“I’m ready right now!” he said defiantly as though she had challenged him.
“You don’t have to do anything but look foolish and be ready to cast a spell!” Sadie snapped in reply. She rummaged in a trunk and pulled out a large woolen cloak that she wrapped around her shoulders. A smaller kerchief covered her hair, and when she pulled the hood of the robe up, her face was deeply cast in shadow. She murmured a spell, and her nose grew long and hooked, while her chin sprouted a few bristling hairs.
“Can you tell that it’s me?” she asked a tad vainly.
“I wouldn’t know you if I was standing right in front of you,” Peat replied, blinking. He was certain that even someone with decent vision would not recognize her.
“Good. Now get out of here. Remember, we can’t be seen together.”
“I remember,” Peat retorted, though in fact he had momentarily forgotten that crucial part of the plan. He took hold of his cane and quickly left the store, tapping up the street toward the great market square at the city’s center. The place, as usual, was crowded but quiet—the king didn’t tolerate rowdiness or unruliness among his subjects. Once there, he mingled with a crowd of old dwarves at an ale wagon, paying a copper coin and helping himself to a glass in order to blend in. He kept his eye on the street, and soon Sadie—looking a hundred years older, more stooped and withered even than her real self—emerged and made her way through the aisle between the stalls in the big plaza. Even with his blurry vision, Peat could follow the disguised crone’s progress.
Finishing his beer, he was about to order another when he recognized Abercrumb pushing his way up to the cart. Ducking his head and turning away, Peat regretfully decided he had better not have a second ale. Instead, he followed quickly behind Sadie as she moved on.
The market square of Norbardin was crowded, a teeming maze of aisles, stalls, plazas, and shops. But the dwarf citizens moved in small groups, making way for each other with undwarflike politeness and with little conversation or eye contact.
The wide plaza covered a vast area of flat pavement, terraced into several levels, sprawling out for nearly a mile behind the great central gate of the dwarves’ city. Stalls and carts covered much of the space, lined up in orderly ranks, creating roads and alleys between the vendors. The whole place, as with the rest of Thorbardin, lay under a vast, overhanging roof, studded with spearlike stalactites. The only illumination came from the oil lamps burning here and there, each at the expense of one of the merchants so as to better illuminate that seller’s wares and to draw attention to that particular location in the midst of the hundreds of similar booths.
A hubbub of commotion up ahead caught Peat’s attention, and he saw that Sadie had turned toward the noise as well. Still keeping a safe distance from each other, they drew up to the back of a crowd that had gathered around a royal herald. The speaker was flanked by twenty armed dwarves of the palace guard, and the warriors of the escort glowered so fiercely that the citizens averted their eyes as they listened abjectly.
“The Festival of the Forge has become a bacchanalia of depraved behavior and dishonors the dignity of the very god is purports to exalt!” cried the herald. “It is the word of Reorx, relayed through his loyal servant King Stonespringer, that the festival is heretofore canceled. Normal schedules of industry and mercantilism will continue to apply!”
The herald continued his spiel, outlining the harsh punishments promised to any citizens who dared to flaunt the king’s decree. A few of the listeners exchanged furtive glances, but no one dared murmur a single word of objection. After all, the beloved Festival of the Forge was simply joining a long list of celebrations and rituals, long held as tradition but banned because of Stonespringer’s strict interpretation of Reorx’s will. They were almost getting used to it.
In another minute the herald finished and, still guarded by his escort, moved on to exhort another part of the great merchant square.
Even as he had departed out of earshot, no one raised a murmur of protest. Nervously eyeing nearby strangers, the citizens of Norbardin went about their business. Hunched, cloaked dwarves moved everywhere, weaving back and forth on the tangled and winding roadways, clustering around the booths and carts, examining goods and quietly quibbling about prices. Despite the throngs of customers and the hundreds of transactions in progress at any given moment, the bargaining consisted of only whispers, furtive exchanges of steel, and quick, stealthy departures. Rarely did voices rise above the background hum, and when they did, it was invariably a brief argument between two males, each short-tempered dwarf displaying his stubbornness and tenacity in the time-honored fashion. Everywhere the mood was somber, with no one daring to display anything approximating insubordination—or joy.
The females among the dwarves were especially muted, speaking, dressing, and moving so as to avoid drawing the least attention to themselves. They were cloaked from head to foot and always were escorted by a watchful male—by decree of the king, a male who was a relative or some other legal protector. Stern, frowning enforcers—a special and particularly intolerant breed of the monarch’s royal guards—stalked among the crowds, ready to club or arrest any female they discovered to be in breach of the royal decrees.
Peat followed a group of those royal guards, but broke off when he sensed that his wife was ready to act. He stood a dozen paces away, waiting, watching her.
“Did you hear?” whispered Sadie, an anonymous shape distinguished only by the fact that she was unaccompanied, as she glided among the groups of dwarf shoppers. Her masking robe suggested she was slender, even frail, but there was nothing weak about her voice or her words. “The mountain is going to fall!”
“What do you mean?” asked another dwarf maid who overheard, her tone hushed but urgent. Nearby other shoppers ceased their bargaining, shuffling closer to listen, glancing nervously around to make sure there were no enforcers nearby.
“It is in the auguries!” insisted Sadie. “Doom will rain upon the highest of the high. Thorbardin’s mighty will fall, and the meek will perish in the same storm.”
“Horrible!” gasped another listener, clasping a gloved hand to her veiled face. “But are you sure?”
“I tell you, the auguries of the Forgemaster do not lie! Take good care—hold your dear ones close! Bar your doors, and make your offerings to Reorx! The storm will come very soon.”
“How soon?” asked another breathless shopper.
“This might be the day! It will be upon us before the turning of the next interval. Beware!”
“But you cannot know for certain, surely?” protested an elderly matron, her voice rising slightly to penetrate the growing buzz of excitement and alarm. “What auguries are these?”
“The Master of the Forge—Reorx himself!—told me in a dream and confirmed it in the ashes and leaves of my morning rituals,” retorted Sadie, hunching lower, letting the cowl of her hood droop open to reveal her exaggerated features. “I consulted the priests, and they tell me there is no denying the truth! The stones are loose; the mountain is cracking. The fall is coming soon!”
Dwarves are far from the most superstitious of peoples, but something in the conviction of Sadie’s voice gave her listeners pause. By speaking of the mountain falling, Sadie made them think about an earthquake, and there was nothing more terrifying, more deadly, no menace more conceivable to the subterranean-dwelling mountain dwarves. The females looked around nervously, heads bobbing as, one after the other, they seemed to accept the grim truth of the old woman’s statement.
“What’s going on here?” demanded a burly Hylar swordsman, roughly pushing his way through a trio of female shoppers. He wore the red badge of the king’s enforcers, and he glowered with the stern, suspicious expression that seemed to be required, almost part of the uniform, of that elite and hated company.
“What did she say?” he demanded when no one answered immediately.
“It’s a warning from Reorx!” one of the citizens barked. “The mountain will fa
ll!”
“Nonsense!” declared the Hylar. Despite his confident reply, he glanced nervously upward at the shadowed ceiling lofting far over the city’s streets.
“You there!” the guard demanded, addressing Sadie. “Is this true? You are spreading these tales?”
“The mountain will fall!” Sadie crowed fearlessly. She spoke loudly, her harsh voice spearing the darkness, carrying across the square with its brazen and shocking assertion.
“How dare you speak thus? You spread false rumors!” retorted the enforcer, eyes bulging. Certainly he had never encountered such insolence in all his years on the job. His hand went to the hilt of his sword as he glared at the old woman. “You can be whipped for that, you know.”
“I speak the truth!” she said. “The king is a fool if he doesn’t see it!”
The man’s eyes widened. “Now you speak sedition!” he growled. “You’re coming with me!”
Sadie straightened up, looking at him boldly. Something in her expression held him back as he blustered and glared at the old dwarf woman.
He didn’t see Peat gesturing, subtly flicking his finger upward, muttering the single word to a simple spell. But he heard the crack as a piece of stone, one of the slender, spearlike stalactites far overhead, broke free from the looming mantel. Many dwarves in the crowd cried out in alarm, scattering as fast as they could.
The burly enforcer didn’t hear the warning in time. His last breath was an explosive curse as the pointed shaft of stone struck him on the head. The sharp, slender stone smashed the dwarf to the ground and shattered in an explosion of smaller chips.
The king’s man lay dead in a steadily expanding pool of crimson.
By then the panicked shoppers had fled, shouting the alarm, in every direction. Their words—“The mountain is falling! Reorx is angry!”—echoed through the vast space as they stumbled over each other and crashed into carts and stalls, spilling goods and breaking bottles, their fear swelling.
The chaos rippled through the great plaza and into the streets that fanned out through the whole city. Each fleeing dwarf frightened ten more, and those ten spread out to further fan the flames of panic.
The shouts grew wilder:
“Death comes!”
“The fury of Reorx is upon us!”
“Run for your lives!”
It seemed that the terror only grew in strength as it spread, and within another two minutes, the tidal wave of fear was surging unstoppably toward even the far corners of Norbardin.
Gypsum and Facet were teleported to the highest edifice of Jungor Stonespringer’s royal palace, the king’s prayer tower. It was a lofty structure, a spire that rose almost to the ceiling of the great cavern over Norbardin. Emerging from the side of the ruler’s personal quarters, it held a lofty vantage over the royal fortress, the great square, and all of the city center. A rimmed parapet circled the shaft just below the top, while, a mile away, the city’s main gate loomed above the other side of the great market square.
The two black-robed Theiwar arrived unseen, having cast their spells of invisibility before they drank the elixir of teleportation. They could lurk there, unseen, for many hours while they awaited their opportunity. Knowing the Master’s plan, they realized they probably would not even need that much time. They could hear the sounds of excitement and fear from the city streets and understood that events were already in motion.
Facet, however, had provided herself with an additional edge. Back in the laboratory, unknown to her partner, nor even to Willim himself, she had cast a spell that allowed her to detect invisible objects. So though both aspiring assassins were invisible to normal view, Facet remained invisible to her companion, while Gypsum, crouching nearby, revealed himself as a shadowy outline to the female Theiwar.
“Do you hear that?” Gypsum whispered as a rumble of crowd noises billowed from the vast square. Someone shouted commands in a vain attempt to restore order, but from the screams and shouts, it sounded as though a large mob had been seized by panic. Dwarves could be heard scrambling through the square, knocking over tables, jostling and fighting each other as they all tried to flee some unseen disturbance.
“It begins,” Facet replied quietly.
“Be ready to strike at once!” Gypsum ordered haughtily.
“Fear not,” the female wizard replied. “I will be—I am—ready.”
She sat there, still and silent, observing her partner. At the same time, she held the hilt of her knife, gently rubbing her fingers up and down the flat of the silver steel blade.
THREE
A WIZARD’S WAR
Though the metropolis of Norbardin lay some six or seven miles from the lake, several winding tunnels and one wide, smooth roadway connected the city to the shore of the Urkhan Sea. Each of the routes was guarded by a small garrison, but the two flanking tunnels lacked any kind of defensive fortifications. Instead, they terminated simply in stone wharves at the shore of the Urkhan Sea. The landings were manned typically by two dozen guards, but the number had been cut in half because of the king’s decision to reinforce his troops in the inner city. Wharf-watching was boring duty, and the sentries at those outposts spent most of their time sleeping, gambling, and drinking; only rarely did one even bother to look out across the dark lake that never changed appearance.
The wide central road had a sturdier protection against attack from the sea. A vast ramp, constructed of timbers brought into the dwarf nation a century earlier, when commerce between the surface and underground worlds was routine, stood like a wall against the shore of the great body of water. Controlled by winches and levers on the landward side, it presented a solid barrier to anyone trying to reach the city from the water.
It was to that ramp that five of Willim’s apprentices had teleported themselves.
Unlike the two side tunnels, the barrier was not garrisoned by the king’s guards, for it was believed that any attempt to breach the ramp would have to be so loud and destructive that a company of defenders from the main gateway, just a few miles away, would have plenty of time to reach the platform before it could be destroyed.
Quickly the Theiwar magic-users went to work, deploying a mixture of spells, magically silenced hammers, and brute strength. They released the locks holding the ramp in place, activated the winches, and, using the weight of the ramp itself to assist them, lowered the huge barrier until the edge dropped right to the surface of the water.
The five apprentices gathered on that ramp, gazing across the Urkhan Sea, straining for a glimpse of movement. Finally they discerned what they were looking for: white wakes trailing away from the bows of a dozen, a score, a hundred boats, all churning toward the city under the power of expertly coordinated oarsmen.
“Here they come,” said the tallest of the magic-users, nodding in satisfaction. The apprentices stood aside and waited for their master’s army to arrive for the assault against Norbardin.
Three Theiwar magic-users, more of Willim’s apprentices, teleported into the middle of the great gatehouse that, after the Urkhan Ramp, was Norbardin’s second line of defense against the potential rampages of a band of feral Klar or any other threat that advanced against the city from the direction of the Urkhan Sea. The displacement of air caused a slight pop of sound, quiet enough that even those guards who were awake didn’t notice anything. Quickly the young wizards-in-training went to work.
One of them descended the long stairway into the largest storage locker, near the front rank of the ramparts. There he found thousands of arrows and crossbow quarrels, casks of oil, bales of tinder to be ignited and tossed from the walls upon enemies, as well as a host of spare armor and weapons. With instant determination, the dark wizard picked out the oil casks and quickly tumbled some of the bales around the large, greasy kegs. When he judged the pile sufficient, he backed off a dozen steps and pointed his finger.
“Igniti!” he hissed, the single magic word bringing a spark to his fingertip. The glowing ember that had materialized drifted
through the air and came to rest among the pile of dry tinder. A tiny flame erupted immediately, quickly consuming the fuel, growing in brightness and warmth as it embraced the heavy, flammable casks.
By then, the arsonist was out of the storeroom, scrambling back up the stairs as fast as his short legs could carry him. He met one of his Theiwar companions on top of the ramparts just as a trio of royal guards on routine patrol emerged from a nearby doorway. They gaped in momentary astonishment, startled by the presence of the black-robed dwarves who were lurking just a few paces away.
The second apprentice raised a hand. “Slumbris!” was all he said. The spell of sleep went to work immediately; the guards staggered and dropped to their knees. One was carrying a shield, and the first apprentice leaped forward and caught the metal disk before it could clang onto the floor.
By then, the third of their companions, also operating according to Willim’s instructions, had arrived at the lofty arch over the high gate leading into the city. That gate was currently open, but it pivoted on a pair of massive stone hinges, and could be slammed shut with only brief seconds’ notice.
The last of the apprentices glanced at the hinge and saw that the massive stone slab was poised to turn. He extended a hand and touched the stone.
“Decripis,” he whispered, and immediately that stone began to crumble. As it rotted away, the ten-ton slab of the gate settled onto the ground. It did not move appreciably, but no longer was it ready to be moved easily. Rather, when the gate crew tried to close the gate, they would discover that the entire massive weight of the barrier was resting very comfortably on the ground. It would take about a hundred ogres or a thousand dwarves to budge the gate.
Well satisfied with their work, the apprentice wizards took up their daggers and retired to the shadows of the great gatehouse. They knew that they wouldn’t have long to wait.
The shore of the Urkhan Sea, in most places, rose as a steep slope of rock directly from the waterline toward the looming ceiling above the vast subterranean space. In several places, however, caverns and excavated passages reached the lakeshore and provided access to the large network of tunnels, cities, and food warrens—the living space of Thorbardin’s dwarves. As the fleet of boats approached the shore, General Blade Darkstone divided his army into three groups directed toward three landing sites.
The Heir of Kayolin Page 4
