by Markus Heitz
“Yes, master.” Goda did not even ask the reason for the order. She put down her weapon and shield and got ready for the task.
Ireheart picked them both up. “Who said you were to put those down?” he said bitingly. “A dwarf never leaves weapons lying about. And certainly never puts down his weapon if he’s only got the one.” He nodded at her. “Carry the wood, then you can start the search of the vaults.”
She wrinkled her brow. “What search?”
Boïndil rattled the metal balls of the night star and started to swing it. “Later. I’m going to hide it and you can’t go to bed till you find it.” He stepped round the corner. He was only just out of sight and chuckled to himself. He heard her give a big sigh as she tried to lift the first of the beams onto her shoulder. He was thrilled to bits with his plan. He’d think up some more good ideas soon. He’d be rid of the child within a few orbits, he was sure.
Tungdil stepped quietly into the bedroom.
Balyndis lay under a thick blanket. Her eyes were closed and her face was half hidden in the pillow. The long dark hair made her face look chalk white in contrast: she really did look weak and sick. Cautiously he sat down next to her, thinking through what he had prepared to say; he stretched out a hand to touch her gently on the shoulder.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think I was dreaming,” she whispered. “A fine-looking dwarf has entered my chamber.” She opened her brown eyes and reached for his left hand with her right. “You’re looking good, Tungdil Goldhand. It’s been a long time since I saw you looking like that. What does this change in appearance signify?”
“It’s not just an outward change.” He kissed her fingers. “I’ve been a fool. Boïndil forced me to see the error of my ways. I’ve stopped drinking,” he said quietly, looking her straight in the eyes. “I was making you suffer for the pain and the guilt that I was feeling and I behaved like a…” He swallowed.
“… like a stubborn, blind drunkard, self-obsessed and tortured by his conscience,” she completed for him without mercy. “You mean to say you’ve been off on a trip, had a chat with Ireheart and now you’re completely transformed?” Her surprise was obvious and her voice incredulous. “You’ve changed, just like that, in a few orbits?”
Tungdil nodded.
“How? Tell me everything, so that I can believe you.”
He told her what had happened at the edge of the precipice and how his warrior friend had forced him to choose between life and death. “The wall round my mind broke down and I saw things clearly for the first time in many cycles. I can only beg for forgiveness,” he said quietly. “Will you believe that I have changed?”
When she put her arms around him, Tungdil started to cry. He embraced her in return, pressing her to him; he closed his eyes. He smelt her hair, felt the soft down on her cheeks and her warmth against his skin.
They sat like that for a long time, holding each other tightly, each enjoying the nearness of the other—a closeness shared once more. Shared wholeheartedly.
“It’s not just your fault that we grew apart. I withdrew and left you on your own,” she confessed. “It won’t happen again.”
“Never again.”
She hugged him and took a long look at his face. “Give me time to get used to the new old Tungdil. This seems too good to be true.”
“It is true, Balyndis,” he smiled, but then a shadow fell across his face. “You look ill,” he said, his voice full of concern.
“It’s just the remains of a chill,” she answered. “I’m feeling much better now.” She kissed him on the brow. “You’ve met Goda?”
“She was quite a surprise. Especially for Ireheart.”
She grinned. “It will do him no harm if he has to contend with a dwarf-woman.”
Tungdil looked surprised. “You knew about her plan?”
“It was my idea.”
“What?”
Balyndis chuckled and sat back against the pillows. “When she turned up and asked if she could stay, I had no idea who she was. We talked a lot that first evening and I learned that she had been to the Blue Mountains. She had hoped to find you here to ask you where Boïndil was. The secondlings refused to tell her.”
“You have set a young child on him, not a dwarf-woman.”
“She’s four and forty cycles old. You can see by her stature that she’s no longer a child,” Balyndis contradicted with amusement. “Ireheart will soon discover her female charms.”
“She’s related to the dwarf-woman he killed. There’s not likely to be any romance blossoming between those two,” he countered. “What was her original plan before you suggested this approach?”
“She wanted to kill him.”
Tungdil stood up, opened the buckles on his chain shirt and let it fall to the ground. Then he hung it carefully on the stand by the door. “She would never have been able to. But by the time her training is over, things might be different.” He slipped off his leather over-garment and stood before her in his shirt, breeches and boots. “She’s a thirdling, Balyndis. She’ll have picked up all the fighting skills and soon be better at it than him. Do you want her to kill him?”
She folded her hands and laid them on the blanket. “It won’t go that far.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Balyndis shrugged her shoulders and kissed him again, this time on the tip of his nose. “I can’t really say,” she admitted. “Call it intuition.”
“You women and your intuition,” he murmured and gave in. “Let us pray to Vraccas that you’re right about this.” He looked at his armor. “Have you heard what’s happening in Girdlegard?” When she shook her head, he summed up all the recent events he and Ireheart had experienced or heard about. “You’re sure that Goda isn’t after the diamond? What does your intuition say on that score?”
“It was good in the past when you could meet a child of the Smith and not have to worry about whether they were telling the truth,” she groaned. “I can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but in all the orbits she’s been here there hasn’t been anything suspicious about her.” She stroked his bearded chin. “The stone is exactly where we hid it.”
“I’ll go and tell it I’m home.”
“I’ll make us something to eat. If I know you and Boïndil, you’ll both be ravenous.” Balyndis got up and quickly threw on a simple woolen dress over her linen nightgown, then put on her boots. “The meal will be ready soon, so don’t spend too long talking to your precious one.”
“My precious,” he hissed, imitating the stance of the greedy rock gnome that grabbed and kept anything that looked valuable. Then he laughed and walked out of the chamber hand in hand with his wife. Soon their ways parted and he took a different corridor, using an oil lamp to light his path into the other gallery where once Lot-Ionan’s apprenticed famuli had had their quarters. Most of the iron doors were still in place. Behind them the student initiates had followed their studies of magic and had dreamed of one day inheriting Lot-Ionan’s enchanted realm.
Now nothing was left. No magic, no enchanted realms. No Lot-Ionan.
Tungdil entered the laboratorium.
It was in this very room that a trick had once been played on him that had resulted in most of the fittings and equipment going up in flames; it had not been his fault. The flasks full of elixirs, the pots of ointments, the glass tubes containing extracts and essences, all that priceless experimentation had melted into one dangerous mass. A powerful explosion had ensued and little had survived of the benches, shelves, tables and apparatus.
And that was still how it looked. He stepped over the splintered glass and the broken pottery, walking over to where a pile of glass was all that remained of what had been complicated distillation equipment. Before the explosion.
The dwarf bent down and rummaged around. He didn’t locate the diamond immediately. There was so much broken glass that it was practically invisible. Nobody would ever find it if they didn’t suspect it was hidden in the rubbish.
Whenever he took the stone in his hand he waited for the jewel to show him somehow whether it was just a diamond or the most powerful, magic artifact in all Girdlegard.
And, as always, he waited in vain. He put the stone back in its mound of glass fragments and pushed it down to the bottom of the pile.
Girdlegard,
Kingdom of the Fourthlings,
Brown Mountains,
Early Summer, 6241st Solar Cycle
A shrill whistle sounded up through the broad shaft and straightaway the bell rang in the winch room. Apart from one alcove, the entire room was filled with a strictly logical system of pulleys, winches, winding gear, cogwheels and levers, weights and counterweights in every conceivable size, all carefully proportioned. The alcove was the lift master’s post.
Ingbar Onyxeye of the clan of the Stone Turners, faithfully carrying out his important duties, had recognized the signal. “Here it comes!” he shouted back down.
His hands worked the various iron levers in turn, each as big as a dwarf; these released the brake blocks from the rollers and the wheels. Machinery whirred loudly into action.
The rotating parts set up a draught that smelled of oil and lubricating grease; the sheer mass of weights on the end of their chains pulled the lift upwards without a single dwarf wasting his muscle power. By this means, forty hundredweight could be heaved up easily.
Ingbar closed his eyes to listen better. Responding to the sounds, he took his oil can and applied lubrication where the machinery needed it to run more smoothly. It was intolerable to know metal was rubbing against metal, causing lasting damage. Oil would prevent unnecessary wear.
Suddenly there was a sound the lift master had never heard before, and the whole winding gear came to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” he muttered, swiftly checking all the most vulnerable parts of the equipment. He couldn’t find anything untoward. The cogwheels were intact, as were the chains, and the pulley belts had not come out of their runners.
Ingbar went over to the shaft. Right at the bottom he could see a pale shimmer of light coming from the lift cage. It had to be at least fifty paces down. “Oi, you down there! Has the pulley jammed?” he yelled.
In reply the little bell rang wildly, somersaulting and ringing fit to bust, so loud that it hurt his ears. Then its cord broke and the bell fell silent. “What are you doing down there?” he called, worried now.
The chain jerked, started and stopped, the metal screeching as the load increased.
“Have you gone mad? What are you doing? Are you dancing down there in the cage?” Ingbar stared at the winding gear. The whole system was running in reverse and the lift was dropping down. He ran back over to the levers and applied the brakes. “You’re overloaded. Unload something quickly, otherwise…”
With a scream of grinding metal the first brake gave way. A high-pitched metallic clang resounded as the other holding devices failed one after another. The bolts shot out like bullets. One of them, sharp-edged, flew through the chains and pierced the lift master’s leg. Slowly the chains unwound, sending lift and cargo down toward the bottom.
“What the hell?” Ingbar clamped a hand over the gaping wound. There was no time to bandage it now. He had to save the workers in the cage and stop them crashing to their deaths.
He limped over to the ramps where the extra counterweights were stored. They used these when particularly heavy loads were being transported; they would be applied to the winches, but nobody had ever tried to do that while the lift was already running.
Ingbar knew the winding gear very well indeed; he knew the ins and outs of the system and its peculiarities and foibles. He fixed new weights to a long chain, attached a huge hook and thrust it into the emergency slot on one of the winches that was still moving.
The hook sat firm. The chain came taut with a clank and pulled the new weights down toward itself. Because of the tons of extra ballast the chain was prevented from unwinding, so the lift came to a standstill.
“Are you all right down there?” he called down the shaft. The cage with the workers must be a hundred paces down, he reckoned, judging by the chain length. They’d stopped by one of the secondary galleries. “Good,” he shouted. “Now unload the shale-tailings or some of you will have to get out. Otherwise it’ll never move.”
He waited a while to be sure they had followed instructions, then removed the counterweights and set the winding-gear into action, to get the lift up at last. For brake power he took a long iron bar and inserted it into one of the smallest cogwheels; as soon as the cage arrived he jammed the bar all the way in to block the cog. The cage had come up.
“That was a near thing.” Ingbar wondered why the lights had gone out. The faint glow given by the lamps in the engine room was not strong enough to show what was inside the cage. The iron door rattled open. “I’ll have to close the shaft down till we’ve renewed the brakes. What were you…?” What he saw robbed him of the power of speech.
Huge figures stepped out of the lift cage. They were armed to the teeth, carrying cudgels and shields with unfamiliar writing. But one glance at the brutal faces with the jutting tusks was enough to tell the dwarf what he had here: Orcs!
“To arms!” he screamed, drawing out his ax. “Greenskins!” Before he knew it, a missile flew toward him and hit him on the brow. It knocked him flying and he collapsed. Half conscious, he imagined he saw a pink-eyed orc bending over him, fingering his skull, then disappearing…
When Ingbar came round later he was still lying in the engine room. He could hear the rattle of chains. Groaning, he struggled upright and felt for the lump on his head. Next to him a stone lay on the ground. The orcs must have thought he was dead, no two ways about it. They would never leave a dwarf alive.
Footsteps were approaching and in the torchlight he could see a band of warriors coming up. “Ingbar! Did the greenskins come this way?” one of them asked him urgently.
“They came up here, but whether…” He looked for the lift cage. It was gone! “No… Look! They’re on their way down.”
The warrior stared grimly and helped him to his feet. “Then bring them up again!”
Ingbar limped over to the machinery, adjusted some of the cogwheels and attached extra weights again. The orcs had collected a lot of booty during their raid on the Brown Mountains, it seemed. The cage was overloaded. “What happened?”
“We hoped you could tell us that,” replied the dwarf. His companions arrayed themselves in a semicircle round the shaft, crossbows at the ready; the enemy would be met with a hail of bolts. “The orcs appeared from nowhere, overcame the guards and stole the diamond.”
“The diamond?” Ingbar was horrified. “What are the monsters planning to do?”
One of the warriors took a look down the shaft. “Another twenty paces, and they’re up,” he reported, moving into place.
“We don’t know. Notice anything unusual about them?” asked the dwarf.
“No, not…” Ingbar hesitated. “Yes! One of them had pink eyes.” He gave a brief description of events. “And when I came round, you arrived.” He stopped speaking, for the cage had arrived. The door stayed shut. So maybe the orcs were afraid to come out.
“Come out and face us, you cowards!” called the warrior. “You can’t escape!” Nothing happened, so he sent one of his men over to open the iron door.
That was when Ingbar realized what had been bothering him: the cage was too heavy! Whatever was in there it couldn’t be the orcs; because before he’d pulled them up with the conventional forty hundredweight. Now he’d applied the forty plus the extra counterweights. No diamond in the whole of Girdlegard was that heavy!
The soldier who’d been sent forward to the lift freed the catch and pulled the door open
a little way.
A steel arm shot out through the narrow gap and forced the doors wide. A cloud of steam hissed from the cage, enveloping the astonished dwarves. They staggered, fighting for air; the scorching fumes hurt their lungs and stung their eyes; water droplets formed on their cold armor.
Clicks, clanks and rattles; a rain of crossbow bolts shot through the air randomly, mowing down several of the soldiers. They fell to the stone floor, dead or injured.
“Get back!” cried Ingbar. He knew what it was that had got itself transported up in the lift. All the dwarf regions had by now received the warnings of the death machines wreaking havoc in the mines of the children of the Smith. There were at least a dozen of these machines now, that was for sure. And he knew there was little chance of combating them.
The mist cleared enough for him to see his immediate surroundings. “I’ll send it back down before it can get out of the cage,” he coughed into the vapor cloud. He unhooked the weights from the winch-pulleys and stretched out his arm for the iron rod blocking the vital cogwheel.
At that point a monstrous shadow appeared out of the fog next to him. An iron vice-grip snapped at him, biting down on his left arm.
Ingbar was lifted up and whirled against the roof as if he were a doll. It felt like being in the mouth of a dragon. From up here he could see the back of the devilish machine, as strongly armored as the front. Dwarf-warriors were courageously attacking, but the machine rolled steadily forwards over the bodies of the dead and wounded.
He could see how the rod was slipping under the cogwheel. It was being forced out of true. The winch gave way under the sheer weight, having no ballast, and the cage shot down to the depths.
Pulleys, cogwheels and rollers worked faster and faster, chains unwound at great speed. But Ingbar’s plan had failed. The devil machine had already left the cage.
