Nancy Berberick - Stormblade

The years after the Cataclysm were plague years, and the Neidar, the hill dwarves who before the Cataclysm had left Thorbardin for the Outlands, for what they called the freedom of the hills, wanted to come back to the mountain kingdom. They were hungry and they could raise no crop, hunt no game, in lands burned sere by endless drought and fouled by plague.

They needed allies, the Neidar, and they found an ally in the great mage Fistandantilus who, at the head of an army of ragged humans, laid siege first to Pax Tharkas, and then to Thorbardin. The humans believed there was treasure stored in the mountains.

Duncan knew, and so did the hill dwarves, that there was indeed treasure: there was food. But not enough to feed even those who lived in Thorbardin.

High King Duncan knew that his duty lay with his people. He and Kharas, his friend and champion, laid plans for what history would come to call the Dwarfgate Wars.

Kin made war against kin as Duncan, the last king of the dwarves made his choice to feed and shelter what relatively few people he was able to within ancient Thorbardin.

War again raged in Krynn. Hornfel knew, however, that, though war’s brutalities were the same from century to century, this war was not the same as the one Duncan had fought.

For one thing, he thought, staring out into the fire-threatened valley, we are not fighting this one. My people have chosen to hold themselves comfortably apart from this war. For another, the refugees we shelter here are not of the dwarven race.

No, they are humans. Is that really a difference? One could not, in any seriousness, call those over-tall and truculent, short-lived creatures kin. Yet, in the warlands, humans and elves had allied, if uneasily, against the dragonarmies. An old proverb had it that the wolf at the door will make brothers of strangers.

“And so is another old saying still good, King Duncan,” he whispered to a dwarf three hundred years dead. “ Who does not learn from his fathers will learn from no one .”

The wolf is howling for your children’s blood, Duncan. I can smell his breath in the guyll fyr ’s smoke. We have to turn these strangers into brothers now.

So thinking, he turned away from the ledge, from the fire, and passed between his two guards and into the gatehouse. He didn’t know where Gneiss was, and he couldn’t wait for him any longer. He would leave word with the captain of the guard that he been here and—

An indrawn breath whispered, and Hornfel looked around. Realgar leaned against the shaft of the gate mechanism, arms folded and at ease. He wore a dark, heavy cloak against the biting wind. The cloak did not hide the shape of a sword worn, as always, at his hip. His narrow-pupiled, black eyes glittered.

“It’s like an army,” Realgar said, “and it comes closer.”

Fire without and fire within! Hornfel remembered Dhegan shadowing him and Gneiss on the dark bridge, and he looked to his guards. Their eyes cold, Gneiss’s Daewar closed ranks.

“Like an army, aye,” Hornfel said. He resisted the urge to drop his hand to the dagger at his hip. “I’m going to call a council. Plans will have to be made; it’ll be a lean winter.”

Realgar shrugged. “As you say.” He stepped aside to let Hornfel pass and waited, too, until the four guards fell in behind their charge. As he made his way through the muttering guards, Realgar amused himself with thinking about his plans for murder and revolution. His army of bloody-handed Theiwar were ready to begin the fight for the cities, and Stormblade was heavy in the scabbard beneath his cloak. The Kingsword seemed to breathe with restless, hungry power.

He closed the distance between himself and Hornfel’s guards. The chill, damp corridor opening on the bridge across Anvil’s Echo was not absolutely lightless, though to Kelida it seemed so after the warm, comfortably lighted streets of Thorbardin. It took long moments for her eyes to adjust to the faint gray light leaking into the stone hallway. This was not light from outside the mountain, but a whisper of the stronger illumination from the glittering shafts of crystal that guided and enhanced the sun’s light in the city proper.

When her eyes adjusted, she shrank back against Hauk, who stood close behind her. The bridge spanned a cavern so high and so deep that Kelida, who could see neither roof nor floor, could not imagine boundaries. Low stone rails lined each side of the wide bridge. As though they stood sentinel, small carvings of dwarves held up the rail with strong, stone arms.

“Stanach,” she whispered. The whisper echoed endlessly around the cavern. Kelida swallowed hard and touched Stanach’s shoulder to get his attention.

His hand on the sword he’d picked up in the city, Stanach turned and Kelida gasped. As he had said in the caverns far below the cities, his eyes were only wide, black pupils now, empty and ghostlike. A chill swept down her back.

The dwarf grinned, a comical mock leer. “Aye, didn’t I tell you? Frightening to see if you’re not accustomed to the look of them, eh?” With his bandaged right hand, he patted her arm. “It’s me, little sister, only me.”

… me, only me … me … me …

Kelida shuddered, then felt Hauk’s hand tentative but warm on her shoulder. His words chased themselves around the cavern, too, when he spoke.

“I don’t like this hole, Stanach. What’s Hornfel doing here? We should have gone to your Council of Thanes for aid.”

It would have been Stanach’s first choice, but the Theiwar guard they’d overpowered in a cold dark corridor near the dragon’s lair had responded to their questions about Realgar and his plans with only a hard laugh and a boast he seemed happy to make: “Hornfel’s dead on Northgate now!”

By grim, silent agreement, Stanach drew Kelida on ahead with him as Hauk lingered with the Theiwar guard just another moment before catching up to them. He’d left the Theiwar dead in the shadows of the corridor.

The dead guard’s gleeful boast had filled Stanach with anger and despair that hadn’t abated until the three reached the upper levels of the city. It was Hauk who pointed out that what the guard had said could not be true. Or not yet.

“Look,” he’d said, gesturing toward a merchants’ square, a tavern, a park. “These people are nervous, Stanach, but they aren’t behaving like people who have heard that one of their leaders is dead.”

Stanach agreed and felt the easing that hope brings. They might not be too late to help Hornfel. The mood of Thorbardin was one of waiting and simmering fear.

Thorbardin scented a storm and knew the lightning would strike very soon, though it didn’t know which quarter of the sky would bring it. Stanach, roused from his thoughts, gestured to the darkness around them. “This is a Theiwar holding and even the adventurous don’t come here. The bridge should be safe enough.”

Followed by the echoes of their footsteps, echoes like stealthy ghosts, the three set out across the bridge.

Kelida started out counting steps as a way to keep her mind off the seemingly endless drop below. Though the bridge was wide enough for them to walk abreast, it seemed all too narrow for Kelida’s comfort. The whispers of their footsteps grew thicker, as though they were rebounding from closer walls. Kelida sighed, the sound like the wind wandering through canyons. The bridge over Anvil’s Echo was behind them. Stanach glanced over his shoulder and then wordlessly waved them forward.

His sense of direction below ground, as keen as an elf’s in a forest, kept them heading unfailingly north. They passed walls black with the marks of fire and white with the scars of battle. In dark corners lay the skeletal remains of warriors three hundred years dead. The leather and fabric of their clothing had long since rotted, but the brittle bones of hands still clutched shattered swords. Rusted mail and pierced armor still hung about what had once been bodies.