Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

Cale Greeneye shook his head, grim anger narrowing his own eyes as the thin, cold mountain breeze rippled his full snow-touched beard. For three hundred years these Einar had kept to their little valley, tending their herds and their crops, supporting their families, hurting no one. Yet something deadly had come, and now—in one night—everything was destroyed.

But by what?

“No chance at all,” the Neidar leader rumbled, agreeing with his nephew.

They had spoken to the survivors, but learned almost nothing. Whatever it was that came had come unseen. Mists had rolled in that evening, and a heavy fog. The destroyer had been in the cloaking mists. They had heard its roar, and had glimpses of. . . of something very evil and very large that seemed to wrap itself in fog and darkness. Then the terror had begun. The old dwarf’s hands shook as he tried to describe the sounds and scents of rampaging death. The children had cringed, wide-eyed and pale, remembering. Of them all, only the young woman, Willow Summercloud, had not wept. She had seemed to feel no emotion at all. . . until one met her eyes and saw there a determination so deep and cold that it was like mountain snow.

Cale Greeneye gritted his teeth and looked away. In a hundred and thirty years of life he had fought many things, many times—hordes of human mercenaries, ogres and goblins on the border slopes of Kal-Thax, great cats in the hidden valley southwest of Tharkas. Like most dwarves in these lands, he had seen death and had known grief. He had seen the great pit beneath which lay the remains of his brother, Handil the Drum. He had seen the lifeless body of his own father, Colin Stonetooth, after the old chieftain was felled by treachery so long ago—ninety years or more—in the caverns beneath the Windweavers. And, like Damon, he had known the worst grief. He had lost his own beloved Spring, wife and best friend of nearly seventy years, to an avalanche.

Through the years, many a grief had touched the dwarf known once as Cale Cloudwalker of the Calnar, later Cale Chieftain’s-Son of the Hylar, and now as Cale Greeneye of the Neidar.

But never had anything touched him more deeply than the sight of these four desolate dwarves staring at what was left of their homes. The old one sat with dull eyes that saw nothing and shut out everything. The two children seemed to be in a trance, and the young woman —Willow Summercloud—wandered aimlessly here and there, poking through wreckage.

“We must find the thing that did this,” Cale told Damon. “The Neidar know these mountains best. We will search.”

At the scrape of steel soles on stone, they turned. Mace Hammerstand, captain of the Roving Guard and leader of the Thorbardin expedition, had completed his questioning of the survivors and was climbing up to join the two on the ledge. Like the other two, the young captain was of Hylar stock, with the dark, back-swept beard, chiseled features, and intense, thoughtful eyes of his ancestors. Polished steel armor glinted beneath his short cape of gray velvet, and the hammer and shield at his back were carried as casually as a stonemason would carry a wedge-maul. Like all of the Roving Guard of Thorbardin, Mace Hammerstand—at three inches over five feet in stature, nearly as tall as Damon himself—was a formidable warrior. But the eyes he turned upon Cale and Damon now were full of distress.

“They’ve told us all they can,” the captain said. “Maybe they had a glimpse of the thing in the fog, but they aren’t sure. They heard it, though. They heard it”—he gestured futilely, indicating the strewn devastation of the little valley—”doing that.”

“Nothing more?” Cale frowned. “There must be something they can tell us.”

“It was large.” Mace shrugged. “It came in low, beneath the mists on the fields, but when it raised itself upright, it stood above the roofs of the cabins. The fog seemed to follow it, as though it were draped and wrapped in swirling mist. And its roar was like winter wind that rattled the walls. The old one has an impression of great fangs—as long, he says, as he is tall—and of huge, rending claws. But he saw only a glimpse and isn’t sure even of that.” Mace sighed. “Now he sees nothing at all. He says he doesn’t care to see any more.”

“No tracks?” Cale pressed. “Nothing?”

“We have found marks.” The Hylar nodded. “Your scouts found them. But they are indistinct. How do you look for the tracks of something that might have anything for feet? Or might not even walk?”

“What does that mean?” Cale glanced at him.

“I don’t know. It’s something one of the children said. The littlest one. He said the cellar door rattled when the fog beat its wings.”

“Wings,” Cale mused. “Like a dragon?”

“Who knows?” Mace shook his head. “Have you ever seen a dragon, Cale?”

“No,” the Neidar admitted. “I never have.”

“Nor have I. Nor has anyone else I know. But I don’t believe this was the work of any dragon. Why would a dragon hide itself in mists? And why”—he pointed again, out across the rent fields, the shattered village—“why would a dragon wreak such mindless havoc? They say dragons are mighty, and can be fierce, but I never heard of a dragon as berserk as a bell-taunted tractor worm.”

Cale stroked his beard, thinking. What could be as powerful as a dragon, and as big as a dragon, and maybe even fly like a dragon, but was not a dragon? He shook his head and pulled his heavy, mottled cloak around him, seeming to blend into the mist and stone of the surroundings.

Like an elf, Mace thought. These Neidar become the terrain, as elves become their forests. Yet, glancing at Cale’s troubled face beneath his studded helmet—the dark hair with only traces of gray, the trimmed, backswept beard—reminded him that Cale Greeneye, youngest son of the legendary chieftain Colin Stonetooth, was as much Hylar by origin as he himself was. As Hylar as the big Damon Omenborn and his father, the Hylar chieftain Willen Ironmaul—Cale’s brother-in-law. Cale Greeneye was of Hylar stock and had been Hylar once, before choosing the sun over the stone—the axe over the hammer. Some said that Cale Greeneye had been the first of those who now called themselves Neidar—a bonded thane, and as much a part of Thorbardin as those who lived beneath the mountain peaks.

Yet the Neidar preferred life outside to life inside the great caverns of the subterranean fortress. They numbered in the thousands now and were often present within the cavern walls. But they didn’t really live there. They came to trade and to visit, and sometimes to sit in council with the other thanes. They served Kal-Thax as scouts and observers, as border guards, and as guardians of the great Road of Passage that ran through the dwarven lands from the southern plains of the human realms to the vast lands north of Tharkas.

Many of the Neidar had been simple Einar in times past—the people of valleys and scattered villages like this one had been. But there were also many Neidar who had been of the undermountain thanes. Among them were gold-bearded Daewar, stocky, long-armed Theiwar, and even a few iron-masked Daergar and wild-haired Klar. Like Cale Greeneye, they were Neidar because they chose to be Neidar, because they preferred the outsides of mountains to the insides.

Just as the Holgar—the combined thanes working to complete the great gates and the intricate ventilation systems, which were the final tasks in the building of Fortress Thorbardin—were considered people of the hammer, so the Neidar were considered people of the axe.

Mace Hammerstand shook himself out of his thoughts and turned to look once more across the devastated little valley. “We’ve done all we can do here,” he said. “But for burying the dead and drumming a dirge over them, there’s nothing more that the guards can do except report back to Thorbardin.”