such as food and warmth and even light. Drink, however, retained its eternal appeal, so he went immediately into the cellar, drawing himself a mug from a recently tapped keg. Removing his new helmet, he scratched at his face and sat down in his most comfortable chair.
He was waiting for someone. No, something, he corrected himself. He didn’t have long to wait.
The monster arose from the floor, its webbed black wings emerging first from the very ground, followed by its crimson eyes and that terrible fanged maw. Poleaxe trembled in a mixture of terror and delight as the creature, the being he had chosen to believe was proof of his own elite status, once again made its presence known to him.
“Have you sent out your summons?” hissed the thing.
Harn Poleaxe didn’t even stop to wonder how the creature knew about his plan.
“Yes!” Poleaxe boasted. “I have dispatched two dozen messengers to more than fifty villages and towns. I expect to raise an army of at least two thousand valiant dwarves.”
“All hill dwarves, yes?”
“Hill dwarves, every man sworn to the destruction of the mountain dwarf outpost in Pax Tharkas,” the warrior pledged stoutly. “Their longtime enmity and treachery will be punished, and my people will once again rule the hills of Kharolis.”
“That is good. My master will be pleased,” replied the creature silkily. “And when will you make this war? Time is short.”
“We march on Pax Tharkas in ten days or less,” vowed the new warlord of Hillhome.
“Again, that is good,” hissed the creature.
“And you will be there too?” Harn said. “You will do as you say, break down the gates of the fortress?”
Again the creature hissed, a long, sibilant sound as its jaws gaped and its red eyes flared. “The gates,” it murmured, “will not be a problem.”
Otaxx Shortbeard found Tarn where he almost always could be found: up on the catwalk along the Tharkadan Wall, supervising the progress of his great task.
“Almost done now,” said the old Daewar general, watching in approval as another load of rocks was dumped from the lift, individual dwarves bearing the stones onto the unthinkably heavy pile of the reloaded trap.
“Aye,” Tarn said, allowing himself a tight smile. “I predicted completion by the end of the year, but now I’d guess we’re no more than a month away.”
“I remember that hall, when we first claimed this place,” Otaxx said, looking down into the huge, almost empty chamber below. “Rocks filling it halfway up the walls and worse. No way to open either gate, not even so much as to let a goat crawl through.”
“Now with the gates open, wagons can roll down the road. We can open up trade with Haven or Tarsis, bring new traffic here. Finally restore some life to this old backwater.”
“True, true,” Otaxx said, gazing below. Indeed, the piles of rocks that still remained down there were already neatly shunted off to the left and right. The central part of the hollow wall, where the two gates allowed passage, had been cleared the previous year.
“You look troubled, old friend,” Tarn said, clapping his old battle commander on the shoulder. “What are you thinking about? You should be proud at this happy time.”
“Ah, we’ve known each other too long for secrets,” said the old dwarf. He stared across the vast hall, but his gaze was focused on somewhere much farther away. “I’ve been remembering Berrilyn, more and more these days. When our work here is done, I’d like to travel into the east, to see if I can… well, not find her, not anymore. I don’t fool myself about that. But learn what happened to her, to all of them. I’d like to look for Thoradin.”
Tarn nodded. He, too, had known love at an early age. Belicia Slateshoulders, his true love, was dead, that he knew for certain, but if he didn’t know, he would be tempted to go and look for her himself, just as his old friend was tempted to do.
“Do you think you’d have any mere chance of finding them? Of finding her?” the thane asked.
Otaxx could only shrug. “I’ll always hate myself if I don’t try.”
“Here, I brought you some warm soup.”
Gretchan’s voice brought Brandon out of his solitude and misery, and he quickly pushed himself to his feet and crossed the cell to the securely locked door. He touched her hand where her fingers were wrapped around the bar, his stomach growling as he smelled the rich broth.
But it was not the food that lightened his heart as much as the dwarf maid who brought it.
“Thanks,” he said with a slight chuckle. “But how are you going to get that bowl through the bars?”
She laughed with him. “I knew you’d point that out right away. Here’s the way we’ll do it. I’ll hold it up, and you put your lips against the bars. I’ll pour it right down your throat.”
“Sounds all right. Be careful, though.” He gestured to his tattered and stained tunic, unwashed and unchanged in the weeks of captivity and travel. “I’m wearing my best shirt.”
She lifted the bowl, and he sipped, feeling the soup warm his throat and his belly. Almost magically, strength and energy began to spread through his body, suffusing his limbs, brightening his eyes, lifting his spirits.
“Did you bring this right from the royal kitchen?” he asked, wiping his lips after he’d finished.
“Hardly. Nobody knows I’m down here yet,” she said. “I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.” Gretchan held her pipe in her hand, exhaling smoke through her nose, and Brandon relished the sweet smell of burning leaf. He had come to associate that scent with their pleasant visits and was delighted by the way the odor lingered for hours even after she departed.
“I hope you’re being careful,” he cautioned. He didn’t know how she managed to hide in the fortress, but she’d visited him virtually every day he’d been in the cell. The memory of her last visit, and the expectation of her next, kept him from descending into utter despair.
“Maybe you shouldn’t come here anymore,” he said, hoping she’d ignore him. “It’s too dangerous.”
She waved away his objections. “Your stories are finally starting to get interesting,” she teased. “For your ancestor to be climbing Garnet Peak on the very day the Cataclysm occurred, for example. It almost makes me believe in all your tales of bad luck!”
“That’s when it started,” Brandon admitted morosely. “Nothing left of him but his axe, and I left that in Hillhome!”
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll have a chance to go back and get it someday,” she suggested. “Now, tell me again, when did the governor of Kayolin decide that he should start calling himself a king?”
“You know all my sore points,” he said with a grin, touching her hand again. “No, let’s talk about you for a change. I don’t really know very much about you, do I? I know you don’t come from Thorbardin or Pax Tharkas or Kayolin. So when are you going to tell me more about yourself?”
She sighed and looked at him affectionately. “In due time, I will,” she said. “But I’m begging you to be patient with me. Can you?”
“Sure, of course I can,” he said. His eyes twinkled. “Especially if you bring me some more soup tomorrow.”
Garn Bloodfist studied the two wedges of green and blue stone. He propped them on the desk in his office near an oil lamp, its wick set to burn bright. He was dazzled by the shiny pure colors, seduced by the flickering facets that danced across the desk and the floor and sparkled along the walls. Eyes shining, he studied the reflections, giggling in sheer pleasure.
“Where did you come from?” he inquired of the objects.
It was not the first time he had spoken to them. For two weeks he had been studying them with every waking moment, wondering about their origins, their value. He had even gone out onto the upper parapet of the East Tower and asked answers from his father when Dashard Bloodfist appeared to him in the night sky. Though he preferred his nocturnal communions in the wilderness, such was his fascination with the two stone wedges that he was willing to risk the uneasy looks, the whispered gossip, that inevitably resulted from his seemingly unbalanced behavior.
Only Garn knew that his father was real, that his memory, the proof of his horrible betrayal, was the flame that kept the Klar warrior’s fiery spirit burning so bright. And Garn Bloodfist was not afraid of the uncanny, the unexplained. Indeed, he was becoming increasingly convinced there was something supernatural about the stones. It wasn’t so much the result of any special observation, though he did spend hours handling and scrutinizing the stones. It was more like a deep, growing conviction.
It was his conviction, more than anything else, that caused him to reevaluate the prisoner he had dragged
