The Covenant of The Forge

9

The first invaders past the gates charged into the dimness of the great tunnel below Thorin Keep, then hesitated, slowing and searching as others piled in behind them. “Where are they?” men shouted. “Where did they go?”

Where moments before there had been ranks of slowly retreating dwarves, now there was no one. The dwarves had simply disappeared. But the confusion was only momentary. Among the marauders were men who had been within Thorin — agents of Grayfen who had lived among the neighboring tribes and had attended previous Balladines. They knew the ways of the fortress.

As men milled around in the subterranean roadway, peering at side tunnels and rising stairways cut into the stone, Sith Kilane and Bome Tolly pushed forward to take command. Kilane pointed down-tunnel with a bloody sword. “That way lies their arena, called Grand Gather. The keep is above us, up those stairs. We will split up here. Some of you follow Bome Tolly to Grand Gather. The rest come with me, up to the keep.”

Led by men who knew the way, the hordes divided and went in pursuit of the Calnar. Some, out on the terraces and around the gates, paused to loot the bodies of the dead, but most swarmed around and into the underground city. Many among them had waited years for just such a chance — to conquer and loot the fabled treasures of Thorin. Howling with bloodlust, their war cries ringing through the corridors and halls of Thorin Keep, those following Sith Kilane thronged onto the twin spiral stairways and raced upward, spreading and searching at each level.

Steel rang upon steel, and Thorin Keep echoed with the sounds of combat as human raiders encountered companies of dwarven guards at each level. The stairways wound upward, parallel spirals of hewn steps bending around monolithic pillars of dressed stone which rose within a vaultlike shaft. Everywhere they looked, the invaders saw more and more finery — tapestries gracing tiled walls, furnishings of the finest craft, bolts and swaths of exquisite cloth — and the higher they climbed the finer were the treasures displayed. The humans had thought the dwarves to be wealthy. Now their eyes glowed at the very richness of what they saw.

Guards met them at each level, fought and retreated, heavily outnumbered. Kilane noticed vaguely that his followers were fewer than they had been. Many had stopped at each level, anxious to steal what they could before someone else beat them to it.

It was fewer than a hundred invaders who took the rising stairs toward the highest level of the keep. Kilane halted them halfway up, raising a hand for silence. Somewhere nearby were faint rumblings that seemed to come from within the very stones.

“What is that?” someone behind him snapped. “It sounds like winches!”

Kilane raised his hand again, hushing them, trying to identify the sound. It did sound like winches being operated — a low, continual rumbling sound with a metallic, rattling undertone. Like cables on pulleys. He didn’t know what it was, though the noise from below had decreased, and he heard it clearly now. For a moment longer, the sound continued. Then it stopped, and an eerie stillness came over the vertical shaft with its two stairways.

In the silence, another sound grew. Far below, metal grated against stone, a series of sharp, hissing noises, each ending in a final-sounding thud. It seemed to go on and on, then ended with a heavy, metallic thump that echoed up the shaft. Around and behind Kilane, men gazed about in confusion. A dozen or so on the second stairway crowded the rim of the stairs, peering downward, and a man screamed as he lost his balance and fell, disappearing into the gloom below. A long moment passed, then the rest heard him land — not with a thud, as on the stone floor of the entry tunnel, but with a ringing, rattling thump, followed by clatters of small things falling.

From somewhere below, voices came: “Gods! That one is done for!” “What is that down there? What did he hit?”

And from farther down: “They’ve closed the shaft! Look at that, will you? We’re sealed off in here! There are iron bars clear across, wall to wall. The whole stairshaft is blocked off at the second level!”

Sith Kilane swore under his breath. It had been expected that the dwarves might have some surprises, but to slide cage bars across the whole shaft?

“We’ll have to go on,” he told those behind him. “The dwarves are just ahead. They’ve sealed themselves in here with us. Find them! We’ll make them let us out!”

With anger added to their energies, the horde of humans sped upward, a spiraling mass of armed men racing around twin pillars of stone, and came out on the highest enclosed level of Thorin Keep. Overhead, skylights flooded the wide hall and the corridors beyond with brilliant light.

And they were alone. There wasn’t a dwarf in sight, anywhere. The invaders spread out to search. Sith Kilane stalked the bright halls in a fury. All the way up Thorin Keep, there had been dwarves ahead of them. They had seen them, had clashed with their rear guards. They had been in hot pursuit. There had been dozens of dwarves … many dozens of them. But now they were just … gone.

“There must be secret passages!” Kilane shouted. “Find them!”

Long minutes passed in frantic search, then one of the men swept aside a tapestry on the back wall of one of the stair pillars and gawked at what he saw there. He shouted, and others came to look. It was a doorway, cut into the stone of the huge pillar. A small doorway — to humans — less than six feet high and about four feet wide. The closed door was of finely finished wood, highly ornamented.

Men pushed at the door, pried at its edges, and strained against it, but it would not move.

“Stand back!” Sith Kilane ordered. Raising his bloodstained sword in both hands, he swung downward at the center of the door. The blade struck and broke. The impact made Kilane’s teeth rattle. With the others, he peered at the gouge in the wood where his sword had hit it.

The wood was a veneer. Beneath its decorative surface, the door was solid metal.

When the humans first entered the stairways of the keep, Tolon the Muse had made up his mind — the invaders might get in, but none of them would ever get out alive if he could manage it. With guards fighting delaying battles at each level, Tolon rushed to get all the dwarves in the keep to the highest level, where the lift-stages opened. The human mob was still far down the stairs when Tolon assembled his survivors and opened the lift doors.

He held position there, on the upper level of the keep, while people streamed past him, entering the lifts nine at a time, packing the suspended stages one after another for their trip downward through the hollow pillars surrounded by the stairs.

Many of them were injured. At the lower levels the guards had fought, had held the stairhead long enough for other dwarves to stream upward ahead of the invaders. Some had died, and many were bleeding. Tolon had no idea how many Calnar had been in the keep when the attack came, but he guessed there were more than a hundred. Yet, when the last of them arrived in the upper hall, and he herded them toward the cable-lift, he counted fewer than fifty who had made it to the top. Grieving and dark-browed with a smoldering anger, the second son of Colin Stonetooth saw the last of them into the lift stages and shared the next stage with two injured guards. He sealed the portal behind him as he stepped onto the platform. Could the humans break through that door, into the lifts? He didn’t know. It depended upon the tools they could find. But it would not be easy.

In the meantime, he had a surprise for them.

Normally, only Colin Stonetooth himself could have ordered the keep sealed and had his orders obeyed. But the chieftain was not here, and looking at the fierce scowls of the armed Calnar with him — the remnants of an entire company of keep guards — he knew that they would follow his plan.

How many of the invading humans were in the keep? There was no way of knowing. Hundreds, probably. But it didn’t matter. Tolon had made up his mind that those who were there — who had invaded the very home of the leaders of the Calnar — were not going to leave.

Tolon did not know where the rest of his family was now. He had seen his father, retreating with the Ten on the first terrace, making for the gates. The chieftain must be inside now, maybe in Grand Gather or beyond. He had last seen Handil on his way to Grand Gather, carrying his drum as always, with Jinna Rockreave beside him. Cale Greeneye, of course, was gone — off on some adventure of his own choosing, with the pretext of seeking a lost patrol — and Tera Sharn had been on her way to the main concourse earlier in the day. Tolon wished them all well and muttered a prayer to Reorx for their safety as he lent a hand at the stage winches, inching the endless belt of the lift downward.

Of the family of Colin Stonetooth, only Tolon was present here, where human barbarians streamed upward through the keep. For here and now, Tolon the Muse would take charge of defenses.

“All able guards off at second level!” he called, his voice carrying downward to the stages below. “We’ll make for the winch chamber.”

Beside him, one of the guards grinned darkly. He had been thinking the same thing himself.

Not in living memory had the keep been sealed, but the mechanisms were sleek and ready. It was typical of the Calnar, with their loathing of rust and tarnish, that all metal artifacts in Thorin were kept in good repair. This included the racks of iron bars — some of them thirty feet long — in the winch chamber at second level, and the two-inch-wide holes drilled into the stone of the frontal wall at eight-inch intervals. Beyond the wall was the keep’s big stairshaft, and in its opposite wall, or in the stair pillars themselves, were sockets — one for each hole in the frontal wall.

Working swiftly, Tolon Farsight and ten sturdy dwarven guards lifted the long bars, fed them through their sleeve holes, and drove them home. Beyond the stone, each bar emerged into the stairshaft, slid across, and thumped into its socket. It took them less than two minutes to put all of the bars in place. Dimly, from beyond the stone, they heard a scream, and some of the bars rattled in their sockets.

With the bars in place, the eleven lifted a great, hewn timber and dropped it into iron stays at each end of the line of sockets. The mass of it completely covered the holes, sealing off the bars beyond. Now nothing more than eight inches wide was going anywhere past the second level of Thorin Keep.

With that done, Tolon led his guards back to the lift shaft, where his other charges — fewer than forty dwarves from the keep, mostly women and wounded guards — waited in the shadows.

From far above, they could hear the sounds of humans at the top level, beating on the steel door there, trying to force it open.

“I’m glad Handil isn’t here to see this,” Tolon muttered, staring up the great shaft with its endless, vertical row of lift stages. “This lift is his pride and joy. Next to that vibrar of his, it’s the best thing he ever invented.”

From a cabinet at the base of the shaft, they took tools — prybars and wrenches — and began dismantling the lift belt.

The last coupling had just been pulled when they heard the upper door, far above, crash open and the shouts of humans ringing down the shaft. By sound alone, they could almost see the humans up there, crowding into the chamber, beginning to haul on the pulley cables to descend.

Tolon pointed at the giant pulley wheels on each side of the lift base. “Spring the cables,” he said.

Guards on each side hefted prybars and slipped them under the rims of the wheels.

“Everybody stand back,” Tolon said. The little crowd shuffled away, into the shadows beyond the lift port.

The guards secured their prybars, heaved at them, and the cables jumped from their tracks on the wheels. The guards threw themselves back, one falling and rolling, as pandemonium erupted above. Abruptly the lift shaft was a chaos of falling debris — uncoupled stages slamming down, crushing the stages below, loose cable whirring and slapping in the confines of the shaft … and piercing screams. As the dust settled, Tolon tried to make out how many of the invaders had come down with the lift debris. But it was impossible to tell for sure. There wasn’t enough left of the men to sort out the pieces.

“So far,” Tolon the Muse muttered, “so good.”

The keep was sealed, and the humans within it would wait. With the lifts destroyed, there was nowhere for them to go.

Tolon led his little band into a side tunnel and sealed its entrance behind them. It was only a service way, a maintenance tunnel for the elaborate water system that supplied this part of Thorin. But it led to where he wanted to go.

A hundred yards of dimness, and the dwarves emerged into a narrow, ill-lighted cavern where rough wooden shelves lined the walls. Tools of all sorts were on the shelves, and Tolon easily found what he was looking for. There were hammers, delvers’ shields, and slings. And in a corner was a rack of three-inch iron balls. The heavy balls were intended for aqueduct cleaning, but Tolon had another use in mind. Every tool had a left side.

Leaving his injured in the hidden cavern with some of the women to care for them, Tolon and his guards made packs of sacking and filled them with cleaning balls. Each took a pack, a pair of web slings, a hammer, and a shield, and Tolon led them up a dark, winding tunnel that opened into a maze of windshafts. He looked back and found he had more help than he had expected. Fully a dozen of the dwarven women had armed themselves as the guards had and followed along.

Tolon nodded his approval. “Everybody pick a shaft,” he told them. “Follow it to its end, and feel free to kill any human you see.”

Some of the shafts led to the upper walls of Grand Gather, some to the vents of the first concourse, and some to the intakes on the outer wall of the keep. The airshafts would be almost impossible for a human to negotiate, but to the Calnar they were easy. The vents — always high above the floor beyond — would make fine ambush holes, and there wasn’t a dwarf in Thorin who was not deadly accurate with a sling.

Aqueduct cleaners! The ubiquitous three-inch iron balls would be lethal weapons when propelled by delvers’ slings. It was, however, unfortunate that one of the first humans killed by an iron ball that day — out on the first terrace — was Bram Talien of Chandera. The trader had just put a sword through the gullet of one of his captors and was trying to get back to his family when the ball smashed his skull. Shena Brightiron, whose sling propelled the missile, was a young Calnar maiden whose home was deep within Thorin, near the markets. In her entire life, she had seen only two or three humans, and to her they all looked alike.

They were the enemy.