Measure and the Truth

by Doug Niles

  “I am not afraid of the emperor!” Ankhar roared, the force of his voice sending du Chagne retreating behind the Nightmaster.

  “We are not here because we fear the emperor,” the priest stated coldly, “but because we can give him a battle to our advantage here. I myself will take command of the south gatehouse—that’s the most likely place for him to come against us.”

  “I will see to the Knights’ Spur,” Hoarst said. “It’s a good position for guarding the approach on the road up from the plains.”

  “And I will stay here, on the High Lookout,” Ankhar declared haughtily, “where I can keep an eye on everything.”

  “What makes you think that will be enough?” demanded du Chagne, his voice quavering. “We all know he has one of his cannons left. He can set that up on the Wings of Habbakuk and blow this tower to pieces—even if it takes him all winter.”

  “True, that bombard is a threat,” Hoarst allowed.

  “Then why are you so sanguine about our chances here?” demanded the former lord regent.

  “Because I intend to see that his vaunted bombard never reaches the pass,” the gray wizard replied confidently.

  Coryn and Jaymes teleported from Palanthas to the far side of the great pass. There they would wait for the Crown Army, the Palanthian Legion, and the dwarves of New Compound, all of whom were marching as fast as they could across the plains. Even so, they knew it would be several days before the troops arrived.

  “We should find a place we can use for shelter and to keep an eye on the road,” the emperor suggested. Coryn agreed and they started to ascend the wide roadway, remaining out of sight of the tower.

  Nearby they found a small herdsman’s cottage adjacent to the road, about a mile below the pass. The shepherd and his flock were apparently spending the summer in the high pastures, so the place was abandoned, and they decided it would be a cozy place to wait.

  Jaymes took a walk up the road, going about a half mile before he reached the last bend below the fortress. He went far enough to look at the tower rising so high about the surrounding walls, gatehouses, and fortifications. He thought ruefully of General Markus, always the boldest of his commanders. He knew that Markus and his Rose Knights would have given a good account of themselves. He was sorry the old veteran was dead.

  “We will avenge you, good knight,” he said softly before turning and making his way down the road and back to the cottage.

  When he got there, he found Coryn had made herself right at home. The white wizard had produced a wide array of objects from within her bags of holding, setting up a crystal ball on the little kitchen table, taking over a pantry to store her potions and little boxes of components. Her spell books went on a shelf beside the door.

  As Jaymes entered, she was seated at the table, using the scrying ball to see what she could learn about their enemies.

  “They’re all in the tower,” Coryn confirmed after quick scrutiny. “The Thorn Knight and the Nightmaster have both placed many spells of detection around the place, so I couldn’t probe too deeply. But the ogres that fled New Compound are manning the walls, and Ankhar himself seems to be the one in command.”

  Jaymes gazed at her. Her black hair spilled across the back of her robe, lustrous and long, a sharp contrast to the whiteness of her garb. Those traces of silvery gray—premature in a sense, for she was still a young woman—only added allure to her appearance. Lost in concentration, she held her slender fingers to her chin, absently chewing on a nail as she studied the murky globe. Abruptly she looked up, surprising him as he stared at her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking … how much we have been through together … and how grateful I am to have your help. Nothing I have accomplished would have been possible if I hadn’t had your help, your support.”

  She smiled radiantly. “Why … thank you. You’ve never said anything like that to me before.”

  “You’re right,” he replied in some surprise. “I guess I never have. I should have before now. Long ago, I should have.”

  Coryn rose and came to him, taking his hands in hers, her black eyes looking up into his own dark gray orbs. However, her expression was cloudy and troubled. “I have done things for you that I would never have done for anyone else. I’m not proud of everything. It was all toward a good end I trust, but sometimes I do regret the means we employed toward those ends.”

  He nodded with understanding. She had brewed the potion he had used to win Selinda du Chagne’s heart, to cause her to fall—at least temporarily—in love with him. It was not something they had spoken of since that time—nor was it mentioned at that moment. But Jaymes remembered how surprised he had been at Coryn’s bitterness when he had explained he needed that potion. She had complied but had done the work in a cold fury.

  Suddenly he remembered Selinda’s words about Coryn. Were they true?

  The white wizard turned and sat back down at the table, that time chewing on a strand of her hair as she peered into the globe again. Once, she turned to the side and saw that he was still watching her. She smiled warmly again and went back to her inspection.

  Jaymes decided that almost certainly Selinda had been right.

  The Palanthian Legion and the Crown Army marched up the road, climbing the pass from the plains of Vingaard toward the High Clerist’s Tower. Dram and the dwarves came behind the human troops. The mountain dwarves rode on the driver’s seat of one of the freight wagons. He had, for once, persuaded Sally to do the sensible thing and stay back in New Compound with her father and son to supervise the rebuilding that had to get under way. He missed her terribly but was glad she was not riding to war.

  Five hundred dwarves accompanied Dram and his precious cargo. A mixture of hill and mountain dwarves, they had all volunteered to take part in the final battle of what the dwarves had taken to calling the Ankhar Wars. The dozens of wagons in the train were hauling hundreds of casks of black powder, each vehicle separated by some distance from the others to prevent an accident. One mistake with one wagon could turn into a disaster for the entire army.

  From his seat on the first wagon, Dram was enjoying the sight of the mountains looming around him. The Garnet range was nice, with its snowy glaciers and vast pine forest, but the stark and rocky cut in the Vingaard Mountains had always appealed to him.

  “Reorx knew what he was doing when he carved these grand peaks,” he had remarked to the other dwarves as the saw-toothed ridge came into view. The walls rose up on both sides of the dwarf contingent.

  The lone bombard was in front of him, hauled on its great wagon in the midst of the marching legion. Because the steep, uphill road was long and curved, the dwarf had a good view of the massive gun ahead as it lumbered along, hauled by oxen.

  Suddenly, even as Dram stared at the bombard, the cliff ahead uttered a groan and gave way, a crack spreading across the near face of the mountain. The section of the road where the bombard had been traveling simply dropped into the chasm, carrying the gun, the wagon, the team of oxen, and more than a hundred marching men of the Palanthian Legion into the depths.

  The landslide was so sudden, so pinpoint, that it could have been provoked only by magic, Dram realized at once. The dwarf caught a glimpse of two figures, men high up on the crest of the ridge on the far side of the valley. The hair at the back of his neck prickled, but he could only fume as their sole remaining artillery plummeted into the chasm and shattered into splinters far below.

  His eyes shot back to the ridge top, but he was not surprised to see that the two strangers had disappeared.

  “It was an earthquake spell, no doubt, and it took us a day to carve out a new road in the gap,” Dram reported to the emperor three days later, when the column of dwarves at last reached the herdsman’s cottage. “But we’re here now. We lost probably a hundred good men. And unfortunately, we don’t have the gun.”

  “Hmm, but you still have the powder, right?” Jaymes asked. He seemed s
urprisingly undismayed by the act of sabotage.

  Looking around, Dram had to wonder if the emperor’s stay in the little cottage—he and Coryn had almost set up housekeeping in the place, the dwarf had decided with a single glance through the door—was making Jaymes soft or even apathetic.

  “Yep. Plenty of powder—’bout three hundred casks, give or take.”

  “Excellent,” said the emperor. “Come with me.”

  They went to meet Dayr and Weaver, who were riding at the heads of their respective armies. Jaymes instructed them to put the men into large, comfortable camps on the Wings of Habbakuk, the flat plateaus spreading out a mile or so below the High Clerist’s Tower.

  “Tell them to pitch their tents securely. I expect we’ll be here for at least a month or so.”

  Then the emperor led Dram, together with Generals Dayr and Weaver, and Captain Franz of the White Riders, up the road. A few hundred paces carried them around the last bend before the pass, where the High Clerist’s Tower rose before them in all its majesty.

  “We won’t want to get too close to the walls; the ogres on the battlements keep launching boulders at anyone who comes within range. But I can show you everything you need to see from here.”

  He pointed out the great, self-contained fortress that was the south gatehouse, and indicated a wall of mountainside that was below the gatehouse, several hundred yards away and, thus, out of range of the ogre-thrown boulders.

  “What about it?” Dram wondered aloud.

  “Your dwarves brought picks and shovels, I presume?” the emperor asked.

  “Of course. We never go far without them.”

  “Then I’d like you to get them started digging—right there. And don’t stop until you have a tunnel extending all the way under the south wall, beneath the courtyard behind that gatehouse.”

  “You’re going to try and mount an attack out of a tunnel?” Franz asked when no one else seemed inclined to question the mad plan. “They’ll just drop rocks on us when we try to climb out! The first man out of the hole will have to face a dozen ogres!”

  The emperor smiled, taking his objection in stride. “No, the tunnel will be a dead end,” he explained. “There’s no need even to break the surface into the gatehouse. But I want the tunnel big enough and deep enough to hold all three hundred casks of the black powder.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  MINING FIRE

  The dwarves set to digging with a vengeance, working around the clock, each team of miners putting in a twelve-hour shift. The tunnel began as a simple shaft bored straight into the mountainside. Only a dozen or so dwarves could work at a time, but as the hole grew deeper, more and more picks and shovels could be brought to bear. They made steady progress and after a week had progressed more than three hundred yards straight into the rock.

  There the diggers began excavating a path breaking away to the right at a perpendicular angle. That tunnel would bore toward a large section of the curtain wall beside the south gatehouse. At the same time, the dwarves continued the original straight shaft, with even more workers chopping away at a time. When the original shaft had grown to six hundred yards long, a second tunnel to the right began to creep toward the tower. Both shafts were extended and widened, the second one pushing through the rock directly underneath the great gates.

  In the lightless tunnels, the distinction between day and night was meaningless, but that was no obstacle to the doughty dwarves. Dram was omnipresent, supervising the excavation with a keen eye and curt instructions to “shore up that archway” or “smooth off that knob.” Under his direction the tunnels grew deeper and wider and stronger, with many hidden passages expanded.

  The ogres and humans in the High Clerist’s Tower watched the surface work from the walls but made no effort to interfere. All they could see were the periodic shift changes, as two hundred dwarves trooped out of the mountainside while another two hundred trooped in. They took note of the ever-mounting pile of tailings spilling from the mouth of the shaft and wondered at the excavation.

  As a deterrent to interference from the garrison in the tower, Jaymes maintained several companies of infantry and cavalry units within a quarter mile of the southern gatehouse. If the enemy made a sortie out to attack the miners, the troops would counterattack immediately. But Ankhar obviously scoffed at dwarves digging holes and decided not to risk his precious troops in a fight outside the lofty walls.

  If, in fact, Ankhar were really in charge. Despite the magical obfuscation created by the Thorn Knight and the Nightmaster, Coryn had continued her scrying of the enemy. Sometimes her searching could penetrate through the veils of secrecy, and several times she had reported arguments between du Chagne and Hoarst, or Ankhar and the black-masked cleric. The siege was taking its toll on the enemy, even before the first clash of arms.

  Outside, the troops staged competitions and games in plain view of the walls. They marched back and forth in maneuvers, singing martial songs, and generally acting as though they were happy to be there. And the dwarves were truly happy; the diggers were all experienced miners, and the work was very much to their liking. The thought that they would strike a devastating blow against the hated ogres—the same ogres who had destroyed their town—only added to their pleasure and fervor.

  As a result, some nearly four weeks after the mine was started, the shaft was completed to Dram’s, and the emperor’s, satisfaction.

  It was time, Jaymes declared, to bring in the black powder and to set a very long fuse.

  Ankhar paced the small circle of the High Lookout. That was as high up as he dared to go in the great fortress. The Nest of the Kingfisher, perched on its spire some fifty feet over his head, he judged to be too small to accommodate his size and weight. Anyway, from where he was he could see everything he needed to see. With Pond-Lily at his side, he watched the fortress and the enemy army and left the planning of the defenses to the others.

  Despite his bluster about hiding behind walls, he had quickly concluded that was a very good place to live. There was plenty of food, and the officers of the Solamnic Knights had maintained a splendid wine cellar that had been requisitioned by the dark forces. When he and Pond-Lily went inside, they spent their time in a couple of very nice rooms high up in the tower. He had hobgoblins bring up his food and drink, so he never had to bother himself going up and down the long flights of stairs.

  Occasionally he grew a little wistful, remembering Laka or the heady days of his great invasions out in the open air. He truly missed his stepmother, but when he cradled the Shaft of Hiddukel in his arms, he felt the presence of the Prince of Lies and that brought Laka very much into his thoughts and feelings. She had been, and would remain, the central Truth of his life.

  Wandering through the wilds, living outside in the wind and rain, trying to maintain order in a large, chaotic band of barbarians—those old Truths entailed a great deal of work, a significant amount of discomfort, and massive aggravation. He had realized during the weeks in the tower that he was really very tired being a great leader. Being there with Pond-Lily in the comfort of his fine rooms, was a much more comfortable existence.

  On that gloomy late-summer afternoon, clouds glowered low across the Vingaard Range, and the threat of an impending storm crackled in the air. But the half-giant’s rooms in the tower were rainproof, and Ankhar suspected that, come winter, they would prove quite snug as well. So he wasn’t worried about the weather, or much of anything else, as he propped his foot on the parapet. The rampart was waist high to a human, but it came up only to Ankhar’s knees and made for a comfortable brace as he looked out over the fortress.

  There was the great gatehouse in front of him, manned with a hundred ogres and an equal number of Dark Knights, commanding the approaches from the south. The ogres had stacked great piles of boulders on the upper platforms and were prepared to rain those down on any attackers who came within fifty or sixty paces. Every once in a while, an ogre tossed one of those rocks in the direction of th
e dwarf miners laboring some three or four hundred paces away. The dwarves were well out of range of the impulsive attacks, but throwing the stones gave the ogres a bit of useful target practice as well as the grist for wagers and other amusements.

  Protecting that garrison were two massive outer gates, a pair of portcullises that could be dropped at a moment’s warning, and an interior set of gates that were just as massive as those in the outer wall. If an attacker somehow managed to penetrate inside, he would find himself in a deep courtyard, with commanding positions on all four sides where the defenders could pour a murderous fire of arrows, rocks, and burning oil down upon him.

  The half-giant had learned that at the time Hoarst and the Black Army attacked the place, the emperor and his Solamnics had garrisoned the tower with only three hundred knights, far too few to defend the place. The Knights of Solamnia had paid the price when the Dark Knights flew up and landed atop the walls then opened the gates for their comrades outside. With that history in mind, Ankhar was glad for the more than two thousand ogres and Dark Knights who now patrolled the walls.

  The half-giant spotted the Nightmaster, clad all in black, walking among the troops down there on the gatehouse ramparts. The priest had diligently overseen the preparation of the defenses, and Ankhar was pleased to have him down there. He was further pleased by a corollary benefit: having the cleric down there meant that the man was not up here with the half-giant. The sight of that veiled, featureless face never failed to send a shiver up and down his spine.

  The Dark Knights, too, seemed inclined to avoid the half-giant in his lofty aerie, and Ankhar was not displeased by their wariness. After all, he had his woman and a cadre of loyal ogres and hobgoblins waiting on him. All was right in his world.

  “How long we stay here, Ankhy?” asked Pond-Lily, sidling close.