to someone else to ease our patrol aches.”
“I’ll buy the second keg,” Pierce Shard offered, “if that’s the sort of ease you have in mind.”
“I doubt if that’s it,” someone in the ranks chuckled. “Agate finds more comfort in the bright eyes of Lona Anvil’s-Cap these days than any of Lobard’s ale can match.”
“Mind your own bright eyes, and keep them sharp,” Agate snapped. “We’re not out of this crack yet.”
At the very top of the trail’s crest, Sledge Two-Fires scanned the towering banks above, then glanced down as Piquin snorted. The dwarf’s eyes went wide, and he hauled on the reins. “Arms!” he bellowed. “Shields up! It’s a trap!”
Just ahead, where the trail began its downward slope, lay two still forms. Dalin Ironbar would scout for no more patrols. He was dead. A few feet away lay the body of his horse, a broken javelin protruding from its ribs.
“Eyes high!” Sledge shouted. “Defend!”
But it was too late. Even as the word “defend” left his lips, an arrow flew from above to thud into his exposed throat and downward into his chest.
In an instant, the air sang with the whines of arrows and bolts, the luffing whisper of thrown spears, and the clatter of flung stones.
Agate Coalglow saw his leader fall and raised his own oval shield just in time to deflect a deadly arrow. He dodged another, and a third buried its ripping head in his thigh just below his buckler. Two arrows protruded from his horse’s neck, and Agate flung himself from the saddle as the big animal began to pitch and dance, blind with pain. He lit hard on the stony trail, rolled, and slid behind a fallen boulder as other arrows sought him, whining down from the steep slopes above.
There were men up there. Where moments ago there had been nothing, now the slopes were alive with humans springing from hiding. A human voice, harsh and commanding, shouted, “Block that trail! Don’t let any of them escape! Kill the dwarves! Kill them all!”
Near at hand, Agate heard a familiar whirring sound and glanced around. Pierce Shard was still in his saddle, his shield dancing here and there as his horse spun and pivoted. Pierce was blocking bolts frantically, spinning his mesh sling while desperate eyes roved the slopes above. He found a target, let the sling fly, and a fist-sized stone whistled upward. Above, someone screamed, and a rough-bearded human pitched outward from the brushy face of the cliff to land in a sprawl not a dozen feet from where Agate huddled.
The pain in his thigh was excruciating, but Agate gritted his teeth, cleared his misted eyes, and drew his steel sword. He broke off the shaft standing from his thigh and got to his feet. Deflecting an arrow with his gauntlet, he staggered slightly and roared a war cry. Then, crouching, his sturdy legs pumping, he headed up the nearest slope, directly into the face of the attack.
His charge caught some of the humans off guard. Arrows whisked past him, and then he was on a narrow ledge in the midst of a gang of them, and his sword flew and danced in silver arcs that abruptly turned bright red. A human fell from the ledge, then another and another as the raging dwarf continued his charge, right into the thick of them.
Six ambushers fell from that ledge, their blood spraying in the light of the setting sun, before one of them got behind Agate Coalglow and put a spear through his heart. Even then, with the spearhead thrusting from his chest, Agate managed one more cut with his dripping sword, and a severed human hand dropped into the shadows below.
He staggered then, dropping his sword and sinking to his knees. Dimly, he heard the sounds of combat echoing back and back in the narrow crevice. Some of the Calnar, somewhere, were still fighting, making the ambush as costly as they could for the humans who had sprung it. But there was no chance, and Agate knew that as his world went dark. Too many humans! Fifty or more of them, at least. Maybe a hundred, and only fourteen dwarves — or whatever number remained now.
“Thorin!” he tried to whisper as blood rushed from his mouth. “Thorin-Dwarfhome! Thorin-Everbardin … hope and comfort, welcome this one home. …”
Below, in the bottom of Crevice Pass, shadows crept across a tumble of carnage. Here a dwarf crouched behind his dead horse, still fending off attackers. There, another — blood dripping from many cuts — used his shield as a weapon of attack in a last effort to regain his fallen sword.
But it was over now, as howling humans boiled into the narrow pass to complete the work of slaughter. The last of the Calnar to die was a fierce young defender named Tap Bronzeplate. As the final arrow pierced him, he tried to say the words that Agate Coalglow had whispered. But only some of them got past his lips.
“Thorin,” he gasped. “Thorin-Everbardin!”
2
Here on the outer shelves of Thorin, lush meadows crowned the gigantic, stair-step terraces carved into the slopes of soaring mountainsides. Vast fields of grain formed curved mosaics, vivid patterns of color in the late morning sunlight cresting saberlike peaks to the east. On the lower terraces, the fields were hues of gold and deep red where early crops ripened. Above these were patterns of rich pastels, and higher still - where the rising terraces flanked floral gardens - were greens as deep and rich as emeralds.
Here, more than anywhere else in the realm of Thorin, the landscape and the creature-works had the look of ogre about them. Not like the brutish, dark lairs of the ogres who yet lurked among the wild mountain passes, far beyond the neighboring lands of Thorin, Golash, and Chandera, but the solid, regimented design of ancient times when the ogres — some said — had ruled all the lands of the Khalkists.
It was in the scope and breadth of the terracing, in the precise spacing of the rising ways between terraces. Not in memory or certain lore had ogres dwelled here, and while ogres still were seen from time to time — lurking on the distant slopes — they and their kind were not the original builders of Thorin.
The ogres now were primitive, often savage creatures, wild in their ways and in their surroundings. But once there had been ogres of another kind. Ancient ancestors of the huge, brutish creatures of today, those ogres of the distant past had hewn mountainsides to their liking and had delved their cold, monotonous lairs into the very hearts of the peaks.
So said the wisest among the short, sturdy, energetic race that now occupied Thorin. This had once been the home of ogres. But the ogres fell from power and lost their skills. Over time, what might once have been a great civilization had deteriorated into savagery. What they left behind was theirs no more, the ballads said. Delvings belong to those who live within them, who hold and improve them. Thorin belonged now to the Calnar, by right of habitation and tradition.
Thorin now was Thorin-Everbardin, home of the Calnar.
On the outer shelves, the look of ancient ogre craft remained because the Calnar had found no need to improve it. The vast, rich meadows ranking the slopes of the highest peaks of the Khalkists served the purposes of the dwarves very nicely. Crops, flocks, and herds were rotated from level to level with the seasons, an enterprise as bustling and busy as the foundries and crafters’ halls within Thorin itself, deep in the stone heart of the mountain. Not in memory had the Calnar — the people known to their neighbors of other races simply as “the dwarves” — known famine.
Now midsummer’s harvest was proceeding in the lower fields and among the orchards and vineyards that flanked them. Now the drums had begun to speak on the sentinel crags above.
Colin Stonetooth, riding out from Thorin Keep to inspect the harvest, heard the talk of the drums and drew rein to look upward, knowing the distances would show him nothing of the drummers. Thorin was vast, and they were far above and far away. Yet their drums floated the muted thunder of the Call to Balladine on the bright air of morning, and the sound was good to hear.
Handil would be up there with them, of course. It was always Handil’s great vibrar that spoke first, setting the deep rhythm of the call. Colin Stonetooth squinted against the high sun, and his eyes sought the monolith of the First Sentinel. There, at the top of that mighty spire, was where Handil would be. Though he could not see him
