather boots from under a bench by the door and
jammed them onto his thick feet. There was nothing to be
done about it - he'd put off this errand as long as he could.
The massive vallenwood front door creaked as Flint
opened it, causing the shutters on his windows to bang in
the chill breeze, their hinges sagging like an old woman's
stockings. They ought to be repaired - there were many
such tasks to be done before the first snow fell.
Flint's home was one of the few in Solace at ground level,
since he was one only of a handful of non-humans living in
the town, including dwarves. While the view from up in the
trees was quite lovely, Flint had no interest in living in a
drafty, swaying house. Wooden walkways suspended by
strong cords attached to high branches were the sidewalks
of Solace. Probably they had provided a useful means of de-
fense against the bandit armies that had once ranged across
the plains of Abanasinia in the wake of the Cataclysm.
Nowadays the trees served as an aesthetic delight, Solace's
trademark. People came from many miles away simply to
gaze on the city of vallenwood.
The day was cool but not cold, and warming sunshine cut
through the thick trees in slanted white lines. The greengro-
cer's shop rose above the very center of the eastern edge of
the town square, a short distance away. Flint set out for the
nearest spiral stair leading to the bridgewalks overhead. By
the time his short legs had pumped him to the top of the cir-
cling thirty-foot wooden ramp, his brow had broken out in
beads of sweat. Flint plucked at the furry edges of his vest
and wished he hadn't dressed so warmly; he slipped his arms
from it and draped the leather and wool garment over one
shoulder. He saw the grocer's, at the end of a long straighta-
way.
For the first time in quite a while, Flint truly noticed his
surroundings. The village of Solace was washed in vivid fall
colors. But unlike the maples or oaks of other areas, each
large vallenwood leaf turned red, green, and gold in perfect,
alternating angled stripes of about an inch wide. So instead
of seeing blazing clumps of solid color, the landscape was a
multicolored jumble. The bright sunlight cast the leaves in a
shimmering iridescence that shifted in shade and intensity
with each passing breeze.
The view from the bridgewalk allowed him to see quite a
distance. He looked down at a smithy, where the blacksmith
Theros Ironfeld toiled at shoeing the lively stallion of a
robed human who was pacing with impatience.
A seeker, Flint thought sullenly, and his mood darkened.
It seemed the seekers were everywhere these days. The sect
had arisen from the ashes of the Cataclysm, which was itself
caused by the old gods in reaction to the pride and misdirec-
tion of the most influential religious leader at the time, the
Kingpriest of Istar. This group, calling themselves seekers,
loudly proclaimed that the old gods had abandoned Krynn.
They sought new gods, and sometime during the three cen-
turies since, the seekers claimed to have found those gods.
Many of the folk of Abanasinia had turned toward the flick-
ering promise of the seekers' religion. Flint, and many oth-
ers of a more pragmatic nature, saw the seekers' doctrine for
the hollow bunk that it was.
They could be recognized by their brown and golden
robes, these seeker missionaries who rode about the plains
collecting steel coins for their coffers. Most of them at the
missionary level were the young, bored malcontents who
grew up in every town. The promise of money and power, if
only over people desperate for a sign that gods existed,
seemed to lure these spiritual bullies like a magnet. They
were molded into persuasive salesmen by an intensive
"training" session in the seeker capitol of nearby Haven, and
they claimed to have converted thousands to their cause.
The seekers were as close as anything to the governing
body of the plains. A body with muscle, of course: seeker
followers were equally divided between the zealous acolytes
who taught the words and ways of the new gods, and the
men-at-arms who garrisoned the towns for no discernible
purpose.
Unfortunately, groused the dwarf to himself, their con-
cept of governing seems to involve little more than mooch-
ing off the towns and villages unlucky enough to host their
temples and guardposts.
Flint's mood dipped even farther when he noticed a group
of seekers hovering around the doorway to Jessab the
Greengrocer's. He recognized this bunch as rude, belliger-
ent, over-postulating phonies who couldn't cure a split fin-
ger any more than they could speak with their so-called
gods. In one of the few times Flint had ventured from his
home in the last month, he had come upon a villager chok-
ing on a bite of meat. This very group had been summoned
to help, and after much desperate prodding from the small,
gathered crowd, the leader of the three, a pimply young
whelp, had sighed and gesticulated uselessly above his head
as if casting a clerical spell. No miracle appeared. The vil-
lager had gasped his last before the other two could try to
help him. The three had shrugged in unison and then headed
into the nearest inn, unconcerned.
Flint could feel his face tighten with anger now as he con-
sidered the cluster around the doorway. Novices, he noted,
from their coarse white robes edged with embroidered hem-
lock vine and the all-too-familiar emblem of a lighted torch
on the left breast.
"Who are you staring at, little man?" one of them de-
manded, his arms crossed insolently.
Flint's eyes narrowed in irritation, but he let a shake of his
head and a snort of disgust suffice to answer the question.
Tipping his head slightly, he made to squeeze his way be-
tween them and into the greengrocer's.
A bony finger poked him in the shoulder, scarcely enough
pressure for the dwarf even to notice. "I asked you a ques-
tion, gully dwarf." The seeker's friends laughed at the insult.
Flint stopped but did not raise his eyes. "And I believe I
gave you as much answer as your kind deserves."
Egged on by his friends, the young seeker pressed his
point. "You've got an awfully smart mouth for an outnum-
bered old man," he growled, stepping fully in front of Flint.
He reached down to grab the dwarf's lapels.
"Teach him a lesson, Gar," a crony purred in anticipation.
Flint's irritation turned to fury. He looked into the face of his
antagonist. What he saw was the glee-and-fear mixed ex-
pression of an animal who was closing on an easy victim. Or
so the seeker thought.
Flint decided that the fellow needed a lesson in humility
and manners. Moving like lightning, he drove his fist into
the boy's belly. Stunned, the youth doubled over and
clutched at his stomach. The dwarf's stubby fingers flew up
to pull the seeker's droopy, coarse hood down over his red
face. Flint quickly drew the strings tight and knotted the
hood shut, until only the boy's pimply nose poked out.
Flailing his arms desperately, the seeker let out a screech and
tumbled to the planks of the bridgewalk.
Flint was dusting off his hands when his sharp dwarven
ears picked up the familiar "whoosh" of blades being un-
sheathed. Whirling around with stunning quickness, the
stocky dwarf knocked the small daggers from the other
seekers' hands. The metal weapons glinted in the sun as they
flew over opposite sides of the bridgewalk.
"Daggers! Look out below!" Flint called over the railing in
case anyone stood beneath. Looking down, he saw a few
villagers scatter without question, and the blades fall harm-
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