Stormblade

27

Bitter wind cut across the narrow, crumbling ledge. Screaming like the abandoned souls of the damned, the wind dragged behind it the black smoke of the burning Plains of Death.

Like funeral shrouds.

From this ledge, one thousand feet above the pine forested valley, Hornfel saw the fire as a bolt of golden silk unfolding like a banner, rippling and shifting to the vagaries of a capricious breeze. As Hornfel watched, the fire left the Plains. Leaping with uncanny speed, it gained the thickly forested slopes of the mountain. Like a rampaging army of conquerors, it made waste of everything in its way. The wind shifted suddenly, as it will in the steep corridors of the mountain peaks, howling now from the northwest. The wall of flames followed the wind’s trail, galloping madly through the valley below Thorbardin.

Gneiss’s message had been to meet at the gatehouse. Hornfel had waited, speaking with the captain of the guard for a moment or two before the scent and sound of fire rampaging in the valley drew him out onto the ledge.

Now, Hornfel stood alone on the ledge, or as alone as his guard would permit. Behind him, in the wide empty place where once the Northgate had warded this entrance to Thorbardin, four strong dwarf warriors stood, two facing the Hylar thane, two watching several yards farther into the gatehouse. The eyes of those two were not on Hornfel, but on the inner courtyard and the shadows of the rubble-strewn, ruined gatehouse itself. Their hands hovered near the hilts of their swords. None of them forgot for an instant that Gneiss had given them charge of Hornfel’s safety.

Northgate was, after all, an enemy holding. Though some of the gate was occupied now by Theiwar, most of the great hall leading from the gatehouse to the North Hall of Justice was thick with the dust of centuries. The hall itself, a sometimes active guard station, was clean and repaired to the point of easy use. But the structures of the temple and residences beyond seemed unchanged from the time of the Dwarfgate Wars. The marks of ancient battle scarred the stone walls and floors. In some places, huge black stains, the shadows of old blood, fouled the cracked, shattered tiles of the floor.

Until the Theiwar had laid claim to the area, none but the skeletons of the dead, dwarf and human, occupied Northgate. Some still did as falls and scatters of bones and ancient armor in black, lightless corners. The Theiwar, that strange derro race of dwarves, took perverse pleasure in sharing quarters with the dead.

A song of steel ringing on mail, booted feet on stone, sounded in the corridor between the gatehouse and the North Hall of Justice. The Guard of Watch was changing.

Deep voices murmured questions. Hornfel imagined that the new watch was inquiring as to the state of the guyll fyr. Hornfel sensed a palpable unease in the voices of the retiring guards.

Hornfel stepped back from the ledge. Impregnable Thorbardin was not at immediate risk from this fire, but the destruction of the marshes and woodlands would exact a toll on the mountain kingdom’s food supply in the spring.

We won’t be hungry, he thought bitterly, but we will be lean. What will convince the Council of Thanes that we should not only continue to aid the refugees sheltering here now, but open our doors to others?

Hornfel sighed.

Like ghosts, thoughts of the anguished days of the Dwarf gate Wars haunted Hornfel. Then, the Cataclysm had driven the dwarves into the mountain kingdom. The devastation of that time had reshaped the face of all Krynn.

The years after the Cataclysm were plague years, and the Neidar, the hill dwarves who before the Cataclysm had left Thorbardin for the Outlands, for what they called the freedom of the hills, wanted to come back to the mountain kingdom. They were hungry and they could raise no crop, hunt no game, in lands burned sere by endless drought and fouled by plague.

They needed allies, the Neidar, and they found an ally in the great mage Fistandantilus who, at the head of an army of ragged humans, laid siege first to Pax Tharkas, and then to Thorbardin. The humans believed there was treasure stored in the mountains.

Duncan knew, and so did the hill dwarves, that there was indeed treasure: there was food. But not enough to feed even those who lived in Thorbardin.

High King Duncan knew that his duty lay with his people. He and Kharas, his friend and champion, laid plans for what history would come to call the Dwarfgate Wars.

Kin made war against kin as Duncan, the last king of the dwarves made his choice to feed and shelter what relatively few people he was able to within ancient Thorbardin.

War again raged in Krynn. Hornfel knew, however, that, though war’s brutalities were the same from century to century, this war was not the same as the one Duncan had fought.

For one thing, he thought, staring out into the fire-threatened valley, we are not fighting this one. My people have chosen to hold themselves comfortably apart from this war. For another, the refugees we shelter here are not of the dwarven race.

No, they are humans. Is that really a difference? One could not, in any seriousness, call those over-tall and truculent, short-lived creatures kin. Yet, in the warlands, humans and elves had allied, if uneasily, against the dragonarmies. An old proverb had it that the wolf at the door will make brothers of strangers.

“And so is another old saying still good, King Duncan,” he whispered to a dwarf three hundred years dead. “Who does not learn from his fathers will learn from no one.”

The wolf is howling for your children’s blood, Duncan. I can smell his breath in the guyll fyr’s smoke. We have to turn these strangers into brothers now.

So thinking, he turned away from the ledge, from the fire, and passed between his two guards and into the gatehouse. He didn’t know where Gneiss was, and he couldn’t wait for him any longer. He would leave word with the captain of the guard that he been here and—

An indrawn breath whispered, and Hornfel looked around. Realgar leaned against the shaft of the gate mechanism, arms folded and at ease. He wore a dark, heavy cloak against the biting wind. The cloak did not hide the shape of a sword worn, as always, at his hip. His narrow-pupiled, black eyes glittered.

“It’s like an army,” Realgar said, “and it comes closer.”

Fire without and fire within! Hornfel remembered Dhegan shadowing him and Gneiss on the dark bridge, and he looked to his guards. Their eyes cold, Gneiss’s Daewar closed ranks.

“Like an army, aye,” Hornfel said. He resisted the urge to drop his hand to the dagger at his hip. “I’m going to call a council. Plans will have to be made; it’ll be a lean winter.”

Realgar shrugged. “As you say.” He stepped aside to let Hornfel pass and waited, too, until the four guards fell in behind their charge. As he made his way through the muttering guards, Realgar amused himself with thinking about his plans for murder and revolution. His army of bloody-handed Theiwar were ready to begin the fight for the cities, and Stormblade was heavy in the scabbard beneath his cloak. The Kingsword seemed to breathe with restless, hungry power.

He closed the distance between himself and Hornfel’s guards. The chill, damp corridor opening on the bridge across Anvil’s Echo was not absolutely lightless, though to Kelida it seemed so after the warm, comfortably lighted streets of Thorbardin. It took long moments for her eyes to adjust to the faint gray light leaking into the stone hallway. This was not light from outside the mountain, but a whisper of the stronger illumination from the glittering shafts of crystal that guided and enhanced the sun’s light in the city proper.

When her eyes adjusted, she shrank back against Hauk, who stood close behind her. The bridge spanned a cavern so high and so deep that Kelida, who could see neither roof nor floor, could not imagine boundaries. Low stone rails lined each side of the wide bridge. As though they stood sentinel, small carvings of dwarves held up the rail with strong, stone arms.

“Stanach,” she whispered. The whisper echoed endlessly around the cavern. Kelida swallowed hard and touched Stanach’s shoulder to get his attention.

His hand on the sword he’d picked up in the city, Stanach turned and Kelida gasped. As he had said in the caverns far below the cities, his eyes were only wide, black pupils now, empty and ghostlike. A chill swept down her back.

The dwarf grinned, a comical mock leer. “Aye, didn’t I tell you? Frightening to see if you’re not accustomed to the look of them, eh?” With his bandaged right hand, he patted her arm. “It’s me, little sister, only me.”

… me, only me … me … me …

Kelida shuddered, then felt Hauk’s hand tentative but warm on her shoulder. His words chased themselves around the cavern, too, when he spoke.

“I don’t like this hole, Stanach. What’s Hornfel doing here? We should have gone to your Council of Thanes for aid.”

It would have been Stanach’s first choice, but the Theiwar guard they’d overpowered in a cold dark corridor near the dragon’s lair had responded to their questions about Realgar and his plans with only a hard laugh and a boast he seemed happy to make: “Hornfel’s dead on Northgate now!”

By grim, silent agreement, Stanach drew Kelida on ahead with him as Hauk lingered with the Theiwar guard just another moment before catching up to them. He’d left the Theiwar dead in the shadows of the corridor.

The dead guard’s gleeful boast had filled Stanach with anger and despair that hadn’t abated until the three reached the upper levels of the city. It was Hauk who pointed out that what the guard had said could not be true. Or not yet.

“Look,” he’d said, gesturing toward a merchants’ square, a tavern, a park. “These people are nervous, Stanach, but they aren’t behaving like people who have heard that one of their leaders is dead.”

Stanach agreed and felt the easing that hope brings. They might not be too late to help Hornfel. The mood of Thorbardin was one of waiting and simmering fear.

Thorbardin scented a storm and knew the lightning would strike very soon, though it didn’t know which quarter of the sky would bring it. Stanach, roused from his thoughts, gestured to the darkness around them. “This is a Theiwar holding and even the adventurous don’t come here. The bridge should be safe enough.”

Followed by the echoes of their footsteps, echoes like stealthy ghosts, the three set out across the bridge.

Kelida started out counting steps as a way to keep her mind off the seemingly endless drop below. Though the bridge was wide enough for them to walk abreast, it seemed all too narrow for Kelida’s comfort. The whispers of their footsteps grew thicker, as though they were rebounding from closer walls. Kelida sighed, the sound like the wind wandering through canyons. The bridge over Anvil’s Echo was behind them. Stanach glanced over his shoulder and then wordlessly waved them forward.

His sense of direction below ground, as keen as an elf’s in a forest, kept them heading unfailingly north. They passed walls black with the marks of fire and white with the scars of battle. In dark corners lay the skeletal remains of warriors three hundred years dead. The leather and fabric of their clothing had long since rotted, but the brittle bones of hands still clutched shattered swords. Rusted mail and pierced armor still hung about what had once been bodies.

Kelida kept close behind Stanach and took a little comfort from the sound of Hauk’s even breathing behind her.

After a time whose passage seemed slow in the unmarked blackness, light, like gray fog, eased the dark around them.

Kelida made out the tall broad shape of a dome-capped building to which wide stone steps led. They were no longer in the stone walled corridors, but a kind of plaza or square.

“The temple,” Stanach breathed. “We are close to the gatehouse. Listen!”

Echoing flatly, like whispers from the long past, came the sound of mail jingling and metal-shod boots scraping on stone. Fear spidered along Kelida’s skin. Hauk’s hand, warm on her shoulder, made her gasp and start.

“Easy,” Stanach hissed. “It’s only the Guard of Watch changing. And likely a good thing. Whatever Realgar plans, he can’t possibly carry out Hornfel’s murder in front of two full watches.”

At one time the temple must have been as beautiful as any within the precincts of the cities. Though the domed ceiling was gapped and shattered now, it had once soared across the temple. Some of its pieces lay on the dusty black marble floor and stars, carved deep into the stone and blacker than the marble, showed from beneath shrouds of dust. At first Kelida wondered why the artisan who’d made this dome would show the stars as blacker than the sky. Then she realized that these stars had originally been deep etchings filled with gleaming silver. That silver, tarnished now with age, must once have reflected the lights of torches and braziers in such a way as to mimic the dance and play of true stars. Columns of rose-colored marble, some split and fallen, some still whole, lined the wide, crimson tiled walk leading to the central altar. There an anvil stood, seven feet high, its face five feet across. The whole altar had been carved from a single block of obsidian. At the anvil’s foot lay what seemed to be the helve of a giant’s hammer.

A temple to Reorx, Kelida thought, how beautiful it must have been!

She shuddered to think that murder was being planned so close to what had been a place of worship.

Stanach slipped behind the altar and found a cleric’s door.

“This should lead us out into the great hall itself. This whole place is part of the North Hall of Justice. At one time, the temple was for the convenience of visitors to the kingdom. Now, it’s only a ruin. From here on, the going should be easier. Theiwar may like the rubble and filth, but the gatehouse is kept clear in case a watch is mounted.”

Hauk moved close beside him. When he spoke, his voice was a barely heard whisper. “What lies beyond?”

Before Stanach could reply, a scream, high and filled with a terrible agony, rang from without. The echoes of that horrible cry had not fully settled when a shout of alarm and then another followed.

Like a bolt from a tightly strung crossbow, Stanach was through the cleric’s door.

Hauk grabbed Kelida’s wrist. His eyes mirrored both fear for her and a strange, fierce longing that had nothing to do with her at all. Kelida fell back a step, recognizing the lust for battle.

“Stay,” he snarled. Then, perhaps hearing the harshness of his command, or recognizing that no order of his could hold her if she took it into her head to follow, Hauk said, “Defend the door. If we can still help Hornfel, likely this will be our only way out.”

He did not stay to see that she obeyed.

Alone, the sound of battle rising and swelling close now, Kelida swallowed back an urge to call after him, forced herself to stay where she was and not run to follow. He had looked like some strange, heartless warrior whose purposes all had to do with killing.

Kelida’s fingers were cold and dry around the grip of her dagger. The little weapon felt both heavy and absurdly light in her hand. Faint memory ghosts from what seemed a long, long time ago, Lavim’s incongruously cheerful instruction in the art of the dagger, whispered to her.

Another thing a dagger is for is stabbing.

Kelida tried hard to ignore the roiling sickness in her stomach, the weakness of her knees, and crept closer to the doorway. Stabbing … The great hall beyond the temple was only a little less dark than the disused sections of Northgate, but the illumination there was more diffuse and even. There was enough light for Kelida to see that Realgar had indeed attempted Hornfel’s assassination during the change of the Guard of Watch, and that for a very good reason. Dwarven warriors wearing the black and silver of Realgar’s service filled the place, falling upon the Guard of Watch and outnumbering them almost two to one.

The battle thundered through the hall. Steel clashed against steel, voices soared high in almost indistinguishable cries heralding death or triumph. The stench of blood and fear hung over the place as though it were the clouds from which the storm fell.

In the center of that storm, its eye and its focus both, a badly outnumbered, embattled dwarf fought for his life. Nothing marked him as the Hylar’s thane unless it was the storm raging around him, and perhaps the innate nobility of one who knows himself beaten but fights on. Hornfel had long been a warrior before he was thane.

There was one guardsman left to him, a young dwarf wearing the scarlet and silver of what Kelida imagined must be the Guard of Watch. His back to Hornfel’s he kept off all comers with a wolfhound’s valiant ferocity. It was for this eye, this focus, that Stanach ran. Behind him, Hauk defended Stanach’s back.

Kelida moved without thinking. She was not a half dozen yards into the hall before the tide of battle swept between her and her friends. Something hit her hard in the back, an arm caught her around the knees and, too breathless to scream, she fell. Terror tightened her hand on the dagger’s hilt or it would have flown from her grip. Twisting hard, kicking out with her right foot while she got her free hand and left foot under her, Kelida lurched to her knees.

She screamed then, but not from terror. She screamed with the rage of one who sees her own death in the eyes of an opponent.

Stabbing is funny stuff … Don’t stab down if you’re in close. All you’ll do is hit bone and make someone mad. Stab up from below. That way, you stand a really good chance of hitting something important, like a liver or kidney …

Two handed, Kelida drove her dagger’s blade hard and up. Steel rasped on mail and the blade turned. Panting desperately, Kelida adjusted her aim without thinking and plunged the dagger with all her strength up and into the dwarf’s throat.

Blood, like an ugly crimson fountain, spurted high and the Theiwar guard fell away.

Retching from the coppery reek of hot blood, Kelida scrambled to her feet. Again something hit her from behind. Blindly she spun and struck, missed her mark, and simply kicked low and dirty. Her attacker fell, gagging. Instinctively, Kelida brought her knee up hard. She heard and felt the dwarf’s jaw shatter.

Heart thundering now, Kelida spun and found herself, for a moment, in the clear.

Quelling urges to vomit, scream, or run, Kelida searched the bloody hall for her companions. The guards of the black and silver, though not as many as before, still outnumbered Hornfel’s defenders. Tall among them all, like an enraged bear among the battling dwarves, Hauk still fought to keep any enemy away from Stanach’s back.

Stanach, now an arm’s length from his thane, swept the head from the shoulders of a Theiwar guard with his sword. He kicked the corpse away and reached with his right hand, the bandage stained with blood and dirt, for Hornfel.

As he did, the valiant guardsman, Hornfel’s only defender, died with a Theiwar dagger sunk to the hilt between his ribs. When Stanach touched him the thane spun.

Splattered with the blood of the dead guardsman, his eyes wide and blazing with maddened fury, Hornfel swung his sword high for a double-handed blow.

Kelida screamed.