Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

The only way for the old tunnel to be safe, he felt, would be for there to be no tunnel at all. If it were somehow obliterated, instinct told him, then even magic couldn’t unobliterate it.

Wandering the ways of the Daebardin waterfront, Quill fumed and fretted. Something was nagging at him, some hunch or intuition that seemed just beyond his grasp. He couldn’t tell which of his many worries it was.

Could it be the fact that Northgate, though almost completed, was still an open portal? Or the fact that nothing had been heard from Cale Greeneye’s search party since they set out to track the fogbound creature?

Could it be something he had eaten?

He searched his mind for all of the many things he might find to worry about, seeking clues as to which one had suddenly raised itself in his thoughts from worry to innate dread. Mistral Thrax had always been an intuitive dwarf, often seeming to know a bit more about things than he rightly could know. It came, he had said, of having been exposed once to magic. He had recovered from the magic, he said, but some of its echoes lingered on.

And maybe some of those echoes had passed on to Quill Runebrand.

There was the question that had become foremost among the chieftains, almost from the moment Barek Stone expressed it. The point that, in emergency, Thorbardin could have only one leader. As the captain general of forces stated it, the point was obvious and in-arguable. But to Quill, as to most dwarves of Thorbardin, the idea of everybody being led by one person was a frightful thought. And worse yet, it bordered on the heretical.

Only once had anyone ever tried to be king of all the dwarves. That was the maniac Glome, ninety years ago. Glome had died for his efforts, but the episode had solidified one thing that all the dwarves could agree about. They didn’t want to have a king.

And nobody wanted to be a king, either. No sane dwarf, in Quill’s opinion, would ever seek such a job. But in case of real emergency, one must lead.

Quill scratched his beard, shook his head, and started to pace again, then looked up, and his eyes widened. He was standing at the lakeshore—the subterranean lake that was named Urkhan Sea—and as he raised his eyes some trick of light drew his gaze to the mighty stalactite descending into midlake from the shadows of the great cavern above. The stalactite was the largest natural construct of living stone that anyone had ever seen. It was probably the largest stalactite in the world. It was called the Life Tree, and within it was the rising city of Hybardin, home of Thane Hylar.

Sun-tunnels above Daebardin lighted the shoreline brightly, but out in the center of the lake there was a gloominess as though clouds were forming around the Life Tree—dark clouds that spread in all directions to obscure the distant, vaulted ceilings of Thorbardin.

Quill blinked and rubbed his eyes. A trick of the light, he told himself. But it was still there, and now a ghostly figure seemed to appear in the clouds. Huge, wavering, and barely visible, it might have been a faint mirage, but Quill stared at it in openmouthed awe. It was the vague outline of a dwarf, and it seemed to shift from one contour to another. One minute it appeared to be an old dwarf leaning on a crutch—the way Mistral Thrax had leaned on his crutch sometimes—and the next moment it was slightly different, like a tattered dwarf beset by scars and pain, holding in his hand a fishing spear.

Quill stared, gulped, and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the phenomenon. But none had, it seemed. People came and went around him, hurrying this way and that as people always did, but even those who glanced toward the lake in passing seemed to notice nothing odd. Yet when Quill turned back, the shifting cloud-image was still there for his eyes. Now voices spoke in his mind, voices that whispered in unison.

“What one fears is not the teeth of a dragon, nor the tail nor the talons of a dragon,” the voices whispered.

“What one fears when the mind envisions dragons is the whole dragon.”

“What?” Quill asked aloud. Around him, several dwarves glanced his way, raised curious brows, then went on.

“It is not this scroll or that scroll that contains wisdom,” the voices whispered in his head. “Wisdom is not in any scroll. . . but it is in all scrolls.”

Quill frowned, flapped his arms, and shouted. “What in the name of Reorx does that mean?” Around him people stopped, stared at him, then hurried away, hoping whatever afflicted the lorekeeper was not contagious.

The cloud-vision shifted, from crutch-leaner to spear-holder and back. “A spoke is not a wheel,” the mind-voices whispered. “A point is not an arrow, nor is grain bread. Knowledge is not wisdom, Quill Runebrand, nor is the part the puzzle.”

“Is that supposed to make sense?” Quill shrieked. “What does it mean?” Members of a guard company passing nearby looked at one another and shook their heads. The keeper of scrolls was becoming stranger by the day.

The mind-voices were silent for a moment, the vision shifting and swaying. Then a single voice, a voice halting and oddly inflected, whispered to him, “Your concerns are well founded, Quill Runebrand. Thorbardin is in peril. Beware.”

Before he could react, the voice changed to another voice, and Quill gasped. “What did I teach you?” the voice of Mistral Thrax hissed in his mind. “What was the first, fundamental thing I tried to get through your thick skull?”

Then as quickly as it had appeared, or seemed to appear, the vision was gone, though the impression of dark clouds over Thorbardin remained. Maybe the lorekeeper had seen a vision, and maybe he only imagined it, but suddenly the vague dreads in his mind became sure knowledge. He turned away, his face as pale as winter ice.

The fundamental thing! Wisdom is not a knowledge. Wisdom is all the knowledge one has, speaking in its own way, telling the mind things that are beyond knowing.

Intuition, Mistral Thrax had told him many years ago, is wisdom trying to get through the narrow places in the mind.

Quill knew now what had been bothering him. It was not just the mystery of the mages, not just the killing beast that stalked the mountains, not just the question of how to meet an emergency. It was all of those things combined.

Somehow they were all connected, somehow all interrelated, and they were the parts of the danger that Quill sensed.

Thorbardin was in peril, and the dark clouds he sensed were an omen!

A time of storms was at hand.

“Barek Stone was right!” Quill announced to no one in particular, as startled passers-by turned to stare at him. “The mages will come to Thorbardin, and we will have to fight them! And the beast of the fog is out there because of the mages!”

Scattering bystanders in all directions, Quill Runebrand ran as fast as his quick, short legs could pump, heading for the pavilion where the chieftains of the thanes were just facing the question of how to meet an emergency that could threaten the entire fortress and the realm it protected.

As he approached, Quill was shouting, “Listen to me! Listen! We don’t need a king, but we do need a . . . a . . . Oh, rust, what’s a good word? A . . . an executive! A council can rule, but one must order!”

In the pavilion, puzzled faces turned toward him.

“What the blazes is the scrollmaster jabbering about?”

Olim Goldbuckle snapped, turning to Willen Ironmaul. “He’s Hylar, Willen. Does he make sense to you?”

For a moment, Willen Ironmaul didn’t answer. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Yes, he makes sense. And, by Reorx, he’s right!” Willen stood and raised his hands for silence.

“I propose a regency,” he said when he had their attention. “We all agree, Thorbardin needs no king. But we must have one who can direct all when necessary. A regent could have full authority to lead and command, and still not be a king. He’d just be a chief of chiefs.”