The Hammer of the Sun

by Michael Scott Rohan

  "I have, and more," Roc rumbled disdainfully. "There's chatter enough about them round the court. Aye, it's said that they're like him, but I think not. There's two of them, Geraidh and Kenarech, and all too close, in years not the least."

  "Jealous, then?"

  "Aye, so I've heard, for all they're so alike. Of each other, but more of him, for all he dotes on them and spoils them rotten. Not that they show it, though; they're careful to play the devoted sons and brothers before him, and the merry swaggerers before the common folk - but less so of letting their tongues wag before servants, or bragging to the thrall lasses they bed. So I get all the gossip, for the girls don't like 'em a bit; cocky young bastards and nasty-minded with it, that's the word. A lot of the troops favour them, though, and so also a lot of the folk; Nithaid's too hard a taskmaster for some, and they blame him, would you credit, for not seeing off the Ekwesh sooner. Seems to me the lads are taking pains to foster that…" He paused significantly.

  "You mean, they've already got their eye on the succession? Before they're even of age?"

  "Wouldn't surprise me a bit. No less did Nithaid, at their age; but he worked hard to inherit the kingdom, and fought hard and brutal for his father, putting down rebel lords and Ekwesh reivers. These two don't seem of the same mettle; they want everything the easy way, and now. There's been talk of compounding with some of the more troublesome lords, giving them local independence for the sake of quiet -"

  "Or support," mused Elof. "But don't the young fools see there's no end to that, save with the Ekwesh? All Nithaid's vicious ambition, but without his vision, or his driving will. Ready to sell the morrow to buy the moment… I'm glad I made that armour as well as I did, Roc. I'd as soon nothing happened to Nithaid; not yet."

  That thought brought him some greater consolation for the loss of Gorthawer; for it was borne into battle as he no longer could, and he heard of Nithaid doing greater deeds than ever with the black blade in his hand. That sixth long winter of his captivity was the first time in Nithaid's reign that not even one Ekwesh raid penetrated the heartland successfully; most were met and driven back among the wild lands to the north, and the few who slipped through broke harmlessly against the new fortifications. But neither blade nor walls could turn the weather, and where the Ekwesh failed to go the stormwinds came. Sieges they laid with floods and drifting snow, and after them, quieter and deadlier, the frosts, to crack stone in the still night and lay deadly fingers upon the hearts of those who lacked shelter and fire enough. Nor was that the only terror of the night; the weather drove wolves down in hungry packs from the wild lands, and the huge forest bears, with many other beasts, some among them of an unheard-of strength and ferocity. From byre or pen a terrible screaming would be heard as of beasts fear-maddened, so terrible that many feared to go out to them even though all their wealth and livelihood were threatened; the more so, as many who did never returned, and were found in the first light butchered among their flocks. The beast responsible was never caught, or even seen clearly, and so wildly did accounts vary that it seemed there must be many; yet the manner of attack was always the same, the skull crushed and the brain devoured. Often wayfarers were attacked thus on overgrown paths, by some thing that lay along a stout branch above and struck downwards with a vast paw; yet this also was never clearly seen. And through storm and blizzard still stranger shapes stalked, and men abroad were missed till the thaw uncovered their gnawed bones; on the clear nights shadows thin and spider-limbed lurked in thickets for the unwary traveller, or beneath the haloed moon climbed through unbarred windows to suck the lifeblood from sleepers within.

  "This is how it must have been at the fall of Morvan, Roc," said Elof on one such clear night towards the winter's end, as they opened their door before sleep to gaze upon the Yskianas sparkling in starlight. The distant shore shone white with snow, but upon the island it lay lightly among the grass. "Do you remember how Korentyn spoke of it?"

  "Aye, do I. But Kerys is far from falling yet. The glaciers are a long way from even its outermost walls."

  "Yet they can travel fast, at need. And Louhi spoke of only having to tip the balance a little, make the world a trace colder… but how? To overrun this great land is scarcely a small work, even for the Ice."

  Roc grew thoughtful. "If it froze the Yskianas as it did the Great Waters of Morvan… no, that couldn't work…"

  "No; sea-lakes are one thing, a river well-nigh the width of a sea another. The most Louhi and her kind might do is freeze the Gate falls and dam the main inflow, and I guess they would be hard put to it to do that till the Sea-Ice itself came south -"

  His words faltered; he choked, caught his breath, and suddenly, with a great thrust of his crutches, he hurled himself out of the door into the darkness. Roc, plunging after him in astonishment, saw him raise a hand to the sky as if to claw down the very moon or stars. But then he also saw the shadow sweeping over the snow, the shape that cast it, blacker still against the shimmering sky as it glided down towards them. Low it came, and lower, long-necked and graceful, shivering the moonbeams with its speed and the still air with the slow pulse of its wingbeats; nigh over Elof s head it swept, so close that the wind of its outstretched wings uplifted his tangled hair, yet not quite close enough to touch. Despairingly he lunged upward, arms out-thrust in a wild embrace, and shouted out in his great voice a name like a cry of agony. "Kara! Stay, Kara! Only stay awhile!" A wild embrace, but futile; for even as he gave voice the dark wings lifted over the rooftree and vanished over the snow-hung crowns of the oaks. He fell headlong among the frosty grass, and screamed aloud in frustrated fury. "Damn these corpse-legs… Kara! Ach, Kara!"

  He called after her again and again, but the great swan did not reappear. Out into the icy silence of the night his strong voice rang, across the River at the Heart of the World, and it seemed that the waters trembled in answer, and the mirrored stars shook. But it was no more than a breath of wind, coming to stir the leafless trees above, and rustle the grass about their feet. Elof, scrabbling for his crutches, looked dimly down at it.

  "Roc," he inquired in a wholly different tone, vague and distracted. "I've hardly looked at this grass of late. There's scarcely any snow here…"

  Roc shrugged, and helped him back to his feet. That sudden vision had left him almost as shaken as Elof; he was glad of anything else to talk about. "There never is, not much. Same every winter…"

  "Yes… Hella's fires! Idiot that I've been, never to think of it! And the smithy, so warm and comfortable… Roc, whoever built it as it first was, he was a great smith, building a forge to suit him, a worthy forge. I should have seen that at once!"

  Roc looked hard at him. He seemed almost to have forgotten what he had seen. "You did. We both did. So?"

  "So would not he also have needed great heat?"

  "He might; aye, he might, at that. But whatever he got it from, it's gone now."

  "Is it? Come inside - come!" He hobbled towards the bench laden with his present studies, bent beneath the weight of books and notes. "So many forms of heat I've studied!" He picked up sheaves of parchment scraps, tablets, wooden slips, tossing them aside one after another. "The sun! Crystals! Stonesblood! Strange metals! All this time and I forgot what was most obvious to me!" He seized a map from among the clutter, brushed a table clear of tools with a single sweep of a crutch and in a crackle of crisp linen unrolled the map across it.

  "Roc, you've travelled widely enough in the land by now, you can tell me - those loskveneth, those fire-mountains like the ones we saw, whereabouts exactly do they lie? No, don't show me - mark them in with the charcoal here…"

  "Well…" began Roc slowly, and then with growing irritation, "Does it have to be now? I need my bed, I'm too sleep-ridden to remember! I don't know where every single one is - there's too many, large and small, it seems they've been spreading lately, and in some places there's a whole lot close together -"

  "Just the major ones - and mark regions where they're grouped - yes, so…"


  Yawning, Roc cudgelled his weary brain, and made his charcoal circles, here and there as they came to mind, in no particular order. But after a moment he stopped, blinked down at the map a moment and swore.

  "Yes?" demanded Elof keenly.

  "This… did you foresee this? You did, didn't you? I can see it in those cat's eyes of yours. Or… has somebody whispered something in your ear?"

  "Foresee what?" grinned Elof.

  Roc's mouth twisted impatiently, and he drew a single savage slashing streak across the map, and plucked it up under Elof s nose."That!"

  Elof whistled softly. "That they'd form a pattern, yes. I learned something about the flow of earthfires from the Mastersmith, and more among the duergar -that within the shell of the world there are vast and shifting stresses, that the shell is broken along many lines…"

  "Like fractures in fatigued metal, you mean?"

  "Aye, very like. And it is along these that the earthfires break out at their fiercest. One such ran up through the Meneth Scahas in our old homeland, and among the Nordenbergen; but in our Eastland, almost none, and no fire-mountains. Whereas here… But I never foresaw that the line would run thus!" His finger traced the streak of dark ash that linked the marked fire-mountains in a single straight line, dead straight across the land of Kerys. And some two-thirds of the way along that line the finger slowed and rested, and a tremor of excitement crept into his voice. "Nor that Elan Gorhen-yan would sit so squarely upon it!"

  "You can't be that precise!"

  "Close enough! Somewhere here, somewhere by here…"

  "Such as?" objected Roc, seeing Elof cast about like a hunting dog on the scent. "Do we not know every corner of this island by now - who better? Have we not trodden over every damned finger's breadth of it, aye, even you, in all the years we've been here?"

  "The warmth, the half melted snow!" Elof flung back at him.

  "Aye, but how would we get to it? Have we not even seen the forge stripped down to its foundations and rebuilt? So where could anything lie hidden?"

  Elof stared at him a moment, then snapped his fingers and swung about on his crutches. He turned towards that last room left of the old lodge, that was still Roc's bedchamber. But Roc seized his arm.

  "No, damn you! You're not going to start ripping up walls or floor before I've had my this night's sleep, at least! If there's anything there it won't be gone by morning!"

  Elof glared at him, then half smiled and threw up his hands in defeat. "Very well! Till morning, then!" And he appeared to compose himself for sleep no less willingly than Roc; to all appearances he had indeed forgotten the coming of the swan altogether. But more than once in the night Roc was awakened by the restless tapping of crutches about the forge, and a muttering voice that seemed to be repeating questions to itself, over and over in a tone of growing desperation. "The fires… what was she doing here? .. what did she mean?… what could she hope to gain… would it not work against her… was it mockery?… was it? Was it?"

  It was as much in pity as in irritation that Roc turned over and stopped his ears with the blankets. But he swore loudly when he was awakened at the very first light by Elof, hunched on his crutches, ripping a length of timber from the rear wall. He had seized a boot to hurl when he stopped, sat back among his blankets and stared at the surface that was being revealed.

  It had been covered, once, with some kind of sandy concretion, plastered tight against the surrounding rock; then the new surface must have been hard to tell from old. But now the concretion was decayed, and it was crumbling back to damp sand as if the immense weight of years had suddenly descended upon it. Beyond it was a jumble of heavy rocks, some that looked naturally fallen, others piled clumsily as if by hands hasty or nervous; these Elof was already pulling away, and finding beneath them a blackness that was not emptiness. He plucked away another stone from the pile, and half of it slid into the gap he had opened. But it landed with a dull clangour that no stone ever made. Roc, amazed, put down his boot and grabbed for his clothes.

  It was midmorning before the two smiths had the door cleared, for door it was, though all of metal and bound with steel, and set at a slant backward beneath a low arch in the rock; clearly there was a descent beneath."Stairs, I'll wager!" said Elof breathlessly, running his fingers over the surface, stained but only mildly corroded for all the damp. "Now those locks must've been full of muck already when this thing was walled up, they're set solid; but I'd guess we could cut the stone around the bolts, or if not, chisel through to the hinges…"

  "Hold hard!" grunted Roc. "First, I want my breakfast, 1 do; second, if you're right, who knows what that door may hold back? Could get more earthfires than you want!" For answer Elof banged his crutch hard down upon the centre of the door, and Roc nodded as he heard the hollow boom die away. "All right. But there's still breakfast!"

  Elof s first idea proved the best; the stone was hard of its kind, but their chisels were harder. They cut clean through to the recess that received the bolts, and all around the sleeve of steel that lined it. Elof levered it free, peered at it and scratched the bared bolt-ends with a sharp probe. "Strong work, scarcely touched by corrosion. There are virtues on it for that, but it owes as much to skilful alloying, I would guess. What of the hinges, I wonder?" Before Roc could stop him he dug in his fingers beneath the lip of the ancient door and heaved. Roc sprang up with a cry; he heard clearly the cracking of Elof's muscles, and a minute later the sharper crack of wood as the prop of Elof's crutch bent beneath the weight. But he was too late to prevent, he could only hurl his weight against the door as it lifted with a metallic screech that tore his ears. Half way it rose in a shower of grime and rubble, and there it jammed, even as the tortured prop snapped beneath Elof's left armpit and stabbed like a blunt knife into his arm.

  "Might've been your heart, and serve you right!" raged Roc, tugging out splinters of wood no more gently than he needed to, "Into your fifth year thus and still you won't learn what you may and mayn't manage!"

  Elof winced and mumbled rebelliously as the wound was bound up, though till his outburst of the night before he had hardly even grumbled about his infirmity these last two years. He kept staring down into the opening his haste had made. It looked like a well of darkness, gathering from the skies above; for their labours had lasted all the short day. The moment Roc was done Elof seized another pair of crutches, with no sign of pain, lit a plain oil lanthorn and leaned over the sloping lip of metal and into the dark. "A stair it is!" he exclaimed, with grim satisfaction.

  "If you're feeling generous," added Roc, looking askance at the roughly stepped stone slabs, covered in dirt and fallen rock, and the dim earth floor they led to. "Do you use your wits for once and let me take the lead!" Elof grinned, and made no protest; Roc helped himself to a stout spear from the litter of arms about the forge walls, and gingerly lowered himself down the metal ramp that led from the rim onto the first step. Then Elof s hard hand landed on his shoulder.

  "Stand a moment! Do you not smell anything?"

  Roc shrugged. "Stale air; are you surprised?"

  "Stale, but not damp; no mould, no nitre, as we found in Morvan, dry though it was."

  Roc nodded. "It's warm, right enough; I can feel it in the air. And there's something more…" He hooked the lanthorn over the spearhead and dangled it down into the dark. Its light swung tantalisingly over shadowy shapes along the walls, then dimmed as the wick guttered and flickered. "Bad air."

  "But breathable. The lamp still burns. And there's no mine-fume to flame in the air about us, at least." With gasps of painful effort Elof heaved himself down onto the stairs; Roc tactfully ignored him, but swept a path clear as he went. Elof worked his way down after him, clutching at every shelf and outcropping in the rock to steady himself; but before either had reached the floor he stopped. "Feel it?" he hissed, and Roc, reaching out to the stone, started at the distant thrill and quiver that was almost like touching the flanks of a living beast. He knew it well, just as it had
shivered through the stone foundations of the Mastersmith's tower where he had grown up.

  "Earthfires it is," he nodded, grimacing at the altogether too generous layer of grime that had come off on his fingers. "You were right. And look here!" He stepped down onto the floor and swung the lanthorn around the wall ahead. Rows of murky shapes stood ranged upon stone shelves cut out of the very wall, pot and crucible and mould-case, draped deep in ancient spider-webs that the fine grime had turned to black lace. An encrusted block, like a petrified table, stood in midfloor. "An underground workshop, it must've been! See there, all those shelves, the walls go right back… and those vents in the wall there, full of rubble, they'd be fireplaces, but with the chimneys stopped up or fallen in… Have a care, the floor slopes down!"

  "So it does!" grinned Elof. "And where to, think you?"

  "Another door, of course!" Roc announced. "I can see it, too, good and solid, set deep in the stone - sliding back into it, I'd say. Looks like there's your furnace, right enough!"

  Elof nodded absently, running his fingers along the litter on the shelves. But for the deep layers of grime they might have been his own store, or any true mastersmith's, a jumble of uncompleted pieces, old moulds, leftover metal and offcuts, coils and coils of wire… or was it wire? It felt fine as hair - disturbingly like hair, in fact. He made a mental note to rummage through the mess at the first chance he had; who could say what fascinating relics his predecessor might have left? But then he heard Roc swear explosively, and turned to hobble down the steep floor after him.

  The reason became obvious as Roc held up the light. The air here was worse, if anything, and it shed only a faint glow upon the wall around the furnace door. But it was enough to show the wheel which must work the door's running gear, and the broken lengths of chain which dangled from it. He pointed up to the ceiling. "Must've run up through those holes there; to some kind of counterweight system, probably, up above. That must have gone with the original forge, decayed or torn down, or both. Be damned to it! We'll have to rig the whole thing again before we can get at the furnace!"