Nancy Berberick - Stormblade

Hornfel! Stanach trembled with exhaustion and sudden understanding of what Isarn was saying. Hornfel would be high king.

Stanach closed his eyes, trying to think. Isarn was inarguably mad. Was this more rambling? Some said Isarn’s descent into madness began when Stormblade was stolen. Stanach knew his master had begun that long descent when he saw the unquenchable heart of fire in Stormblade’s steel and knew that he’d created a Kingsword.

Aye, but not for a high king. For a king regent. Even Hornfel himself did not look to claim more than a regency. The old swordcrafter was confused and wandering in the murky hazes of madness and death. He could not know what he was saying.

“Master Isarn,” Stanach said, very gently.

Isarn made no response. Stanach looked at him closely, his heart racing. The old swordcrafter’s eyes were no longer wide and staring, but hooded and still. “Master?”

“I made the sword,” Isarn whispered, “for a thane. Realgar will use it to kill a high king.” His hand, gnarled with age, pitted with forge scars, crabbed across his chest. When his fingers touched Stanach’s they were dry as ancient parchment. “You brought the sword home. Find it again. Find it.”

A knot of pain, like tears, choked any reply Stanach would have made. He closed his fingers around the old dwarf’s hand. “Please, Isarn, no. Don’t charge me with …” His words died in a whisper and a sigh. Isarn Hammerfell was dead.

Slim, shaking fingers touched his shoulder. Stunned by the death of his kinsman and friend, Stanach turned blindly.

Kelida dropped to her knees beside him.

Wavering in the torchlight, a black shadow cut across the girl and the corpse. Stanach looked up to see Hauk standing behind Kelida. His eyes, feral once, were tamer. But they were still haunted. Images of torment lived in them.

The dwarf made to rise, then dropped back to his knees. He was too tired, it seemed, for even this. How was he going to bear the terrible weight of Stormblade?

Kelida reached to take his hand. “Let me help you.”

Stanach moved to accept her help. Before she could take his hand, Hauk’s came between them.

His was a large hand, fingers hard and scarred with the marks of sword and dagger. When he pulled Stanach to his feet, he did not, as the dwarf expected, immediately free his hand. Instead he closed his fingers around it in a warrior’s long clasp of companionship.

Stanach said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“I heard what the old dwarf told you,” Hauk said. “I don’t know anymore whether this sword, this Stormblade, is mine. I think it’s not.

“But I’ve been a part of this. Realgar—” Hauk’s voice dropped low.

“Realgar has done things to me—he showed me Tyorl’s death, and he made me believe that I had killed him. I know—I know you say he’s alive, but the memory of—murder is still in me. He has made me die, and he has brought me back.” He kept his eyes on Stanach’s now because he didn’t want Kelida to see the naked emptiness in them. “And he made me die again. Stanach, Realgar owes me something.”

Stanach looked down at his broken-fingered hand. He closed his eyes and saw crows in a hard blue sky, heard wind mourning around a cairn in the cold hills. Isarn’s last words had been madness, ghost-dreams of myth and legend. The reality was that friends and kin had died for Realgar’s poisonous longing for power. More would die, still.

Stanach watched with a chill of fear as Hauk handed his dagger to Kelida. “You, too? No, Kelida.”

“Yes.” She shivered, looking around the cold cavern. “I won’t stay here. I go where Hauk goes. Where you go.” She stroked the hilt of the dagger with her thumb. “You were the one who insisted that I learn how to use this. I think our friend Lavim was a good teacher. I still don’t know if I can kill with it, Stanach. I do think I can defend myself. I’m going with you.”

She touched his bandaged hand gently. “People have allowed themselves to be harmed for my sake. I have to go with you.”

The dwarf looked at Hauk and saw some of the emptiness vanish from his eyes. He saw fear for her there, too. In that moment, a silent understanding passed between the ranger and the dwarf. Come with them she would, but both agreed that she would not come to harm.

Bitter wind cut across the narrow, crumbling ledge. Screaming like the abandoned souls of the damned, the wind dragged behind it the black smoke of the burning Plains of Death.

Like funeral shrouds.

From this ledge, one thousand feet above the pine forested valley, Hornfel saw the fire as a bolt of golden silk unfolding like a banner, rippling and shifting to the vagaries of a capricious breeze. As Hornfel watched, the fire left the Plains. Leaping with uncanny speed, it gained the thickly forested slopes of the mountain. Like a rampaging army of conquerors, it made waste of everything in its way. The wind shifted suddenly, as it will in the steep corridors of the mountain peaks, howling now from the northwest. The wall of flames followed the wind’s trail, galloping madly through the valley below Thorbardin.

Gneiss’s message had been to meet at the gatehouse. Hornfel had waited, speaking with the captain of the guard for a moment or two before the scent and sound of fire rampaging in the valley drew him out onto the ledge.

Now, Hornfel stood alone on the ledge, or as alone as his guard would permit. Behind him, in the wide empty place where once the Northgate had warded this entrance to Thorbardin, four strong dwarf warriors stood, two facing the Hylar thane, two watching several yards farther into the gatehouse. The eyes of those two were not on Hornfel, but on the inner courtyard and the shadows of the rubble-strewn, ruined gatehouse itself. Their hands hovered near the hilts of their swords. None of them forgot for an instant that Gneiss had given them charge of Hornfel’s safety.

Northgate was, after all, an enemy holding. Though some of the gate was occupied now by Theiwar, most of the great hall leading from the gatehouse to the North Hall of Justice was thick with the dust of centuries. The hall itself, a sometimes active guard station, was clean and repaired to the point of easy use. But the structures of the temple and residences beyond seemed unchanged from the time of the Dwarfgate Wars. The marks of ancient battle scarred the stone walls and floors. In some places, huge black stains, the shadows of old blood, fouled the cracked, shattered tiles of the floor.

Until the Theiwar had laid claim to the area, none but the skeletons of the dead, dwarf and human, occupied Northgate. Some still did as falls and scatters of bones and ancient armor in black, lightless corners. The Theiwar, that strange derro race of dwarves, took perverse pleasure in sharing quarters with the dead.

A song of steel ringing on mail, booted feet on stone, sounded in the corridor between the gatehouse and the North Hall of Justice. The Guard of Watch was changing.

Deep voices murmured questions. Hornfel imagined that the new watch was inquiring as to the state of the guyll fyr . Hornfel sensed a palpable unease in the voices of the retiring guards.

Hornfel stepped back from the ledge. Impregnable Thorbardin was not at immediate risk from this fire, but the destruction of the marshes and woodlands would exact a toll on the mountain kingdom’s food supply in the spring.

We won’t be hungry, he thought bitterly, but we will be lean. What will convince the Council of Thanes that we should not only continue to aid the refugees sheltering here now, but open our doors to others?

Hornfel sighed.

Like ghosts, thoughts of the anguished days of the Dwarf gate Wars haunted Hornfel. Then, the Cataclysm had driven the dwarves into the mountain kingdom. The devastation of that time had reshaped the face of all Krynn.