The Covenant of the Forge

by Dan Parkinson

  The rebels turned, separated, and fled in panic, thousands of howling dwarves on their heels.

  In dark shadows near the warren tunnel, Glome the Assassin lay hidden as the chase went by, then crept upward to the cleft where the tunnel began. Behind him, diminishing in various directions, were the sounds of conflict—of his rebels being run down by an enraged mob. But that didn’t really matter to him. All he wanted was a place to hide, a means of escape. He was almost at the cleft when a lone figure stepped from the shadows to face him.

  “I know you, Glome,” Slide Tolec said coldly. “I knew where you would be.”

  Slide knew Glome too well to give him a chance to strike. Even before the assassin could raise his sword, the Theiwar chieftain lunged at him, and the axe he swung nearly cut Glome in two.

  Some of the rebels made it as far as the Theiwar digs before they were cut down. Others fell at the lake’s edge, and others beneath the jutting cliffs that blocked the northwest shore. A hundred or more of them, rallied by the best among them, made a stand at a place that had no name and were methodically cut to pieces there by Daewar footmen, Daergar swordsmen, Theiwar blades, and Klar stone axes.

  Two former Daewar, hunted down in the first warren later, were disarmed and chained by Gem Bluesleeve’s guard. From somewhere, delvers brought little silver bat-bells and hung them from the prisoners’ chains. From a distance, the Daewar watched as a rampaging tractor worm located the source of the sound and smashed at it until the bells no longer sounded.

  Olim Goldbuckle himself went to the road tunnel to meet the returning Hylar, and Willen Ironmaul and Tera Sharn saw a thing there that no living dwarf had ever seen. The prince of the Daewar of Kal-Thax had tears on his cheeks as he told them what had occurred.

  On a bright winter morning, the bodies of Colin Stonetooth and the Ten were carried in solemn procession along the great corridor that was the source of winds, and the winds seemed to hush their whispers as the drums of the Hylar beat a requiem.

  They were buried with great honor in the deep, walled canyon that the Theiwar had always called Deadfall. But as Olim Goldbuckle called upon Reorx and all the other gods to recognize and honor those being buried there, he gave the place a new name.

  From that day forward, the place would be known as the Valley of the Thanes.

  And high above, all around the crests of the great walls of the valley, lifeless figures dangled from iron spikes. The bodies of Glome and his followers had been taken out of Thorbardin and given to Cale Greeneye and his Neidar adventurers. It was Cale’s tribute to his father, that the bodies of his murderers be hung where their lifeless eyes could look down upon what they had done, and from where—when their bones decayed and fell from the spikes—they would be lost among the rubble of the cliffs.

  For a time, Tera Sharn’s grief at her father’s death kept her to her quarters, and Willen Ironmaul stalked the Hylar digs, hard-eyed and lonely, tormented by guilt that he had not been there when his chieftain—his beloved wife’s own father—needed him. Yet the time of grieving eventually passed, and the two were together again. Still, at times Willen caught her eyes upon him, brooding and speculative, deep with thoughts she was not ready to share.

  In a way, the death of Colin Stonetooth had bonded the clans closer, as though the bloody, senseless act of Glome and his followers stood as an example of everything evil and pointless about the old ways, when tribal rivalries had overshadowed all other interests. Now Daewar, Theiwar, Daergar, and Klar had fought shoulder to shoulder against enemies from within, and they saw one another with wiser eyes.

  Still, it was as though the heart had gone out of Thorbardin. Colin Stonetooth had been that heart. Now the thanes went about their delvings grimly and separately, each tribe progressing at its own rate as they tried to build homes within the great cavern of the underground sea. The Daewar delved rapidly, but to no great depth. The Theiwar hollowed out lairs that were little more than caves within caves, and the Daergar stayed to the dark places, unwilling to come near to anyone else.

  The population of Thorbardin had grown greatly as Einar from the outside came to join this or that clan, but the increased numbers of dwarves only made food scarce, as no real systems of production and trade had yet been perfected.

  Then, on a morning when the sun of Krynn shone radiant down the quartz veins and the subterranean lake sparkled with its light, a sound arose that brought people from their labors and their lairs. The Hylar drums were singing again, that same quickening, pulsing beat that they had played before on the slopes of Cloudseeker. The music the Hylar named Call to Balladine.

  The drums were muffled, here deep beneath the mountains, but every ear in Thorbardin heard the call and most responded. By the thousands, following the lake shore, they went to see what was going on.

  The table of seven sides was erected again on the scrubbed stone of that same shore where Colin Stonetooth had died, and behind it waited a dozen Hylar drummers and Olim Goldbuckle, Prince of the Daewar. When the thane leaders were present, Olim asked them solemnly to take the seats they had claimed before. When they were seated, Tera Sharn came to stand at her father’s place at the seventh side. With Willen Ironmaul at her shoulder, seeming to tower over her, she gazed silently at one and then another of the four chieftains gathered at the table. When her gaze rested on Olim Goldbuckle she asked, “You ordered the drums?”

  “It is how the thanes were first called.” The Daewar shrugged, his blond whiskers glowing in the subdued light. “I thought it appropriate, and the drummers agreed. We have things to discuss at this table, and now we are assembled.” He glanced around. “Well, most of us are.”

  The Aghar were absent this time, because the entire tribe had wandered off somewhere and had not yet been found. And most of the Einar had retired to their valleys to prepare for spring.

  But the Daewar prince was there, and Slide Tolec, with Vog Ironface of the Daergar, and the Klar leader, Bole Trune. The Hylar drums had called, and they had responded. With wide, dark eyes as wise as her father’s, Tera Sharn regarded them one by one. Then she asked, “You … all of you … avenged my father. Why?”

  There was silence for a moment, then Olim Goldbuckle said, “It was not vengeance. We joined to keep the peace of the covenant.”

  “Glome and his followers would have brought chaos upon Thorbardin.” Slide Tolec nodded. “In Kal-Thax, we have seen the face of chaos. We have despised one another and have paid the price for it.”

  “The Hylar, your father,” Vog rumbled, “brought wisdom here.”

  “I see,” Tera said. “And now my father is gone.”

  “Which is why we are here at this table today,” Olim said. “Who will lead the Hylar now?”

  Behind Tera, Willen Ironmaul said proudly, “Our people have asked my wife to take her father’s place.”

  “You, and not your brother?” Vog raised his mask, looking at the young dwarf woman curiously. Even to his Daergar eyes her beauty was obvious, as apparent as the fullness of her belly. “Your Hylar would follow a female chief?”

  “My brother Cale Greeneye favors the open sky above his head,” Tera said. “He is Neidar and has no wish to lead. He has told our people that.”

  “What have you told your people?” Olim asked.

  “I have given them no answer,” she said. “Though I have thought about the matter.” She hesitated, collecting her thoughts, then said, “Colin Stonetooth, my father, was a wise person. He looked always ahead, and never back. And because of that wisdom, he made a mistake … twice. He trusted the right people, seeing the path ahead, but he failed to see the wrong ones behind. At Thorin, which is now Thoradin, it was humans who betrayed him.”

  A resonant growl came from Vog’s mask, but Tera raised a small hand. “Not all humans,” she said. “Those my father trusted as friends were—as much as they could be—true friends. But others were not. And then here, where we found others of our own kind, he trusted. He trusted and was blind to the enem
ies who stalked him.”

  “As we all were,” Olim nodded.

  “I am my father’s daughter,” Tera said. “His blood is my blood, and his ways my ways. Sooner or later I would make the same mistakes he made, because I see as he saw. Therefore I will propose another for chieftain of the Hylar, but I believe I would like for each of you to approve before I do.”

  They stared at her blankly. “Why ask us?” Slide Tolec tilted his head. “Each thane in Thorbardin is independent. The Covenant is clear about that.”

  “So it is,” she agreed. “But there is much to do here if Thorbardin as my father envisioned it—and as each of you envision it—is to be built. Old differences among the clans must be recognized, and different ways respected, but the Council of Thanes must act as one on matters of the future. To do things which have never been done before, all must work together. This Council alone can make that occur. Therefore I ask your approval before I say to my people that my husband, Willen Ironmaul, should be their chief.”

  Behind her, Willen’s mouth dropped open. “Me? Tera, I am no chief! I’m just a soldier. I wouldn’t know how to …”

  Tera looked around at him and slipped her hand into his. “No one is a chief until the time comes to lead,” she said.

  Slowly, a grin spread across Olim Goldbuckle’s wide face, parting his golden whiskers. “You are your father’s daughter,” he said. “I wonder if your Hylar suspect how fortunate they are.”

  “I would welcome Willen Ironmaul to this table,” Slide Tolec said solemnly. “I know as well as anyone that being chief comes of necessity more than by design.”

  Vog Ironface hesitated, then raised his mask. Glinting ferret eyes in a face that sloped like a fox’s studied the big Hylar guardsman, and he nodded. “I have seen you fight,” Vog said. “There is more to your strategies than strength and precision. There is something unseen. What is it?”

  “It is order.” Willen shrugged. “The teacher who taught us how to fight also taught us why and when. He said that skills without honor—which I think is nothing more than order of the heart—are like a forge without fire.”

  “Honor is order?” the Daergar mused. “Order of the heart. Interesting. Wisdom”—he glanced at Tera—“and honor. Willen Ironmaul, Vog Ironface will welcome you to this table.”

  “As will I,” Olim Goldbuckle chuckled. “Maybe some order of the heart is what is needed to get us all moving forward again.”

  At the far side, Bole Trune rose to his feet, drew his cudgel, and placed it on the table before him. Then he turned to Willen Ironmaul. “Klar have trusted Hylar,” he rumbled. “Bole Trune trusts you.”

  A few days later the muffled drums said that Willen Ironmaul had been named chieftain of Thane Hylar of Thorbardin. And in the song of the drums was a resonance that echoed in the hearts of dwarves of all the thanes, quickening their steps as they worked. Purpose, they felt, had been restored.

  26

  The Road to Reason

  Through the final weeks of winter forges rang beneath Cloudseeker Peak, and the vapors rising above the Windweavers were warm from the fires far below. Though the clans of Kal-Thax had acted in unison for centuries to defend against intrusion into their lands, this was the first time in history that they had actually worked together to achieve something positive, and deep in the heart of the mountain, their combined skills began to show visible results.

  To the Daewar’s genius at delving were added the Hylar arts of stonecutting and masonry, and the delves were no longer limited in their expanse. With the introduction of lift platforms, like those invented by Handil Farsight, the difficulty of working from level to level in a dig was almost eliminated. The dark steel of the Daergar proved excellent for the making of rails and cables, and the dwarves began construction of a series of subterranean roads to connect the centers of all the separate towns of Thorbardin and to accommodate cable carts to and from the warrens.

  Boats were crafted from lumber brought by the Neidar or traded from the region’s independent Einar, and wharves were chiseled into the slopes of the lakeshore. From there, cables were strung out to the base of the great, living stalactite above the water and fixed there. From here would begin the construction of the Hylar’s delves, working upward through the stone and—eventually—downward from the mountain’s peak through shafts that would later accommodate sun-tunnels.

  Most of what would someday exist here was still in the minds and on the scrolls of the crafters, but it was begun and there would be no stopping it.

  The thane leaders envisioned Thorbardin as a fortress, a stronghold from which the dwarves could issue forth at will to protect their fields and valleys. No longer could all of Kal-Thax be, simply, closed. It was far too large, and too accessible, for the growing press of outsiders to be entirely kept out. In times long past, when intruders were few, that might have been possible. But now it was not a practical option, and the dwarven people were nothing if not practical. Still, the realm could be held against settlement, and this was the intention of the new covenant.

  Some outsiders would get in. Some might journey across Kal-Thax. But with the fortress of Thorbardin dominating the realm, none would take root there.

  An option of a different sort was proposed by Tera Sharn and presented by Willen Ironmaul. If the tide of outsiders could not be stopped, they suggested, then why not turn it, as a shield turns a lance?

  They puzzled over the idea and how it might be accomplished, and it was Olim Goldbuckle who came up with the answer. “Since we don’t want all those people coming here,” he suggested, “maybe we could give them somewhere else to go instead. Most people—humans in particular—are more likely to follow a road than to cross it.”

  Thus, even before the first thaw of spring was felt in the valleys, Cale Greeneye rode out from Kal-Thax with a company of Neidar volunteers to scout the internal ranges, and Willen Ironmaul rode eastward with a hundred mounted Hylar warriors led by his new guard captain, Sand Sakor, and accompanied by Gem Bluesleeve and his Golden Hammer footmen. On behalf of the Council of Thanes, Willen intended to have a talk with whoever was in charge in southeastern Ergoth. The humans who lived there were as beset by the flood of refugees from the east as the dwarves of Kal-Thax were.

  During the Hylar migration, they had seen human citadels scattered here and there across the countryside. Homes and fiefdoms to the knights of the lords that governed the land, some of these were no more than manor houses perched atop ridges and rocky hills overlooking the fields and herds of their supplicants. But there was one that Cale Greeneye had seen from a distance and reported. It was a great, walled keep atop a high bluff and was obviously the home of someone important. It sat several miles north of the field where the Hylar had defeated the Cobar raiders, and Willen suspected that the place was the seat of that gray knight who had spoken warning to him on that day—the one Glendon Hawke called Lord Charon. For Calnar horses and sturdy Daewar footmen, the place was not too far away, and the man had seemed to be in charge. Willen decided he would be the one to see.

  Two days out from the lower slopes, the dwarf troop entered tilled fields and meadows, with little villages visible here and there among them. A few miles farther and the great citadel was in sight. It was as Cale had described it—a tall fortification of gray stone, with ramparts and parapets where banners flew. It was not a great structure by Hylar standards, but better than most things Willen had seen built by humans.

  He wasn’t sure what protocols were involved in approaching a human stronghold to discuss business, but he had observed back in Thoradin that humans were very much like dwarves in their thinking, except for their inability to really concentrate on anything for very long. So he took the direct approach. With his troops at his back, the new chieftain of the Hylar of Thorbardin simply headed for the place and assumed he would be noticed soon.

  The first to notice the dwarves were villagers at a little place where thatch-roofed huts crowded along what seemed to be the beginn
ing of a road. At first glance there were no people visible, either in the village or thereabouts in the crusted fields where the melting snows had left gray-white patterns atop the dark mud beneath. No one was stirring, but there was smoke above the huts, so Willen had a trumpeter blow salute, then led his troops right into the center of the place. Here and there shutters parted, and doors opened a crack. Shadowed eyes stared out at the short, armored creatures perched on the tall horses, then shutters slammed and doors echoed to the sounds of bolts being dropped into place. From somewhere a flimsy arrow—like a quarrel from a badly strung crossbow—arced in the sunlight and glanced off Willen’s helm.

  He raised his shield and quartered around in his high saddle. “Here, now!” he roared. “There’s no call for that!”

  Somewhere nearby, a great squawking and flailing erupted. It sounded like foxes in a chicken coop. At one flank of the dwarf troop, a shutter opened momentarily and something flew out, bouncing harmlessly off the armor of Sand Sakor. Sand looked down at the fallen object, then looked up at his chieftain. “It’s a potato,” he said in disbelief. “Somebody threw a potato at me.”

  Gem Bluesleeve strolled forward to ask, “Would you like for us to haul those people out where we can see them?”

  “Go away!” a muffled human voice called from within one of the huts. “Go away! There’s nothing here for you!”

  And another voice, even more muffled, said, “Hoodlums! Can’t they just leave us alone?”

  And another, “Wait, Mullin! I don’t think these are the same hoodlums. Look how short they are. Do you think those might be dwarves?”

  “Dwarves don’t ride horses, idiot!” the first voice chided.

  “Are those really horses? How’d they get so big?”

  The sound of chickens in panic came again, then stopped. Willen shook his head. “We mean no harm!” he called. “We’re just passing through. We’re looking for the home of Lord Charon.”