It is a miracle, Stanach thought. A bonding and a binding. A bond with the gods, a binding of elements. It was the first lesson Isarn had taught him. Trust the gods; know the elements; trust your skill. The crafting of the simplest blade is nothing less than worship. This worship Isarn had been perfecting for all his life.
The steel came thick from the fire, crimson as the red moon, glowing like the sun. Stanach, his eyes squinted tightly against the wild heat, brought the stock to the anvil. Isarn, his large hands gentle now, lifted the hammer. He was ready to begin the shaping of Stormblade.
Steel is not carved the way wood is, but drawn by being placed upon the anvil and hammered until it has reached the proper length and taper. Though he had made countless swords before this one, though hammer and hand were one, each of Isarn’s strokes was prudent. Every raise and drop of the hammer was a considered one. Yet, the considering was done quickly, based upon both knowledge and instinct. The steel could not be allowed to cool to the point where it was no longer malleable. The hammer’s anthem rang through Isarn’s smithy, a joyous clamor which set Stanach’s heart soaring. It was the Song of the Masterblade he heard, and he knew that Isarn’s hammer and anvil had never sung like this before. They would not sing like this again until Stanach himself forged another masterblade.
There were no words to the song but those the master and apprentice heard in their souls. The song celebrated a blade which was long and slim, and Stanach knew by the look of the weapon alone that it would balance perfectly in Isarn’s hand. The master shaped it with file and rasp, and the filings fell to the stone floor of his forge like silver dust. Stanach came to think of the blade as a shaft of argent starlight. The blade formed, it must now be returned to the fire again to be tempered. “This!” Isarn Hammerfell told his apprentice, “is the blade’s last journey into the fire, its last dance among the flames.”
Stanach had heard the words before—so many times! Now, as he watched Isarn plunge the blade into the tempering fire, he heard them as if they were fresh and new.
Isarn performed the functions of this last heating and final quenching as carefully as all the functions before. Stanach had built the fire to exactly the right temperature, and now he checked the oil for proper coolness. Satisfied, he looked to his master and the sword.
In this final heating the blade was not a shaft of starlight, but a crimson extension of the sun, a blood-red arm of fire.
When Isarn finally plunged the blade into the oil, Stanach watched the sun-glow cool and fade. Red iron became silver steel, pure as snow, strong as the mountain itself. Isarn, his lungs filled with bitter steam, sweat glistening on his face and thick forgeman’s arms, gently withdrew Stormblade from the trough.
He wiped the shimmering oil from the blade with a soft cloth, his strokes gentle caresses, and laid the sword upon the face of his anvil the way one would lay a newly born babe upon the breast of its mother. Stanach watched the play of the forge fire’s reflection in the pure steel, watched the orange light slide along the keen edge of the blade. Fascinated, his heart thudding hard against the cage of his ribs, he stepped between the fire and the anvil.
His shadow did not banish the light from the steel.
Stormblade, perfect in every detail, bore a heart of fire. That heart ran in a thin streak of crimson light within the cooling steel itself, and no shadow could dim it.
Eyes wide, old, gnarled hand shaking as though palsied, Isarn reached for the blade, then drew back his hand as though he could not, or would not, touch the steel.
“Do you see it?” he whispered. “Oh, lad, do you see it?”
Stanach had no words. He nodded dumbly and took a half step back from the steel. In that moment, as his eyes filled with the beauty of the as yet unhilted blade, the words of a fragment of poetry so ancient, so often quoted, and so little believed that it had become the street chant of children, whispered in his heart.
Mountain dwarves know. These things a high king make: A Kingsword heart-touched by Reorx the Father.
A soul formed to wisdom in the crucible of strife.
The hammer which legendary Kharas keeps in the mists.
A Kingsword to wield, made for the king, carried by him through all the days of his reign, and finally buried with him. A soul made wise by the fires of strife: the flames of battle, aye, and experience and judgements made, decisions lived by. The Hammer of Kharas, long hidden and believed to be more than a myth by fewer dwarves each generation. Yet, myth or truth, no bid for the high kingship of the mountain dwarves had been made successfully since the Hammer of Kharas had been lost.
Stanach shivered, suddenly cold despite the sweat trickling down the sides of his face. He closed his eyes, breathed once deeply to still the shivering, and looked at the sword again.
The steel’s crimson streak pulsed gently, as though it were indeed a heart touched by the hand of Reorx and brought to life. As he watched it, Stanach s own heart began to take on that newly born beat and rhythm. Legend told that only a Kingsword breathed like that.
No Kingsword had been forged in Thorbardin in three hundred years. And yet now—
Stanach shook his head.
He knew the legends. What dwarf did not? There had been a line of high kings once. The last, Duncan, had reigned during the Dwarfgate Wars three hundred years ago. He’d had a champion and friend, “legendary Kharas” of the poem. It was told that Kharas, whose name meant “knight” in Solamnic, had crafted a war hammer at Reorx s forge. It was told that none fought with more skill than Kharas during the bloody and bitter time after the Cataclysm, when the invading armies of humans and hill dwarves led by the mysterious mage Fistandantilus had sought admittance to the mountain kingdoms and access to what they imagined were the riches of Pax Tharkas and Thorbardin.
Thorbardin had been successfully defended from the attackers, but more than Pax Tharkas had been lost. Dwarf had warred against dwarf. This, the greatest of all sins, enraged Reorx. In his fury, the god struck with the same hammer he once used to forge the world; the one, legend said, that had helped make Kharas’s war hammer. He was not pleased to simply destroy the world that so filled him with anger. He unmade it. In that unmaking, the face of the world, twisted and torn as it was by the Cataclysm, was changed yet again. The Plains of Dergoth became a seeping and haunted marsh, known now as the Plains of Death. When the god’s hammer struck Zhaman, which had once stood tall and proud, the fortress of the mages collapsed and fell in upon itself, unleashing a great scorching storm of sand and stone.
It has been said that the ruins of that place, when first Kharas saw them, were shaped in the image of a huge and grinning skull. Now called Skullcap, it is a fitting grave-marker for the thousand who were slain as they killed their kin.
But the face of the world was not the only thing changed. Soon after the war, Duncan died. His sons greedily fought for the high king’s throne before Duncan had even been buried. Kharas, grieving for his friend and king, watched their cynical fight for power and decided that none of them would rule.
He entombed Duncan in the magnificent burial tower now known as Duncan’s Tomb. A place of mourning and magic, it hung magically suspended above the ancient dwarven burial place called the Valley of the Thanes.
He then hid his war hammer with the aid of magic and Reorx himself, and decreed that no dwarf would rule as high king in Thorbarin without it. Legend or truth, Stanach reminded himself, no dwarf had been crowned high king since. The histories were filled with tales of dwarven suffering during times when a high king was needed to rule the people. Times like these, he thought, when rumors of war seeped in from the Outlands, accompanied by reports of dragons and the Dark Queen’s rising. Stanach wiped cold sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand. None could rule without the hammer, and none could rule without a Kingsword. Through the years, many had tried to have such a sword forged, some because they knew that it would be enough to rule Thorbardin as king regent, some because they hoped it would point the way to the Hammer of Kharas. Though these swords had been beautiful works of craftsmanship, none had ever been a Kingsword. Reorx had never touched the blades, never gave them the crimson heart of red-glowing steel… . Until now. It was said among the smiths that the voice of every dwarven hammer striking an anvil’s plate would be recalled for all time in Anvil’s Echo, the huge, dwarf-built cavern connecting Northgate to the city of Thorbardin. If the legends were true, Stanach thought, the ringing of Isarn’s hammer must be sounding the keynote and shaping the echoes of centuries of work into an eternal song in Anvil’s Echo.