Dark Thane

by Jeff Crook

  "Twelve boats await us at the old wharf," Jungor said. "The Hylar have begun to gather on the Isle of the Dead."

  "Let us go then," Tarn said, rising from his throne. With Crystal resting her hand lightly on his proffered elbow, he descended the stairs. Mog walked behind them, his beard jutting out defiantly. But when they reached the floor, Jungor remained where he stood, blocking the king's path.

  "Do you intend to bring her?" the Hylar thane asked, pointing at Crystal. Tarn stepped back in surprise. Crystal had joined him on the Isle of the Dead for the Festival of Lights every year since their marriage. No one had ever questioned her presence before, so why was Jungor making an issue of it now?

  "Of course she is coming," Tarn said, clearly flabbergasted.

  "She is a hill dwarf," Jungor said, stating the obvious.

  "She is the mother of my son," Tarn countered, his temper growing dangerously short.

  "Only Hylar may walk upon the rocky shore of our island," Hextor Ironhaft said.

  "Impertinent swine! How dare you insult the king in the king's own house?" Mog snatched a halberd from one of the nearby guards and stepped toward the Hylar delegation. "Allow me to teach these dwarves some manners, my lord," he snarled.

  Jungor took a step back, raising his staff defensively. "Call off your dog, Tarn Bellowgranite," he demanded.

  "Mog!" Tarn shouted.

  "The king can handle this," Crystal angrily admonished the Klar captain.

  But Mog remained menacingly near. "And they say the Klar are barbarians," he growled, knuckles cracking around the haft of his halberd. Some of the delegation began to back away, and the guards along the walls grew nervous. Though valiant and loyal, Mog had a reputation for cracking heads first, begging forgiveness afterward.

  Satisfied that Mog was properly restrained, Jungor resigned his position before Tarn. "The Isle of the Dead is sacred to the Hylar," he said. "It would be unseemly for your wife to come. Though nobleborn, she is Neidar."

  "Dwarves of every clan died there that day," Tarn countered.

  "Yes, attacking us. But it was our home that broke apart and fell into the waters of the Urkhan Sea. You, as much as anyone here, should understand how we feel. The body of Belicia Slateshoulders lies unburied in the ruins there, too," Jungor said.

  These words stung Tarn to silence. He had long ago come to terms with the loss of his first true love, when a section of Hybardin that she was attempting to restore broke off and fell to the island below, carrying her and several hundred workers to their deaths. But Jungor's audacity to speak of her here, before his wife, robbed his voice of words to express his outrage.

  Jungor turned to Crystal and said, "I pray you will understand this, Mistress," he said, bowing slightly from the hips. "But you cannot go. It is not I that must forbid it. The other members of my clan have spoken."

  "Perhaps it would be better if I stayed behind," Crystal offered softly.

  Incredulous, Tarn stared at her for a moment as though unable to believe his own ears. "You will not!" he shrieked, then turned back to the Hylar delegation, his face flushed a brilliant crimson that rose all the way up to the roots of his blond hair. "She is the mother of the future King of Thorbardin!" he raged, spittle flying from his lips.

  Jungor calmly replied, "Primogeniture is our tradition, but it is not our law."

  Again, for a few heartbeats, Tarn was speechless. Could this queer, misshapen, histrionic idiot of a Hylar thane really be so bold as to challenge him in this way, through his infant son? When he found his voice again, Tarn growled, "What is that supposed to mean?"

  Emboldened by the king's frustration and Jungor's defiance, Hextor Ironhaft answered rudely, "The people of Thorbardin will never accept a half-breed as their king."

  "They accepted me!" Tarn snapped.

  "Indeed, but you are of Hylar and Daergar blood," Jungor said smoothly. "You became king when Thane Hornfel and your father, Thane Baker Whitegranite, died during the Chaos War. Your son, on the other hand, is a hill dwarf."

  "Part hill dwarf," Tarn protested.

  "The people of the mountain will never respect a king with any amount of hill dwarf blood," Jungor said. "They have borne many changes under your rule, Tarn Bellowgranite, but they will not bear that rupture of tradition. It is too great a thing to ask. Your son is a hill dwarf. He cannot be king. We only speak aloud what others whisper."

  Before Tarn could answer with all the venom of his heart, Crystal stepped forward and placed a cool, restraining hand on his arm. "I'll stay here," she said, but not to Tarn. Her icy gray eyes were upon the Hylar thane. "You go and honor your dead. I will remain behind with the living."

  A terrified expression came over Jungor's twisted, misshapen face. Gripping the wizard staff in both hands, he hammered its butt end three times on the floor in rapid succession, chanting unintelligible words.

  Tarn brushed his wife's hand from his arm, then gripped the hilt of his kingsword. Mog edged closer, his halberd held at the ready. "What are you doing? What evil are you trying to avert?" he demanded of Jungor. "What do you think, that my wife is trying to cast a spell on you?"

  "She spoke words of ill omen!" Jungor cried defensively.

  Tarn's sword nearly sprang out of its sheath. " How dare you accuse the queen of witchcraft!"

  Jungor gripped his staff tighter and faced the furious king. What he said next surprised even the other Hylar. "She may be your consort, but she is not my queen."

  "What! Get out of my house, you traitorous dog!" Tarn shrieked. "Get out! If you ever cross the threshold of this house again, I'll have your head."

  Jungor made an obscene gesture with his hand as he turned and stalked from the reception chamber. Mog surged toward him, ready to split his head open with his halberd, but Crystal leaped between the two, stopping the Klar before he could revenge his king. The other Hylar quickly followed Jungor, angrily grumbling at the way Tarn had insulted their thane. Meanwhile, Tarn climbed the steps and flung himself down on his throne sullenly.

  "You would only have made things worse," Crystal said to Mog when they had gone. She patted him on the cheek as she released him. He flung his halberd clattering to the floor and stormed out, the door banging against the wall as he left.

  Crystal then addressed the guards. "Leave us. I would have private words with the king." Slowly the guards filed out, but not without many a backward, uncertain glance. Several of them were Hylar, and they felt torn in their loyalties.

  When they were alone at last, Crystal stood at the base of the steps and glared up at Tarn. She said nothing, merely stood with one hand thrust against her hip, one foot impatiently tapping the polished marble floor. For a while, Tarn avoided her gaze. Finally, he looked up and shouted, "To the Abyss with them. To the Abyss with them all!"

  "Tarn Bellowgranite, you know that you cannot afford to make an enemy of the Hylar thane," Crystal admonished.

  "I did not make an enemy of him. It is he who has made an enemy of me," the king said, his fist slamming down on the arm of the chair. "How dare he insult you in our house, in my presence?"

  "Jungor Stonesinger is the Hylar thane, and he has his own opinion about the way you rule Thorbardin," Crystal said as she slowly climbed the steps to Tarn's side. "He has the loyalty of most of the Hylar, whose support you need. And he is swiftly gaining followers among the other clans as well. You know as well as I do that he covets your throne. What will happen to us if you are driven from power? What will happen to our son?"

  "I am thinking of our son. What would happen to him if his father were disgraced?" Tarn asked harshly. "This idiot thane pushes me and he pushes me, and I am expected to yield at every turn. Well, this time he has gone too far with his insults."

  "You must not give Jungor Stonesinger any excuse to challenge you that the Council of Thanes would support," Crystal advised. She knelt beside Tarn's throne and laid her head in his lap. "And… I hate to admit it, but Jungor may be right. The dwarves of Thorbardin will never acc
ept me, and they will never allow Tor to be king. The old hatreds run too deep."

  Tarn reached out, stroking her hair. She had worked for hours preparing herself for this day, to look perfect for the Hylar delegation. Her hair was meticulously arranged, sparkling with jeweled pins. But all her work and consideration had been for naught. They didn't see the woman eager to please them for her husband's sake. They saw only a hated Neidar, a woman of the hill dwarves.

  "I had hoped our marriage would heal the breach between our two peoples," Tarn said in a weary voice. "I overestimated my peoples' love for me. I thought they would come to love you for my sake and accept you as their queen. Instead, we've deepened the divide."

  "I wouldn't go so far as that. We're but two people. There is still hope. Take my pupil Haruk, for instance. He is young but wise for his years. When he looks at me, he sees his weapons master, not a hill dwarf," Crystal said, smiling at the thought of the strong young Hylar warrior she had trained. After her marriage to Tarn, Haruk had joined their household and become her apprentice as part of an effort to ease the political tensions between Tarn and Jungor. Haruk was Jungor's nephew, the oldest son of Jungor's sister, a dwarf destined to be a powerful and influential leader among the Hylar. If his heart remained as pure as she knew it to be… "There is yet hope for the future," she concluded.

  "I have never regretted marrying you, though," Tarn wistfully said. "No matter what happens, I shall always know that I did the right thing. Ours was a political marriage, but I would never have gone through with it had I not loved you, even then."

  "You hardly knew me," Crystal laughed.

  "I knew enough. I had spies in your father's court."

  "Yes, I know," she said.

  "See! That's why I knew that you would be a queen worthy of the title. Beautiful, wise, a formidable warrior, and your father's most trusted councilor; nothing got by you, not even my most capable spies. I determined that I had to have you for my queen, and I always get my way," Tarn said, grinning fiercely.

  But Crystal's face grew serious. "For once, then, listen. My advice was good enough for my father, so it is certainly good enough for you, Tarn Bellowgranite." She lifted her head from his lap and looked long and hard into his eyes. "Swallow your insufferable pride. Go to the ceremony on the Isle of the Dead and honor the souls of the Hylar who have laid their bones in the ground. I will stay here with our son, and we will await your return together."

  Tarn closed his eyes, then nodded.

  18

  You wait here," the gully dwarf, Shnatz Ong, whispered around the corner.

  "We follow you."

  "You wait here," Shnatz repeated impatiently.

  "You say follow you."

  "That then. Now, you wait here!" Shnatz spun on his heel and began to creep along the narrow, dark passageway. He had gone several feet before he heard them coming up behind him again. He stopped, turned, and stamped his foot in anger, raising a cloud of dust. Someone sneezed.

  "What you doing? I say you wait there," Shnatz hissed.

  Twenty gully dwarves crept out of the shadows, cringing and mewling. One of them whined, "You not say how long we got to wait. We get scared. We not supposed to be here. This place forb… forb… "

  "Forbidden," Shnatz finished for him. "That why you got to be quiet, stay where I put you bunch of knotheads." Someone dropped a pickaxe clanging to the floor, and everyone, including Shnatz, cringed. The noise seemed to echo forever through the maze of dark, rubblestrewn halls and passageways that made up this part of the ruins.

  When the sound finally faded, Shnatz fairly shrieked, "Who did that? Come on, who did it?" There was a brief scuffle among the huddle of gully dwarves until one, a large, dull-faced lout, was booted to the front by the others. He slipped on the dusty floor as he skidded to a stop before Shnatz, catching himself on a section of fallen stone.

  "What the matter with you?" Shnatz demanded.

  "It slipped," the gully dwarf answered sheepishly.

  "Oh, yeah? That okay. Accidents happen. Like now." Shnatz lashed out and cracked the clumsy gully dwarf on top of the head with the hilt of a small dagger he carried concealed in his grubby fist. The gully dwarf clapped his hands to his pate and sank to the floor, moaning like a felled ox.

  "You dumb puhungs got to be quiet. Somebody catches you here, I hate to think what they do to you. This place forbidden, and that means you no go here. 'Cept now you got to go here 'cause that's what I tell you to do. You not do what I tell you to do, I hate to think what I do to you. You unnerstand?"

  The cringing gully dwarves stared at him blankly, unresponding. Shnatz sighed and said, "You got that?" They nodded, twenty grimy, knot-bearded faces bobbing so vigorously that it nearly made Shnatz seasick—even though he had never been to sea, unless you counted the great underground Urkhan Sea lying somewhere below him at this very moment. Shnatz got seasick every time he crossed the Urkhan Sea, despite the fact that it had neither wind nor waves, tides nor currents.

  "Dumb puhungs not even know what 'understand' means," Shnatz grumbled as he turned and started up the passage once more. When he heard them surge into motion behind him, following at his heels, he stopped even trying to scout ahead. There was little purpose to scouting ahead, anyway. He'd been exploring this area for months, and he knew for a fact that no one had been to this part of the ruins in a dozen years or more. Dust lay thick among the crumbled walls and fallen pillars, and the only footprints he saw on the floor as he crept forward were his own from two weeks ago. Not even his fellow gully dwarves had taken up residence in the place, and that was saying something. Gully dwarves generally moved into any place where they would be left alone by the other clans.

  But for some reason that not even Shnatz could name, gully dwarves had never invaded the ruins of Hybardin, the old home of the Hylar dwarves. There wasn't much left of it, for one thing. Weakened by the ravages of the Chaos dragons forty-one years ago, most of the great stalactite that had been the Hylar city had long since crumbled and fallen to the Urkhan Sea hundreds of feet below. This had led to the formation of a huge rocky island of jumbled ruins and broken stone that the Hylar called the Isle of the Dead. As with the ruins of Hybardin, the gully dwarves also avoided the Isle of the Dead. Only the Hylar went there anymore, and then only once a year, during the Festival of Lights.

  Shnatz continued to follow his own old footprints through the dust. There were two sets of footprints—one going in and the other coming out. Shnatz was glad to have the footprints to guide him, because the map he had drawn had proven itself to be worse than useless. Jungor had forced him to draw a map, but Shnatz was a gully dwarf, not a kender. He wasn't much good with anything that had to do with paper or pens or desks or government clerks asking him what his mother's name was. His map had started in the wrong place and led in a big circle right back to it. After the third go-round, he had blown his nose into the map and tossed it aside.

  Shnatz's footprints led through the dust of the cramped, broken passage, over piles of ruins and through narrow cracks into other halls and chambers filled with the charred bones of dead dwarves. Stripped of their flesh, one dwarf was as similar and as different as any other—Hylar, Daewar, Daergar, Theiwar, and Klar. You could not pick up any one skull and say this was the braincase of a noble Hylar lord. It might just as well be the skull of a scheming Daergar assassin, or a blood-mad Klar berserker with his face caked with white clay. Even a gully dwarfs bones might be mistaken for those of a Hylar youth.

  Shnatz didn't need to remind his band of twenty gully dwarves not to touch any of the skeletons. There was some power left in these old bones, power to chill the heart and fog the mind with terror. The gully dwarves wanted nothing more than to get beyond them. Finally, they left the scene of slaughter behind and entered a wide paved courtyard surrounded by darkly glaring windows and empty doorways. In the center of the courtyard, a fountain had once sent a stream of clear cold water jetting from the mouth of a cavorting wolf. But now the wolfs
head lay in the bottom of the dust-filled basin; its tail and one of its legs were broken off and lost amid the ruin of shattered stone that had fallen from the porticos of the surrounding residences.

  Shnatz's footprints crossed the courtyard in a meandering line, like a hound upon a scent. In places, the footprints bunched up and overran themselves. But Shnatz ignored the path now and made his way directly across the courtyard, to the place where the footsteps ended abruptly at a large paving stone completely free of any trace of dust. Fresh stone showed through in chips along its edges, and several lines of footprints led away from and back to it. Shnatz stopped here and pulled a small pry bar from some hidden fold of his second-hand tunic. He inserted it along the edge of the paving stone, and on the third try, the stone tilted. He caught it and slid it to the side before it could fall into the black hole beneath.

  He turned to his companions and said in as firm a voice as he could muster, "Wait here. You got it?" They nodded in unison, a sea of bobbing heads that made his stomach roll over.

  He stepped to the edge of the hole and dropped in, landing with a thump some twenty feet below and immediately splaying himself out on the stone to keep from sliding down the rather severe slope of the glassy floor. After a few moments to get his bearings, Shnatz slipped down the slope until he found the ladder. It wasn't much of a ladder. He had nailed it together from broken pieces of furniture that he scavenged from the ruins, and he certainly was no carpenter. Neither was he a stonemason, but he had managed to chip a pair of grooves out of the floor beneath the hole to set the ladder's feet in to keep them from slipping on the steep, glass-slick floor. Nevertheless, he was quite proud of his ladder and anxious to show it off, even if only to puhungs.

  That's when he heard the first one hit the floor with a yelp and a clang of tools. He quickly stepped aside as the gully dwarf went shrieking by, sliding on his back with his pickaxe skittering and sparking behind him. Shnatz didn't even bother to try to catch him. Instead, he hefted the ladder and rushed upslope to try to stop the next one. The cries of the first one died away behind him even as the next one slammed into the ground in front of him. He threw his ladder down and grabbed her before the unfortunate creature could gather any momentum. She clung to his arm in terror, while at the same time instinctively catching her hammer as it streaked by, spitting sparks.