The Covenant of the Forge

by Dan Parkinson

  He stared at her stupidly, then his eyes widened. “Ah?” he said. “Ah! That time!” Staggering forward, he joined the Hylar chieftain at the winches, and the boat fairly raced for the tip of the stalactite in the middle of the lake.

  Mistral Thrax frowned, shoving for space between two of the females. The women always know, he thought, the women with their cloths and their serious expressions, the copper pots for heating water—probably they knew even before the drums sounded from the Hylar quarters. It was time for a child to be born. His palms tingled and itched, and he clung to a wale to keep from being pushed overboard as the women shifted their positions in the boat impatiently. “Hurry!” one of them demanded. “Can’t you people pull faster?”

  Muttering an oath, Mistral Thrax tapped his crutch against the timbered deck, then stared at it, blinking. For an instant, the crutch had seemed to glow. And in that instant it had seemed not like a crutch, but more like a fishing spear—a spear with twin tines. Mistral looked up. Apparently, no one else had noticed anything. He noticed that other boats were coming from other piers around the big lake, all pulling toward the center.

  Approaching the giant stalactite was like approaching an upside-down mountain suspended from the sky. It was a huge, glistening mass of stone, rounded at the bottom where it almost touched the little island beneath that was its twin stalagmite, rising from the water. The distance between the stone surfaces was less than ten feet, and they were coupled now by a masonry shaft where the Hylar had installed a lift-belt, of the kind Handil the Drum had perfected in Thorin. The lift rose upward, into the main shaft where delving had begun and where the first quarters of the Hylar had been installed.

  The boat creaked and nestled into a stone quay made of rubble from the delving above. Guards hurried forward from the lift to secure the lines, then stepped back as Willen Ironmaul stepped ashore and turned to lend stout hands to the others debarking. “How is my wife?” Willen asked.

  “Very well, Sire,” a portal guard assured him. “But those with her say that her time is at hand. The child comes soon.”

  Willen headed for the lift, but the women crowded ahead of him. “You wait your turn,” one of them snapped. “She needs us now more than she needs you. Just stay out of the way.”

  “Here!” the Theiwar woman thrust her copper kettles at the chieftain of the Hylar. “Make yourself useful. Bring water.”

  He handed the kettles to a guard. “You heard her,” he said. “Bring water.” As the lift stages disappeared up the shaft, carrying the women, Willen swung aboard the next stage and Mistral Thrax scrambled on beside him, clinging to Willen’s breastplate to keep from falling. Behind them, Olim and others crowded toward the next stage.

  Upward through its shaft the lift-belt rumbled, and they stepped off onto fresh, hewn stone where a delve had been completed and shorings and partitions put into place. With Hylar craftsmen following them, Daewar delvers had dug an open area ten feet high and expanding a hundred feet in all directions from the central shafts. The Hylar had partitioned the space into various cubicles and enclosures, their pillars and masonry walls serving both as partitions and as braces to shore up the ceiling. The great delve, in the living stone of the stalactite, was only just begun, but already there was space enough for twenty Hylar families.

  In a cubicle floored by fine carpets and hung with bright Daewar tapestries, Tera Sharn lay in her bed, radiant and determined. Dwarven women were gathered around her, and the new arrivals joined them. When Willen pushed through the crowd, Tera’s eyes brightened. “Willen!” she cried. “You’ve come back! How did it go with the Ergothians?”

  “There will be a road,” he assured her, leaning over to plant a kiss on her lips. “And you?”

  “Splendid,” she said. “Everything is well, my love. Our child is—”

  “Mercy!” a Daewar woman snapped, tugging on Willen’s belt. “Back off, you oaf! Give her room to breathe.” Others joined her, and Willen allowed himself to be hauled away. Beyond the crowd he turned and bumped into another dwarf. It was Olim Goldbuckle.

  Other boats had landed, and suddenly the little cubicle was packed with people. Slide Tolec was there, and Bole Trune leaning on his cudgel and looking thoroughly out of place, and others, everywhere.

  “We heard,” the Theiwar said, “so we came. The birth of a child is a—”

  “I’ll tell the lot of you what it is not!” a Hylar woman hissed, glaring at all the males packed into the room. “It is not a public spectacle! Out! All of you, out!”

  Sheepishly, most of the leading citizens of Thorbardin were herded from the room by irate females. One, though, remained. Mistral Thrax refused to budge. He clung to his crutch and to a tapestry, shaking his head. “I won’t leave,” he insisted. “I am needed here.”

  “Then stay out of the way,” someone said, and turned away to close the doors, shutting out all the other males. For a time the crowded cubicle was alive with bustling, chattering women doing mysterious things, then a silence fell which was broken by a slap and an angry wail. “A boy!” someone said. “A strong, healthy boy!”

  The wail had carried through the closed doors, and now they flew open and people thronged in again, deep male voices laughing and chattering, aahing and oohing, hard hands slapping Willen on his armored back as he tried to see past the mob of women. In the bed, a tired and radiant Tera Sharn held her infant close to her and smiled her pleasure.

  Mistral Thrax was not watching, though. His hands ached and his heart was pounding, and his gaze was fixed on the open doorway. There was something there—barely visible—something like a whiff of smoke that grew and roiled and formed itself into the tenuous shape of a tall, human man. In dark hollows a pair of spectral eyes opened, and Mistral pushed forward to face the apparition. “No!” he shouted. “No! I forbid you!”

  The “eyes” began to glow, a murky red that grew brighter and brighter.

  “I killed you once,” Mistral Thrax rasped. “I’ll do it again!”

  The smoke flowed but held its shape, and now all eyes in the room were on it, people backing away in fright. A voice like a whisper of smoke said, “The child. The seed. In morit deis Calnaris,” it whispered. “Refeist ot atium—”

  Roaring a challenge, Willen Ironmaul threw himself at the vision … and rebounded as though he had run into a wall. The whispering voice hesitated only an instant, then repeated, “Refeist ot atium—”

  Raising his crutch, Mistral Thrax flung it at the smoke. It seemed to strike an invisible shield, but it clung there and began to glow. It turned red, then brighter red, and its shape changed. The crutch became a spear—a twin-tined fishing spear in the hand of a tattered, ancient dwarf who seemed only partly visible.

  “—ot atium,” the smoke whispered. “Dactas ot destis!”

  Fires flew from the glowing “eyes,” fires aimed directly at the infant in Tera Sharn’s arms. But they did not get there. Like a magnet drawing iron, the spear in Kitlin Fish-taker’s hand drew the fires. They raged into its point, along its shaft, and into the spectral dwarf who flamed as bright as sunlight. He flamed, absorbing the curse, then thrust the spear forward into the heart of the smoke, and the flames flowed back from him into the specter. For long seconds the two stood motionless, sharing forces that were beyond imagining. Then the flaming shape of Kitlin Fishtaker raised its free arm over its head and opened its hand. In its palm lay a medallion—a fourteen-point star melded from seven metals. Above the roar of fire-forces, the dwarf-apparition’s voice said, “The child’s name shall be Damon. He shall be known as Father of Kings.”

  A moment more the glare raged, then it flared out as though it had never been. The smoke-vision of Grayfen the Magician was gone. The spear was gone. Kitlin Fishtaker was gone, and a stunned silence lay on the packed little room.

  There was a tiny thump as something fell to the floor, landing on bright carpet at the foot of Tera’s bed. Willen Ironmaul, just getting to his feet, stooped and picked the thing up, lo
oked at it, and then held it up for others to see. It was that same amulet—the one forged by the thanes to bind the agreement among them, the one whose final weld came from the hammer of Colin Stonetooth.

  “Father of Kings,” Willen muttered, shaken. He turned, gazing at his wife and their infant child, then gently laid the amulet on the pillow beside them. “Damon,” he said, touching his son’s pink brow with hard, gentle fingers. “Damon. Father of Kings.”

  In a corner, unnoticed, Mistral Thrax held his hands open before him and gazed at their palms. The marks were gone. As though they had never been there, the scars of magic had disappeared. “I’m free,” the old dwarf muttered. “I am clean at last … and free.”

  Without anyone noticing him, he turned and hobbled out of the room, using a guardsman’s pike as a crutch. Suddenly he had a real yearning for a mug of cold ale.

  About the Author

  With more than two dozen novels published in the last decade, Dan Parkinson has had best-sellers in several genres, including westerns, high-seas adventures, and science fiction. To TSR readers he is well known as the author of the science-fiction love story Starsong and the best-selling DRAGONLANCE® book The Gates of Thorbardin, as well as stories in 1992’s popular DRAGONLANCE Tales II Trilogy. A native Kansan and long-time Texan, he was author guest of honor at the 1991 GEN CON® Game Fair.

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