Dan Parkinson - The Covenant of The Forge

For a long moment, Grayfen held him there, letting all the others see. Then he snapped his fingers, and a louder snap echoed it, the crack of Porge’s neck breaking. Grayfen lowered his hand, and the body sprawled on the ground like a tattered doll.

“Get rid of that,” Grayfen said contemptuously. He turned to Grak. “I accept that the dinks surprised you,” he said. “You had not faced them before. Now you have. Remember what you’ve learned. Rest your men now. The drums are speaking. Tomorrow we move into Golash. From there, we go to Thorin.”

Men were lifting Porge’s body to carry him away. Grayfen glanced at them, then at the pile of dwarven armament nearby. “Get rid of those, too,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen with dink steels. They would be recognized.”

Grak cleared his throat and nodded, glancing down at the fine dwarven sword hanging at his hip. It was of Thorin steel, exquisitely burnished, point-heavy in the dwarven fashion but razor-edged and beautiful. It was the kind of sword a man might spend a lifetime acquiring, a sword worth a small fortune anywhere else in the world.

As though reading his mind, Grayfen said, “The dinks have fine wares, Grak. Far better than they deserve. But we will change that. The treasures of Thorin will buy a thousand such swords. The treasures of Thorin …” As he spoke, Grayfen’s ruby eyes went distant. It seemed to Grak that the magic-man was speaking not to him at all, but only to himself. “The dinks!” The soft voice became a hiss of purest hatred. “The scheming, selfish, arrogant dinks! We shall see soon enough who deserves the treasures those little misers hide in that dwarf-lair of theirs.”

Grak was a callous and brutal man, but something in the mage’s words and in his tone made the raider’s flesh creep. Never in a long, cruel life had he heard such pure, malevolent hatred in a voice as when Grayfen spoke the name he had given the dwarves. “Dinks!”

Others beyond Grak had heard it, too. When Grayfen was gone, striding toward the main encampment of raiders in the hidden cove above the Bone River, some of the men gathered around their captain.

“What … what do you suppose made him that way?” Calik whispered, awed.

“I don’t know.” Grak shook his head. “He hates the dwarves.”

“So? Who doesn’t? Misers and thieves … why should they have all the best things?”

“He hates them more than anyone.” Grak shook his head again. “Something happened, between him and them. I don’t know what it was, but I think it was at the same time that he gained his magic.”

“I noticed that you didn’t tell him about the dwarven horse that got away.”

“I told

*

The camp of the intruders was large, sprawled across the bottom of a huge, washed-out cove above the east bank of the Bone River. It was separated by broken lands and by a rugged, seldom-traveled rock crest from the tribal lands of Golash, south of Thorin’s outer fields. A hidden place, it held little comfort for the hundreds of humans assembled there.

And now, in the evening when the distant drums of Thorin could be heard like deep, chanting voices in the still mountain air, the camp was a dark, cold place. No fires were lit, nor would be again. That was Grayfen’s command. Smoke from cooking fires the morning before had almost led to discovery. It was the smoke that the dwarf scout had seen from atop Crevice Pass that had sent him hurrying back toward his patrol to report. It was because he had seen it that the patrol of dwarves had been ambushed and massacred. The intruders had orders from Grayfen not to let word of the encampment reach Thorin. Such an encampment would be investigated by Calnar soldiers, and the mage’s plan would be foiled before it began.

In the gathering darkness of the cove, Grayfen made his way through the sprawling camp, unseen except by those he wished to see him. The sun was gone from the sky, and the two visible moons had yet to climb above the towering, saber-tooth peaks of the Khalkists. Only the stars in an indigo sky gave light now, and it was not a light to penetrate the shadows of the cove.

Passing among the groups and clusters of his collected people, Grayfen was only a shadow among shadows — to them. But he could see them plainly, and as he made his way toward his private quarters — a circular, slab-stone hut with a low, tapering roof, surrounded by a perimeter that none but he could cross — he studied them, assessing their readiness. Six hundred fighting men he had assembled, and each of them had recruited others. Now there were thousands.

Their weapons and equipment were a motley mix of the trappings of every nomadic culture he had encountered in two years of recruiting beyond the mountain realms. There were dour Cobar among them, huddled in their own tight groups, their woven garments bristling with quilled bolts for their crossbows and the heavy hand-darts they favored. There were burly marauders from the Baruk tribes, Sandrunners from the northern plains, hill-dwelling Flock-raiders, evil-tempered Sackmen and many who fit no particular group. There were hard-bitten fugitives from the agrarian lands to the east, refugees from the fringes of the Silvanesti forests driven out by elves — and, some said, by a marauding dragon — and a hundred kinds of wandering mercenaries willing to fight anyone’s battles for a share of the spoils.

Two things bound them all together as a single force — the promise of riches when Thorin was taken and their fear of Grayfen. In recruiting, the mage had touched each of them with burning fingers and stared into their eyes with those featureless ruby orbs that were his eyes. And having touched them, he had the power to kill any one of them — anywhere — at any time he chose.

This, then, was the force that Grayfen the Mage, whom some called Ember-Eye, had amassed for his assault on Thorin. These, and his agents already at work among the people of Golash and Chandera. He was satisfied. The Balladine was beginning. The dwarves — the dinks — would be off guard and vulnerable. It would be the last Balladine, he told himself, and the end of the Calnar of Thorin.

Thorin would be his, and every dwarf within his reach would pay painfully and finally for the pain that lived within him each day of his life.

Grayfen made a sign with his hands, strode across the forbidden perimeter around his hut, and stepped inside, into a darkness that was not dark to him. He saw clearly in the gloom, as brightly as he saw everything — in brilliant, burning shades of red. Closing the portal behind him, he went to a plain, wooden pedestal in the center of the room and knelt before it.

With a sigh, using the thumb and first finger of each hand, he removed his eyes, easily plucking them from their sockets. Immediately, the fiery pain in his head subsided, and he rested there for a moment, letting the familiar relief of it wash over him.

With a muttered incantation, he placed the two ruby spheres on the pedestal, stood, and shuffled to his sleeping cot — a blind man groping in darkness. He found his cot and lay down upon it, wishing for real sleep … wishing that, for a few hours, he could be as blind as the empty sockets beneath his brows.

He was blind, but still he saw — as brightly and relentlessly as always. He saw the ceiling of the hut above the pedestal. He saw what the ruby orbs saw — always that, and never less. They lay in gloom, glowing faintly, staring at the ceiling, and the first sight in his mind was that ceiling. The second sight, captured within the orbs and always present, was of a ragged, bleeding dwarf with a slender, double-tined javelin in its hand — like a fishing spear, except that it hummed to itself and glowed with a crimson luster. As always, in his mind, Grayfen saw the image of that wounded dwarf — and as he saw it, it hurled its glowing javelin at his face.