The Chaos Curse Read Online Free PDF Page B

understanding.
    “You invited me in,” Rufo said clearly with his last bit of strength. He began to laugh then, weirdly, out of control, and the laughter became a great convulsion, and then a final scream.
    None in attendance remembered ever seeing a man die more horribly.

The Ultimate Perversion
    “There ain’t no burned cave!” Ivan roared, and a rumble from above, from the unsteady, piled snow, reminded the dwarf that a bit more care might be prudent. If Ivan didn’t get the point then, he got it a second later, when frantic Pikel ran up and slapped him on the back of the head, knocking his helm down over his eyes. The yellow-bearded dwarf grabbed a deer antler and adjusted the thing, then turned a scowl on his brother, but Pikel didn’t relent, just stood there waggling a finger in Ivan’s face.
    “Quiet down, both of you!” Cadderly scolded. “Oo,” replied Pikel, and he seemed honestly wounded. Cadderly, thoroughly flustered, didn’t notice the look. He continued his scan of the ruined mountain, amazed that the opening-an opening large enough to admit a dragon with its wings spread wide-was no more.
    “You are sure that it is not just snow?” Cadderly asked, to which Ivan stamped his boot, dislodging a chunk of snow from above that fell over him and Pikel.
    Pikel popped up first, snow sliding off the edges of the flopping, wide-brimmed hat he had borrowed from Cadderly, and was ready with another slap when Ivan reappeared.
    “If ye don’t believe me, go in there yerself.” Ivan bellowed, pointing to the snow mass. “There’s stone in there. Solid stone, I tell ye! That wizard sealed it good with his storm.”
    Cadderly put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath. He recalled the storm Aballister had sent to Nightglow, the wizard thinking that Cadderly and his friends were still there. Aballister had no way of knowing that Cadderly had enlisted the aid of a hostile dragon and was many miles closer to Castle Trinity.
    Looking at the destruction, at the side of a mountain torn asunder by hurled magic, Cadderly was glad that Aballister’s aim had been misplaced. That did little to comfort the young priest now, though. Inside this mountain waited an unguarded dragon hoard, a treasure that Cadderly would need to see his plans for the Edificant Library, and for all the region, realized. This had been the only major door, though, the one opening they could push carts through to extract the treasure before the next winter’s snows.
    “The whole opening?” Cadderly asked Ivan.
    The yellow-bearded dwarf started to respond in his typically loud voice, but stopped and looked at his brother (who was readying yet another slap), and just growled instead. Ivan had bored through the wall of snow for more than an hour, pushing in blindly at several locations until the rock wall behind the snow curtain inevitably turned him away.
    “We’ll go around.” Cadderly said, “to the hole on the mountain’s south face that first got us into the place.”
    “It was a long walk between that hole and the dragon hoard.” Ivan reminded him. “A lung walk through tight tunnels, and even a long drop. I’m not for knowing how ye’re planning to bring a treasure out that way!”
    “Neither am I,” Cadderly admitted. “All I know is that I need the treasure, and I’m going to find some way to get it!” With that, the young priest walked off along the trail, in search of a path that would lead him around Nightglow’s wide base.
    “He sounds like a dwarf,” Ivan whispered to Pikel.
    After Pikel’s ensuing “Hee hee hee” brought down the next mini-avalanche, it was Ivan’s turn to do the head-slapping.
    The trio arrived on the south face early the next morning. Climbing proved difficult in the slippery, melting snow. Ivan got almost all the way to the hole (and was able to confirm that there was indeed a hole in this side of the mountain) before he slipped and tumbled, turning into a dwarven snowball and