The Heir of Kayolin

by Douglas Niles

  They listened to all the clamor, the shrieks of alarm from the dying defenders, the cries of the many dwarves fleeing from the violence that stalked through the streets and square, and the curses of the many more who milled about in fear, shaken and unsettled by the old crone’s dire prophecies of earthquake and doom. The city was in panic, and if the king still slept, the two Theiwar knew that it must be a very unsettled slumber.

  “Summon the king!” called one nearby officer. “Sound the alarm—we’re under attack!”

  The time was soon. Gypsum raised his knife and reached out to touch Facet’s shoulder, feeling her nod in response. She gripped her own blade, staring down, intently watching the door leading to the king’s chambers. The two dwarves would have been in plain sight to any nearby observer except for the spell of invisibility that masked them from detection, so long as they stood still and made no sudden gesture or move.

  Soon the king’s portal burst open, and royal guards charged out to gawk over the ramparts, witnessing the size of the attack with shock and horror.

  “It’s civil war!” one cried, turning back to the doorway. “Alert the king!”

  More cries of alarm and death were ringing throughout the city, and still the two assassins waited and watched, prepared for their victim to emerge. Once again the door burst open, and two armed guards charged out to flank the entrance. The two guards were followed at once by a gaunt, robed figure carrying a ruby-tipped scepter.

  “Now!” Gypsum spat as the robed king raced through the doorway underneath the two Theiwar assassins. He sprang outward, dagger extended. His abrupt movements broke the thrall of the invisibility spell, but that was no hindrance, for Gypsum was on target, plunging toward the dwarf monarch’s unprotected back.

  “Sire!” One of the guards at the parapet, turning to gesture his king forward, had spotted the flash of movement. With surprising quickness, the dwarf dived at his king, tackling the ruler to the ground.

  The Theiwar assassin could not alter the path of his dive. Gypsum stabbed as he smashed into the floor, but his blade sliced through the back of the foolish guardsman. Even as that soldier died, King Stonespringer wriggled away, shrieking in fury and terror.

  “Kill him!” gasped the king. “It is the will of Reorx that he die in my presence!”

  Gypsum rolled to one side, wrenching his knife free from the soldier’s fatal wound and bouncing to his feet. He spotted the king, but already a half dozen burly Hylar had grouped themselves before the monarch and the erstwhile assassin. The Black Robe looked upward, seeking Facet where she had lurked beside him on the mantel. Nothing moved there; if she was still in place, she was still immobile and invisible.

  Yet she must be there! He had touched her arm, felt her presence just moments earlier. Why did she not attack? The opportunity was golden.

  “Strike now!” Gypsum called out to her, urging Facet to strike the king’s unprotected back from her vantage overhead. Certainly she, like he, would gladly sacrifice her life in the Master’s cause! The apprentice wizard feinted a charge and danced away from the guards’ swords, making sure that their attention remained focused on him, not the unseen danger. He parried a defender’s slice with his dagger, fanatical determination allowing him to smash the larger weapon aside with his slender blade.

  Why did she still not attack? Retreating, he cast an urgent spell, using his left hand to aim a stream of magic missiles at the king. The sparking, hissing darts struck the chest of a guard who bravely stepped into their path, and Gypsum cursed aloud as the last of the magic missiles killed the soldier but failed to strike the monarch.

  The Theiwar mage had to defend himself in earnest, swords coming at him from all sides. He couldn’t sidestep as the tip of a weapon plunged in to tear the flesh of his biceps. Cursing in pain, he spun, backing all the way to the edge of the rampart.

  Blood trickled down his arm, and he grunted as another sword tip cut him, gouging his left hip. He recoiled from the blow, but there was nowhere else he could retreat. He stared into the one good eye of Jungor Stonespringer, saw the king’s face distorted by rage and fear, heard his shrill voice calling for the guards to slay the would-be assassin.

  “Facet!” he cried, a desperate last croak as more blades struck home, including one that plunged into his belly. Flailing, Gypsum sliced the sword hand of that attacker, but his mind, his reflexes, failed as the blood drained out of him in too many places.

  Once more he peered up at the balcony, and at last he saw his fellow apprentice crouching there. Facet had moved, shrugging away the spell of invisibility, but she stared down on him with a thinly smiling face that was cold, cruel. Her blood red lips were curled mockingly. Gypsum’s dagger fell from nerveless fingers, and he raised his hand in a mute plea. The king, his back unprotected, stood directly below the female; she could launch herself at him at any time, landing on him for a certain kill.

  Gypsum dropped to his knees, not even feeling the rain of blows that continued to cut him, to kill him. His vision grew foggy, and his last glimpse of Facet was of his fellow conspirator mockingly blowing him a kiss before she spoke a magic word and blinked away, alive and treacherous, ready to fight again on another day.

  FOUR

  STORM UNDER THE MOUNTAIN

  Willim the Black teleported to the commanding rampart in the city’s main gate and quickly located General Darkstone. The wizard simply watched as his commander ordered his companies through the gate and had them form up within the city for the next phase of the attack, the charge toward the palace across the great square.

  Only when the troops were well organized, moving smoothly into position, did the wizard summon his general with a curt gesture.

  “Yes, my master?” asked Darkstone, hurrying to kneel before the magic-user.

  “Have your men bring me the hearts of two slain enemies. They must be warm and freshly bleeding. Then proceed with your attack.”

  “Yes, my lord,” promised the general. He quickly dispatched a pair of aides to perform the task before returning to his regiment on the square. Less than a minute later, the aides returned with the grisly trophies.

  Willim dismissed the dwarves but clasped the two hearts, one in each hand. Closing his eyes, he squeezed the organs, silently casting his powerful spell of summoning. Blood dripped from his fingers, but it was consumed by magic before it could strike the ground.

  Soon the wizard felt the embrace of black wings and noted the looming presence of his minion, an even blacker shade against the darkness of the sunless world. The monster rose before him, maw gaping, eyes flaring with crimson hunger.

  “Go!” commanded Willim the Black. “Strike at the very bottom of the city! Spread terror there, and bring that fear back to me!”

  With no sound, the minion bowed, flapping its huge bat wings and flexing its sharp, hooked claws. The magic user could sense its pleasure at the command, and Willim watched, breathing hard from the exertion of the summoning—and from his own excitement—as the minion sank through the stone floor of the city.

  He knew that it understood the command, and that it would obey.

  The streets of Anvil’s Echo, the lowest levels of Norbardin, were crowded with the wretched and the poor. Narrow passages twisted between looming, sediment-stained walls, as water—and less identifiable liquids—sluiced through gutters. Dark, shadowy holes lined the walls, in most cases without any doors. A stink of rot and effluence pervaded the air in those close confines, but thousands of residents bustled their way around the “Echo” with no apparent difficulty.

  For they were—except for the all-but-exterminated gully dwarves—the lowest of Thorbardin’s low. They scraped and scrimped, working as coal-haulers and boiler-scrapers, street-sweepers and debris-rakers, earning but a few miserable coppers a day if they were lucky. They dwelled, often two or three families at a time, in tiny, cramped, poorly ventilated hovels that were little more than caves.

  But there were advantages to being so far away from the
attentions of the powerful. For one thing, the king’s enforcers didn’t spend much time among the miserable poor of Anvil’s Echo. Perhaps it was because there was so little wealth to be mined from those hapless folk. Or maybe the rich and powerful avoided the shadowy, sewage-stinking alleys because of the miasma that seeped through the air. No doubt, at least part of the guard’s aversion to the Echo was the fact that more than one of the bearded fanatics who so readily enforced the regime’s repressive policies had been found with his throat slit, lying in one of those back alleys. Invariably, by the time the body was discovered by another party of guards, the slain enforcer’s belongings, including weapons, boots, and clothing, had all been claimed by one or another of the thieving dwellers of that most miserable of Norbardin’s neighborhoods.

  There, unlike the rest of the great city, some female dwarves dared to challenge the monarch’s repressive rules. The bold dwarf maids, though few in number, operated their own stalls and stores, always in darkened alcoves off the main roads of Anvil’s Echo. On those streets, some of the women of Norbardin went about uncloaked, faces bare in proud defiance of the king’s harsh decrees. They walked without escort, talked loudly, even dared to argue with those males who were foolish enough to challenge them. In fact, Anvil’s Echo, though filthy and poverty stricken, was closer in nature to the dwarf cities of the past than were any of Norbardin’s higher and more prosperous neighborhoods.

  And there, as elsewhere in the city, the population was purely dwarf, so the inhabitants worked hard, drank even harder, and took their frustrations out upon each other. Brawling and thuggery were common in Anvil’s Echo, and the strong routinely lorded it over the weak. Rough overseers, sometimes wielding whips or cudgels, held their laborers to their looms or forges or stitching, while those suffering workers cowered and cringed and sought to earn a few lousy coppers for a hard day’s work.

  The outbreak of civil war, as Willim’s rebel forces swarmed over the three main gates leading into Norbardin, was barely noticed there in the deepest depths of the city. The sound of the violence was a distant distraction, and the dwellers of Anvil’s Echo had little care for who won or lost. One thing was for sure: whichever side prevailed, their miserable lot and their endless work would go on.

  But all that labor came to a halt, along both sides of one narrow street, when the stones of the pavement began to shift and shimmer, as though a puddle of black oil leaked up from below. Passersby gasped and sprang away from the fast-growing murk, their cries of alarm bringing people out of the shops and down from both ends of the long roadway. Dwarves gathered in a circle, whispering and muttering then edging backward as the darkness coalesced into something very solid. Like a pillar of shifting black smoke, it rose from the ground, climbing and writhing until it was taller than any dwarf.

  And it continued to grow and climb and writhe.

  “What is it?” called one foreman, pushing his way through the throng.

  “It ain’t natural, that’s for sure,” one old fellow retorted, taking another step backward.

  “It’s some kind of creature!” warned a dwarf maid, an edge of hysteria to her voice.

  “Ah, calm yerself,” barked the foreman. He took another step forward but, despite his bravado, couldn’t bring himself to draw any closer to the black form.

  That black shape of murk loomed high above the damp rock of the Echo’s nearby main thoroughfare, and even the largest and most brash of the bullies quailed.

  The minion of Willim the Black was a bat-winged monster, with embers like Abyssal fires for eyes. Those fiery coals glowed with an infernal light.

  The circle of dwarves widened and edged back.

  Finally, when the creature spread its black wings and uttered an otherworldly roar, panic seized the crowd of dwarves. They turned as one and started to run, tripping and falling over each other. The weak and the slow screamed and fell as the stronger and faster elbowed them out of the way. The minion struck, stomping among the fleeing dwarves, slaying randomly right and left with slashing blows of its taloned hands. Terrified dwarves fled both ways along the narrow street, crying out in terror, spilling onto the main thoroughfare and gathering more and more of the population into their flight.

  And the panic spread, and the people screamed, fleeing.

  Peat Guilder could hear the commotion of war from the front room of his shop. The clash of steel against steel, the shouts of battle cries, the wailing and screaming of the grievously wounded—they echoed down the street from the great plaza. Even with the front door closed tight, he couldn’t drown out the din. Every once in a while, he felt certain that the fighting was getting closer to the shop, but then it would recede again.

  Sadie was in the back room, still laboring over the tricky scribing of the mysterious scroll she had been working on. A few hours earlier, Peat had asked her how the work was coming, and she’d just about bitten his head off. No fool, he had left her alone since then. Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and went to the door to the back room.

  “What are you working on there, anyway?” he demanded.

  Somewhat surprisingly, she looked up at him without her usual angry or irritable expression. “Remember what you said?” she asked.

  “What? I say lots of things—most of which you don’t even hear,” he replied.

  She ignored the barb. “You said you’d like for us to get out of here, even if it meant leaving this shop, all our possessions, behind.”

  “So? I was thinking out loud. What of it? I think out loud all the time.”

  “Did you mean it? Would you be willing to live in poverty, start over again, if we could get away?”

  He was startled by the question and still trying to formulate a sensible reply when he heard the loud clank of the shop’s front door opening.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  The voice came from the front of the Two Guilders Novelty and Pharmology Emporium. Peat bustled out of the back room, leaning on his cane, squinting at a prosperous-looking Hylar, stout and middle-aged, accompanied by a frumpy dwarf maid, with two young ones peering from behind their mother’s skirt. The shopkeeper cleared his throat and overcame his surprise—they were the first potential customers he’d seen in several weeks. Even before the war, the king’s stern disapproval of magic had served to keep dwarves away from the shop that specialized in that unsavory field. Those of the Hylar clan, in particular, tended to look askance at the two Guilders.

  “Um, yes,” he said. “Welcome to Two Guilders. How can I help you?” He gestured to a row of vials and bottles. “A potion to help with sleeping, perhaps, in these troubled times? Or something of a more exotic nature?”

  The Hylar family advanced into the shop, allowing the door to slam behind them.

  “What is it?” Sadie demanded crossly from the storeroom. “Are you talking to yourself again?”

  She, too, hobbled into the shop and gawked in surprise at the sight of the Hylar family standing there. “What do you want?” she demanded as Peat winced at her harsh tone.

  “They’re customers!” he hissed. “You do remember customers, don’t you?” He offered a thin smile to the Hylar father, whose gold belt buckle, fine vest, and fur-lined boots were apparent even to Peat’s feeble eyes. The woman wore several diamond bracelets, a glittering necklace, and a pair of gemstone earrings. The customers were clearly well to do.

  “I apologize for my wife’s ill manners,” Peat said, glaring at Sadie—who was still staring open mouthed at the Hylar family. “But please,” he said, turning his gaze back to the Hylar, “how can we help you? Perhaps you know that we have an impressive assortment of charms and trinkets, as well as the potions that you see before you.”

  Indeed, he felt justifiably proud as he indicated the well-stocked shelves with their array of contents. “We have a number of unique items here—many of them unavailable in any other shop in all Thorbardin,” he said, trying not to sound boastful. “We have elixirs that will ease the temperaments of conten
tious adversaries and others that will allow you to vanish from sight in a moment, should an unwelcome visitor present himself at your door. With such a potion, I assure you, you won’t be seen unless you want to be seen.”

  “Er, yes,” said the Hylar, who Peat felt virtually certain was a fellow businessman, perhaps a vendor of exotic fabrics or rare gems. “Truth is, we’ve never really come in here before—”

  “We’ve known about you, of course,” gushed the dwarf maid. “But, well, you know how people talk. We’d never really felt right about all the magic and—”

  “Now, hush, dear,” said the Hylar patriarch sternly. “These nice Theiwar don’t need to hear our life story!”

  “Well, what would you like to see now that you are here?” Peat said, gritting his teeth impatiently. “In these troubled times, there must be something we can offer.”

  “Well, it’s because of the magic, you see,” said the Hylar, introducing himself as a merchant whose name was Horth Dunstone. “That’s why we came to you.”

  “There’s no other way to do it, only magic,” said his wife. “Only magic can help us.”

  “Help you to do what?” asked Peat gently.

  “Well, there’s the war. Times are hard. My business has already suffered. My children, well, all of us, our lives are in danger. As is everyone else’s of course. But we really hoped you could help.”

  “Again, help you in what fashion?” Peat felt his fixed smile starting to slip. “Do you need to hide, to protect yourselves?” His voice dropped conspiratorially. “Do you have an enemy you want to hex? To sicken, perhaps, or to blind—temporarily, of course.”

  The Hylar’s eyes widened at the litany of possibilities, and he gulped nervously. Finally, he seemed to shake off his fears, clearing his throat as he recovered his nerve. “Well, it’s just this. Can you help us to get out of Thorbardin?” the merchant asked bluntly. “Just get us, our whole family, as far away from here as possible?”