The History of Krynn: Vol IV

by Dragon Lance

  With nothing else to do, Derkin stood still, waiting. A minute passed, then another, and suddenly a howl of pain echoed around the pit. He turned in time to see a human pitch forward onto the ground, screaming. Then another fell a few feet away, and another, their screams joining the first as if in chorus. Other humans hurried toward them, and Derkin saw a wooden club materialize beside one man and lash out at him. The man fell, as the others had.

  By the stone outcrop, the lounging guard stood erect, gawking at the melee out in the pit, then drew his club and hurried toward it. Keeping his invisible cloak tight around him, Derkin raced to the wall, found the shadowed hole behind the stone, and stepped into it, then stopped. “Hole?” he muttered. “There is no hole here. It’s a dead end.” He turned, started out of the shallow trap, and collided with something solid and invisible. Thrashing legs appeared as Calan fell backward, then disappeared again. “Watch where you’re going!” his angry voice demanded. “I told you to wait here, didn’t I?” A callused hand appeared and pushed Derkin back into the shadows.

  “You said there was a hole here, a way to escape,” Derkin rasped.

  “There is!” Calan spat. “Just be quiet and hold on to my shoulder.”

  It was only two steps from the opening to the back of the concavity, but as they approached it, the rough stone receded, and the opening became a lengthening tunnel. “Magic!” Derkin rumbled.

  “Of course it’s magic,” Calan said, ahead of him. “Shut up and come on. I don’t like magic any more than you do.”

  “Then why are you using it?”

  “Stop complaining. It’s the only way. Come on.”

  The tunnel lengthened ahead of them, dim and curving, seeming totally dark, yet somehow lighted faintly by a slight, greenish glow that came from nowhere.

  “I thought you weren’t going to kill any more guards back there,” Derkin snapped, still peeved at the seemingly senseless killings of the sleeping guards outside the cell.

  “I didn’t kill these,” Calan snapped. “I just broke some kneecaps to make them yell. It worked. They yelled.”

  “How did you find this tunnel?”

  “A friend showed it to me. Will you stop yammering and hurry? All this magic makes me nervous.”

  A few steps farther on, the tunnel widened, ending in a small cave deep within the mountain stone. The same slight, greenish glow provided just enough light to see. Calan stopped, shook free of Derkin’s hand, and became visible from the feet up as he pulled off his unseen cloak. “We won’t need these now,” he said. “From here on there will be no one to see us.”

  Derkin pulled off his concealing garb and breathed deeply. As with most dwarves, the very presence of magic was offensive to him. He tossed the cloak aside, then immediately wished he had not. It might take an hour of crawling around to find the thing by touch, and, magic or not, such a thing might prove useful again.

  As though reading his mind, the old Daewar rasped, “Forget about the cloaks. I told you, we won’t need them anymore.”

  The only feature of the place was a shallow, dark bowl resting on the stone floor, and Calan approached it. Derkin followed Calan, stooping once to pick up the unseen cloak he had dropped. He could not see it, but his fingers found it. Quickly, he rolled it, thrust it under his tunic, and secured it beneath the chain wound around his waist.

  The darkwood bowl contained an inch of milky liquid. Calan squatted beside it, staring into its silent, mysterious depths. Derkin glanced at the bowl, then went on past, to the back wall of the cave. With spread hands, he started exploring its surface, wondering where the next tunnel would appear.

  Behind him, he heard Calan say, “Despaxas? We are here.”

  Derkin turned, but there was no one there except the old dwarf squatting beside the dark bowl. With a shrug, he turned back to the wall. “Where is the next tunnel?” he asked. “I can’t find any …”

  Abruptly, the stone seemed to swim before him. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, and disoriented. He closed his eyes, opened them again, blinked, and fell on his back. Overhead, stars glittered in a vast sky, and the light of a rising red moon silhouetted the branches of a tree. Not far away, precipitous slopes rose on both sides, great walls of stone climbing away toward the sky. He struggled upright, feeling slightly sick to his stomach. A few feet away, old Calan squatted on stony ground, bracing himself with his one arm and shaking his head. “Rust, but I hate that,” he growled.

  “What … what happened?” Derkin gasped. “Where are we?”

  “Away from the mines,” Calan said. “I told you I knew a way out.” Still shaking his head, the old dwarf got to shaky feet and rubbed his belly with a gnarled hand. “What happened was a transport spell. Magicians use them sometimes.”

  “You’re a magician?” Derkin glared at him.

  “You mind your mouth,” Calan snapped. “I certainly am not a magician! But Despaxas is.”

  “Who is Despaxas?”

  Calan turned, pointing. “He is,” he said.

  From the shadows of a grove of conifers, a lean, cowled figure appeared. Derkin could see nothing of him but his stature and form as he strode forward. But one thing was clear: he was no dwarf.

  The figure approached, lithe and graceful even in the muffling of his full robe, and Derkin squinted, trying to discern his features. Then the newcomer spoke, and his voice was rich and clear, musical as few human voices and no dwarven voices were. “Welcome to freedom, Derkin Winterseed,” he said. “I am Despaxas.”

  “Where are we?” the Hylar demanded.

  “About four miles from where you were,” the hooded one said quietly. “This is Tharkas Pass. The mines of Klanath are back that way, to the north. And south of here, through the pass, lie the dwarven lands … or what used to be dwarven lands.”

  Derkin looked where the figure had pointed, then swung back. “What do you mean, ‘used to be’?” he demanded.

  “You think you were the only one captured by slavers in these past years?” Calan rasped. “Well, you weren’t. The human emperor’s soldiers hold the dwarven mines now, and the lands all the way to Sky’s End. And all the miners who worked those mines are now slaves in them, just as you have been a slave in Klanath.”

  “I never made it that far,” Derkin said grimly. “We were attacked on the road south of the Tharkas mines by human raiders. My escorts were all killed. Only one survived with me, and he died of his wounds before they got us to Klanath.”

  “Those were no raiders,” the hooded one said. “Those were scouts for the assault force that invaded Kal-Thax and took over the Tharkas mines. Only a very few dwarves survived that assault, got away, and made it to Thorbardin.”

  “Then the alarm was spread?”

  “It was,” the cowled one said sadly. “But no one came. The tribes were at war again within Thorbardin, and no one thought it important to defend the mines outside the undermountain realm.”

  “Gods,” Derkin whispered, realizing the enormity of what he had just heard. Since his capture, Kal-Thax had been invaded by humans. And now the humans ruled the northern ranges. “And what of Thorbardin now?” he asked.

  “It stands,” the figure assured him. “There are reports that some order has been restored, at least temporarily. But still there is no help for these northern realms.”

  Again Derkin squinted, peering into the shadows of the cowl. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want of me, and how do you know all this?”

  With an eloquent shrug, Despaxas reached up and pulled back his cowl, dropping it to his shoulders. Rising moonlight revealed a chiseled, serious face with long, lustrous hair and no beard. It was a faintly ironic face, but the smile on it was as innocent as a child’s. It was a face almost – but not exactly – human.

  “You’re an elf!” Derkin said.

  “Of course I am,” Despaxas admitted. “My mother was a good friend of an ancestor of yours. She admired him, in a way. Look here.” The elf knelt and brushed back gravel an
d dust with a graceful hand. Beneath was a glint of iron. “This is a claim spike, Derkin. A long time ago, it was driven here to mark the boundary of the dwarven lands. My mother was here when that was done. The person who set the spike was named Cale Greeneye. His sister was your great-great … well, several greats, grandmother.”

  “And your mother was alive then?”

  “Yes. She still is. Her name is Eloeth. It was her idea, frankly, that I should come and find you.”

  “Why?” Derkin frowned up at the innocent, ironic face. His frown became a startled stare as his eyes shifted. Behind the elf, only a few feet away, something was watching … something he could barely see. As he stared, the creature seemed to unwrap itself, unfurling wide, shadowy appendages that seemed to ripple in the shadows. Undulating gracefully, it rose silently, then turned and glided away, disappearing from sight.

  Derkin stared after it. “What in the name of corrosion was that?” he hissed.

  “I call him Zephyr,” Despaxas said. “He’s a verger.”

  “A what?”

  “Verger,” the elf repeated. “It means he doesn’t exactly exist in this world, but he isn’t exactly out of it, either.”

  “It’s Despaxas’s pet shadow,” Calan Silvertoe rumbled. “It follows him around. Ugly, isn’t it? I mean, what you can see of it.”

  “Zephyr doesn’t see you any better than you see him, Calan,” the elf said softly. “He probably doesn’t see your body at all. What he does see, though, is your soul.”

  Derkin stared at the elf, then at the empty night where the almost-creature had gone. “That thing looks at souls?” he growled. “Why?”

  “So he can tell me what he sees there,” the elf said. “Zephyr is my friend.”

  Derkin shook his head in amazement. There was something he had meant to ask these odd people – something about his escape from the mines – but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.

  Chapter 3

  THE RELUCTANT LEADER

  From a high, cold pinnacle of stone, two dwarves and an elf looked down upon a scene of desolation, and Derkin Winterseed felt a hard, stubborn anger begin to grow within him. They were south of Tharkas Pass, and the steep ranges below – just now touched by morning sun – were the region of the Tharkas mines. Once a rich, productive cluster of hard-ore shafts, the mines had been carefully developed over a span of more than two centuries by the dwarves of Kal-Thax. Originally delved by Daergar experts from Thorbardin, the mines had proven immensely productive, yielding the highest grade of precious iron ore any of them had ever seen.

  Once before, when he was very young, Derkin had seen the Tharkas mines, and he well recalled the busy, bustling slopes where hundreds of Neidar worked the shafts and the mills, the scours and the seines, preparing top-grade ore for transport to Thorbardin for processing in the great smelters deep within the mountain fortress. It had been a happy scene, as the Hylar remembered it. Everywhere he had looked there were hundreds of bustling dwarves laboring in relative harmony, doing what dwarves most enjoyed – working for their own purposes.

  But the scene now was different. Where there had once been neat, orderly ore dumps and the methodical ring of hammers and drills, a sound as musical as dwarven drums echoing among the mountains, now there was an ugliness about the entire area. Everything seemed discordant. Slag flows ran here and there at random, the ore heaps were messy hills of ill-sorted stone, and the ring of hammers and drills had no rhythm to it, only the heedless clatter of slaves at labor. Even without the companies of armed humans that roved the area, it would have been obvious to any dwarf that these were no longer dwarven works. Everywhere, the thoughtless sloppiness of human mining methods was obvious.

  Here was proof of what every dwarf knew – humans were poor miners at best, and even the skills of dwarven slaves could not improve their methods. Unlike dwarves, humans found no harmony with their enterprises. They didn’t work their mines as dwarves did, cooperating with the stone to ease its riches from it. Instead, humans fought the mines, as one would fight an enemy. They fought the mines, fought the ores, and fought the very mountains that provided their riches. The human concept of mining, to most dwarves, was like the human concept of most things: take what you want any way you can, usually by brute force. The scene below the pinnacle seemed proof of that. The few cabins and sheds below the mines – three of the buildings were the remains of what had once been a pleasant Neidar village – now looked run-down and unused. It was obvious that the shelters now served only as sleeping quarters for the human conquerors. Even from the pinnacle, one could see the dejected weariness of the few dwarven women working around what had once been a handsome longhouse. Like the dwarves in the mines, the females too were slaves, kept by the humans to cook and clean for them.

  The only other habitation visible, as far as they could see, was a small, distant campsite farther along the mountainside, beside a pretty lake that Derkin remembered from his childhood. The lake was a reservoir, built ages ago by dwarven craftsmen. A long, curving stone dam contained the flow of several mountain streams, channeling it slowly into a series of walled canals that wound along the slopes.

  This system had once provided reliable water for the entire Tharkas region. But that had been in the golden times of Thorbardin, the days of the great Road of Passage, when people of all races and nations traveled between southern Ergoth and the northern lands, along a route maintained jointly by the dwarves of Kal-Thax and the knightly orders of human Ergoth.

  Those times were gone now. The old road had fallen into disuse, and parts of it had been obliterated. And while the mountainside reservoir remained, its channels were choked with clutter and debris. The lake remained, but it no longer served dwarven villages and farms.

  Squinting, Derkin tried to make out who was camping there now, and Calan said, “Those are humans over there. Nomads from the plains. See how they avoid the empire soldiers at the mines? They come and go, passing through, but most plains people have no use for the emperor.”

  Scowling, Derkin stared down again at the sad scene below and cursed beneath his breath. Then he turned to the hooded elf who had led him here. “Two years?” he demanded. “They have made this much ruin in just two years?”

  “They would have done the same to Thorbardin itself,” the elf replied, “but they couldn’t get in. Lord Kane sent an assault force south to test Northgate. Zephyr observed them for me. The humans finally gave up and came back. They never got past Thorbardin’s outer defenses. But they do hold the mines, and have been stockpiling ore for nearly a year to send through the pass to Klanath.”

  “But why hasn’t Thorbardin sent troops to drive them out?”

  “What troops?” old Calan Silvertoe rasped. “You have been in Thorbardin since I have, young Hylar. How long has it been since the thanes within stopped their feuding long enough to send a force outside?”

  “My father restored order in Thorbardin!” Derkin snapped.

  “Yes, of course,” the old one sneered. “And the Hylar Peace lasted slightly longer than your father did. Then, as you know better than I, they started at it again, Theiwar against Daewar, Daergar fending off Klar, the Hylar holed up and pouting in their Life Tree. …”

  “I know,” Derkin rumbled. “That was why I left Thorbardin. But I didn’t know they had turned their backs on the outside lands.”

  “Well, they did.” Calan’s frown was as fierce as Derkin’s. “And without Thorbardin’s troops, the world outside fell into the hands of … humans!” Disdainfully, the old dwarf pointed downward, his single hand a rigid arrow of accusation, pointing out shame.

  “Rust and corruption,” Derkin muttered.

  Behind him, Calan whispered to the elf, “He reminds me of his father when he looks like that.”

  “He will need to be as strong as his father,” Despaxas replied.

  Derkin whirled on them, turning his back on the sad scene below. “It’s high time somebody put a stop to that atrocity
,” he said. “Humans don’t belong in Kal-Thax. This land is for dwarves.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” the elf said sympathetically.

  “One would need an army to reclaim this territory,” Calan pointed out.

  “Then I’ll go to Thorbardin myself and bring back an army,” Derkin snapped.

  “What army?” Calan shook his head. “We’ve kept abreast of what’s going on in Thorbardin. There is no army. Just a bunch of bickering clans barely kept in check by Jeron Redleather and Dunbarth Ironthumb, with every reliable follower they have working to police the undermountain. Nobody is coming from there to help. Not until the time comes when Thorbardin has a real leader again, like in the old days.”

  “There is an army,” Despaxas said softly. “At least, there could be. But you won’t find it in Thorbardin.”

  Derkin frowned at the elf, hard Hylar eyes seeming to pierce him. “Where, then?”

  “Back there.” The elf gestured northward. “Back where you just came from. The humans have a few hundred dwarves working these mines south of the pass, but there are nearly eight thousand dwarven slaves in all laboring in Klanath. They would make quite an army if they had the right leader.”

  “You’re crazy,” Derkin snapped. “I’m free of there. I’m not going back.”

  “That’s too bad,” Calan said. “You know, those pit slaves back there are going to pay dearly for the two guards who died so unfortunately when we …”

  “You murdered those men yourself!” Derkin spat. “You cut their throats gleefully, and now you’re worrying about who will be blamed?”

  The elf pulled his cowl forward, hiding the slight smile that pulled at his cheeks. “It was your escape, Derkin. Do you want to be responsible for the misery that will befall all those innocent dwarves?”

  Derkin stood silent for a moment, looking from one to the other of his odd companions. Then his eyes narrowed. Glaring at Calan Silvertoe, he said, “I wondered why you killed those guards. It seemed a needless, senseless thing to do. But you had a reason, didn’t you, Daewar? I should have known. A Daewar always has a reason.”