The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

by C. L. Werner

  ‘Would that the circumstances were more amenable,’ Thoriol said. ‘But the king would hardly let me stray far from him if they were.’

  Lord Athinol rose to his feet, a trace of alarm in his face. ‘The king suspects you?’

  ‘Far from it,’ Caradryel assured him. ‘If Caledor had any misgivings about his nephew he would send him as far from him as he could.’

  Thoriol withdrew from his mother’s arms, looking to her and then to Athinol. ‘I wonder at that,’ he said. ‘It is certain Hulviar has his suspicions and he certainly has the king’s ear. Whatever influence I might have on my uncle, Hulviar’s is greater.’

  Athinol removed a fold of parchment from the cuff of his tunic, tapping it against his forearm. ‘Was it Hulviar then who suggested dismissing Prince Naeir from command of the armies in Elthin Arvan? Liandra tells me that Lord Draikyll has arrived in Tor Alessi to replace him.’

  ‘It could well be,’ Thoriol said after a moment’s thought. ‘I know the king was unhappy with Naeir and considering replacing him. I didn’t know he’d chosen Draikyll.’

  Caradryel shook his head and started to pace before the fire. ‘That’s bad,’ he said. ‘It means Hulviar has planted enough doubt in the king’s mind that he’s starting to keep secrets from you. He was open enough about the other generals he appointed – at least with you.’

  ‘Is Draikyll’s appointment so very different?’ Thoriol wondered.

  ‘It is to those of us who still think we can extricate ourselves from this useless war,’ Yethanial told him. ‘Draikyll is a noble of considerable influence and resources. He is also aware that both his fortune and his influence are waning. The wealth of Elthin Arvan would appeal to him, as would the prestige of being the general who drove the dawi back into their holes.’

  Colour rushed into Athinol’s face. ‘There are enough people who still owe him favours that Draikyll can draw considerable troops and material away from Ulthuan to support any adventure he plans in Elthin Arvan.’ He smacked his fist on the side of an ebony writing stand. ‘Just when our campaigns against the druchii have a real hope of victory, this has to happen!’

  Thoriol looked from Yethanial to Athinol and then to Caradryel. ‘I thought you were against war.’

  ‘We war against the dwarfs by choice,’ Athinol said. ‘The war with the druchii is a matter of survival.’

  Thoriol shook his head. ‘I don’t agree. Perhaps I’m the wrong one to be acting as your spy. I believe the king is right. We can’t allow ourselves to be driven from the colonies.’

  ‘The real war is with the druchii,’ Athinol declared.

  The prince matched Athinol’s hostile glare. ‘The war is with the creatures that murdered my father.’

  ‘Then you’ve sided with the king?’ Yethanial asked. ‘You’ve taken his side?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thoriol confessed. ‘But I have to wonder. If we abandon the lands my father died to defend, then what did he give his life for?’

  Ranuld Silverthumb could feel the weight of ages pressing down upon him. The venerable runelord felt as though every minute and every hour was like some parasitic thing, fattening itself upon what vitality remained in him, what magic still coursed through his veins. The old magic, the magic that had carved the first holds from the roots of the mountain. The magic that had brought the great runes to the dawi. The magic that had forged the mighty Anvils of Doom.

  The magic that had drawn the gronti-duraz from the dark beneath the world.

  Generations had passed since the gronti-duraz last stirred. The great stone giants were the greatest accomplishment of the ancients, the pinnacle of the runesmith’s art. Their awakening was a secret known to only a few now. Like so much of the old ways and the old magic, there were none among the lesser generations wise enough to be entrusted with such knowledge.

  The runelord sank back in his stone chair, feeling the comforting chill of the naked granite through his robes. So few among the dawi really understood. They waged their wars and pursued their grudges, chased after gold and glory, all the time oblivious to the changes all around them. They were blind to the poison sifting through the very air, seeping down into the very rock, sinking into their own bones. The light was fading, but none noticed because there was still enough to let them see.

  The younger runesmiths and even some of the elders of the Burudin chose to ignore it. They allowed themselves to be drawn into comparatively petty feuds and vengeance. They let the runes be twisted and warped, put to uses that only a generation before would have been unthinkable. They turned a blind eye to the excesses of the engineers’ guild and their reckless experimentation. The destruction of Kazad Mingol should have been enough to stir them from their indifference.

  Ranuld sighed. Even the kings were deaf. Claiming to venerate their runelords, they instead denied them their true purpose. They’d defied his every attempt to gather the Burudin, to work the great magic that alone could lead the dawi back to the old ways and warn them away from the doom before them.

  The runelord cast his gaze across the darkened hall. He let his eyes linger on the silver war shield. Once it had allowed him to commune with his fellow runelords. Perhaps it might still, if he were to focus his dwindling powers upon it and draw out the enchantments trapped within its runes. But would anyone respond? And if they did, would there be any purpose to it?

  He no longer believed there was any use trying to defy the will of the kings. One look at the shadowy hall convinced him of that. The pedestals where the Anvils of Doom rested were half empty. Three of the six had been carried off to war. Not for a single battle, but dragged along through the entire campaign, hauled about like a bolt thrower or rock lobber, like a mere weapon to be used and forgotten.

  Ranuld lifted his gaze, looking past the remaining Anvils and to the great hunched shapes that crouched in the darkness. The gronti-duraz, the mighty golems fashioned at the dawn of dwarf kind. The first was said to have been shaped by Thungi himself, ancestor god of the runesmiths. First or last, they were marvels of magic – manifestations of what the dawi had once been capable of.

  The runelord looked at the three Anvils, wondering if he dared do what he had in mind with only three of them to magnify his power. Briefly he considered summoning his apprentice Morek. The young runesmith had proven himself a most capable student. Ranuld coughed as a chuckle caught in his throat. What he had in mind was dangerous enough alone. To have some young wazzock mucking things up would only make things that much worse.

  Besides, he had grown somewhat fond of Morek. He didn’t really want to watch him die.

  Ranuld squirmed back in his chair, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible. He raised his runestaff, pointing it towards the Anvils. One last time he wondered if he should try what he wanted to do. Wondered if he shouldn’t just allow himself and the old magic to fade away.

  No, that was never the dawi way. A dwarf was too stubborn to quit, no matter the odds against him. It was the great strength of their kind and also their great weakness.

  Letting the runes take shape in his mind, Ranuld let the magic flow through him, flow down the length of his runestaff and into the Anvils. One by one, the artefacts began to glow with power, fingers of golden lightning crackling and dancing across them. Ranuld could feel his blood boiling inside his veins as he continued to feed energy into the Anvils. More and still more, as much as he could summon. As much as he could command.

  Blood dripped from his nose, from his ears and mouth, sizz­ling as it splashed against the cold granite of his chair. Still Ranuld kept channelling the power through him and into the Anvils. More, just a little more! He could smell his beard begin to cook, could feel his skin crackling and sloughing away.

  Through the pain of his exertions, Ranuld glanced at those great stone giants crouching in the darkness, those manifestations of the old magic and the old ways. He focused his
thoughts upon the great rune, the secret too enormous to ever be written down. The rune that would bring life to unmoving stone. The rune that would make the gronti-duraz walk.

  The agony was incredible now. Ranuld heard his teeth burst, one after another, felt their fragments trickling down his beard. They sounded like pebbles as they struck the floor.

  His gaze strayed from the golems, intending to see what had become of his teeth. Instead his eyes fixated upon the hand gripping his runestaff. The skin had completely burned away, but what lay exposed beneath was neither flesh nor bone, but blackened stone.

  Ranuld slumped back in his chair, breaking the connection between himself and the Anvils. It needed more strength than he possessed to rouse the gronti-duraz, more power than a single runelord could summon.

  He watched as the power he’d drawn into them slowly faded from the Anvils. When it was gone, Ranuld tried to stir from his chair. The effort was too great. His legs felt as though they were lead. He looked down at his hand, watching as the petrifaction he’d observed continued to spread.

  There were a few secrets he would have liked to pass on to Morek in what time was left to him. Not the great rune that would waken the gronti-duraz, but useful things. It seemed his apprentice would have to learn them for himself, if he ever could.

  Ranuld Silverthumb, High Runelord of Karaz-a-Karak, swung his head around, fixing his eyes on the slumbering stone giants. He wanted them to be the last thing he saw before his body was completely petrified and he joined them in their stony slumbers.

  Heglan Copperfist looked up from his labours, staring at the stuffed birds that filled his hidden workshop. Few dwarfs had ever been here. His brother Nadri, a handful of others. He knew Guildmaster Strombak suspected the existence of such a workshop, but the master engineer had never pressed Heglan for the details. It afforded Strombak the ability to deny any involvement in Heglan’s continuing experiments.

  The whole of the engineers’ guild seemed divided over the matter of the skryzan-harbark even now. There was one faction that urged Heglan to build more of the airships, perhaps smaller ones that wouldn’t cause as much destruction if they crashed. The other faction roared for him to be given the short trouser ritual and cast out of the guild. Heglan suspected that King Brynnoth’s continued confidence in the airships was what made Strombak so noncommittal. After the conflagration that engulfed Kazad Mingol, he was certain there was nothing more the Guildmaster wanted than to cleanse his hands of the whole affair.

  Heglan appreciated that sentiment more than Strombak could ever guess. After the calamitous finish to the battle, he’d ordered the skryzan-harbark back to Barak Varr. Carefully and deliberately he’d had each one disassembled. Piece by piece they had been brought down into his workshops to be examined, studied and catalogued. In the shock of the conflagration, there had been none to gainsay his decision. It was only later that more calculating voices had risen to point out that while the destruction had been unfortunate, Kazad Mingol would have been destroyed by the dragons in any event. More to the point, the airships had killed one dragon and left a second mortally wounded at a cost that was, after all, quite small compared to the losses inflicted on the dawi armies during the Fourth Siege of Tor Alessi.

  Maybe so, but the dwarfs who had been lost had been his dwarfs, the crews that he himself had chosen. That made Heglan feel directly responsible for what had happened to them. Caught in such a ghastly explosion, none of them had any chance at all.

  It shouldn’t have happened. Heglan had tried and tried to replicate the effects with the materials from the surviving airships. Canvas, wood, gas – nothing would recreate even a fraction of what he’d witnessed above Kazad Mingol.

  There was something missing. Some factor he had been unable to work into his calculations. Until he found it, until he discovered what it was and found a way to negate it, he couldn’t allow the skryzan-harbark to return to the sky. The danger was simply too great.

  Heglan rose from his work table and marched over to the great stone shelves that held the materials he’d been experimenting on. Not for the first time his attention was drawn to the jar of Tharzharr he’d removed from Nadri’s Retribution’s arsenal.

  It was strange stuff to be certain, the discovery of Thane Drogor of Kazak Zorn. The incendiary burned more violently than anything Heglan had ever encountered, short of molten lava. But it didn’t merely burn what it touched; it devoured it, gnawing away with its fiery teeth until there was nothing left.

  Heglan frowned as he looked at the jar. The impressions of tiny paws were distinct in the dust coating it. Glancing down he saw a rat lying on the floor just behind the shelf, as stiff and lifeless as a board. The sight of the tiny carcass made him reflect on the ingredients that went into Drogor’s incendiary.

  ‘Foulstone,’ Heglan muttered to himself. It was an ugly green-black rock found in the deeper mines. Normally dwarfs despised the stuff. It had a corrosive effect on any ores near it. Discovering a vein of foulstone meant that any gold or silver in the area would be degraded, perhaps even completely worthless. The stuff was also toxic. Breathing in foulstone dust produced a condition called weeping lung where the insides of the lung were burned and began to fill with pus. It meant a slow and loathsome death for any dwarf.

  When foulstone had been rendered down into granules to make Tharzharr, those who handled it had been careful to keep their faces covered. Even then, several had developed wracking coughs and dripping noses.

  Another curious property of the stuff was the unnatural way in which it attracted rats. Any shaft with a profusion of rats scurrying around it almost invariably held a vein of foulstone.

  Still, for all its nasty properties, every test Heglan had made with the stuff failed to produce the same catastrophic reaction he had witnessed.

  ‘Maybe Drogor could have explained,’ the engineer said as he carried the jar back to his workbench. That, of course, was impossible. Drogor had been aboard the great King Snorri when it caught fire and exploded. There had been no survivors, not even enough to bring back to Barak Varr and inter in the vaults.

  ‘What makes you think their bones would rest any easier in your musty old vaults?’

  Heglan leapt up in surprise as the voice echoed through his workshop. He was alone. He knew he was alone. No one could come in here unobserved. The secret door in his public workshop was something only he knew how to operate. Even if someone had discovered the mechanism, however lost in his experiments he was, he would have noticed the wall rotating to admit an intruder.

  ‘I came by my own method.’

  The engineer spun back around, staring at the displays of his birds. A shadow moved out from among them. As it stepped into the light, Heglan blinked in disbelief. It was impossible! He had to be suffering from some kind of delusion, some fantasy brought on by overwork.

  ‘No. I’m quite real,’ Drogor said. An amused smile formed on his face. ‘Though perhaps “real” is a bit too limited a concept. Ideas like that can be rather limiting.’

  Heglan slumped against the workbench, spilling the jar of Tharzharr across the surface. ‘You… you’re…’

  Drogor slowly walked towards the horrified engineer. ‘Dead? There we go again with such finite, constrained ideas. You’d be much better off without them.’

  ‘Keep back,’ Heglan warned. He drew a heavy iron spanner from his belt, brandishing it as though it were a battleaxe.

  The other dwarf paused, his smile growing even wider. ‘Do you really think that can stop me if I survived the explosion of my airship?’ Drogor laughed. ‘Do try to be reasonable. Believe it or not, I came here to help you.’

  Heglan rushed the intruder, bringing the spanner crashing against his skull. He could feel the bone splinter beneath the iron, could see the blood and brains rushing from Drogor’s scalp.

  Drogor’s fist slammed into Heglan’s chest, throwing the engineer acr
oss the room. He slammed into the shelves holding the materials from the airships. He felt one of the shelves crack as he slammed against it. He also felt his spine snap.

  ‘That was rude,’ Drogor warned the paralysed engineer. ‘I almost think you aren’t happy to see me.’ He paced across the workshop, finally settling at the workbench where Heglan had been making his studies.

  ‘Your skryzan-harbark are quite clever,’ Drogor declared. ‘You know, they really could have won the war for your people. The elves could never have roused enough dragons to overcome them. After all, it takes only a year for one of your workshops to turn out a new airship. Do you have any idea how long it takes to rear a dragon from its egg?’

  Heglan tried to speak, but all that came from his mouth was a bubble of blood. Drogor frowned at his distress, shaking his head sadly.

  ‘Your kind could still be masters of the air, despite themselves,’ Drogor said. ‘They could force the elves from your lands and bring a new age of peace.’ The smile now stretched across the entirety of his face, more like something ophidian than dwarfish. ‘But who wants to see an end to war? Peace is so boring. Yet that’s what they want, those who think they’ll make more airships without you.’

  Drogor leaned across the workbench, his grin becoming still more predatory as he gazed on Heglan. The engineer was doing his best to reach a jar of blasting powder on one of the nearby shelves. The sight brought another laugh from Drogor.

  ‘No need for that, I assure you,’ Drogor said. ‘No need at all. You see, I came here to show you what happened to your ships. It was the least I could do after all the amusement you’ve afforded me. I shall truly miss your kind when they’re all gone.’ Drogor ran his finger through the spilled Tharzharr. ‘This is the key, you know. This and the gas you used to lift your ships. But they needed something else. A catalyst. And that, I fear, was something you simply couldn’t find on your own.’