Dan Parkinson: Hammer and Axe

Quill would never forget that day. There on the sunny meadows of the lower slopes, under a spreading tree, the two warriors—uncle and nephew—had donned armor and taken up arms while hundreds of curious dwarves gathered around to watch.

The weapons were simple. Damon had carried a hammer and shield, Cale Greeneye an axe and shield. They had faced each other, saluted, then launched a simultaneous attack, each doing his best to kill the other, just to prove his point.

It was recorded that the two had fought for most of an afternoon, pounding away at each other, lunging, swinging, dodging, and shielding while the sun of Krynn swept from directly above the Windweaver crag to just above the Anviltops in the west. Four times the fight had stopped, while the combatants outfitted themselves with fresh armor and new shields—the discarded items were so dented and bent that they were good only for scrap—then continued with fresh enthusiasm.

The argument never had been settled. The Neidar with his axe was a match for the Hylar with his hammer, and the Hylar was the equal of the Neidar as well. Finally the two contestants had backed away, saluted each other, and gone off together to see what kind of ale might be found in the taverns of Gateway.

Behind them, though, a ritual was being born. Many a wager had been laid by onlookers during the combat. The wagers being unsettled by the outcome of the battle, others had taken up the contest. A Daewar merchant had started it by refusing to pay off a side bet to a Neidar woodsman. Before the echoes of their shouts had died away, the two had armed themselves and were having at it under that same spreading tree. Within minutes, a dozen separate conflicts had broken out around them, and the slopes rang with the clash and clatter of steel on steel. From that day forward, it was the custom to settle disputed wagers not in the pits of the Great Hall, where taunts and challenges were often heard, but out on the slopes under what would be named the Tree of Pittance.

Since then, Quill Runebrand had taken particular interest in Damon Omenborn and had tagged after him with an eye to learning whether the Hylar chieftain’s son had plans to remarry. Damon had married once at about fifty years of age to a lovely Hylar girl named Dena Grayslate. But Dena had died childless, drowned in the Urkhan Sea when a cable-boat capsized, and Damon had never really gotten over it.

Still, there was the legend of Damon’s birth—that an apparition had appeared and proclaimed that the child would be the “father of kings.” It was a puzzling legend, since there were no kings in Thorbardin, and it was unlikely there ever would be, considering the tribal rivalries of the thanes. Damon Omenborn was ninety years old now—still a robust young dwarf, but certainly no longer a youth. And far from being the father of kings, it was beginning to look as though he might never be a father at all if he didn’t put his grief behind him and find a wife.

So Quill Runebrand had taken it upon himself to bedevil the chieftain’s burly son about his “responsibilities”—to the point that he began to fear that the big dwarf might break a few of his bones in irritation.

Just now, though, Damon was away from Thorbardin. He had gone off on some errand with his friend Mace Hammerstand, captain of the Roving Guard, and hadn’t returned.

Quill had shrugged and resumed his old habits. He roamed, pried and inquired, and made notes. Each evening, at the dimming of the sun-tunnels, he put away his work and made his way to the Den of Respite. Among the things he had learned from old Mistral Thrax was the appreciation of a half-loaf, pot meat, and a mug of good dwarven ale.

The Dwarven Realm of Old Kal-Thax

Kharolis Mountains

Century of Wind

Decade of Cherry

Spring, Year of Tin

(The ninetieth year in the construction of Thorbardin, founded by the bonded thanes of Kal-Thax, under the Covenant of the Forge.)

The scene was like the others that the Neidar had reported. What had been a tiny village, deep within a little valley among the Horn’s Echo Peaks west of the Windweavers, now was a scene of wreckage and devastation. Damon Omenborn stood on a low ledge, brow-shadowed eyes narrowed and cold as he turned slowly, scanning the surrounding slopes for any sign they might give. Beside him his uncle, the Neidar leader Cale Greeneye, cursed quietly and methodically, shaking his head. Below them, Neidar scouts mingled with Mace Hammerstand’s grim warriors from Thorbardin as they poked through the debris, gray-faced and shaken at what they found.

A few of the low, thatch-roofed cabins had burned, though most were simply demolished and ransacked as though by something gone berserk. Tables, chairs, stools, and cots lay broken and splintered. Bits of fabric, once clothing, towels, and even tapestries, now lay sodden or fluttered in the breeze like little shredded flags. Damaged tools lay scattered on the ground, and even humble cooking pots were strewn about, bent and dented.

Some of the houses and outbuildings had doors smashed inward and stood empty and deserted. But other cabins had been literally torn apart, ripped asunder log from lintel, their heavy plank doors and shutters torn from their hinges, their roofs smashed as though by rockslides. Within these, which had been the soundest and strongest of the village structures, lay most of the dead. The people had known that something fearful was upon them and had tried to protect themselves. But their efforts had failed. Whatever had wanted in had gotten in, one way or another.

Everywhere there was spattered blood, drying in the high mountain air, and the bodies of the dead brought a pallor to even the hardiest dwarves. These people had not been merely killed. They had been violated, their bodies ripped and torn apart. They had been mutilated as horribly as the carcasses of their flocks in the surrounding pastures, as the devastated crops left ruined and flattened in their fields.

Cale said it was like the other villages where this had happened—three times now, that the Neidar knew about—except for two things. The other tragedies had occurred in distant border villages far to the northwest in the shadows of the Iron Wall Peaks. This was much deeper into Kal-Thax and much closer to the undermountain fortress of Thorbardin. There had been no survivors the other two times. This time there were. Damon gazed down at the little group huddled around a tiny fire and felt a stab of pity. There were only four of them there, being attended and questioned by Cale’s Neidar followers and a handful of Thorbardin warriors, Mace Hammerstand’s Roving Guard, with whom Damon had come from the great fortress beneath the Windweavers.

Four survivors. Out of a hundred or more peaceful, harmless Einar dwarves minding their own business in their little settlement, only four had survived! A gray-bearded ancient with blood on his shirt, a young woman with auburn hair whose haunted eyes looked out from a face covered with smudges and grime, and two young, orphaned children were all that remained of the village of Windhollow. They had escaped the fury of—whatever it was—by hiding in a root cellar.

“No one here had a chance,” Damon muttered, his cold gray eyes wintry and fierce. Wind-whipped and tight with barely controlled emotions, he tensed hard shoulders and turned his eyes away from the carnage below. Though at five feet, four inches, Damon was taller than most of his kind, and ninety years had brought him to full maturity, still at this moment he seemed—to his uncle—to be very young. Nothing in Damon’s life so far, in and around the great subterranean realm of Thorbardin, had prepared him for such savagery as was displayed here. Damon had known grief, of course. Cale wondered if his nephew had ever really recovered from the loss of his wife to the waters of the Urkhan Sea. But no one was ever prepared for a spectacle like this.