Driving the mules hard, he was determined to at least ensure his passenger reached Karaz-a-Karak in good time.
Perhaps it was his obsession with achieving that goal, or possibly some residual anger from his meeting with Skarnag Grum though it was days old, that blinded Krondi to the fact that he had strayed into the sights of a predator. Three days out of the domain of the hill dwarfs and he finally realised they were being tracked.
Cursing himself for ignoring the signs and allowing his good instincts to be clouded by selfish concerns, Krondi turned to his charge who was sitting quietly alongside him in the lead wagon.
‘We are being followed,’ he said. Krondi glanced over his shoulder, but all he could see was the lengthening shadows of the slowly dipping sun. Nightfall was not far off and they were too far away from Everpeak to reach it before the light died completely. Krondi did not want to still be on the road when that happened.
The old hooded dwarf beside him grunted something, appearing to ignite the smoking root in the cup of his pipe with his finger.
Hailing one of the guards riding at the back of the wagon, Krondi said, ‘Keep a sharp eye behind us. I don’t think we are alone out here.’
Durgi frowned, gesturing to the twenty or so warriors that rode on the four wagons. ‘Only a fool would attack such a well-defended caravan.’
‘That is what concerns me. A sharp eye, remember,’ Krondi told him, pointing to his eye before returning both hands to the reins.
They were approaching a rocky gorge. High-sided and narrow, it would funnel the wagons into a tight cordon, an ideal position for an ambush. Krondi tried to search the highlands at the summit of the gorge for signs of warriors. There were only craggy boulders and rough gorse bowing gently in the wind.
He muttered, ‘Something doesn’t feel right.’
On the path laid before them the wagons would be exposed but at least they would have room to manoeuvre if needed. Through the narrow defile of the gorge they’d be sheltered from the flanks but vulnerable to an attack from above. Making any sort of camp in this terrain was out of the question, so the two choices remained.
Take the path or travel through the gorge?
Krondi chewed his beard then said, ‘These mountains are my home. I know them as I know my own skin. So, why then do I fear them all of a sudden?’
‘Do you wish me to answer, beardling?’ asked the old dwarf with a voice like cracking oak.
‘Something hunts us,’ said Krondi, urging the mules to greater effort. ‘And anything bold enough to attack a party of over twenty armoured dawi in their own lands is something I do not wish to fight.’
‘We won’t reach Karaz-a-Karak,’ said the old dwarf, ‘not before they catch us.’
Krondi turned to the hooded dwarf sitting next to him smoking his pipe. His eyes grew a little wider. ‘So I am not imagining it. We are being followed.’
‘Have been for miles, lad.’
Krondi was incredulous. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘What good would that do? Kill us quicker, maybe. No, better to get closer to the hold, better to let them see us and know us for what we are.’
‘Their prey?’ asked Krondi.
Now the hooded dwarf turned and there was fire in his eyes, of forges ancient and forgotten, of jewels that glitter for eternity.
‘No. We are dawi, stone and steel. And we are not afraid. That is what they will see. Strength, lad. Strength and courage of our ancestors.’ The flame in the hooded dwarf’s eyes faded and he added, ‘Slow down, spare the mules or you ride the wagon train into the ground and do our hunters’ job for them.’
Krondi nodded, let his beating heart slow also to a dull hammering in his chest.
‘I have fought in dozens of battles, fought the urk and grobi, trolls and gronti. I am a warrior, not a merchant.’
‘Aye, lad,’ said the hooded dwarf, ‘but this is not a battle. There’s no shield wall, no brother’s shoulder to lock against your own. We are alone out here in the rising dark.’
The mouth of the gorge was approaching, forking off from the main path.
‘What should I do?’
Supping deep of his pipe, the passenger said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Either way, we will have to fight.’
Muttering an oath to Valaya, Krondi took the gorge.
The skryzan-harbark was ruined. It slumped in Heglan Copperfist’s workshop a broken wreck, once a ship and now little more than kindling. Some of the hull had survived intact but the sails had been utterly destroyed, along with Helgan’s dreams, in the crash.
Under threat of expulsion from the guild, Master Strombak had commanded him to break the vessel down, strip it for parts, but faced with the reality of that Heglan was finding it hard to imagine such a formerly magnificent creation rendered into anything so prosaic as a stone thrower or heavy ballista. It would be an easy task, Heglan was gifted as an engineer, but that was also why he railed against the fetters of tradition the guild shackled him with.
His entire workshop was littered with designs, plans sketched with sticks of charcoal depicting various flying vessels he one day hoped to build. Incredibly detailed, each parchment schematic was filled with calculations, formulae for wind speed and velocity, theories on loft and chemical equations related to steam and pressure.
Of the engineers, Heglan was the only one to have fitted his workshop with a vast skylight. He had fashioned the glass himself and the massive aperture sat above the wreckage of his airship, letting in the sun to expose its many wounds. Shadows intruded on the scene as Heglan scrutinised through a pall
