by Jeff Crook
A soft knock at the door ended Jungor's lecture. He motioned for Astar to open the door. With a scowl, the Hylar captain stood aside to allow Ferro Dunskull to enter. "Ah, Ferro, good of you to come. Thank you, Thane Delvestone, for stopping by. Everything will proceed as intended. Do not be frustrated or impatient. Remember that Thorbardin was carved one chip at a time. Captain Trueshield, will you show the thane to the door?"
Rughar bowed and took his leave, and Astar closed the door behind them as they left Ferro dropped back to the corner farthest from Jungor, his dark eyes nervously darting around, taking in every object and item of furniture, every avenue of escape. Jungor eased around the desk and settled himself on the couch beside the fire. He pointed to a crystal decanter on a silver tray on a table by the wall. "That's very good brandy," he said. "Have some."
"No thank you, my lord. Brandy unsettles my bowels," the Daergar softly answered from his dark corner.
Jungor turned, his one eye twinkling in the firelight. "Then sit down and tell me how you… failed."
Ferro slunk around the wall until he reached a small chair standing beside the table with the decanter of brandy. He seated himself on the chair's edge, his hands nervously fidgeting at the edges of his studded leather vest.
"Don't be shy," Jungor said. "I know you have something to tell me, some tidbit of explanation. If I thought you had betrayed me, you would already be dead, dear Ferro."
Ferro started in his chair, nearly bolting for the door. With a supreme effort of will, aided by his stubborn Daergar pride, he was able to control his fear. "The draconians that I hired attacked Tarn's party before my agent could deliver the killing blow to the king. Stupid, stupid of them! Still, things might have gone as planned if General Otaxx had not appeared with a large force of the Pax Tharkas garrison. He was traveling behind the king, his soldiers being burdened with a large consignment of supplies for Thorbardin. When he heard the fighting, he quickly gathered his troops and rushed to the attack, turning the tide of the battle."
"So, what you are saying is, you failed to properly reconnoiter the situation and see what forces were arrayed against you," Jungor said with a pleasantness that belied the edge in his voice.
"I am afraid so," Ferro reluctantly admitted.
"I cannot abide a fool, especially if he is to be my master of scouts, Master Dunskull," Jungor said. "I assume all the draconians were killed to prevent them telling who hired them."
"We ourselves attacked the last group from the rear," Ferro said, "to cover our mistake."
"Commendable. And this agent, this assassin, what about him? He was eliminated as well?"
When Ferro did not immediately answer, Jungor sat up, glaring at him in the firelight. Finally, a small voice said from the shadows, "Not exactly."
"What do you mean? Where is he now?" Jungor demanded.
"You saw him today in the Council Hall," Ferro answered. "Ilbars Bleakfell."
Jungor's jaw dropped open. "You corrupted that pompous Daewar buffoon? By the gods, Ferro, I underestimated you."
"You do not understand, my lord," Ferro said nervously. "Captain Ilbars is not himself. The real Ilbars is waiting out eternity at the bottom of a bog, most likely. What you saw today in the Council Hall was a sivak draconian named Zen. He was the leader of the band I hired to kill Tarn. He indeed killed Ilbars and took his place, as was the plan." Jungor nodded, listening. He had heard of the sivaks' ability to assume the shape of anyone it kills. He was also keenly aware of how dangerous such a creature, loose in Thorbardin, could prove. If Tarn were to discover him…
Ferro continued, "The draconians sprang their ambush before Zen could get close enough to the king to kill him. But Zen survived the battle somehow and accompanied us back to Thorbardin, still in the guise of Ilbars Bleakfell. I have not had the opportunity to speak with him alone, therefore I am puzzled… that is, I am unclear as to his ultimate intentions."
"Unclear? Your euphemisms are tiresome," Jungor said, his patience worn thin. "So where is this failed assassin now?"
Again, it was some moments before Ferro was able to answer. Finally, his words came blurting out. "After the Council, he slipped into the crowd and disappeared. I don't know where he is. My agents are searching for him as we speak. All I know is that he's somewhere in the city."
Steeling his patience, Jungor rose from the couch with a deep sigh and slowly strode to the window. With his hands clasped behind his back, he stared out into the torchlit darkness of the garden. "I trust that your agents will find him," he said at last.
"Of course, my lord," Ferro said hurriedly. With Jungor's back turned, Ferro lifted the brandy decanter and poured a third of its contents down his throat Coughing on the potent liquor, he said, "But with his shapechanging ability, Zen could be someone else by now. He could be… anyone."
Jungor nodded and hissed without turning. "Pray that you find him before he finds you. And may the gods who are no more help you if you fail this time."
A Moment
In a tiny room lit by fire, his haggard face starkly divided between light and shadow down the crooked line of his nose, the captain of the North Gate solemnly nodded his sweaty bald head. Released, the mechanism slowly commenced its turn. Driven by swift, icy water hidden behind stone, it propelled a gleaming steel screw thick as an Urkhan worm into the side of the mountain. The gate, a solid plug of stone, swung out of its cavern lair on hinged steel arms and slid into position over the coiling rod, silent as the first day of Creation. The floor shuddered with the leviathan waking of the machine.
In his bed deep inside his fortress home, in the dark with his wife breathing deep and slow beside him, Tarn Bellowgranite wondered if it would be enough. Enough to keep Beryl out, when she came, if she came. Enough to quiet the souls of those he'd led to their doom. Somewhere in the world above, the elves of Qualinost wandered alone. He wondered if they knew the price he'd paid for their freedom, sacrificing his own. He wondered if their young king deserved it. He wondered if he had the right to wonder or the wisdom to question. He fell asleep and clutched the sheets as he dreamed of drowning dwarves.
In the city beneath the stone, Norbardin, Jungor Stonesinger paused in his garden, submersed in sudden moonlight. By some unlikely chance, Krynn's pale moon had chosen that moment to peer down through the skylight and limn every line and shape in silver and forest green, startling him as though he had walked, unaware, onto a stage. In his fancy, the lights had come up and the crowd sat breathless in their seats, awaiting the chorus that would open the play. The blistered skin round his eyeless socket tightened as he recalled his lines and smiled. He had written this play himself.
In the darkness of the Anvil's Echo, Ferro Dunskull lost himself in a pale Daergar beauty, as rare and pure as a black dragon's tear, whose name he had already forgot. His fear and anger and loneliness he poured out like a bitter libation onto her floor, both needing and hating her, and she welcomed him into her small, well-apportioned room, hungry to share his power. Her limbs long and lithe, the flat round of her belly pallid as moonlight, she paused at the edge of the candle's light, a crystal decanter of black brandy hanging from the crook of her finger. He turned away to hide his sneer.
In the shadow beneath a barbican gate, Zen shucked off the mortal form of Ilbars Bleakfell, trading it for one less familiar, one less regarded. The pale gray corpse lay at his feet on the slick stones, blood pooling black behind its neck. Now Daergar inform, he set to work dismembering his victim and stuffing the sundry parts down a sewer grate, losing his patience when the head wouldn't fit between the rusty bars.
Into its uneven seat in the stone, silent as the dawning day, the North Gate twisted home, sealing the dwarves of Thorbardin inside their mountain once more. Through hidden windows high above, guards watched the northern horizon for dragon flame and the watch fires of camping armies. They watched the approaches to the gate, not to welcome visitors but to drive them away with arrows and bolts and falls of stone. As the gate sa
nk into place, melding with the surrounding stone so perfectly that not even a dwarf could find it once shut, the air inside the mountain grew tight, and the guards at their posts smelled the hot metallic reek of melting lead. The plumber had come to seal the gate, humming a song and sucking the remains of his breakfast from his teeth while he stoked the fires of his portable forge. The captain of the North Gate waited with a signet stone to press into the warm lead seal, to finalize the Council's command to shut out the world.
He was glad no one had come to witness the sealing of the gate. He was glad for the heat of the forge fire and the sweat that hid his tears.
Book II
17
Tarn never tired of looking at him. He never tired of holding him in his arms or feeling his soft fat little fingers close around his own coarse one. "You will he strong, like your father," he whispered to the infant boy.
Tor Bellowgranite, son of Tarn Bellowgranite, smiled his blank, toothless smile up into his father's face. Crystal said he was too young to smile, but Tarn knew better. Tor was smiling because he knew his father. He shook his fists, like little balls of dough, at Tarn's face, and began to kick. Tarn laughed without really knowing why, feeling only a deep and abiding joy unlike anything he had ever known.
Dwarf babies were, to put it simply, quite ugly. Even dwarf mothers had no illusions about the beauty of their own infants. Though usually born with a full head of hair, dwarf babies did not come into the world already fully bearded, despite popular superstitions. Tor shared the Hylar trait of golden hair, just like his father. Crystal argued that Neidar babies were also born blonde-headed, but that they soon lost their fine golden baby hair and replaced it with a proper color. Tarn was pleased that his son, just six months old, still sported a magnificent shock of tawny locks.
Suddenly, the baby's fat little face scrunched up in a horrible grimace. Tarn stared at him in surprise, then recoiled as Tor sneezed. "He's caught something," he said in alarm. He turned to the open door and cried, "Auntie! Tor is ill. Fetch the healers at once."
"He's not sick. You've just tickled his nose with your beard again," a female voice answered from the next room.
Tarn felt a tug at his chin and looked down, chuckling as the baby pulled at the ends of his long beard hairs. "Where is your beard, Tor?" he murmured to the child. "Did your mommy shave it off to make you look like an elf child? Or maybe it was wicked old Aunt Needlebone."
"I heard that," the female voice said from the other room. A matronly old dwarf appeared in the doorway, a rag hanging from the fist planted firmly on her hip. With her other hand, she pointed a quivering finger at Tarn. "Stop filling that boy's head with your foolishness," she admonished.
"He doesn't understand what I am saying to him," Tarn said, gazing down at Tor. "He's just responding to the sound of my voice."
"Don't you count on it This child is brilliant. I've never seen a more brilliant child in my three hundred and fifty years, not even his mother." Tor blinked at Tarn; he had his mother's gray eyes. "Sometimes he looks at you with that piercing gaze and you think he's about to whisper great secrets. You feel like you haven't got any clothes on, or that he is looking right through you. But the next minute, there he is a baby again. It passes like a cloud over the hill." Her voice trailed off in a sigh of longing. Tarn had heard the old dwarf woman sigh that way many a time since she came with Crystal to live inside the mountain. The old hill dwarf nursemaid missed her home in the hills west of Thorbardin. Only her love for Crystal, and now for the boy, kept her here.
Closing the nursery door behind her, Aunt Needlebone shuffled to Tarn's side and peered over his shoulder at infant Tor lying in his father's arms, quiet now, peering at their faces with his large gray eyes. "Sometimes I think he really can talk already. He just hasn't decided what he wants to say," she said.
Tarn smiled and shrugged. "I don't know about talking, but he'll certainly be walking before much longer."
Auntie laughed at the king. "Hill dwarf babies are already walking by Tor's age. Mountain dwarves are a bit slower, I hear."
Knowing that Auntie was only trying to provoke him, Tarn growled, "He's as stubborn as a hill dwarf, that's for certain. This morning, I tried to give him his wooden rattler, but he was having nothing of it He wanted his gemstone shaker and nothing else would do. Such a voice!"
"He'll need that voice to be heard in this family," Auntie said.
The door to the nursery opened and Crystal entered. She was dressed formally, with golden hoops dangling from her ears and rings winking with gems on her fingers. Her face was rouged, her long auburn hair arranged with jeweled pins and combs into a tall coif atop her head. A wide belt of green felt circled her waist, into which was tucked a blouse of milky white silk. A skirt of tooled and gilded leather covered her legs, and over all she wore a robe of fine green wool lined with gray silk and trimmed in ermine.
She stopped just inside the door and looked at Tarn in alarm. "Aren't you ready yet?" she asked.
Tarn growled something unintelligible into his beard. Crystal sighed and adjusted one of her earrings. "The delegates will be here any moment, Tarn," she said.
"I'd rather stay here with Tor," Tarn responded sullenly.
"Well, you can't. You are the king. This is an important day, the celebration of the Festival of Lights, a time to honor the dead and to remember the destruction suffered during the Chaos War. You can't hide in the nursery, today of all days."
"Here, give me the child," Auntie said as she gently pried Tor from his father's arms. Tarn only reluctantly released his hold on the boy.
"I'm not hiding," he said angrily as he rose to his feet. "I enjoy spending time with my son. Is that so wrong?"
"You dote on him too much," Auntie said. "You'll spoil him."
Snarling, Tarn stalked from the nursery. Aunt Needlebone's fuzzy gray eyebrows rose in a silent question, but Crystal only shrugged and followed her husband.
As Tarn swept into the reception hall of his residence, guards along both walls snapped to attention, their boots thundering on the floor as one. Tarn wore his full ceremonial regalia—plate armor polished to a mirror sheen, kingsword at his hip, crown of Thorbardin encircling his golden mane of hair. A long cloak of wolf fur dragged on the ground behind him as he climbed the stairs to his throne. Crystal walked at his side and took her accustomed place to his left, standing a little behind the throne with her right hand resting on its high, dragon-carved back. Mog Bonecutter emerged from a door behind the throne and took his place to Tarn's right. Mog wore a full suit of golden-tinted chain mail, his unruly black beard poking fiercely from the circle of mail coif, a tabard of red silk emblazoned with the hammer and anvil symbol covering his chest and back.
The highest dignitaries of the Hylar clan bowed in greeting at the foot of the steps. Thane Jungor Stonesinger was foremost among them. Because the acid damage to his face had caused part of his facial hair to eventually fall out, Jungor had taken to braiding his remaining beard into three short plaits. Even today, when he and all the other dwarves of Thorbardin were dressing in their finest and combing out their beards to achieve the greatest fullness and luxuriance possible, Jungor chose to keep his severe style. With his ascetic's beard, long gray robes, wizard staff, and golden orb winking from the hollow of his right eye, he looked almost like a sorcerer.
Beside Jungor stood the wealthy merchant Hextor Ironhaft, gold fairly dripping from his fat fingers. Several dozen generals, former priests, nobles, and artisans made up the remainder of the delegation—the cream of Hylar society, both male and female. Most were dressed either in the most expensive silks imported from the north or the richest armor forged by dwarf or man. Several years ago, Tarn's engineers had opened several new ore veins in the stone near the North Gate. These mines had provided much of the reason for the dwarves' rising prosperity. Because of Tarn's policy of openness, dwarf traders from Thorbardin had begun to carry their goods all over the world. Wealth flowed through the North Gate, improvi
ng everyone's lives.
Flowed, that is, it until Jungor convinced the Council of Thanes to seal the mountain after the disaster at Qualinost. Now, the wealth of Thorbardin was being consolidated in higher and higher levels of its society, just as it was in the old days. Gold and iron still flowed from the mines and steel continued to be forged in its foundries, but these riches no longer flowed out with traders traveling to distant lands, bringing home the mundane goods and strange curiosities that once filled the markets of Norbardin. Now, money was hoarded rather than invested. The poor grew poorer, the rich richer. Some dwarves ate off plates of gold while other had nothing to eat at all. And as long as the mountain remained sealed and the economy of Norbardin forced to feed off itself, this situation would never change.
Tarn was well aware that Jungor wanted to keep it that way. The Hylar thane had made no secret of his ambitions in the last year, while Tarn had withdrawn ever deeper into family matters. As he had said, he'd rather spend time with his son. Instead, he was forced to participate in these endless ceremonies.
Crystal nudged him, bringing him out of his dark reverie. He coughed and cleared his throat. "Clansmen and clanswomen of the Hylar, I welcome you into the home of the son of Baker Whitegranite, son of Brom Whitegranite. In remembrance of those now gone to join the Kingdom of the Dead, I wish you a joyous Festival of Lights."
The Hylar nodded appreciatively. Although many of them had little enough love for their half-breed king, none disputed that Tarn had a remarkable talent for speaking on public occasions, especially rituals and formal ceremonies. There were many who said Tarn would have .made a good priest, an observation that only made Tarn laugh when he heard it.
