by James Enge
“Who are you?” she demanded thinly. She moved her head as she spoke, and only then did Earno recognize her. Her gray hair was stained and torn, and there were venom burns on her face and hands.
“Morlock syr Theorn, a thain. I must know what happened to you and your company.”
“Yes. You must tell the Graith . . . I can’t. I’m dying. I can’t. I won’t. I won’t. God Sustainer, I’m so hungry!”
“They’ll bring food. They should have done so already.”
“No.” Her throat clenched visibly, the neck muscles moving like fingers beneath her slack wrinkled skin. “No! It doesn’t matter. Listen! There are dragons!”
“I know,” Morlock said patiently. “How many?”
“How many? How many? How do I know how many? But they are a guile together; they have a master. . . . I saw him. . . . The sky was full of fire. I ran. Crawled . . . underground. Lost in the tunnels. So hungry. But there was water.”
“What happened to Summoner Lernaion?” Morlock asked gently.
“He was fey. A dead man! So proud, so . . . wise. I told him, before we left the tunnels. I told him about my dream. I told him I was afraid of the sky. He said . . . about old people, eager to be buried. It was clever. It was cruel. But he was tired of being underground. I’m not angry anymore. But when we came out into the light . . . I was still angry. I could taste the smoke, the tang of venom in the air. I should have said. . . . I didn’t say anything. Waited for them to notice. They were fey. They didn’t notice.
“Then we came over the rise. The town was there, all ashen, with bodies burning in the streets. No dragons. But that feeling. Then we looked up. There they were on the mountain, watching us. They leapt up into the air. So many! Like birds in the winter. You see them in the Southhold. Blackbirds. In troops. And they fly together and turn all at once, the light flashing on their black wings and bodies. Then they all roared and the sky was red and the air stank of poison. I was too afraid to move. We were all afraid.
“Then one fell out of the guile-in-flight, dropped like a hawk, stalled over us, stretching out his claws. Roared. Like red fog, the poison and the fire. I saw the collar about his neck, the sign of the master, like in Earno’s Song. The guile master: that was too much. I ran. Not back. Two tried that; he burned them, breathed right on them. Aside. Away in the valley. He didn’t care. Hunt me down later. I thought so too. Found a cave, crawled inside. Kept on crawling. It went on and on . . . Into the tunnels. I. I. No. No. No! The Graith . . . yes, of course. Tell them. The summoner. I won’t! I won’t! The summoner. Oh, yes. Yes. I will. But I failed. . . .”
“No, Vocate Almeijn!” Morlock said urgently. “The summoner is here, Earno himself; he has heard all you have said. The Guard is maintained; be at peace.”
“It. It wasn’t so important. And I’m not angry anymore. He was fey. Maybe I was fey, too. . . .”
As her voice trailed off Almeijn’s face turned toward Earno. He could not tell if she recognized him. He caught one glimpse of deep fiery redness in the blacks of her eyes—like the flash of a cat’s eyes. Then her eyelids closed convulsively.
Morlock rose and spoke to the dwarves in their own language. Two of them covered Almeijn’s hands and carried her body away. Morlock spoke for a few moments with the other guards and then crossed over to Earno.
“Did you notice her eyes?” the thain asked.
“Did you look in them?” demanded the summoner, suddenly alarmed.
“Only for a moment. Then I looked away. I’ve heard . . .”
“Yes,” said Earno. “You’re right. It was a dragonspell.”
They stood there in silence for some time. Earno dimly sensed Morlock’s impatience, but he could not bring himself to move. He hoped his inertia made him look as if he were deep in thought. But he was not. His thoughts were embroiled in a cloud of deep red light, the color that had flashed from Almeijn’s eyes.
“The gate guards tell me that Elder Tyr has gone to Southgate, which is under attack by dragons,” Morlock said finally. “Shall we bring him this news?”
Earno nodded. As wordlessly, Morlock took a torch from the wall of the gate chamber and led the way into the corridors.
They arrived at Southgate after several hours of travel. Earno was bone-weary, but determined to keep pace with his thain-attendant.
The battle for Southgate had ended long before their arrival. The roof of the terminal chamber was stove in, and a great part of the mountain above had fallen down in avalanche. But dwarves were already at work, bringing order out of the ruin. Passages had been cleared through the rubble to many of the corridors that had converged at Southgate. Thus Earno and Morlock came abruptly to the ragged end of their corridor and found themselves in the darkness and bitter cold of the autumn night.
Earno paused gratefully, drinking in the refreshing night air, at first not recognizing where they were. Then he looked with amazement on the wreckage of what he had seen whole just an hour before sunset. In the light of the major moons (Horseman was standing radiant in the western sky while somber Chariot loomed above the eastern horizon) it appeared to be nothing but a vast heap of broken stones.
Turning to make some comment to Morlock, Earno saw the thain’s face graven with shock and grief. He was pressing a hand against the side of the trench in which they were standing, as if it were the stump of a severed limb. He shook his head and walked swiftly away through the trench leading out of the corridor, forcing the summoner to follow before he had quite caught his breath; Earno’s comment, if it had ever been made, would certainly have gone unnoticed.
As Earno’s eyes grew used to the moonlight he saw that a legion of dwarves was at work amid the vast rolling hills of broken stone. Above them the dragons moved like red stars of ill omen, occasionally setting behind the black mountainous silhouette of Thrymhaiam.
“Hurm strakna?” came a challenge out of the darkness above them.
“I am Morlock syr Theorn,” the thain replied, “conducting Earno Summoner, called Dragonkiller.”
“Welcome Dragonkiller! Rokhlan!” cried the voice, and a chorus of assents echoed him. “Ath! Ath!”
“Ath rokhlan sael!” Morlock replied, somewhat perfunctorily. “Is Eldest Tyr at Southgate?” he continued.
“He is just before the gate-that-was, with the slain rokhleni.”
Morlock shouted into the darkness. “Hurs?”
“Your pardon, Elder Brother,” another voice replied. “With the slain—not among them.”
“Your pardon, rather,” said Morlock, clearly embarrassed. “To die a rokhlan would be no shame.”
“To wish one’s father alive is certainly none,” said yet another voice from the darkness above, this one known to Earno. “I notice, though, you do not ask about any of your lesser kin. Perhaps in a month or so you would have gotten around to asking, ‘What ever happened to harven Deor?’ only to be told I had died heroically under a load of rubble, while taking a valiant nap behind the rockpile—”
A chorus of shouts drowned out Deor’s self-lament.
“Then you can haul the rest of these stones by yourselves,” Deor said, sparking off a new outburst of good-tempered abuse. “Stand aside, Thain and Summoner!” he hollered over the voices of his mates. “I’m rolling down this rock-slide!”
Earno and Morlock backed away to the far side of the trench. Deor appeared suddenly in the sphere of light cast by Morlock’s torch, picking his way swiftly down the steep slope of rocks. Surprisingly few of them shook loose under the oblique impact of his heavy dwarvish boots, and Earno realized that the rocks in the trench wall had been fitted together to form a solid, though temporary, construction. It was anything but a rock-slide; Earno would have called it painstaking salvage work. For the dwarves, taking such pains was apparently a matter of instinct.
“A dark morning for us all, Guardians!” Deor said in greeting. “But perhaps not so bad as it might have been. Come along, if it suits you; the Eldest would no doubt like to hear yo
ur news.”
They followed him down the trench, toward the site where the gate had been. Deor was an interesting study to Earno. He seemed to be as hurt and grieved by the destruction about them as Morlock was. But he was challenged and invigorated in a way that Morlock was not. His eyes dripped tears he did not even attempt to hide. But he moved with a quick decisiveness, cracking jokes like nuts. From what Earno could see of the other dwarves—and hear, as the air above them resounded with the ringing consonants of the Dwarvish language—they were reacting much as Deor was. Morlock, in sharp contrast, seemed to become more silent, if that were possible, and more somber with each step.
Finally they reached a space beyond the rubble. Earno spotted the stone table at which Deor and his companions had been sitting the previous evening. It looked strangely isolated, without the slope of the mountain above it. The whole area had been burned with fire and stank of blood and venom.
In the middle of the bleakest space stood the Eldest and Vetr, his eldest son. They carried long spears, virtually twice their own height; beside them on the ground lay three dead dwarves, one of them a beardless child. The child, Earno realized, was Ny, the wordless dwarf-lass who had been his guide. Beyond them, asprawl over the small hill that stood above the road leading south, stretched the torn fuming corpse of the dragon they had slain at the cost of their lives.
The Eldest was drawing on the venom-stained ground with the butt-end of his spear, twirling the long metal shaft in his fingers as if it were a stylus. He looked up at the approach of the newcomers. “Khuf! Douse that torch!” he commanded. “No fire at the vigil of rokhleni!”
Morlock ground out the torch without a word.
“A moment from you all,” Tyr requested curtly, and turned back to Vetr. “So: you see it. We can only begin to build the new gate out of the wreck of the old. We will need more stone. The gate, which should have been the strongest point in the perimeter, had become the weakest. In recent centuries the fortifying stone had all been hollowed out for storerooms and guest chambers.”
Vetr grunted. He seemed dismayed. “Same must be in other gates.”
“Not all,” Tyr corrected him. “The Helgrind Gate, certainly: much trade with Haukr has gone through the Runhaiar. Northgate, too: the Ranga trade led us to weaken ourselves there. But the High Gate over the Coriam Lakes must still be strong enough to stand, among others.”
“Then?”
“Those chambers, in the weakened gates, must be cleared out, of course. Then: filled up with stone, gravel, debris from the mines—anything that can give weight to a wall. But the new Southgate will be different. We will cut down to bedrock and rebuild the shoulder of the mountain, fusing stone to stone. And we will timber the new terminal chamber with a web of maijarra wood. Let there be no honeycombing of the walls; we have already spent too many lives with such economy.”
Vetr said nothing. But his shadowy face turned toward the dark mountainside above them. There the dragons still wandered, spreading fire among the black pine forests.
“Let them come,” said Tyr, understanding Vetr’s gesture. “I mean it, Vetrtheorn! The work must be done as it ought to be done. To work in a panic, to content ourselves with a flawed job that would fail us when we need it most—this would be to hand the dragons their victory. They watch us, even now. They understand the choices before us. So must we, also. It is all or nothing. Either we rebuild the gate as it ought to have been, or we seal the southern corridors and carry on the Longest War with our backs to a solid wall.”
“Seal the corridors!” Vetr was truly dismayed.
“Yes. All or nothing, Vetrtheorn. The Longest War has returned—they have returned: to plunder, to kill, to destroy. That is the nature of dragons. Very well: it is our nature to defend, to build, to make. To remember and forget. The more they are dragons, the more we must be dwarves.”
“Akhram hav!” Vetr said thoughtfully. “It will be done.”
“It will be yours to do,” the Eldest replied. “I misdoubt I shall see the Seven Clans at peace again.” He turned back to the others and said, “Your pardon, Summoner and my kin. Yours, especially, Morlock. I should have remembered you were never taught how to stand a death-vigil over rokhleni. It was thought a rather obscure ritual, even when I was young.”
“No offense, yedhra harven. I hope it is obscure again before I am old.”
“Who can say, Morlocktheorn? The hero labors to slay monsters, that heroism will become unnecessary. The thinker labors to systemize thought, that thinking will become unnecessary. The worker labors to amass treasure, that work will become unnecessary. Softness, stupidity, and sloth inevitably follow; have any of the three really benefited their children? Yet we work and work and work. . . .”
Morlock shrugged; even in the darkness Earno sensed his discomfort. “Surely there are other monsters to slay . . . other thoughts to think . . .”
“And other treasures to amass? Yes. That last thought smacks of greed, of course. And we both know scholars, as greedy of knowledge as a miser is of coins. In my old age have I grown greedy of monsters, unwilling to turn away from the darkness in which I see myself most clearly?”
“For our sake, yedhra—I hope not.”
“My mother’s shadow! I am well-answered of my earlier rebuke—Morlock, you have chided me twice.”
“I meant no harm, yedhra harven; all this is strange to me, like an epic of the Longest War.” He gestured abruptly at the dead unbearded dwarf. “But surely that is—”
“Whoever she may be, Morlock, it would be unwise to say the name. That, too, is part of the vigil. To say their names would be to call them back from their journey to those-who-watch; that would be dangerous for them and for us. We watch until sunrise. When the gate in the west opens they can depart the world as the sun enters and take their places among those-who-watch.”
Earno recognized the name of the ancestral almost-gods who, in dwarvish belief, mediated between the Creator and Creation. The notion had always struck him as primitive before. Now he did not know what to think.
Meanwhile Morlock, like Vetr before him, had glanced up at the dark fire-written mountainside above them. The Eldest understood the impulsive motion. “A rokhlan’s vigil is stood where he has fallen,” the ancient dwarf said flatly. “In any case, my place is here, to direct the work. Necessary business does not defile the vigil. Go, now, Vetr; send the message to the gate-leaders and the Elders of the Lesser Clans.”
The Eldest’s eldest son bowed and vanished into the darkness and the dust clouds drifting from the wreckage of the gate.
Morlock knelt down by the fallen dwarves and looked long at each one of their beardless faces. In the midst of his contemplation he glanced up and said to the Eldest, who was gazing fixedly at him, “Is this fitting?”
“Certainly,” the ancient dwarf replied. “Look on them. Remember their deeds, good and bad, and, in your own heart, praise their names. After the Praising of Day we will bury them”—and he gestured with the point of his long spear—“there, where the old gate opened up.”
Morlock nodded, then glanced sharply down at one of the fallen.
Earno, following Morlock’s eye, saw that one of the dwarves lay beside a battered shield . . . the one bearing the Ambrosian hawk and thorns.
“Yes,” said the Eldest, who had apparently been waiting for Morlock to notice this, “she seized it at the dragon’s first approach and bore it through the whole battle. She won the honor of rokhlan under its protection. Let none say the Ambrosii have brought bad luck to Thrymhaiam!”
Morlock did not say so. He said nothing at all.
“Will you bear it now,” the Eldest asked quietly, “since danger has come again to the north?”
“No!” said Morlock sharply, and stood up.
The Eldest turned away for a moment. Earno dimly understood that the exchange had some awful significance. But in his weary bewildered state nothing was clear to him. Why should the Eldest, Morlock’s harven father, wish M
orlock to take up the shield of his ruthen father, the disgraced and exiled Merlin? Why was the Eldest not pleased when Morlock refused to consider himself an Ambrosius at all, with what Earno was inclined to consider as a laudable shame? Of course, he was an Ambrosius: his very stance, the trick of his expressions gave him away. But at least he tried to overcome his heritage, to deny it, to hate it. That was good, wasn’t it?
Eldest Tyr had turned back to the group. “Then,” he said matter-of-factly. “The shield will be placed as a marker over their tombs. Let it remain there until someone arises who can bear it. I have spoken.”
There was a tense brief silence. The Eldest broke it, saying calmly, “What word do you bring of your comrade Guardian? I heard a message that she died.”
With Earno’s permission, Morlock told the Eldest and Deor the whole story of the encounter with Almeijn at the Helgrind Gate. Vetr returned in the course of the telling, and what he had missed was recounted to him in the Dwarvish language. All three dwarves appeared very disturbed by the story.
“This is troubling, Morlocktheorn,” Tyr said, when the thain was finished. “We had discussed this before your arrival. It is obvious (now!) that the dragons have been in the north for months—because of the fire and the poisonings at Ranga, the trouble with the Wards, some other things. Why, then, did they wait till now to show themselves?”
“We guessed that they didn’t want to, even now,” Deor explained. “It would have made sense for them to wait until winter had closed the passes southward. Then they would have had all winter to deal with us alone and to settle into dwellings through the north, and the southern holds would know nothing of it. But we supposed the vocate had escaped them, and that for some reason they felt they must pursue her, even at the risk of showing themselves.”
“Now, though,” Tyr continued, “you tell us she was under their spell. That undermines everything we had thought we knew.”
“Well,” said Deor, “we don’t know what the spell was for, or whether it was effective. Maybe her story was the simple truth.”