The Border Mountains of Orvundar. One month before the name day of the King of Men.
The snow did not lie.
That had been the first thing Captain Durgan taught him, back when Korrin had climbed up to the ridges with the Border Watch for the first time. Rock kept silent. Wind blew things away. Men lied, or so they said in Orvundar, with every second breath. But snow told anyone who could read it who had walked across it. How heavy. How fast. How many.
This morning it was telling him something Korrin did not like.
He knelt at the edge of the path, his gloves tucked into his belt, and traced the rim of a print with two fingers. Broad, deep, with three notches at the tip where claws had pushed through the leather of the boots. An orc. There was no doubt about it.
Beside it, a second print. Behind it, a third. And behind that, dozens.
Dozens. In a line.
Korrin straightened and let his gaze travel up the slope. The track ran through the white like a dark ribbon, dead straight, as if someone had laid it out with a measuring cord. Not one print lay beside the path. Not one had strayed to relieve itself, to pick a fight, or to shove a comrade into the snow, the way orcs did when twenty of them were on the move.
When twenty orcs were on the move, there were usually only eighteen of them an hour later.
“Well, lad?”
Durgan had come up behind him without a sound, which should not have been possible for a dwarf of his girth. The captain was as broad as a doorframe, his beard as grey as the rock they stood on and braided with three bronze clasps: one for every decade on the border. Korrin did not yet wear a single one. At forty winters he was barely more than a child by dwarven reckoning, and the others let him feel it at every opportunity.
Korrin wiped the snow from his fingers. “Orcs. Forty. Maybe fifty.”
“And?”
“They’re marching.”
Durgan raised a bushy eyebrow. “Orcs walk. Orcs run. Orcs stagger, when they’ve found beer in a wagon they’ve raided. They don’t march.”
“These do.” Korrin pointed at the prints. “Same distance. Every step. As if someone was calling the beat for them.”
The captain said nothing. He crouched, his knees cracking like dry wood, and laid his broad hand flat beside one print. Then beside the next. Then beside the one after that. Korrin watched the lines around his eyes deepen.
Behind them the other six of the patrol waited. Tovar, the eldest after Durgan, leaned on his axe and chewed on a strip of dried meat. Mirva, the best crossbow shot in the Border Watch, had already spanned her weapon, though no one had ordered it. The others stood close together, their breath hanging in white clouds before their faces.
Tovar stopped chewing. “Captain?”
Durgan rose slowly. “The lad’s right.”
Korrin felt himself grow warm despite the cold. It was the first time in three years that Durgan had said those words in front of the others.
“Look at the fire pits,” the captain went on, pointing to a shallow hollow a little way above the path. Korrin had missed it. Now that he looked, he saw the circular patch where the snow lay thinner, and the stones someone had carefully piled over it. “Covered. So no one sees the smoke and no one finds the ash.”
“Orcs don’t cover their fires.” Mirva spoke quietly, as if the stones might hear her.
“No.” Durgan brushed the snow from his knees. “They don’t.”
For a moment there was only the wind, sweeping across the ridge and blowing fine snow from the edges. Korrin looked up towards the peaks. Somewhere up there, three days’ march away, lay the King’s Hall of Orvundar, deep in the mountain, where it was warm and smelled of beer and forge fire. Out here it smelled of nothing. Only of cold and of stone.
And of something that doesn’t belong here.
“We follow them,” Durgan decided. “Until we know where they’re headed. Then back, and we make our report. Nobody fights unless I say so. Understood?”
Seven heads nodded.
The track led east, then south, always downhill, always following the easiest way. It never faded. Even where the wind had blown the snow off the rocks, Korrin found scratches on the stone, snapped dwarf pines, a scrap of coarse linen on a thornbush.
Too easy.
The thought came in the early afternoon, after they had crossed the third ridge, and it would not go away. Korrin was young, but he was not stupid. In three years with the Border Watch he had read a dozen orc tracks, and every single one had been a muddle: prints that crossed each other, that ran in circles, that suddenly ended because some orc had decided the way over the slope was shorter after all. Orcs left tracks like a bucket of water kicked over.
This one looked as if someone had laid it down.
He lengthened his stride until he was walking beside Durgan. “Captain.”
“I know, lad.”
“They want us to follow them.”
“I know.”
Korrin stared at him. “And we’re following them anyway?”
Durgan did not answer at once. He stopped and looked ahead, to where the path wound down between two sheer rock walls into a gorge. The locals called it the Wolf’s Maw. Korrin had never found out whether there had ever been wolves there. He only knew that at the narrowest point the walls drew so close that two dwarves could barely walk side by side.
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“Fifty orcs that march, lad.” Durgan’s voice was so low that only Korrin could hear it. “Fifty orcs that hide their fires. If that’s true, then there’s something out there I haven’t seen in thirty years. And the king needs to know what it is. Not what it might be. What it is.”
He started walking again.
“Stay behind me.”
The gorge swallowed the light.
After only a few dozen steps the path lay in shadow, and the cold crept through their boots into their bones. Now and then snow trickled down from above when the wind ran over the edges of the rock walls. Korrin flinched every time.
The track ran on, straight and tidy, as if it were following a road.
Then it stopped.
In the middle of the path, in the middle of the gorge, the prints simply ended. None led on, none led back, none led up the rock walls. As if fifty orcs had dissolved into thin air on this very spot.
Durgan raised his fist. The patrol froze.
Korrin looked around. Rock to the left. Rock to the right. Ahead, the path winding on downwards, clean and untouched. Behind them their own tracks, eight pairs of boots that had walked straight into …
Into a trap.
He wanted to say something. He opened his mouth.
From above came the sound of a horn.
It was not an orc horn. Orc horns sounded like dying oxen, harsh and ragged. This note was clear, long and deep, and it echoed between the rock walls until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Then came the arrows.
They fell from both sides, from the rims of the gorge, from cracks in the rock that Korrin had not even seen. The dwarf beside him, Hesk, who had always made bad jokes about the beards of men, clutched at his throat and fell into the snow without a sound.
“Shields!” Durgan roared. “Back to back!”
Korrin wrenched his round shield up. Something struck it so hard that his arm went numb to the shoulder. He looked up and saw small, hunched figures along the rims: goblins, dozens of them, with short bows and yellow eyes that glowed in the half-light. They were not shooting wildly, the way goblins usually did. They were shooting in waves. One row, then the next, then the first again.
In time.
Then the orcs came. They came from the front and the rear at once, from the lower end of the gorge and from the way the patrol had just come down. Big, grey, in mismatched armour, with axes and clubs. They did not roar. That was the worst of it. Orcs always roared before they attacked, to give themselves courage. These came in silence, in closed ranks, shields before their chests.
Mirva’s crossbow snapped. The foremost orc fell. The one behind him stepped over him without so much as looking down.
Then the lines met.
Korrin had practised. For years, in the yard of the border fort, with a wooden axe and a leather shield, against straw dummies and against Tovar, who had thrown him into the dirt every single time. None of it had prepared him for this. For the weight of an orc throwing itself against his shield. For the stench. For the sound his axe made when it bit into something soft.
Beside him Durgan swung his war hammer, and every blow sent an orc to the ground. The old captain fought as if he had been hewn from the same rock as the walls of the gorge. But for every orc that fell, another stepped up. Orderly. Patient. As if they knew exactly that they had time.
Tovar fell next. Korrin did not see what struck him. He only heard the old dwarf’s axe ring against stone, and then Tovar was no longer there.
Korrin stepped back to draw breath, and as he did, his gaze slid upwards.
On a ledge above the gorge, where the goblins stood, stood someone else.
A figure in a long, dark robe, motionless among the hunched archers. Taller than a goblin, slimmer than an orc. The hood was drawn low over the face. One hand rested on a long staff. The goblins beside it kept their distance, as if the rock around it were too hot to step on.
The figure did not fight. It gave no orders, at least none that Korrin could hear.
It only watched.
And with sudden, ice-cold certainty Korrin understood that every orc in this gorge, every arrow and every step in time, obeyed one single will.
“Lad!”
Durgan’s voice tore him back. The captain stood with his back to the rock wall, blood in his beard, the hammer heavy in his hands. Of the patrol only three were still standing. Mirva had dropped her crossbow and was fighting with a dagger.
“Captain, I …”
“Listen.” Durgan seized him by the collar and pulled him so close that their foreheads almost touched. His eyes were calm. Far too calm. “Behind the third rock on the left there’s a crack. Narrow. An orc won’t fit through. A dwarf will, if he’s thin enough.” A brief, crooked smile. “And you’re thin enough.”
“I won’t leave you …”
“That’s an order.” Durgan’s grip tightened. “You go to the king. You tell him what you saw. The tracks. The fires. The horn. And that one up there. Do you understand? Not what it might be. What it is.”
Korrin wanted to argue. He wanted to say that he would stay, that he could fight, that Tovar must not have died for nothing. But he looked into Durgan’s face, and written there was that the captain had no intention of leaving the gorge. That he had never had any such intention, not since the track had ended.
“Yes, Captain,” Korrin whispered.
Durgan let him go. He turned, raised his hammer and let out a cry so loud and deep that the walls of the gorge threw it back like the horn before. It was an old battle cry, older than the King’s Hall. Mirva and the last dwarf beside her took it up.
The orcs turned towards them.
Korrin ran.
The third rock. The crack, barely wider than his shoulders. He threw away his shield, then his axe, and squeezed inside. The stone scraped his cheeks, his hands. Behind him Durgan roared once more.
Then no more.
Korrin crawled on. Through darkness, through cold, through a fissure that grew so narrow he thought the mountain would crush him. He crawled until his fingers bled and he no longer knew whether the sounds behind him were footsteps or only his own heartbeat.
When he tumbled out into the open on the other side, it was night.
The King’s Hall of Orvundar. Four days later.
The king’s hall was so vast that the fire in the great forge could not quite reach the vault. Up there, between the stone arches, it stayed dark. Korrin had been here once as a child, holding his mother’s hand, and had believed the ghosts of the old kings lived up there.
Now he stood alone before the throne. His hands were bandaged, his clothes torn, and he could not stop shaking, though the hall was warm.
King Kaldrun listened without interrupting him even once. He was not a large dwarf, smaller than Durgan had been, but he sat on the throne of black granite as if he had been carved from the same stone. His beard was white, his gaze hard as iron.
Korrin told him of the tracks. Of the fire pits. Of the horn and of the arrows that fell in time. Of the orcs that did not roar. Of Durgan.
And of the figure on the rock.
When he had finished, no one spoke for a long while. In the forge a log cracked.
“A leader.” The king did not say it as a question.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“For three hundred years the tribes in the east have torn each other apart. That has been our good fortune. An orc would rather kill another orc than a dwarf, because the other orc is closer.” Kaldrun leaned slowly back. “If someone has united them …”
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
The king turned his head towards the counsellors standing in the half-dark beside the throne. “Send out messengers. To every realm of men. To every duke, and to their king in Crownhaven. Tell them what this young dwarf has seen. Tell them that Orvundar holds the east, as we have always held it.” He paused. “And tell them that this time we will not manage it alone.”
One of the counsellors cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, the men have not helped us in two generations. They quarrel among themselves over every field. They will not …”
“Then let them say it to my face,” Kaldrun cut him off. “Or to their own people, when the orcs stand before their gates.”
Three days later the messengers left Orvundar.
They rode west, over the passes that were still open, on tough mountain ponies that knew no cold. One to the north, one to the south, several to the little duchies whose borders shifted so often that the dwarves had long since stopped drawing them on their maps.
And one to Crownhaven, the capital of men.
Where in three weeks their king would celebrate his name day.