Hammer and Axe

by Dan Parkinson

  “Stay up there!” Megistal demanded.

  “I’m not up here,” Clote called back, sinking lower and lower. “This isn’t real.”

  “Can’t you hold him up?” Damon inquired.

  “He’s getting very heavy,” Megistal puffed. “But that’s impossible. While under this spell, he shouldn’t weigh anything.”

  Damon shrugged. “Clote Darkeye weighs a hundred and sixty pounds.”

  Abruptly, the Daergar dropped the last three feet, landing nimbly.

  Megistal panted, shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he said, as though to himself. He whirled, pointed at another volunteer, and muttered. The selected dwarf suddenly was covered with feathers. He resembled an unhappy owl.

  “Look at him!” Megistal demanded. “What do you see?”

  “He looks like he has feathers,” Damon said.

  “Do you have feathers?” the wizard demanded of the dwarf.

  “No,” that one assured him. “I’ve never had feathers. Right now I look like I do, but I don’t.”

  “Gods!” Megistal snorted, shaking his head.

  The dwarf who stepped forward then was older than most of the rest. He wore bright armor, and there were hints of silver in the dark beard below seamed cheeks and cold, wide-set eyes.

  Before Megistal could begin a chant, the newcomer said, “Enough play, wizard. Kill me, if you can.”

  Megistal’s brows raised, and he turned to Damon. “I gave you my word …” he started.

  “It’s all right,” the Hylar said. “Do as he says. Kill him, if you can.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Damon looked up at the wizard, challenging him. “Are you?”

  Megistal took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. He muttered a spell, and a large, hurtling stone appeared above the armed dwarf, crashing down on him. He barely got his shield up in time to deflect it, and the impact knocked him to his knees. But the stone bounced away. The dwarf stood.

  “No man could have stopped that,” Megistal gasped. “That stone is the size of a water keg!”

  The armored dwarf looked at his shield, studied its surface, and turned to whisper to a golden-bearded dwarf beside him. The gold-beard stepped forward. He tossed aside his shield and removed his body armor. “Try me,” he demanded, glaring at the wizard. “Kill me, if you can.”

  “Kill him,” Damon Omenborn said. “Kill him with a spell, if you can.”

  Megistal took a deep breath, focusing his powers, putting all of his will into the spell. This time it was not a stone, but a heavy bolt, as though from a siege engine. The three-inch-wide shaft with its four-edged metal point appeared out of nothing, hurtled toward the dwarf, and impaled him. He fell, gasping.

  “There!” Megistal snapped. “Magic!”

  For a moment, the impaled dwarf lay inert. Then he twitched, groaned, and sat up, struggling to pull the shaft from his body. The shaft became transparent as he tugged at it. It paled, shrank, and diminished, then was gone. The dwarf stood, pale and trembling, but very much alive.

  “Are you all right, Gem?” Damon called.

  “That hurt like all blazes,” Gem Bluesleeve assured the Hylar. “You were right about that, Damon. But I’m all right. There was really nothing there.”

  Megistal gawked, at first one dwarf and then another. Quist Redfeather was staring at the recently impaled dwarf in absolute disbelief.

  “If I had believed that was a real bolt, I’d be dead now,” Gem Bluesleeve told Barek Stone quietly.

  “And if I had believed that stone was the size it looked, I’d have been crushed,” the captain general agreed. “But the stone wasn’t real. It shook me, though.”

  Damon Omenborn faced the wizard, a deep curiosity in his narrowed eyes. Somehow, it had seemed to the dwarf that, at least the last two times, the wizard had held back. The spells had been potent spells and were delivered with force, but Damon had a feeling that something beyond spells had been withheld—something against which the dwarves might have had no defense. “Have you played enough games for now?” Damon asked. “Have you learned what you wanted to learn?”

  “I have learned that it isn’t just you who can resist spells,” Megistal said. “It seems to be dwarves in general. And I have confirmed that the method of resistance is plain, stubborn refusal to believe. You don’t like magic, so you just … just don’t allow for it in your concept of the universe. But I still don’t know how you do it. There must be some natural defense in your race. Magic is an absolute and is as certain as alternate realities.”

  “There aren’t any alternate realities,” Damon said flatly.

  “Gods,” Megistal muttered. “You’re about as open to suggestion as a chunk of basalt. Very well, I suppose I have learned as much as I can. Now, what do you want from me?”

  “Oh, we already have what we want,” Damon told him. “Except for one thing. In magic, is the power in the person or in the spell itself?”

  “I won’t tell you that,” Megistal said suspiciously. “I have probably revealed too much already.”

  “I guess I must find out for myself, then.” Damon shrugged. Pointing at Megistal, he said, “Hippochus bes. Chapak!”

  The wizard’s mouth dropped open … and closed as a horse’s mouth. Where Megistal had been, now there stood a red horse, shaking its head in confusion.

  “The power is in the spell,” Damon mused. “I thought so.” To the horse, within which he still saw the mage, he said, “You’re not really a horse, you know. You’ve never been a horse and never will be.” He turned to Quist Redfeather. “I promised you a horse. Do you want this one?”

  “How long will he remain a horse?” the Cobar asked, wide-eyed with wonder.

  “I haven’t any idea,” Damon admitted. “Until the spell is reversed, I suppose. Or until he realizes that magic is no more than a bad habit. When he comes to that conclusion, he won’t be a horse anymore. But then, he won’t be a wizard anymore, either.”

  Quist walked around the red horse, looking it over. It was a fine, big horse, as sturdy and well formed as any he had seen. “I’ll take this one,” he said, turning, and found that he and the horse were alone. Somewhere, a gate closed with a heavy, metallic sound. The dwarves were gone. He ran toward where he had heard the sound and found only a stack of bales and water kegs. He looked around at the wide, deep little valley with its sheer vertical walls and muttered every curse of Cobar custom and a few from other tribes.

  The dwarf had kept his word about a horse. Quist had a horse, if it didn’t turn back into a wizard. But he was a prisoner here, in this valley, with no way out.

  Intuition grew within him, and he ran back to the fireside where he had left his pack. He searched inside it. His credentials from the High Overlord and the missive to Daltigoth were gone. The dwarves had found them, then. They knew about his mission. And they had made him prisoner.

  He turned over in his mind the odd thing Damon Omenborn had said to him: “If you help us with our problems, maybe we can help you with yours.”

  But what could they know of his problems? Of his family held hostage in Xak Tsaroth to ensure his return, of the cruelty of the High Overlord …

  Something nudged him from behind. The horse stood there, pressing its nose against his shoulder, wanting to be rubbed. He gazed at it thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “I, for one, believe in your magic even if I hate you for it. I saw you turn into a horse, and I don’t care what that dwarf says, you are a real horse.” Casually, he ran a strong hand along the animal’s muzzle and rubbed a stiff ear. “That’s all you are now,” he said. “Just a horse.”

  Inside Thorbardin, Damon Omenborn, Barek Stone, and Gem Bluesleeve compared notes as they hurried toward the Grand Hall where the regent and the chieftains were waiting.

  “We have learned that magic can hurt us,” Gem Bluesleeve admitted. “It has great power.”

  “But its power is not absolute,” Barek said. “I wonder if the wizards really understand
magic themselves.”

  “They may not,” Damon suggested. “I think that is why they want to build towers of sorcery. They have magic, but their skills are poor. They want to refine them.”

  “We have also learned that they—the other wizards—will come for their stone. They’ll do everything they can to get it back.”

  “From what I’ve seen of wizards, they aren’t very good at anything but magic.”

  “When the attack comes, it won’t be by wizards alone,” Barek told Damon. “Neidar rangers reported today that several large companies of human raiders have crossed into Kal-Thax. We don’t know how they got past the border guards unchallenged, but I suspect the wizards had something to do with it. The Neidar say they are converging on a place southwest of here, where the wizards may be assembled.”

  “Well, we’ve learned something important that may help,” Damon noted. “We learned that magic is in the words of the spells. It doesn’t take a magician to work a spell, if the spell is known.”

  “You worked one,” Barek admitted. “I couldn’t believe you’d do that, but you did.”

  “I hope I never need to again.” Damon wrinkled his nose. “It almost made me sick. What I’d like right now is a long hot bath.”

  15

  Fortress Thorbardin

  There could be no further doubt, based on the Neidar reports, that Kal-Thax had been invaded and Thorbardin would be attacked. The fog-beast had not been seen since the day it murdered Mace Hammerstand and a hundred members of the Roving Guard on Sky’s End, and there were some who said that it had gone away. But the greater threat, the wizards who had released it, remained, and they were determined to get back the thing the dwarves had taken from them—the Stone of Threes upon which the Tower of High Sorcery of Kal-Thax must be built.

  For nine decades, the bonded thanes of Thorbardin had labored to create the mightiest of fortresses, deep in the heart of a mountain under Cloudseeker Peak. And now the fortress would be tested, with the fate of the entire race of dwarves at stake. If Thorbardin should fall, all of Kal-Thax would fall.

  Under command of the regent, Willen Ironmaul, Thorbardin made ready for siege. Stores and supplies were laid in, defenders drilled in every cavern and corridor, and the great smelters surrounding the Shaft of Reorx roared with activity as Daergar iron and Theiwar fire-stone went into the making of steel to be fashioned into weapons. The metal-smithies were already geared to weaponry, having only recently completed a huge order of armaments for some buyer in the human realm of Ergoth—arms which, rumor said, were for a man named Darr Bolden. But now the forges went on double duty as every guardsman, soldier, and reservist in Thorbardin—and every civilian capable of bearing arms—was called to service.

  Drums sang through the mountains, and patrols of Neidar scoured the nearby countryside escorting whole communities of unaffiliated Einar dwarves to the safety of the great fortress. By the thousands they came, pouring in through the great portals of Southgate and Northgate, past the gateways where Southgate’s plug sat ready to close and where Northgate’s identical plug was being hurriedly installed upon its ram. Whole villages came up from the valleys and the fields, driving their herds and carrying their belongings, to disappear into the vast subterranean maze that was Thorbardin.

  In Hybardin, Daebardin, Theibardin, Theibolden, and Daerbardin; in Northhole and Lakeshore; in the unnamed Klar city; and in every other established delving, hammers rang. Additional space was made for the refugees, and woodsmiths and weavers worked to erect large, temporary camps in the east and west farming warrens, which had been cleared of tractor worms. The worms, huge thirty-foot-long creatures with clusters of waving tentacles for faces, were in the back warrens, where Klar herdsmen used them to clear new fields for planting.

  Cambit Steelsheath, warden of ways, at first tried to count and record each person coming in from outside in an attempt to guard against infiltration by anyone who didn’t belong. But the tide of refugees was so vast that his clerks found themselves overloaded, and surly crowds built up in the gateways. So he did it another way. At the entrance to each Anvil’s Echo chamber, he had cables strung across the way at a height of five feet, five inches. Guards were posted at each side, with orders to stop anyone who had to stoop or duck to walk under the cables. No mature human or elf would pass such inspection, and no ogre of any age.

  Beyond the fields of the Einar, other villages—those of the settled Neidar, whom most people now called hill dwarves—began moving inward toward the fortress, some to take shelter within and others to join their cousins, the Neidar Rangers, as the first line of defense.

  Cale Greeneye had made it clear to the chief of chiefs that the fighting Neidar would remain outside, no matter what. “Thorbardin may be impenetrable,” he said, “but what good is it if no one is left outside to defend?”

  Willen Ironmaul was everywhere, it seemed, testing defenses, reviewing troops, and meeting with thane leaders and wardens. Followed by Cable Graypath and the Ten, the Hylar regent was constantly on the move throughout Thorbardin.

  Barek Stone, captain general of forces, studied plans and strategies with his commanders, always keeping in mind that two defenses would be required if the wizards and their “allies”—increasing hordes of human mercenaries brought in from the outlands of Ergoth and the wild lands beyond—pressed an attack beyond the outer slopes. Thorbardin was constructed for defense but had never been tested in true conflict. And in addition to the threat of troops and armies, it must now face the barely understood forces of sorcery.

  Gem Bluesleeve, warden of the watch, reviewed all of his forces and then put direct command in the hands of another Daewar, Lodar Yellowkilt, captain of court guards. Gem had another task for himself, and to accomplish it he commandeered a hundred of the best Daewar delvers, a hundred select Theiwar volunteers—all of whom had served as boatmen on the Urkhan Sea—and a troop of Vog Ironface’s best mine sappers, all draped from head to toe in heat-resistant spunstone fabric created by the weavers of Daebardin from fibers collected by the Klar. In addition, he put a dozen Hylar glaziers to work, blowing large glass globes with foot-wide openings at one end and sockets for shoulder straps.

  Part of the task began in the Shaft of Reorx, just above the smelter vents, where the heat-exchange ducts fed outward to the various cities. Here the Daergar sappers, with masks and thick, protective spunstone wraps, were put to work setting a hinged iron cap over the abandoned duct that had been begun years ago to feed heat to Hybardin, before a better way was found.

  The other part of the task was miles away, three hundred yards out from the south shore of the Urkhan Sea. A dozen boats congregated there on the bright water, tethered together like a little floating island. Beneath each boat were climb-lines, long cables with stone weights that rested on the bottom.

  Daewar delvers, sullen and nervous, were gathered on the boats, outfitted with lead-soled boots and tool straps. A glass globe was placed over the head of each one, with straps beneath his armpits. A towline was attached to each belt, and the delvers were lowered over the side in groups of ten by grinning, joking Theiwar boatmen.

  Each delver sank to the bottom of the sea, worked furiously there for eight minutes, then was raised from the water, given a chance to breathe fresh air, and lowered again. It was probably the worst experience of the delvers’ lives—trying to dig a hole underwater while living on the air contained in a fragile glass bowl, and, worst of all, being completely dependent upon a bunch of “tarnish-happy Theiwar” to bring them up before they drowned. It was doubtful that any of them would have even tried it, except for their respect for Gem Bluestone—not to mention the rich reward Olim Goldbuckle promised to each one who survived.

  So, while mine-sappers capped the old heat-exchange tunnel in the Shaft of Reorx, delvers were at work at the other end, digging toward the same duct to flood it with water.

  It was Willen Ironmaul, as regent, who had approved the project. Now, as he watched the diving delvers
descending from their boats, the regent sighed and turned to Gem Bluestone. “Let us pray to all the gods who matter, Gem,” he said, “that this contrivance works properly … should we need it. Because if it doesn’t, I imagine the Council of Thanes will draw and quarter one ex-regent and one excellent soldier who have wild ideas.”

  With all these intense preparations underway, Willow Summercloud was left with little to do but watch as Fortress Thorbardin came to life around her. Damon Omenborn had refused to let her accompany him on his wizard-study expedition, and since his return he was so busy, being involved in all sorts of preparations, that she hardly saw him at all.

  At first, Willow tagged around after Tera Sharn, learning the ways of Thorbardin. Then, when Tera became involved in a “ladies’ home defense plan,” Willow wandered around by herself, exploring the huge subterranean realm that—she had decided—was going to be her home, if she could just capture Damon’s attention a few more times.

  Dressed in the fine, practical garb Tera had shown her how to wear, but still carrying her woodsman’s axe wherever she went, the Einar girl wandered about, marveling at the wonders of Thorbardin. The controlled daylight of the sun-tunnels fascinated her, as did the nighttime splendor of the Temple of Stars above the Shaft of Reorx. She rode the lifts and cable-carts, wandered the public ways, and explored the galleries with their myriad shops and stalls. She watched the crafters at work, with their forges, looms, shuttles, and lathes. She saw the gloomy corridors of Daerbardin, the quiet, dim passages of Theibardin, and the bright, many-colored concourses of Daebardin. And more than once, she found herself fending off groups of young male dwarves vying for her attention.

  She was fascinated by the great farming warrens—miles of subterranean fields and vine-covered ledges where the thanes had learned to grow a hundred kinds of useful crops. But the east and west warrens were packed by refugees camping at their entrances, so she headed for the old north warren beyond Theibardin. It was there, they said, that the first farming had been done. It had been called the first warren then, and most of the experiments with subterranean agriculture applied in the newer warrens had been done there. But the north warren itself had only recently been made ready for farms of its own.