Lord Silverthumb shook his head. ‘No, lad, I didn’t. Old magic is getting harder to find.’ He scratched his beard as if pondering why. Unable to reach an answer, he carried on. ‘But I fear the world is changing because of it. Something lurks in the air, the earth. I fear it will change us, that it is changing us even now.’
Morek frowned and the furrows deepened. ‘Old magic?’
Ranuld Silverthumb shrugged. ‘Magic is magic, I suppose. It’s what’s done with or can be harnessed with it that makes some of it feel old. We dawi know magic. Its dangers are known to us too, so we trap it within stone and steel in order to control it, lest it control us and we become as stone.’
Morek didn’t fully understand, but chose to ask no further questions. His master had answered; he had to fathom its meaning for himself.
They were walking the slab-stoned passage that led to the iron forge where the clattering of hammers sounded and bellows wheezed in time with every strike of metal against metal. Bordering the threshold of the forge hall, Lord Silverthumb’s expression darkened as a cloud passing over the face of the sun.
‘Trouble is coming. It’s been coming for thousands of years but we’ll see it in our lifetime, Valaya have mercy. A great doom, lad, and a terrible darkness from which there may be no light.’ With the premonition bright like azure flame in the runelord’s eyes, he retreated into himself but spoke his inner monologue aloud. He rasped, voice barely rising above a whisper, ‘A gathering must be made, a conclave of the runelords.’ He shook his head, his faraway eyes no longer seeing the fuliginous dark of the forge or the lambent orange glow of embers at its yawning cavern entrance. ‘Won’t be easy. Some might be dead, others lost or asleep. Some can sleep for years at a time. It feels like an age since I last slept… Ancestors, all of us. Too old, too thin and past our time. Been centuries since the last conclave, but the wisdom of the ages can no longer be left to slumber. I fear it will be needed in the end…’
Ranuld Silverthumb blinked once and his voice returned to as it was before. ‘What are you staring at, wazzock? Look like you’ve seen one of those talking rats those two ufdis were blathering about.’ He snapped his fingers and made Morek jump. ‘Wake up, wannaz. Now,’ he added, heading into the forge, ‘Snorri Lunngrin, now Halfhand, needs a gauntlet fashioning. Find him before you begin the rune rites, examine his wound and see what’s to be done.’
Morek was half agape, unable to follow his master’s capricious nature in the slightest.
‘Well, go on then, zaki,’ said Lord Silverthumb, shooing his apprentice away like he was a beardling. ‘Bugger off and find the prince. And do it fast, the anvil calls.’
Ranuld had brought him all the way down to the grongaz only to dismiss him and send him back up its steps again. He was about to ask why but his master was gone, swallowed whole by soot and shadow.
Scratching his head, more furrow-browed than ever, Morek went to look for Snorri Halfhand.
For Ranuld, the dark brought with it a sense of peace. Even with the hammers of the grongaz flattening and shaping, he found tranquillity in his own domain. Breathing deep of the soot and ash, of the metal and the heat, he sighed.
The words spoken in the ruins of Karak Krum had come unbidden. They were also not meant to be heeded, but fate had other ideas it seemed. Briefly, he hoped he hadn’t begun a landslide with his trickling rock. Deciding it was done and could not be undone, he sagged in his ceremonial armour and began removing it. Unbuckling straps, uncinching clasps, he walked over to a stone effigy of a dwarf’s body. There he released the breastplate, followed by the rest of the cuirass. Resting it reverently on the armour dummy, he took off his helm and did the same with that. Then he grabbed a leather smock, stained with the evidence of forging, streaked black and scorched with burns. He passed through a dark chamber, beyond his forging anvil. No other smiths were present, Ranuld was alone. The sound of hammers echoed from the upper deeps, from the foundries and armouries above. Passing a weapons rack, he took up his staff and looped a hammer to his belt.
Smoke parted before him and the firelight of the forge itself cast deepening shadows, pooling in his craggy features. Through a narrow aperture in the stone, he crossed a small corridor to a door hewn from petrified wutroth. Ranuld merely presented his staff and a sigil hidden upon the door’s surface glowed. With the scrape of rock against rock, the portal parted wide enough for the runelord to enter. A muttered incantation and the solid door closed behind him again, sealing off the new chamber like a tomb.
It was dark within, darker even than the rune forge, and no sound reached its confines. Warmth radiated from inside, even standing at the threshold. Lifting his staff, Ranuld ignited the first braziers set into the flanking walls. Like ranks of fiery soldiers they came alight, first six then ten then twenty then a hundred. A chain of fire burst into life down both walls and threw an eldritch glow upon the contents.
‘Duraz a dum…’ he intoned, releasing a breath of awe.
No matter how many times he had seen them, they never failed to impress him.
Six immense anvils sat in front of Ranuld, arranged in two ranks of three. Silver flashed in the brazier light, the anvils capturing the potency of the magic used to ignite them and using it to set their own runes
