Dan Parkinson - Hammer and Axe

“Fast?” She hissed the word and turned to point where the Neidar had gone. “They travel fast, Holgar. The Neidar. I can keep up with a hole-dweller like you anytime. I demand to go with you! I want to learn what that thing is, so I can help kill it.”

At a loss for words in the face of such scorn and fury, Damon spread his hands, then clenched his jaw and shook his head. “You’ve been through a bad experience,” he said. “I understand your feelings, your loss----”

“Loss!” Willow glared at him. “What would you know of loss, you who live sheltered by mountaintops? My whole family died here, hole-dweller! My father and mother, my sisters, my grandmother. You weren’t here. You didn’t hear the screams, but I did. Maybe the Neidar will find that thing and kill it, and maybe not. But I’m going with you.”

“No, you aren’t,” he said flatly. “You are staying here.” He turned. “Mace, look after this girl. She’s upset and distraught, and not thinking clearly. Take care of her.”

With his two members of the Roving Guard, Damon Omenborn—Damon the Quiet, only son of the chieftain of Thane Hylar of Thorbardin—mounted and headed west, toward the distant, climbing ranges of Kal-Thax. And as the mountain terrain unfolded ahead, he admitted to himself that he shared something in common with his uncle, Cale Greeneye. Damon was not Neidar; he preferred the bustle of Thorbardin to the open spaces outside. But now and then, he admitted, it was good to breathe the open air of the mountains.

Watching them disappear around a bend on the climbing trail westward, Mace Hammerstand whispered a quick prayer to Reorx to protect them. He knew Damon could take care of himself. There wasn’t a tougher fighter in all of Thorbardin. And the others, Tag Salan and Copper Blueboot, though young, were also seasoned fighters. Still, he had a bad feeling about the three taking off like that. It would have been better had they stayed with the main company.

Beside him, the girl stood, still holding her axe in white-knuckled hands and watching where the three had gone. “What does that Hylar know of loss?” Willow Summercloud spat.

“Quite a lot,” Mace said gently. “More than most people would guess.” He turned away. “I hope there is truth in prophecy,” he muttered to himself.

Behind him, Willow said, “What?”

“Nothing.” Mace shook his head. “I was just thinking about an old prophecy, that Damon Omenborn will one day be the ‘father of kings.’ If it’s true, it should protect him against his own foolhardiness, because he isn’t anyone’s father yet.”

Mace was busy for a time, directing the preparation of graves. When again he thought of the girl and went to look for her, Willow was nowhere to be found.

Among most humans—and even among elves, in certain circumstances—serving as escort to the son of a high chieftain would have been a privilege and an honor. But Damon Omenborn knew that for the two members of the Roving Guard riding west with him, their pleasure at the journey had nothing to do with honor. Among the dwarves, no special prestige was attached to being related to someone important. To the pragmatic, individualistic people of Thorbardin, respect and honor were things earned—each person for himself—and did not follow bloodlines.

The pleasure of Tag Salan and Copper Blueboot in accompanying Damon on his mission lay simply in the fact that they liked him, just as he liked them. Damon had many friends among the Roving Guard and had once been one of them before the death of his wife. He had been out on a mission when the boat accident happened, and had never really forgiven himself for being gone when he could have been with her. But instead of being in Thorbardin he was tracking down a rogue magician who had wandered into dwarven lands and was causing havoc among the Einar.

They had never found the magician. He had disappeared, not to be seen again. But through the years, Damon had nurtured a deep and abiding dislike for magic and the users of magic—a dislike even more intense than the distaste most dwarves felt for wizards.

Still, he rarely displayed much anger. If there was one truly disconcerting thing about Damon Omenborn—aside from the sheer size he had inherited from his father—it was that. He simply never seemed to lose his temper. The Hylar were, of course, a cool-headed people by nature. Everyone knew that. As a rule, Hylar were neither as jovial and exuberant as Daewar nor as quick to anger as the explosive Daergar. Still, Hylar or not, they were dwarves, and theirs was, by and large, a quick-tempered race—quick to anger, quick to react, and, usually, just as quick to forgive and forget afterward.

But if Damon Omenborn ever felt anger, no one had detected it, and many found that quality ominous. What would it take to make Damon Omenborn angry? And—an alarming question to those who knew him well, who knew his strength and his skill—what would he be like if he ever really got mad?

Even now, heading into the wilderness with the memory of the destroyed village still fresh, it seemed to Tag and Copper that Damon was not angry, just intense and curious.

Damon’s map in the sand had told him roughly where the—whatever it was—had begun its foray. He headed straight for the central Anviltops to the west, and, with four days of travel behind them, the three dwarves saw the dark, ruler-straight expanse of Sheercliff in the distance ahead.

The Anviltop range was west of Thorbardin near the center of the old dwarven realm traditionally known as Kal-Thax. Like most places in Kal-Thax, the mountains were named for what they resembled—a long, north-to-south ridge of tall peaks, many of them flat-topped in silhouette, like giant anvils. Along the east slope of the range, near its center, a wide, flat plateau extended outward from the mountains, several miles wide in some places, to the sheer, clefted drop that was Sheercliff. From the east, it was a huge, rough wall of solid stone, many miles in length and rising sometimes hundreds of feet straight up from the slopes below, slopes that dropped away into a series of deep, stony canyons.

Though it lay in central Kal-Thax, the region was one of the wildest and most remote in the dwarven realm. It had been casually noted by Einar herdsmen in the early years of Kal-Thax, but except for observations from a distance—from which had come the names of the Anvil-top mountains and of Sheercliff and the broken canyons —the area was largely unexplored. Daergar miners had spoken of Sheercliff as a place where hard ores might be sought sometime in the future, and some of the Daewar spoke of the possibility of extending trade routes across the middle ranges to foster commerce with the humans of western Ergoth—and maybe with the roaming elves who frequented the forests beyond Sky wall. But no one had ever really charted or explored the central lands. Most of the dwarven settlement of the mountains of Kal-Thax lay in the eastern third of the region, where the Einar had found fertile valleys and good graze, where the clans had become thanes, and where the immense fortress of Thorbardin was being created deep within a mountain.

As far as anyone in the Thorbardin realm knew, central Kal-Thax was empty.

By the time the travelers made their fourth night camp, within sight of Sheercliff, they were a long way from any place where anyone lived. Thus it came as a surprise when, from the top of a stone bluff in the darkness before the rising of the moons, Tag Salan spotted a speck of firelight some miles away, back the way they had come, on the far side of the wild valley they had spent most of the day crossing. He called to the others and pointed it out to them, but they had no idea whose fire it might be. They hadn’t passed anyone that they knew of. In fact, in the past two days they hadn’t seen anyone at all.