Dan Parkinson - The Covenant of The Forge

“We’ll have to go on,” he told those behind him. “The dwarves are just ahead. They’ve sealed themselves in here with us. Find them! We’ll make them let us out!”

With anger added to their energies, the horde of humans sped upward, a spiraling mass of armed men racing around twin pillars of stone, and came out on the highest enclosed level of Thorin Keep. Overhead, skylights flooded the wide hall and the corridors beyond with brilliant light.

And they were alone. There wasn’t a dwarf in sight, anywhere. The invaders spread out to search. Sith Kilane stalked the bright halls in a fury. All the way up Thorin Keep, there had been dwarves ahead of them. They had seen them, had clashed with their rear guards. They had been in hot pursuit. There had been dozens of dwarves … many dozens of them. But now they were just … gone.

“There must be secret passages!” Kilane shouted. “Find them!”

Long minutes passed in frantic search, then one of the men swept aside a tapestry on the back wall of one of the stair pillars and gawked at what he saw there. He shouted, and others came to look. It was a doorway, cut into the stone of the huge pillar. A small doorway — to humans — less than six feet high and about four feet wide. The closed door was of finely finished wood, highly ornamented.

Men pushed at the door, pried at its edges, and strained against it, but it would not move.

“Stand back!” Sith Kilane ordered. Raising his bloodstained sword in both hands, he swung downward at the center of the door. The blade struck and broke. The impact made Kilane’s teeth rattle. With the others, he peered at the gouge in the wood where his sword had hit it.

The wood was a veneer. Beneath its decorative surface, the door was solid metal.

When the humans first entered the stairways of the keep, Tolon the Muse had made up his mind — the invaders might get in, but none of them would ever get out alive if he could manage it. With guards fighting delaying battles at each level, Tolon rushed to get all the dwarves in the keep to the highest level, where the lift-stages opened. The human mob was still far down the stairs when Tolon assembled his survivors and opened the lift doors.

He held position there, on the upper level of the keep, while people streamed past him, entering the lifts nine at a time, packing the suspended stages one after another for their trip downward through the hollow pillars surrounded by the stairs.

Many of them were injured. At the lower levels the guards had fought, had held the stairhead long enough for other dwarves to stream upward ahead of the invaders. Some had died, and many were bleeding. Tolon had no idea how many Calnar had been in the keep when the attack came, but he guessed there were more than a hundred. Yet, when the last of them arrived in the upper hall, and he herded them toward the cable-lift, he counted fewer than fifty who had made it to the top. Grieving and dark-browed with a smoldering anger, the second son of Colin Stonetooth saw the last of them into the lift stages and shared the next stage with two injured guards. He sealed the portal behind him as he stepped onto the platform. Could the humans break through that door, into the lifts? He didn’t know. It depended upon the tools they could find. But it would not be easy.

In the meantime, he had a surprise for them.

Normally, only Colin Stonetooth himself could have ordered the keep sealed and had his orders obeyed. But the chieftain was not here, and looking at the fierce scowls of the armed Calnar with him — the remnants of an entire company of keep guards — he knew that they would follow his plan.

How many of the invading humans were in the keep? There was no way of knowing. Hundreds, probably. But it didn’t matter. Tolon had made up his mind that those who were there — who had invaded the very home of the leaders of the Calnar — were not going to leave.

Tolon did not know where the rest of his family was now. He had seen his father, retreating with the Ten on the first terrace, making for the gates. The chieftain must be inside now, maybe in Grand Gather or beyond. He had last seen Handil on his way to Grand Gather, carrying his drum as always, with Jinna Rockreave beside him. Cale Greeneye, of course, was gone — off on some adventure of his own choosing, with the pretext of seeking a lost patrol — and Tera Sharn had been on her way to the main concourse earlier in the day. Tolon wished them all well and muttered a prayer to Reorx for their safety as he lent a hand at the stage winches, inching the endless belt of the lift downward.

Of the family of Colin Stonetooth, only Tolon was present here, where human barbarians streamed upward through the keep. For here and now, Tolon the Muse would take charge of defenses.

“All able guards off at second level!” he called, his voice carrying downward to the stages below. “We’ll make for the winch chamber.”

Beside him, one of the guards grinned darkly. He had been thinking the same thing himself.

Not in living memory had the keep been sealed, but the mechanisms were sleek and ready. It was typical of the Calnar, with their loathing of rust and tarnish, that all metal artifacts in Thorin were kept in good repair. This included the racks of iron bars — some of them thirty feet long — in the winch chamber at second level, and the two-inch-wide holes drilled into the stone of the frontal wall at eight-inch intervals. Beyond the wall was the keep’s big stairshaft, and in its opposite wall, or in the stair pillars themselves, were sockets — one for each hole in the frontal wall.

Working swiftly, Tolon Farsight and ten sturdy dwarven guards lifted the long bars, fed them through their sleeve holes, and drove them home. Beyond the stone, each bar emerged into the stairshaft, slid across, and thumped into its socket. It took them less than two minutes to put all of the bars in place. Dimly, from beyond the stone, they heard a scream, and some of the bars rattled in their sockets.

With the bars in place, the eleven lifted a great, hewn timber and dropped it into iron stays at each end of the line of sockets. The mass of it completely covered the holes, sealing off the bars beyond. Now nothing more than eight inches wide was going anywhere past the second level of Thorin Keep.

With that done, Tolon led his guards back to the lift shaft, where his other charges — fewer than forty dwarves from the keep, mostly women and wounded guards — waited in the shadows.

From far above, they could hear the sounds of humans at the top level, beating on the steel door there, trying to force it open.

“I’m glad Handil isn’t here to see this,” Tolon muttered, staring up the great shaft with its endless, vertical row of lift stages. “This lift is his pride and joy. Next to that vibrar of his, it’s the best thing he ever invented.”

From a cabinet at the base of the shaft, they took tools — prybars and wrenches — and began dismantling the lift belt.

The last coupling had just been pulled when they heard the upper door, far above, crash open and the shouts of humans ringing down the shaft. By sound alone, they could almost see the humans up there, crowding into the chamber, beginning to haul on the pulley cables to descend.

Tolon pointed at the giant pulley wheels on each side of the lift base. “Spring the cables,” he said.

Guards on each side hefted prybars and slipped them under the rims of the wheels.

“Everybody stand back,” Tolon said. The little crowd shuffled away, into the shadows beyond the lift port.

The guards secured their prybars, heaved at them, and the cables jumped from their tracks on the wheels. The guards threw themselves back, one falling and rolling, as pandemonium erupted above. Abruptly the lift shaft was a chaos of falling debris — uncoupled stages slamming down, crushing the stages below, loose cable whirring and slapping in the confines of the shaft … and piercing screams. As the dust settled, Tolon tried to make out how many of the invaders had come down with the lift debris. But it was impossible to tell for sure. There wasn’t enough left of the men to sort out the pieces.