Dan Parkinson - The Swordsheath Scroll

In the days following the taking of Klanath, squadrons of dwarves fanned out from the compound. Street by street and house by house, they went through the surrounding town. Most of the people had already fled, but wherever the dwarves found humans they cleared them out-sometimes courteously, sometimes not, but always firmly. And behind the evictors came teams of incendiaries with lamp oil and torches. Every structure built of stone, they tore down. And everything that would burn, they burned. For long days, thick smoke rose above Klanath to darken the threatening clouds overhead. Through long nights, the flames spread, outward and outward, until there was nothing more to burn.

As the fires died, Derkin had the human prisoners led up from the dungeons and herded out of the compound. Disarmed and cowed, without shelter, without employment, and without a cause, the men would wander away, most of them never to return. Some of them, perhaps many, might even join the emperor's enemies in the war on the central plains-a war that should have ended with the defeat of the emperor's general, Giarna, but which seemed destined just to go on and on.

When the sloping plain around Lord Kane's fortress was nothing but a wasteland of ash and rubble, Hammerhand gathered his lieutenants and issued new orders. "Bury that mess out there," he said. "I want it all plowed under, all the rubble and all the ash, before the ground freezes. Then, when that's done, we'll go to work on the Klanath mines."

"You want us to work those mines?" Vin the Shadow protested. "I still remember too clearly being a slave there."

"We won't mine them," Hammerhand said. "We are going to close them off, fill them in, and bury them. This place is too close to Kal-Thax for humans to have mines here."

"That will take all winter," Talon Oakbeard mused. "It might be fun, though." He turned, gazing around at the sumptuous, ornate fortress that Sakar Kane had built for himself. "What about this place?" he asked. "And those new fortifications the humans were building? Are we going to leave them standing?"

"We will leave nothing standing," Derkin decided. "When we leave, there will be no Klanath. It will be as though Sakar Kane had never come here at all… as though no human ever had."

"This will be fun!" Talon Oakbeard exclaimed.

"And keep us all busy for a while," Vin the Shadow muttered. Then the large eyes behind his iron mask crinkled in a hidden smile. Hammerhand was right, he decided. We're at our best when we have work to do… and choose to do it."

"I'd like to see Sakar Kane's face if ever the Prince of Klanath comes back here and finds he has nothing to be prince of," Talon chuckled. Then, more seriously, he asked Derkin, "Do you think Lord Kane will come back here?"

"I don't know." Derkin shrugged. "If not, maybe one day I'll go and find him, wherever he is." He strode across the compound, the others following him. From the wall, he looked across scorched ruins to the rising slope where Tharkas Pass began. "We will leave one thing standing here," he said. "A single stone… a monument, right out there where the city ended. Four miles from that point, Kal-Thax begins. We will inscribe that stone with the fourth law of Kal-Thax: 'If we are wronged, we will retaliate. We will always retaliate.' "

"I have a new name for our Derkin," Vin the Shadow told Talon Oakbeard. "He gives the law- our law-to our enemies, in ways they will understand. I have followed Derkin Winterseed, and I have followed Derkin Hammer-hand. Now I follow Derkin Lawgiver, and proudly."

By the time the heavy snows began on the slopes north of Tharkas, there was almost no trace of the sprawling city that once had stood there. Every useable stone and timber had been carried away, and the remaining ashes and rubble were plowed into the ground. In the spring, new grass and seedlings would sprout there. Within a few seasons, no trace would be left of the human settlement that had dominated the northern Kharolis Mountains.

Among the thousands of dwarves involved in the project, the work became known simply as "The Tidying," because Derkin the Lawgiver had referred to it so.

The task of burying the Klanath mines was a larger project, but the dwarves tackled it with enthusiasm. Many of them, like their leader, had once been slaves in these mines, and found great satisfaction in obliterating them. The shaft mines, high on the slopes, were caved in and sealed with stone. Then hundreds of delvers with climbing-slings and stone-drills went aloft above the pits. Working in conditions that would have been unthinkable for humans, the hardy mountain people began a series of "punches" in the stone face of the great peak. Master delvers went first, to "reckon" the stone-testing it, tasting it, marking its contours and slants, its seams and cracks, and noting the natural flaws in the granite. They patterned a half-mile's length of mountain with their scratches and marks, their chips and gouges, all the directional runes of delving.

Drillers followed, in teams of two, working on precarious platforms all along the length of the reckoning. From below, the platforms with their two dwarves each looked like a hundred tiny dots, high on the sheer stone. But when they began to punch-heavy sledges ringing on steel drills-the echoes of their efforts were a chorus that could be heard for miles around.

And joining the chorus was the ring of axes, as Neidar foresters worked in the nearby forests to the north. Day after day, they selected, cut, and hauled the timbers from which dwarven woodsmiths and binders were fashioning a fleet of sturdy sleds to be used as stone-boats. The dismantling of the palace compound, and of the partially constructed new fortress which Lord Kane's slaves had been building when the dwarves attacked, had taken only three weeks. Now, with several inches of good snow on the ground, the building stones were being hauled away into Tharkas Pass. As full winter closed on the lands north of Tharkas, the only structure still erect there was Lord Kane's palace. The tall structure served now as headquarters for Derkin's army and for the dismantling of Klanath.

With hundreds of horses, oxen, bison, and elk harnessed to the new sleds, dwarven teamsters were now busily transferring everything except the palace itself to the border of Kal-Thax, four miles away.

The work of hauling the stone was enhanced, the teamsters were forced to admit, by a bargain that Derkin had made-a bargain that most of the dwarves still could hardly believe. Among the countless hundreds of slaves they had found in Klanath there were no dwarves, but there were some of just about every other race the dwarves had ever heard of. Most of the slaves were humans, some were goblins, a few were elves, and two were ogres. On Derkin's orders, all of the slaves-even the goblins and ogres-had been freed and told to go away. But at the last moment, Derkin had called the ogres back. Then, while the Ten hovered near with drawn weapons and hundreds of other dwarves looked on with awe and disbelief, the Lawgiver had calmly invited the hulking pair into his chambers in the palace for a talk.

Their names were Goath and Ganat. Now they worked happily alongside the dwarven teamsters, hauling building stones into Tharkas Pass.

Only Derkin, the ogres, and the Ten knew exactly what had been discussed in that private meeting of the Master of Kal-Thax and two of his people's oldest ancestral enemies. But it was widely rumored among the Chosen that Derkin had made them a deal-fifty milk cows and a good bull from Lord Kane's herds in return for a winter's work.

It was known that the Lawgiver had given the ogres one law by which to govern themselves during their service. Derkin had told Goath and Ganat that if they so much as laid hands on any dwarf, other than to assist him, Derkin would personally tear their hearts out.