Stormblade

2

A child woke, whimpering and sobbing from the same nightmare that haunted most of the eight hundred humans trying to find peace in sleep: the nightmare of slavery. The stars, dancing silver lights in the black vault of the sky, watched as a woman rose wearily and lurched, still half asleep, toward the child. She was not the youngster’s mother. She was a woman who had seen her own child die that same morning. In the two days since these people, once slaves in the mines of Pax Tharkas, had fled the mountains, five men, sick and old, and two children had died. So far, Tanis Half-Elven thought. He stared into the flames of the dying campfire and toed a bundle of kindling closer. He was tired to his bones. Eight hundred people went only slowly through the narrow mountain passes between Pax Tharkas and the South Road.

And the South Road was not a route to freedom. It was only a place to start.

A footstep, soft as the woman’s whisper of comfort to the whimpering child, sounded behind Tanis. He turned, dropping his hand to his short sword, and then smiled an apology when he saw who stood behind him.

“Goldmoon,” he whispered. “I’ve been wondering where you were.”

She was lovely, the Plainswoman, and though her face was pale and lined with the same exhaustion Tanis felt, she radiated a kind of calm peace that touched the half-elf like a soothing hand. “I was looking for Tasslehoff.”

“Find him?”

Goldmoon smiled. “No. Of course not. It was a good excuse to walk into the hills for a while.”

“I wouldn’t think anyone would be looking for an excuse to do what we’ve been doing for two days and will likely be doing for too many more.”

She dropped gracefully to a seat beside Tanis. “Sometimes walking alone is what I need to help me think. Tanis, where are we going to take these people?”

Where, indeed. Tanis cocked his head. “There aren’t many choices. Verminaard will have his draconians all over this mountain behind us soon—if he doesn’t now. Tas blocked the gate well enough, but it won’t hold. We’ve got to get these people out of here soon. We can’t go back now. We have to go ahead.”

“To where?”

“There’s only one place that would hold them, Goldmoon, only one place that is anything like safe now.”

“Thorbardin.” Goldmoon shook her head. “The dwarves haven’t taken any interest in the war these three years, though its been tearing Krynn to pieces. What makes you think they’ll admit eight hundred refugees to Thorbardin now?”

Tanis tossed the kindling onto the fire and watched the flames lick the twigs and bark. “We’ll reason with them.”

“It’s been tried.”

“We’ll plead.”

Goldmoon sighed. “They hear no pleas, Tanis.” Tanis, his green eyes glittering dangerously, smiled with no humor. “Then we’ll make them hear.”

Eight hundred voices, he thought, cannot be ignored.

High on the eagle-haunted slopes outside Thorbardin, there was a series of narrow ledges which, though they could not be seen from the deep clefts and valleys far below, have been known to the dwarves for as long as Thorbardin has stood. It was impossible to climb to the ledges from the valley. The mountains forbade it. But from within the dwarven fortress there is a way to reach the ledges. Narrow paths led up from the Southgate wall, paths that only a mountain goat or a dwarf born in Thorbardin would use. A wild windsong howls along those paths. Summer or winter, the air is cold there and thin. Stanach Hammerfell always thought of these ledges as his own.

He climbed to them now, a filled flask tied to his belt. All day the forge fires had dragged sweat from him like blood; the steam of the cooling troughs sucked at his lungs until he wondered if he would ever breathe again. He needed the peace of the heights now; he needed a place to think. Stanach propped his back against the eternal strength of the mountain stone. The first sip of the potent dwarven spirits warmed his belly. Far down in the valley, night settled to fill the deeps and clefts, covering the gold and brown leaf-strewn slopes with cold black velvet. Only an hour ago, Stanach had learned that Stormblade had been found in the Outlands beyond Thorbardin. From the lands where dragons cut the sky on wide leather wings and armies fought while gods strove against each other, whispering rumor came of a young ranger who carried a sapphire-hilted sword. Two years after its theft the Kingsword was found, and Hornfel even now prepared to send men to fetch it home. It would be no easy thing. Hornfel feared that the Theiwar Realgar had also heard the rumor. The Hylar’s men would have to be swift and on their guards. A Kingsword was something Realgar would kill to nave.

There was never a time when Stanach looked into the flames of his forge and did not remember the night Stormblade had been born of ore, fire, and water. There was never a time when he forgot that on the night the Kingsword was born, it was stolen. That night, Isarn—his master, his kinsman, and his friend—began a slow descent into grief and madness. Stanach did not care about the danger. He wanted to bring Stormblade home.

He would be going, if going he were, with his kinsman Kyan Red-axe. A border patroller, no one knew the Outlands as well as Kyan did. Or so Kyan said, and Stanach, for the most part, believed him. Though he and Stanach were of an age, Kyan had always seemed older. It was his experience, his look of being always on guard for dangers that Stanach could only imagine, and the look of being able to handle those dangers with ease, that made him so. Stanach who never ventured outside Thorbardin, but stayed close to his home and family, as most dwarves did, would willingly place his life and safety in Kyan’s hands. Were Kyan not safety enough, Hornfel was sending the mage Piper to accompany him. What, Stanach thought, could possibly happen that Piper couldn’t take care of? He’d known the golden-haired human for all of the three years that Piper had been at Thorbardin. Jordy, his name was, though all in Thorbardin called him Piper. Named so by the dwarven children for all the glad singing of his flute, lanky Piper and Stanach were close friends. The mage’s carefree good spirits lightened the dark brooding that had become Stanach’s nature.

The best times were spent in the taverns of Thorbardin, killing time and kegs of ale. The best times got better when Kyan, in from the borders, joined them, trying to pass off one outrageous story after another as Reorx’s own truth.

Stanach wanted badly to accompany them. But he needed to find a way to convince Hornfel that he should be with those sent to retrieve the sword.

He did not consider this easily. The thought of leaving the mountain and separating himself from the pattern of well-ordered days frightened him.

A son of wealthy Clan Hammerfell, his future was assured. He was a fine craftsman in a respected trade. His father had lately begun to speak of marriage contracts, and his mother’s dinner conversation was now laced with references to one dwarf maid or another, subtle recommendations which both amused Stanach and intrigued him. Seventy-five was not a great many years for a dwarf to have attained. Stanach was young yet by his people’s reckoning and not in any great hurry to take a wife and begin his family. But a family, too, is wealth and riches of a kind. That wealth cannot be inherited from a father’s coffers.

“You earn it with trust,” his mother had told him. “It’s not a matter of filling cradles and watching children grow. It’s a matter of giving the woman you wed, the children you sire, the friends you find, reasons to trust you. Then, though you go dressed in rags, you are wealthy.”

Stanach rested his forehead on his drawn up knees. He was poorer than any ragged gully dwarf. He was a trust-breaker.

I should have guarded the sword better!

Aye, but he hadn’t. The Kingsword had been stolen. Though Isarn did not blame his apprentice, there was no need to; Stanach blamed himself and paid the guilt-price every time he saw a forge fire.

A warrior Hornfel would send, and a mage. What need would there be to send the apprentice who had lost the sword in the first place?

Then Stanach smiled. His cousin Kyan Red-axe was a fine warrior; Piper, a powerful mage. But neither of the two had seen the sword, neither would know it but from its description. Stanach saw it every night in his sleep.

He raised his eyes to the jeweled sky, to the red star gleaming above the mountain’s highest peak. Legend said this star was the gleam of Reorx’s forge.

“I know I should have guarded it better,” he told the god. “Father, if you give the wit-craft to convince Hornfel to allow me to accompany Kyan and Piper, I swear by Stormblade itself that I will ward it well and carry it home.”

His prayer made, Stanach rose from the ledge and, framing the words of his request to the thane, returned to Thorbardin. Trust-breaker, he called himself. He couldn’t live with the name any longer. With Reorx’s help, he would find a way to go with his cousin and Piper into the Outlands and bring Stormblade home.