“Row, you worms!” hissed the helmsmen, beating a stealthy rhythm on muted, leather-topped drums. The sound whispered across the lake, almost inaudible beyond a few hundred paces, but the drumbeat kept the boats moving at a steady speed even as the three detachments slowly diverged toward their beachheads.
To the left and right, the landing sites were the small tunnel mouths terminating in docks and wharves; each was the objective of a small force, numbering some fifty boats. It was the center, where the broad ramp had been lowered, that the main portion of the attacking force, numbering more than two hundred boats, would come ashore.
General Darkstone, in the lead boat, could see the ramp had been lowered precisely as the wizard had planned. The commander was the first dwarf ashore, and he was met by two black-robed apprentices.
“We have not been discovered,” one of them informed him.
“Good.” Darkstone turned back to the boats, which were drawing up to the ramp as close together as their many oars would allow. “Debark and form up,” he said in a hushed voice. The word swiftly passed from boat to boat: the main route to the city was open.
He watched the veteran troops splash onto the ramp and move rapidly forward to clear the way for the next arrivals. When he turned to look along the dark road leading toward Norbardin, he didn’t see his army; instead, he saw his daughter’s face in his mind’s eye. She was beautiful and young, as he remembered her—before she had been captured by the king’s agents and given away like some sacred token to Ragat Kingsaver. When she had killed herself, she had salvaged her honor and signed a death sentence for the king and his commanding general.
“Rest well, my child,” Darkstone whispered to himself.
Then his brow knitted and he pictured Jungor Stonespringer, General Ragat, and the task ahead.
“Your hour of judgment is near,” he promised his enemies, who remained unseen in the darkness. But surely they must know he was coming.
“Hey! Who goes there?”
The first challenge came from the leftmost of the landing sites, where one of the royal garrison had taken note of the disturbance on the water. The reply came in the form of a hundred crossbow bolts, loosed by archers standing in the prows of the approaching boats. The sentry fell into the water with a gurgling splash, and the panicked cries of his comrades receded quickly, as the small garrison fled precipitously toward Norbardin.
The garrison at the right tunnel similarly bolted, and the flotillas reached dry land at the same time. The dwarves wasted no time in scrambling out of their boats. The flanking forces charged, shoulder to shoulder, along the two narrow tunnels leading into Norbardin. Veinslitter’s Daergar, a disciplined formation bearing swords and axes while protected by shields and plate armor, marched in tight ranks along the road to the left. To the right, Captain Forelock’s Klar advanced in a swarm, jogging along the smooth pavement, grunting and shouting as they picked up the pace of their advance.
General Darkstone himself led the main body of his force, the Theiwar regiments with Hylar skirmishers in the lead. As they were the largest of the army’s elements, the general took extra time to organize and form up his units as boat after boat debarked, depositing its complement of the army onto the sloping shore formed by the lowered ramp. Eight boats could pull up at a time, and the empty crafts were quickly shuttled out of the way so the next wave could beach and make ready. The dwarves of William’s army had drilled the procedure many times on the similar shores of the Isle of the Dead, and the practice paid off as the whole operation of emptying the many boats took less than fifteen minutes.
When the whole force, several thousand strong, had landed, Darkstone supervised organizing them into ranks, and finally they all started marching toward the city. They moved at a measured pace, for it was Willim’s plan that the two flanks would be engaged before the powerful knockout punch was delivered by the center.
The right wing advanced first, with General Forelock’s Klar charging at an enthusiastic trot, whooping and shouting as they swept around the bends of the narrow tunnel—stealth being not much valued by the impetuous Klar. As the right formation spread out, the dwarves of that undisciplined clan raced each other toward the nearest enemy positions. Barely a mile from the lake, the Klar berserkers encountered the first guard posts of the king’s royal garrison. Because of the inevitable noise they had made during their advance, they found the defenders stoutly waiting for them—but the fanatical attackers would not have had it any other way.
The first guard posts were blockhouses carved into the walls on both sides of the roadway. They had stout metal gates, usually left open, ready to block any undesirables. The guards, alerted brief moments earlier by the sound of the wild-eyed Klar’s advance, had already started to swing that gate shut when the attackers burst into a mad sprint. Howling wildly, the Klar hit the moving barrier at full tilt, the weight of the onslaught slamming the gate back against the defenders.
Swinging axes and swords with mad glee, the berserkers hurled themselves at the doors and the shuttered windows of the two blockhouses, quickly forcing their way inside. The outnumbered defenders had been expecting a small raiding party at best and were stunned by the onslaught of a full regiment. The king’s defenders were quickly slaughtered while the rest of the Klar spilled through the barricade and down down the tunnel in a mad rush toward the streets of lower Norbardin, some three miles away.
To the left, the Daergar also had taken out their first guard post in a sudden, silent rush, approaching the city gates with more stealth. There, the last of Willim’s apprentices had worked their sleep spells on the advance guard posts, and as a result the first company rushed through the entryway before the guards even knew what was happening. As some of Willim’s warriors took control of the wide plaza just inside the gate, the follow-up ranks swarmed over the defensive positions, killing the royal guards in their barracks, often before the startled dwarves had time to get out of bed.
In the center, finally, the Hylar skirmishers took the main gates of Norbardin in a whirlwind of fighting. The ruined hinge of the massive gate was discovered too late, and the great barrier stood useless as the attackers stormed past. Many of the garrison dwarves were distracted, having been called to fight the fire that had erupted in the gatehouse’s main storeroom. Using grappling hooks and ropes to scramble up the steep walls, Willim’s attackers carried the upper ramparts in the first few intense minutes of combat. The main bulk of Darkstone’s force, the Theiwar regiments in their tight, disciplined formations, marched through the gate and broke into a double-time march.
The first goals, all three of them, had been achieved by surprise and ferocity. Across a wide plaza, protected by a series of moats and walls, loomed the next, the main objective: the royal palace of Jungor Stonespringer, High King of Thorbardin.
The king of Thorbardin was jolted awake, wrested from a dream wherein he was being tended, most gently, by a harem’s worth of beautiful dwarf maids. The dream was exceedingly pleasant, and his initial reaction was outrage that someone would have dared to interrupt his reverie. Almost immediately, however, he realized that something was gravely wrong.
First, a dwarf—one of his guards or household members, almost certainly—had the audacity to pound loudly at the door that led into the king’s sleeping chamber.
“Your Majesty!” came the urgent cry, and Stonespringer recognized the voice of his chamberlain, Robards. “Please get up! We are attacked!”
Shaking his head, the king sat up in bed and swung his short, skinny legs over the edge of his hard mattress. Even above the clamor of Robards’s shouts of alarm, he could hear screams and battle cries, all close enough to indicate the enemy was already in the city. Even as he digested that shock, he heard the resounding clash of steel against steel, a nightmarish clanging that seemed to fill the whole of the great plaza beyond his palace walls.
His good eye flashed wildly as Jungor Stonespringer stared around his barren sleeping chamber. One object comp
elled his attention: the gleaming golden orb of his artificial eye. He snatched it up and pressed it into the empty socket, trying to process all the commotion.
“It is a test!” he croaked, understanding immediately. Reorx was displeased with the people of Thorbardin, and in his wisdom, the Master of the Forge had chosen to test their devotion, their strength, their faith.
“It is a test of faith!” he repeated, much more loudly, crowing his realization to Robards, to anyone else who could hear. “Reorx is testing us!”
“Yes, Majesty!” the chamberlain replied. “He tests us most assuredly! You must take up the reins of rule and prove to him our worthiness!”
Ignoring the aide—the king had no need of such advice—Jungor stood up and crossed the room, snatching his thin robe from its hanger and shrugging the plain garment over his thin shoulders. Like the rest of his lack of adornment, like the frail physique that attested that he did not overindulge in food and drink, the simple robe was intended to serve as an example for his people. They would behold their ruler in such minimalist attire and strive to emulate his disdain for riches and ostentation.
But those concerns were far from his churning mind at the moment. The king threw open the door to his chamber to confront Robards. The chamberlain’s face was flushed above the bush of his braided, oiled beard, and sweat beaded generously across his brow. “Sire, they have attacked from three directions and breached the great gates. Already the attackers swarm into Anvil’s Echo and across the great plaza!”
“Who dares attack us?” demanded the monarch.
“We don’t know,” stammered the aide. “Dwarves, to be sure—it seems there are Klar and Theiwar among them. They came at us so quickly that we have not yet divined their purpose or their lord. Could it be the Failed King, come to reclaim his throne?”
“No, no. It cannot be Tarn Bellowgranite,” Stonespringer replied, thinking aloud. “Thorbardin itself remains sealed against the outer world, and he cannot reach us from his bastion in Pax Tharkas.”
“No, indeed, lord. It cannot be Bellowgranite,” Robards agreed.
“Willim the Black!” snapped the king, fastening onto the identity of the one rebel who was known to dwell deep within the mountain fastness of the dwarven nation. “It must be him. But he has no army!”
“Perhaps he does now,” the chamberlain replied hesitantly. “There have been reports of sorcerers among the first wave of attacks. Some guards were enchanted into sleep, and it seems that magic might have been used to disable the city’s main gate.”
“Impossible!” insisted Stonespringer, even as the thought sent a stab of worry through his bowels. Sorcerers attacking! At the same time, he had been warned by General Ragat, and apparently Ragat had been right: the menace to his kingdom lay beyond, not within, the city. The king had guessed wrong, and his troops were beleaguered inside the gates of Norbardin. With the aid of his sorcerers, Willim the Black’s forces had gained access to the city and brought the war right to the gates of the royal palace.
An insurrection led by the wicked black-robed wizard was the worst nightmare King Stonespringer could imagine. Indeed, the monarch had ordered the wizard slain more than a year before, had even—at considerable expense—procured potions of teleportation to allow his assassins to magically transport themselves into the wizard’s otherwise impenetrable lair. Too late, he realized that he had not obtained enough teleport potion for his successful assassins to return and report upon their mission. He had counted on their success. Though none of them had in fact returned, he had been lulled into thinking that the wizard had been removed as a threat. Even as rumors had surfaced in the past months that talented young Theiwar were again being recruited by a mysterious magic-user, that mercenary dwarf warriors were slowly sneaking away from Norbardin and gathering at some unknown location, the monarch had convinced himself that Willim was no threat and that no one would dare to challenge his complete mastery of Thorbardin.
It seemed his mistakes would be tested by Reorx.
The sounds of battle echoed through the great plaza of Norbardin, the tide of combat threatening to wash up against the walls of the royal palace itself.
“Call up the constables and reserves!” Stonespringer barked loudly. “Get a message to General Ragat—tell him to use every available dwarf in the city’s defense.”
“It shall be done, sire!” Robards declared, frantically waving at a signalman who was standing in the doorway of the king’s chamber, hastily writing notes. “But, Your Majesty, nothing would help so much as a public appearance by yourself as soon as possible. I beg you—go forth onto your prayer tower and rally the city with your own words!”
“Yes, I shall,” Stonespringer agreed. He snatched up the royal scepter, a tall staff tipped with a large, spherical ruby. Stamping the butt of the pole on the floor, he stalked across the floor of his chamber, pushed open the outer door, and marched boldly onto his balcony.
“It’s started!” Peat shouted, closing the door behind himself and clapping the lock.
“Who farted?” Sadie demanded crossly, emerging from the shop’s back room.
“No, not farted! The war, the war! The war has started!” the male Guilder replied in exasperation. “I can hear the battle going on in the square—right at the end of the street!”
“Eh?” His wife blinked, smacking her lips as she digested the news. “So it’s started, then.”
“I guess you could say that,” Peat agreed with a silent groan.
“I don’t like it much,” Sadie warned. “Bad for business, for one thing. And if the Master needs us again …” She let the foreboding idea drift, unfinished.
“Do you think he will?” Peat asked worriedly. “I’m not as young as I used to be.” In fact, even their simple mission, the task of spreading fear and confusion in the great square, had caused his heart to flutter dangerously. He didn’t even want to think about the chance that Willim the Black would find fault in their performance, be stymied in his own endeavors, and call upon them to perform even more arduous, dangerous activities.
Their musings were interrupted by the sound of a persistent pounding on the outer door, the entry to the shop. The two Guilders hobbled out of the back, Sadie leaning on her cane while Peat squinted at the door as if trying to see right through it. The knocking was repeated, even more insistently, so finally, with some prodding from Sadie, he released the latch and pushed it open.
“Abercrumb!” he exclaimed, feigning pleasure as he recognized their neighbor, a merchant who ran a silver shop on the other side of the street. Peat pointed at the sign beside the door. “I’d love to chat—but, you see, we’re closed now.”
“We’re all closed,” muttered Abercrumb, pushing open the door and brazening his way inside. “That’s what I need to see you about. Business has come to a complete halt. I expect this, whatever it is, this war, to come spilling down First Street at any minute. Why, some dwarves are talking about the end of the world! How can I sell my silver plates to folks who are worried about the end of the world?”
Abercrumb was a Hylar, unusually slender for a dwarf. He had a nervous habit of playing with the straggling ends of his long beard while he was thinking, or listening. He was doing that as he looked worriedly from Peat to Sadie and back again.
Sadie clucked in sympathy. “True, we haven’t had a customer in days,” she said, nodding. “Business has been terrible for a long time. And now no one will buy novelties and tokens when they’re wondering if an army of rebels is going to come smashing down their door!”
“These new rebels—do you know who they are?” Abercrumb asked, looking slyly out of the corner of his eye. “That is, are they Theiwar—you know, of your clan?”
Peat chuffed irritably and straightened himself. “I’m sure I don’t know anything about it! Certainly there’s a wizard behind some of this mischief, but don’t make the mistake of thinking all the Theiwar are in some kind of league against the king!”
“Oh, no, I’
d never make that mistake,” Abercrumb responded smoothly. “It’s just that, well, business has been so terrible, and I wondered if you have any ideas about what is happening all of a sudden. When things might get better or blow over.”
“Well, if we hear anything, we’ll let you know!” Sadie declared. “Not that we are getting any information that you couldn’t get yourself. Just keep your eyes open!”
“Oh, I’ll keep my eyes open. You can count on that!” Then Abercrumb departed with his words—he was known to be a curious, even nosy, fellow—hanging in the air.
“I don’t like it,” Peat groused. “For all we know, he could be spying on us while we’re spying on the king.”
“I don’t like it either,” Sadie replied in disgust. “But what are we going to do about it?”
That was a question with no good answer. Peat shook his head, discouraged. “I wish we could just get out of here, out of Thorbardin altogether,” he said morosely. He gestured at the jumbled mess of their shop. “Even if we had to leave all this behind!”
He didn’t notice his wife scratching her chin as his words plunged her deep into thought.
Gypsum and Facet saw the initial rank of the attackers burst through the gates of Norbardin, and heard the trumpets and drums sound with alarm. They remained magically concealed, poised on the parapet atop the king’s prayer tower. Each young wizard clutched a long dagger; both silently watched the door below them. Facet, still enhanced by her spell of invisibility detection, also watched her companion, stealing frequent glances at him to make certain he was following the plan; she smiled thinly to think he could no more see her than he could see the air between them.
The Heir of Kayolin Page 5
