What are we going to do, Father?” Brandon asked. He felt like a young, wide-eyed lad again, helpless against the chaotic events of the “grown-up” world. Garren Bluestone had ever been his anchor in that world, and even as an adult dwarf warrior with a number of successful fights under his belt, he needed his father’s strength and advice as never before.
“We’re going to put on our formal garb and go to the king’s palace. There, we will file your claim.”
Brandon nodded, for once not even bothering to correct the improper use of the governor’s title. “What about Nailer’s murder?” he asked.
Garren’s eyes shone with rage and grief, but he placed a cautioning hand on his son’s shoulders. “Listen, Brandon,” his father said finally with a sigh. “Nailer must be-will be-avenged. But we don’t know enough to embark on a vendetta-not yet, anyway,” he added grimly. “So we will work on the first task we should accomplish and endeavor to learn more before we act on the other. Now I suggest you go talk to your mother for a few minutes while I have the servants assemble our garments.”
Brandon nodded, wondering if it was his own exhaustion or his father’s clear rationality that had knocked the stuffing out of him. Numbly, he went into the next room, where Nailer’s body had been laid out on the bed. His mother and several of the servants were tenderly combing his hair and beard, weeping softly. When her younger son entered, Karine swept him into an embrace, clinging to him, sobbing into his beard. Her grief, somehow, made Brandon feel stronger, and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, letting her anguish slowly drain away.
“I–I’m sorry, Mother,” he said when her tears had dried.
“I know,” she whispered. “We all are. Now go with your father. Make us proud.”
He saw Garren was standing in the doorway of the room, waiting for him. Gently disengaging, he followed his father to the anteroom, where the servants had laid out formal capes trimmed with bear fur and a fresh tunic to replace Brandon’s torn and bloodstained shirt. He sat down and exchanged his miner’s boots for the formal black footwear preferred at court, and they were ready to go.
A small crowd of neighbors and friends was waiting quietly in the street when they emerged from the front door, and one by one those gruff dwarves and teary-eyed dwarf maids offered condolences as the two Bluestones started down the street.
“Terrible,” one muttered sadly.
“Our condolences,” said a pair, husband and wife, holding hands.
“It’s that old Bluestone luck,” whispered an old dwarf to his nearly deaf companion, the words carrying clearly to Brandon’s ears.
“I’m so sorry, Brandon,” said Bondall, the barmaid who ran the Cracked Mug-the level’s most popular tavern. She gave him a long, shuddering hug, and he held her tenderly, feeling his own eyes grow wet. Finally, sensing his father’s growing impatience, Brandon thanked her and broke away to enter the great stairwell.
They climbed the long, spiraling stairway connecting the city’s levels in grim silence, the air of foreboding surrounding them clearing any dwarves they encountered out of their path. At many places the stairwell gave out onto wide plazas, popular gathering places with inns and gaming floors and fungus gardens, but the two Bluestones took no note of those popular diversions as they climbed ever higher.
Garnet Thax was the capital city of Kayolin and the one great city in that nation. It was aligned vertically, with levels and half-levels and terraces and tunnels all arrayed around the wide, virtually bottomless pit called the atrium. The deep-levels were the lowest of those, centers of manufacturing, smelting, and refining. Those were the smoky neighborhoods that Brandon had passed through while bringing Nailer’s body up and out of the delvings, which were the vast mining networks extending far out and below the city. The midlevels, where the Bluestones dwelled, were numerous terraces of houses, shops, inns, and other places of business, where the majority of Kayolin’s population resided. They were the heart of the city.
As they climbed through the upper-levels, they approached the nerve center where the important decisions in Kayolin society were made. The inns at the landings became more exclusive, the crowds less teeming, the dwarves behaving more quietly and wearing better clothes. Brandon knew his family’s house once had been located on those exalted floors, but as he looked at the aloof dwarves-mostly Hylar-seated in their comfortable chairs near the atrium, he was happy he had lived his life in a more humble place.
All dwarfkind could be found in Kayolin. Unlike the Thorbardin of lore, wherein each clan maintained its own separate city, Garnet Thax was host to all types and clans. True, there was a Theiwar quarter on a number of the deep-levels, and the hapless Aghar maintained their miserable warrens wherever they could dig enough living space out of the rock. But for the most part the Daergar, Daewar, Hylar, and Klar lived beard by jowl with each other, pervasively in the midlevels. Of course, as was ever the case among dwarves, some of the Hylar considered themselves better than the rest of their kin and maintained their own exclusive lodgings in the best, and highest, levels.
Brandon thought briefly and ruefully of his grandfather, who had been the last patriarch of the Bluestones to live up there. Then a question started percolating in his brain. He gave voice to the query as he and his father continued on the long climb.
“Father, what did Harn Poleaxe mean when he said that ‘now was the time to do it’ or something like that? What does he want you to do?”
Garren looked sideways at his son, even as he continued his measured, ascending steps. For a time the elder dwarf said nothing, but Brandon got the impression he was considering his reply.
“You’ve heard the history: how our family was named for the sapphire infused rock strata that led to the Third Delve?” his father began.
“Yes, of course,” Brandon replied. “That’s why we’re called House Bluestone.” He saw that Garren was looking at him strangely. “Isn’t that true?” he asked.
“No, it isn’t-at least, not entirely,” replied the elder dwarf, startling his son with the revelation. “In fact, we possess an actual wedge of bright blue rock, an artifact that our ancestor Galric Axeblade discovered, and brought back to the city with him. He knew it was valuable, and unique, and so he invented the tale of the sapphire strata to keep the existence of the real Bluestone a secret.
“But the story is partly true, as well, insofar as Galric Galric Axeblade discovered it when he was exploring the mine that would become the Third Delve. He changed his named to Galric Bluestone and founded our house with the wealth he gained from those mines.”
“I never heard that,” Brandon declared. “I always believed the story of the official history-that the sapphires, and the rich mines, were the source of our house’s foundation, and fortune.”
Garren shook his head. “It wasn’t just the Third Delve that made Galric a wealthy dwarf. It was the stone itself. It’s a powerful talisman in its own right. Now it’s all we have left of the wealth that once exalted our family; the rest was lost in the Cataclysm and its aftermath as my father tried to stay in business, to pay his workers and his loyal clients even after his mines had been destroyed.” There was something in Garren’s tone that showed he approved of his own father’s decision, and Brandon felt a stab of fierce family pride.
“Harn Poleaxe wants to buy the Bluestone from me,” Garren said quietly, his steps still steady as they spiraled up the wide, stone stairs. “He is offering me a tremendous amount of money; he’s been raising the offer for more than year, every time he sees me.”
Brandon knew Poleaxe had visited his father at least every five or ten intervals over that time. He struggled to digest the information. “Why does he want it so badly?” he asked finally.
“He says it’s part of a hill dwarf legacy, one the Neidar have only recently uncovered. There are several of these stones, all of them dating back to the days of the Graygem. His clan, the Neidar, already possess the green one, which he calls the Greenstone. He assures me if he could return home with the Bluestone, his status among his people would be permanently cemented. He would become a virtual lord.”
“And how much is he offering you for the stone?”
Garren stopped climbing for the first time and looked straight into his son’s eyes. “Enough money for me to move our house up to the highest levels again. It would make me a force in Kayolin, not quite with the clout of, say, the Heelspurs, but very nearly. It would change our luck for the better in a way that the whole nation would see.”
Brandon whistled aloud. “All that-for a single stone?” he asked quietly.
