“I’ll see what I can do, Keselo, but I’m just a little busy running away right now.”

“How much farther would you say we’ve got to go before we get out of this silly gorge?” Gunda asked Longbow as they hurried along.

Longbow looked around. “I make it be about six miles, but I don’t think we’ll be able to stop just because we’ve reached the head of the gorge. We need to find someplace to get us out of the smoke.”

“Like a cave, you mean?”

“It seems to be working for our enemies,” Longbow replied with a shrug. “If it works for them, it should work for us.”

“I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem, gentlemen,” Commander Narasan said. “We’re here to stop the enemy, and I don’t think hiding in a cave is the best answer. What we really need to find is some way to block off the mouth of this gorge. If the bug-people manage to get out into open country, they’ll spread out and kill all the people and take the land.”

“We could try breastworks, I suppose,” Gunda said, “but the cursed smoke coming up behind us would make that a bit dangerous, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose we could collapse the mouth of the gorge,” Keselo suggested.

“How could we possibly do that?” Gunda demanded with skepticism written all over his face.

“Well,” Keselo said, “if I remember correctly, one of the people who described this gorge for us back at Mount Shrak said that the quartz at the upper end of the gorge is all crumbly because of the water that seeps down through it and then freezes. If there’s some way that we can get people up to the top with hammers and long iron bars, they could break a lot of that quartz free, and it would fall down into the gorge up near the mouth.”

“And that would spread that smoke out even farther,” Gunda added.

“I don’t really think so, sir,” Keselo disagreed. “The smoke is coming up the gorge because the gorge walls are protecting it from the prevailing wind, which comes in out of the west. The smoke will have to rise up to get over our barrier, and that would get it up quite a bit higher. Then, when it came out of the gorge, the prevailing wind would carry it off to the east—toward a region that’s almost totally uninhabited.”

“Would that really work?” Gunda asked Commander Narasan.

“It sounds feasible to me,” Narasan replied. “Why don’t we try it and find out?”

2

It was about midafternoon when they reached the mouth of Crystal Gorge. The almost continuous crashing of thunder back on down the gorge indicated that Veltan and Dahlaine were still hard at work, and the smoke cloud had noticeably slowed.

“If those two are dropping that much rain down in the gorge, there’s probably a wall of water rushing out of the southern end,” Rabbit suggested. “That might be making things unpleasant for the buggies, I’d say.”

“Buggies?” Gunda asked.

“Never miss a chance to insult your enemy,” Rabbit said with a wicked little smirk.

“If I remember the map Lord Dahlaine had set up under Mount Shrak correctly, there’s a fairly steep slope off to the west that leads up to that side of the gorge,” Keselo said.

“It’s there, all right,” Chief Two-Hands confirmed.

“Then it won’t be too hard for me and a crew of men to get up there and start plugging off the mouth of the gorge,” Keselo said. “We don’t know for sure just how far behind the smoke-cloud the bug-men will be coming, so I think we should close the door on them as soon as possible.”

“This young man spends a lot of his time thinking, doesn’t he?” Chief Two-Hands said to Longbow.

“Almost all of his time,” Longbow said. “His thinking has saved us a lot of hard, honest work, though, so we try to encourage him to think as much as he can.”

“All right, then,” Rabbit said, hefting his hammer, “let’s go up topside and start crumbling quartz.”

As it turned out, the quartz wall on the west side of the mouth of the gorge was even more fragile than Keselo had anticipated, and his “crumble-crew” was mostly Maags, who were bigger and stronger than Trogite soldiers. Oddly, the Maags seemed to find shattering quartz very entertaining, and they soon had an almost continuous avalanche pouring down into the gorge. Several of them even went so far as to loop a rope around one of the many trees lining the top of the gorge and then slide down several yards and bash even more quartz off the gorge wall, shouting “Look out below!” every time they swung their hammers.

“I’ll never understand those people,” Keselo murmured to himself as he walked on down the gorge-rim to see how far up the smoke had come.

It was noticeably thinner than it had been when they’d first seen it boiling up the gorge toward Gunda’s fort. The continuous rainstorm Dahlaine and Veltan had been pouring down into the lower end of the gorge appeared to be working out quite well. If things continued to go the way they were going now, the bug-people’s “greasy smoke” scheme wasn’t going at all the way they’d believed it would.

It was almost evening when Keselo and his “crumble-crew” came down the steep slope to rejoin their friends.

“This seems to be working even better than we’d hoped,” Commander Narasan said to Keselo. “The smoke has to rise to get over all the rubble you and your men dropped down on the bottom of the gorge, and the wind from the west is carrying it out of our general vicinity. I think we’ll want to wait until morning to make sure that the smoke will go away. Then we’ll start building breastworks. The bug-men won’t be able to come up the gorge until their fires go out, so we’ve got some time to play with.”

“I just had an idea that you might want to consider,” Longbow’s friend Athlan said then. “The ground on this end of the gorge is mostly just ordinary dirt.”

“There are quite a few rocks,” Gunda pointed out, “but we’ll probably be using them to build our breastworks, so what’s to the front will be mostly dirt. What did you have in mind?”

“There are several streams nearby,” Athlan said, “and when you mix dirt and water, you get mud, right?”

“Almost always, yes. Where are we going with this, Athlan?”

“There are quite a few swamps over in Tonthakan, and I’ve learned over the years that wading through soft mud makes for very slow going. If there just happens to be a lot of soft mud in front of each one of your little forts, it’s going to slow the bug-people down to the point that they’ll be easy targets for the archers. I don’t think very many of them will reach your forts if we do it that way, do you?”