by Dragon Lance
“I have a hunch your idea will work very well.” Willen nodded. “We’ll discuss it while you eat your eggs.”
Thus it was that, when the drums spoke of the massacre of Mace Hammerstand and his hundred at the old citadel in front of the Daewar tunnel, Quill Runebrand, keeper of scrolls, was well on his way toward that place, leading a strange procession. In addition to armed guards and flankers, his company included dozens of Daewar delvers with tool-carts piled high, three wagons loaded with pots and casks of such substances as leached ash, powdered brimstone, cave salts, free soot, and finely ground graphite, and an ancient white-haired Daewar putterer riding guard over an assemblage of mixing vats, dry-forges, and strange tools.
Through a moonlit night they traveled as fast as their Daergar night-guides could trot, and when the dawn brought the sound of drums they were high on the eastern slopes of Sky’s End, heading around the bulge of the great peak by precipitous trails, heading for the northeast crests.
First light brought a dizzying vista of enormous distances – the lesser promontories of the giant mountain rising beyond their shallow coves, and beyond them, miles away and thousands of feet lower, the winding ribbon of the Road of Passage coming up from human Ergoth toward the Great Gorge where old Kal-Thax began. In the far distance were the spreading, vast plains of southern Ergoth – the realm of humans.
But few among the hurrying travelers on this morning paused to marvel at the view. The drums had told them of the massacre – by some creature that seemed to be pure rage – of Mace Hammerstand and his hundred guards.
Quill had drummers come forward to respond, to learn who was at the scene and what was happening. Cale Greeneye and a force of Neidar rangers were there, the drum-call answered, along with the remaining companies of the Roving Guard from Thorbardin. Leaderless now, the Thorbardin companies had attached themselves to the Neidar and were awaiting orders.
And where was the thing, the killing beast?
They did not know, except that it seemed to have gone east. Tracks had been found, but not yet followed.
Quill hurried back to the wagons where old Pack Lodestone guarded his arcane barrels and casks. “You can start mixing your concoctions now, revered one,” he said. “We will soon be where they are needed.”
“Concoctions?” Pack fussed. “Failed concoctions, so far. What good is a forge fuel that refuses to burn in a civilized manner? Who wants stuff that does nothing but stink and blow up? Maybe I’ll try something a little different this time.”
“To tarnish with your forge fuel!” Quill snapped. “What we want is exactly what you did last time, outside of Northgate. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember! What do you think I am? Senile?” The old dwarf cocked his head, raising one bushy eyebrow. “What do you want that stuff for?”
“Never mind what I want it for,” Quill said. “Using it is my job. Making it is yours. Just be sure you make a lot of it.”
By the time the caravan came in sight of the old citadel, downslope on the shoulder of the great mountain, old Pack Lodestone was busily stirring great vats of gray-black, dusty-looking substance atop the rolling wagon, complaining and muttering to himself. “This is no proper way to combine a mixture. Probably be a lot better if I could saturate all of this for blending, then set up drying tables. Better compound, that way. Far more control of consistency. Of course, it would all have to be reground after it dried. But he says do it like last time, so I’ll do it like last time. Quick and dirty and who cares? Rust and corruption! These youngsters! All push and prod, and not a single ounce of patience to the dozen of them. …”
While Quill went down to confer with Cale Greeneye, the Daewar delvers went to work high on the slope, half a mile above and behind the old abandoned citadel that guarded the opening of the Daewar tunnel. With chisels and mauls, picks and prybars, scoops and stone drills, they began a wide, narrow cut in the stone of the mountain – a cut that would wedge downward to a distance of at least forty feet. And as they worked, Pack Lodestone fumed and muttered and mixed vat after vat of dry, gray-black dust made of cave salt collected by roaming Klar foragers, yellow brimstone from Einar delvings north of Redrock, and a blend of ground graphite from Daergar mines and powdered soot harvested from the shields of Theiwar furnaces.
Quill Runebrand wandered among the carnage of the beast’s killing field, following Cale Greeneye. The bodies – and pieces of bodies – of the murdered guardsmen had been removed for burial, but the signs of slaughter were everywhere. Bits of armor, broken weapons and implements, shreds of clothing, and ruined field packs were strewn about like rubbish, and everywhere – on the ground, on the walls, even overhead where old timbers still jutted – was drying, congealing blood. The carcasses of several horses, not yet removed, were mute evidence of the awful fury of the thing that had killed them. They were literally torn to pieces.
“What … what sort of thing would do this?” Quill asked, stunned and ashen-faced.
“Rage,” the Neidar said. “Its name is Rage.”
“You know its name? How?”
“It could have no other name,” Cale said icily.
At the battered seal of the old tunnel, Quill stared at the broken stone plug and the dark shadows beyond it.
“It did this?”
“It is very strong,” Cale affirmed. “It broke the seal down and went inside, but then it came out again and went eastward. Don’t worry. I had runners with torches search inside. The second seal is still in place.”
“So much for an impregnable seal.” Quill shook his head. “By Reorx, I hope what we are doing here works.”
“Exactly what are you doing?” Cale looked uphill, where delving was in progress.
“We are going to … at least we hope to … look, I’d just as soon not try to explain. If it works, I’ll tell you about it afterward. Just accept that Willen Ironmaul ordered us to try, and we are trying. But in the meantime – just in case it does work – I’d suggest you and all your people back off until we are finished.”
“Back off? How far?”
“I don’t know.” Quill shrugged. “For safety’s sake, I’d say at least a mile.”
“A mile?” The Neidar gaped at him, then shrugged. “If you say so. But let me know when you’ve finished.”
Quill stroked his beard, gazing thoughtfully up the slope. “Oh, if it works, you’ll know.”
*
The finest delvers in the known world were the Daewar of Thorbardin. And the delvers with Quill Runebrand were the best of those. Before the sun stood above the Anviltops to the west, their trench was completed. It was a V-shaped trough, cut straight downward into the slope. It ran for a thousand feet straight across the mountainside and was forty-eight feet at its deepest part, in the center.
Along the upper side of the cut a hundred dwarves worked with barrows and spades, dumping layer after layer of the stuff Pack Lodestone had mixed. Like coarse black dust, the mixture cascaded down to bury the bottom of the trench. When all of it had been shoveled in, the entire bottom of the cut was a wide path of black, seven feet deep. By Pack’s estimation, they had deposited three tons of the mixture. Quill Runebrand guessed it was closer to five.
When all that was done, dwarven workers trundled stone cuttings to the trough and dumped them in, burying all but the center five feet of black material under fifteen feet of rubble. Then, carefully, Quill lit a lantern, hung it from a braced wooden frame above the exposed center of the cut, and looped a noose of light cable around the frame’s supporting brace. Like people walking on eggs, the dwarves hurried away uphill, playing out line behind them as they went. Three hundred yards uphill they ran out of line. “This will have to do,” Quill said.
The delvers and crew dwarves bellied down behind whatever cover they could find, crouching behind boulders and outcroppings, cringing in shallow holes, while the armed guardsmen ringed them, holding shields above themselves and the workers.
Quill glanced aside at Pac
k Lodestone. “You’re sure you mixed that stuff just like before?”
“Of course I’m sure,” the old dwarf snapped. “Do you think I don’t know my business?”
“If your business is making fuel for tinsmith forges, I’m not sure,” Quill admitted.
“So it went wrong,” Pack grumped. “At least give me credit for being consistent.”
“Well, I guess we’re about to find out,” the lorekeeper said. With a muttered reminder to Reorx about dwarves being his best and therefore favored people, Quill tugged at the cable. The long line scratched against the downslope, came taut, and Quill pulled harder. Far below, the bright lantern on its frame jiggled and swayed. Then, abruptly, the frame support pulled free, and the frame sagged. The lantern dropped into the hole.
For an instant, nothing happened. Then, with a roar like all the thunders ever heard, the cut in the mountainside erupted, spewing a sheer, hurtling wall of stone, dust, and smoke skyward, propelled by a blinding flash of light. Higher and higher the debris flew, rising toward the feathery clouds far above, driven upward by a giant wall of instant fire. The rising clouds caught the late sunlight and flared to brilliant life. The very mountain slope seemed to shiver, and little landslides of gravel and dust swept down in rivulets along a mile or more of mountainside. The thunderous roar was drowned by a deeper, rumbling thunder that grew in volume.
“Great Reorx’s red rivets!” someone shouted. “Quill, what have you done?”
The wall of debris blanked out the entire vista to the north and east, seeming to grow higher by the second. Then a pebble bounced off a guardsman’s shield, and a fist-sized rock thumped into the ground an inch from Quill’s knee. More stones fell, and more, a pelting shower of debris pummeling and battering the entire slope like stone rain. And below, lost in the dust and smoke, the ominous roar became a deafening, cascading drumbeat of sound, growing louder and louder.
Minutes passed, and still it rained stone on the slope of Sky’s End. Then the thunder of falling debris faded, and the roaring, cascading noise became more distant, rumbling away down the mountainside. Here and there, guardsmen tilted their shields, and workers peered out into the haze of dust that was just beginning to clear as winds from above swept down the slope. The near edge of the great, delved cut became visible, but beyond it, there seemed to be nothing. Quill Runebrand and Pack Lodestone crept from their shelter, peered around, then started down the slope, followed by others.
At the cut, they stopped and gawked. Where there had been a neat, delved cleft across the mountainside, now there was a cliff, forty feet high. Beyond the foot of it was altered terrain. The entire slope below was a sea of gravel and debris slanting downward toward the old citadel … or where the old citadel should have been. There was nothing visible there now. A massive avalanche had buried everything beneath millions of tons of stone rubble. And strong on the evening air was the stench of rotten eggs.
Carefully, they scaled down the new cliff and made their way to what they guessed was the level where the citadel had been. There was nothing there. The avalanche caused by Pack Lodestone’s mixed powders had carried away everything standing and buried the entire site – in fact, the entire mountainside – fifty to a hundred feet deep.
“It worked,” Quill breathed. Impulsively, he grabbed Pack Lodestone by the shoulders and danced the old dwarf around in enthusiastic circles. “It worked!” he crowed. “The old tunnel is gone. Gone as though it had never been here! Nothing, not magic nor beasts nor armies nor the passing of ages, will open it again! The tunnel is a tunnel no more! It is a tunnel that never was!”
“Let go of me!” Pack growled, breaking away to glare at the lorekeeper. “Of course it worked. I made that stuff myself.”
Chapter 13
A STRANGE ALLIANCE
Pack Lodestone’s blast – or, as the scrolls of Thorbardin would record it, Quill Runebrand’s blast – changed for all time the profile of the lower northeast slopes of Sky’s End Peak. Cascading stone was sheared away from the mountain’s face by the explosion, leaving a fresh smoke-blackened precipice along the farthest shoulder, a precipice that tapered downward as it curved around the mountainside. Below, a new feature was added. The great avalanche spread a deep slope of heavy rubble downward and outward, fanning out on the curvature of the mountainside to bury everything in its path. The old citadel, built by Daewar in times long gone, no longer existed. The tunnel which had begun there, leading through Sky’s End to what was now Thorbardin, was buried beneath masses of stone, capped by a huge shelf of granite that had sheared away and fallen with the lesser debris.
The entire fan of fallen stone extended for more than a mile, and a side quake to the southeast had dumped other stone-fall down a deep cove, almost to the bridge where the Road of Passage crossed the Great Gorge. The rockfall had stopped just short of destroying the bridge. Secondary avalanches above the main shear, high on the face of the peak, had opened deep rifts in the mountainside on each side of a natural prominence, and spilled stone-fall downward to create twin swales below.
Forever after, the northeast face of Sky’s End – as seen from the human lands across the Gorge, beyond the foothills, and on a clear day from as far away as Xak Tsaroth – would resemble the face of a giant, angry dwarf with deep-set, narrowed eyes, bushy brows, and a pug nose above a wide, downturned mouth beneath which spread a wide, full beard. The side-fall, south and east above the bridge, even resembled a thick, powerful fist raised in challenge. It was a sculpture that, even though accidental, would stand for centuries as the largest piece of statuary in the entire world.
Quill Runebrand was ecstatic at the success of his venture, and most of those with him were shocked and stunned at what had occurred. Those below, who had waited in the valley, had mixed emotions for a time. Guard units spent most of the night rounding up the horses that had bolted and scattered at the explosion, and a company of dour Neidar set off immediately around the slopes to see what damage might have been done to the road and the bridge. It was bright morning before everyone was reassembled.
“You’re just lucky that fall stopped short of the bridge,” Cale Greeneye pointed out to the lorekeeper. “I expect the Council of Thanes would have personally drawn and quartered you had the bridge gone down.”
“I guess we used more mix than was really required,” Quill conceded. “But you’ll have to admit, nothing is going into that tunnel again. It would take a cataclysm to open it.”
*
For many miles around, the explosion had various results. The flash was seen as far away as the border posts below the promontory, east of Southgate, where a dwarven trade caravan had just delivered a large supply of weapons to human traders. It was the biggest single order of crafted armaments ever traded outside Kal-Thax. Thousands of fine dwarven steel blades, shields, helms, and various weapons of force were on their way east, into Ergoth. Where they were going was a secret even to the dwarves. Still, the third Lord Charon, whom the dwarves had learned to trust, had given his word to Olim Goldbuckle that the weapons were not for use in any way against Thorbardin.
Olim had his own ideas, though, about who wanted the weapons and why. The wily Daewar and his merchant-spies kept close watch on the world outside. Even better than the wide-ranging Neidar, Olim Goldbuckle knew the ebbs and flows of the realms beyond the dwarven lands.
“I suspect they are going to Xak Tsaroth,” he had told Willen Ironmaul when the trade order was first received.
“To the overlords?” Willen frowned.
“No, but maybe to those who are tired of the overlords.” Olim replied, grinning.
*
At Northgate of Thorbardin, the blast was felt and its echoes heard, and guards were redoubled the length of Anvil’s Echo.
On the western slopes of Cloudseeker Mountain, a tiny creature, half the height and a fourth the weight of a male dwarf, had just completed the scaling of a great wall to get out of the hole where her bird had left her. It had taken her most
of a day to climb from the bottom of what the dwarves called the Valley of the Thanes up to the face of the mountain, and when the shock waves from fifty miles away reached her, they tumbled her backward, flailing and grasping, halfway down the height she had just climbed. For a time she clung there, hanging on to precarious fingerholds, then she took a deep breath and blinked big, lustrous eyes. “Wow!” she breathed. “I wish I’d seen whatever that was!”
*
Surreptitious wizards, making their way toward Thorbardin from the southeast, dived for cover when the sky lit up from the explosion, and several of them whispered abrupt spells, not well thought out. The resulting havoc was intense. Shielding spells collided with shielding spells, and wizards flew in all directions. Fires blazed up here and there, rain fell in several places, a whirlwind danced among them, and a sprig of thorny adze-brush became a nest of hissing, writhing vipers.
Days would pass before the wizards got themselves all sorted out and despelled – and before those few who had inadvertently sent themselves on long journeys could be found and brought back.
*
In a clearing beyond the Einar fields below Cloudseeker, three pairs of eyes turned abruptly northward when the explosion occurred. One pair of eyes was dwarven, the other two human, and they glanced aside only momentarily before returning to the business at hand. All day the three had been here, in this clearing; the situation was a standoff. Damon Omenborn had contrived the circumstances, then gone off toward Thorbardin with Willow Summercloud tagging after him.
Those who remained were the dour Theiwar guardsman, Tag Salan, the human Cobar warrior, Quist Redfeather, and the red-strap wizard, Megistal.
Damon had told them to wait until he returned, and wait they did, because Tag Salan demanded it.
The wizard was protected from the Cobar only by the fact that Quist Redfeather had given his word to the dwarves that – as long as Megistal behaved himself – he would not put an arrow into him. The Cobar, in turn, was protected from the wizard’s spells by the fact that, at first hint of sorcery, Tag Salan had solemnly promised to bury a heavy axe in the wizard’s skull.
