by Markus Heitz
“Falls apart,” supplied Tungdil, realizing that Boïndil was struggling.
“Exactly! So Balyndis didn’t have a choice, do you see?”
“I grew up in a human realm…”
“Do humans choose their partners willy-nilly, with no regard for their families?” demanded Boïndil.
“No,” conceded Tungdil, “but love comes first. I thought dwarves would be the same.” He leaned back against the rock next to his friend. “Look, I’ve been thinking—the fifthlings should choose a new leader.”
“What for? You’re the one they want: Tungdil Goldhand, hero of the Blacksaddle, rightful heir to Giselbert’s belt, and the only dwarf who can kindle the power of Keenfire.”
“They need a dwarf who grew up with our lore, someone who knows the traditions and respects them. There aren’t many of us, and we’re miles from the other kingdoms; our future depends on us pulling together. Keenfire and I will fight if we’re needed—I don’t have to be leader as well.”
Boïndil removed his pipe and blew smoke rings through his mouth. He waited for the blue smoke to disperse. “I understand what you’re saying, scholar. I’ve never known anyone so wise,” he said admiringly.
Tungdil reached into the bubbling stream and scooped a handful of water into his mouth. It was wonderfully clear—slightly metallic, but delicious. It tasted a hundred times better than any overland spring or river, and it slaked the thirst at once. “Is it wrong of me to wish him dead?” he asked softly, damping his hair with his hands.
“Who? Glaïmbar Sharpax?” Boïndil roared with laughter. “I’ve been wishing him dead since I met him; anyone who makes my best friend unhappy and pilfers his girlfriend deserves as much.” On seeing Tungdil’s shock, he laughed again. “What’s the matter? I’m crazy, remember? My inner furnace has melted my mind.” He made an effort to be serious. “Honestly, Tungdil, I’d challenge Sharpax to a duel if I thought it would do any good, but rules are made for a reason. One rash deed leads to another, and before you know it, it’s a bloodbath.” He thumped Tungdil on the knee. “Chin up, scholar. You’ll find another maiden who’ll give you a place in her heart and her bed—you’ll forget about Balyndis.”
“No,” said Tungdil.
“It’s the only way,” his friend advised sharply. “You can’t store up your anger forever. Believe me, I know.” He handed his pipe to Tungdil, who took it gratefully.
Long moments passed as they sat in silence by the stream.
If it weren’t for Glaïmbar, you and Balyndis would be happy, said the fiendish voice in Tungdil’s head. She’ll be miserable with Glaïmbar. Do her a favor, and kill him when you have a chance.
“How will you do it?”
“Do what?” asked Tungdil guiltily, sure that Boïndil could read his thoughts.
“Tell them you don’t want to be leader. How will they know whom to choose?”
“Oh… I’ll say what I said to you,” he said carelessly. “They should pick a leader of proper dwarven stock.”
He fell silent because Boïndil was on his feet, sniffing the air excitedly. His axes flew to his hands. “You can’t say the Gray Range doesn’t look after us; it gives us everything we ask for: water for our gullets—and orcs for our blades.” His eyes glinted as he grinned at Tungdil. “Can’t you smell the stinking runts?” He pointed to a passageway on the right. “This way—down the tunnel!”
The tunnel was labeled with an ancient inscription to signpost the route. It led upward, toward the Stone Gateway.
Their brief rest was over.
Hurriedly they packed their things and lined up for battle, with the warriors at the front. The masons, more accustomed to splitting granite than crushing orc skulls, brought up the rear with their chisels, hammers, and other tools.
The unit of dwarves moved off down the corridor at a jog. By now Tungdil could smell the beasts’ acrid perspiration and the rancid fat on their armor. The foul odor was anathema to any dwarf.
“I knew they’d turn up sometime,” said Boïndil gleefully as he jogged at Tungdil’s side. “Nôd’onn or no Nôd’onn, they can’t keep away from our borders. Girdlegard is too tempting for a band of hungry orcs.”
Tungdil spotted light in the distance—they were nearing the end of the tunnel. The Stone Gateway, a miracle of dwarven masonry, awaited them on the surface, along with an unknown number of enemy troops.
“Word won’t have got out that the dwarves have recaptured the fifthling kingdom,” said Boïndil, tossing his black plait over his shoulder. “I reckon we can kill at least a hundred before they catch on. We’ll storm out and take them by surprise.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” his friend told him sternly. “I want to see who we’re dealing with.” He tiptoed to the end of the passageway and peered outside.
Two dozen or so orcs were standing in a huddle on the site of the ruined gateway. The portal was wide open, the five powerful bolts that had once protected Girdlegard from invasion in pieces on the ground. At some point during the orcish occupation, the beasts had pried the metal from the doors.
The leader of the band pointed to a flight of stairs leading up to a watchtower. They didn’t seem in a particular hurry, and Tungdil had the impression they were studying the defenses.
As if to confirm his suspicions, one of the orcs bent down to inspect a fragment of bolt, while the rest set about climbing the stairs.
“How many are there?” asked Boïndil eagerly, banging his axes together. “A hundred? Two hundred? How many runts can I kill?”
Tungdil described the group.
“What? Only two dozen?” spat Boïndil. He gave the others a threatening look. “Don’t even think about it! These are for me! You’ll have to find your own orcs.”
“They’re acting strangely,” said Tungdil. He quickly explained his hunch. “If you ask me, they’re scouts. They must have been sent ahead to find a means of destroying the defenses forever.”
It was all the encouragement Boïndil needed. “Hurrah! In that case, we’d better stop them!” He sprinted off, heading straight for the watchtower. Bounding up the stairs, he caught up with the orcs and killed three in quick succession. Only then did the rest of the troopers realize they were under attack.
Muttering under his breath, Tungdil ran to the base of the tower and stopped. Dead orcs tumbled down the stairs, landing in a heap by the door. His help wasn’t needed.
By the time the rest of the dwarves caught up, twenty or so orcs had died by Ireheart’s hand. The watchtower was too narrow and the orcs too broad-shouldered for close combat with a raging dwarf. At last, Boïndil started to make his way down the staircase, stepping over the muddle of dead orcs, whose efforts had been hampered by their cumbersome swords, clubs, and axes.
“Quick, I want him alive,” said Tungdil, pointing to the orc who had stopped to inspect the bolt. His chance of interrogating any of the troopers would be lost if Boïndil got there first. “Four of you capture the beast; everyone else, come with me—we’ll meet Boïndil halfway.”
They climbed the bloodied stairs, squeezing past bodies, taking care not to slip, and steering clear of falling corpses.
Suddenly a clawed hand reached out and grabbed Tungdil by the ankle. Growling and snarling, the orc lunged toward him, but Tungdil struck out, burying his ax in the creature’s right shoulder.
With a pained grunt, the orc pulled on Tungdil’s ankle, knocking him off his feet. Toppling backward, Tungdil landed in the arms of the dwarf behind him, and the orc, still attached to Keenfire, came too.
He should be dead by now, thought Tungdil, noticing the wounds inflicted by Boïndil’s axes. Summoning his strength, he wrenched his blade from his antagonist’s shoulder and kicked him in the kneecap to stop him getting up. Then, swinging Keenfire as savagely as the confines of the watchtower permitted, he took aim at his neck. The orc’s head hit the wall and bounced down the stairs; the rest of him slumped to the floor and showed no sign of movement.
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��Stubborn bastard,” said the dwarf behind him, glowering at the corpse.
A terrible thought occurred to Tungdil. “Shush,” he commanded. Judging by the grunting and jangling at the bottom of the watchtower, Boïndil’s other victims were clambering to their feet.
“Everyone back!” he ordered. “The beasts aren’t… dead.” His mind was gradually clearing. Only the Perished Land had the power to raise the dead—but its influence stopped at Girdlegard’s border, beyond the Northern Pass. It doesn’t make sense… His success in defeating the revenant seemed to confirm that there was only one sure way to deal with the beasts.
“Chop off their heads!” he bellowed. At the bottom of the watchtower, the dwarves at the rear of the unit were fighting off the sharp claws and hastily drawn daggers of a horde of undead beasts. “They’re revenants!”
The battle started all over again, only this time it was fiercer and more dangerous.
Tungdil fought his way out of the tower, brandishing Keenfire. The ax lit up, vaunting its legendary power.
Runes ablaze, the shimmering blade sliced through the air, leaving a trail of blinding light, but the spectacle seemed to bypass the orcs, who attacked with undiminished savagery. The beasts were natural fighters, quick to exploit the slightest mistake, and the dwarves, hampered by the height difference, were hard pressed to behead them.
“Aim for their throats!” yelled Tungdil, ducking and swinging his ax. He brought down his opponent with a blow to the leg and followed up with a decapitating strike.
Panting heavily, he straightened up and looked around. The battle was shifting in favor of the orcs: All around him, dwarves were being killed or wounded after assuming—mistakenly, as it happened—that they had dealt their antagonists a mortal blow.
Most of Tungdil’s companions, unfamiliar with revenants, were on the defensive, slashing pluckily but pointlessly at the orcs. Their axes cleaved through flesh and bone, but the undead orcs fought on regardless, faltering only if they lost both arms. The determination faded from the younger warriors’ faces as the casualties grew.
“You need to behead them,” shouted Tungdil, rushing to the aid of a dwarf who was hacking frantically at a clawed hand that was closing around his throat. Green blood spurted in all directions, but the orc, caring nothing for his injuries, merely tightened his grip. With three powerful strikes of Keenfire, Tungdil felled and killed the beast.
The beasts had to be brought to their knees before they could be beheaded, which was troublesome and tiring, but the indefatigable Tungdil seemed to be everywhere at once. Inspired by his example, the dwarves regained their confidence and overpowered the undead orcs.
Victory didn’t come cheap. Tungdil’s unit had started with superior numbers, but fifteen had fallen and another twenty were seriously hurt. To everyone’s relief, the slain dwarves showed no sign of rising from the dead to turn on their erstwhile friends.
“To the tower!” shouted Tungdil to the survivors. He and the others raced up the steps, nearly colliding with Ireheart, who had cornered the final beast. The secondling swung both his axes simultaneously into the creature’s groin. Yelping, the orc sank to his knees and dropped his sword, which clattered down the stairs past the warriors’ boots.
“I need to behead him, right?” he shouted. His axes sped forward, severing his antagonist’s vile green head. He wiped his face, which was dripping with sweat, blood, and foul-smelling filth. “Well that was fun,” he sighed happily, bending down to clean his axes on the dead orc’s jerkin. “By the hammer of Vraccas, if only we could fight on narrow stairways all the time—it’s the best way of making sure the cowards don’t escape. I wasn’t counting on fighting revenants, though—not after we defeated the Perished Land.” He fell silent and counted the bodies. “There’s one missing,” he said grimly, a crazed glint returning to his eyes. “Unless you miscounted, scholar.”
Tungdil, his mind chafing at the reasons for the orcs’ longevity, wasn’t prepared to enter a discussion. “We’ll talk at the top,” he said firmly, shooing his friend up the stairs.
Boïndil led the procession, and soon all the dwarves were gathered at the top of the fortified tower. From there they were able to survey the land on both sides of the gateway, including the track leading north out of Girdlegard.
“No sign of the enemy,” said Tungdil, relieved. With the stone doors wide open and the bolts in pieces, there could hardly be a worse time to fight off an army of orcs—especially if they were revenants. He didn’t feel ready; Girdlegard wasn’t ready.
“What made them keep fighting?” persisted Boïndil. “Was it the curse of the Perished Land?”
Loud, brutish snarls heralded the arrival of the missing trooper, dragged and pushed by his smaller captors to the top of the tower.
“Maybe he can tell us,” said Tungdil. This time he didn’t need to warn Boïndil to keep his axes away from the prisoner; judging by the warrior’s pained expression, the message had got through. “Bring him over,” Tungdil instructed the four dwarves, who promptly pinned their victim against the battlements.
It had clearly taken considerable effort to capture the orc, and the dwarves had set about their task wholeheartedly. The beast was bleeding from manifold gashes, mainly to his thighs and abdomen. His jawbone had been smashed by a dwarven hammer, and nothing remained of his tusks except two jagged stumps. Any ordinary mortal would have died of such wounds.
The beast’s deep-set yellow eyes darted nervously between the dwarves, taking in their bearded faces. His flat nose quivered as he sniffed the air. The rise and fall of his grease-smeared breastplate mimicked his shallow, rapid breathing.
“What brought you here?” demanded Tungdil, hefting Keenfire. The diamond-encrusted blade glittered in the sunlight, dazzling the prisoner. Squealing, the orc shied away, but his back was against the parapet. “You’re right to fear my ax,” said Tungdil, speaking in the tongue of the orcs. Once again, he had cause to be grateful for the cycles of study in Lot-Ionan’s library.
The orc’s terror gave way to surprise. “You speak orcish!”
“Where are the others? What made you immortal? How strong is the Perished Land?” He swung his ax, stopping just short of the creature’s nose. “Talk, or we’ll kill you.”
“It’s because of the water,” stammered the orc. “The blood of the Perished Land turned us into…” He tailed off. “I’m not allowed to tell you.”
Just then Tungdil, who was working on the assumption that the orcs had invaded from north of the border, realized that his logic was flawed. How would an orc from the Outer Lands recognize Keenfire? Could news of the weapon have spread beyond Girdlegard? Would an orc be scared of an ax that he knew only from hearsay? “You know this weapon, don’t you?” he challenged him. “You know the weapon, and you know who I am. You’ve come from the Blacksaddle, haven’t you?” He glared at him menacingly. “You’d better tell me about the water.”
“I can’t,” the orc said hastily, keeping his eyes on the blade.
“Do you want me to kill you?”
“No, but Ushnotz will…” The orc broke off and looked around frantically. Tungdil read the signs correctly and jumped aside in time to evade the charging beast.
But neither Tungdil nor his captive had reckoned with Ireheart’s smoldering spirit. Shouting wildly, the secondling warrior threw himself on the orc, using both axes to slice through his neck. Blood gushed from the headless body, which slumped to the floor.
“Bravo, Boïndil,” said Tungdil sarcastically. “We can safely assume that the prisoner is dead.”
“He tried to attack you,” said Boïndil meekly, knowing that his friend was right to be cross. “Did he tell you what they were up to?”
“He might have done, if you hadn’t cut his throat.” Tungdil looked thoughtfully at the corpse. The name Ushnotz seemed familiar, but he couldn’t work out why. “Search the bodies,” he ordered. “And keep an eye out for anything that might link the revenants to the battle of t
he Blacksaddle.” He bent down and rummaged through the dead orc’s pockets and rucksack.
Boïndil, full of contrition for killing the prisoner, hovered behind him. “If they came from the south, they must have sneaked past our sentries,” he said evenly, fixing his gaze on the surrounding peaks.
“Not necessarily—they probably got to the Gray Range before us and lost their way in the tunnels. The signposts wouldn’t be any good to them because they can’t read dwarven runes.” He picked up the dead beast’s waist bag and turned it upside-down. “They weren’t carrying much, which means one of two things; either they’ve been traveling for orbits and finished their provisions—or they’ve set up camp nearby.”
The crazed glimmer faded from Boïndil’s eyes. For a short while his mood would be stable until he was filled again with a burning desire to hunt down Tion’s hordes. A cool breeze buffeted his face, drying the blood on his beard, as he contemplated the ruins of the gateway.
“They pulled the bolts off,” he said, thinking aloud. He noticed gouges around the upper edge of both doors—it looked as though someone had attacked them with a chisel. “Look, they were trying to take down the doors, but their second-rate tools weren’t strong enough. They must have settled for ripping off the bolts.”
“Our smiths and masons will put everything to rights,” Tungdil reassured him. He hadn’t found anything yet to indicate where the orcs had come from. He searched methodically, frisking the orc’s clothing and removing his mail shirt and armor to check underneath. At last, a small chunk of wood fell out of the cuff of his glove. It was clumsily engraved with the insignia of an orcish chieftain, and it was darker and heavier than ordinary wood.
Boïndil leaned over to take a closer look. “It’s fossilized,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it came from a dead glade, like the one we saw in Gauragar.”
The memory snapped into place. Tungdil’s last encounter with Ushnotz’s troopers had taken place in Gauragar before he met the twins. While hidden in a tree, he had eavesdropped on the orcs’ plan to attack the village of Goodwater. Strictly speaking, Ushnotz and his band belonged in Toboribor, the orcish enclave in the southeast of Girdlegard. Toboribor is fifteen hundred miles away. What would Ushnotz be doing in Gauragar? And why would he send a band of troopers to reconnoiter the Northern Pass? He shared his thoughts with Boïndil.