Secret of Pax Tharkas

FOURTEEN

The Kharolis mountain range sprawled over an immense distance beyond the lofty ground of the High Kharolis, from its center around Cloudseeker. The prominent ridges ran generally north to south, with a slight lean toward the east in the north and the west in the south. Some of the escarpments extended into Abanasinia, reaching almost to the Newsea at the northern end of the range, while others, in the south, formed frowning bluffs overlooking Ice Mountain Bay and the cold waters of the southern ocean. In their whole extent, the mountains of the Kharolis presented a formidable barrier between south central Ansalon and southwest Ansalon.

In between those great ridges existed many different types of terrain. A wide lowland, generally flat but scored with gullies and ravines and steep, rocky ridges, extended for dozens of miles north of Thorbardin. Called the Plains of Dergoth, the lowland was flooded extensively during the depredations of dragon overlords and the forces of chaos. The southern portion of the former desert was called, simply, the “Bog” and was crossable by only a single, narrow track, and even that during only the dry season.

The ancient fortress of Zhaman, ruined during the Dwarfgate War of the post-Cataclysm dark age, dominated the plain, with its high bluff, scarred into the eerie image of a death’s-head. The humans, and many dwarves, called the place Skullcap, and most avoided it completely under the not-unbelievable impression that it was dangerously haunted.

North of Skullcap and the plain, another great tangle of mountains arose. These summits were not so high as Cloudseeker, but they were manifold and featured extremely steep crags and sheer ridges. Trees and streams marked the valleys, which could often be traversed-to a certain extent. Eventually, even the most promising routes terminated against the impassable barrier of the sheer wall. Those heights were so formidable, they could be crossed only on foot, and even then the precipitous paths were limited to the hardiest of climbers, traveling light.

The one exception was the Tharkadan Pass, a long and winding vale that cut generally southeast to northwest through the mountain barrier. A good road followed the pass, and for years it was the lone land route connecting not just Qualinesti and Thorbardin, but the two large sections of the continent wherein those two nations coexisted.

Firmly astride that road, right in the middle of the long pass, stood the fortress known as Pax Tharkas.

Built as an impervious barricade across the pass, the fortress was essentially a great wall flanked by two massive towers. Oriented to defend primarily against attack from the north, two additional curtain walls barred approach from that direction. Each of the curtain walls was pierced by a single gate, and the roadway approached each gate via a long, utterly exposed upward ramp. An attacker would have to penetrate both of those lesser defenses just to reach the formidable bastion itself, and the whole route was exposed to view-and to barrage with arrows, rocks, flaming oil, or even garbage-from the heights of the walls and towers.

Despite its strong orientation against northern attack, the fortress was no easy objective to an attacker coming from the south. Though it lacked the two curtain walls to delay an approach, both the main wall and the two towers loomed high over the floor of the pass, and any army coming from that direction would likewise be exposed to a ruthless barrage as it set to work against the massive stone gates that allowed access to the interior of the Tharkadan Wall.

The twin spires of Pax Tharkas, immense and blocky, mountainlike in their appearance, rose to either side of the long, broad battlement that connected the pair of lofty eminences. The Tharkadan Wall itself was a defensive battlement unmatched anywhere on Krynn. The two towers that flanked it to the right and left were joined, at their bases, to the sheer cliffs that flanked the valley, ensuring that anyone who was not a mountain goat had to pass through the fortress to travel north or south along the road.

Each of those square-walled spires was a fortress in its own right, with walls forty feet thick formed of tightly wedged stone blocks. They were divided into levels and contained the living quarters for, at that time, some one thousand inhabitants. The interior of the Tharkadan Wall, while also a huge and enclosed space, was not used for anything except as a training room for the military garrison.

Despite its appearance, so square and blocky, so suggestive of dwarven stolidity, the fortress was in fact a cooperative work of both the dwarf and elf peoples. Constructed shortly after the great elf king Kith-Kanan had formed his new nation of Qualinesti, Pax Tharkas had become a testament to the long peace between those two ancient peoples and the nations of Thorbardin and Qualinesti. It was only during later years, after the Cataclysm had set dwarf against dwarf and elf against human, that the fortress had fulfilled its promise as a bastion of war. Even when-due to the utter obliteration of the elven realm-the race war was a far distant memory, Pax Tharkas stood as a monument to dwarf implacability.

Tarn Bellowgranite knew the exalted history of the place, and he thought of those stories often as he walked the top of the Tharkadan Wall alone, as he did at the start of every day. He had read the tales of the builders who had labored so hard and so diligently to create Pax Tharkas. The staunch masonry was a testament to dwarf skill, but the location and the design had been the work of elves. The two races had worked together to create the mighty fortress, and all had regarded it as a symbol of amity. For a millennium and a half, the two nations had garrisoned Pax Tharkas together, elf and dwarf soldiers rubbing shoulders as they manned the battlements and watched the pass, ready to meet any potential enemy, sharing the belief that a foe to one race was a foe to both.

Then the gods had hurled their wrath upon the world in the form of the Cataclysm. The elves had fled to the depths of their forest home, and Pax Tharkas had become the gateway-very stoutly barred-to Thorbardin. Internecine warfare had rocked the dwarf world as the mountain dwarves refused to shelter their hill dwarf cousins under their mountain. Pax Tharkas was manned by the mountain dwarves, but it had been carried by storm when the wizard Fistandantilus and his army had attacked Thorbardin during the Dwarfgate War. That war had ended in disaster for both sides and left the two kin clans of dwarfkind licking deep wounds and nursing even deeper grudges.

Two centuries later, during the War of the Lance, the dwarves, mainly Neidar, had held Pax Tharkas against the onslaught of the dragonarmies, allowing many thousands of refugees, including humans and elves in great numbers, to escape southward, evading certain and horrible death. Following that war, the Neidar had for the most part returned to their villages, leaving Pax Tharkas, again, to the mountain dwarves of Thorbardin.

Key to the fortress’s imperviousness was the ingenious defense mechanism that had closed the gates against Verminaard’s dragonarmy: the interior of the Tharkadan Wall was hollow, penetrated by only a single massive gate in the north face of the wall and an equally large, lonely gate in the south. The space within the wall, and above the two gates, had been filled with many tons-a small mountain’s worth-of heavy boulders. When the enemy had threatened to breach the defenses, those rocks had been released and fell into the gap between the gates, forming a solid and intractable barrier.

That fill thwarted the attackers, and it had remained in place for many decades, blocking passage from north to south, a sturdy reminder of the darkness that had befallen the world with the coming of the Dark Queen’s legions. Nearly a century after the War of the Lance, the world had finally changed enough for a reopening to be considered.

The lone dwarf on the rampart felt a thudding through his boots and knew that the important work never ended. Another ton of rocks had been cleared from inside the gates and carted upward to arm the great trap again. His workers, those of the day shift, were already busy after relieving their colleagues who had labored through the night, for it was a task that continued, under the orders of Thane Bellowgranite, around the clock.

Tarn Bellowgranite felt the vibration, heard the rumble of rock, and he was pleased. His was a life that had been occupied with many vital tasks, but he had convinced himself that none of them were so crucial as that, the job that he would see completed in the twilight of his days. The road through Pax Tharkas would reopen, and it would be Tarn-well, the dwarves of Tarn’s clan, more accurately-who would make it happen.

They called him the Tharkadan Thane, his loyal dwarves did, even though the title was vaguely embarrassing. He had once been a true thane, leader of the Hylar clan in Thorbardin-an unusual and exalted post for him because he was an exotic blend, descendent of a Hylar father and a Daergar mother. Both of his parents were long gone, killed during the Chaos War. For a time, the son who bore their legacy had seemed to have exceeded even the promise of his twice-noble birth: indeed he ascended to become the high king of Thorbardin, the highest-ranking noble in all dwarvendom.

But that seemed a lifetime ago, even though it had been only a decade. Jungor Stonespringer’s revolt had overthrown him, and he was exiled. At first he had come with merely three hundred others, including his pregnant wife and their infant son. A mixture of Hylar and Klar dwarves and a few Daewar-those who had not journeyed east with the Mad Prophet-joined him. In the following years, other mountain dwarves had come along until he ruled a population of a thousand or so able-bodied adults, together with their young and elderly dependents. They called themselves a clan, though they were really refugees from three true clans, and they called him their thane, though he was really just the leader of a band of refugees.

Still, he was a sort of leader, and they were a sort of clan, and their home was important: Pax Tharkas. It was their position in that great fortress, more than anything else, that gave them a sense of identity and continuity in dwarf history. Even more, it provided them all with a purpose, for Tarn had vowed to see the Tharkadan Pass reopened before he died. He deemed the task of reopening the pass so important that many nearby fields lay fallow since the farmers who would have tended them were otherwise busy in fulfilling their thane’s commands. That goal gave him the strength to rise and face each new day.

To be sure, he very much wished to see his children grow to adulthood and prosper, but his years suggested that might not happen. He had married late, to a much younger dwarf maid, and though she had borne him two wonderful offspring, his age made him feel more like their grandfather. He was glad they were there with him, but as he often reflected privately, he often acted as father to a nation more than father to his two children.

Long had he spurned trade with the hill dwarves, the Neidar whose settlements dotted all of the surrounding lands. His intransigence had not sat well with his wife, who was of Neidar blood, but he understood the ancient rivalries of his people better than he had when he was younger, and he knew that a mingling of populations would inevitably hurt the mountain dwarves in Pax Tharkas. He nursed the idea that his “clan” would one day return to Thorbardin to oppose and defeat Jungor Stonespringer and his fanatical followers. That narrow-minded despot represented everything Tarn hated about dwarf stubbornness, rigid thinking, and mindless obedience to authority.

Tarn Bellowgranite’s life had already been marked by too much disappointment and tragedy. He had known love only once; his true beloved-a Hylar warrior named Belicia Slateshoulders-had died in the residual destruction of the Chaos War, and after that he had thought himself destined for a life of loneliness.

His marriage to Crystal Heathstone had been a political arrangement, but even as they took their vows, he had hoped that it might signal a thaw in the long enmity between the dwarves of the hills and the mountains. He and Crystal had become fond of each other, even learned to love each other in a limited way, but at the same time the fractures between their two peoples had seemed to grow deeper. Eternal wars, betrayal under the mountain, and lingering clan hatreds had all cast their pall over the life of the thane and his wife. Only in their two children had they found a focus, and a hope, for the future.

Tarn completed his circuit of the wall, looking up as he approached the east tower. The sky was clear, but the sun had not yet risen high enough for its rays to penetrate the steep-walled valley. Even so, he could detect the first signs of bright daylight limning the crest of the ridge overhead, and he paused to admire the daybreak for a minute before approaching the door to the tower. A Hylar guard snapped to attention, holding his battle axe at port arms as the thane approached then quickly opening the door for his thane.

Tarn nodded his thanks and entered the large, open room that served as a rallying point and ready room for garrison troops. It was currently empty of dwarves, but the rows of benches and the racks of weapons and shields lining the walls gave proof of its martial purpose. A single stairwell spiraled through the center of the room, leading both up and down.

The thane would soon descend to his living quarters, but there was another part of his morning ritual that he needed to complete first. Climbing the steps to the next level, he reached the fortress’s command center. The level was divided into four large rooms, connected by a central hallway, and he headed to the farthest of those rooms. The door was open, and he strolled into the office of the garrison commander, Captain Mason Axeblade.

Axeblade was seated at his desk, talking to his former commander, retired general Otaxx Shortbeard. The two Daewar started to get to their feet as Tarn entered, but the thane waved them back to their chairs and took a seat for himself.

“No incidents reported overnight, my thane,” Axeblade replied. He had been one of Tarn’s loyal captains during the civil war, and Bellowgranite had welcomed his choice to follow him into exile. “The night workers lifted twelve tons of rock by the time their shift was over.”

“Good,” Tarn replied. “Looks quiet out there this morning as well.”

“I almost wish something would happen around here!” huffed Otaxx. Ever a man of action, he chafed as the long, empty years passed by.

But there was more to his glum nature. Both of the dwarves bore a burden Tarn couldn’t fully appreciate, as they were among the few Daewar who had remained behind in Thorbardin when Severus Stonehand, the Mad Prophet, had marched away with the bulk of the clan on his mad quest to regain ancient Thoradin. None of those dwarves had ever been heard from again, and they had long been given up for lost by those they had left behind.

Axeblade’s parents had gone with Stonehand, but Otaxx had suffered an even more grievous loss. His wife of twenty years, pregnant with their first child, had also departed on the quixotic quest for the lost kingdom. Ever true to his duty-which he vested toward the whole kingdom, not just his Daewar clan-Otaxx Shortbeard had been unable to follow his pregnant wife, for to do so would have betrayed the oath he had sworn to his king, Tarn Bellowgranite. Even though Tarn had given him leave to go, Otaxx had elected to remain behind; he had been a source of great strength to Tarn and all Thorbardin during the dark years after the Chaos War. But Otaxx sorely missed his wife, and pined for the child he had never known-the child that might not even have made it to birth.

He was too old to fight anymore, however, and Tarn knew he spent his days remembering his bride and second-guessing his path in life. Always gruff, Otaxx had become more irascible and more depressed as the years passed. He always hoped to hear word of Severus Stonehand’s fate, but no word ever came. Still, he was one of the few who clung to some hope the Mad Prophet’s expedition might not have met complete disaster.

“Any word from Garn Bloodfist?” the thane asked with some trepidation.

“I sent him another message two days ago; he’s on campaign in the hill country, but I haven’t heard back,” Axeblade said.

Tarn nodded, not surprised. Garn was the captain of the Klar contingent of the Tharkadan garrison. Some three hundred strong, the dwarves of that impetuous, high-strung clan were unsuited to the steady labor of rock-hauling required for work on Pax Tharkas. They craved action, and Tarn had found it impossible to keep them immobile in the fortress; the inevitable fights and fits and brawls were too disruptive to the rest of his band.

So every so often the Klar marched out of Pax Tharkas to raid the hill dwarves who lived in countless small towns throughout the vast foothills of the mountain range. Sometimes they killed some Neidar, and sometimes they lost some Klar. Almost always they returned with plunder and food, which they shared willingly enough with the rest of the garrison. Though Tarn didn’t condone their dubious activities, he knew that the Klar kept the hill dwarves off balance and probably prevented them from marshalling their forces all at once to lay siege to his fortress. Still, Garn Bloodfist was a bit of a loose catapult, and the thane could never be sure exactly what kind of trouble he would make.

“Well, let me know if you get a message,” Tarn said not very hopefully.

“Aye, my thane. I will.”

He left the two Daewar and headed down the stairs, past the ready room, into the many levels of living quarters that filled the lower half of the east tower. On the fourth of those, he left the stairs, walked down a short hall, and opened the door to his open, private treasure room.

“Papa!” Tor cried. The robust ten-year-old raced over to his father, proudly holding up a wooden sword. “Look what I made! Otaxx Shortbeard promised to teach me how to parry once I have a sword! Look what I can do!” He waved the sword wildly.

Tarn chuckled, leaning down to embrace his son. “Why don’t you go show Otaxx; I’m sure he can teach you a trick or two.”

Next he hugged Tara, two years younger than her brother. He let her nuzzle his beard, as she loved to do; then he carried her around the playroom on his shoulders, her whoops and shrieks brightening his day like nothing else. Only when he was out of breath did he put her down, promising to return in a few minutes.

He went into the bedroom, then, and found his wife, Crystal Heathstone, standing at the window, as she often did, as he had known she would be doing. She turned to look at him, the anguish on her face tearing at his heart. She would always be a hill dwarf, daughter of a former clan leader, and her life as the wife of a mountain dwarf ruler had not been easy, he knew.

“Garn Bloodfist has taken the Klar out again, hasn’t he?” she said, and he knew it wasn’t really a question.

He merely nodded.

She sighed and shrugged off his touch when he went over to her. “One of these days, he’s going to stir up a hornet’s nest, and that could be the end for us all,” she declared.

“The hornets are always buzzing,” Tarn pointed out. “Sometimes Garn swats them away.”

“Why can he only do it through war?” she demanded.

He shrugged, wishing they weren’t having that conversation. “It’s always been that way,” he pointed out.

“Not always!” she retorted. “It had a beginning: the Cataclysm. Why can’t there be an end? Why can’t we end it?”

“We’re dwarves,” he replied, not knowing what else to say. “War is in our nature. You might as well try to stop the sun from moving through the sky.”

She looked at him with a strange expression, a look that, to Tarn, was more scathing even than a glare of contempt. When she spoke, it was almost to herself. “Once, I thought you might be the kind of dwarf who would try to do just that, and to the Abyss with the consequences.”

He turned on his heel and went to the door, tense and angry. He would not slam it, not when his daughter was so near, but he looked at Crystal as if he didn’t recognize her.

“Maybe I was that dwarf, once. But I’ve seen too much. I’m not him now. I’m not that Tarn Bellowgranite anyway, not anymore.”