Stormblade

25

Stanach stared into empty darkness, listening to the rumble and gusting of the dragon’s breath. Like a small echo of the dragon’s breathing, he heard Kelida’s shuddering sigh. Unmoving, as she had been since they’d been brought to this place, the girl lay huddled beside him. His eyes on the dragon, Stanach moved his hand slowly to the side. He slipped his fingers around her wrist and tried to feel her life-beat. Slow and steady as it was, it did not ease Stanach’s fear. Realgar’s sleep spell was taking far too long to wear off.

He put his back to cold stone again, his heart lurching each time the dragon yawned or stretched, each time Kelida stirred and the huge beast looked their way.

Dual chambered, the cavern held the small cave where Stanach sat now and the broad, high-ceilinged lair of the dragon. The separation of the chambers was marked only by a broadening of the stony floor and a sudden high leaping of the walls. The walls, he realized, did not soar to a ceiling but to what surely must be the sky. From the high entrance to the dragon’s lair, echoes of the wind sweeping the mountainside moaned in the caves.

His own natural dark-sight showed Stanach the dim red outline of the dragon where it lay in its lair. He tried to estimate the distance and thought that nearly fifty yards of rough stone floor lay between them and the beast. Aye, he thought, and it can cross that in an instant!

A smoldering fire burned from his right wrist to his shoulder. Realgar’s guards had not been gentle. Yet, for all the awakened fire in his arm and shoulder, Stanach’s hand, still bandaged, had no feeling at all. He now knew that he had not Kern’s salves to thank for the absence of pain. He would never again feel anything in that hand. No, not even pain. Broken bones, aye, even twisted bones, could be mended. Shredded muscle could never be healed.

Stanach saw the yellow, malevolent gleam of the dragon’s eyes. Its breathing quickened, like the pumping of a bellows. He felt its hunger as a dread deep within his bones, and he felt it waiting. It had been commanded not to dispatch Realgar’s prisoners yet, only to guard them. And so it waited.

Darknight, Realgar called it. Some time ago it had been brought two goats and a screaming calf to sate its appetite. Stanach still smelled the blood, a thick, coppery reek on its breath. Among the animal’s bones lay the shreds of the black and silver uniform of a Theiwar guard. Kelida stirred, a small moving of her hand, and fell still again. Too long, Stanach thought. She’s been unconscious too long. How much time had passed? He had only scattered memories of waking in this place deep below the cities. For a time his mind had been thick with confusion and the aftereffects of Realgar’s sleep spell. Then, as in dreams, time had little meaning. Even now, listening to the dragon breathing, Stanach only remembered the few moments after Darknight set down in a deep ravine below the Northgate ledge.

A squad of six Theiwar, Realgar at its head, had poured from the mouth of a cave like bats seeking the night. Each of the six had crossbows trained on Stanach and Kelida, bolts anchored and ready to be loosed at their thane’s command. Realgar had issued no such order. He bade the two dismount and they did, both expecting every minute to feel the shock of a bolt flying home.

Three of the guards had surrounded Stanach the moment his feet touched stone. They disarmed him neatly and in seconds. While one guard kept Stanach well in his bow’s range, two others grabbed his arms and hustled him toward the gaping hole of darkness that was the cave’s mouth. At the entrance, despite his captors’ holds, Stanach dug in his heels and wrestled himself around to see Kelida similarly surrounded. Realgar approached her, strange dark eyes alight, hands twitching restlessly as though anticipating the feel of Stormblade’s cool, golden hilt. His guards’ hands tightened on Stanach’s arms. They yanked his arms tightly behind him, sending white-hot bolts of pain shooting from his elbows to his shoulders. Stunned by the pain, Stanach watched Kelida’s disarming through a dizzying, red-shot haze.

Stanach’s stomach turned over as he remembered Realgar’s slow reach for the Kingsword, saw again how he almost touched the sapphired hilt, then drew back. He had motioned the guards away. Very gently, Realgar unbuckled the sword belt from Kelida’s waist.

Stanach closed his eyes now, trying not to hear again Kelida’s soft moan, trying not to hear his own cry of outrage and horror as Realgar buckled on the swordbelt and smiled.

Now, in an echo of that thin despairing moan, Kelida’s breath caught once in her throat. Stanach reached for her hand again, covered it, and leaned close to her.

“Lyt chwaer” he whispered, so low that he barely heard the words himself, “easy, now. I’m here.”

The cave was blacker than a moonless midnight and she, a human, had no dark-sight. Stanach felt her hand quivering in his.

Darknight rumbled deep in its chest and snaked its neck around, a baleful yellow light in its eyes as it observed the prisoners. Then, as though disinterested, the huge black dragon backed away. Kelida’s hand went cold and limp in Stanach’s as the rough sound of scales dragging on stone, dagger claws scraping, echoed in the cave.

Stanach closed his fingers around Kelida’s hand again, holding her still and silent until Darknight withdrew completely. How long would Realgar’s command hold the dragon?

Slowly, as silently as he could, Stanach shifted his position and released Kelida’s hand. She caught her breath and grabbed his arm, a drowning woman clinging to her only hold in a black, cold sea. Her voice was low and thin, tight with panic. “I can’t—I can’t see.”

“Oh, aye, you can, Kelida. You just can’t see here. Quietly, now, hold on to me and sit up.”

She moved slowly. She got the stone wall against her back and pushed herself straight.

“Better? How is your head? Hurts, I’ll wager.” He tried for as careless a tone as he could, hearing it ring false in his own ears. “Aye, it’s the sleep spell. All the headache of a good flask of dwarf spirits and none of the fun.”

In its lair, Darknight moaned low and deep, scales whispered again on stone. Kelida gasped, then held perfectly still.

“Just the dragon.” Stanach said as he might have said just the rabbit.

“We’re safe enough for the moment.”

“Where—where is it?”

Stanach shrugged. “In its lair, playing watchdog.” He lied smoothly.

“It’s not interested in us.”

Did she believe it? Stanach didn’t think so.

“Why can’t I see?”

Stanach snorted. “Because there’s no light. In the Outlands there’s always light. Even on the cloudiest night, it gets caught between the ground and the sky. Here, in the heart of the world, there’s no light unless we make it.”

“But—you can see me.”

Darknight sighed a gust of breath reeking with blood.

Stanach spoke quickly to still the panic he sensed rising in Kelida.

“All living things give off warmth. Things not having life, stone and mountain, those hold the day’s light. That’s what I see, the outline of that warmth. You’re a dimensionless form, but I see that very well. If you could see my eyes right now, I don’t think you’d like them. The pupils are so wide, expanding to get the little bit of light, that they look like bottomless pits.”

Kelida drew in a long breath and let it out in a slow, almost silent sigh.

“What’s going to happen to us?”

Stanach didn’t know how to answer. He shook his head, then remembered that she couldn’t see the gesture. “Lyt chwaer, I don’t know. Realgar has Stormblade now. I don’t know why he hasn’t killed us already.”

Kelida was silent for a long moment. Stanach felt her fingers tighten again around his hand. He knew what she’d say next.

“Then—then Hauk is dead.”

Stanach swallowed hard and said nothing.

“Stanach?”

“Aye,” he whispered. “Hauk’s dead.”

How could he read such grief, such pain, in a depthless outline of red light?

“Lyt chwaer” he whispered.

She buried her face in his shoulder. Stanach felt her tears warm on his neck as she silently wept. Lyt chwaer, he named her, little sister. She’d comforted him in his grief, cared for him after his maiming, her hands gentle, her ministrations tender as a sister’s.

Stanach held her tightly as she wept. Over her shoulder, he saw his right arm, outlined in the red glow of his body’s warmth. His hand, bandaged in the torn strips of her cloak, lay heavy and nerveless against her back. Lifeless as it was, no light edged the place where his hand should have been.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Kelida, I’m sorry.”

Kelida suddenly went stiff in his arms, then limp as though unable to bear the burden of some new grief. Her voice thick and ragged with silent weeping, she said, “I—I killed him.”

Stanach caught his breath, not certain he’d heard her correctly. He held her away, trying to see her face, her eyes, and saw nothing but a trembling red outline.

“Kelida, what are you saying?”

“I should have—I should have guarded the sword better.” Her hands, like the ghosts of red birds, covered her face. “No. I should have given it to you or Tyorl. If I’d kept it safe—if you could have brought it to your thane—” She drew a rough breath. “Oh, Stanach! If I hadn’t been such a fool about carrying it, about—about holding on to it, he’d still be alive!”

“No,” Stanach whispered. “No, Kelida, that’s not true. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“If I’d let you have the sword instead of pretending that—that because I had it, I had something of him. Oh, instead of pretending that he gave it to me because—because he cared. That he would remember me and maybe he would—”

“No!” he cried harshly.

The echo of that cry rebounded from the walls of the small cavern, thin protests. Claws scraped again on stone. Darknight rumbled deep in its chest. Yellow eyes gleamed from across the cavern. The beast didn’t move, yet Stanach was sure it was laughing.

He held Kelida’s arm with his left hand and let his feelingless right hand fall.

“Kelida, I’m sorry. Oh, gods, I am sorry! Hauk’s death—it was never a thing you could prevent.”

She swallowed hard and shook her head. “Yes, if I—”

“No,” he whispered, “no. Hauk is dead, aye, but you had nothing to do with it. Kelida, he was likely dead before we left Long Ridge.”

She drew away from him, slowly as though edging away from a suddenly drawn dagger. “But, you said …” Her voice dropped to a shuddering sigh as she groped for understanding. “No, Stanach. You said …”

“I lied. I needed the sword. I lied to you.”

She moaned softly.

Stanach leaned his head against the stone wall and closed his eyes. He didn’t say that he was sorry, though only Reorx knew that he had never in his life been sorrier for anything.

Aye, not even for the loss of the Kingsword. He couldn’t find the words for how he felt; he didn’t think they existed in any language. After a long time spent listening to the growling breath of the dragon and the stilling of Kelida’s sobs, Stanach felt her hand light on his right arm. She lifted his hand, wrapped in the rags of her cloak. Because he heard the faint whisper of her fingers passing over the bandage, he knew that she held his ruined hand.

Guyll fyr raced madly across the windswept Plains of Death. Long narrow fingers of flame charged ahead of the main body of the fire, blazing outriders bearing pennons brighter than the sun. Greedy for pillage, the fire raged through swamp and marsh, feeding on thin grasses and brittle, dry bracken.

Standing before the worktable in the Chamber of the Black Moon, Realgar watched the fire in the smooth, clear surface of the glass. A simple spell of seeing had called the vision to the glass, and like a man on a mountaintop, he watched the fire’s advance.

Well satisfied, he whispered a word as he passed his hand over the table. The scene shifted, becoming more focused and sharper. A marsh rat scuttled to ground beneath a shallow, reedy pool and died a length from its nest, its blood boiled in water suddenly heated. An emerald-headed duck caught in an airless pocket burst its lungs with a last effort to rise to flight and escape the flames.

A long-legged crane and a prowling silver fox fled the advance of a common enemy. Pitiless, the guyll fyr caught and killed them as it did every creature in its path. The once cold air above the Plains writhed under the heat of the fire’s passing. The wind, ever a lost and mad traveler across the Plains of Death, twisted the path of the flames.

To the mage, the fire appeared as a furious and deranged beast, rearing and bucking in explosive sheets of flame. The guyll fyr charged toward the foothills of the mountains, hissing over the marshes and roaring toward the fuller feast of a forest thick with sap-rich pines and panicked, fleeing wildlife.

Realgar turned away from the scenes of destruction. They wove a tapestry of lurid and violent death, but there was one thread more to be woven in order to make the picture complete. Realgar had that thread in his hands now.

Though no regular Guard of Watch had been set in ruined Northgate in many years, one had been now. The crumbled gate, useless since the ruinous battles of the Dwarfgate Wars, was unofficially sanctioned as a Theiwar holding. Realgar dropped to a seat behind the glass table and laughed. The watch was composed of Gneiss’s faithful Daewar. Faithful all, he thought. Or almost all. Anyone can be corrupted, even a Daewar guard.

One such was even now looking for Hornfel with the word that Gneiss wished to meet him on the Northgate wall. The treacherous guard would bring the message that the Daewar thane had seen the guyll fyr sweep down to set the Plains of Death ablaze. The message would rise in urgency as the false guard relayed Gneiss’s supposed anxiety about the danger to Thorbardin’s food supply.

Reluctant as Hornfel might be to enter even unsanctioned Theiwar territory, the Hylar knew that Northgate was the only place to track the fire’s progress. He’d be comfortable enough in the belief that he was going to meet Gneiss.

Only it was not Gneiss who would be waiting for Hornfel in Northgate. It would be Realgar. And Stormblade.

Realgar ran his palm along the scabbarded sword at his side.

“Aye,” he whispered, “you’ve searched long for the Kingsword, Hornfel, and you’ll find it in Northgate. You’ll see it at last and you will die on it!”

The hand of the goddess Takhisis, the Dark Queen, was extended to him. He need only reach to take it. The spark of revolution that would ignite tinder-dry Thorbardin would give life to the start of a derro reign. Realgar closed his eyes, slipped easily into the language of the mind, and called the black dragon.

Have you found the ranger?

Darknight had not. A thread of impatience drifted through the Theiwar’s mental speech. It doesn’t matter now. This will be over soon. We’ll find him then.

A thought, a command, and Realgar sent the black dragon flying for the mountaintops. Darknight would stand ready to back up his attack on Hornfel and then on Gneiss’s guards at both Northgate and Southgate. Gneiss paused in the center of the garden outside Court of Thanes. The air was thick with the scent of white dog rose and scarlet queen’s plume. He had no inclination to admire either and was uncomfortable with the gentle serenity suggested by the garden. Beyond the green boxwood borders, Thorbardin had a strange and brooding air. In that way that a city’s people have, the populace scented trouble. Though few could identify it, all seemed to be reacting to it with shortened tempers and anxious looks.

Gneiss turned to leave, taking the shortest path back to the street. When he walked past the small pond at the garden’s east border, he realized that the garden was not as empty as he’d thought it. The Outlander Tanis Half-Elven crouched at the water’s edge, idly pitching pebbles into the water.

Tanis turned sharply at the sound of the dwarf’s approach and visibly relaxed as he recognized the Daewar.

“If you’re looking for Hornfel,” Tanis said mildly, “he’s not here.”

“I can see that.” Gneiss eyed him carefully. “Something you need here?”

The half-elf shook his head. “Just enjoying the garden.” When Gneiss’s careful look became one of slight suspicion, Tanis smiled. “Easy, Gneiss. Hornfel was here a moment ago. We were talking and a guard—one of your own by the livery—called him away.”

“Say where he was going?”

“Not to me.”

An awkward moment of silence fell between the two. Tanis, his long green eyes hooded, scratched his beard. “Gneiss, you don’t like me, do you?”

Caught off guard, Gneiss stammered, “I haven’t an opinion one way or the other.”

“Oh yes, you do.” Tanis settled back on his heels and pitched another pebble into the pond. “You don’t like Outlanders, and you especially don’t want them in Thorbardin. Tell me, why did you finally vote to shelter those refugees?”

“Because all of Hornfel’s arguments made sense.” Gneiss said curtly. He narrowed his eyes. “What do you want, Half-Elven?”

“Safety for the refugees.” Tanis got to his feet with easy grace and let the pebbles fall from his hand.

“You’ve got it.”

“Aye? Not as long as they’re in danger of being caught between the anvil and the hammer. Or both sides of a revolution.” Tanis looked out beyond the fragrant boxwood hedges to the street outside. “They’re nervous put there, Gneiss. Tell me you can’t taste it in the air.”

Gneiss said nothing. He did not consider Thorbardin’s politics and problems fit matter for discussion with an Outlander.

“It’s very uncomfortable in the middle, Gneiss. Before you came, Hornfel and I were talking about that. The refugees will fight if they have to. It would be better if they were fighting with you, and not in spite of you. If a revolution does break out here, you are going to need our help.”

Gneiss shook his head. “Not the help of untrained farmers, I don’t.”

The half-elf ran a gentle finger along the edge of a half-blown spray of queen’s plume. The featherlike blossom left a faint dusting of golden pollen on his knuckle. “What about the help of the people who freed those refugees from slavery—snatched them from under Verminaard’s nose, Gneiss!—and brought them here all the way from Pax Tharkas?”

Eight hundred, Gneiss thought. Maybe half of them would be able to fight, or at least defend the East Warrens if it came to that.

But he didn’t think it would come to that. Realgar would not mount his revolution if he were not certain that he would win. Yet, if Realgar did strike, it would be because Ranee had thrown in his lot with the Theiwar. The first thanes would not waste time trying a first strike on the remote farming warrens in the east of Thorbardin. There was no need to involve the half-elf or his refugees.

Or was there?

Gneiss eyed Tanis again. This time there was no suspicion or mistrust in his gauging. He smiled slowly. There was not any certain way to know when, or even if, the derro would strike. But there was a way to assure that their blow, if struck, would be weakened.

The East Warrens opened into Ranee’s Daergar city from the north and the south. Pinned in their city like rats in holes, the Daergar would find it difficult to support Realgar’s attempt at revolution.

He looked at Tanis and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know much about farmers, Half-Elven. I’d imagine that they have to be good at trapping vermin to protect their crops.”

Tanis shrugged. “I would imagine.”

Gneiss stroked his silvered beard. “Then I might have a job for your farmers after all.” He bent to retrieve one of Tanis’s pebbles and pitched it into the pond. Like echoes, the ripples of the stone’s strike sighed out to the edges of the water.