NINETEEN
B randon awakened with the loud opening of the brig’s door. Several dwarves entered the building and stood near the entrance while the jailer, together with the bullying Neidar called Rune, came swaggering all the way back to the mountain dwarf’s cell. Rune flourished a sword while the turnkey unlocked the barrier and pulled it open. Brandon wondered what the bullying Neidar had done with his venerable axe.
“Time to come out and play,” Rune sneered. “You get to be the center of attention!”
Pushing himself to his feet, Brandon emerged from the cell. But they didn’t know his hands were no longer tied. He owed the dwarf maid historian a favor, he reckoned.
Abruptly he jabbed his elbow into the jailer so hard, he knocked the dwarf into one of the barred doors. With a curse and a clatter of metal, the filthy turnkey tumbled to the floor.
“Watch yourself!” Rune declared, jabbing the tip of his sword against Brandon’s side until the prisoner swiftly twisted out of the way and grabbed the hill dwarf by the wrist, pinning his sword hand against the bars of an adjacent cell.
“Hey-how’d you get your hands untied?” Rune demanded, squirming. The jailer scrambled to his feet and moved toward Brandon, but he froze at the glare from the burly Hylar.
The other dwarves at the door, swords drawn, edged closer, and Brandon could see there was no escape. Releasing Rune’s wrist and brushing past the jailer, Brandon shrugged and continued toward the outer door and the painfully bright daylight outside.
“Good luck,” he heard the Theiwar prisoner say loudly, and he grunted an acknowledgment.
It was morning, he saw as he emerged, and Hillhome was bustling with pedestrians. At first he guessed that the moderately crowded street was busy with hill dwarves making their way to work. Only most of them weren’t going to jobs. They were going to his trial.
Rune prodded him down the steps and toward the middle of town. The gathered hill dwarves watched him with barely concealed hostility, and the bulk of the crowd followed along as the Neidar led his prisoner toward a small square in the center of Hillhome.
A raised platform occupied one end of the open area. A pair of hill dwarf guards, each carrying a long-hafted battle axe, stood to either side of a large, thronelike chair-which was unoccupied. To the left, a wooden rack had been erected, and judging from the manacles attached to the upper and lower supports, Brandon deduced that the contraption was a means of immobilizing, while undoubtedly torturing, a spread-eagled prisoner. He felt a twinge of fear but resolved not to give his captors the satisfaction of seeing him squirm. Instead, he swaggered into the plaza with all the bravado he could muster.
The edges of the square were crowded with muttering hill dwarves, mostly males conspicuously armed with a variety of weapons. They glared at Brandon as he was pushed into the center of the square. Rune stood right behind the prisoner, his sharp blade prodding the mountain dwarf at intervals. The dwarf from Kayolin tried to scan the crowd, looking for a glimpse of blonde hair, of that pretty, oval face with the small, upturned nose. He felt surprisingly dejected when he realized Gretchan Pax wasn’t here to record his fate.
“All set for the festivities, are you?”
He turned to see Slate Fireforge eyeing him. The hill dwarf had ambled up behind him, and while his expression wasn’t exactly friendly, nor was it as hostile as so many others in the crowd.
“Don’t see that I have much choice,” Brandon replied with a shrug, trying to appear nonchalant. He squinted at Fireforge. “Why’d you stop him from killing me that morning up in the hills? You don’t believe him, do you? You know I’m not really a spy, don’t you?”
Fireforge made a face, half bemused, half grimace. “Can’t say one way or the other, to tell the truth. But I believe there’s a proper way to do things, and slicing your head off on a rock up there just didn’t seem, well, proper. And Harn Poleaxe knew that too, or he wouldn’t have listened to me.”
“He seems to be a pretty important fellow around here. Why is everyone so anxious to do anything he says?”
The hill dwarf pondered the question for a while but finally answered. “He comes from money-his father was the richest goldsmith in the north hills. And he’s always been a leader. Quite handy with a sword… and with the ladies.”
“And with a bottle,” Brandon noted, his bitterness showing.
“Aye-uh, that too. But mainly it was when that old woman, whom they call the Mother Oracle, came to town, ’bout ten years ago. She took him under her wing, so to speak, and he’s been on a run of good luck and prosperity since then. I hear it was her sent him to Kayolin, to look for that stone you brought down here.”
“Who’s this Mother Oracle?” Brandon asked.
“An old, blind dwarf woman, is all,” Fireforge replied. “Claims to have some mystical powers. I guess she’s given Harn Poleaxe some good advice, though.” He nodded at the other side of the plaza, where the crowd was starting to stir. “Looks like the show’s about to start. Good luck to you,” he said, apparently sincere.
“I’ll need it,” Brandon muttered. “But I don’t think I’m going to get it.”
He stared at the platform with its lofty chair, a veritable throne, and was not surprised to see Harn Poleaxe swagger into view, pushing his way through the crowd that parted for him. He was dressed in a fur cape and shiny black boots, looking for all the world as if he were the lord of the place.
But a closer look at the hill dwarf leader did surprise him-just as it apparently surprised the others in the crowd, who whispered to each other or simply stared at the hulking figure of the Neidar.
For Harn Poleaxe had changed considerably from the last time Brandon had laid eyes on him. His already oversized body seemed to have grown bigger, so that he towered over the biggest Neidar of his bodyguards. His head, in particular, looked huge and swollen, with his eyes receding into deep, almost cavernous, sockets. Several warts had sprouted on his cheeks, and the hill dwarf scratched at one of them as if it gave him great pleasure. He twitched in a sudden nervous gesture, looking behind him and glaring. Then, as Poleaxe neared the chair on the platform, those eyes turned menacingly at the Kayolin dwarf. He was a new, strangely transformed, frighteningly different Poleaxe.
Brandon met that glare even as he felt its power. A wickedness lurked in Poleaxe’s presence, an abiding evil that, somehow, hadn’t been obvious before, during his long journey with the hill dwarf. Poleaxe puffed out his barrel chest and strutted back and forth on the raised platform, and some in the crowd audibly gasped at his remarkably strapping presence. His arms, too, seemed to have grown in size and length, and his muscular limbs swung easily, his fists seemingly reaching to his knees.
“We are here to usher in a new dawn of Neidar pride,” Poleaxe proclaimed, even his voice louder and more fearsome than before. “And to rid ourselves of the symbol of an old enemy.” With a flourish, he lifted a leather pouch that Brandon recognized-for he himself had worn it around his waist on the long journey southward from Kayolin. Harn pulled the Bluestone out of that pouch, holding it up so all in the plaza could see.
“This is the stone that the Mother Oracle sent me all the way to Kayolin to find. I return with it now, in triumph!” he declared.
Most of the crowd watched silently, though a few of Poleaxe’s personal guard shouted hurrahs for their leader. With another broad gesture, Harn raised another stone, one he plucked from another pouch at his side. Brandon stared in surprise, realizing the object was nearly identical in shape and size to the Bluestone, except that it was a deep and shimmering green color.
“And this is the stone that our beloved Mother Oracle herself brought to Hillhome, nearly ten years ago,” Harn declared loudly. “She told us then that we needed both of them to work the will of Reorx. See how they match and complement each other! Now we have them both!”
The loud cheers came from all around, all quarters of the Neidar crowd. The big hill dwarf then set the two colored stones down on a small table beside his chair and waved his hand, a gesture for silence that the citizens of Hillhome quickly heeded. It was then that Brandon saw his axe, the weapon of Balric Bluestone, sitting on that same table-it was like a display of Harn’s prizes, all stolen from a betrayed companion. Poleaxe glared about the
