The Covenant of The Forge

The human didn’t even look at him. “Why are you waiting? I invited you to attack.”

Jerem frowned, then shrugged. He raised his own blade before him, circled two steps to the right, and abruptly ducked and lunged, a movement almost too quick to see. Taking the man at his word, he went straight for the heart … and stopped. Somehow his sword was not where it should be. It was still in his hand, but now pointed off to one side. The clang of struck steel rang in his ears, and something sharp was poking at his throat. It was the human’s blade.

“You see,” Glendon said, critically, “you made two mistakes there. The first was in thinking that I did not see you. The second was that midriff thrust. I hardly had to parry at all to knock it aside. If you intend to defeat a person in combat, you shouldn’t give him such advantages.”

The man pulled back his sword, and a tiny drop of blood trickled from beneath the dwarf’s whiskers. Jerem glanced over at his chieftain. “It was a fluke, Sire. May I try again?”

“As you please,” Colin Stonetooth nodded.

This time the captain of the Ten gave no advantages. With a flurry of whistling cuts and thrusts he attacked the tall human … and found himself flat on his back on the hard ground while his sword spun upward, flashing in the evening sun. At the top of its arc the sword steadied, then fell point-downward directly toward him. At the last instant, a long arm stretched above him and a long-fingered, human hand caught the falling blade.

Jerem rolled away and got to his feet. Glendon Hawke calmly flipped the dwarf’s sword, reversed it, and handed it back to him. “That was much better,” he said approvingly. “If you would like to learn that disarm-deck- and-skewer trick, I’ll teach it to you … after you have mastered some basics.”

Colin Stonetooth spread his hands, looking at his grinning son. “Very well, Cale,” he agreed. “The man can instruct us. What does he want in return?”

“To be released from service when his task is done, and to have his belongings returned to him. He asks no other reward. He said his pledge is bound by honor, not by trade.”

“A noble human,” Colin said, wonderingly.

Glendon Hawke heard the comment. “Nobility, like chivalry, is a condition of knighthood, … Sire. Skill alone is only the pattern of the tapestry, not the fabric. Disciplines of hand and mind must be woven from the heart.”

“We can stop here for a while,” Colin decided. “It will do us no harm to learn what this man can teach us.”

Off to one side of the camp, noise erupted — a flurry of booming sounds that settled quickly into a fast, rhythmic beat. Colin Stonetooth put his hands to his ears, and Cale Greeneye shouted, “Somebody get that kender away from the drums! And while you’re at it, search him! I want my spur back!”

All around, dwarves glanced at one another and shook their heads. Everyone knew about the kender. Through all the history of Thorin, wandering kender had appeared now and then among the Calnar — usually during Balladine, when bright baubles lay everywhere for quick hands to take.

Kender had never been welcomed at Balladine. But no one had ever devised an effective way to keep them out. And, once present, there was no good way to get rid of a kender short of killing him or boring him.

There was an old saying among the dwarves, accepted as just one of those unpleasant facts of life: Kender happen.

“It is a contamination of magic,” Mistral Thrax explained sadly. “The old scrolls tell of it, those handed down by the earliest smiths. It was the god Reorx — they say — who created the powers of chaos, in the form of a faceted gray stone. And all in its path became infected by its evil.”

“Old tales.” Colin Stonetooth shook his head. “Why would the greatest of the gods, the creator of all metals — and maybe the creator of all of us as well — have despoiled the world with …” — his beard twitched as he curled a lip in disgust — “with magic? Surely, Mistral, you don’t believe that?”

The ancient shrugged and turned his palms upward. On each calloused palm a symbol glowed dull red — a Y-shaped design that might have been a twin-tined spear. “I don’t know now what I believe,” he said. “But this is real, and it came from the magical eyes of a human who used sorcery. And I believe my vision of Kitlin Fishtaker was real … and I know the way to Kal-Thax. How would I know the way to Kal-Thax if I weren’t touched by … by magic?”

They sat atop a stone bluff, watching the combat drills in the fields below. The human knight, Glendon, had started teaching Willen Ironmaul’s guards the skills of his craft, and now he was surrounded by fully half the Hylar nation — men, women, and even children — all anxious to learn the arts of strategy and weaponry. Colin Stonetooth noted to himself that his Hylar had come a long way since Thoradin. No longer was the left side of the tools just an occasional interest. Many of the tools they carried now — things like swords and maces — were tools with no other side but the left.

Glendon Hawke might not have been happy with the turn of events that brought him here, teaching the means of combat to hundreds of fascinated dwarves, but he had admitted to the chieftain that he had never encountered students more apt. The Ten had been the first instructed, and Jerem Longslate had learned the sword so well that he could now disarm the teacher one time out of three. They were also learning the fine art of shield- play and the strangely human arts of the lance. The giant Calnar horses had proved surprisingly adept at lance- charging and were learning along with their riders.

In many ways, the dwarves surprised Glendon. As they learned, they adapted their new skills to their own circumstances and often improved on them. One example — the sudden wheeling of a rider to pick up a footman, then charging into battle with each dwarf clinging to one side of the high saddle, hammers or axes swinging in great arcs — had come as close to killing the knight as any tactic he had ever seen. Had he not dived facedown into the dust the first time Willen Ironmaul and a guardsman demonstrated that, he was sure he would have been beheaded.

The field below the bluff rang with the clang of steel on steel, an energetic counterpoint to the ringing of hammers on anvils off to one side, where dwarves were shaping new shields crafted after Glendon Hawke’s own. There were also bits of armor in the making and sturdy axes suited both to woodcraft and to war. Some of the craftsmen were also beating out battle-helms more suitable for outdoor wear than the old delving helmets most of the Hylar had worn.

Colin Stonetooth watched his people moodily. They were changing, becoming a nation unlike the Calnar from whom they had separated. He hoped the differences would not one day bring their downfall. As a tribe, the Hylar were becoming more formidable by the day, under the tutelage of the somber human knight. But, as with the Calnar of their origins, they were not a prolific people. A male and female who wed tended to wed for life and rarely produced more than three or four children.

We are becoming fighters, Colin Stonetooth thought, watching. Let us not become so enamored of our new skills that we put too much trust in them. No matter how dangerous we are, one by one, we are not destined to be numerous.

As though reading his mind — a tendency the old dwarf had developed of late and which Colin found startling and distracting — Mistral Thrax said, “Yes, we have a destiny. I do not see it clearly, but the new skills will aid in it.” He stared at the marks on his palms, looking puzzled, then muttered, “In Kal-Thax. Our destiny. Not to be all, or even most, but to lead … others?” He shook his head. “I do not understand, my chieftain.”

“Nor do I,” Colin admitted. “Tell me more about the old scrolls.”

“They are very old,” Mistral Thrax mused. “Several centuries, at least. Perhaps more. And some of them speak of that mystical gem, the faceted gray stone. They say that Reorx himself created it and placed it on Krynn. It was delivered into the keeping of a human king.”

“Why?” Colin’s brows went up in outrage. “A human? Why a human? If Reorx had done such a thing, why not give it to dwarves? We are the primary people of this world, after all.”

“They don’t say why.” Mistral Thrax shook his head. “But they do say that the humans lost the thing.”

“Well, of course they did! Who would trust any human with anything of importance? Even a god should know better! At least, no self-respecting dwarf would ever actually try to use such powers.”

“Gnomes set it free,” Mistral Thrax said. “At least, so the scrolls say.”

“Gnomes? That’s even worse than it being in the hands of humans!”

“Oh, they didn’t get it. Gnomes can’t do anything right. They just set it loose, and since then there has been magic on Krynn. So the scrolls say.”