Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

As he took another step, the last torch passed, and darkness descended. Sledge pushed on and suddenly found himself beyond the eerie, heavy murk. He was standing at the rim of a little gully, inside what seemed to be a wide tunnel of solid stone. He looked to his left and saw the last of a large party of armed men trotting away around a bend. Their torches cast eerie shadows on the tunnel’s walls.

Just behind him, Pyrr Steelpick stepped out of what seemed a solid stone wall, and others appeared, crowding around, gaping at the long tunnel that seemed to run through the bottom of a ridge that was not a ridge.

“What is this?” a sapper demanded. “Is this magic?”

“It might be,” Sledge said. “I’ve never seen magic, but this sure looks like it.”

From down the tunnel came the sounds of voices and trotting feet, and torchlight glinted on the stone. Another band of armed humans came around a bend and skidded to a halt as the light of torches fell on the mob of Daergar spreading across the way.

“Dwarves!” a human voice shouted.

An arrow hummed along the corridor and buried itself in the throat of a miner. The dwarf fell, thrashing in death, and two more pitched backward as they were hit, one by an arrow and one by a thrown hand-dart.

Sledge raised his miner’s shield and shouted, “Defend!” In an instant, every standing dwarf had dropped to his knees, with his shield before him. A barrage of arrows, darts, and bolts from the human band whisked over them or clanged against shields.

“Attack!” Sledge ordered. The dwarves came to their feet, closing ranks even as they charged into the ditch, becoming a short, solid wall of raised shields and running feet. The first line of Daergar hit the humans, and men went down, shrieking and tumbling as hammers, picks, and iron chisels smashed at them. Even as they fell, those still standing among them pitched forward as stone-drills flicked from between shields to shatter knees and pierce thighs. Thirty or more humans fell within seconds, and the first line of Daergar washed over them, then parted, swinging aside in disciplined lines as a second wave of dwarves flooded through to attack the humans beyond. Here and there a Daergar fell to a lucky blow, but far more humans went down than dwarves.

“The torches!” Sledge ordered.

Lines of dwarves swarmed past the melee, clambering up the sides of the little gully, and ran along the line of humans still pushing forward. Delving axes lashed out, and torches flew from human hands as dwarves scrambled in the confusion to extinguish them with their shields. Within seconds, the entire section of tunnel was dark.

In the darkness, the Daergar went to work with murderous efficiency. A vague glow here and there was all the light their miners’ eyes required.

It was a massacre. Those humans who tried to hold their position were cut down, and those who tried to run were caught and killed. When silence returned, Sledge called, “Regroup!” The Daergar gathered around him, blood-soaked and sweating from exertion. There had been more than a hundred of them. There were still more than eighty, and for each fallen dwarf there were at least ten slaughtered human invaders. With the torches gone, the humans had not stood a chance. What was darkness to human eyes—and to most dwarves—was fighting light to a Daergar.

“Who were they?” Pyrr rumbled, wiping gore from his heavy pick. “What are humans doing here, and why did they attack us?”

“Ask this one,” a miner said. Several grim Daergar led forward a battered human, the only survivor. Sledge recognized the appearance and attire of the marauders called Sackmen, nomads from the northern deserts who had sometimes tried to make their way into the dwarven lands. The man was bloody and disarmed, though the odd, curved basket with which the Sackmen threw their deadly hand-darts was still strapped to his right wrist.

“Only one left alive,” a miner growled, prodding the man forward with his pick handle.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” Sledge demanded of the man.

The man sneered, shaking his head. Without hesitation, Pyrr Steelpick stepped forward and crouched in front of the human, loosing his heavy hammer and digging a long rock-spike from his pouch. “I’ll nail his feet to the ground,” he told Sledge. “Humans talk better that way.”

Several dwarves seized the man’s legs, holding him motionless, and the burly shaft boss set the point of his spike atop a large foot and raised his hammer.

“Wait!” the man squealed. “Wait, I’ll tell you. We came . . . We were hired to fight for some wizards.”

“Fight against whom?” Sledge asked.

“Against . . .—the man swallowed—”against dwarves.”

Pyrr raised his hammer again.

“Wait!” the man wailed. “It’s nothing personal! We . . . They’ve hired a lot of people. It’s just business.”

“Hired you with what?” Sledge asked.

“Coin,” the man said. “In . . . in my pouch.”

Dwarven hands removed the pouch from the man’s belt and dumped the contents out. A handful of bright coins fell on the ground. A miner picked one of them up, frowned at it, and tasted it. “Rock,” he muttered. “It sort of looks like a coin, but it’s only a little rock.”

“How many of you are there?” Sledge asked, then raised a hand. Human voices sounded somewhere in the tunnel. “Get him out of here,” Sledge ordered.

Without hesitating, Pyrr Steelpick grabbed the man’s arm in powerful fingers. Others grabbed his other arm, and the man was propelled up the bank and toward the wall. The dwarves, running at full speed, hit the stone and disappeared within it. The man screamed, smashed against the stone, and bounced off, flipping and rolling to the edge of the gully. Where he had rebounded, heads popped out of the blood-splattered “stone.”

“Whoops,” Pyrr said.

Sledge squatted beside the man. He was dead. Nearby, a dwarf stooped and picked up a small stone. “Rock,” he said. “Doesn’t even look like a coin now.”

“I think we had better tell Vog Ironface about this,” Sledge decided.

Down the tunnel, more glows indicated that more human invaders were approaching. Turning, Sledge climbed what he hoped was the north side of the little gully and walked directly into the stone wall of the tunnel. “There isn’t any tunnel here,” he reminded himself. He stepped into the stone and disappeared. Behind him, the others followed a few at a time. The last of them were still climbing from the gully when another band of mercenaries rounded the near bend and found themselves wading through, and stumbling over, the bodies of the dead. Those in the lead, holding torches high, spotted the last few Daergar still in the “tunnel” and sprinted toward them, blades drawn.

Chink Deepshaft, a young sapper, was the last Daergar to reach the gully bank, and several big humans were at his heels as he raced full-tilt into the wall. He dived for the apparently solid stone and rolled through it. Behind him, blades clanged against solid rock, and a pair of Sackmen warriors bounced off the stone.

Beyond the ridge, the group of Daergar emerged into normal night and gazed at the Promontory spreading ahead of them with Cloudseeker rising beyond it.

As they emerged, five shamefaced young miners scurried down the slope of the ridge that wasn’t a ridge and joined them, gawking at the blood-smeared apparel and gore-stained tools of those who had gone through and survived.

“That’s what you get for doubting your own logic,” Pyrr Steelpick snapped at them. “You knew there wasn’t a ridge here, but you believed there was, so you missed all the fun.”

“Let that be a lesson to you,” Sledge added. “If you know a thing is so, it’s so. If you know it’s not, it’s not. Otherwise you’re no better than humans.”