Secret of Pax Tharkas

TWENTY-THREE

A fter another meeting with the Mother Oracle, only two days after the Klar raiders had been repulsed, Harn Poleaxe had taken the next step in his increasingly detailed and ambitious scheme. Following the ancient one’s instructions, he had kindled her fire, brewed her tea, and stood back, drinking from his jug of spirits and scratching at the multiple sores across his face and arms, as she cast the liquid onto the floor to watch it puddle and melt in the midst of the sticky debris. She studied its signs and meditated. When she finally spoke, it was with great authority and conviction.

“You must summon the Neidar warriors from all across the hills,” the Mother Oracle counseled in her blunt fashion. “Bring them to you here, and unite with them for strength. Form an army to destroy the mountain dwarves in Pax Tharkas!”

Harn was thrown by the grandiose idea. How many hill dwarves from towns a hundred miles away would care to follow him, he wondered. How many would even know his name?

“It will take some work, but they all share your goal, and many more than you know will have heard of you!” the Mother Oracle cackled, reading his mind. “The Klar from Pax Tharkas have been raiding these lands for ten years. There is not a Neidar anywhere in the Kharolis range that doesn’t hate and fear that troublemaking clan.”

“Will they come?” Poleaxe asked, feeling intrigued as he began to imagine the possibilities. He took another drink and pondered the glory: a great army, at his command!

“You alone can make them come and unite!” the oracle hissed, her whisper hoarse and dry and like a knife that penetrated to the core of his being. “You have seen the way the dwarves of Hillhome responded to your leadership! Put your orders in writing, and send them with fleet messengers. The Neidar will surely answer your call!”

“I will, Mother Oracle!” he crowed, clenching his bloody fingers into a fist.

She nodded as if pleased. For a long time, she held her white, sightless eyes upon him, and he squirmed, even twitched around to see if someone were behind him. He turned back with the uncanny sensation that the blind, old woman was studying him.

“You must look the part of a commander,” she said. “Find a great war helm-one with a plume of feathers, so that all will see you on the field.”

“A splendid idea!” he agreed.

She reached out a bony finger, touched a bleeding spot on his cheek, and nodded. “And make sure it has a visor,” she added. “A plate of metal that you can lower to protect… and shield your face.”

And so he had done just as advised. Harn spent the next day drafting an eloquent call to action, a rather lengthy missive detailing, with minor exaggeration, the cruelties of the mountain dwarf attack against Hillhome, and the irreplaceable treasures that had been stolen from the hill dwarf coffers. He reminded the Neidar all through the Kharolis range of the long years of injustice, brutality, and violence wreaked upon their peaceful villages by the mountain dwarves of Pax Tharkas. That fortress, his missive read, was chock-full with treasures that the Hylar had stolen from many hill dwarf towns, villages, and homesteads.

He hinted, without claiming so directly, of an ally who would smash the gates of the mighty fortress and allow the Neidar army to charge inside and extract their vengeance. With each word that he wrote, he felt the growing power of his leadership, the compelling force of his will, transferred to the page. Somehow, the strength of his irresistible will would be communicated across the whole of the hill country.

At the same time as he was writing the letter, his lieutenants were gathering volunteers and fleet horses. When the missive was finished, some two dozen riders had assembled. Secretaries made multiple copies of the letter, and each rider took one of those epistles and departed at a gallop. Harn Poleaxe stood proudly in the plaza of Hillhome and watched them go, well satisfied at the momentous events he had put in motion.

Even as the horses thundered away, the town’s best weaponsmith, Kale Sharpsteel, brought him a new helmet. It was tailored to cover his whole head, resting on his breastplate and shoulder pads, and was topped with a great plume of black and white stork feathers. The smith averted his eyes as he handed the metal cap to Lord Poleaxe, and Harn immediately placed it over his head. He lowered the visor with a flick of his finger and found that he could see clearly through the wide eye slits Sharpsteel had perfectly placed. The lone drawback was the fact that he had to raise the visor in order to take another drink of spirits.

Only then did the hulking dwarf swagger back to the private sanctuary of his own house. The hearth there had grown dark and cold, but that didn’t matter to him; increasingly, he had become contemptuous of concerns such as food and warmth and even light. Drink, however, retained its eternal appeal, so he went immediately into the cellar, drawing himself a mug from a recently tapped keg. Removing his new helmet, he scratched at his face and sat down in his most comfortable chair.

He was waiting for someone. No, something, he corrected himself. He didn’t have long to wait.

The monster arose from the floor, its webbed black wings emerging first from the very ground, followed by its crimson eyes and that terrible fanged maw. Poleaxe trembled in a mixture of terror and delight as the creature, the being he had chosen to believe was proof of his own elite status, once again made its presence known to him.

“Have you sent out your summons?” hissed the thing.

Harn Poleaxe didn’t even stop to wonder how the creature knew about his plan.

“Yes!” Poleaxe boasted. “I have dispatched two dozen messengers to more than fifty villages and towns. I expect to raise an army of at least two thousand valiant dwarves.”

“All hill dwarves, yes?”

“Hill dwarves, every man sworn to the destruction of the mountain dwarf outpost in Pax Tharkas,” the warrior pledged stoutly. “Their longtime enmity and treachery will be punished, and my people will once again rule the hills of Kharolis.”

“That is good. My master will be pleased,” replied the creature silkily. “And when will you make this war? Time is short.”

“We march on Pax Tharkas in ten days or less,” vowed the new warlord of Hillhome.

“Again, that is good,” hissed the creature.

“And you will be there too?” Harn said. “You will do as you say, break down the gates of the fortress?”

Again the creature hissed, a long, sibilant sound as its jaws gaped and its red eyes flared. “The gates,” it murmured, “will not be a problem.”

Otaxx Shortbeard found Tarn where he almost always could be found: up on the catwalk along the Tharkadan Wall, supervising the progress of his great task.

“Almost done now,” said the old Daewar general, watching in approval as another load of rocks was dumped from the lift, individual dwarves bearing the stones onto the unthinkably heavy pile of the reloaded trap.

“Aye,” Tarn said, allowing himself a tight smile. “I predicted completion by the end of the year, but now I’d guess we’re no more than a month away.”

“I remember that hall, when we first claimed this place,” Otaxx said, looking down into the huge, almost empty chamber below. “Rocks filling it halfway up the walls and worse. No way to open either gate, not even so much as to let a goat crawl through.”

“Now with the gates open, wagons can roll down the road. We can open up trade with Haven or Tarsis, bring new traffic here. Finally restore some life to this old backwater.”

“True, true,” Otaxx said, gazing below. Indeed, the piles of rocks that still remained down there were already neatly shunted off to the left and right. The central part of the hollow wall, where the two gates allowed passage, had been cleared the previous year.

“You look troubled, old friend,” Tarn said, clapping his old battle commander on the shoulder. “What are you thinking about? You should be proud at this happy time.”

“Ah, we’ve known each other too long for secrets,” said the old dwarf. He stared across the vast hall, but his gaze was focused on somewhere much farther away. “I’ve been remembering Berrilyn, more and more these days. When our work here is done, I’d like to travel into the east, to see if I can… well, not find her, not anymore. I don’t fool myself about that. But learn what happened to her, to all of them. I’d like to look for Thoradin.”

Tarn nodded. He, too, had known love at an early age. Belicia Slateshoulders, his true love, was dead, that he knew for certain, but if he didn’t know, he would be tempted to go and look for her himself, just as his old friend was tempted to do.

“Do you think you’d have any mere chance of finding them? Of finding her?” the thane asked.

Otaxx could only shrug. “I’ll always hate myself if I don’t try.”

“Here, I brought you some warm soup.”

Gretchan’s voice brought Brandon out of his solitude and misery, and he quickly pushed himself to his feet and crossed the cell to the securely locked door. He touched her hand where her fingers were wrapped around the bar, his stomach growling as he smelled the rich broth.

But it was not the food that lightened his heart as much as the dwarf maid who brought it.

“Thanks,” he said with a slight chuckle. “But how are you going to get that bowl through the bars?”

She laughed with him. “I knew you’d point that out right away. Here’s the way we’ll do it. I’ll hold it up, and you put your lips against the bars. I’ll pour it right down your throat.”

“Sounds all right. Be careful, though.” He gestured to his tattered and stained tunic, unwashed and unchanged in the weeks of captivity and travel. “I’m wearing my best shirt.”

She lifted the bowl, and he sipped, feeling the soup warm his throat and his belly. Almost magically, strength and energy began to spread through his body, suffusing his limbs, brightening his eyes, lifting his spirits.

“Did you bring this right from the royal kitchen?” he asked, wiping his lips after he’d finished.

“Hardly. Nobody knows I’m down here yet,” she said. “I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible.” Gretchan held her pipe in her hand, exhaling smoke through her nose, and Brandon relished the sweet smell of burning leaf. He had come to associate that scent with their pleasant visits and was delighted by the way the odor lingered for hours even after she departed.

“I hope you’re being careful,” he cautioned. He didn’t know how she managed to hide in the fortress, but she’d visited him virtually every day he’d been in the cell. The memory of her last visit, and the expectation of her next, kept him from descending into utter despair.

“Maybe you shouldn’t come here anymore,” he said, hoping she’d ignore him. “It’s too dangerous.”

She waved away his objections. “Your stories are finally starting to get interesting,” she teased. “For your ancestor to be climbing Garnet Peak on the very day the Cataclysm occurred, for example. It almost makes me believe in all your tales of bad luck!”

“That’s when it started,” Brandon admitted morosely. “Nothing left of him but his axe, and I left that in Hillhome!”

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll have a chance to go back and get it someday,” she suggested. “Now, tell me again, when did the governor of Kayolin decide that he should start calling himself a king?”

“You know all my sore points,” he said with a grin, touching her hand again. “No, let’s talk about you for a change. I don’t really know very much about you, do I? I know you don’t come from Thorbardin or Pax Tharkas or Kayolin. So when are you going to tell me more about yourself?”

She sighed and looked at him affectionately. “In due time, I will,” she said. “But I’m begging you to be patient with me. Can you?”

“Sure, of course I can,” he said. His eyes twinkled. “Especially if you bring me some more soup tomorrow.”

Garn Bloodfist studied the two wedges of green and blue stone. He propped them on the desk in his office near an oil lamp, its wick set to burn bright. He was dazzled by the shiny pure colors, seduced by the flickering facets that danced across the desk and the floor and sparkled along the walls. Eyes shining, he studied the reflections, giggling in sheer pleasure.

“Where did you come from?” he inquired of the objects.

It was not the first time he had spoken to them. For two weeks he had been studying them with every waking moment, wondering about their origins, their value. He had even gone out onto the upper parapet of the East Tower and asked answers from his father when Dashard Bloodfist appeared to him in the night sky. Though he preferred his nocturnal communions in the wilderness, such was his fascination with the two stone wedges that he was willing to risk the uneasy looks, the whispered gossip, that inevitably resulted from his seemingly unbalanced behavior.

Only Garn knew that his father was real, that his memory, the proof of his horrible betrayal, was the flame that kept the Klar warrior’s fiery spirit burning so bright. And Garn Bloodfist was not afraid of the uncanny, the unexplained. Indeed, he was becoming increasingly convinced there was something supernatural about the stones. It wasn’t so much the result of any special observation, though he did spend hours handling and scrutinizing the stones. It was more like a deep, growing conviction.

It was his conviction, more than anything else, that caused him to reevaluate the prisoner he had dragged back there all the way from Hillhome. Who was Brandon Bluestone? Why had he possessed the Bluestone, as he claimed? And why had he risked his life to confront the Klar? Was it to retrieve the fascinating colored stone?

In truth, Garn didn’t believe his prisoner was simply another treacherous hill dwarf. There was something exotic, foreign, about him that aroused other suspicions, though, and the Klar commander had waited long enough to act upon his suspicions. Scooping the two stones back into their bag, Garn locked the precious stones in a vault and started down to the dungeon, determined to get some answers.

He was startled, but not shocked, to encounter a gully dwarf at the bottom of the stairway leading into the dungeon. The wretches were common enough pests around there, but he didn’t like the thought they were often straying beyond the boundaries of their filthy town.

“Get out of here, you!” he snapped. “Or I’ll knock your head right off your shoulders!”

Much to his surprise, the little fellow didn’t budge, but instead stood there, glaring up at him, almost as if he had something he wanted to say.

“What is it, runt?” demanded Garn. “Don’t you understand plain speech?”

“Prisoner complaint!” spit the Aghar with surprising vehemence. He gestured down the corridor toward the cell where Brandon Bluestone was imprisoned. “Him not locked up good enough!”

“He escaped?” Garn asked, startled until the gully dwarf firmly shook his head.

“Not escape. But not locked up enough!”

“What do you mean?” asked the Klar captain with exaggerated patience.

“Uh, him visited by nice, pretty maid. Nice, pretty maid all right, real important historian. Prisoner fools her. Gretchan visits him-and him not locked up good enough!” With that, the angry Aghar spun on his heel and sprinted away into the darkness, toward Agharhome.

Garn stared after him, amazed and alarmed. First of all, that was a pretty long speech for a gully dwarf. Then, too, he remembered the historian named Gretchan Pax very vividly; her sudden appearance in the midst of his company’s camp had unsettled him more than he dared to admit. Her foul powers had paralyzed him in the mountain camp that night. She was either a witch or something much worse. Who was she really? Why was she there? And what was her purpose in talking to the prisoner?

Every answer he could imagine caused him worry.

Gus strutted proudly through the dungeon of Pax Tharkas. He was getting to know the place fairly well, and indeed, not far away he had found himself a second home in the scummy tunnels of Agharhome, on a comfortable sleeping pallet. The pallet had been graciously offered up by Berta, who volunteered to sleep on the cold stone instead, and Gus allowed himself to feel a measure of gratitude toward the dirty little gully wench.

She even continued to call him “highbulp,” which he found a delightful and inspiring title. Thus far, the rank was not acknowledged by any other of the tower’s Aghar population, but Berta kept telling everyone that Gus was the new highbulp, and she kept telling Gus himself that, in two days, the rest of the bluphsplunging doofars in Agharhome would recognize his exalted status as well. In point of fact, he didn’t really care if the others called him highbulp. It was enough that Berta did so and that she would share the occasional rat or other morsel she acquired. Her pallet was nice too.

But right at the moment, he was thinking of a different female. He was very proud of his boldness in speaking to the great Hylar prince, and he wanted to boast about his deed. Up till then he had been in a jealous snit for days and had avoided Gretchan Pax. Speaking to the Klar prince had made him feel better. Gretchan didn’t seem even to care if he was alive, but he had been doing some very good spying, and he knew right where to find her.

Gretchan had made her quarters, all unknown to the Tharkan garrison, in a small, dry, secret room just next to the dungeon halls. The chamber was clean and warm, and she always seemed to find good food to eat; she was constantly taking food to the prisoner. Gus felt another stab of jealousy but set his chin, marching onward.

Coming to the secret panel, which was concealed behind a weapons cabinet in one of the rooms that would have been used to garrison dungeon guards, should there ever be enough prisoners down there to require a garrison, Gus pulled the cabinet door open and knocked on the wooden back wall. Immediately he heard a low growl from beyond the panel.

“Kondike! It’s me! Gus!” he whispered loudly.

Moments later the panel was pulled aside and Gretchan Pax was beaming down at him. “Gus!” she said very sweetly, the gully dwarf had to admit. “I was afraid I’d lost you! Come in.”

“No lose Gus!” he replied sarcastically, stepping into the room as she held the door open for him. “Gus no lose Gretchan either.”

“Well, now you have found me and I’m glad,” she said. “This is a good hiding place, but I didn’t think anyone else knew where I was.”

“I follow!” Gus bragged happily. Then his features twisted into a dark scowl, and his tone became accusing. “Follow when you visit big kisser dwarf in jail!”

“Why Gus!” Gretchan chided, her eyes widening and her cheeks colored by a tinge of embarrassed redness. “Have you been spying on me?” she asked sharply.

“No! I mean yes!” the Aghar replied, gazing steadfastly at the floor to avoid Gretchan’s beautiful eyes. His big toe jutted out the front of his worn boot, and he used it to mark irregular circles on the floor. “Not Gretchan, but Gus spy on big kisser dwarf!”

“All right now, Gus. I’m serious. What are you talking about? What’s the big deal about this big kisser-oh, his name is Brandon, damn it. What about him?”

“I not like big kisser dwarf. Him bad for you. Big dwarf general gonna lock him up more better! Him not locked up enough!” Gus stated bluntly.

“Oh, isn’t that sweet. Are you jealous?” Gretchan asked amusedly. She started to laugh then caught herself, her expression growing stern. “Wait, what’s that about a big dwarf general? Did you talk to someone?”

“Yep. Gus brave, talk to Klar chief. Him gonna lock up prisoner more better. You and I then go away like before. Forget big kisser dwarf!”

“Oh, Gus, you didn’t!” the dwarf maid gasped, kneeling down to grasp the gully dwarf firmly by the shoulders. Her eyes were large, serious, and concerned. “Did you… did you tell the Klar general that I am here, that you saw me visiting the prisoner?”

“Yes!” he declared hotly.

“Oh, that’s terrible!” she said, shaking her head as her eyes moistened with tears. “Garn Bloodfist will be angry, and he’s already so twisted up with hate. There’s no telling what he might do! How could you do this to me?”

“To you? Big kisser dwarf bad; him do to you! Klar gonna make him stop!”

“You don’t understand!” accused Gretchan. “Brandon doesn’t mean any harm to you or anyone else. He keeps ending up in jail, but he’s innocent; he did nothing wrong! Now you might have cost him his life!”

“Life?” gulped Gus. “N-no! Not life. Just lock him up better!”

The dwarf maid stamped her foot angrily. She was furious, so angry she was shaking. Gus took a step backward, feeling suddenly very miserable. “You little fool!” she snapped. “You’ve just ruined everything! Oh, just get out of here! Go away, I tell you!”

Stunned by her outburst, his heart breaking under the onslaught of her harsh words, Gus could only retreat out through the secret door still cracked open behind him. He wandered, feeling forlorn, back into the dungeon, haunted by the sound of Gretchan’s sobs coming through even after the door had slammed shut.