Hammer and Axe

20 Favored of the Powers

Within moments of the departure southward of the dark mage, Kistilan, the relentless, fanatical attack on the slopes below Southgate began to falter—at first only a little, but enough for the defending dwarves to notice a change in the intensity of the human marauders. It was as though, here and there, groups of them became confused and uncertain, pausing in their attacks, shifting to defense as they gaped at the strewn bodies of their own kind all around them.

It was Quill Runebrand, the lorekeeper, who suggested a reason. Quill had come to Southgate carrying an armload of scrolls in which he had recorded all that Damon Omenborn had earlier reported about the nature of magic. He was hoping to question the big Hylar about the strange “double vision” which illusionary sorcery seemed to create. Quill had missed Damon, though he arrived in time to see the Neidar attack on the humans’ rear forces and to get a glimpse through a lens tube of the Roving Guard rounding up wizards.

The little he saw, before a burly Daewar took the lens tube away from him, answered his questions. He saw one of the Roving Guard change abruptly into a tusked ogre and realized that he could see both the “ogre” illusion and the reality of the guard as he actually was, simultaneously. He scribbled furiously at a scroll, jotting down his observation, then looked up again in time to see the floating magician—or magician on the floating chair—soar off to the south.

Occupied with such thoughts, it seemed obvious to the scrollster what it meant when—as Willen Ironmaul noted—the human horde seemed to lose its momentum.

“Some of those companies are without their wizards,” Quill said. “They are seeing the field now as it really is, rather than as they have been made to believe, and they don’t like it. There are a lot of dead humans down there.”

Barek Stone turned to gaze curiously at him, then nodded. “He may have something there,” he told Willen. “There aren’t many wizards left among them, and they must have their hands full.”

“Worry about the reasons later,” the chief of chiefs rumbled. “Drummers! Sound general advance!”

The drums sang a fast tattoo, and all along the slope dwarven companies pushed forward, beating and slashing at the hordes of humans before them. With their short, sturdy statures, and the downhill slope in their favor, the dwarves pushed the human assault backward down the hill, and at several points the human defenders turned and ran in panic.

“Locate the wizards,” Willen told his spotters. “Damon didn’t get them all. Where are the rest?”

As though in answer to his question, human heads appeared suddenly, directly before him across the ledge wall, and a long arm drove a flashing blade toward his neck. Barely in time, the chief of chiefs got his shield up to deflect the killing cut. The sword clanged on steel, flashed above his head, and Willen continued the shield motion, hurling himself forward, half across the low wall of the ledge, to drive the corner of his shield into the man’s face. Blood spurted, the man screamed and toppled backward . . . and disappeared.

In a glance, Willen saw that the man had been standing on a flat stone, levitated upward by sorcery. And there were three others still on the stone. Willen rolled aside as a spiked cudgel smashed down upon the wall where he had been and saw Barek Stone’s sword flick past him to skewer the second attacker. The third was raising a sword when a heavy lens tube bounced off the side of his head, hurling him from the stone. Then Willen was face-to-face with the one man remaining on the floating stone, and his eyes narrowed. The man was unarmed, but by his stance and his look of concentration, the chief of chiefs knew him. A wizard. The man started to mutter a spell, and suddenly someone dashed past Willen, over the wall and onto the flying stone.

Quill Runebrand, babbling in his excitement, grabbed the wizard’s beard, pulled his head down, and thrust the small end of a lens tube roughly into his mouth. The spell was never completed, and the man’s levitation-hold was broken. The stone plunged downward, and Willen grabbed wildly. A hundred and fifty feet below, stone and wizard thudded onto the downward slope as Willen Ironmaul, belly-down on the ledge wall, clung to the wrist of a flailing, kicking lorekeeper.

With a heave, the big Hylar pulled Quill to safety and stared at him in disbelief. “Are you a complete fool?” he demanded. “Jumping out onto the floating stone was . . .”

“Stones don’t float.” Quill glared at his chief. “It’s just as Damon said. Magic exists, but it isn’t real.”

“And that stone wasn’t up here, floating in the air with people riding on it?”

“Of course not. Stones don’t do that.”

“Then what kind of imbecile jumps onto a stone that doesn’t float, a hundred and fifty feet up in the air?”

“That’s the point,” Quill started, then went pale above his whiskers. “Oh. Uh, well. . . .” He stood on tiptoes to look over the wall at the slope below. There, straight down, were the fragments of the fallen stone and the crushed bodies of three human mercenaries and a wizard. “Gods!” Quill muttered.

All along the ramparts, guards were watching for more floating stones, but no others appeared.

“We count at least two dozen unarmed humans down there,” a spotter reported. “We assume they’re wizards. But they are scattered all over. The only group we see is down past the bluff. Six of them . . . no, seven now . . . have gotten together. They are arguing or something. They . . . Uh-oh!”

“What?” Willen turned.

“That group of wizards.” A dwarf with a lens tube pointed. “They were right down there. Then they all said something together, and they just disappeared.”

Above the heads of the dwarves, the air seemed to crackle for an instant, and a Theiwar guard turned toward the gate. “They’ve gotten inside,” he said. “Somehow, they’ve transported themselves past us. They are in Thorbardin.”

Behind the ledge, beyond the huge gate, there were shouts and the sounds of pounding feet, then the unmistakable rattle of missiles flying from murder holes within the great chamber of Anvil’s Echo. Moments passed, and dwarves ran from the open gate, waving excitedly. “There are humans in the main tunnel!” the first one reported. “We don’t know how they got there. They just. . . just suddenly appeared.”

“How many?” Barek Stone demanded.

“Ah . . .” The new arrivals glanced at one another, whispered together, and the first one said, “Seven, we think. At least there were. Three of them appeared on the catwalk. The other four were just beyond. The three on the catwalk are dead now, but the other four vanished again, and we don’t know where they are.”

“Inside,” Willen muttered.

More dwarves were pouring out from Southgate now—hundreds of them, as though fleeing for their lives.

“What are you people doing?” Barek Stone demanded. “Where are you going?”

“Out here,” a Daewar said. “Gem Bluesleeve’s orders. He said if any humans got in, past the gate and the catwalk, then everybody in the gatehouse was to get outside.”

From the great, gaping gateway came an ominous rumbling sound, like the turning of a gigantic screw within sockets. A last few dwarves scampered from the opening, and the massive gate-plug drove itself into place just behind them, sealing the gate with a solid wall of steel-clad stone. The chunk of its closing had a hollow, final sound.

“Well, that does it,” Willen muttered. “Damon said to trust Gem Bluesleeve. I guess now we have no choice.”

The sight of the great gate closing drew stares all along the upper and lower slopes, and the fighting there renewed itself as howling gangs of humans surged forward against the advancing dwarves. Within a minute, fierce hand-to-hand conflict raged all along the swale below the ramparts and out onto the slopes on either side.

On the eastern embankments, a battalion of masked Daergar massed a charge at a rank of human fighters, hitting them so fiercely that they went all the way through the line, then found themselves cut off from retreat as the humans closed in behind them. For long moments it was a standoff—the humans battered and bloody, hesitating to subject themselves again to such ferocity, while the steel-masked dwarves formed a tight ring and waited for the attack. Then from the ring a square, burly dwarf with massive wrists stepped forward, holding a bloody miner’s pick.

Pyrr Steelpick, boss of the shafts, was thoroughly exasperated with the entire situation. Pointing a blunt finger at the nearest humans, he shouted, “What do you people think you’re doing here? Why don’t you go home where you belong?”

The challenge was so unexpected that the humans just stared at him, and some started laughing.

“Well,” the irritated miner demanded, “why are you here?”

“For money, dink,” a tall warrior shouted back. “We fight for hire.”

“What kind of money?” Pyrr goaded the man. “Rocks?”

“Good coin, dink!” the man said. He pulled forth a shiny coin and held it high. “This kind of money!”

“That’s nothing but a pebble!” the Daergar jeered.

“Pebble?” The man looked at his coin, frowning. “This is no pebble! This is a bronze hundred-point coin!”

“Do you all have them?”

“Of course we all have them! We don’t fight for free!”

Scowling behind his mask, Pyrr pointed his pick toward a dead human lying almost at the man’s feet. “Does he have coins like that? Take a look at them!”

Curious, and glad for the chance to regain his breath before fighting dwarves again, the man crouched beside the fallen body and withdrew a pouch from the dead man’s tunic. “Here they are,” he said. “See, we all have. . .”

He had opened the pouch, and upended it. The men around him stared in disbelief. What fell from the pouch was nothing more than a few pebbles.

“You’ve been swindled,” the dwarf snapped. “Those wizards don’t have any coins. They make stones look like coins, but they’re still only stones. I’ve seen that before. You people have been fighting and dying for pebbles.”

Out on the Promontory, Damon Omenborn and the Roving Guard watched in fascination as the enthroned wizard, Kistilan, floated toward them. The chair in which he sat was an elaborate, ornate high-backed thing, encrusted with gems and bits of bright metal. The wizard was a large man, his features shadowed by a wide, dark hat. When he was a hundred feet away, the chair settled to a position a dozen feet above the ground, and Kistilan gazed at the armed dwarves and their sleeping captives. “Fools,” he muttered. “Overcome by simple dwarves!”

“Speak up, spell-crafter!” the nearest dwarf demanded. “I can’t hear you.”

Kistilan fixed his gaze on the speaker—a powerfully built, brightly armored creature slightly larger than most dwarves he had seen. But still only a dwarf. Casually, the wizard muttered a spell and pointed his finger at the insolent creature. But even as he did, the dwarf turned his wide shield, displaying its concave backside. The spell lashed out as a thunderbolt and reflected directly back at Kistilan. The mage stiffened, gasped, and glowed with a greenish light as little lightnings crackled around him. It was over in a second, but he found himself gasping for breath. He glared at the dwarf and snapped, “So that’s what you did earlier? Mirrors? How did you learn that?”

“I have been studying sorcerers,” the dwarf said with a scowl of disgust, as though admitting that he had been mired in manure.

Kistilan’s eyes narrowed.” So you’re the one! Sigamon said a dwarf killed Tantas. That was you.”

“Tantas?” Damon hesitated. “Oh, yes. That one. An evil man. I defended myself against him.”

Kistilan glared at the dwarf. “And now you are interfering with others of my company. How have you brought these . . . No, never mind how. Why have you brought these brothers of sorcery out here to this place?”

“It was the only way I could think of to lure you out here,” Damon told him honestly. “It worked. You’re here.”

“So I am.” The wizard glared at him. “So, what do you want with me?”

“To get rid of you, once and for all,” Damon said. “Will you leave these lands?”

“You . . .” Kistilan hesitated in disbelief. “You think you can threaten me?”

“I just did,” Damon pointed out. “Will you leave, or will you die?”

“You arrogant runt!” the wizard roared. “Des domenet bes! Cha. . .!”

“Kapach!” Damon shouted.

“. . . pak!” the wizard finished, then gasped as a winged thing with enormous teeth and claws plummeted toward him, coming out of nowhere. “Kapach deset!” he hissed. The winged thing faded into smoke, but blood ran from scratches on the wizard’s cheek where its claws had reached him.

“Another kind of mirror,” Damon explained.

“Pestilence!” Kistilan shrieked. “Dwarf, you will die for this!” Enraged, he raised a hand, opened his mouth, and tumbled a dozen feet to the hard ground. Damon had held his attention so thoroughly that several soldiers of the Roving Guard were able to get beneath the floating throne. With a climbing hook and line, they had snared the chair and jerked it out from under the wizard.

Kistilan was still recovering from his tumble when a heavy dwarf landed on top of him. With powerful hands, Damon rolled the man over onto his stomach, then straddled his shoulders, raising his hammer. For a second, he hesitated.

The instant’s hesitation was all Kistilan needed. Calling on powers that very few mages had been given, or even knew about, he summoned darkness and chaos, and hurled it outward from himself.

One instant, Damon was astraddle the fallen wizard. The next, he found himself tumbling through a murky, stifling nothingness, with unseen terrors tearing at him from every side. His hammer was flung away, and he felt his armor being ripped open. With every ounce of will, he rejected the spell, knowing with dogged determination that it was only magic. But he had never encountered magic like this. Nothing had prepared Damon for the sheer, brutal, evil power of dark forces unleashed. He felt his ribs beginning to break, his spine twisting, his eyes starting to burn . . . and somewhere in his mind a voice said, “Damon! Quickly! Release me!”

“Who—” he tried to ask, but his lungs were being crushed.

“You made me be a horse,” the voice urged. “Only you can undo what you have done. Hurry, before you die!”

Damon felt his mind growing dim. Nothing seemed to make any sense, and he realized that he had stopped breathing. But there was something he needed to do. Something, but what?

“Hurry!” the mind voice urged. “Reverse your spell, and I will try to help you! You know how!”

Faintly, Damon remembered a word. The mirror word. “K. . . Kapach,” he whispered, as the world went dim and his mind closed its gates. Thorbardin, he thought, feebly. Everbardin, receive this one. . . . And then there was nothing.

Kistilan got to his feet, backing away from the struggling, gasping dwarf who lay now where he had fallen.

Above and around the twitching body, a darkness seemed to hover—a busy darkness full of shrieking, tearing things that were hard to see. Grimly, the wizard concentrated, increasing the power of his torment-death spell. A human would have been dead by now, he thought, yet still the dwarf struggled.

A thrown hammer whisked past the wizard’s face, and he glanced about. The other dwarves were all around him, rushing to attack. Quickly he shielded himself, then resumed his concentration. Hammers and blades drummed at his sorcerer’s screen, some of them nearly reaching him, but he ignored them and increased the intensity of his concentration. It seemed a shadow passed above him, and he heard hooves on the stony ground, but did not turn. There was nothing they could do to him. With fierce willpower, he pressed the spell.

Abruptly, his shield of power seemed to implode upon him, knocking him sprawling. A spinning hammer flashed just above his nose, and he tried desperately to recreate his shield. But it faltered and shredded around him, and he realized that there was another magic at work here.

He looked up. Nearby, just beyond the ring of angry dwarves around him, were two men . . . a powerful-looking Cobar nomad, and another one he recognized instantly. Megistal.

Even as Kistilan realized who it was, Megistal’s hands moved gracefully, and a tangle of thorny vines grew around Kistilan, twining around his legs, around his chest and down his arms, twisting tendrils mingling with his whiskers, clawing at his face.

With a curse, the dark mage tore himself free and hissed a chant. The waving, weaving vines shriveled and faded. A flung sword embedded itself in the ground between his feet, and he cursed, muttering. All around him, dwarves were thrown backward, tumbling and somersaulting. A dozen unconscious wizards were flung after them, as was the barbarian beside Megistal. In an instant, the knoll was almost clear. Only two wizards and a fallen dwarf remained. Damon lay facedown, not moving.

“Megistal,” Kistilan hissed. “So you have come.”

“You knew I would,” the red-strap said calmly, drawing up the sleeves of his coat. “We have unfinished business between us, Kistilan.”

“Your oath to kill me . . . if you could.” Kistilan nodded. “But you gave another oath, Megistal. To hold all else in abeyance until the mountain tower is complete.”

“There will be no tower.” Megistal shook his head. “The dwarves have seen to that. Now you must pay for what you did.”

“What I did?” Kistilan laughed harshly. “The Scions gave me my powers, Lunitarian, just as they gave you yours. I am favored of the Scions.”

“You were,” Megistal admitted. “And of all who learned at their feet, you were the first to betray them. You turned their gifts against them.”

“They refused to give me more!”

“They gave you all they could. Like the rest of us . . . the favored ones . . . it was up to you to go beyond, if you desired.”

“I did!” Kistilan snapped. “What they wouldn’t give, I took.”

“And the Scions are gone from Krynn now. And I have sworn, in the names of our mentors, that you will die.”

“You haven’t the power that I have!” Kistilan shouted, flinging a spell at the buckskin- and fur-clad man. Brilliant lightnings writhed like serpents around Megistal, twining and striking at him, then diminished. The red-moon sorcerer stood unscathed, smiling faintly. With a hiss of rage, Kistilan drew darknesses around himself like a second cloak, and unleashed them furiously, muttering spell after spell.

Megistal was swallowed up in seething, swirling darkness, where dull red, angry glows danced crazy patterns. Twin vortices of blackness seemed to descend from the skies above and swell from the earth below to envelope him. Then the swirling slowed, went mute, and faded. And only one thing was changed about Megistal. Where the look in his eyes had been a slight sadness, now it was anger.

“The Scions knew you, Kistilan. They predicted there would be corrupters, and they knew you would be the first. The elemental powers are not to be invoked; they are only to be studied. They threaten the very fabric of existence on this world.”

“I am favored of the Scions!” Kistilan raged. “I alone am favored of the powers!”

“You, alone?” Megistal asked sarcastically. “There were twenty-one of us so honored.”

“There were,” Kistilan sneered. “But I found the others. You are the last of the rest.”

“So I had feared.” Megistal nodded.

“You are the last of the rest!” Kistilan repeated. “Do you think I have not gone past the powers? Do you think I hesitate to use them?” Seething, he hurled flames and lightning bolts from his fingertips.

Megistal was forced backward by the sheer might of the evil magic pounding at his shields. He had expected elemental forces, but had not thought that Kistilan could have so corrupted them. They were now something new and implacable. Megistal tried to counterattack with spells of his own, but the intensity of the black-robe’s magic buffeted him. It was inconceivable that so much power could be unleashed by one man, and yet it was, and the dark wizard increased its concentration second by second.

Kistilan was at the limit of his strength, drawing upon the pure hatreds that lived within him to give force to his spells. He concentrated, amplified, and regenerated the powers striking from his fingers and saw the red-moon mage begin to crumple. Then, suddenly, the magic was broken, and Kistilan found himself lying facedown on the hard ground. Something had kicked his feet out from under him. He turned his head and looked up at the angriest face he had ever seen.

Damon Omenborn, still hurt and shaken from the torments of magic, stood over the fallen wizard, glaring at him.

“You dare. . .”

Damon kicked the wizard solidly in the ribs. “I dare,” he growled. “That man there”—he pointed at Megistal—“I have despised, because he is a wizard. Because he uses magic. But he is not an evil man. I see that now. He is a mage, but nothing like you. He isn’t evil. You are!” Stooping, the dwarf grasped the man’s lapels and lifted him as a child might lift an oversized rag doll. The mage spat, hissed, and started to mutter, and a hard dwarven hand slapped him so hard his teeth clicked together.

The wizard’s eyes went wild, and his hand pointed at the dwarf. A hard glare lashed out at Damon and ended abruptly as a human arrow—a Cobar arrow—pierced Kistilan’s hand. Then Megistal shouted something that was in no language at all.

Kistilan’s eyes opened wide, and he gasped. To Damon, it seemed that he abruptly became as light as a feather, and the dwarf clung more tightly to the fabric of the man’s cloak. But the fabric thinned, became like smoke, and parted in his hand. Kistilan whimpered, and Damon realized abruptly that he could see right through the man’s head.

For a moment, Kistilan hung there, gasping, fading away. Then he was gone, and Damon stood alone with an empty fist. A hand came from somewhere to rest on his shoulder.

Damon half-turned, looking up at the sad face of a disillusioned wizard. “You had such power all along?” he asked.

“I had it,” Megistal admitted.

“Then, all those times . . . out there, and in the valley . . . you could have killed me. You could have killed us all.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You were right in what you told Kistilan,” the mage admitted. “I am—by your views—a vile thing, a magic-user. But I am not evil, Damon. Many of us are not.”

“Favored of the powers,” Damon muttered. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I have a burden to bear, that I hope no other man must ever have. My conscience must always be stronger than the powers I was given.”

Others of the Roving Guard had recovered now and were trudging toward them. Among them, surrounded, pushed, and in some cases dragged by grim dwarves, were the remaining captive wizards and the Cobar, Quist Redfeather.

Damon looked up at Megistal, frowning. “Will this conscience of yours permit you to leave Kal-Thax and not come back?”

“I don’t see why not.” The wizard shrugged, an ironic smile touching his cheeks. “I have no further business here.”

“Good!” Damon said. He pointed at the battered humans being brought forward by his guards. “And take these with you.”

“Goodbye, Damon Omenborn.” Megistal lifted a hand in farewell. “I have truly learned from you.” The big wizard muttered, and the air seemed to crackle. Then he was gone, as were the other captured wizards. Only the dour Cobar remained in the midst of the dwarven guards.

“Wait a minute!” Damon shouted into empty air. “Take the Cobar, too!”

From somewhere—from everywhere and nowhere—a chuckling voice responded. “He is your problem, Damon, not mine. You still owe him a horse.”

“My problem,” Damon growled. He glared at the human warrior, who glared right back at him fiercely. Then Damon looked northward, toward Thorbardin, and his heart went cold. On the slopes, armies still fought, but above them the massive face of Southgate was blank metal. The plug was closed. It could mean only one thing. Enemies had penetrated the defenses and were now inside.

“Bring him along,” Damon commanded, pointing at the human.