“I am thinking of our son. What would happen to him if his father were disgraced?” Tarn asked harshly. “This idiot thane pushes me and he pushes me, and I am expected to yield at every turn. Well, this time he has gone too far with his insults.”
“You must not give Jungor Stonesinger any excuse to challenge you that the Council of Thanes would support,” Crystal advised. She knelt beside Tarn’s throne and laid her head in his lap. “And… I hate to admit it, but Jungor may be right. The dwarves of Thorbardin will never accept me, and they will never allow Tor to be king. The old hatreds run too deep.”
Tarn reached out, stroking her hair. She had worked for hours preparing herself for this day, to look perfect for the Hylar delegation. Her hair was meticulously arranged, sparkling with jeweled pins. But all her work and consideration had been for naught. They didn’t see the woman eager to please them for her husband’s sake. They saw only a hated Neidar, a woman of the hill dwarves.
“I had hoped our marriage would heal the breach between our two peoples,” Tarn said in a weary voice. “I overestimated my peoples’ love for me. I thought they would come to love you for my sake and accept you as their queen. Instead, we’ve deepened the divide.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as that. We’re but two people. There is still hope. Take my pupil Haruk, for instance. He is young but wise for his years. When he looks at me, he sees his weapons master, not a hill dwarf,” Crystal said, smiling at the thought of the strong young Hylar warrior she had trained. After her marriage to Tarn, Haruk had joined their household and become her apprentice as part of an effort to ease the political tensions between Tarn and Jungor. Haruk was Jungor’s nephew, the oldest son of Jungor’s sister, a dwarf destined to be a powerful and influential leader among the Hylar. If his heart remained as pure as she knew it to be… “There is yet hope for the future,” she concluded.
“I have never regretted marrying you, though,” Tarn wistfully said. “No matter what happens, I shall always know that I did the right thing. Ours was a political marriage, but I would never have gone through with it had I not loved you, even then.”
“You hardly knew me,” Crystal laughed.
“I knew enough. I had spies in your father’s court.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
“See! That’s why I knew that you would be a queen worthy of the title. Beautiful, wise, a formidable warrior, and your father’s most trusted councilor; nothing got by you, not even my most capable spies. I determined that I had to have you for my queen, and I always get my way,” Tarn said, grinning fiercely.
But Crystal’s face grew serious. “For once, then, listen. My advice was good enough for my father, so it is certainly good enough for you, Tarn Bellowgranite.” She lifted her head from his lap and looked long and hard into his eyes. “Swallow your insufferable pride. Go to the ceremony on the Isle of the Dead and honor the souls of the Hylar who have laid their bones in the ground. I will stay here with our son, and we will await your return together.”
Tarn closed his eyes, then nodded.
18
“You wait here,” the gully dwarf, Shnatz Ong, whispered around the corner.
“We follow you.”
“You wait here,” Shnatz repeated impatiently.
“You say follow you.”
“That then. Now, you wait here!” Shnatz spun on his heel and began to creep along the narrow, dark passageway. He had gone several feet before he heard them coming up behind him again. He stopped, turned, and stamped his foot in anger, raising a cloud of dust. Someone sneezed.
“What you doing? I say you wait there,” Shnatz hissed.
Twenty gully dwarves crept out of the shadows, cringing and mewling. One of them whined, “You not say how long we got to wait. We get scared. We not supposed to be here. This place forb… forb… ”
“Forbidden,” Shnatz finished for him. “That why you got to be quiet, stay where I put you bunch of knotheads.” Someone dropped a pickaxe clanging to the floor, and everyone, including Shnatz, cringed. The noise seemed to echo forever through the maze of dark, rubble-strewn halls and passageways that made up this part of the ruins.
When the sound finally faded, Shnatz fairly shrieked, “Who did that? Come on, who did it?” There was a brief scuffle among the huddle of gully dwarves until one, a large, dull-faced lout, was booted to the front by the others. He slipped on the dusty floor as he skidded to a stop before Shnatz, catching himself on a section of fallen stone.
“What the matter with you?” Shnatz demanded.
“It slipped,” the gully dwarf answered sheepishly.
“Oh, yeah? That okay. Accidents happen. Like now.” Shnatz lashed out and cracked the clumsy gully dwarf on top of the head with the hilt of a small dagger he carried concealed in his grubby fist. The gully dwarf clapped his hands to his pate and sank to the floor, moaning like a felled ox.
“You dumb puhungs got to be quiet. Somebody catches you here, I hate to think what they do to you. This place forbidden, and that means you no go here. ’Cept now you got to go here ’cause that’s what I tell you to do. You not do what I tell you to do, I hate to think what I do to you. You unnerstand?”
The cringing gully dwarves stared at him blankly, unresponding. Shnatz sighed and said, “You got that?” They nodded, twenty grimy, knot-bearded faces bobbing so vigorously that it nearly made Shnatz seasick—even though he had never been to sea, unless you counted the great underground Urkhan Sea lying somewhere below him at this very moment. Shnatz got seasick every time he crossed the Urkhan Sea, despite the fact that it had neither wind nor waves, tides nor currents.
“Dumb puhungs not even know what ‘understand’ means,” Shnatz grumbled as he turned and started up the passage once more. When he heard them surge into motion behind him, following at his heels, he stopped even trying to scout ahead. There was little purpose to scouting ahead, anyway. He’d been exploring this area for months, and he knew for a fact that no one had been to this part of the ruins in a dozen years or more. Dust lay thick among the crumbled walls and fallen pillars, and the only footprints he saw on the floor as he crept forward were his own from two weeks ago. Not even his fellow gully dwarves had taken up residence in the place, and that was saying something. Gully dwarves generally moved into any place where they would be left alone by the other clans.
But for some reason that not even Shnatz could name, gully dwarves had never invaded the ruins of Hybardin, the old home of the Hylar dwarves. There wasn’t much left of it, for one thing. Weakened by the ravages of the Chaos dragons forty-one years ago, most of the great stalactite that had been the Hylar city had long since crumbled and fallen to the Urkhan Sea hundreds of feet below. This had led to the formation of a huge rocky island of jumbled ruins and broken stone that the Hylar called the Isle of the Dead. As with the ruins of Hybardin, the gully dwarves also avoided the Isle of the Dead. Only the Hylar went there anymore, and then only once a year, during the Festival of Lights.
Shnatz continued to follow his own old footprints through the dust. There were two sets of footprints—one going in and the other coming out. Shnatz was glad to have the footprints to guide him, because the map he had drawn had proven itself to be worse than useless. Jungor had forced him to draw a map, but Shnatz was a gully dwarf, not a kender. He wasn’t much good with anything that had to do with paper or pens or desks or government clerks asking him what his mother’s name was. His map had started in the wrong place and led in a big circle right back to it. After the third go-round, he had blown his nose into the map and tossed it aside.
Shnatz’s footprints led through the dust of the cramped, broken passage, over piles of ruins and through narrow cracks into other halls and chambers filled with the charred bones of dead dwarves. Stripped of their flesh, one dwarf was as similar and as different as any other—Hylar, Daewar, Daergar, Theiwar, and Klar. You could not pick up any one skull and say this was the braincase of a noble Hylar lord. It might just as well be the skull of a scheming Daergar assassin, or a blood-mad Klar berserker with his face caked with white clay. Even a gully dwarfs bones might be mistaken for those of a Hylar youth.