The Corgi Chronicles Page 4

  Gornak took out a small metallic tool from his belt. It gleamed as he carefully scratched a symbol into the limestone. Then he chanted in the harsh Dwarvish language and a blue aura developed around the symbol. When the glow reached a brilliant turquoise he shouted, “Barnâkh,” and pointed with the tool. The blue light flowed from the symbol across the ground, under the stasis field, and popped the anchor rock up, throwing it several feet to the side.

  The stasis field followed its anchor, and Aliiana, the rabbit and I were released to fall to the ground. I hit the ground, rolled away from the stasis field, stood up, and shook myself from nose to tail. I was so happy that I ran over to Gornak and gave him a lick on his hand.

  “Pippin,” Aliiana said sternly, “you need to be more careful.”

  I drooped my big ears. “Yes, Mistress. I promise I won’t chase any more rabbits.”

  The following night, we set up camp like usual. Nelathen and Gornak stretched out the elven tarp and Aliiana built a fire. Birgitte was really too small to do anything physical, but she used her magic to set a protective ward against intruders. Barrol bounded off into the woods to hunt.

  Gornak called out after him, “Bring me back a hare, too!” Then he mumbled to himself, “I’m getting tired of this elven bread. Doesn’t properly fill up a dwarf.”

  Barrol returned shortly with blood on his muzzle, holding two hares in his mouth. He dropped them in front of Gornak and purred. It was just like the purr of a regular kitty, but loud and deep, rumbling like a diesel engine.

  “Excellent,” Gornak said. “We’ll have a feast tonight.” He set about skinning and dressing the hares and stuck them on green branches to roast over the fire.

  The fey wrinkled their vegetarian noses in disgust, but I drooled. I’m a carnivore, after all, and I was tired of elven bread, too.

  Gornak and I ate our fill of roasted hare. Barrol had already eaten several fresh hares, and declined the roasted meat. He said cooking meat ruined it, but I thought it was delicious. With my tummy pleasantly full, I curled up near the fire and fell asleep.

  We had been setting a rotation of watches every night, just to be safe. I usually took the last watch of the night. Sometime in the middle of the night, when Aliiana was on watch, I felt her little hand on my head.

  “Shhh… Wake up, Pippin,” she whispered. “I think there’s someone out there.” She quietly woke the others as well.

  Birgitte fluttered above the remains of the fire. “The wards haven’t detected anyone.”

  I heard a rustle in the woods behind me. I spun around and growled low in my throat. Even with my night vision, I couldn’t see anyone.

  Barrol suddenly snarled and leapt forward. At the same moment, Nelathen yelled behind me and I heard the clang of his sword. I heard more rustling all around us and realized that we were surrounded.

  I finally saw one of the intruders. It was insectile, about six feet long, and had dozens of legs and four black eyes as big as grapefruits.

  A giant centipede.

  My hackles rose and my ears pinned back. I’m used to bugs being tiny. A bug as big as a sofa was not my idea of fun.

  The ghastly beast made dry rustling and clicking sounds as it scurried forward on its many feet. I wasn’t sure what to do. I was vaguely aware of my friends engaged in battle with other centipedes. Nelathen and Gornak swiped with their sword and axe, and Aliiana and Birgitte cast magic spells. Barrol tore into another centipede with his claws and fangs.

  The gigantic bug continued to clitter-clatter toward me, and I backed up slowly, still growling. I suddenly remembered seeing border collies herding sheep, running around them, ducking low, and even jumping onto a sheep’s back. I decided to try that with the centipede.

  I held my body low to the ground and zipped around to the left of the beast. His four eyes saw me move, but he couldn’t turn fast enough. I ran around behind him, nipped at the heels of his rearmost set of legs, and jumped up onto his back.

  He turned his head around to glare at me. It was at this point that I noticed that below the four black eyes were two enormous red pincers, each dripping a viscous, medicinal-smelling liquid. I barked at him, but that only seemed to make him more determined to impale me.

  The pincers snapped right in front of me. I jerked my paw out of the way just in time. Then he lashed his head around the other way, nearly snipping off my ears. I was about to become bug food.

  I only had one chance. I barked at him again. His head whipped around, pincers glistening. Right before the pincers made contact with my shoulder, I jumped down to the ground. Instead of piercing tender Corgi flesh, his pincers pierced through his own tough hide.

  The bug made a shrill sound and collapsed, twitching. I had won!

  I quickly surveyed the scene around me. There were seven centipedes dead on the ground, and Nelathen and Gornak were finishing off the last two.

  Aliiana sat down, panting from exhaustion. I went to her and licked her face. “I’m glad you’re okay, Pippin,” she said.

  “Are you all right, Mistress?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Just tired. Casting that many spells takes as much energy from my body as running all day would.”

  I looked at Birgitte. She must have been drained as well, because she wasn’t even flying. She sat on a log, her green wings hanging limp.

  We had all survived, but Barrol had suffered a cut on his leg from one of the centipedes. When Birgitte recovered her breath, she looked at the cut. “I don’t think any venom got in the wound,” she said. “You’re lucky, Barrol. It should heal fine if you keep it clean.”

  We all sat around the dying embers of the fire, breathing hard. “Birgitte,” Aliiana asked, “why didn’t your wards detect the centipedes?”

  “I think it’s because I set the wards against sentient beings. The centipedes weren’t sentient creatures. I think they were mindless slaves, doing the bidding of Angarath.”

  “Then he must know where we are,” Gornak said.

  “Aye,” said Nelathen. “He must be using some sort of scrying spell. We need to be especially careful to avoid more attacks.”

  The rest of that night was free of incident, although none of us slept well from nervousness. The next morning, my friends tried to figure out a way to prevent Angarath from scrying us.

  I learned that ‘scrying’ meant to cast a spell on a liquid surface to see the image of a person or scene far away. Angarath only needed to concentrate on the locations he had passed to see if anyone was following him.

  “Perhaps a cloud spell to obscure his vision?” asked Aliiana.

  Nelathen frowned. “But if a cloud is following us around, that will make us more conspicuous to humans.”

  “Invisibility?” asked Birgitte.

  “Yes, that would work, of course. But maintaining an invisibility spell for that long would be extremely tiring.”

  “Can you scry him back?” I asked. If we could see where he was—and who he was—it would make our job easier.

  “Good thought, Pippin,” said Aliiana, “but unfortunately without knowing what he looks like or where he is, we can’t target him. He can scry us because he knows where to look.”

  “Do any of you know an anti-scrying spell?” asked Gornak. The others all shook their heads.

  “I think the best we’ll be able to do is a diffusion spell,” said Aliiana. “It would blur the image of us. He’ll still know where we are, but he won’t be able to see the details of what we’re doing.”

  Gornak grunted his assent. “Well, let’s see if we can combine our efforts, to make it as strong as possible.”

  Aliiana, Nelathen, Gornak and Birgitte all stood in a circle (well, Birgitte wasn’t standing but was hovering like a hummingbird) and began to chant—three in Elvish and one in Dwarvish. A light yellow glow spun like a whirlwind in the middle of the circle. As it spun faster, it turned peach and then pink, colored like a sunset. They all released the spell simultaneously, and the spinning glow poofed and e
xpanded to cover all of us.

  It didn’t feel any different, but when I looked at the landscape outside the spell I perceived a very slight fuzziness. Aliiana assured me that Angarath’s view in his scrying bowl would be a big fuzzy nothingness.

  The trail had been leading nearly straight east since we left the park. We had gradually come down from the Rocky Mountains into the foothills. We were about two-thirds of the way across the state of Montana, according to Nelathen’s map, when the putrid troll-scent trail suddenly turned south.

  My sniffer led us to the edge of a large lake surrounded by dried brown grasses and cattails. The ice was breaking up with the warming spring temperatures, and there were sharp ridges where sheets of ice had smashed into each other over the course of the winter. In some areas, the ice was white or pale blue, but in other areas it looked black and rotten.

  Gornak peered at a black patch. “That doesn’t look safe to cross.”

  “You dwarves are just afraid of water,” said Barrol, curling his big furry lips into a smile.

  “Be nice,” Nelathen chided Barrol. He pulled out his map again and pointed to a spot at the edge of a large blue mark. “This is Fort Peck Lake. If we went all the way around it to the west, it would add a good sixty miles to our route. I don’t like to think of Angarath getting that much farther ahead of us.” He looked at Aliiana. “What do you think?”

  “I agree,” she said. “I think we should chance it on the ice and go across the lake.”

  “All right,” said Gornak. “But I suggest we take some precautions before we cross.” He surveyed us and our equipment. “I think Barrol and I probably weigh the most, so we should each walk alone. I would suggest that Aliiana walks apart from Pippin. And I would also suggest we tie a rope around our waists in case the ice breaks underneath one of us.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement. Nelathen took out a fifty-foot length of elven rope from his pack—very lightweight and very strong. He looped it around our waists at intervals of ten feet: the dwarf at one end, then himself, me, Aliiana, and then Barrol at the other end. Birgitte could fly over the lake safely.

  “Ready?” Gornak asked. We all nodded, and carefully stepped out onto the treacherous ice. It wasn’t really any different than walking on the snow and ice-crusted rocks of the mountains, except that I knew there was a freezing watery death just a few inches below my paws.

  We were a couple hundred yards out onto the lake when a malevolent thundercloud boiled up right above us.

  My first thought was, Bad luck to be caught in a storm. But before I could comment to my friends, a tornado’s funnel dipped down from the thundercloud, and I realized the storm was yet another trap by Angarath.

  The cloud spun rapidly, turning from grey to purple to black, faster and faster, towering up into the sky. It touched down on the ice in front of us and shattered it. Shards of ice rose up to join the whirlwind.

  Birgitte was thrown down by the wind, and smashed onto the ice near me. She was so tiny, I was afraid she might have been killed. I hurried over to her and gently picked her up in my mouth.

  “Hurry!” Nelathen’s shout barely reached me over the howling wind. We were already running as fast as we could, scarcely making headway against the wind and flying ice chips.

  We aimed toward the far shore, trying to bypass the hole that the funnel cloud had punched through the ice.

  Crack!

  A huge chunk of ice broke away, spinning off into the choppy water. Gornak had been standing on that patch of ice, and when it spun away he was dumped into the water.

  He sank like a rock.

  The elven rope must have still been attached to Gornak, because Nelathen was pulled over onto his back by the rope around his waist. He was dragged along the slick ice toward the hole. I knew that I would be next to be pulled down into the icy water.

  Chapter 6

  Aliiana’s voice sounded in my mind. Hang on, Pippin. I’ll try to get help. I just hope there’s a water fairy in this lake.

  I tried to dig my claws in to stop my slide across the ice, but the surface was slushy and I couldn’t get a grip. I was pulled several feet towards the hole.

  Squinting through the swirling storm, I saw Nelathen wrap the elven rope around the hilt of his sword and ram the sword into the ice to stop our slide. Then he pulled the rope up hand-over-hand from the freezing depths.

  To my other side, I saw Aliiana sit down in the slush, oblivious to the whirling tornado, and place her bare hands on the ice. She closed her eyes and must have been chanting—I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the wind but her lips were moving.

  Tied as I was to the rope between Nelathen and Aliiana, I couldn’t move toward either one without disturbing the other, so I stood still, continuing to hold Birgitte in my mouth. She wasn’t moving at all against my tongue or lips and I feared the worst.

  At last! rejoiced Aliiana’s voice in my mind. She stood up and looked toward Nelathen, who was still pulling on the rope.

  Aliiana, Barrol and I hurried across the slush to the hole. As we watched, Gornak’s head popped above the surface. Nelathen grabbed the dwarf around the shoulders and heaved him up onto the ice. Gornak was unconscious, his lips blue and his beard soaked.

  Nelathen pounded on the dwarf’s chest, then bent his head to listen for a heart beat. He shook his head, and pounded again.

  A new face popped up from the water. It was a water fairy. She was similar in size and build to Aliiana, but had pale bluish skin and tangled wet hair. She looked at Aliiana and said, “He has inhaled too much water and may not live.”

  The water fairy climbed out of the hole and knelt next to Gornak. She placed her tiny blue hands on his chest, closed her eyes, and chanted in Elvish. A blue glow sparkled around her hands and his chest.

  Gornak’s eyes flew open. Nelathen quickly helped him sit up, and Gornak coughed, blinked and looked around. His eyes settled on the water fairy, and he asked in a hoarse voice, “Did you save me?”

  She nodded but didn’t speak.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  The water fairy seemed to be very shy. She glanced back at the hole, then said, “Lennali.”

  Gornak bowed his head. “Thank you, Lennali. I owe you a debt—you and the entire fairy race.”

  Lennali smiled and dove back into the water.

  The funnel cloud was losing its energy. Gornak was able to walk, although he had to stop to cough every few paces. We slowly made our way to the far shore.

  We stepped off the ice onto solid land. By unspoken agreement, we made our way up onto a little hill before stopping.

  Nelathen knelt before me and I gently placed Birgitte on his outstretched hands. There were tears in his eyes as he put a fingertip against her chest.

  “I can still feel her heart beat,” he said. “She’s probably in shock. And her injuries…”

  One of Birgitte’s pale green wings, delicate and beautiful as a butterfly’s, was shredded, the papery tissue hanging in limp threads.

  “I can stabilize her,” said Nelathen, “but I can’t heal her wounds.” He looked at Aliiana and Gornak. Both shook their heads.

  Holding his hand above her tiny, broken body, Nelathen whispered an Elvish spell. A yellow glow surrounded her and her breathing became stronger, but she remained unconscious.

  “We must get her to a healer,” said Aliiana.

  Nelathen nodded. “The nearest elven community is quite a ways to the south, in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.” He turned to Gornak. “Is there a closer dwarven community?”

  Gornak shook his head.

  “Then we must hurry to the Bighorn Mountains.” Nelathen placed Birgitte in his knit snowboarder hat to keep her warm.

  Gornak coughed again, deep racking wheezes that made his body shudder. When he was able to catch his breath, he spoke. “I know a spell for endurance, so we can avoid stopping to rest. But when we reach our destination, we will need to make up the sleep.”

  “Do i
t,” said Aliiana.

  Gornak nodded. He pulled out the metal tool I had seen when I was trapped in the stasis field. Now that I got a better look at it, I realized it was a miniature copy of his battleaxe. He knelt on the ground, brushed away a patch of snow, and carved a strange symbol into the rocky ground.

  “A rune,” Aliiana whispered to me. “The dwarves channel magic through symbols called runes, as I channel it through stone.”

  Gornak finished drawing the rune and muttered a few Dwarvish words. Suddenly, I felt as fast and strong as a greyhound. I could run all day and all night.

  We made excellent time to the Bighorn Mountains—now that we weren’t being delayed by Angarath’s booby traps. Nelathen led us to a grove high in the mountains. As we approached, he whistled a complicated bird song. We heard an answering whistle high in the trees, and halted.

  Nelathen removed his sword and bow and placed them on the ground. He nodded to the others, and Gornak laid down his axe and Aliiana her bow.

  A wiry elf appeared from behind a tree. “Ahh, so it’s you, Nelathen. I haven’t seen you in seven decades.”

  Nelathen bowed low. “Darnel. It’s good to see you. We’re in desperate need of healing.”

  Darnel lifted an eyebrow. I suppose we all looked healthy to him. “Of course,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Nelathen and the others picked up their weapons and we all followed Darnel. Unlike the dwelling of the Prince, which was tucked under pine trees, this was high in the air. A series of wooden platforms connected the trees fifty feet above the ground. Rooms were divided off with hanging green silks, and birds twittered in the trees.

  We were led to a large platform, draped in light green gauzy fabric. In the chamber sat a beautiful elf with snow-white hair and flowing lavender gown. “Welcome,” she said.

  Nelathen bowed, and the rest of us followed suit. “Greetings, fair Princess.”

  A Princess? I bowed as low as I could on my short legs.

  The Princess smiled. “Nelathen. My brother said you might be in the area. This must be Aliiana.” She looked at me. “And you must be Pippin.”