The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) Read Online Free Page B

The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel)
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docile enough, or else skittish.
    Always Londih had thought of those qualities as benefits of living in Haven, a far cry from the grotesque and seedy dangers of the city, still a two-week journey away, down the mountain and across the plain. Londih had visited there only a few times, and always he had spent his time awaiting the moment of his return to his home, to the mountain village he had been born in and imagined he would die in.
    With the appearance of the kenku raiders, he questioned for the first time whether Haven would always be there for him to live in, for his son to rule after he was gone.
    If the village fell, it would be his fault.
    If the village stood, it might be he who was venerated for the plan that saved it.
    Unfortunately, Londih did not yet have any idea what shape that plan might take.

    Haven’s council chambers were housed in a squat, round building made of mountain stone, a buildingused for no other purpose than the once infrequent gatherings of the council, and as Londih approached the heavy doors he once again regretted that, since he had become chief, the meetings had become more and more regular, and the drain on his time and energy was something he recognized as a certain kind of failure. When his father had been chief, there had been no hours of deliberation over every trifling matter, or even more serious ones. In those days, the Old Stargazer had walked among the villagers, often beside Londih’s father, and it was understood by the villagers that the chief—armed with the Crook of Haven, the staff that symbolized his position—spoke for them both.
    Since Londih had become chief, some twenty years before, the old man had withdrawn from the village, locking himself in his observatory and admitting few visitors. Even Londih—whose rule certainly extended to the observatory, at least in his own mind—had only rarely dared to enter, and then with great trepidation.
    The lone exception to the Old Stargazer’s absence had been the day he appeared outside the village gates, on foot, approaching with a bundle in his arms, a baby boy he had found somewhere upon the mountain.
    The mountain provides, the people of Haven all said, a proverb as old as the village, and true enough. It was not a luxurious place to live, but most of whatthe villagers might want could be grown upon its steppes, or else mined from the shallow veins of ore, so close to the surface as to make their acquisition easy even without taking pick or shovel to earth. There was good hunting all around Haven, and the city was too far to encourage greed with their resources. The people of the village took what they needed, traded amongst themselves, and despite the increasingly petty rivalries between them, Londih believed most of the people there were happy with their lives, and with his rule over them.
    The mountain provides, they said, but what had it provided the Old Stargazer, that day he went walking, as he never did, as he never had before?
    A child, pale and helpless, naked except for the flowing sleeves of the Old Stargazer’s robes, wrapped and folded around the tightly clutched baby, about which he would take no questions, and about which he would provide no answers, except to claim him for himself.
    The mountain provides, the villagers said, but that was not the whole proverb, either. The other half of the proverb was a phrase that few of the villagers ever said, but which was always implied, assumed to be understood by the listener, always someone else from Haven, always someone else who had lived their whole life behind those now low-seeming walls.
    The mountain provides, and the mountain takes away, the villagers said, and never would that seem more true than later, when Londih at last pushed open the doors to the council chamber, walking inside to find out what he had almost lost—a son, if nothing else—and what he and the others might still stand to lose, if they did not make the right decisions that
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