The Crown and the Sword

by Doug Niles

  “You’re looking mighty healthy, Sally. Dram told me your good news, or I never would have guessed.”

  “Oh, you’re a smooth one, Jaymes Markham. That you are. And I bet a thirsty one, too. That husband of mine doesn’t have the manners to offer an old friend a drink?”

  “Darn it, woman!” barked the dwarf, who even then was filling a pair of large tankards from the keg that rested to one side of the entry hall. It was a permanent fixture of the room. “He only just came through the door!”

  “Well, let me help the cook get the fire started,” Sally declared cheerfully. “I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about. Get the boring stuff out of the way, won’t you? At dinner, I’ll be joining the conversation and by then I hope you’ll have got around to something interesting.”

  “Ah, she’s a nag, and she bosses me around,” Dram said affectionately as his wife disappeared into the back of the house. “I don’t know how I ever lived without her.”

  “It’s a long way from sleeping on the ground next to a fire, wondering if goblins are sneaking around, getting ready to attack our camp. Do you really miss that life?”

  “You know?” Dram reflected. “Sometimes I feel like I do. But when I think about it other times, I don’t.” Still, the dwarf’s eyes did not turn back to the kitchen or pantry, or his wife. Almost unconsciously, his gaze shifted to the open window, to the mountain horizon, and the blue sky beyond. He passed a beer to Jaymes, and both sat down, sipping their refreshment and saying nothing further for several moments.

  Swig Frostmead arrived shortly. He came into the parlor where Dram and Jaymes were having their beers and enthusiastically pumped the lord marshal’s hand. Jaymes opened his belt pouch and took out a small leather sack. The beaming hill dwarf, Dram’s father-in-law, hefted the sack, feeling its weight, and as he did so, his grin grew even wider. “Hope you don’t mind if I have a little peek?” he asked with a wink.

  “Not at all,” said the human.

  The hill dwarf chieftain dumped the contents of the bag into his palm, and his eyes glittered as brightly as the pile of gems was revealed. “Diamonds, rubies—and a few of them emeralds I like so much!” he crowed. He looked up at Jaymes and smiled even more broadly. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you, my good man!” he said. “And this time I’m not even going to ask where you keep finding these lovely little baubles!”

  “You keep your dwarves busy working in my compound—and keep strangers away from here—and I’ll make sure you keep getting paid,” declared the man.

  Swig’s appearance had changed quite a bit since Jaymes had last seen him, before the winter. Where the hill dwarf chieftain had once been content to wear buckskin clothes and soft moccasins, he now sported a silk shirt, tailored trousers, and shiny black leather boots. Platinum chains encircled his neck, and the marshal estimated their weight to be no less than twenty pounds of precious metal. The dwarf’s fingers were studded with rings, and a diamond earring was set into the lobe of his left ear. The formerly bushy beard was now neatly braided, and his long hair combed and oiled, bound with a silken ribbon into a tail that draped most of the way down his back.

  Dram might not have had time to roast the hog he had planned to butcher, but the household cook—with considerable help from Sally—managed to lay out quite a feast. They started with crusty bread and creamy butter followed by a soup rich and thick with bacon, potatoes, and onions. The main course was a fat turkey, one of the plump and tasty birds that roamed so freely through the foothills of the Vingaard Mountains. It was stuffed with a mix of mushrooms and herbs, and served in a pool of savory gravy. For dessert there was a tort made from flaky pastry, cream, and fresh strawberries harvested from the bogs that dotted the lowlands at the very fringe of the mountains.

  Not surprisingly, Dram had asked about the progress of the war, and now Jaymes filled him in on the latest developments, including how the Crown Knights and foot soldiers of General Dayr’s wing had broken Ankhar’s northern force and driven them, finally, east of the Vingaard River.

  “Ah, the thrill of battle! The chaos, the sounds, the danger,” Dram said, taking a deep draught from his tankard. He wiped the foam from his whiskers and shook his head with melancholy. “You know, I miss them times! The best times of my life!”

  “You can’t be serious!” Sally snorted, her eyebrows raised scornfully. “The killing, the pain, the suffering? All those things you tell me you’ve tried to forget!”

  “Er, yes,” Dram mumbled sheepishly. “Maybe I did a better job of forgetting than I thought. But still, I feel like I should be there with my friend here, should be helping somehow.”

  “You are helping, in case you’ve forgotten that too,” Jaymes noted pointedly. “The black powder you’re making here in the Compound is going to be a decisive factor in our strategy; I’m sure of it. First, we need to learn how to use it in battle.”

  “That’s what the demonstration is for, tomorrow. The gnomes are supervising the preparations right now. Knowing Sulfie and Pete, they’ll be up all night working and tinkering, making sure we’re good to go after breakfast.”

  After an evening of companionable drinking—Jaymes merely sipping, while the hill and mountain dwarves tried to outdo each other, as usual—the visiting marshal slept comfortably in his host’s guest suite. After a hearty breakfast, and some grousing from Swig Frostmead about the early hour, the three followed a stone-paved road through the heart of the Compound, toward the testing range at the far end of the valley.

  As they passed the many buildings, Jaymes took note of the improvements made over the winter. There was a large charcoal factory that had been recently completed and vast yards where hardwood imported over the mountains—the oak, hickory, and maple of the coastal forests—was stored. The heavy, tough timber had proved more suitable than the local pines for the charring process. In the sulfur yards, mountainous piles of the yellow rock excavated by Swig’s miners lined both sides of the road.

  An entire section of the Compound was given over to the purifying of the black power. This was the brilliant contribution of the gnome, Salty Pete. The purifying buildings were sided with planks instead of logs and roofed with actual slate shingles. The whole area looked more like a quaint mountain village than an industrial center.

  “Those are the mixers, down near the creek and the pond,” Dram explained proudly, pointing to several iron casks that were each the size of a small barn. From within these came the sounds of grinding and churning. The three crucial ingredients of the secret formula were being ground into fine powder and mixed in carefully measured proportions.

  Despite the early hour, activity churned across the compound. Most of the factories were staffed with hill dwarves of Meadstone, Swig Frostmead’s village, though there were a few gnomes and humans who had been drawn to the hard work here by the promise of good pay. The marshal could hear forge doors slamming, smiths pounding on iron and steel, and furnaces roaring everywhere. Passing the open doors of one foundry, he could feel the blast of heat against his skin.

  Dram pointed inside. “Those foundry-feeders are the dwarves who really earn their pay,” he said. “For them, it’s like working in the deserts of Neraka without the benefit of shade.”

  “Aye, they’re a hearty breed, those dwarves of Meadstone,” Swig remarked proudly.

  Beyond the manufacturing area, a series of stone-walled structures, half buried in the ground, dotted a field as large as a parade ground. Wide spaces of grass separated these warehouses, and each was surrounded by moats filled with still, murky water.

  “These are the storage centers—twelve of them now, with eight more to go up this summer.”

  “Good. I’m glad to see you have them dispersed. So even if there’s an accident in one warehouse, we should be able to protect the rest of the powder stockpiles.”

  “Yep. Don’t want to have a repeat of the yule disaster,” Dram agreed heartily. Jaymes hadn’t witnessed that calamity, but the results had been
recounted in a grim letter the dwarf had scribed the previous winter: Someone had sparked a fire in the main storage house, and the entire stockpile of powder had vanished in a tremendous explosion. Some dozen workers had perished, and all the nearby buildings had suffered damage. Following that tragedy, Dram had immediately instituted safety precautions. Now some facilities were underground, others spaced apart; and tanks or trenches of water were interspersed throughout the camp. There had not been a repeat of that incident.

  Finally they reached the end of the developed part of the Compound. The lord marshal spotted an intriguing device a half mile away, across the remaining field. There lay a massive tube, like a huge tree trunk that had been trimmed of all branches and bark. As they drew closer, Jaymes noticed a series of stout metal bands wrapped the tube.

  “We’ve made this test barrel out of ironwood,” Dram explained. “After the oak we had been using got shattered in every previous test.”

  “And the projectiles?” Jaymes asked.

  “We’ve got some boulders, chiseled to fit the exact diameter of the tube. That’s one thing we learned—if the ball is too small, there’s not enough pressure to shoot it out. Too large, of course, and it gets jammed in the pipe. Then we just end up blowing up the whole thing.”

  “Oh, hi, Boss. Better stand back if you don’t want to get blowed up.”

  The speaker who popped up from behind the huge tree trunk was a gnome female with frizzy hair and a slightly irritated expression. She wore a pair of spectacles—new since the last time Jaymes had seen her—perched on her tiny nose. The lenses were so smudged, the marshal found it hard to imagine they could be any help with seeing.

  She blinked up at Jaymes and went back to her work, which involved scrutinizing figures she had written down on a scroll of parchment then comparing the amounts to the black powder being poured into three different casks. Each was about the size of a small beer barrel.

  “Thanks for the advice, Sulfie,” Jaymes replied. He watched as the diminutive technician, one of three siblings who were attempting to perfect the black powder for warfare, went back to work. Her brother, Salty Pete, wore a stiff leather apron as he bustled from keg to keg, double-checking the amount of powder in each. If he in any way noticed Jaymes’s arrival, he didn’t let on.

  “The kegs are the same size, as you can see,” Dram continued smoothly. “But we’re putting different amounts of the powder in each. We’ll start with the smallest—just three pounds. This will repeat the measure that we tried with our last test, the one that burst the seams of the barrel. This tube we’ve made at nearly twice the strength specifications, however, so we have a greater expectation of success.”

  “Test away,” said the marshal. “I’d like to see it in action.”

  Jaymes, Dram, and Swig watched as two hill dwarves gently eased the first keg into the mouth of the tube. A third hill dwarf with a long plunger carefully pushed it until it was lodged in the terminus of the shaft, which was about twelve feet long.

  “We run a fuse through the little hole here,” Dram indicated as Salty Pete knelt behind the barrel and fed a stiff piece of rope through a small aperture. “We’ve been working on that little problem, too. We use a weaving of string with some of the powder added, so the fire moves down the line at a controlled speed. ’Course, it’s still not too exact; sometimes the danged thing goes out, and other times it races along like you won’t believe.”

  “Fuse is ready. Let’s load her up,” Pete declared brusquely.

  Two burly hill dwarves hoisted a boulder that, as Dram had described, looked to be the exact diameter to fill the tube. They placed it in the mouth of the shaft then helped the dwarf with the plunger to shove the heavy sphere all the way in, until it was lodged against the keg of powder set in the deepest end of the tube.

  “Now’s the time where we should all back up about a hundred paces,” the mountain dwarf said pointedly. Sulfie, Swig, Dram, Jaymes, and all of the hill dwarves withdrew to a safe distance. Only Salty Pete lingered behind. The gnome held a flint and a match up in the air, keeping his eyes on Dram.

  “Ready?” asked Dram, his eyes sweeping around.

  “Whenever you give the word is fine with me,” Jaymes replied.

  “Fire away!” hollered Dram. “Best cover your ears,” he added for the benefit of the novices.

  Salty Pete struck a flame and extended the match to the end of the snaking fuse. As soon as the rope began to fizz and crackle, the gnome turned and sprinted for the others, arriving just as the fire advanced to the terminus of the tube. Then it hissed out of sight, and there was a moment of torturous suspense, when nothing seemed to happen. Even the wind seemed to falter, waiting, hesitant and fearful.

  The explosion was sudden, incredibly loud, and impressively violent. A boom of sound pulsated in the air, and a cloud of fiery smoke billowed from the mouth of the tube. The round boulder emerged from that cloud, flying lazily for about a hundred paces before it plummeted to the ground, rolled another few dozen feet, and came to a rest.

  “Hmm. So far so good,” Dram declared.

  “In principle,” Jaymes agreed noncommittally. “But not much use on the battlefield—a good longbowman can fire an arrow three times that distance.”

  “Well, that was just for starters, just a warm-up of course,” the mountain dwarf huffed. “Now we’ll try it with some real pop and bang.”

  The crew of hill dwarves scurried back to work. First they swabbed out the tube with a wet rag. “We learned the hard way not to put in a keg back in there while there are still glowing sparks inside,” explained the mountain dwarf.

  Then they eased the second cask into place, one containing twelve pounds of black powder. “Four times as much blast,” the dwarf noted proudly. “More than we’ve ever used before—but the barrel is four times stronger than any we’ve tried, also. So keep your fingers crossed or say a prayer if you’re the religious type.”

  They watched as Pete knelt down and rigged another section of fuse, leaving a generous amount outside the base of the barrel. Finally the dwarves loaded a second stone ball and rolled it into place in the base of the tube. The workers hurried away.

  “This blast is going to be louder,” warned Dram.

  Jaymes nodded and put his hands over his ears, as did the other observers. Salty Pete waited for the signal from Dram then struck a match, touching the burning end to the fuse. Immediately the fire took hold, racing and sputtering along the line so quickly that, by the time the gnome had hopped to his feet and spun around, it had advanced halfway to the breech.

  “Run!” cried Sulfie.

  “Damn—it’s a speed burn!” Dram grunted.

  By the time Pete had taken two steps, the fire had reached the base of the bombard and vanished into the hole. The explosion was much louder this time, but immediately Jaymes realized that something had gone terribly wrong. Instead of a gout of flame and smoke bursting from the mouth of the tube, the entire structure seemed to swell and redden with heat, then the whole device was obliterated in a blast of shocking violence.

  The tube, the mount, and the gnome were gone in a single, massive flash.

  “My brother!” cried Sulfie, starting forward.

  Dram grabbed her by the scruff of her tunic and pulled her back. “Wait!” demanded the dwarf, ignoring the protests of the struggling, weeping gnome. In a few breaths there was a second flash, followed by a steady rumble as the kegs of powder behind the revetment, showered by sparks from the first blast, also began to explode.

  After a few more moments of explosions and fire and light, there was nothing left but stink and smoke.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE ELEMENTS UNLEASHED

  Even now, with the dome of sparkling stars above him, the moons of red and white both visible at differing ends of the sky, Ankhar could not dispel the appalling sense of isolation and entombment that had pressed so heavily upon him during the sunless quest. He had never expected to miss so much of the world he h
ad always known. Never one to wax poetic over the song of a bird or the fragrance of a lush forest, he had nevertheless found those sensory memories tormenting his dreams, jolting him awake and near despair as he recognized the stone and dark and cold of his subterranean surroundings.

  Furthermore, the miserable journey back to the surface seemed to take twice as long as the descent, an exhausting climb back through the underground labyrinth. His muscles ached from weariness; his hands were blistered by the work of lifting himself over rough rock. Often he had to hoist Laka over challenging, steep stretches of the climb. At one point the return trip was eased by the levitation spell Hoarst had cast so, once again with his stepmother cradled in his arms, the half-giant had been able to rise up the miles-long precipice he had magically descended a lifetime earlier.

  At least it seemed like another life. Only the thrilling—and terrifying—success of their mission had given him the strength to persevere, trudging blindly through the long caverns leading, he desperately hoped, back to the surface. Laka’s spirits had never flagged, however, nor had she displayed any doubts as to the correctness of their path. As usual, her wisdom was proved sound.

  By the time the weary trio had approached the mouth of the cave, squinting against the blinding daylight even though it was just past sunset, the commander of the horde had somehow straightened himself. He had even attained a measure of swagger by the time he and his two companions returned to the camp. There they learned that nearly twenty days had passed during their sojourn. The army’s positions hadn’t changed in that time, but Ankhar learned the knights were massing across the Vingaard, so it was with a sense of growing urgency that the half-giant ordered immediate preparations for the attack on Solanthus.

  His most important captains were summoned to arrive at the rendezvous point by midnight. Bloodgutter reported that his brigade, which was to lead the assault once the city wall had been breached, was on the march, and would be in position below the West Gate before dawn. Captain Blackgaard rode up on his midnight-blue charger, the animal snorting and pawing the ground as if it sensed—and thrilled at—the nearness of battle. Rib Chewer Wargmaster was also here; though his lupine cavalry would not be involved in storming the walls, Ankhar wanted his most trusted commander to hear all the plans and view the new power of the Truth. The goblin chief settled beside the fire, wrapped his cloak around himself, and promptly fell asleep.