Once, long ago, Vranesh had told her how her own kind saw Imladrik.
He is the dawn and the dusk, she had sung, respectfully, with none of her usual flippancy. He is the sun and the moon. Where he goes, we will go; when he passes, so shall we. He is the kalamn-talaen. He is the Master.
Liandra tried to look away, and failed. She felt old emotions rising to the surface, breaking the mask of certainty she had learned to wear over the last thirty years.
Salendor, standing at her side, seemed to feel nothing but elation. He turned to her, his face alive with fresh hope. ‘Imladrik!’ he cried. ‘Drakes! The King has sent us rare weapons! Now the dawi shall know fear!’
Liandra tried to smile. All she could think about was the figure atop the sapphire dragon: what he had been to her before, what his return to Elthin Arvan foreboded.
‘They are not weapons,’ she said faintly, her heart already twisting in anguish.
Chapter Nine
The time had come.
The wait had passed quickly by the reckoning of his people, but still every day spent in preparation and argument had seemed like an age. The mountain-realm was huge and sprawling, home to hundreds of holds, mines, bulwarks, citadels and quarries. It took time to reach them all, to pass on the news, to wait for anger to boil up within the deliberate minds of the dawi.
But now the time had come. Given enough of it to consider the wrong, given enough to reflect on it and compare it to the wrongs of the past, they became angry. They started muttering in the deep places, hammering away at the walls in unsettling rhythms. They chanted in the lightless halls and stoked the eternal fires of the forges. They smelted iron and beat gromril, they marched along the winding ways of the Ungdrin, they poured out onto the causeways of the great Karaks, their faces masked by helms, accompanied by the booming call of war-horns.
He had kindled a fire in the deep vaults. Then he had watched it grow, rippling out into every corner of the dawi empire until it became a roaring inferno. The Lords of the Dwarfs had been roused from their torpor. No dissenting voices had been raised, no old grudges had been unearthed, no rival claim to the leadership of this anger had emerged. They were united in slow, cold fury and the rock itself rang from their ironshod treads. A dozen armies already marched; more would follow.
The time had come.
First hundreds came, then thousands, then tens of thousands. His own host snaked along the ice-bitten road to Karaz-a-Karak and down towards the forest-lands of the elgi who had brought such hatred upon their own heads.
Morgrim Bargrum, kin of the High King, cousin to the slain Snorri Halfhand, the Uniter, the one they were already calling the Doom of the Elves, stood on a high spur of rock and watched his army grind its way west.
The sky above him was leaden and bloated with rain. Lightning flickered across the northern horizon, broken by the massive shoulders of far peaks. Dull light glinted from chainmail, from axes, from the tips of quarrels and from the iron of the great standard poles.
Morgrim rested on his axe-handle, his chin jutting and his beard spilling over his crossed hands. His bunched-muscle arms, each one tattooed and laced with scars, studs and iron rings, flexed in time with the tramp of boots. His heavy helm sat low on his brow, pocked with precious stones and draped with a curtain of fine mail.
Like all his kind, he was hard, angular, solid, immovable. The cross-hatch rune zhazad had been daubed on his forehead in his own blood, now dried a dark brown by the chill mountain wind. His eyes glittered darkly under the shadow of furrowed brows. His boots were planted firmly, locked against the stone as if one with it.
The host was immense. Not since the days of forgotten wars had so many of the dawi marched under one banner. Many of them had torn their beards, ripping hair from flesh in savage mockery of what had been done to the ambassadors in Ulthuan. Many more had painted their armour plates with blood, just as Morgrim had done. Dwarf blood was thick. It dried fast, cleaving to steel like lacquer. Even as the rain fell, coursing over hunched shoulders in runnels, those bloodstains remained vivid.
Morgrim watched his regiments creep down towards the lowlands. He watched the tight squares huddle together, ringed with shields and toothed with speartips. He watched grim formations of longbeards, roused from their lethargy by the anger he had birthed. They marched slowly, their grey eyes fixed unwaveringly on the horizon, their lips unmoving. He watched smaller formations of bulkier warriors covered from head to toe in thick plates of gromril, clanking like infernal machinery. He watched hammer-holders stride down the causeway, each one thronged around a great lord of battle. He watched heavy battle standards swinging among them, all adorned with the runic emblems of holds picked out in gold and bronze.
It was just one army of many. More would follow, gathered together in the booming halls of deep fastnesses and sent forth into an unsuspecting world.
All of this Morgrim watched in silence. It was not an army of containment, or of exploration, or of defence. It had no other purpose than destruction.
In my name, cousin, he mouthed silently. You will be avenged.
The time had come.
‘Tromm, lord,’ came a throaty voice at his shoulder. Morgrim did not need to turn to see who it was.
‘Tromm, Morek,’ he said, all the while watching the host march on. It would be many hours before the vanguard cleared the foothills, and many more hours before the rearguard passed his vantage.
