Douglas Niles - Fate of Thorbardin

“No, the hill dwarves have done nothing overt,” Tarn admitted. “But I’ll be cursed by Reorx before I’ll let them serve in any army under my command! Thorbardin is a nation of mountain dwarves! And so it shall remain!”

“But the treaty! You signed it!” she objected impulsively. “The hill dwarves agreed to help in exactly this purpose as soon as it became a real possibility!”

“Do you really think they meant that pledge?” Tarn snapped. “They signed it-and I signed it-in a moment of weakness!”

“It certainly can’t hurt to ask them,” Gretchan said, striving to maintain a reasonable tone in the face of such startling, stubborn intransigence.

“Yes, it can hurt,” the exiled king replied. “Has it occurred to you that Thorbardin harbors a wealth of treasure? If the hill dwarves agree to go with us, it will only be so that they can get their hands on that treasure! It belongs to the mountain dwarves; we will not share it!”

Gretchan was trying to come up with some kind of reply when she-and the older men-were startled by the loud slam of a door. She spun in surprise and only then noticed that the number of dwarves in the room had decreased by one.

Crystal Heathstone, the king’s wife and a proud daughter of the Neidar hill dwarves, had just stormed out of the room.

“Why do you have to be so Reorx-cursed stubborn?” Crystal Heathstone demanded once she and her husband had retired to the privacy of their living chambers. “If you could have just listened to her and seen the wisdom of her words, you could be the greatest leader Thorbardin has ever known! You could be the kind of dwarf I thought you were when I married you!”

“That’s enough, woman!” retorted Tarn Bellowgranite in a barely contained roar. “You forget who you’re talking to!”

“Oh no I don’t! I remember very well! I’m talking to a man who has been prejudiced for so long that he can’t see wisdom unless it’s slathered on a piece of bread and offered to him for breakfast!”

“That’s enough, I say! Do you recall what happened the last time the hill dwarves came to Pax Tharkas? They brought an army and a minion of dark magic! If it hadn’t been for that priestess and her staff, we’d-all of us! — be slaves in the Neidar mines by now!”

Crystal almost cried with exasperation. She turned and stomped across the office then spun back to face her husband. “That priestess, Gretchan Pax, is the same one who wants to reach out to the hill dwarves! Think about that if you can. This could be an historic moment in the whole history of dwarfkind. You could be the leader who finally moves our people beyond the destruction and rivalry of two thousand years!”

“No, I couldn’t,” Tarn retorted sternly. “Because I wouldn’t trust a hill dwarf ally any farther than I could throw him across a ravine. I’d be certain that, at the moment of victory, he’d be ready to stab me in the back! There’s a fortune in treasure in Thorbardin, and it is the property of the mountain dwarves. The hill dwarves only want it for themselves!”

“Think of what you’re saying!” Crystal protested. “These are my people you’re talking about! Do you think I would stab you in the back?”

Tarn glared without replying. His expression didn’t change as his son suddenly, furtively, slipped through the door. Tor was apparently surprised to find his parents there, for he swiftly turned and ducked out again.

The king turned back to his wife, who glared at him with an expression of unrelieved stubbornness. He was about to challenge her again when they were both distracted by a fresh knock on the door.

“What is it?” he demanded loudly. “I’m busy.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” came Mason Axeblade’s reply. “But it’s urgent, an emergency.”

Tarn stalked across the chamber and pulled the door open. “What’s happened?” he snapped.

“It’s Garn Bloodfist, sire,” Mason explained, his eyes wide with concern. “I’m sorry to report that … well, it seems that he’s escaped.”

Gretchan couldn’t suppress a sigh as she sat at the window of her guest apartment, a place of honor high up in the East Tower. The sun had set an hour earlier, and the valley floor below her was dotted with torches, bobbing and weaving as their bearers moved through the fields, searching for Garn Bloodfist. Other parties of armed dwarves stormed through the fortress, sometimes pounding down the hallway directly outside of her door. Tarn had ordered a pair of guards posted right there, so at least she didn’t have to endure their entering the room to search every time they passed.

Kondike lay on the floor beside the door. He looked comfortable, sprawled in a mass of gangly black legs and rough, shaggy fur. Yet one of his ears remained pricked alertly upward, and she knew that any disturbance would bring him bounding to his feet, hackles bristling and long teeth bared in the direction of the alarm.

Could it be that Garn Bloodfist was actually stalking through the halls of Pax Tharkas? She didn’t think so-he was well known and had few friends there. Even the Klar troops who had served him when he had been their captain had seen the danger in his wild hatred and had accepted the wisdom of the treaty that had brought the war to an end.

She shuddered as she pictured the mad Klar. She hadn’t seen Bloodfist since he had been arrested, at the very end of the battle in Pax Tharkas, but she would never forget the murderous look that he had directed at her, his wide Klar eyes staring wildly, dark spots in circles of white, as if he had been staring right through her.

How had everything become such a mess? Why did Reorx allow the affairs of dwarves to be so relentlessly cursed with violence, treachery, and murder?

She held her staff in both of her hands and closed her eyes as she pressed her forehead to the cool, smooth shaft of wood. She murmured a soft prayer to her god, the Master of the Forge. Her evening chants, as always, soothed her, the musical sound of prayer a calming force in even the most tumultuous of times.

She thought of Brandon, still so far away, and prayed for his safety, for his success in his campaign against the horax, for his speedy progress on his journey south. She continued to think of him as she undressed and slipped into bed-into the bed that was almost obscenely comfortable after all of the rough nights in her bedroll on the trail. Things would be so much better if he were there-of that, she was somehow certain.

And with that certainty, and the weariness of her long trek at last behind her, she finally allowed herself to sleep.

The Kayolin Army continued its march southward to Caergoth, crossing the Solamnic plains like some miles-long, infinite-legged centipede. Always the dwarves maintained their precise column and held to the cadence set by the hundred drummers. The miles rolled by underfoot, and the sky swept like a vast canopy overhead-an experience that many of the dwarves, those who had spent most if not all of their lives underground, found profoundly unsettling.

As he walked along the column or stood beside the track and listened to the troops as they passed, Brandon heard many whispered conversations about the uncanny expanse of space there on the surface of the outside world-an expanse that was magnified by the stark emptiness of the plains. A regular debate was waged between those, a majority, who found the daylight hours to be most disturbing, and the vocal minority who had difficulty adjusting to the night sky and its myriad stars. Both sides could agree they couldn’t wait to get back under the shelter of a good mountain range, as Reorx had intended, and escape from the disturbing and vast spaces of the surface world.