by Markus Heitz
At Boпndil's insistence, they had taken the precaution of walking through the undergrowth parallel to the road, but by the fourth orbit they were tired of scratching themselves on branches, finding thorns in their chain mail, and avoiding twigs that seemed determined to poke Tungdil in the nose or eye. They rejoined the dusty road, keeping an eye out for other travelers.
Tungdil still bore the scars of his recent ordeals. His sleep was haunted by nightmares and on stopping to fill his pouch from a stream, he noticed that the reflection looking back at him was older, more weathered, and more serious than before. The horrors he had witnessed were inscribed on his face.
Determined not to fall victim to the orcs, Tungdil applied himself to his daily training sessions with Boпndil. He was a fast learner-uncannily fast, his tutor said. While the two of them practiced fighting, parrying, and feinting, Boлndal sat and watched them, smoking his pipe and keeping his thoughts to himself.
From time to time they came upon wayfarers or a settlement and Tungdil was always sure to mention Greenglade and warn anyone from venturing too close to the Perished Land.
The long line of carts rolling into Lios Nudin reinforced his advice. With war bands of orcs terrorizing Gauragar, people preferred to trust Nudin the Knowledge-Lusty rather than rely on King Bruron to protect them.
It was midafternoon when Tungdil fell back a few paces. Guessing that he wanted to answer a call of nature, the twins walked ahead.
When Tungdil set off again, feeling much relieved, he came to a junction, only to find that Boлndal and Boпndil were nowhere to be seen. A signpost pointed east to Porista, so he set off at a jog.
A short distance along the road was a wooden caravan, its sides painted gaily with pictures of scissors, knives, axes, and other implements. The horses had been unhitched and the driver had abandoned his vehicle in a hurry.
"Hello?" The rear door was ajar, allowing Tungdil to peer into the darkness within. There was something odd about the situation. "Is everything all right in there?"
He drew his ax, just in case. If runts had ambushed the caravan, they might be hiding nearby. Where are Boлndal and Boпndil when I need them?
"Hello?" he called again, climbing the two narrow wooden rungs that led up to the door. He pushed it open with the poll of his ax and glanced around the little workshop. Drawers had been turned out, cupboards pulled open, and in the far corner a pair of shoes poked out from under a cabinet.
He stepped inside. "Hello in there! Is something the matter?" The smell of metal was mixed with a sweeter, almost sickly, odor. Blood. Tungdil had seen enough to suspect that the wearer of the shoes was no longer among the living. I knew it! There could be only one explanation for the string of calamities unfurling around him: His journey was cursed.
Hooking his ax on his belt, he bent down and gave the feet a shake. "Are you injured?" On receiving no response, he lifted the cabinet to free whoever was trapped underneath. It was a dwarf, or rather, the body of a dwarf. His throat had been cut and his head was missing. A ring of crimson gore encircled his neck, indicating that he hadn't been dead for long.
"What in the name of Vraccas is going on?" Tungdil was so perturbed by the sight of the dead dwarf that he let go of the cabinet, dropping it onto the corpse. As he stepped away, he tried to think logically. The poor victim was obviously an itinerant dwarf whose smithy had been ransacked by highwaymen. His death was an unfortunate consequence of the dreadful human greed for precious metals and coin.
No one deserves to be left like that. Tungdil grabbed the feet again and was dragging the corpse from beneath the cabinet when something clattered to the floor.
On closer inspection, the object turned out to be a blood-encrusted dagger, and although there wasn't much light inside the caravan, he was sure he had seen it before: It belonged to the brigand whose horse he had shod several weeks earlier.
Just then he heard the clip-clop of hooves. Peering warily out of the narrow window, he uttered a strong dwarven oath. Five armed bandits had come to a halt beside the caravan. He flattened himself against the wall and hid behind the door: Concealment was his only hope of survival against a band of seasoned warriors. Unlike Boлndal and Boпndil, he wasn't ready to fight five against one.
Heavy footsteps approached, the ladder groaned, the caravan wobbled, and a shadow blotted out the sunlight falling through the door.
Tungdil gripped his ax with both hands.
A man entered, mumbling indistinctly, and knelt beside the corpse. "Someone's been in," he called to the others. "He wasn't lying like this before." He scrabbled around for his knife. "Don't let anyone near the caravan, and hide the darned honey pot," he ordered. "The last thing we need is for people to ask what we're doing with the head of an ugly groundling."
"Stands to reason what we're doing. Earning our money like everyone else," said one of the company, laughing coarsely.
"No need to shout about it," snapped the murderer. "The little fellows are hard enough to get hold of, without every last Tom, Dick, or Harry competing for the loot. Ah, here it is!" He picked up the dagger, wiped the blade on the corpse's jerkin, and returned it to its sheath.
Straightening up, he stood for a moment in the light of the window, his mail reflecting the sun. A beam hit Tungdil's blade and rebounded. "What in the…" The murderer whirled round.
Tungdil had to act while the element of surprise was with him. Rushing forward, he drove his ax into the man's boots, cutting through the leather and cleaving the bone. In his panic he struck with such force that the blade embedded itself in the wooden floor. It took all his strength to pull it out.
The brigand bellowed in pain. If his companions hadn't noticed the commotion, they were certainly aware of it now.
"It's no worse than you deserve!" Tungdil grabbed his ax and fled. Whooping and yelling to spook the horses, he leaped out onto the road.
The panicked animals shied away, unseating their riders, who had dropped their stirrups and were preparing to dismount.
Tungdil didn't wait for them to recover, heading instead for the dense forest to the right of the highway. He knew there was no room between the trunks for the men to pursue him on horseback and the undergrowth would slow their progress if they chased him on foot. For once his diminutive stature was an advantage. Besides, daylight faded quickly beneath the thick canopy of leaves and his eyes were accustomed to seeing in the dark.
"Catch the dwarfish bastard," the company's leader commanded. "We'll get a fortune for his head."
Tungdil tore through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen. Loud curses and snapping branches informed him of the brigands' dogged pursuit, but the gap between them was growing. After a time, their heavy footsteps faded entirely, and he knew that he had given them the slip.
Leaning back against a tree trunk, he stopped to recover his breath. No amount of marching could have prepared him for sprinting through a forest, laden with bags. He made a quick check of his things; the pouch with Gorйn's artifacts was still slung from his shoulder, rattling and jangling as soon as he moved. The bag had been making strange noises ever since his misadventure with the orc.
Still listening attentively for his pursuers, he took a sip of water. The brigands are hunting dwarves for a reward. He could scarcely believe it. Of all the terrible things that had happened, this new revelation shocked him to the core. Putting gold on dwarven lives ran counter to the laws of Girdlegard and it was hard to see the sense of it: What would anyone want with a disembodied head?
As soon as he had recovered sufficiently he made a beeline through the forest toward the nearest path. To his astonishment, Boлndal and Boпndil were coming the other way.
"About time too!" Boпndil called out to him. "You went the wrong way!"
"I went the right way," Tungdil corrected him. "You missed the turn to Porista!"
Boлndal took a closer look at him. "What happened, scholar? Did you run into trouble?"
"Just my luck to miss all the excite
ment," his brother grumbled moodily. Then he laughed. "I know, I bet a squirrel was after his n-"
"Headhunters," Tungdil cut him off. "They're decapitating dwarves in return for a reward."
"What?" screeched Boпndil, eyes rolling wildly. His voluminous beard billowed. "Where are they?"
"I don't know," Tungdil told him, "and to be perfectly honest, I'm just glad they've stopped chasing me."
They stopped in a clearing to decide what to do.
"Did they say who was paying them?" Boлndal asked.
"No, but I've seen them once before. They didn't lay a finger on me at the time-too many other people nearby, I suppose." Given half a chance, they would have killed me, he realized with a shudder.
"Sounds like the thirdlings are up to their tricks again. They're probably paying the bounty hunters to wipe out the rest of the dwarven race, or it could be a ploy to turn us against the long-uns so we end up feuding with them as well as the elves." Boлndal looked at his companions. "There'll be plenty to talk about when we get back to Ogre's Death."
They unpacked their blankets and spent the night under a dense roof of leaves. It seemed prudent to do without a fire: It was dark enough for the flames to be seen for miles around and the mere snapping of a twig seemed alarmingly noisy in the stillness. Tungdil snuggled down and put his hands behind his head, only to sit up abruptly and pluck a beetle from his thick shock of hair. "It's strange," he mused out loud, "but the two of you must have left Ogre's Death at roughly the same time as the headhunting began."
Boпndil, who had coiled his long plait into a pillow, frowned. "You mean it's nothing to do with the thirdlings? You think they were after us?"
His brother shook his head. "That hardly seems likely, Boпndil. No, our scholar thinks they were after him. Am I right?"
Tungdil sighed. "I'm probably making too much of it, but didn't you say I had a rival for the throne?"
Boлndal saw what he was getting at. "Gandogar Silverbeard would never do a thing like that," he said firmly. "He's an upstanding dwarf!"
"I don't know what you're getting so offended about," his brother said reproachfully. "He isn't even a secondling."
"No, but he's a dwarf, an honorable dwarf with some funny ideas." He thought for a moment. "Besides, Gundrabur didn't tell anyone about Tungdil until after we'd left. No," he insisted, "the headhunting is another nasty thirdling ploy. It's bad enough that one of our folks has turned against us, but we can't start suspecting Gandogar. Our race will be doomed if we can't trust one another; it mustn't be true, it can't be."
They lay in silence, pondering the matter uneasily until they fell asleep.
Tungdil's dreams were filled with all kinds of unsettling nonsense. Hordes of orcs and дlfar were pursuing him with shaving soap and razors, determined to cut off his burgeoning beard. In the end they caught him, held him down, and shaved his face; it was humiliating and infuriating to be lying on the ground with cheeks as naked as a baby.
The thought of it jolted him from his restless sleep and he got up, ate some of his provisions, and offered a fervent prayer to Vraccas, asking for protection from bounty hunters and safe completion of his mission.
You're not making it easy for me, Vraccas. Tungdil longed to be back in Ionandar's vaults with Frala, Sunja, and Ikana; even the prospect of seeing Jolosin no longer seemed so bad.
The long journey made friends of the trio and Boпndil devoted every spare moment to instructing Tungdil in the art of combat.
"So tell me, scholar," Boлndal said softly one evening when his brother was snoozing by the fire, "what do you make of the first dwarves you've ever been acquainted with?"
Tungdil grinned. "Do you want my honest opinion?"
"Of course."
"Boпndil has the fierier temper. His fists move faster than his thoughts and he generally acts on impulse, although once he decides himself on something, no one will convince him otherwise."
"I didn't need a scholar to tell me that. Go on!"
"He hates orcs and elves with a vengeance and his life is devoted to warfare. He fights with uncommon zeal."
"You know my brother well." His twin laughed. "Just don't let him hear you say so! And what of me?" he inquired eagerly, passing him a pipe.
"You have a gentler temperament. Your mind is sharper and you're willing to listen to other people's ideas." Tungdil drew on the pipe. "Your brown eyes are friendly, whereas your brother's… I can't describe the look in his eyes."
Boлndal clapped his hands softly. "True, all true."
"Why did the two of you become warriors?"
"Neither of us has any talent for masonry, so we decided to join the guard. The secondlings are custodians of the High Pass, the steep-sided gorge through the Blue Range. At ground level, the pass is fifty paces wide, but its walls are over a thousand paces high, and the sides slope inward after eight hundred paces, leaving the path in shadow except for a short span of time when the sun is directly above."
"Sounds pretty gloomy to me."
"Throughout our history a handful of custodians have defended our kingdom against invaders, no matter how powerful their ranks."
"Don't you have a portal like the fifthlings' Stone Gateway?"
"No, our forefathers cut a trench in the path, forty paces long and a hundred paces deep. On our side of the trench they built a rampart with a mechanical bridge. The engineers worked on the design for almost as long as it took for the masons to hew the trench." Boлndal paused, recalling the genius of the engineering. "They made a collapsible walkway from thin slabs of stone. It's incredibly light but can bear any load. At full extension, it rests on columns that rise up at the pull of a lever from the base of the trench, but the bridge can be retracted instantly by means of chains, cogs, and ropes."
Tungdil was lost for words. "That's…I've never heard anything like it! But what happens when orcs or ogres force their way onto the bridge?"
"We send them crashing into the trench. Tion's creatures are forever littering the fosse with their bones." He laughed softly. "One lot were so determined that they catapulted each other to the opposite side. Most died on impact; the others felt the fury of our axes."
Tungdil joined in his mirth. "If I were trying to cross over," he said thoughtfully, "I'd fill in the fosse or climb down and up the other side."
"They thought of that too, but they didn't stand a chance. There was only one occasion when our folk came close to going the same way as poor Giselbert's dwarves." Like every secondling, Boлndal knew this episode of his kingdom's history by heart. "An army of ogres had the same idea as you. On reaching the trench, they didn't even try to find a way of bridging it; they just climbed down carefully, waded through the bones of their ancestors, and appeared before us in their hundreds."
"But the secondlings managed to stop them?"
"Why do you think it's called Ogre's Death?" Boпndil chimed in chippily. "Can't you keep the noise down when I'm trying to get some sleep?" He rolled closer and gazed into the fire. "I'm wide-awake now, thanks to you!"
He fetched some cheese from his pack and melted it over the flames. This time Tungdil accepted a morsel. It didn't taste nearly as bad as he'd thought.
Boлndal resumed his story. "The ogres had got as far as storming the ramparts when their chieftain was killed. That was our salvation. Without their leader, the ogres didn't know what to do and our warriors succeeded in pushing them back to the edge of the trench. They fell to their deaths. But that was a long time ago, when Boпndil and I were still in nappies. There hasn't been a single attack on the High Pass for at least thirty cycles."
"No wonder." His twin guffawed. "The beasts are too scared of us. Actually, the High Pass has been so quiet lately that Gundrabur decided to send us in search of you." He looked across the fire at Tungdil and his brown eyes glinted. "You were right, of course. I was born to fight. Combat is my calling; it's who I am."
"And I go where he goes. Twins belong together; find one and you'll find both. It's
just the way it is."
"Does every dwarf have a calling, then?" asked Tungdil, wondering what his might be. "Do you think I'll be a stone hauler or a trench digger, or will I be an artisan with a proper talent?"
"Most fourthlings are gem cutters and diamond polishers. Maybe trinkets are your thing?"
Tungdil had never taken much of an interest in precious stones. Lot-Ionan possessed a few items of jewelry and Tungdil had enjoyed looking at the sapphires, rubies, diamonds, and amethysts because of the way in which they caught the light. He had never felt the slightest urge to craft a sparkling jewel from uncut stone, though.
"I don't think so." There was a hint of disappointment in Tungdil's voice. "For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to the forge. The smell of molten iron, tongues of fire that writhe like living things, the ring of the hammer, the hiss of hot metal as it enters the water-ever since I saw my first anvil, that's what being a dwarf has meant for me."
"You'll be a smith, then," Boпndil said approvingly. "A scholarly smith. Very dwarflike."
Tungdil shuffled closer to the fire and tried to divine the secrets of his inner self. He pictured mountains of diamonds and then a column of dancing orange sparks rising from a furnace. He felt more affinity with the furnace. Gold appealed to him too, though; he loved its soft warm shimmer.
"I like gold as well, you know," he confessed in a whisper. "I pick up any lost gold I can find-gold pieces, gold jewelry, gold dust dropped by prospectors. I collect it all."
The brothers roared with laughter. "He's got himself his own private hoard! If that isn't properly dwarven, I don't know what is. You'll be a warrior soon," Boпndil promised him, reaching for the pipe.
"I don't know," Tungdil said doubtfully. "The way you and Boлndal can fight and win against the odds. I'll never-"
"There's no such thing as having the odds against you," Boпndil broke in. "Some challenges are bigger than others; that's all there is to it."