Stormblade

20

Hauk’s dreams were made of stone and moved like ghosts, silently on the near wall of his prison. When they’d first come, he’d thought them a sign of approaching madness.

He didn’t care anymore. He was waiting to die, and to truly die this time. Though Realgar asked no more questions, showed him no more twisted visions, he still amused himself with his game of death. Sudden as a hawk dropping for prey or lazy as a vulture wheeling and waiting, death lived in this dank tomb, whispering his name and sometimes clawing him with cold, cold hands, dragging him through black gates to a realm where the air gnawed at his lungs with teeth of ice.

Hauk had long ago lost count of his deaths and only lay in darkness watching dreams on the wall as they slid across rough stone. He saw the forest. Qualinesti, the green and shadowed homeland of the elves, was lit by thick, honey gold columns of sunlight. Like a dream within a dream, Tyorl drifted through glades and thick stands of pine and aspen. A strange look haunted his eyes, long blue eyes that Hauk knew well: a friend’s eyes. Pain lived there, and grief and—almost—resignation. He followed paths known only to the elves and he was always searching.

Like smoke drifting on the wind, the dream shifted and he was once again in the tavern in Long Ridge. A girl with copper braids and leaf-green eyes smiled at him.

Aye, he thought, but she never did, did she? She’d only shrunk from him in fear and then, suddenly angry, spat in his eye. When the anger had fled, wariness crept into her eyes. Never a smile.

What was her name? He’d never known.

He looked closer at the wall, trying to see the dream and see her face more clearly. Tall, she was, or tall for a girl. She’d stood only a hand shorter than he. The girl. The barmaid. What was her name?

The scene on the wall shimmered, wavered, and afraid that he would lose sight of this girl who made up the only memory Realgar had never pried from him, Hauk reached out, his hand crabbing toward the wall. Aye, tall, he thought as the dream became suddenly sharper. She appeared as a hunter or even a ranger, carrying a sword and wearing a cloak the color of her eyes, with hunting leathers the color of a storm sky. Hunter-girl, ranger-girl, what is your name?

As he asked the silent question, she turned, her face white, her emerald eyes dark. She held out her hand, a graceful gesture of welcome. A cold spill of light winked on sapphires and gold.

She wore his sword, the one Realgar called Stormblade, at her hip. The dream shattered, splintered by a bolt of white hot pain striking hard at his eyes, running in jagged edges down the length of his spine. Hauk cried out in grief for the dream killed and the cry echoed around the prison.

Someone held a lantern high, spilling light like fire all over the floor. Old and dry, choking with its own kind of mourning, a voice haunted the shadows behind the light.

“He won’t have it. He won’t.”

Hauk knew the voice. Mad and old, held together with whispers like spider webs, he’d often heard it rustling around the edges of his nightmares, laughing or sobbing as he died.

Groaning, Hauk asked the question that had never yet received an answer. “Who are you?”

Before, the voice had always vanished with the question, carried away on the shuffling and scraping sounds of retreat. This time it didn’t.

“He won’t have it. Up, boy, up!”

Hauk couldn’t rise. Gnarled hands, shaking and rough with scars, touched his face ancient frames for his pain.

“My Stormblade, he wants my Stormblade. He thinks he’s found it, boy. He thinks he’s found it!”

Fear lanced through Hauk. Smoke from the oily lantern streamed like the banners of the dead. Orange light splashed across the darkness. Hauk rolled onto his back and looked into the face of a dwarf. White hair hung, long and unkempt, to his shoulders. A beard, thickly tangled, spilled almost to his waist. Tears lay on his face, terror in his brown eyes. Though it took every shred of strength that he had, Hauk lifted his hand, frightened by the sound and the creaking of his muscles. He grabbed the dwarf’s wrist. Horror twisted the old, bearded face as it gazed into the eyes of the one it had seen killed by Realgar many, many times. Cavern followed cavern: rock walls soaring up to shadow-draped ceilings; the cold, heavy scent of water; the smell of stone in an endless chain of caves.

He was strong, the dwarf, for all that he seemed as ancient as the mountains themselves. The dwarf flinched every time he had to bear Hauk’s weight or the grip of his hands on his arms. He didn’t take Hauk’s weight easily, but he did take it. He badly wanted the ranger out of that prison cave and to a place that he imagined would provide a safe haven from Realgar.

In that way, they came at last to the final cavern. The dwarf led Hauk to a rough pallet on the floor against the far wall. Four blankets thick, it was warm and, despite the cold stone beneath, felt as fine and welcoming as a lord’s bed. Torches lined the walls of the cave, their intricately worked iron brackets evenly spaced. The ventilation in the place left hardly a trace of their smoke.

The dwarf, quietly muttering to himself as though he would not, for any price, disturb Hauk’s rest, went about the place checking small piles of food supplies and water flasks. A low brazier stood in the center of the stony chamber, and, from time to time, the dwarf stopped to tend it. Each time he did, he looked over at the ranger and his muttering stilled.

Hauk studied him carefully. The brown old eyes were surely mad, but something new flickered in them now, seen for the space of a heartbeat and then gone, chased away by pain, longing, and fear. The new thing was recognition. Hauk didn’t know why it was there, he couldn’t begin to guess what it was that the dwarf recognized.

He didn’t care. He gave him nothing back, not even blinking to break the cold steady stare he knew terrified the ancient dwarf. Little by little, like the tide creeping back at dawn to a barren shore, Hauk’s strength returned. As his strength grew, so did his rage and hatred. He would wait patiently for revenge, for as long as he had to wait. Then, he would rise up and drag the heart out of the old bastard with his bare hands and grind it into the stone.