by Markus Heitz
Eastern Border of the Firstling Kingdom,
Girdlegard,
Spring, 6235th Solar Cycle
Tungdil looked searchingly at the firstling queen. Muffled in warm furs and perched reluctantly on a pony, Xamtys was staring at the snowy peaks of the Red Range. She was looking for a sign, a hint of a threat, evidence of a catastrophe that had occurred in her absence and shrouded the stronghold in silence.
The snow-covered mountains towered into the sky, sometimes vanishing behind the fast-moving cloud. Here and there, a gentle ray of spring sunshine broke through the cloud and caressed the flanks of the mountain, revealing patches of fiery red rock where the snow had melted.
“They’re still here,” said Tungdil. “The mountains are still standing, Your Majesty.”
She turned to face him. “I can’t rejoice until I’ve seen my kinsmen,” she said anxiously. “Remember the state of the tunnels? Who knows what damage has been done to my halls.”
The tunnels to the east of the firstling kingdom had collapsed, hence the reason for traveling overland. It had taken sixty orbits to make the journey on foot. In some places the snow was too deep, in others too soft and sticky. The roads and tracks were covered in slush, and the dwarves and ponies had disappeared up to their knees, which slowed their progress and sapped their strength. Tungdil, Balyndis, and Boïndil were accustomed to the rigors of marching, but the rest of the company had struggled with the difficult terrain.
“It looks too peaceful,” murmured Boïndil, who was marching at Tungdil’s side, having turned down the offer of a pony. “I’m not going to let the mountains trick me into thinking everything is all right.” With a loud splash, his right foot landed in a puddle. Cursing, he pulled it out and wiped it on the grass. “Smooth floors and nice solid ceilings, that’s what I want,” he grumbled.
“We’re nearly there, Boïndil,” said Balyndis, pointing to the mouth of a narrow gully that snaked toward one of the peaks. “See the entrance over there?”
They suddenly became aware of a gray mist that seemed to thicken as they approached, swirling around them until they could barely see. It was almost as if it wanted them to lose their bearings.
Tungdil pictured the six fortified walls that intersected the gully, blocking the entrance and each of its sweeping curves. At the far end of the gully lay the imposing firstling stronghold and its nine soaring towers.
“I can’t see a thing,” he said, disappointed. “I was hoping to see East Ironhald in full…” He tailed off as the mist lifted to reveal a landscape littered with vast slabs of stone. Some were black with soot, others had fractured or crumbled.
Xamtys tugged on the reins, and her pony snorted and stopped. “Vraccas be with us,” she cried, staring at the remains of the defenses. Anyone wishing to enter the gully had once been obliged to scale a wall forty paces high or read the password inscribed on the metal door, which required a good knowledge of dwarfish. Neither the wall nor the door was still standing.
Three paces from the queen’s feet, the ground dropped away, and a yawning black crater filled the path. There was no sign of the cause, but something had evidently hit the ground with tremendous force, crushing the masonry, scorching the rock, and turning the imposing door into an unremarkable scrap of warped metal.
“It’s not possible,” whispered Balyndis. Even the most powerful siege engine, designed by the best dwarven engineer to fell the most monstrous of Tion’s beasts, was incapable of causing damage such as this. “What could have…? Maybe it’s magic. Do you think Nôd’onn somehow…” She suddenly remembered what she and Tungdil had seen on the night of the battle. “The comet!”
Boïndil let out an ear-piercing shriek and charged into the mist, which, it now dawned on them, smelled strongly of scorched earth. Calling his brother’s name, the hot-blooded dwarf dispensed with caution and vanished in the direction of the firstling stronghold, desperate to find his twin.
“Come back!” shouted Xamtys.
Tungdil knew that his friend was in no mood to listen. Fearing that there might be dangers lurking in the fog, he chased after him. Balyndis followed without hesitation.
They relied on their ears to guide them. The sound of Boïndil’s jangling chain mail and the rattling of his helmet echoed noisily through the otherwise silent gully, which made the business of locating him very easy indeed.
But the devastation around them filled them with fear.
The gully was pitted with craters, some the size of wagon wheels, others large enough to accommodate eight ponies side by side. The ground had proven the weaker element in the encounter and some of the indentations were seven paces deep. For the dwarves, it meant lowering themselves into potholes and climbing out the other side. The snow was gone from this part of the mountain, and there was no sign of melt water, just a thin layer of frozen crystals. It was as if the snow had vaporized, leaving a revolting smell.
Hurrying as best they could, Tungdil and Balyndis followed the jangling chain mail, eventually reaching the end of the gully where the stronghold would normally come into view.
They took another few steps and felt snow beneath their boots. Suddenly, the fog lifted to reveal Boïndil, standing at the foot of a mound of recrystallized snow that towered above him, too high and sheer to climb. The mist cleared further, revealing the full extent of the tragedy.
Of the stronghold’s nine towers, only one was visible above the snow. The avalanche had swept away its parapet, but the tower itself was standing.
The other eight towers had disappeared entirely. The twin ramparts and cleverly designed lifts and pulleys lay buried beneath the gray mound of snow—together with the ruins of East Ironhald and, as the three dwarves suspected, the bodies of the dead.
Balyndis peered at the tower, looking for the bridge that led to the stronghold. “It’s gone,” she said tremulously. “The White Death has swallowed the bridge.”
Tungdil was too horrified to speak.
Hooves approached from behind; the rest of the company had arrived. The sight of the ruined stronghold drew curses, cries of horror, and wails of grief from the stricken dwarves.
Xamtys dismounted and walked to the mound. She reached out and thrust her hand into the snow to pull out a battered helmet. The headwear, made of the strongest dwarven metal, evidently hadn’t protected its owner from the weight of the snow.
“Worthy Vraccas, your children have paid dearly for the salvation of Girdlegard,” she said gravely and without a hint of reproach. “Or is this the beginning of a new and unknown threat?” Her brown eyes settled on the surviving tower and tears trickled down her cheeks, rolling through her wispy hair and plumping onto her armored chest. “My tears mark the passing of those who died here. You have my word that nothing will stop me rebuilding my ravaged kingdom. This time the stronghold will be more imposing, more splendid than before, and evil will never triumph against us—not now, not ever, not even if I have to rebuild East Ironhald on my own.” She held the helmet on high. “May the memory of the dead stay with us forever. Long live the children of the Smith!”
“The children of the Smith!” came the shout from a hundred different throats. The words were still echoing when a bugle call replied.
“The side entrance!” Balyndis told Tungdil. “It means they’ll meet us at the side entrance!”
“Which side entrance?” demanded Boïndil with a glint in his eyes that Tungdil knew and feared. The secondling warrior seized Balyndis roughly by the hand. “What are you waiting for? Lead the way!”
Balyndis didn’t usually take orders from Boïndil, or anyone else for that matter, but she had witnessed his temper before. Taking heed of Tungdil’s silent warning, she set off without a murmur, while Boïndil and the others followed close behind.
They picked their way around the edges of the avalanche and came to what looked like a sheer wall.
“It’s in case of a siege—we wanted to be able to attack on the flank,” explained Balyndis. “It’s nev
er been used.”
“Until now,” said Tungdil, watching as cracks appeared in the rock, forming the outlines of a door four paces high and four paces wide. It swung open, revealing a dozen waiting dwarves. Tungdil glanced nervously at Boïndil and prayed that Vraccas had held his protective shield over his twin. Boïndil will finish what the White Death started if Boëndal has come to any harm.
The secondling stepped forward. “Where’s my brother?” he demanded. Naturally, the firstlings were more interested in welcoming their queen and took a moment to respond. Ireheart grabbed the nearest sentry by the collar and shook him roughly. “Where’s Boëndal?” he roared, tightening his grip until the sentry’s face went purple.
Tungdil laid a hand on Ireheart’s arm. “You’ll hurt him!”
“Boëndal?” gasped the poor sentry. “He’s in bed. We dug him out of the snow, but…”
“But what?” asked Boïndil sharply, letting go of his jerkin. “For the sake of Vraccas, speak clearly.”
“We can’t wake him. His skin feels like ice and it’s a wonder that his heart is still beating. It might stop at any moment,” said the firstling, backing away quickly until he was out of the warrior’s reach.
Boïndil’s eyebrows formed an angry black line. “Where is he?” he asked.
In the interests of averting an incident, Xamtys overlooked his rude behavior and ordered one of the firstlings to show him to his brother’s bed. Tungdil and Balyndis followed, while the queen stayed behind to quiz the guards.
The party of four dwarves strode through plain-walled corridors connecting the side entrance to the stronghold proper. The design was entirely functional—unlike the secondlings, the firstlings took little interest in fancy masonry and left the walls of little-used tunnels unadorned, preferring to focus their efforts on metalworking.
“The damage was devastating,” said the guard when they asked about the quake. “We think the falling star was to blame. It came from the east, raining burning boulders from its tail. Most of our fortifications were razed to the ground—then the White Death came and swallowed the rest.”
“How many were killed?” asked Balyndis. “What about the Steel Fingers?”
“They’re fine, I think, but we haven’t heard anything from the clans on the western border, closest to where the comet fell.” The firstling led them to a wooden platform connected to a pulley system. They got on, and the lift shot up, whizzing past hundreds of steps before stopping to let them out in the eastern halls of the kingdom. “I’m just pleased that our queen has returned. Four hundred of our kinsmen lost their lives in the disaster, but Xamtys will give us the strength to carry on.”
They saw straightaway that the dwarf’s description of the damage was no exaggeration. The passageways were riven with cracks, some no wider than a whisker, others big enough for Tungdil to slot his fingers inside. He noticed that the metal bridges, sturdy enough to carry hundreds of dwarves across rivers and chasms, had buckled in places.
“We lost one hall entirely and the ceiling in the throne room is sagging,” said the sentry. “It nearly buried our precious sculptures and statues. It was terrible.”
They ascended a staircase and reached the chamber where they had left the wounded Boëndal many orbits earlier on their way to the Dragon Fire furnace. He was lying in much the same position, swaddled in blankets, in a marble bed with a thick mattress.
Boïndil threw himself on his brother and flung his arms around him. He lowered his ear to his chest and listened to his heart. “He’s cold as a fish,” he said softly. “Anyone would think he was…” He tailed off and a smile spread across his careworn face. “A heartbeat! A good, strong heartbeat!” His joy evaporated. “Nothing again…”
“It’s what I was trying to explain,” whispered the firstling. “We think his blood might be frozen. His poor heart is pumping ice through his veins.”
A firstling appeared at the door with a tray. “He wasn’t the only one we found in the snow, but the others weren’t so lucky.” She put down a pot of steaming tea by the bed.
“Lucky?” said Tungdil, shaking his head. “He’s barely alive.”
“Some of our kinsmen looked like they’d been flattened by a giant hammer when we pulled their poor, crushed bodies from the snow. The rest died from lack of air. Boëndal survived, which goes to show that Vraccas wanted him to live.”
She stood at Boëndal’s bedside, decanted the piping hot tea into a leather drinking pouch, and raised it to his half-open lips. Boïndil stopped her and laid a muscular hand on the pouch. “What are you giving him?”
“A herbal infusion. It will thaw his insides,” she said. She went to raise the pouch, but Boïndil tightened his grip.
“An infusion? A tankard of warm beer will thaw his insides faster than a bunch of herbs.”
“No,” she said firmly. “The herbs have a medicinal effect, especially in combination with hot water.”
“Wouldn’t it be more effective to give him a bath?” threw in Tungdil. He had read about methods for treating hypothermia in one of Lot-Ionan’s books. The author was principally concerned with reviving humans who had fallen into lakes, but there was no reason why the remedy wouldn’t work on a dwarf.
“An excellent suggestion,” she said brusquely. “But I’m afraid we tried it and it didn’t work.” She snatched the pouch away from Boïndil. “You’re a warrior and I’m a physician. You do your job, and I’ll do mine. I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to use an ax.” Boïndil complied begrudgingly, but refused to leave his brother’s side.
“I scoured our archives, and the infusion is our only hope. Nothing else will work.”
Tungdil knew that she was holding something back. “Is there something we can try?” he probed. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I owe my life to Boëndal.”
The firstling looked away. “It’s a legend, nothing more.”
“Listen to me,” shouted Boïndil, as if he were interrogating a spy. “By the beard of Vraccas, I’ll do anything—anything—to rekindle my brother’s furnace and make his spirit burn as brightly as before.” The glint in his dark brown eyes testified to his determination to make his brother well.
“The oldest records in our archives were chiseled by the ancients on tablets of stone. They’re thousands of cycles old,” said the firstling. “According to one of the tablets, it’s possible to fire up the soul of a frozen dwarf by kindling the embers of his furnace with white-hot sparks.”
“What do you think it means?” asked Balyndis. “Surely you can’t use real fire to warm a soul?” She turned to Tungdil. “Do you think we should cut him open and put sparks in his heart?”
“The wound would kill him,” said Tungdil. The legend reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite make the connection.
“Trust a blacksmith to come up with a stupid idea like that,” growled Boïndil. “We can’t feed him with fire or put lava into his veins.”
The firstling glared at him. “For your information, the tablets came from Giselbert’s folk. I’ve told you what I know, and besides, it’s just a legend.”
“Dwarven legends are usually true,” said Balyndis, who wasn’t prepared to give up on the idea, no matter how unlikely it sounded. “So you’ve tried warm baths and hot drinks. How else can you warm his blood?”
The firstling stared at the floor. “I can’t. All I can do is keep giving him the infusion and praying to Vraccas to make him well.”
“Can’t?” Boïndil was so incensed by the plight of his frozen twin that his fiery spirit was burning out of control. “Isn’t there any proper medicine in this joke of a kingdom?”
“Dragon Fire!” broke in Tungdil, who had finally worked out the connection between the legend and its provenance. “A white-hot spark! It’s a reference to the fieriest furnace in Girdlegard!” He saw his friends’ puzzled faces. “I think the Dragon Fire furnace might be able to help. It was lit by the mighty Branbausìl, remember?”
Neither he n
or Balyndis would ever forget the power of the furnace: In all their experience of the smithy, they had never encountered such tremendous heat. The white-hot flames of Dragon Fire were powerful enough to melt any metal, from pure white palandium, made by Palandiell, to the black element of tionium, created by Tion, and the red metal of vraccasium, element of the dwarves.
“That’s all very well,” said the physician, “but how would it work?” She put down the pouch and laid a hand on her patient’s forehead. “We’d need proper instructions.”
Tungdil looked at the secondling’s rigid body. “The key to the legend lies in the fifthling kingdom. My friends and I are going there anyway, and we’ll take Boëndal with us.” He turned to the physician. “You’ve done everything you can for him, but he won’t get better here.” After a short silence, he went over to Boïndil. “I’m not giving up on him,” he said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Vraccas cured him of the arrow wounds and rescued him from the avalanche, and now it’s our task to wake him from his sleep. You mark my words: The Dragon Fire furnace holds the answer, and I’ll scour the fifthlings’ archives to find out how. The old Boëndal will be back before you know it.”
Boïndil took his hand and squeezed it gratefully. “We’re lucky to have a scholarly friend like you.” He loosened his grip and stroked his brother’s cheek. Then he fetched a stool and settled down to wait.
“You should get some rest,” said Tungdil, following Balyndis out of the room.
“So should you,” she said firmly. She asked the physician to fetch some provisions for Boïndil and make sure he had somewhere to sleep. “Come on,” she said to Tungdil. “Let’s get some food and go to bed.”
“Not until we’ve spoken to Xamtys.”
Balyndis’s plaits whirled around in circles as she shook her head vigorously. “The queen will send for us when she needs us. Her advisors will be briefing her on the damage to the stronghold and it won’t be long before she retires to bed. The rest can wait till the morning.” She pulled him through the corridors to her chamber.
It was the first time that he had seen her quarters in the firstling kingdom. Someone had obviously taken care of the cleaning in her absence because the chamber was neat and tidy. Balyndis took a couple of blankets from the closet and laid them over the bed.