Stormblade

Prologue

As the bard hears, faint but clean, the elusive Melody and secret harmonies of the song he was given his voice to sing, as the storyteller knows, deep within his bones, the words and silences of the tale he was born to tell, so the dwarf Isarn Hammerfell knew that Stormblade was the reason he had come to swordcrafting. The sword would be his masterblade and stood, almost seen, behind every blade he made, waiting patiently for its birth.

It waited for Isarn Hammerfell to consider himself worthy. When this blade was forged, when it came from the fires and the cooling oils, to perfect balance and cold blue beauty, Isarn would offer it to his thane, to Hornfel of the Hylar.

If Hornfel judged it good, he would honor the mastersmith, as thanes have done for generations, by displaying the sword with masterblades generations old.

The blade once hung, Isarn would make no other sword. The forge at which he’d labored for so many years would become the forge of his apprentice and young kinsman, Stanach Hammerfell. Isarn would lay down his hammer, his tongs, all the tools which he had known and loved for so many years, and gently finish his days in honor.

Because the forging of this blade would be his finest work, the embodiment of his vision and matchless skill, Isarn used none but the purest steel, newly fired from hard, black wrought iron created by his own hand.

He went to the mines himself, though he was a mastersmith and need not have chosen his own ore. He knew, and none knew better, the look of perfect ore, the feel of it, the bitter smell of it. He stalked the dark, lantern-lit iron mines searching the broad veins for the ore he knew would be the purest. There it was mined under his supervision.

None saw him for many days after he returned to his smithy at Thorbardin. Deep within the mountain’s heart he waited, designing Stormblade. Never once did he take ink to parchment, for the design was composed in his heart and in his soul. He knew what the sword would look like. His hands knew how it would feel. His ears already heard the song of hammer and anvil, fire and steam.

The ore was brought to him. All that remained was to find the right jewels for the sword’s decoration. The hilting of the sword would be the task of Isarn’s apprentice Stanach Hammerfell. It was the traditional sign of the master’s trust in the one who would follow.

There are not only weapons crafters in Thorbardin, but jewelers, goldsmiths, and silversmiths as well. Isarn went among his companions, the masters of those crafts. From the master of the gemsmiths he received five flawless sapphires. Four were the color of the sky at twilight; and the fifth was the pure, deep blue of midnight and deeply starred. These would decorate the blade’s grip. The finest gold was found for the blade’s hilt, and a lustrous silver to chase it.

The sword conceived, it was now ready to be born. Isarn Hammerfell, assisted by only his apprentice, began to create his masterwork. Isarn and Stanach built the furnace fire themselves. They filled the two troughs, one for the water to cool the wrought iron, one for the oil to cool the steel. Stanach pumped the bellows with the slow, steady rhythm Isarn had taught him. Coaxing the fire, Stanach watched the orange light slide up the smooth stone walls of the forge. This was a task he had not been required to perform since the first, fumbling days of his apprenticeship. How familiar this task was now. Yet, how different!

None but he and his master Isarn would see Stormblade born, and Stanach knew that he would never again feel the magic of crafting so intensely until, years from now, he gave life to the unimaginable vision of his own masterblade.

Steel is made from the elements of the world. Dug first as ore, it is shaped through the agencies of fire and water into wrought iron. Stanach watched now as Isarn made the thick, dark iron. Each of his master’s moves was careful and considered. Isarn, who had a thousand times before made his iron with the unthinking skill of one whose hands move almost without will, took each step of the making as carefully now as any apprentice first permitted to approach a forge.

Stanach watched his master as though seeing him perform the task for the first time. I will remember this, he thought. The forge fire pulled the sweat from him. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, his eyes on Isarn. Always, I will remember this.

And always, he thought as the ore came from the forge, he would remember the look in Isarn’s eyes. It was the look of one who loved and saw nothing but the thing he loved.

They were silent while the iron cooled. Nothing needed to be said. Stanach had no questions. Isarn had nothing but the bond between his soul and the elements. When the iron was finally cool and hard, a rough black mass, Isarn placed it in a clay container, itself earthborn and still remembering the kiss of flame.

Stanach lifted the vessel, heavy with charcoal dust and iron, and placed it in the furnace exactly where his master directed. Sweat ran ceaselessly down his face now, soaking his thick black beard. His hair clung to his neck. He had long ago abandoned his loose forgeman’s shirt for a leather apron. His thickly muscled arms gleamed with a golden reflection of flame.

The heat of the furnace sought to mimic that of the fires said to burn ceaselessly in Krynn’s heart. In this terrible heat the charcoal dust combined with the surface of the wrought iron to create a hard, gleaming sheath: steel.

Stanach dragged a bucket of water from the farthest corner of the forge. Cool hours before, the water was now warm, as though it had been lying in the sun. He ladled a drink for Isarn, and then another for himself. In their parched throats it tasted like wine.

Stanach drew another ladle from the bucket and poured it over his head. It ran hot down his neck and back, and he felt suddenly sad. For the first time since they’d come into the forge, Stanach remembered that when Stormblade was finally more than a vision, he and Isarn would no longer work side by side.

Isarn, his master and his kinsman, was also his friend. A shadow of loneliness, like a cloud racing across the moons, touched Stanach’s heart. He placed the empty bucket outside the smithy for the forge-boy to refill, then returned to the fire and the leaping shadows. He watched the old dwarf patiently waiting for the iron to become steel, faithfully waiting for the miracle Reorx had worked for his children since the first dwarven smith had set up a forge.

It is a miracle, Stanach thought. A bonding and a binding. A bond with the gods, a binding of elements. It was the first lesson Isarn had taught him. Trust the gods; know the elements; trust your skill. The crafting of the simplest blade is nothing less than worship. This worship Isarn had been perfecting for all his life.

The steel came thick from the fire, crimson as the red moon, glowing like the sun. Stanach, his eyes squinted tightly against the wild heat, brought the stock to the anvil. Isarn, his large hands gentle now, lifted the hammer. He was ready to begin the shaping of Stormblade.

Steel is not carved the way wood is, but drawn by being placed upon the anvil and hammered until it has reached the proper length and taper. Though he had made countless swords before this one, though hammer and hand were one, each of Isarn’s strokes was prudent. Every raise and drop of the hammer was a considered one. Yet, the considering was done quickly, based upon both knowledge and instinct. The steel could not be allowed to cool to the point where it was no longer malleable. The hammer’s anthem rang through Isarn’s smithy, a joyous clamor which set Stanach’s heart soaring. It was the Song of the Masterblade he heard, and he knew that Isarn’s hammer and anvil had never sung like this before. They would not sing like this again until Stanach himself forged another masterblade.

There were no words to the song but those the master and apprentice heard in their souls. The song celebrated a blade which was long and slim, and Stanach knew by the look of the weapon alone that it would balance perfectly in Isarn’s hand. The master shaped it with file and rasp, and the filings fell to the stone floor of his forge like silver dust. Stanach came to think of the blade as a shaft of argent starlight. The blade formed, it must now be returned to the fire again to be tempered. “This!” Isarn Hammerfell told his apprentice, “is the blade’s last journey into the fire, its last dance among the flames.”

Stanach had heard the words before—so many times! Now, as he watched Isarn plunge the blade into the tempering fire, he heard them as if they were fresh and new.

Isarn performed the functions of this last heating and final quenching as carefully as all the functions before. Stanach had built the fire to exactly the right temperature, and now he checked the oil for proper coolness. Satisfied, he looked to his master and the sword.

In this final heating the blade was not a shaft of starlight, but a crimson extension of the sun, a blood-red arm of fire.

When Isarn finally plunged the blade into the oil, Stanach watched the sun-glow cool and fade. Red iron became silver steel, pure as snow, strong as the mountain itself. Isarn, his lungs filled with bitter steam, sweat glistening on his face and thick forgeman’s arms, gently withdrew Stormblade from the trough.

He wiped the shimmering oil from the blade with a soft cloth, his strokes gentle caresses, and laid the sword upon the face of his anvil the way one would lay a newly born babe upon the breast of its mother. Stanach watched the play of the forge fire’s reflection in the pure steel, watched the orange light slide along the keen edge of the blade. Fascinated, his heart thudding hard against the cage of his ribs, he stepped between the fire and the anvil.

His shadow did not banish the light from the steel.

Stormblade, perfect in every detail, bore a heart of fire. That heart ran in a thin streak of crimson light within the cooling steel itself, and no shadow could dim it.

Eyes wide, old, gnarled hand shaking as though palsied, Isarn reached for the blade, then drew back his hand as though he could not, or would not, touch the steel.

“Do you see it?” he whispered. “Oh, lad, do you see it?”

Stanach had no words. He nodded dumbly and took a half step back from the steel. In that moment, as his eyes filled with the beauty of the as yet unhilted blade, the words of a fragment of poetry so ancient, so often quoted, and so little believed that it had become the street chant of children, whispered in his heart.

Mountain dwarves know. These things a high king make: A Kingsword heart-touched by Reorx the Father.

A soul formed to wisdom in the crucible of strife.

The hammer which legendary Kharas keeps in the mists.

A Kingsword to wield, made for the king, carried by him through all the days of his reign, and finally buried with him. A soul made wise by the fires of strife: the flames of battle, aye, and experience and judgements made, decisions lived by. The Hammer of Kharas, long hidden and believed to be more than a myth by fewer dwarves each generation. Yet, myth or truth, no bid for the high kingship of the mountain dwarves had been made successfully since the Hammer of Kharas had been lost.

Stanach shivered, suddenly cold despite the sweat trickling down the sides of his face. He closed his eyes, breathed once deeply to still the shivering, and looked at the sword again.

The steel’s crimson streak pulsed gently, as though it were indeed a heart touched by the hand of Reorx and brought to life. As he watched it, Stanach s own heart began to take on that newly born beat and rhythm. Legend told that only a Kingsword breathed like that.

No Kingsword had been forged in Thorbardin in three hundred years. And yet now—

Stanach shook his head.

He knew the legends. What dwarf did not? There had been a line of high kings once. The last, Duncan, had reigned during the Dwarfgate Wars three hundred years ago. He’d had a champion and friend, “legendary Kharas” of the poem. It was told that Kharas, whose name meant “knight” in Solamnic, had crafted a war hammer at Reorx s forge. It was told that none fought with more skill than Kharas during the bloody and bitter time after the Cataclysm, when the invading armies of humans and hill dwarves led by the mysterious mage Fistandantilus had sought admittance to the mountain kingdoms and access to what they imagined were the riches of Pax Tharkas and Thorbardin.

Thorbardin had been successfully defended from the attackers, but more than Pax Tharkas had been lost. Dwarf had warred against dwarf. This, the greatest of all sins, enraged Reorx. In his fury, the god struck with the same hammer he once used to forge the world; the one, legend said, that had helped make Kharas’s war hammer. He was not pleased to simply destroy the world that so filled him with anger. He unmade it. In that unmaking, the face of the world, twisted and torn as it was by the Cataclysm, was changed yet again. The Plains of Dergoth became a seeping and haunted marsh, known now as the Plains of Death. When the god’s hammer struck Zhaman, which had once stood tall and proud, the fortress of the mages collapsed and fell in upon itself, unleashing a great scorching storm of sand and stone.

It has been said that the ruins of that place, when first Kharas saw them, were shaped in the image of a huge and grinning skull. Now called Skullcap, it is a fitting grave-marker for the thousand who were slain as they killed their kin.

But the face of the world was not the only thing changed. Soon after the war, Duncan died. His sons greedily fought for the high king’s throne before Duncan had even been buried. Kharas, grieving for his friend and king, watched their cynical fight for power and decided that none of them would rule.

He entombed Duncan in the magnificent burial tower now known as Duncan’s Tomb. A place of mourning and magic, it hung magically suspended above the ancient dwarven burial place called the Valley of the Thanes.

He then hid his war hammer with the aid of magic and Reorx himself, and decreed that no dwarf would rule as high king in Thorbarin without it. Legend or truth, Stanach reminded himself, no dwarf had been crowned high king since. The histories were filled with tales of dwarven suffering during times when a high king was needed to rule the people. Times like these, he thought, when rumors of war seeped in from the Outlands, accompanied by reports of dragons and the Dark Queen’s rising. Stanach wiped cold sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand. None could rule without the hammer, and none could rule without a Kingsword. Through the years, many had tried to have such a sword forged, some because they knew that it would be enough to rule Thorbardin as king regent, some because they hoped it would point the way to the Hammer of Kharas. Though these swords had been beautiful works of craftsmanship, none had ever been a Kingsword. Reorx had never touched the blades, never gave them the crimson heart of red-glowing steel… . Until now. It was said among the smiths that the voice of every dwarven hammer striking an anvil’s plate would be recalled for all time in Anvil’s Echo, the huge, dwarf-built cavern connecting Northgate to the city of Thorbardin. If the legends were true, Stanach thought, the ringing of Isarn’s hammer must be sounding the keynote and shaping the echoes of centuries of work into an eternal song in Anvil’s Echo.

He_shivered again. When he looked away from the god-touched steel, he saw that Isarn was weeping. He had crafted a Kingsword for his thane, for Hornfel of the Hylar.