“And this?” Colin indicated the marks on the old dwarf’s hands. “You think it comes from that?”
“The legends of the scrolls tell of Kitlin Fishtaker, a dwarven spearman who traded river fish to the humans of that place. They say he was there when the gray stone was released and tried to knock the thing down with his spear before it could get loose. The stone punished him. He was permanently contaminated with magic and became an outcast because any who touched him also would catch the disease.”
“Folk tales,” Colin Stonetooth rumbled.
“Maybe.” Mistral Thrax shrugged. “But I saw Kitlin Fishtaker in a vision, and I saw the man who couldn’t be seen in the attack on … Thoradin. And the eyes I pulled from his head were not eyes. And now I, too, am contaminated.”
“And so we wander across the vast lands in search of a place we have never seen, called Kal-Thax.” Colin planted his chin on his fists moodily. “It’s just as well, I suppose. After what happened, I could no longer stay there, and all the rest here came with me by choice. So, having somewhere to go is better than having nowhere to go, even if the place we aim for is only a legend itself.”
“Kal-Thax is there,” Mistral Thrax assured him. “In those mountains ahead.”
“I see no mountains,” Colin snapped.
“But you will, my chieftain. I see them already … more clearly, sometimes, than I see what is around us here.”
On the wide field below, Glendon had his charges lined up in double rows, facing each other. He raised a hand, stepped back, and several hundred Hylar — men, women and children — began happily pounding away at one another with padded swords and shields.
Castomel Springheel drifted through the defenses of the Ten to appear beside Colin Stonetooth. Grinning his delight, the kender surveyed the drill field. “They’ll never believe this back in Kendermore,” he told himself. “Dwarves going to knight school! I wouldn’t believe it myself, if I wasn’t right here to see it.”
Part IV:
The Great Caverns
Beneath Cloudseeker Peak
Century of Wind
Decade of Oak
Early Spring, Year of Copper
17
The mountain peak called Cloudseeker was not the tallest of peaks in Kal-Thax. Its broad summit, from which the Windweavers thrust upward like giant sharks’ teeth, was lower by a thousand feet than soaring Sky’s End, to the north. But Cloudseeker was far wider. From the foot of its north slopes where Sky’s End began to climb, to the sloping fields and the high-walled, closed valley that marked its southern base, Cloudseeker was nearly fifty miles across by horizontal measurement.
The caves and shallow warrens of the Theiwar stronghold, called Theibardin or “Theiwar-Home,” occupied only a small area below its crest. Above, the three great crags of the Windweavers jutted skyward, surrounding an immense sinkhole lake that was frozen over in most seasons but which provided constant seepage of moisture into the very heart of the mountain. Few, if any, Theiwar had ever ventured into the resulting deep caverns, but Daewar explorer-spies, far more venturesome than the dour, single-minded Theiwar, had crept into them by various routes, charted portions of them, and returned to Daebardin with wondrous tales.
Beneath the crags, they said, were deep caverns that ran for miles, converging into an enormous chamber dominated above by a giant stalactite a thousand yards high and even wider at its top, standing like a giant pillar above a subterranean lake big enough to be called a sea. The great stalactite was of living stone, and on the charts they called the sea Urkhan, in honor of a Daewar explorer who had died there on the expedition.
The Urkhan Sea was at least seven miles across, north to south, and was surrounded by dozens of square miles of natural caverns eroded into shale layers surmounted by harder stone. Throughout these, fresh air flowed from natural vents around the base of the peak and wafted upward to numerous open seeps around the Windweavers that served as exhausts. And many of the deep warrens were lighted by quartz strata, admitting daylight from miles above.
Only a bit of the marvel had been explored, but it was these reports and these charts that had enchanted the old Daewar regent, Bole Diamondcuff, and after him the prince, Olim Goldbuckle. Visions of an impregnable fortress, of a subterranean realm which might one day be a kingdom, blossomed for them both. Long before the spread of chaos from the east became obvious, it was Goldbuckle’s decision to drive a road right through the heart of Sky’s End, into the deeps of Cloudseeker, and relocate Daebardin into the subterranean heart of the mountain that the surly Theiwar thought of as their own.
To the ambitious and energetic Daewar dwarves, the golden people of Kal-Thax, the only valid claim the Theiwar had was to the part of the mountain they actually occupied and used, which was almost none of it. “Use it or lose it,” was the Daewar philosophy where territory was concerned.
So the great secret road went forward, a level tunnel twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high, driven through the granite heart of Sky’s End from Daebardin on the north, into the porous underlayers of Cloudseeker. As it neared its end, the Daewar made preparation to move to new quarters.
The hidden opening beneath Galefang, where Olim Goldbuckle led his expedition after the defense of the eastern border and the punishing of the Theiwar chieftain, was only a little, wind-scoured tunnel in the face of a cliff. But set into its back wall were iron doors, and beyond the doors was a wide, spiral shaft leading downward to the roadhead far below.
Hundreds of Daewar worked there, in gloom illuminated by oil wicks, forge glows, and torches. Expert delvers, the Daewar had averaged nearly thirty yards a day for almost ten years, digging away at the solid stone while winch-driven cable carts strung with dozens of almost inaudible bat-bells hauled the rubble back along the lengthening tunnel to dump it below Daebardin’s slopes. The resulting skirt of broken stone now was a slope in itself, extending almost to the great chasm which separated the base of Sky’s End from the foothills and the breaks and plains of the wastelands beyond.
Sealing the high doors behind them, Olim Goldbuckle and his legion descended into the depths of Cloudseeker, where delvemasters studied their charts while picks and drills chipped away at stone that was softer than most they had encountered before and different in color.
Emerging into the roadway, Olim Goldbuckle climbed atop a laden cable-cart and picked up a piece of the stone rubble. He looked at it, sniffed it, and tasted it, then tossed it back and swung down. Above him, bat-bells tinkled merrily. The bells were tiny silver devices which the Daewar had invented long ago to drive away the flocks of blood bats which sometimes invaded digs. But now they had another use as well. Although most people — even dwarves — could hardly hear the bells, they had found that echoes in stone could resonate them. By “thumping” stone in a delve, and counting the times the bells responded, they could tell how far it was from one side of the stone to the other.
Olim ignored the tiny sounds now, brushing his hands. “Gypsum,” he said to Gem Bluesleeve. “We are near the caverns.”
“Very near, Sire,” a delvemaster looked up from his spread chart. “Nearer than we thought. We could break through at any moment.”
“Into what?” Olim squinted at the chart.
