The War God's Own

headed east, and Kaeritha smiled when Bahzell wondered aloud at seeing so much industry in such bitter weather.

'Think about it,' she suggested. 'What's the one thing folk who live underground have the least of?'

'Ah?' Bahzell scratched an ear, then nodded. 'Trees,' he said.

'Exactly. Dwarvenhame is as greedy for forest products as Purple Lords are for gold, and these people make an excellent living supplying them. And not just with lumber or pitch or turpentine, either. Dwarves have a deep craving for fine woodwork, but it's not something they're particularly skilled at producing. And this is a good time for these people to do their timbering. There's less need for farm labor, and without rivers big enough to float logs down, winter actually makes it easier to move them. Timber sleds move much better over snow.'

Bahzell nodded again, though he remained bemused by the shouts echoing through the forests from the labor gangs. The occasional crashing thunder as trees came down and the cheerful profanity bellowed by drovers as ox teams leaned into their harnesses were a far cry from the icy, deserted silence he'd seen further south, yet he still felt taken aback initially when the locals called out cheery greetings as he and his companions passed. It was good to once more find themselves among people who felt secure enough to greet them, yet after their earlier experiences, and especially after the botched ambush, it seemed unnatural for these people to view any large, armed band with anything other than wariness, regardless of whose colors they wore.

But a little thought helped explain the difference between the attitudes of these industrious foresters and the inhabitants of the largely deserted towns and villages. Landfressa's foresters, like those of Vonderland, were a hardy and independent lot, and most were hunters as well as loggers. There were undoubtedly dozens of bows in their work camps, and given the probable skill of those bows' owners-not to mention the fact that woodcutters were inevitably accompanied by extremely sharp axes-only fools would offer them violence. Besides, however valuable timber might be in Dwarvenhame, it wasn't exactly something brigands could seize and ride off with.

Not that there weren't plenty of other temptations to lure potential raiders, for Kaeritha had been right about the relationship between Landfressa's humans and the dwarves of Dwarvenhame. Winter might have frozen them for now, but in warmer weather dozens of brawling mountain streams ran down to the northernmost tributaries of the Greenleaf River. They were too shallow to be used for transport, but every town the travelers passed boasted its own holding ponds, as if an army of beavers had descended upon the land, and Bahzell and Brandark marveled at the scores of waterwheels those ponds served. Many were idle now, but some still turned, and it didn't need a hradani's ears to hear the sounds of hammers, saws, chisels, and other tools coming from the large brick buildings clustered about them. Among hradani, waterwheels were used only to drive the grinding stones of grist mills, but these people obviously used water to power a whole host of other tools, as well, and Bahzell watched in fascination as they passed an open-sided structure where a water-driven saw as tall as many men slabbed enormous tree trunks neatly into planks and timbers. Neither he nor Brandark had ever imagined such an improvement on the slow, laborious saw pits their own people used, yet the fact that the locals seemed totally unaware that winter was supposed to be a time when the pace of life slowed until the spring thaw was almost more bemusing to them.

The humans in their party seemed to take that in stride, but then, with the possible exception of Wencit-who, as a wild wizard, might or might not be properly classed as a 'human' to begin with-they were all citizens of the Empire. Bahzell and Brandark were not, yet the comments their companions let drop told them that busy as all this seemed to them, it was commonplace to the others. Indeed, compared to the more populous provinces further south, all of this bustle and industriousness, however impressive to two barbarian hradani, was downright rustic.

That was an almost frightening thought for Bahzell. His father had worked for years to build a place where merchants and artisans could survive and prosper, and the result had been to make Hurgrum crushingly superior to her foes. By hradani standards, Bahnak's realm was incredibly prosperous, able not only to feed and clothe its people but to arm them and equip them for war with weapons of their own manufacture. It had been an enormous achievement, one which had played a decisive role in Bahnak's rise to the threshold of empire, yet the prosperity and productivity of this area which Bahzell's human friends clearly regarded as a backwater dwarfed all his father had achieved. It put the wealth and power of the Empire of the Axe into stark perspective… and made him realize how incredibly far his own people still had to go.

Or, rather, those busy, productive towns made him begin to realize the length of the journey to which Prince Bahnak had committed his Horse Stealers. It took their arrival at the western end of the Dwarvenhame Tunnel to make the realization complete.

Chapter Fourteen

'Phrobus!'

Brandark's soft-voiced curse, rich with wonder, expressed Bahzell's own feelings almost perfectly. The Horse Stealer glanced at his friend, but only briefly, for the sight before them wouldn't let him look away for long.

The stonework of Belhadan and the Empire's roads had been marvel enough, but this was the first time the hradani had seen the work of dwarvish engineers untouched by the influence of any of the other Races of Man, and they knew it. No one could have looked at the western face of the Dwarvenhame Tunnel and not known it, for no one but a dwarf could have conceived and executed such a project.

The entire face of a mountain had been sliced away to create a sheer, vertical wall of smooth rock eight hundred feet high at the least. There was something merciless about the perfection of that sweep of stone, a purity of line and plane which nature could never have produced. It had been imposed by a hand and eye which thought in straight lines and the consummation of function, and it loomed above the puny mites at its feet with a majestic severity too intense for beauty.

The mouth of the tunnel itself was a black dot against that vast backdrop. Only as they approached its portcullis-fringed maw and the flanking bastions carved from the rock to either side of it did its size truly become apparent. Those bastions were garrisoned, as was the battlemented traverse work cut to overhang the full width of the gate. Sentries looked down on the travelers from embrasures, murder holes for heated oil and banefire, and arrow slits, but the duty officer must have been warned they were coming, for the stocky dwarf only raised his axe to Bahzell in salute and waved them past.

Truth to tell, Bahzell had paid the guards little heed, for his attention was riveted to the tunnel itself, and he felt a fresh sense of awe as hooves clattered on the hard-paved approach and he strode under its massive vault. As a rule, he disliked underground spaces. He wasn't exactly claustrophobic; it was just that most caves and tunnels made someone his size feel hemmed in. But the Dwarvenhame Tunnel was fifty yards across, with a stony roof so high above the roadway that it seemed to float suspended rather than press down upon him, and a reassuring breeze flowed through ventilation shafts on silent feet of chill, fresh air. The light within was dim compared to the daylight without, but it was much brighter than he would have expected. Wall-mounted lanterns burned every twenty yards, and even though they lacked the reflectors he'd seen in places like the Belhadan chapter's training salle, they threw powerful spills of illumination along the tunnel. It took him several minutes to realize why, and then he inhaled sharply.

They didn't require reflectors because the walls themselves served as reflectors. The stone wasn't simply smooth; it was polished almost to the quality of a mirror, without a single tool mark to mar its surface, and he shook his head in baffled wonder.

'What?' Wencit asked quietly from beside him, and Bahzell turned his head. The wild wizard's eldrich eyes looked eerier than ever in the subdued lighting, floating like twin pools of witchfire under his brows. Their shifting glow was so bright Bahzell thought he could almost have read by it, yet not even that unnatural sight could distract him from the odd sense that the tunnel didn't truly exist. That it couldn't exist.

'The walls,' he said after a moment, his voice soft, almost hushed, as if he felt some compulsion to speak without the tunnel's creators overhearing him. 'There's not a tool mark on 'em.'

'No, there isn't,' Wencit agreed, turning to cock his head and consider the walls himself. He studied them almost critically, then shrugged. 'Actually, I think this may be even better than some of the work I saw in Kontovar,' he mused. 'Of course, it's been a while. I suppose my memory could be playing tricks on me.'