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Realgar hissed a curse. The desire for power had always sung in him, like the wash and sigh of his own blood through his veins. He had advanced to the thaneship of the Theiwar not by hereditary means, but along a wide path cut by murder, deceit, and dark magic. He hated the Hylar, son of ancient high kings, as naturally as he loathed sunlight. Slowly, Realgar unclenched his fist. He moved his hand in a graceful gesture of magic and whispered the words of a summoning spell. A clutch of shadows pooled before the glass dais, became thicker, and took on a smoky substance.

“Aye, Thane,” a voice whispered in the moment before the shadows had fully become form.

Realgar did not speak until the thief knelt before him. When he did, he spoke only briefly, gave the thief his charge, and dismissed him. Alone again, he turned to the planning of Hornfel’s death.

Isarn might think it a sign of his god’s favor that a Kingsword had been created at his forge. Realgar, who worshipped a dark and evil goddess, felt Takhisis’s hand moving in the currents of the night. By morning, he would have the Kingsword and be king regent of the six dwarven realms. Skarn was Realgars thief, but not Realgars man. He wiped the blood from his hands, thought about killing the apprentice where he lay unconscious on the stone floor of the smithy, and then saw the sword. Stanach was forgotten.

Newly hilted, straight and slim, its blade was the color of Solinari itself. The steel’s heart was streaked with the sun’s red light. It lay on the anvil’s face where it had been when Stanach, bending over it to smooth some final work, had fallen to a blow from the hilt of Skarn s dagger. Skarn’s plan came fully formed. Realgar owed him a debt of vengeance. ‘Master,’ he called the thane, but had never thought of him as such. Skarn thought of him always as the one who had caused the death of his son.

A carelessness with magic, Realgar had said. It was no apology, barely an explanation for why Tourm had died.

Though the derro were a race inclined to the dark arts, Realgar did not permit mages about him. He was too jealous of his own power. He did, from time to time, train as assistants those talented enough to learn the skills for simple spells. Magelings, he called them, and spoke the word always with a proud sneer.

Tourm had been one of these. He could have been more. With the proper training he could have gone into the Outlands, traveled to the Tower of High Sorcery, and taken his Test with the masters of the Black Robes. He would have passed that Test. The fire of magic had burned in his soul, the desire to dance with its flame was the thing by which his life had been ruled.

And Realgar had known that. He must have sensed the potential of Tourm’s power. Sensing that potential, he recognized a threat. He’d asked Tourm—no, commanded him—to work a spell he knew his mageling had no skill to control. Realgar had watched him die screaming, while formless things of darkness and shadow, born in the Abyss, gnawed the flesh from his bones and tore the soul from his body. Tourm had worked the spell, it was true, but worked it at Realgar’s command. Tourm’s was a death Skarn had been waiting many years to avenge. Now he’d found the path to vengeance.

Skarn lifted the sword from the anvil and smiled coldly. Realgar wanted this sword. The thief didn’t know why, and he didn’t care. He only knew that when the thane had spoken his orders, his desire for the blade lay naked in his eyes. More than desire, Skarn thought now. Realgar needed that sword.

There were secret ways out of Thorbardin, shadowed paths across the Outlands that even the border patrols didn’t know. Skarn knew them. He left Stanach lying where he’d fallen. By the time Realgar knew that the Kingsword was not coming to him, Skarn was gone from Thorbardin.

2

A child woke, whimpering and sobbing from the same nightmare that haunted most of the eight hundred humans trying to find peace in sleep: the nightmare of slavery. The stars, dancing silver lights in the black vault of the sky, watched as a woman rose wearily and lurched, still half asleep, toward the child. She was not the youngster’s mother. She was a woman who had seen her own child die that same morning. In the two days since these people, once slaves in the mines of Pax Tharkas, had fled the mountains, five men, sick and old, and two children had died. So far, Tanis Half-Elven thought. He stared into the flames of the dying campfire and toed a bundle of kindling closer. He was tired to his bones. Eight hundred people went only slowly through the narrow mountain passes between Pax Tharkas and the South Road.

And the South Road was not a route to freedom. It was only a place to start.

A footstep, soft as the woman’s whisper of comfort to the whimpering child, sounded behind Tanis. He turned, dropping his hand to his short sword, and then smiled an apology when he saw who stood behind him.

“Goldmoon,” he whispered. “I’ve been wondering where you were.”

She was lovely, the Plainswoman, and though her face was pale and lined with the same exhaustion Tanis felt, she radiated a kind of calm peace that touched the half-elf like a soothing hand. “I was looking for Tasslehoff.”

“Find him?”

Goldmoon smiled. “No. Of course not. It was a good excuse to walk into the hills for a while.”

“I wouldn’t think anyone would be looking for an excuse to do what we’ve been doing for two days and will likely be doing for too many more.”

She dropped gracefully to a seat beside Tanis. “Sometimes walking alone is what I need to help me think. Tanis, where are we going to take these people?”

Where, indeed. Tanis cocked his head. “There aren’t many choices. Verminaard will have his draconians all over this mountain behind us soon—if he doesn’t now. Tas blocked the gate well enough, but it won’t hold. We’ve got to get these people out of here soon. We can’t go back now. We have to go ahead.”

“To where?”

“There’s only one place that would hold them, Goldmoon, only one place that is anything like safe now.”

“Thorbardin.” Goldmoon shook her head. “The dwarves haven’t taken any interest in the war these three years, though its been tearing Krynn to pieces. What makes you think they’ll admit eight hundred refugees to Thorbardin now?”

Tanis tossed the kindling onto the fire and watched the flames lick the twigs and bark. “We’ll reason with them.”

“It’s been tried.”

“We’ll plead.”

Goldmoon sighed. “They hear no pleas, Tanis.” Tanis, his green eyes glittering dangerously, smiled with no humor. “Then we’ll make them hear.”

Eight hundred voices, he thought, cannot be ignored.

High on the eagle-haunted slopes outside Thorbardin, there was a series of narrow ledges which, though they could not be seen from the deep clefts and valleys far below, have been known to the dwarves for as long as Thorbardin has stood. It was impossible to climb to the ledges from the valley. The mountains forbade it. But from within the dwarven fortress there is a way to reach the ledges. Narrow paths led up from the Southgate wall, paths that only a mountain goat or a dwarf born in Thorbardin would use. A wild windsong howls along those paths. Summer or winter, the air is cold there and thin. Stanach Hammerfell always thought of these ledges as his own.

He climbed to them now, a filled flask tied to his belt. All day the forge fires had dragged sweat from him like blood; the steam of the cooling troughs sucked at his lungs until he wondered if he would ever breathe again. He needed the peace of the heights now; he needed a place to think. Stanach propped his back against the eternal strength of the mountain stone. The first sip of the potent dwarven spirits warmed his belly. Far down in the valley, night settled to fill the deeps and clefts, covering the gold and brown leaf-strewn slopes with cold black velvet. Only an hour ago, Stanach had learned that Stormblade had been found in the Outlands beyond Thorbardin. From the lands where dragons cut the sky on wide leather wings and armies fought while gods strove against each other, whispering rumor came of a young ranger who carried a sapphire-hilted sword. Two years after its theft the Kingsword was found, and Hornfel even now prepared to send men to fetch it home. It would be no easy thing. Hornfel feared that the Theiwar Realgar had also heard the rumor. The Hylar’s men would have to be swift and on their guards. A Kingsword was something Realgar would kill to nave.