by James Enge
Earno saw it differently. “He must take care of himself.”
“That is very true, but also not very generous. Think on it, Summoner. The lass outside will take you to your rooms.” Then the ancient dwarf turned his face and looked out the window, into the darkness of full autumn night.
CHAPTER NINE
Fire and Thunder
The meal that night had a festive air about it. It was held in the High Hall of the East, a tremendously difficult place to reach, at least for Earno. He found himself disturbingly prone to be out of breath, even after many days of travel through the mountainous north, and there were many stairs to climb in Thrymhaiam. When he finally reached the hall, trailing his little dwarfling guide, he felt as if he had climbed a mountain. As, in fact, he had. For when his guide led him to the Eldest’s table he saw that, just beyond it, was a bank of high windows.
Delighted, Earno went to them immediately. He had not realized how high they had climbed. Far below them he could see the tops of clouds. The steep dark sides of Thrymhaiam’s mountains disappeared in a deep valley filled with mist. Across the narrow valley another range of mountains lifted up, their peaks miles distant and already crowned with snow. Above them, the somber moon Chariot glowed. The whole scene, however, was lit by the second moon, Horseman, which had risen eight days ago. It was invisible from where he stood, since he had no view to the west, but it caused the high range opposite to glow with a thin bluish light. Coming after hours spent in the corridors and staircases of the Deep Halls, the view gave him a heady sense of breathing room.
“Is that the Haukr yonder?” he asked his guide. But, in turning around, he found that the little dwarf-lass had gone and it was Deor standing beside him.
“Yes,” the dwarf replied. “That is the Haukr. Magnificent mountains, those. You were missing your guide, little Ny, I guess.”
“I was,” Earno admitted.
“She’s gone to stand as gate-guard with the other cwens. Then she’ll have to get something to eat. But she’ll be back later, I expect. A quiet lass, not like some.”
“How high are we, really?”
“Not so high. That valley down there is actually a gorge several miles deep. We’re not even at the peak of this mountain, which is one of the lowest of Thrymhaiam. It’s the gorge that gives the sense of height. We call it Helgrind—‘deeper than the sea,’ in your language.”
“That sounds familiar, for some reason . . .” the summoner said slowly. Then he heard a voice behind him chanting:
“O what is higher than the tree?
And what is deeper than the sea?
“Or what is heavier than lead?
And what is better than the bread?
“Or what is sharper than a thorn?
And what is louder than a horn?
“O heaven is higher than the tree,
and hell is deeper than the sea.
“O sin is heavier than lead,
the blessing’s better than the bread.
“O hunger’s sharper than a thorn
and shame is louder than a horn.”
The voice was Morlock’s. He joined them at the window, smiling a rare crooked smile.
“You are in peerless voice tonight, Thain Morlock,” said Earno, almost inclined to like him. “But in the Westhold we sing: ‘the thunder’s louder than a horn.’”
“Well, perhaps your horns in Westhold are louder than we have here,” Deor suggested. “Then, too, some people are afraid of thunder, which is a great shame.”
“Why?”
“It’s the lightning that kills. Thunder is just noise.”
The meal began shortly thereafter with the entrance of Tyr. Many of the Eldest’s immediate family had already settled at the long black table, and the rest did so as he appeared, resplendent in blue clothes, that odd fiery-red gem still on his chest. The summoner was guided to a low-slung seat on the left hand of the Eldest’s chair. On the summoner’s left sat Deor, and there was a succession of younger dwarves, some almost beardless, farther down. Facing them was a line of considerably older dwarves, all densely bearded. From the fact that Morlock was placed with them and for some other reasons Earno guessed that these were the sons of Tyr. This guess proved to be correct. They were a grim lot, hardly saying a word after they gruffly introduced themselves. The younger dwarves (guests? descendants?) were much more talkative; Earno wondered why this was so.
The exception was the Eldest, who plied him with questions about the new religion of the Kaeniar—the Way of the Two Powers.
“It is not really new, as I understand,” Earno said. “It is a sorcerer-cult of the Anhikh. They believe that the universe is the accidental by-product of the conflict of the two primal powers, Fate and Chaos.”
“Yet Morlock tells me these shrines are springing up all along the shore of the Narrow Sea—in Kaen, not Anhi.”
“Morlock knows a good deal,” conceded Earno. “He may have been talking with Illion, who was in Kaen this past summer.”
“Morlock was there himself, I think. But he does not know what his Graith intends to do about it, anyway. I won’t ask you, since you’d obviously rather not talk about it. I’m glad to know you’re aware of this, though. From all I hear, the Kaeniar are bad, but the Anhikh are worse. I’d hate to be facing them across the Narrow Sea.”
Earno nodded. “The children of Kaen have never been our friends. But we must think long and hard before we permit a conquering power in the east.”
“And they actually believe that these primal forces live—where is it?”
“In Tychar,” Earno recalled, “the winterwood.”
Tyr grunted incredulously. “Astonishing what some people will believe.” He turned away to make a libation before his father’s deathmask, which was on a stand beside him.
Next to Earno, Deor was leaning over the table, reminding Morlock of some cousins of his—some harven cousins.
Morlock nodded. “I remember them.”
“The ones that were always setting you on fire?”
“Yes.”
“They took over the trading house on the Broken Coast. In five months they had doubled our best trade year.”
“I’m not surprised,” Morlock said. “They were very convincing. I was just short of adulthood, you remember, and they had me believing it was my own, um, fluids that were causing the fires.”
A couple of Morlock’s harven brothers laughed belatedly at this, surprising Earno. Morlock turned to the one beside him and said, “Vetr, do you still oversee the Ranga trade?”
The one called Vetr nodded wordlessly. Deor said, “Ah, here it comes.”
“Deor and I looked in on the travellers back from Ranga.”
Vetr shook his head gloomily. “You should not have done, Morlocktheorn,” he said with difficulty. Earno realized belatedly that he could barely manage Wardic, the realm’s common speech. “They are diseased, badly diseased,” he added, after some thought.
“They are sick, yes, but . . . It reminds me of an illness I’ve seen in the south, along the Narrow Sea. It comes from a poison that the Kaeniar use.”
Vetr smiled. “No Kaenish here, Morlock.”
“The lizards the poison comes from might be. The traders say they saw none, but they ate mostly stored food and I was thinking . . .”
Vetr nodded. Slow in speech, he was far from slow in thought. “The stores. Haukr stores, our stores. They must be checked.”
“I don’t think much of your idea, Morlock,” Tyr interjected. “Thrymhaiam has been eating stored food since summer. The only dwarves that fell sick were in Ranga when they did so.”
Morlock shrugged.
“Has anyone else caught the disease?” Earno asked “Anyone in Thrymhaiam?”
“No—unless we have,” said Deor.
“They were poisoned,” said Morlock, not stubbornly, but as a matter of fact. “That’s their disease. We won’t fall sick from talking to them.”
Earno thought of Lernaion and his
escort being poisoned by stored food in Haukr. Or: a plague fever sweeping out of the north to decimate the Wardlands. That was a kind of destruction by fire he had not anticipated. But the conversation around him was turning in different directions, which was just as well.
“Naeth couldn’t bring himself to finish the shaft,” a young dwarf called Laen was saying, “because it cut through this ‘lovely’ formation. The work still isn’t done. He should be a farmer!”
“No, no,” said Deor, as if this were too harsh a criticism for anyone. “Not a miner, though, you’re right.”
“I learned lode-seeking from Naeth,” Morlock observed.
Deor was at once impressed and defensive. “Yes, but he has no practical skills. You remember what a thumphead he was about—I mean, when he was our tutor for gemstones.”
Morlock shrugged. “I think he cares more about metal or crystal within living rock than any use they might be put to.”
“It’s lunacy.”
“He knows a great deal.”
“But he makes no use of it,” Deor insisted.
Morlock nodded slowly. “I asked him about the Ranga blaze. He thinks it was the Fire . . . that is, vulcanism,” he added, glancing at Earno. It was only then that Earno realized that they were speaking Wardic, and even censoring their use of it, for his benefit alone.
“Ranga has no Fire, Morlock,” Elder Tyr said, forestalling a reply from Deor.
“Naeth thinks that might be changing.”
“Naeth wants it to change,” Tyr replied. “It would suit his notions. But I have been listening to the land for months, and I have heard no Fire in Ranga.”
Earno found Morlock’s presence disconcerting. He resembled his father, his ruthen father, greatly just then: with his crooked shoulders and his crooked smile, a crooked kind of confidence among people he knew. Earno thought about his notion that Merlin was the cause of the northern troubles and was intuitively convinced of its truth. Old Tyr would shelter him at Thrymhaiam, certainly, and perhaps there were others in the north who would do the same. The summoner had been fitting the details he knew into a consistent pattern, and he found it worked admirably.
The second course, roasted fungi stuffed with some sort of diced meat, was brought in. When he resumed his train of thought he felt himself feverish and distracted, with a strange ache inside his head. Something was wrong. He could lie to himself or face it: something was wrong.
He stared out of the windows, trying to lose his thoughts in the magnificent view. But there were more lights in the room now, many of them torches, and he could see little except reflections of himself and the rest of the company in the dark glassy surface.
“. . . it was not the summoner Lernaion who bothered our Eldest,” Deor was saying mischievously. “No: it was those splendiferous thains.”
Vetr grunted. “One spoke dozen languages. Not ours, though.”
Morlock was looking uncomfortable. “They’re senior thains. Seniority gives privileges in the Guardians, just as it does in the Seven Clans. Is this news? Thains’ Northtower is on our very border.”
“Well, you didn’t see them,” Deor replied. “They weren’t much like those peasants in Northtower. How they whined. Roughing it in the newest hold!”
“Their fingers were as soft as feathers,” one dwarf recalled with amazement.
“One had a tear in his silken cloak,” another dwarf recalled. “Didn’t want it mended—that’d make an ugly seam, he said. He wondered if we could get him another.”
“Another tear?” said Deor. “Easy enough!”
There was laughter. Part of it was real amusement; part of it was local or racial prejudice. But part of it was anger. Morlock’s ragged and burned cape would linger in the clans’ memory alongside that torn silken cloak. Earno thought of Tyr’s words to him earlier: May my son never be like them! But still. . .
“It’s no great honor to be a senior thain,” Earno found himself saying, into a silence that formed around his words. “It is honorable enough, and perhaps very comfortable. But the real honor is to be elected vocate. Younger thains have that honor more often, and with some reason.” He paused, concerned that he had said too much or not enough.
But it wasn’t so. The dwarves were nodding solemnly. Apparently something he had said had checked their anger without giving them the impression that he had personally elected Morlock to the rank of vocate.
Which would be far from the case. For, if Earno’s deductions were correct, he would soon be sending their harven kinsman into exile. He felt anxiety suddenly descend on him again, and his head ached. He looked at the windows again, almost yearningly, longing for solitude and escape. But all he could see was the red light of the torches glittering on black surfaces. Watching them, he swiftly became dizzy; he felt that he was seeing two levels of reality at once, as in a Sight. There was no Sight, no revelation. Yet the illusion continued.
He heard Tyr speaking in his ear. “Summoner Earno, is anything wrong?”
“Do you see anything outside?” he responded tensely. “In the chasm?”
Everyone stood and looked out the windows. They glanced at each other, but Earno found the dwarvish expressions (including Morlock’s) unreadable.
“Extinguish the lights!” the Eldest commanded, and it was done.
There was red light glowing diffusely in the thick blue clouds of Helgrind chasm. The light moved and dimmed and brightened, flowing like water. Presently it could be seen that there were many brighter parts of the light, as intensely red-gold as separate flames or coals in the murkily glowing clouds.
“The Fire?” Deor demanded of no one in particular.
“No,” said the Eldest Tyr firmly. “Not as you mean.”
They waited.
The dragons broke through the clouds in groups of three, casting distorted shadows behind them by their own light. There were perhaps a dozen groups. Most of them soared steeply out of the range of sight, but three dragons flew directly to the windows of the High Hall of the East. One roosted directly before the windows (the mountain shook beneath them) and peered within: smoke and fire trailing from his jaws, his bright scales shedding red light at their edges, his slotted eyes as red and gold as molten metal.
Eldest Tyr moved to take a coldlight and lit it. Then he walked to the windows so that the dragon could see him clearly.
The Eldest spoke. “I know you,” he said quietly. “I know you and I deny you. In the first days of the father of my father’s father my kith defeated you and drove you from this land. You have come again. You will be killed again. Let all of you come, all our ancient enemies together. Let them come to steal our homes and the things our skill has made. Let the Longest War flare up again in every mountain valley, in every cave beneath the earth. These mountains have stood and will stand. If we cannot live within them we will die beneath them. We will deny you our homes, and the things our skill has made!”
Earno wondered if the dwarf was in rapport with the dragon somehow or whether he spoke for his people’s benefit or for other reasons. But it was as if the dragon understood him. He rose up on his hind legs and roared flame down on the bank of windows.
Earno flinched (was it the mountain, or the deck of Stonebreaker shuddering beneath him?) but the Eldest stood motionless as the wave of fire broke like water on the slabs of dwarvish crystal. The sound of all three dragons roaring penetrated dimly into the hall.
“Father,” said Morlock, after some moments, “yedhra harven coruthen, the Deep Halls are under attack. You must lead your people.”
Tyr turned to him quickly, as if startled, but there was no surprise on his face. “Morlocktheorn, you are right. I have been wondering why . . . But that does not matter, not yet.” He turned to his other sons and spoke to each of them briefly in Dwarvish.
Earno stood motionless, not daring to move or think, lest he make some new error. He was the chief Guardian here. But he had no authority over anyone save Morlock. And he wondered if Morlock would obe
y his commands, rather than Tyr’s, and if it would be right to do so. He had foreseen so much! Somehow, visions had come to him, warning him of this danger. But foreknowledge had been wasted by folly. He waited, not thinking, not moving, and the red light moved about him like a sea of blood.
The dragons began to batter the mountainside with their tails; the stone walls and floor shuddered with the repeated attacks, and the mountain above them rumbled disturbingly. Tyr still stood, defiantly, before the windows, issuing commands to his kith.
Earno felt a touch on his sleeve and moved instinctively toward it. Morlock was there, his expression at once concerned and eager. The summoner felt it was unusual for the thain to be so unguarded, and it would have been interesting to watch if he were not so reluctant to meet Morlock’s eye.
“Summoner Earno,” said the thain, presenting to him a very young beardless dwarf, “this is Olla, a messenger stationed at the Helgrind Gate, that faces the Runhaiar . . . the tunnels which pass under the Haukr.”
Earno nodded.
“She says that an hour ago a woman crawled over the threshold out of the Helgrind and collapsed. She was wearing a vocate’s cloak.”
Earno nodded again. As moments passed he realized painfully that he must also speak and move.
“Lead me to her, then.”
The sound of the dragons’ attack faded like thunder as they descended under the mountain.
It took much less than an hour to descend to the Helgrind Gate. Arriving there they found the vocate still lying on a bed of rags before the great cave of the Helgrind Gate. The portcullis was down. The dwarf guards beside it were armored and carried long spears with metal shafts.
Morlock greeted them in Dwarvish, and they responded in kind. He spoke with them for a few moments and then, seeing that Earno had made no move toward the vocate, went and knelt by her.
“Vocate Almeijn,” he said to her, and she started.