“When human killed human with no more thought than killing a warg,” continued the king, “the dwarves already had a great civilization!” And suddenly the crowd came alive with a roaring approval that filled the giant keep. “And the six original clans carved this great city where before there was only solid rock. And this city, this keep and our civilization has endured for thirty thousand years.” The crowd cheered again.
“We endured the Sundering and the blight of darkness. We endured the war of the schools and the Schism. We endured the Great War, when only one out of nine dwarves returned home. Not only did we endure, we triumphed! Even at the battle of Nemetia, when every defending dwarf was killed, we brought so much destruction upon the enemy that even the Legion lost their taste for war!” The crowd roared approval. “And now this effrontery!” said the king as he held up a small silver thing. “A goblin-carved clan ring!” The crowd reacted with thundering disapproval.
“That’s my ring,” Nerdraaage shouted.
“I believe you’re right,” worried Dangalf aloud.
“Those who can no longer call themselves dwarf call themselves Clan Ghostbeard!” shouted the king. The crowd’s fury was overwhelming. “It is an insult and injury that challenges the very foundation of our ancient civilization, the very cornerstone of all civilizations, and it can not go unpunished like so many other attacks from the black side of the world!” The crowd roared approval. And then to the dismay of Dangalf and Ashlyn, the king began speaking in Dwarven. Dangalf asked Nerdraaage what he was saying, but the enraptured Nerdraaage waved him off.
“Aye, Nerdraaage is it?” said a red-haired dwarf wearing blackguard blacks.
“Yes—I mean, aye.”
“You have gained much reputation with the ring you brought back. Your foreign friends as well. I am Assassin Bearach of Clan Warfoot. We have a mutual friend I believe? A human who goes by Icil?”
“You know Icil?” said Nerdraaage.
“There is not better a blackguard in all the world,” said Bearach. “You outsiders have probably not before heard a dwarf say anything not dwarven is the best. But dwarf blackguards are few in number. Most don’t make it past the bandit class, and many of those end up getting themselves estranged. Humans do not have the dwarven resistance to secrecy and solitude, and as such they have blackguards in many numbers, and great blackguards some become.”
“Have you seen Icil?” asked Ashlyn. “How is he?”
“How well could he be? He’s a wretched creature pining over a ghost.” And then to Dangalf. “You humans would do well to form your own clans. Then when times are darkest, maybe you would not seem so alone.” Then again to Nerdraaage, he said, “A handful of assassins and blackguards are going out by wagon in an hour to do some reconnoitering in Brimstone before the main force arrives. You are not experienced for such a mission, but you are trained by Icil, and you wear the colors of a great clan, so I have decided to ask you along. It is, after all, your ring that launched this war.”
“Okay,” Nerdraaage said softly.
“Good. We will see you at the stables in an hour.”
When Bearach was out of earshot, Ashlyn said, “Did you just volunteer to go to war?”
“What are you doing?” added Dangalf. “We have to rescue Doppelganger!”
“What was I supposed to say?”
“No,” suggested Ashlyn.
“That would have made me look real good.”
“It would have been better than going to the stables in an hour and telling him you can’t go,” she continued.
“We need you, Nerd,” said Dangalf.
“You do?”
“Of course.”
“Look, it’s my ring that started all of this,” said Nerdraaage. “I think it will look bad if I don’t go.” Nerdraaage struggled for the right words to convince his friends. If ever he needed to express himself with concise and powerful words, it was now. “The bells of war are ringing!” he said.
“The bells of war?” asked Dangalf.
“You know,” said Ashlyn. “The war bells.”
A frustrated Nerdraaage said, “I can’t just run away with my pride between my legs.” Dangalf tried not to laugh at the mixed metaphor, but when Ashlyn laughed out loud, he couldn’t prevent a broad smile from spreading across his own face. “I wouldn’t expect skin-knickers to understand!” Nerdraaage said angrily.
“Nerd,” said Dangalf as he composed himself. “You agreed not to break up the group. Not until we were ready.”
“Doppelganger already did,” said Nerdraaage. Dangalf and Ashlyn looked at each other. He had a point.
“Okay,” said Dangalf.
The endomorph had won an intellectual victory against the two ectomorphs and enjoyed the moment. But when he realized he was going off to war alone, he wondered if he shouldn’t have lost this argument.
“Wait,” said Ashlyn. “What about the element of randomization we were going to use?” she continued.
“Good call,” said Dangalf. “Nerd, are you willing to let the cards decide your path?”
“Okay,” said Nerdraaage.
Dangalf spread the divination deck before Nerdraaage. “We’re pressed for time, so I guess this will have to do. Pick one.” Nerdraaage turned over the Red Horse.
“What does that mean?” asked Ashlyn.
“War,” said Dangalf.
“Best two out of three?” she suggested, but it was not to be.
Ashlyn went to the elven ambassador, who still stood nearby. After a few minutes, she returned to her friends. The ambassador understood the war was actually to be a raid of only a few weeks at most. And it was hoped, since the primary objective was for the dwarves to kill their own kind (even though the dwarves would dispute that undwarves were “their own kind”), that this was not an AARR operation, and that the cold war would not become immediately hot again.
Dangalf and Nerdraaage were relieved to hear about the expected duration and that it was being called only a “raid.” Ashlyn said that they could keep in touch by sending Clay back and forth. Nerdraaage grumbled that he would look bad to the other blackguards if a pigeon could find him. Ashlyn told him to write to them when he got the chance.
The stables were located down a winding stairway from the floor of the keep. It was enormous with a stench to match. There were myriad animals housed here, mostly ponies, which were favored because of their stature and thick coats.
They found a rogues’ gallery of blackguards sitting on or standing near a cart already attached to four horses. They looked battle scarred and intimidating. They wore buckskin, presumably over their blacks, just like Nerdraaage. But that was the only sense in which he seemed to fit with them.
The blackguards looked unsympathetically on the dwarf escorted by human and elf and laden with goods. Nerdraaage carried a firkin of beer. Dangalf carried his roasted boar and Ashlyn his roasted chicken.
“Ah,” said a black-haired blackguard. “The cook is here.” The other blackguards laughed heartily. Even a stable hand leaned on his shovel and guffawed.
“Pull up my scarf,” Nerdraaage whispered to Ashlyn.
“What?”
“Pull up my scarf. It’s inside my jacket.”
Ashlyn reached into Nerdraaage’s jacket collar and pulled up his Clan Stonefist tartan and draped it across his shoulders. The dwarven laughter died down, and the stable hand returned to shoveling shite.
Nerdraaage placed his goods upon the open carriage. Dangalf and Ashlyn followed suit. “It’s not a very glamorous mode of transport,” said Dangalf after the Keepers stepped away to converse privately.
“We don’t take mounts into battle because they can’t unappear.”
Bearach showed next and had a few parting words for the rouges. The army had already left, but they had a long march ahead of them. “Wait, wait!” cried a voice. It was Camran running up to them from a distance. He was pushing a cart with three casks on it. He ran up to the wagon and loaded one of the casks on
to it.
“What’s all this then?” demanded Bearach.
“This is the solution to your greatest problem,” said Camran breathlessly.
“And what would that be?”
“Powdered beer!” he said proudly.
“Powdered beer?”
“You just add water!”
“Water!” protested the black-haired blackguard.
“Beer is mostly water,” said Camran.
“Maybe the beer you drink in the White School!”
“No. All beer. Please. There is enough in these casks to make twelve hundred pints of beer.” The promise of 1,200 pints instantly silenced the critics. “You’ll find your loads much less of a burden, and you can reconstitute it with any local water source.”
“Well,” said the black-haired blackguard. “Looks like we won’t need to carry all these supplies.” And he tapped into Nerdraaage’s firkin and poured himself a bootful. Other blackguards opened up Nerdraaage’s roasted boar and chicken even though Camran had not delivered any powdered food.
Finally, Nerdraaage patted Dusty good-bye, and he and the blackguards climbed aboard the wagon. Nerdraaage saluted solemnly to his friends, and they saluted in return. The wagon began moving. Ashlyn felt like a mother sending her special child off for his first day of school, only this school matriculated thieves and backstabbers, and he might not be back for months. She felt a tear run down her cheek. “Nerdraaage,” she yelled after him. “Did you remember your murder kit?”
“Yes,” he answered over a chorus of dwarven laughter.
While still in the stables, Dangalf paid to have his flying cloak returned to Vinland for repacking. He had already purchased an inexpensive but warm hooded cloak to replace it. He thought the hood would be a nice deception for faraway pursuers looking for a wizard hat. And they were off, this time exiting from the stable doors below the grand stairway. As soon as her first paw hit snow, Dusty was up and into her pocket on Dangalf’s robe with only her head poking out.
“I’m very hopeful about Doppelganger,” said Dangalf. “Templars are great fighters, but they are also very learned. I think that the change will be good for him, that he will be back to his old self.”
“Oh, I hope so.”
“I wish I had done more to help him. Let’s not forget it was his warrior mentality that got us through that first quest. None of us could have killed those dire wolves but him. And that was the foundation for everything we’ve achieved since then. And then when we got a little bit comfortable, his coarseness became a burden or an embarrassment. I wish I had reached out to him before he felt he had to go off on his own. I will never forgive myself if something happens to him.”
She ran her arm inside his cloak and around his waist, and it did make him feel better. But she let go soon enough, as it impeded their walking speed to be standing so close. “You must be tired,” Ashlyn said.
“Exhausted. I can sleep on the flatboat though. I’m glad you’re still with me. I don’t think I could do this alone.”
“You could do it alone,” she said. “You were alone on that mountain.”
“Well, not exactly,” he said, looking down to Dusty.
“I think you’re going to be the most powerful of the four of us,” she said.
“You think? Regicide said something about me becoming very powerful. Weyd Salint warned me that success as a mage meant I would be alone in a tower with only my books and telescope.”
“No,” said Ashlyn. “Just as we’re going after Doppelganger now, we’ll all come for you if you try to hide away in a tower.”
“What about you? Maybe you’ll want to associate more with the elves. I can’t say I would blame you.”
“Elves are fine,” she said. “But I have a special fondness for humans. Maybe because I was one.”
“Do you know what it means, the Keepers of the Broken Blade?”
“It’s from a Hardy Boys mystery, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“I saw the book in your library.”
“Of course,” said Dangalf. “But have you seen this?” And he held out before her a card from the Divination Deck: The Broken Blade.
“You mean there really is a broken blade?”
“This is one of the sympathy cards. I believe it is a clue to our greater purpose in this world. The mask of chance makes destiny seem like coincidence.”
“Who said that?”
“I just made it up.”
“You should never say it again,” she said laughing. And after a while, she added, “Does it strike you as unbelievable the adventures that we’re having? I mean, I know we agreed that we weren’t dreaming or having a psychotic episode, but still, it just doesn’t make sense all of the great things that have been happening to us. And by great I mean good and bad. We’ve met elven princesses and ghosts. We found a ring that has started a war, and we were even present for the creation of powdered beer. Doppelganger was invited to train as a Templar. You bought me a spider ring that just happened to ward me when I was attacked by a giant spider. It just seems like too many important things have happened around us.”
“And why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t we matter to this world reciprocal to how we didn’t matter in the other world?” Dangalf thought of how he had always seemed to lose out in the other world, not for lack of intelligence or ambition, but due to inexplicable forces at work—as if he was out of synch with that universe.
When he was in high school, his eccentricities had made him an outcast. But he had compensated for that with ingenuity. Well before his prom, he had marketed himself as a tutor at the nearby girls’ school, where they did not know him to be an untouchable. He had insinuated himself with several of the prettier girls and had scored the best-looking one of them to be his prom date. She was not only beautiful but she was the head cheerleader. Why a girls’ school needed cheerleaders was unclear, but he found the very notion to be full of erotic potential. When his big night came, all heads turned when he entered the prom with a date who made his own school’s popular elite seem plain. But it was not to be. Shortly after their arrival, his date excused herself. Thirty minutes later she returned to apologize and say she wasn’t feeling well.
He offered her a ride home, but she said she thought it was the limo that had made her sick, and she turned around and left with the high school quarterback. Turn lemons into lemonades he had always been told, and so Dangalf flirted with the quarterback’s jilted date, who responded that he was “fat.” And that was years before he was fat. Dangalf thought he had never been sadder in his life than when he was riding home alone in the back of that limo. Worse, he had to ride around for hours and construct a pleasing story for his parents about the prom. As miserable as he felt, he could not let his parents know. They would have hurt more deeply even than him, and he could not bear being the cause of that pain.
Years ago, an unemployed Dangalf had impressed upon his parents to buy him a new suit, waited in a two-hour line, and earned the chance to sit down for an interview with his dream employer at an outdoor job fair. Dangalf gave the interview of his life, answering all of their questions with ease and confidence. He had had many job interviews in his life, and he nailed this one. This job was his to lose. And as he rose and bid farewell to his future employer, a pigeon suddenly landed on his head. It sternly resisted his gentle attempts to remove it. (Looking back he wondered if it had had an important message from Acadia.) He saw his interviewers’ demeanor change right before his eyes. They were not seers or sages, and they didn’t know exactly what the pigeon on Dangalf’s head portended, only that it portended in part that they must not hire him. He got their “thanks but no thanks” letter in the mail two days later, postmarked the day of his interview.
Some people seemed to be living charmed lives in the other world, but Dangalf was clearly not one of them. And he guessed that was true for the other Keepers as well. Who was to say they hadn’t been born in the wrong world, the wrong uni
verse, the wrong body? He looked over to Ashlyn, who met his gaze and smiled. “It is a bit chilly,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind if I put my coat on.”
“Not at all.”
And she morphed into tyger form. Dusty, his other feline bookend, yawned and tucked her head into his pocket. Dangalf knew that, despite the danger, he could have been happier only if Doppelganger and Nerdraaage walked this snowy road with them.
Dangalf hadn’t allowed himself much time to think about loved ones from the other world. There was too much exhilaration and jeopardy in this world to accommodate sentimentality, and now their party was splintered and facing unimaginable danger. But he thought back now to the last conversation he had with his mother. He had rushed her off the phone because he wanted to get back to playing Cronica. With mild disappointment his mother had told him, “You could do great things if you only stopped playing that game.”
He hoped he could someday tell her just how right she was.
XCII
From a fragment discovered by the first Faraway expedition and dated by our most gifted seers as over thirty-thousand-years-old: Woden did summon the two wisest elves, the two strongest dwarves, and two bravest humans to his mountain. He did give each pair the task of slaying the monster Grendil, who resided at the center of the earth, since the world was turned inside out, and who also did put the evil in the heart of Kejavik to make the first murder. The elves said Grendil was immortal and it was prophesied that he could not be killed by sapien, and Woden did send them away. The dwarves next set upon the task, and with their great strength dug the Profundity, which was a path to the underworld where Grendil lived. But the dwarves, when faced with the monster, found that their strength was no match, and they were slain. The two humans next took the path of the Profundity and faced the great monster. And Grendil did make the humans know that he was too powerful for them to kill. He showed them the corpses of the dwarves and of all the many more beings that he had killed and torn asunder. And the humans did not despair, for unlike elves and dwarves they would not live forever, and to lose their lives in an impossible struggle was a great thing to do. And this courage in the face of such certain death caused a perplexity to Grendil. He had not known but the terror and desperation of those that did face him, and it was of grievous concern that the humans had none. And Grendil thought this human courage could only come from their foreknowledge that they would kill him and that they knew the secret of his demise. And when the humans raised up to strike Grendil, he made himself adamantine against their swords and was alive no more.
Cronica Acadia Page 40
