“We ourselves attacked the last group from the rear,” Ferro said, “to cover our mistake.”
“Commendable. And this agent, this assassin, what about him? He was eliminated as well?”
When Ferro did not immediately answer, Jungor sat up, glaring at him in the firelight. Finally, a small voice said from the shadows, “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean? Where is he now?” Jungor demanded.
“You saw him today in the Council Hall,” Ferro answered. “Ilbars Bleakfell.”
Jungor’s jaw dropped open. “You corrupted that pompous Daewar buffoon? By the gods, Ferro, I underestimated you.”
“You do not understand, my lord,” Ferro said nervously. “Captain Ilbars is not himself. The real Ilbars is waiting out eternity at the bottom of a bog, most likely. What you saw today in the Council Hall was a sivak draconian named Zen. He was the leader of the band I hired to kill Tarn. He indeed killed Ilbars and took his place, as was the plan.” Jungor nodded, listening. He had heard of the sivaks’ ability to assume the shape of anyone it kills. He was also keenly aware of how dangerous such a creature, loose in Thorbardin, could prove. If Tarn were to discover him…
Ferro continued, “The draconians sprang their ambush before Zen could get close enough to the king to kill him. But Zen survived the battle somehow and accompanied us back to Thorbardin, still in the guise of Ilbars Bleakfell. I have not had the opportunity to speak with him alone, therefore I am puzzled… that is, I am unclear as to his ultimate intentions.”
“Unclear? Your euphemisms are tiresome,” Jungor said, his patience worn thin. “So where is this failed assassin now?”
Again, it was some moments before Ferro was able to answer. Finally, his words came blurting out. “After the Council, he slipped into the crowd and disappeared. I don’t know where he is. My agents are searching for him as we speak. All I know is that he’s somewhere in the city.”
Steeling his patience, Jungor rose from the couch with a deep sigh and slowly strode to the window. With his hands clasped behind his back, he stared out into the torchlit darkness of the garden. “I trust that your agents will find him,” he said at last.
“Of course, my lord,” Ferro said hurriedly. With Jungor’s back turned, Ferro lifted the brandy decanter and poured a third of its contents down his throat. Coughing on the potent liquor, he said, “But with his shapechanging ability, Zen could be someone else by now. He could be… anyone.”
Jungor nodded and hissed without turning. “Pray that you find him before he finds you. And may the gods who are no more help you if you fail this time.”
In a tiny room lit by fire, his haggard face starkly divided between light and shadow down the crooked line of his nose, the captain of the North Gate solemnly nodded his sweaty bald head. Released, the mechanism slowly commenced its turn. Driven by swift, icy water hidden behind stone, it propelled a gleaming steel screw thick as an Urkhan worm into the side of the mountain. The gate, a solid plug of stone, swung out of its cavern lair on hinged steel arms and slid into position over the coiling rod, silent as the first day of Creation. The floor shuddered with the leviathan waking of the machine.
In his bed deep inside his fortress home, in the dark with his wife breathing deep and slow beside him, Tarn Bellowgranite wondered if it would be enough. Enough to keep Beryl out, when she came, if she came. Enough to quiet the souls of those he’d led to their doom. Somewhere in the world above, the elves of Qualinost wandered alone. He wondered if they knew the price he’d paid for their freedom, sacrificing his own. He wondered if their young king deserved it. He wondered if he had the right to wonder or the wisdom to question. He fell asleep and clutched the sheets as he dreamed of drowning dwarves.
In the city beneath the stone, Norbardin, Jungor Stonesinger paused in his garden, submersed in sudden moonlight. By some unlikely chance, Krynn’s pale moon had chosen that moment to peer down through the skylight and limn every line and shape in silver and forest green, startling him as though he had walked, unaware, onto a stage. In his fancy, the lights had come up and the crowd sat breathless in their seats, awaiting the chorus that would open the play. The blistered skin round his eyeless socket tightened as he recalled his lines and smiled. He had written this play himself.
In the darkness of the Anvil’s Echo, Ferro Dunskull lost himself in a pale Daergar beauty, as rare and pure as a black dragon’s tear, whose name he had already forgot. His fear and anger and loneliness he poured out like a bitter libation onto her floor, both needing and hating her, and she welcomed him into her small, well-apportioned room, hungry to share his power. Her limbs long and lithe, the flat round of her belly pallid as moonlight, she paused at the edge of the candle’s light, a crystal decanter of black brandy hanging from the crook of her finger. He turned away to hide his sneer.
In the shadow beneath a barbican gate, Zen shucked off the mortal form of Ilbars Bleakfell, trading it for one less familiar, one less regarded. The pale gray corpse lay at his feet on the slick stones, blood pooling black behind its neck. Now Daergar inform, he set to work dismembering his victim and stuffing the sundry parts down a sewer grate, losing his patience when the head wouldn’t fit between the rusty bars.
Into its uneven seat in the stone, silent as the dawning day, the North Gate twisted home, sealing the dwarves of Thorbardin inside their mountain once more. Through hidden windows high above, guards watched the northern horizon for dragon flame and the watch fires of camping armies. They watched the approaches to the gate, not to welcome visitors but to drive them away with arrows and bolts and falls of stone. As the gate sank into place, melding with the surrounding stone so perfectly that not even a dwarf could find it once shut, the air inside the mountain grew tight, and the guards at their posts smelled the hot metallic reek of melting lead. The plumber had come to seal the gate, humming a song and sucking the remains of his breakfast from his teeth while he stoked the fires of his portable forge. The captain of the North Gate waited with a signet stone to press into the warm lead seal, to finalize the Council’s command to shut out the world.
He was glad no one had come to witness the sealing of the gate. He was glad for the heat of the forge fire and the sweat that hid his tears.
Book II
17
Tarn never tired of looking at him. He never tired of holding him in his arms or feeling his soft fat little fingers close around his own coarse one. “You will he strong, like your father,” he whispered to the infant boy.
Tor Bellowgranite, son of Tarn Bellowgranite, smiled his blank, toothless smile up into his father’s face. Crystal said he was too young to smile, but Tarn knew better. Tor was smiling because he knew his father. He shook his fists, like little balls of dough, at Tarn’s face, and began to kick. Tarn laughed without really knowing why, feeling only a deep and abiding joy unlike anything he had ever known.
Dwarf babies were, to put it simply, quite ugly. Even dwarf mothers had no illusions about the beauty of their own infants. Though usually born with a full head of hair, dwarf babies did not come into the world already fully bearded, despite popular superstitions. Tor shared the Hylar trait of golden hair, just like his father. Crystal argued that Neidar babies were also born blonde-headed, but that they soon lost their fine golden baby hair and replaced it with a proper color. Tarn was pleased that his son, just six months old, still sported a magnificent shock of tawny locks.
Suddenly, the baby’s fat little face scrunched up in a horrible grimace. Tarn stared at him in surprise, then recoiled as Tor sneezed. “He’s caught something,” he said in alarm. He turned to the open door and cried, “Auntie! Tor is ill. Fetch the healers at once.”