The Great Betrayal

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Legacies

The surface of the dokbar faded from pearlescent silver to ash grey, its activation robbing it of its lustre and plunging Ranuld into shadow. Like the massive runic shield, his surroundings were a dark mirror to his thoughts. Through the gate between holds he had warned the others. He hoped it would be enough to spare them a similar fate. The magic in the runes inscribed around the dokbar’s edge were fading. Soon it would speak no more and his voice would no longer be heard across the leagues.

Much as he had feared, old magic was leaving the world. As the secrets of the old lore diminished, so too did what the dwarfs used to be. Ruin was changing them, as slowly and inexorably as the tide erodes the face of a cliff and exposes its inner core to further decay.

Ranks of gronti-duraz surrounded the runelord but were not good company, no salve to his grief. Still dormant as they were, he alone did not possess the craft to reanimate the stone giants and breathe magical life back into their runes. He needed others to achieve that feat. It was one made harder by what had happened at the borders of Everpeak.

Since leaving the Great Hall after the rinkkaz, Ranuld had remained in the forge but he had felt the passing of Agrin Fireheart like a physical blow. Scattered coals, a fuller lying strewn and uncared for, still littered the floor above. Intent on his work in another chamber of the forge hall, Morek had not heard them fall.

Another light had faded, snuffed out by a great doom that would douse all the lamps should it be allowed to run unchallenged. Ranuld knew not what he could do to stop it, only that he must.

Hope lay in those younger than he and the ancients he had summoned to his conclave. Age and wisdom were giving way to youth and passion. All he could do was help temper this young steel into a blade that would cut through the encroaching shadow.

Weary, Ranuld left the vault and went back to the forge itself, drawn by the sound of hammering.

Morek was toiling at the anvil. Sweat lathered his muscled frame and he wiped a gloved hand against his brow to soak up the worst of it on his face.

‘Star-metal is not so easy to shape,’ uttered the runelord, causing his apprentice to turn.

A partially formed blade, slowly being cogged into shape and then to be edged and fullered, lay upon the anvil. Morek stared at it forlornly.

‘It is unyielding, master.’ He sounded breathless; the sinews in his arms were taut enough to snap and his muscles bunched like overripe fruit grown too big for its own skin.

‘Like the karadurak, it must be coaxed into giving up its secrets,’ Ranuld told him. ‘Strength is not enough. Any oaf can whack a hammer with enough force to split a rock, it will only respond to skill. And much like splitting ever-stone, meteoric iron, gromril, can only be forged by a master smith. Are you such a dawi, Morek of the Furrowbrows?’

‘I think so, master.’

Ranuld scoffed. ‘Werit. Think? Think, is it? Think!’ He bellowed, ‘You must know it. Az and klad will not forge themselves.’

‘Master, I…’

‘And to think it is to you who I must pass on all my knowledge… Kruti-eating wanaz, I should take the hammer from your hand this instant and use it upon your stupid head! Ufdi!’

‘Please don’t, master.’

‘Wazzock,’ spat the runelord. His eyes narrowed on his terrified apprentice then to the slowly bending star-metal he had clamped against the anvil. An axe blade was visible, and once it was finished the runes could be struck. ‘Hit it again,’ Ranuld told him, watching sternly as Morek worked the meteoric iron.

‘Gromril is the ore of heroes and masters. It is only they who can wield it, only they who can craft it.’

Morek kept going, hammering relentlessly, slowly building up a rhythm that Ranuld felt resonate in his very soul.

‘It requires an artisan’s touch to tame and temper. No mere metal-smith can do it. Let them forge shoes for mules or rivets for scaffolds. Theirs is not the way of the rhun. That is the province of our sacred order alone, of which you are a part.’

Hammering, Morek became entranced and the star-metal began to bend to his will.

Ranuld lit up his pipe, took a deep draw as he sat back to regard his apprentice.

‘The rhun is slow, so too the metal that bears it. Many weeks it can take just to make a single ingot. Forge its angles sharp and tight, imbue it with the magic of our elders and become a master.’

The ring of metal against metal was almost hypnotic now. Morek had transcended from the ‘now’ to a place of creation, the rites of forging tripping off his lips like a chant.

‘Aye,’ said Ranuld, ‘now you know, lad. Now you can see.’

Slowly, a smile crept up at the edges of his lips. Morek was learning.

‘As one light dies,’ he said, ‘another ignites.’

Even the skies presaged a storm. Grim, black clouds crawled across the sun to blot out the light. Imladrik felt the cold pull at his clothes and seep beneath the plates of his armour. But it was not just the sun’s absence which chilled him. The look in the High King’s eyes was like ice when he had dismissed Imladrik and the other elves. Suppressing a shiver, he dug his heels into Draukhain’s flanks, urging the beast to fly lower.

Karaz-a-Karak was a bitter memory. He cursed inwardly that blades had been drawn in the High King’s hold hall and wondered if there was any turning back from the course they were set upon now.

The prince’s retainers were on their way back to Oeragor, where he would join them just as soon as he had made this last flight with Draukhain. Others would return to Athel Maraya, Kor Vanaeth and even the vaunted spires of Tor Alessi. After what little he had heard in the entrance hall, Imladrik had decided to track the dwarfs leaving Everpeak. Not those going to Barak Varr but the rangers who had been ordered to recover the bodies of the slain. He wanted to see where it had taken place, and know what had happened in order to make sense of it. One of the dwarfs’ runelords was dead. It was unlikely a bandit’s arrow had killed him. Imladrik suspected something darker was at work and intended to find out the root of it. The only way to do that was to go to where Agrin Fireheart had died.

The prince’s dragon snorted and growled, behaving more belligerently now than when it had been surrounded by dwarfs. It felt the prince’s ire and frustration, echoing and amplifying it.

‘Peace, Draukhain…’ Imladrik soothed, inflecting his voice with a mote of dragon mastery. The beast eased, piercing a layer of cloud.

Below, the rangers were gathering up the bodies of the dead, wrapping them in cloth and placing them reverently on the back of a cart. As funerary transportation went, it was hardly fitting. Imladrik stayed within the lower cloud layer, wreathed in its grey tendrils so if the dwarfs should look up they would not easily see him. The last thing peace needed now was the sighting of a dragon prowling the scene of a foul murder. But then perhaps peace was beyond them at this point. He hoped fervently that this was not the case, and wondered how much his brother knew or cared about what was unfolding on the Old World. Not for the first time in recent weeks, Imladrik wondered if he should return home. The letters he had received at the tournament were still tucked in his vambrace. Their words were burned so indelibly in his mind that he had no need for either any more.

Rising again with a beat of Draukhain’s powerful wings, Imladrik found he was not alone when he returned to higher skies.

‘Can you smell that reek?’ asked Liandra from the back of Vranesh. The beast was small in comparison to the mighty Draukhain but the two dragons recognised each other as kin, snarling and calling to one another in greeting.

Liandra wrinkled her nose. ‘It is dark magic. Like a canker on the breeze, the stench is unmistakable. The Wind of Dhar has been harnessed here.’

Though her lips moved, Imladrik heard the words in his mind as though they were standing side by side in a quiet room and not aloft and far apart in a turbulent sky.

He calmed Draukhain, for the depth of the beast’s greeting cries would build to the point where the dwarfs below could hear them and think they were under attack.

Liandra frowned. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Flying.’ Imladrik was in no mood for an inquisition. ‘Why did you follow me?’

Beyond his dragonsong, which was potent, Imladrik had no magical craft to draw upon. He had to shout, but Liandra heard him easily enough.

‘You can speak normally,’ she told him. ‘The enchantment works both ways.’ She reined Vranesh in a little, for the dragon could smell the dwarfs far below them and wanted to better taste their scent. Like its mistress, the beast neither liked nor trusted the dwarfs. But also like his mistress, he had even less love for dark elves.

Imladrik would not be distracted and asked again, ‘Why did you follow me, Liandra?’

‘If I said it was to make sure you weren’t going to do anything reckless, like try and talk to the dwarfs, would you have believed me?’

‘No.’

‘Then I did it to find out what you were doing. You entire household leaves the dwarf lands, headed for Oeragor, and yet you, their prince and master, go west after a trail of rangers. I wanted to know why you would do that, Imladrik.’

‘And do you?’

‘You don’t believe that asur did this.’

‘No elf of Ulthuan I know uses the Dark Wind. Those that do are rounded up as traitors by the warriors of the White Tower and executed.’

A darkness flashed across Liandra’s face at a bitter memory.

‘You think it was druchii?’

‘You do not?’

They circled one another, the wings of their mounts flapping lazily but their nostrils flaring as the wind grew steadily more vigorous. It was buffeting Liandra’s hair, releasing her gilded locks into the air like flecks of brilliant sunshine.

‘Storm is coming,’ she said, gazing into the heart of a thunderhead growing on the horizon.

Imladrik maintained a neutral expression. ‘You didn’t answer my question again.’

‘I do not think it matters whether the druchii are involved or not. But I can taste Dhar like ashes in my mouth. Whatever was unleashed down there in that gorge left a mark.’

‘A powerful sorceress then,’ said Imladrik, partly to himself. ‘It is worse than I first thought.’

Liandra nodded. ‘And something else too, something I cannot quite see.’

Imladrik was keen of sight. He looked through a patch of thinning cloud and saw that the dwarfs had collected their dead and were moving on.

‘Would a closer look make it any clearer?’

‘I would rather not descend into the gorge,’ she told him, and there was a note of fear in her voice.

‘The dwarfs are leaving. If we land at the ridge on either side and climb down into the gorge, they would not see us.’

Despite the prince’s reasoning, she looked far from certain.

‘I would have thought of all people, you would be the most keen to find out if there are druchii abroad in the Old World. It might have a bearing on whatever happens next. You are no friend to the dwarfs but I also know you do not want another war for our people.’

She peered down through the clouds for a few seconds before conceding. ‘We must be swift.’

The dragons dived a moment later, Draukhain in the lead with Vranesh a few feet behind. In keeping with Imladrik’s plan, they perched on the ridges of the gorge on either side. The elves then dismounted and climbed down. They met in the middle in a scrum of scattered, broken blades and patches of churned earth.

‘It was a brutal fight,’ said Liandra. She was crouching down, running the earth between her fingers.

‘That is plain even to my mundane sight,’ said Imladrik. ‘What else do you feel?’

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

‘Dhar saturates this place. It has been tainted by it. Three sorcerers, one much more potent than the others…’

Imladrik kept his voice low, but his gaze was intense. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Each crafts the wind of magic subtly differently. Such a thing leaves a trail of essence behind it if you know how to look for it.’

‘And what of the other thing, the enigma you spoke of?’

She screwed her eyes tighter. Her fists were clenched at her sides. Liandra’s already pale skin drained further, leaving her cold and corpse-like. She shuddered, wracked by a sudden convulsion that threw her off her feet and onto the ground where she spasmed.

‘Liandra!’ It was as if Imladrik’s voice was lost through the veil of a waterfall, distant and muffled.

Reaching her side, he shook her hard, pulling her up onto her knees again.

‘Liandra!’ Rubbing her arms, trying to beat some warmth back into her, Imladrik didn’t know what else to do. ‘Come back to me,’ he urged and was about to strike her when Liandra’s eyes snapped open again.

She flushed at the look of concern on Imladrik’s face. When the prince recognised it too he backed off.

‘Are you hurt?’

She struggled to her feet but refused any help.

‘We cannot linger here. It’s not safe.’

‘Liandra?’

She was already climbing back up to the ridge, finding trails no dwarf ever could and moving with a grace and swiftness that would seem impossible over such rugged terrain. Equally as nimble, Imladrik gave chase.

‘Liandra…’ He grabbed at her arm, and she snapped it away with a muttered curse.

‘Even with a dragon to protect me, I do not want to feel a crossbow bolt in my back,’ she said.

‘The dwarfs are gone, and I doubt they would shoot us without cause.’

‘Did you not see as I did in the dwarf hall? They want retribution for this. Even if their king is wise, they are not. They are a vengeful and greedy people, Imladrik. It is time you realised that. It might not be tomorrow, or even next year, but a war is coming to our people and there is nothing you can do to prevent that.’

Imladrik was about to respond but knew she was right.

Perhaps he had lingered too long in the Old World with the dwarfs. His brother was calling him back. He had received several letters from the Phoenix King petitioning for his return. Standing there looking at Liandra, he also realised something else.

‘You hate them, don’t you.’

‘The druchii,’ she sneered, ‘yes. They killed my mother, there is much in that for me to hate.’

‘No, not just that. You hate the dwarfs too.’

She nodded without hesitation.

And just like that, Imladrik saw how far apart the two of them had become. He wanted harmony, a peaceful accord between their races; Liandra wanted war. Either against dark elves or dwarfs, it didn’t matter.

‘I did not notice it before,’ he admitted. ‘I think I was blind somehow, but you are a supremacist, Liandra. Whether from your bloodline or the horrors you have endured in the past, you have become intolerant of every race except for your own.’

‘I am my father’s daughter,’ she answered defiantly. Her face softened and she added, ‘You are leaving, aren’t you?’

Imladrik looked resigned. ‘Yes. With Malekith’s forces stirring in the north, my brother has need of me to marshal the warriors of the dragon peaks.’

‘I wish I could go back with you, but my father forbids it.’

‘Don’t be so eager for bloodshed, Liandra. It is not as glorious as you think it is.’

‘I only want to be by their side… my father’s and brothers’. But if there are druchii here, I will find them,’ she promised.

‘Don’t give in to hate, Liandra.’ Imladrik paused, unsure of how to ask his next question. He decided to be direct. ‘What did you see, when that palsy stole upon you?’

Her face paled a little at the memory.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Nothing born of Naggaroth?’

She shook her head, which only made the prince’s frown deepen. Their enemies were gathering, it seemed.

Though she was a little further up the rise, Imladrik was much taller than her and looked down on the princess. As their eyes met, they drew close enough to touch. She gently put her hand upon his cheek. The metal of her gauntlet was cold, but the warmth of the gesture was not.

‘You are such a noble man, Imladrik.’

The prince’s face darkened as he thought of those who waited for him back on Ulthuan, and the feelings stirring within him as he looked at Liandra despite everything.

‘No, I am not.’

‘Love is not love when the choice is made for us,’ she said, cradling his chin before leaning in to kiss him delicately on the cheek.

He didn’t stop her but didn’t know how to respond either. She did all the talking for him.

‘If this is to be farewell then I would have you know what I think of you, my prince.’

She touched his chest once, her armoured fingers lingering against his breastplate just where his heavy-beating heart was drumming. Then she carried on up the rise without another word.

Imladrik let her go. He didn’t return to the gorge but summoned Draukhain from the opposite ridge, leaping onto the dragon’s back as it flew beneath him.

He flew into the storm, his mind troubled. If the dark elves really were abroad in the Old World then the High King of the dwarfs must be told. Arriving at the gates of Everpeak on the back of a dragon after being banished would only create further discord. A subtler method was needed. Reining Draukhain, Imladrik headed west in the direction of his retainers. He needed a swift messenger, one the dwarfs would not try to kill or capture on sight. Praying to Isha, he only hoped he would not be too late.