Dan Parkinson: Hammer and Axe

“Magic is a new art.” Megistal shrugged. “There is still much that isn’t known. But once the Towers of Sorcery are in place, the learning can proceed more rapidly.”

In a dark place deep beneath the surface, cold mists stirred and swirled to echoing roars of pure, intense anger. Like a sleeper beset by insects, she had hissed and grumbled, clinging to sleep, shutting out the torments. But they had continued too long—the stings of unseen aggravation that annoyed her—and now that she was awake, her roar was like the only name she had ever had. Rage.

How long had she slept? She had no way of knowing, but she knew it had been a very long time. Ages of time. Where once there had been an ice cavern, deep within a mountain, now cold mists swirled. And where once she had been trapped within the ice—imprisoned there by forces beyond imagining—now she lay half-encased by a shell of stone, limestone that had formed around her with the gradual melting of the steel-hard ice. Ages had passed. Eons had come and gone while she slept.

But now she was awake, and her name was Rage, and rage was all of her. Her bondage was over. She had been imprisoned because the creatures of her world feared her, with good reason. They were living things, and Rage was death to them. She had rampaged freely among them, exulting in her power to kill. There had never been another like her. It was as though the forces that created her had regretted what they had done and turned against her, imprisoning her forever in the ice. But now, it seemed, forever was over.

Now she was awake again, and free. How, she didn’t know, but she was. Were there still creatures in this world? Were they still the soft-bodied, screaming things that had so delighted her, things that held warmth within them and writhed in agony as they died? She didn’t know, but she meant to find out. Rage stirred, and the limestone cracked away in the swirling mists that surrounded and clung to her like a silver-dark cloak.

It didn’t matter to Rage how she came to be awakened. All that mattered was that she was awake. She slowly studied the stone around her until she found a crack large enough to permit her passage. With the mists flowing about her and following after her, she went looking for the outside world. Eventually she emerged into moonlight near the base of a great wall of serrated stone, a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high. Before her lay a mountain world of peaks and valleys, of stark slopes and vast vistas.

Turning her back to the cliff from which she had emerged, Rage went hunting.

Several hundred miles to the east, where rolling plains began and within view of the eastern range of the mountains of the dwarven realm, high tower windows looked out on the teeming ways and climbing roofs of a great walled city. In the crowded streets below the tower, throngs of people vied for space and for bits of the wealth that was released occasionally by the overlords to sustain the city and its populace. Among them, everywhere, dark-armored and bright-pennanted, marched the companies of grim guards who kept order and enforced the dictates of the overlords.

But the man standing at the tower window was not looking at his city or its thronged streets. Instead he gazed westward, where tall snowcapped peaks, blue with distance, broke the horizon and seemed to dominate it. The nearest and tallest of the peaks, Sky’s End, stood like a defiant monolith, seeming to return the man’s hard gaze. Between the city and the mountains were nearly impassable barriers—miles of dangerous, broken lands where travelers gathered and brigands hid in waiting, and past that, the great chasm known simply as The Gorge. But the barriers to the mountain lands were more than just terrain. The real obstacle was the border of Kal-Thax, the land of the dwarves. For centuries, conqueror after conqueror had tried and failed to penetrate and seize the mountain lands, but the dwarves of Kal-Thax were fierce and stubborn.

Still, the High Overlord of Xak Tsaroth had ambitions, and one was to conquer and rule the dwarven realm, to loot it of its riches. And the High Overlord had plans in motion, toward that end.

From the west window he turned and crossed the tower chamber, his gilded slippers making almost no sound on the thick, richly textured carpet that covered the polished stone of the floor.

Directly beneath the east window were the postern gates of the keep, where three men were exiting as the High Overlord looked down. Three wizards had come from a distant encampment, seeking audience, and now three were leaving. But they were not exactly the same three. Two were the same—wizards of the orders of Solinari and Lunitari—but the wizard of the Nuitarian order who had come with them was dead, killed by a magic far greater than his own. In his place a different Nuitarian had joined the remaining two.

The High Overlord did not trust Kistilan. The dark wizard had plans of his own, and the High Overlord knew it. Still, they had an agreement. The mission of the orders—to establish a place of high sorcery in the dwarven lands—was an opportunity too great to let pass. Soon there would be trouble with the dwarves, and Kistilan had agreed to act as the High Overlord’s agent. When the time was right, Kistilan would take command of the mages heading westward where their surveyors had gone and would bring down the fortress of the dwarves.

Would Kistilan then give over the realm to the High Overlord? The ruler of Xak Tsaroth did not trust him that far, but then, he had a contingency plan of his own. If any human could penetrate the lands of the dwarves, cross it, and make alliances with western Ergoth beyond, it was Quist Redfeather. And the High Overlord owned Quist Redfeather. As long as the man’s family remained captive in the lower chambers of his keep, the High Overlord could command the grim Cobar as he pleased, and the man would do his bidding. Quist Redfeather was already on his way across the dwarven realm. Once before the High Overlord had sent such an emissary, but that one had disappeared. But then, that man had not been Quist Redfeather of the Cobar.

The High Overlord looked down from his window and smiled a cold smile. One way or another, he would see the dwarves of the mountains defeated. One way or another, Xak Tsaroth would have the riches of Kal-Thax.

In the Year of Tin of the Decade of Cherry, toward the end of the Century of Wind as time is reckoned by the dwarven thanes of Kal-Thax, the great undertaking of Thorbardin was nearing completion. Deep beneath the peak called Cloudseeker, with its crown of three crags, the Windweavers, in the subterranean caverns first discovered by the Daewar explorer-spy Urkhan, the mightiest work of the ages stood almost finished. Brought together by necessity and prodded onward as much by internal conflict as by the dreams of their leaders, the squabbling, bickering subjects of the bonded thanes had, in the opinion of Quill Runebrand, accomplished the improbable.

It was not the building of a huge realm underground—that, after all, was only the logical result of ninety years of concerted effort by the finest planners, delvers, craftsmen, stonemasons, and metalworkers in the world. What Quill held as the height of unlikelihood was that so many dwarves of so many tribes, with so many differences of opinion and so many rock-hard prejudices about one another, could have managed to share the same caverns for so long, without wiping each other out.

Quill Runebrand had never ceased to marvel at the sheer stubbornness behind the great project. Even his old mentor Mistral Thrax, who had been the personal advisor of the visionary Hylar chief Colin Stonetooth, had commented on the strength of purpose that was required, day by day through all the years, to keep thousands and tens of thousands of jovial, arrogant Daewar; suspicious, intuitive Theiwar; sullen, secretive Daergar; and impulsive, unpredictable Klar—not to mention the Hylar, with their tendency to be reserved and aloof; or the Neidar and unaffiliated Einar who wandered about freely; and even the occasional tribes (or tumbles, as Quill thought of them) of bumbling little Aghar—working side by side despite their differences.