Honourkeeper

by Nick Kyme

  Rugnir knew this place. He had been here before, long ago. It was called Broken Anvil Hill.

  A huge cheer erupted from the gathered warriors as King Bagrik and Prince Ithalred entered the Great Hall of Karak Ungor. Together, their crowns glittered like halos in the flickering torchlight of the hall. Both lords wore robes and ceremonial armour plate with runes of dwarfish or elvish design as appropriate. Ithalred came on foot, whilst Bagrik was carried upon his throne. Where Ithalred wore a cape of star-blue silk, Bagrik shouldered the boar mantle of his namesake.

  The king’s health had improved slightly each day since leaving the encampment near the edge of the Sea of Claws. Dwarfs were fast healers. There was little that didn’t kill them that left them debilitated for long. Even still, Bagrik was a shadow of the dwarf he once was, a constant grimace cast upon his face like a mask as his every moment was pained by the poison inside him. The onlookers surrounding him, except the few that knew the truth, would assume it was his natural wrathful demeanour that forged the king’s expression.

  The hall was teeming with dwarfs and elves, mingling with one another as a mood of solidarity pervaded. By joining blades with the dwarfs, through the blood they’d shed on the field, the elves had atoned for their previous dishonour. And while it would never be forgotten, at least the relationship between the two races could move forward. They exchanged words, patted one another on the back and shoulder, even laughed together. Some, mainly the dwarfs, were sombre and reflective, seeking isolated corners to raise their tankards or goblets in remembrance of the deeds done and fallen friends. Others, predominantly elves, were ebullient and self-aggrandising, enjoying the moment for what it was – a celebration of victory.

  Captains followed in the wake of their conquering lords. First Morek, clad in his finest gromril armour and best tunic, then Haggar similarly attired, the banner of Karak Ungor held up proudly. Other thanes and clan leaders followed behind him in a dazzling array of battle helms, ancient mantles and ornate regalia. For the elves there was Korhvale, the hunter wearing a magnificent lion pelt across his bare shoulders and a silver ithilmar cuirass over vermillion robes. Lethralmir followed him, the other elf nobles stepping into line after him. The raven-haired elf wore a perturbed expression in addition to his silver-trimmed azure robes and gilded headband, at being only second in the processional column behind his prince.

  Of the original elven delegation that had come to the hold several months before, the ones who had not fallen in battle, only Arthelas was not present, deciding to stay in solitude at Tor Eorfith until her brother had returned for good. This fact had only further soured Lethralmir’s already caustic demeanour.

  Morek noted the look in the raven-haired elf’s face, following his venomous gaze as it came to rest on the ambassador, Malbeth. The hearth guard captain reserved his own ire for the dwarf alongside him.

  Kandor, you ufdi, he thought. Where were you when the call to war was sounded? Preening your beard, no doubt!

  He scowled as the ambassadors were the first to receive the triumphant heroes, offering their weak congratulations and honeyed platitudes. Kandor brought a tankard of ale for the dwarf king, and Malbeth a goblet of wine for his prince.

  ‘From the vineyards of Eataine, Prince Ithalred,’ said the elf, his tone respectful and not obsequious.

  The prince nodded his thanks.

  ‘From Brewmaster Heganbour’s finest stocks,’ chipped in Kandor, proffering the tankard to his king, who took it with difficulty. ‘You gift me with ale from my own stores and expect me to be grateful?’ Bagrik growled.

  Morek smiled to himself, and then followed the gaze of the king as it pierced the throng and came to Brunvilda waiting patiently upon her throne. She was a sight for sore eyes, right enough. Though outwardly composed, Morek saw the relief at the return of her husband fracture her guarded expression, the suggestion of tears glistening in the corners of her eyes.

  The hubbub fell to a dull murmur in the Great Hall, as the doors were shut and Bagrik addressed his hold.

  ‘Long have we fought,’ he said, ‘far from our home, far from our hearths.’ The king lingered on Brunvilda. ‘The north-men are dead!’ Bagrik stated flatly. ‘And Nagrim…’ Bagrik’s voice was nearly cracking, ‘and Nagrim,’ he repeated after he’d regained his composure, ‘is avenged.’

  Solemn muttering from the dwarfs greeted the pronouncement, amidst much head nodding and beard biting.

  Prince Ithalred spoke up, breaking the melancholy mood with his musical voice.

  ‘Alliance,’ he said, ‘is an easy word to use. It is much harder to mean. This day, we asur have forged that alliance. It is a bond of hot iron, cooled and hardened by blood,’ he continued, the analogy not lost on the attentive dwarfs. ‘But it is more than that.’ Ithalred turned to face the dwarf king, and offered his hand. ‘It is friendship.’

  Bagrik nodded, and clasped the elf prince’s hand in his own and then embraced him.

  Malbeth was still translating Ithalred’s words into Khazalid when the roar from the crowd drowned him out. The gesture between king and prince said far more than words ever could. The dwarfs and elves in the Great Hall followed the example of their lords and a warm air of camaraderie slowly filled the massive chamber.

  ‘Drink for all!’ bellowed the king. ‘We drink to battles won, and to the passing of kith and kin. Remember them, one and all.’ Bagrik nodded once to Ithalred and the lords made their way together to the King’s Table where Brunvilda waited for them.

  ‘I am glad you are safe,’ she whispered into Bagrik’s ear once the throne bearers had set him down.

  ‘Aye lass, as am I,’ the king replied, grimacing as he went to pat Brunvilda’s hand.

  She didn’t know about the battle on the ice plain.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ said the dwarf queen, her face awash with concern as she leaned over.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘No, you’re wounded–’

  ‘Please Brunvilda,’ Bagrik snapped, then lowered his voice. ‘It is over now,’ he said, looking out to the celebrating throng. ‘Let them have their moment.’

  Brunvilda bit her tongue, leaning back and facing the crowd with a stony expression.

  Morek watched Brunvilda’s face darken and knew that she had discovered the truth about the king’s injury. As she surveyed the crowd, her eyes met with the hearth guard captain’s and she smiled weakly. Morek chastened himself. Averting his gaze, he found himself locking eyes with Grikk Ironspike. The captain of the ironbreakers, his face smeared with a thin patina of soot, folded his arms in reproach. This was not the triumphant return that Morek had hoped for.

  The feast was over an hour old before Brunvilda slipped away from the Great Hall. She padded quickly on soft sandals, weaving through the darkened corridors of the hold in silence. Hearth guard warriors gave her murmured greeting as she passed them, but none dared impede the Queen of Karak Ungor. Soon, she had reached the lower halls and the entrance to the vaults. Pausing at the iron-bound door, she reached for a hanging lantern. Her heart was pounding. The Grey Road lay beyond, and the ironbreakers who Bagrik had stationed there to guard it. But neither them, nor the fear of that lonely place would stop her from seeing her son.

  Braving the shadowy catacombs of the vaults as she trod the Grey Road unaccompanied, Brunvilda brow-beat every ironbreaker patrol that sought to challenge her. Even the guard at the gate, the one who bore the key to Lothvar’s dungeon, fell victim to her withering iron-hard stare.

  With the door yawning open, its guardian unable to meet her gaze, Brunvilda covered her mouth against the stink from within and went inside. The place was much as she had left it, dank and smeared with filth. She’d seen pigs in the sties of the overground farms at Zhufvorn and Undvarn in less squalor. Ignoring the rank surroundings, Brunvilda stepped quickly to the opening in the floor that led down to Lothvar’s cell. When she looked inside, she found the pitiable dwarf with one misshapen ear pressed hard against the cave wall.
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br />   ‘I hear noises from above,’ he said, in halting speech. ‘Are we under attack? Does my father need me? I am ready.’

  Despite his obvious afflictions, Lothvar possessed far superior hearing and olfaction than other dwarfs. Evidently he had heard the merrymaking far above, even through the many thick layers of stone between the Great Hall and his wretched pit. As if to prove his other ‘natural’ aptitude, Lothvar sniffed suddenly at the rancid air of his cave.

  ‘I can smell elgi. Are we at war, mother? Lend me an axe and I’ll drive them from the hold. Nagrim and I will do it. No enemy of Ungor can stand against us brothers!’ he declared proudly standing tall, at least as tall as he was able to given his misshapen spine.

  ‘Nagrim is dead,’ Brunvilda told him softly, leaning down over the hole and bringing the lantern close, so that Lothvar could see her. It was dark in the cave, night having fallen over the mountains, but Brunvilda could still make out her son. Unlike Lothvar, her nocturnal vision was excellent. ‘To a northmen ambush,’ she said. ‘I told you this long ago.’

  ‘Dead?’ Lothvar gasped, halted in his belligerent posturing. The dwarf’s face twisted as he struggled to comprehend at first. ‘Yes, I remember…’ he said at last, falling into a sudden melancholy, ‘…Gazul, guide him to the Gate.’

  ‘Lothvar,’ said Brunvilda, patiently, ‘I came to tell you that your father has returned, that he is safe.’

  ‘Did he slay the elgi?’ the dwarf asked, sorrow turning to aggression in an eye blink.

  ‘No. The elves are our allies, our friends.’ It was like coaxing a frightened mule though it was a timid naïve dwarf Brunvilda goaded, and towards understanding and the truth rather than the edge of a lode tunnel.

  ‘I wish I could have fought beside him,’ Lothvar bemoaned wistfully, his earlier melancholy returning.

  It was worse than usual. Lothvar was barely lucid for a moment, before he drifted back into the imagined history of his inner world. His speech devolved into muttered ravings, and he shrank back into the darker shadows.

  Brunvilda could endure no more of it.

  ‘Give him this,’ she told the guard, who lingered at the portal behind her.

  She left a bundle of food wrapped lovingly in cloth, and returned to the Grey Road in silence.

  Brunvilda’s mind was tormented. Seeing Lothvar so debilitated, sinking ever deeper into a mire of madness, was an agony she felt scarcely fit to bear anymore. And what had it driven her to? Defiance of her king, skulking in the shadows like a thief? Perhaps Bagrik had been right… perhaps it would have been better if Lothvar had been exiled and left to the beasts of the mountain. No, he was her son, she could not countenance that, even if it meant going against tradition and ritual, even if it meant lying to Bagrik. Her husband or her son, it was no choice for anyone to make. Brunvilda was so preoccupied agonising over her thoughts that she failed to see Morek standing in the passageway in front of her.

  ‘If the king finds you here, he’ll know you have been to see Lothvar,’ he said sternly, standing outside the antechamber that led back to the Great Hall.

  Brunvilda was startled by Morek’s voice, but calmed down as soon as she realised it was him.

  ‘Have you been taking him morsels from the feast, again?’ he asked.

  Brunvilda nodded, ‘And to tell him that his father has returned, and remind him that his brother is dead…’

  A fissure was cracking through the queen’s resolve that she could not prevent. She sobbed and broke down.

  Morek couldn’t watch Brunvilda suffer. He came forward and held her in his arms.

  ‘I fear for him, Morek,’ she confessed. ‘I fear for Bagrik.’

  The hearth guard captain paused, unwilling at first to voice his concerns should speaking them suddenly make them real.

  ‘I cannot lie, Brunvilda,’ he replied. ‘The king’s wound is grave. Whatever poison was on that blade–’

  ‘Poison!’ She recoiled, though Morek still held her, albeit at arm’s length. ‘I knew nothing of this–’

  The creak of an opening door echoed dully behind them.

  ‘Do you covet my queen, Morek Stonehammer?’ asked a dour and sonorous voice.

  Morek and Brunvilda stepped away from one another as if scalded, and turned to face the speaker.

  Bagrik emerged from the shadows, the door to the antechamber closing quietly behind him.

  ‘You should not be without your throne bearers,’ Brunvilda told him, walking towards him. The queen was stopped in her paces by Bagrik’s wrathful glare.

  ‘I’ve strength enough to stand, rinn!’ he snapped. ‘Though, you obviously think me weak in mind as well as body if you believed that this… deceit,’ he snarled waving his hand over them both, ‘would go unheeded.’

  ‘You misunderstand, my liege,’ Morek told the king firmly, putting himself deliberately in Bagrik’s eye-line. ‘I love my queen,’ he said, ‘as I love my king. I would gladly give my life for either. It would be the greatest honour you could bestow upon my shoulders,’ he said vehemently. ‘I have served you for over one hundred years. I cannot believe you could think this.’

  Bagrik’s face was hard as stone at first but then his resolve cracked, and his weary shoulders sagged.

  ‘My line is dead, Morek,’ he said, close enough to rest his hand upon the hearth guard captain’s pauldron for support. ‘And I am so very tired…’

  Catching sight of his queen again, Bagrik’s demeanour changed.

  ‘Your continued defiance of my will is not excused!’ he raged, before she approached any further. ‘Where else could you have been but visiting that thing. I was wrong to spare its life. It should have been cast out long ago.’

  ‘If only you would speak to him,’ Brunvilda pleaded. Morek stepped out of the way. It was unwise to get between a dwarf king and his queen.

  ‘And say what?’ asked Bagrik. ‘What sense would it make to a zaki?’

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ she warned.

  ‘You’d prefer nubungki? For that is what he is.’

  Brunvilda was furious. Morek feared the heat from her face and her fiery glare would melt the iron in Bagrik’s ceremonial armour.

  ‘He is our son,’ she said calmly, through clenched teeth.

  There was no time for a bellicose rejoinder. The door to the passageway was thrown open and Kandor barrelled through with several other dwarfs behind him. Amongst them were the king’s throne bearers. Mercifully, Kandor’s sudden arrival had dispersed the pressure cooker of building tension.

  ‘King Bagrik,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You must come quickly.’

  ‘What is it?’ growled the king, annoyed by the interruption.

  ‘Rugnir,’ Kandor replied. ‘He’s alive.’

  Abject silence filled the Great Hall as all within awaited the return of Rugnir Goldmaster. Against all odds it seemed, he had survived the northmen ambush and found his way back to Karak Ungor after almost four months in the wild mountains.

  Runners had been sent ahead to the outer gateway hall – Rugnir was to be brought before Bagrik at once. The king would know of the final moments of his son Nagrim. All would hear of it. Apparently, the dwarf had said little upon his arrival back at the hold. Only that he must see the king with all haste on a matter of the direst importance.

  Bagrik steepled his fingers, bent low over the arms of his throne so that his broad back was arched and his chin nearly touched his knees. Gargoyle-like, he stared at the double doors to his hall without moving. After what felt like an age, remarkable given the patience and tenacity of dwarfs, the sound of booted feet could be heard echoing down the long corridor beyond. A few minutes later and the massive gates to the Great Hall were thrust open, a group of six hearth guard trooped in beside the lone ambush survivor.

  Rugnir kept his gaze level and straight ahead. He met the eyes of his king and did not falter as he strode down the narrow aisle and past the tables thronging with dwarfs, some confounded, their mouths agape or scratching
their heads; others thoughtful as they supped on pipes, longbeards muttering disapprovingly. The elves alongside them looked disconcerted.

  Morek noticed two in particular, Ithalred and Lethralmir, sharing a dark glance between themselves furtively.

  There was no announcement, no herald to usher him, just Rugnir, alone, with the hearth guard left behind him.

  The dwarf, still laden with Craggen’s pack, his hunting axe in a loop on his belt, bowed before his king at the edge of the stone dais beneath his throne.

  ‘Approach,’ Bagrik growled, taking the utmost care not to look at Brunvilda sitting beside him.

  Rugnir rose quickly and moved forward to kneel at the foot of his liege lord, placing the knuckles of both fists on the ground as he did so.

  ‘Tromm, King Bagrik,’ he uttered, head bowed, his voice harsh and rasping like grit.

  The dwarf king squinted at him with one eye, before he leaned forward and prodded Rugnir hard on the shoulder. It made the dwarf look up. Satisfied that Rugnir was indeed corporeal, Bagrik leaned back again, and began stroking his beard.

  ‘You are no apparition then, Rugnir Goldmaster,’ declared the king. ‘Welcome back,’ he added, somewhat belatedly.

  Morek was watching the entire display intently, between glances at the elf nobles, who seemed so stiff as to be easily mistaken for petrified wutroth. Rugnir, though, seemed different. No raucous pronouncements, no drunken swagger. Even the alcoholic cherrying of his cheeks was gone, replaced by a rawness, a hollowing out of something inside. Something had happened to him, and it was more than just merely surviving the ambush.

  ‘I bring news,’ said Rugnir, when it was clear he was expected to speak. ‘Of Nagrim’s death and the ambush in the gorge,’ he added, much louder than before.

  ‘Tell me, Rugnir,’ urged Bagrik in little more than a harsh whisper as tears gathered at the corners of his rheumy eyes. ‘Tell me what happened to my son.’

  ‘My king,’ Rugnir began, standing to his feet as his voice cracked with emotion, ‘it was not northmen that attacked us in the gorge, though that is what you were meant to think no doubt.’ He turned to face the elves and levelled an accusing finger at Lethralmir. ‘It was them.’