Nancy Berberick - Stormblade

“On the mountain!” The old kender scrambled down from Tyorl’s back, fumbling for his dagger and calling for the rangers. “Finn! Kem! Dragon on the mountain!”

Tyorl snatched Lavim’s arm and his attention. “Where on the mountain? Where, Lavim?”

Lavim shuddered and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, caught between Tyorl’s questions and Piper’s answers. He did his best to sort them out, but his head seemed to be filled with the confusing echoes of Piper’s voice, his own thoughts, and the demands of Tyorl and the rangers. Talking to everyone at once and feeling like he was talking to himself, Lavim tried to answer. “Where? Tyorl, on the peaks … high … behind the crest of the mountain … What? What are you saying? All right! All right!”

As from a great distance, the kender heard Finn mutter something and Tyorl answer. Lavim clutched the elf’s arm, his heart pounding hard now, his breath coming in ragged gasps. “He’s going to kill the Hylar’s thane! That fellow that Stanach was always talking about!”

“Who, Lavim? What are you talking about, and where is the dragon?”

Lavim shook his head hard to clear it. “The dragon is on the mountain, behind the peaks over Thorbardin. There’s a mage, a dwarf, and he’s going to kill Stanach’s thane. He’s thinking about it now, Tyorl. He’s going to do it soon—and—and there’s going to be a battle or something.

“Stanach’s there! And Kelida!”

Stunned, Tyorl could do nothing but stare. It was Finn who spoke.

“Kender, what are you talking about? Stanach and the girl are dead.”

Lavim turned to Tyorl, tugging hard on the elf’s arm.

“Tyorl, Piper knows what he’s talking about. It’s happening now—what Stanach’s been afraid about all along!”

Tyorl did not doubt the veracity of Piper’s report. He looked around them, along the smoky channel of the defile and at the shadows gathering high on the mountainside. The shadows of a dragon and war. He sensed Finn’s disbelief and confusion.

“Lavim,” he said, slowly, carefully, “calm down now. Ask Piper if it is really happening now.”

No, but soon.

Lavim shook his head. “Not now—but soon. Tyorl, we have to get—”

“Where are Stanach and Kelida?”

“In Thorbardin. They’re there, Tyorl, with—” Lavim cocked his head, listening to Piper’s soundless words. His eyes went wide with amazement.

“They’re with Hauk. He’s all right! Piper says we’re real close to Northgate now. Just another quarter mile down the defile. We could get there in time, Tyorl, maybe.”

Finn snorted. “Aye, maybe. Maybe we’ll miss our way. Tyorl, the smoke is so thick now we can’t see a yard ahead. Chances are very good that we’ll miss the gate completely.”

Lavim answered quickly. “Oh, no, we won’t miss it. The defile becomes a ledge right in front of the gate, and it’s real narrow. Five feet wide, maybe. We couldn’t miss that.”

Finn stared at the kender as though not certain if he was joking. “We’d better not, eh? It’s a thousand feet to the valley below. What does your ghost say about that?”

Nothing could have been more innocent than Lavim’s expression then.

“He says you’d better not miss your footing. He says you probably won’t want to be caught outside the gate in case the dragon notices us, so we’d better get going.”

Rage coursed through Realgar the way the guyll fyr tore through the valley below Northgate. His attack on Hornfel had failed! Like a bloody haze across his vision, fury clouded everything. He heard nothing but his own raving thoughts and was only dimly aware of the groans of the dying, his own guard and the Daewar who had defended Hornfel, as distant whispers. Then, cold and black, Darknight’s mental voice growled from the heights above Thorbardin. Realgar heard that bad-tempered growling as a deep rumbling in his mind and grabbed it. The Theiwar slipped, staggering, into the language of the mind.

Are you ready!

Aye, ready. I am hungry and I smell blood.

Realgar smiled then. Patience, my friend. There will be food enough for you soon. You’ll have your pick of the Hylar’s kin.

Darknight subsided. Thin wisps of its longing drifted through Realgar’s soul and twined with his own.

Realgar ran his thumb along Stormblade’s guards, feeling the blade’s red heart of fire as a wild song in his own heart. The great hall was still now and, but for the groans of the dying and wounded, quiet. New blood stained the cracked and shattered paving stones of the court, spattered the walls and broken columns. He counted twenty dead from among his own guard, thirty from Hornfel’s defenders.

He had not killed all of them. Realgar cursed bitterly. He should have killed the two humans, should have made certain that Hammerfell’s apprentice was well and truly dead!

Aye, Hammerfell’s apprentice, he was the one who had fouled the coup. Without his aid, the two humans would still be in the Deep Warrens, dark-blind and secure until Realgar could finish his business with them. Without that damned stripling of an apprentice to interfere, Hornfel would not now be holed up in the gatehouse.

Realgar closed his eyes and breathed deeply, seeking a calm place within where he might think. Slowly it came, and with it came an ordering of his thoughts. With order came a solution.

Though twenty of his own men were dead, there still remained six, uninjured and, by the look of them, eager to avenge the deaths of their comrades. Though they were not enough to rush and take the gatehouse, there was an easy way to increase their ranks. It would take time, but not so much that Hornfel and his three defenders would become so emboldened as to try for a renewed engagement in the hall. Soon, he thought, soon he’ll tire of his bolt hole. There is no way out of it. The whole of the two Guards of Watch are dead, his own guards are dead. Now, there is no way for him to send for aid. Realgar laughed aloud. In short order, anyone who might think to aid Hornfel would be busy fleeing the fire of revolution.

Secure in the knowledge that the thousand-foot drop to the valley below the Northgate wall would keep Hornfel tightly trapped—and if it did not, Darknight would!—Realgar called a guard to him.

“Five squads, I think, to the Northgate. Move them fast.”

The guard ran, ducking back into the North Hall of Justice and into secret passages beneath the ruined temple. There were Theiwar ready to attack the Klar city. Among them he would find the derro to fill his thane’s need.

Realgar stroked the flat of Stormblade’s bloody blade.

Hornfel listened to the final cries of the dying. Here in the gatehouse, he could not tell whether those cries were made by friends or enemies. Muscles quivering with the exhaustion of a battle’s aftermath, his lungs thick with the encroaching smoke of the guyll fyr , Hornfel leaned against the wide shaft of the huge, ancient gate mechanism. It hardly mattered whose cries they were. They were the cries of the dying. Treacherous Theiwar or Gneiss’ faithful warriors, they were dwarves.

He shuddered. Whether or not they chose to acknowledge the fact, they were kin. And kin had raised steel against kin, as they had in the Dwarfgate Wars.

Then, he thought bitterly, they were fighting for the right to eat. Today, we fight for the right to rule.

The sword Realgar wielded was the Kingsword. Hornfel had never seen Stormblade before today. Fire-hearted steel and blazing sapphires, Stormblade had cut through Gneiss’s warriors like a scythe through wheat. The Kingsword had come back to Thorbardin.

Behind him he heard the restless pacing of the hungry-eyed human warrior they called Hauk. He was well named. In battle he struck with a raptor’s instinct to kill and kill fast, a hawk’s wildfire in his eyes. The girl, possessed of a starveling’s thin, pale face, they called Kelida. Hornfel wondered who had named her and if they had known that if they softened the d in her name she would be known as Wanderer in dwarven speech. Kelye dtha : the one who wanders.