The Swordsheath Scroll

smile on it was as innocent as a child's. It was a face almost-but not exactly-human.

'You're an elf!' Derkin said.

'Of course I am,' Despaxas admitted. 'My mother was a good friend of an ancestor of yours. She admired him, in a way. Look here.' The elf knelt and brushed back gravel and dust with a graceful hand. Beneath was a glint of iron. 'This is a claim spike, Derkin. A long time ago, it was driven here to mark the boundary of the dwarven lands.

My mother was here when that was done. The person who set the spike was named Cale Greeneye. His sister was your great-great… well, several greats, grandmother.'

'And your mother was alive then?'

'Yes. She still is. Her name is Eloeth. It was her idea, frankly, that I should come and find you.'

'Why?' Derkin frowned up at the innocent, ironic face. His frown became a startled stare as his eyes shifted. Behind the elf, only a few feet away, something was watching… something he could barely see. As he stared, the creature seemed to unwrap itself, unfurling wide, shadowy appendages that seemed to ripple in the shadows. Undulating gracefully, it rose silently, then turned and glided away, disappearing from sight.

Derkin stared after it. 'What in the name of corrosion was that?' he hissed.

'I call him Zephyr,' Despaxas said. 'He's a verger.'

'A what?'

'Verger,' the elf repeated. 'It means he doesn't exactly exist in this world, but he isn't exactly out of it, either.'

'If s Despaxas's pet shadow,' Calan Silvertoe rumbled. 'It follows him around. Ugly, isn't it? I mean, what you can see of it.'

'Zephyr doesn't see you any better than you see him, Calan,' the elf said softly. 'He probably doesn't see your body at all. What he does see, though, is your soul.'

Derkin stared at the elf, then at the empty night where the almost-creature had gone. 'That thing looks at souls?' he growled. 'Why?'

'So he can tell me what he sees there,' the elf said. 'Zephyr is my friend.'

Derkin shook his head in amazement. There was something he had meant to ask these odd people- something about his escape from the mines-but for the life of him he couldn't remember what it was.

3

The Reluctant Leader

From a high, cold pinnacle of stone, two dwarves and an elf looked down upon a scene of desolation, and Derkin Winterseed felt a hard, stubborn anger begin to grow within him. They were south of Tharkas Pass, and the steep ranges below-just now touched by morning sun- were the region of the Tharkas mines. Once a rich, productive cluster of hard-ore shafts, the mines had been carefully developed over a span of more than two centuries by the dwarves of Kal-Thax. Originally delved by Daergar experts from Thorbardin, the mines had proven immensely productive, yielding the highest grade of precious iron ore any of them had ever seen.

Once before, when he was very young, Derkin had seen the Tharkas mines, and he well recalled the busy, bustling slopes where hundreds of Neidar worked the shafts and the mills, the scours and the seines, preparing top-grade ore for transport to Thorbardin for processing in the great smelters deep within the mountain fortress. It had been a happy scene, as the Hylar remembered it. Everywhere he had looked there were hundreds of bustling dwarves laboring in relative harmony, doing what dwarves most enjoyed-working for their own purposes.

But the scene now was different. Where there had once been neat, orderly ore dumps and the methodical ring of hammers and drills, a sound as musical as dwarven drums echoing among the mountains, now there was an ugliness about the entire area. Everything seemed discordant. Slag flows ran here and there at random, the ore heaps were messy hills of ill-sorted stone, and the ring of hammers and drills had no rhythm to it, only the heedless clatter of slaves at labor. Even without the companies of armed humans that roved the area, it would have been obvious to any dwarf that these were no longer dwarven works. Everywhere, the thoughtless sloppiness of human mining methods was obvious.

Here was proof of what every dwarf knew-humans were poor miners at best, and even the skills of dwarven slaves could not improve their methods. Unlike dwarves, humans found no harmony with their enterprises. They didn't work their mines as dwarves did, cooperating with the stone to ease its riches from it. Instead, humans fought the mines, as one would fight an enemy. They fought the mines, fought the ores, and fought the very mountains that provided their riches. The human concept of mining, to most dwarves, was like the human concept of most things: take what you want any way you can, usually by brute force. The scene below the pinnacle seemed proof of that. The few cabins and sheds below the mines-three of the buildings were the remains of what had once been a pleas-antNeidar village-new looked run-down and unused. It was obvious that the shelters now served only as sleeping quarters for the human conquerors. Even from the pinnacle, one could see the dejected weariness of the few dwar-ven women working around what had once been a handsome longhouse. Like the dwarves in the mines, the females too were slaves, kept by the humans to cook and clean for them.

The only other habitation visible, as far as they could see, was a small, distant campsite farther along the mountainside, beside a pretty lake that Derkin remembered from his childhood. The lake was a reservoir, built ages ago by dwarven craftsmen. A long, curving stone dam contained the flow of several mountain streams, channeling it slowly into a series of walled canals that wound along the slopes.

This system had once provided reliable water for the entire Tharkas region. But that had been in the golden times of Thorbardin, the days of the great Road of Passage, when people of all races and nations traveled between southern Ergoth and the northern lands, along a route maintained jointly by the dwarves of Kal-Thax and the knightly orders of human Ergoth.

Those times were gone now. The old road had fallen into disuse, and parts of it had been obliterated. And while the mountainside reservoir remained, its channels were choked with clutter and debris. The lake remained, but it no longer served dwarven villages and farms.

Squinting, Derkin tried to make out who was camping there now, and Calan said, 'Those are humans over there. Nomads from the plains. See how they avoid the empire soldiers at the mines? They come and go, passing through, but most plains people have no use for the emperor.'

Scowling, Derkin stared down again at the sad scene below and cursed beneath his breath. Then he turned to the hooded elf who had led him here. 'Two years?' he demanded. 'They have made this much ruin in just two years?'

'They would have done the same to Thorbardin itself,' the elf replied, 'but they couldn't get in. Lord Kane sent an assault force south to test Northgate. Zephyr observed them for me. The humans finally gave up and came back. They never got past Thorbardin's outer defenses. But they do hold the mines, and have been stockpiling ore for nearly a year to send through the pass to Klanath.'

'But why hasn't Thorbardin sent troops to drive them out?'

'What troops?' old Calan Silvertoe rasped. 'You have been in Thorbardin since I have, young Hylar. How long has it been since the thanes within stopped their feuding long enough to send a force outside?'

'My father restored order in Thorbardin!' Derkin snapped.

'Yes, of course,' the old one sneered. 'And the Hylar Peace lasted slightly longer than your father did. Then, as you know better than I, they started at it again, Theiwar against Daewar, Daergar fending off Klar, the Hylar holed up and pouting in their Life Tree…'

'I know,' Derkin rumbled. 'That was why I left Thorbardin. But I didn't know they had turned their backs on the outside lands.'

'Well, they did.' Calan's frown was as fierce as Derkin's. 'And without Thorbardin's troops, the world outside fell into the hands of… humans!' Disdainfully, the old dwarf pointed downward, his single hand a rigid arrow of accusation, pointing out shame.