The fortress at the Greyhorn, Border Mountains of Orvundar. Autumn, seven years after the ambush in the Border Mountains.
The fortress at the Greyhorn had not fallen in three hundred years.
Korrin knew that because it was carved into the stone above the gate, in old, angular runes that the rain of centuries had washed smooth. Here Orvundar holds. Beneath it the names of the commanders, one below the other, twenty-eight of them. The last was still fresh and bright. Arnulf, son of Arn.
For nine days Korrin had looked up at those runes every morning before climbing onto the wall. He did not know exactly why. Perhaps to make sure they were still there.
The fortress clung to the flank of the Greyhorn like a swallow’s nest to a barn wall. Three rings of wall, one above the other, cut into the rock, and at the very bottom the great gate that barred the only pass from the east wide enough for an army. Above it all rose the peak itself, grey and crooked like a broken tooth. Whoever wanted to reach Orvundar over this pass had to go through that gate. And in three hundred years no one had managed it.
Down in the valley the fires of the orcs were burning.
Korrin counted them that morning for the ninth time and arrived at a number he preferred not to say aloud. They burned in rows. Of course they did. Between the rows ran trenches, straight as if drawn with a cord, and behind the trenches stood palisades, and behind the palisades goblins had been building for six days at something that from a distance looked like the skeleton of an enormous beast.
“A battering ram?”
Ottar stood beside him at the parapet, crossbow pressed to his chest like a child with its doll. He was thirty-eight winters old and had been with the Border Watch since the spring, and he asked more questions than Korrin had asked in his whole life.
At least Korrin believed so. Perhaps it was not true either.
“A siege tower. For the second wall. The ram they’re building back there, under the hides. So we can’t set fire to it.”
Ottar swallowed. “Orcs don’t build siege towers.”
Korrin slowly turned his head and looked at him. Ottar went red under his thin beard, barely a finger long.
“I mean … in the songs. In the songs they don’t.”
“Well, lad,” Korrin heard himself say. “Then the songs are old.”
His own voice startled him a little. The Well, lad. It had slipped out without his meaning it to, and it had sounded like the grumble of an old dwarf with three bronze clasps in his beard who had died in the snow in a gorge seven years ago.
Korrin still wore no clasp. Three more winters, and he would have been ten years on the border. He had sometimes wondered whether he would even want to wear the first one then. Whether it did not really belong to Durgan.
“Will they come?” Ottar asked. “The men?”
Korrin did not answer that.
Seven days ago Arnulf had sent two messengers west through the tunnels. Seven years ago King Kaldrun had sent messengers to Crownhaven, and before and after that again and again, every year, as soon as the passes were open. Korrin had once carried a letter to the border himself. He had watched a human captain with a bored face look at the seal and put the letter in his saddlebag without opening it.
No soldiers had ever come. In the old days, before Durgan died in the Wolf’s Maw, in that narrow gorge in the snow, at least a wagon full of grain had rolled over the passes every autumn, with a silver raven on its black canvas, the gift of some human duke from the east. For seven years that wagon had not come either. When Korrin had asked a trader about it, the man had only shrugged and said the house no longer existed.
“They won’t come,” Korrin said at last. “And now hold that crossbow properly. If it falls out of your hand, it falls four walls deep, and then Arnulf sends you down to fetch it.”
On the evening of the ninth day it grew quiet.
Korrin noticed it first in the drums. The orcs had been beating them since the siege began, day and night, always in the same dull, even rhythm, until you no longer heard it but only felt it in your belly, like a second heartbeat. Shortly after sunset they stopped. Not gradually. All at once.
The silence was worse than any drum.
On the wall heads turned. Someone whispered. Commander Arnulf stepped out of the watchtower, a broad, heavy dwarf with a beard so thickly braided with bronze and silver that it jingled with every step. He said nothing. He went to the parapet above the gate and looked down into the valley.
The orcs were pulling back.
Not far. Only a few hundred paces, behind the first row of trenches. They pulled back in ranks, shield to shield, without haste, and left before the gate a wide, empty strip of rock on which the rising moon cast its cold light.
Ottar pressed closer to Korrin. “What are they doing?”
“They’re making room.”
“For what?”
Korrin did not answer. He did not know. He only knew that something tightened at the back of his neck, cold and narrow, as it had back then in the Wolf’s Maw, just before the horn had sounded.
Then he saw the figure.
It came alone. Out of the orc camp, between the fires, across the empty strip of rock, with measured, calm steps, as if it were crossing a market square. A long, dark robe. A hood drawn low over the face. In the right hand a staff, whose lower end ticked softly on the stone with every second step.
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Korrin stopped breathing. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
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He had seen it only once, seven years ago, on a ledge high above the gorge, among hunched goblins who kept their distance as if the rock around it were too hot. Only once, for a few heartbeats. But he had seen it every night since. In his dreams. In the snow. In the shadows beneath the vaults of the King’s Hall.
“Crossbows!” Arnulf’s voice boomed across the wall. “On my signal!”
Along the parapet weapons rose. Ottar fumbled with his crank. Korrin loaded his bolt without looking, because his hands had done it a thousand times and his eyes could not let go of the figure.
It was close enough now that you could see the hem of the robe trailing across the rock. Eighty paces. Seventy.
“Now!”
Thirty strings snapped at once.
Korrin saw his own bolt fly, straight and fast, right at the chest beneath the hood. He had not missed. He knew he had not missed.
An arm’s length in front of the figure the bolt dropped.
Not deflected. Not turned aside. It simply fell, straight down, clattering onto the stone, as if in mid-flight it had forgotten where it was going. And with it all the others. Thirty bolts lay in a neat half-circle at the figure’s feet, and it stepped over them without looking down.
On the wall nobody said anything.
“Reload,” said Arnulf. His voice no longer sounded quite the way it had before.
They reloaded. They shot twice more. It changed nothing.
The figure stopped before the gate. Directly beneath it, so close that Korrin, if he leaned over the parapet, could see the hood from above, black and motionless, like a hole in the moonlight. Then it raised its left hand and laid it flat on the gate.
It was a good gate. Iron-bound oak, two hands thick, in a frame of granite that the stonemasons of Orvundar had hewn from the mountain itself three hundred years ago. Korrin had touched it often enough, at the changing of the watch, in passing, the way you clap an old friend on the shoulder.
Under the figure’s hand it turned grey.
First the wood, where the fingers lay. Then the iron of the fittings, which lost its sheen and grew dull as old ash. Then the granite of the frame. The grey crept outwards, slowly at first, then faster, in fine, branching lines, like cracks in a sheet of ice that you do not hear. Where it passed, nothing was left that still looked like stone. Only something dry and crumbling that cast no more shadow in the moonlight.
Korrin felt it through the wall beneath his feet. A fine, deep tremor. Like a sigh.
Stone does not die, he thought. That was the first thing every dwarf child learned. Stone is patient. Stone endures.
The gate collapsed into itself.
There was no crash. No splintering. It simply sank in, like a sandcastle over which a wave rolls, and where a moment ago there had been oak two hands thick, grey dust trickled over the threshold.
And in the valley the orcs began to call.
It was the first time in nine days that they had made a sound that did not come from a drum. It was not a battle cry. It was a word. A single word, called in time from a thousand throats, so that it echoed from the flanks of the Greyhorn and came back and rolled over the walls again and again.
Ma-la-char. Ma-la-char. Ma-la-char.
Then they came.
Afterwards Korrin remembered only fragments.
Arnulf roaring down from the tower that they should hold the inner court, and then storming down the stairs himself, hammer in both hands. The orcs streaming through the empty gate, silent again now, only the stamping of their feet, shield to shield. The smell, which was the same as back then in the Wolf’s Maw. The weight of his axe, which after the third hour had grown so heavy that he could only lift it with both hands.
Ottar, who stood beside him and fought and wept, both at once, and did not stop.
The second wall held until midnight. The third until shortly before the fourth hour. Then came the siege tower, and the goblins climbed over the battlements like ants over a sugarloaf, and from somewhere Korrin heard Arnulf’s voice, hoarse and ragged, calling the same word over and over.
“Tunnels! Into the tunnels! Everyone into the tunnels!”
Korrin seized Ottar by the collar.
The young one was bleeding from a wound in his thigh, and he was limping, but he ran. They ran across the inner court, between burning storehouses, over bodies, over shields, over broken crossbows. Ahead of them lay the entrance to the tunnels, a low, dark arch in the rock through which the survivors were pushing. Beyond it the old passages led deep into the mountain, mile after mile, all the way west. The orcs did not know them. Not yet.
Twenty paces before the arch, Ottar stumbled.
Korrin pulled him up. He turned to see who was following them.
And there it stood.
In the middle of the court, among the flames, barely ten paces away. Alone. The orcs streamed past it to the left and right like water round a rock in a river, and none of them came closer than an arm’s length. The firelight played on the dark robe, and the hood was turned towards Korrin. Get faster updates on novelping . com.
Turned straight towards him.
Korrin could not move. He wanted to. Every muscle in his body screamed at him to turn and hurl himself into the tunnel. But his feet stood on the stone as if hewn from it.
From here he could see beneath the hood. Not much. A chin. A mouth. Pale, smooth, beardless. No orc. No goblin. And most certainly no dwarf.
The mouth moved.
“You’re the one from the gorge.”
The voice was calm. Far too calm for a court full of fire and screams. And it spoke Dwarvish. Not the broken traders’ Dwarvish you sometimes heard from men, but the old, deep Dwarvish of the King’s Hall, clean and flawless, with the rolling r that only the mountain clans still pronounced that way.
Korrin could not get out a word.
“I watched you crawl through the rock back then.” Something that might have been a smile. “You were thin enough.”
An icy chill ran down Korrin’s spine. And you’re thin enough. Durgan’s last words. Spoken with his forehead almost touching Korrin’s, so quietly that only he had heard them.
Only he.
“I let you go,” said the figure. “So that you would tell your king what you had seen. And your king told the men.” The head tilted slightly to one side, like someone asking a question to which he already knows the answer. “Did they come?”
Korrin was silent.
“No.” The pale mouth smiled again. “They never come.”
Behind Korrin, Ottar gasped something, a prayer perhaps, or a curse. Korrin barely heard it.
“Go. Take the young one with you. Go to your king and tell him what you saw today. Tell him that the walls of Orvundar are built of stone.”
It turned away. Walked back, among the flames, among the orcs, who made way for it without looking.
Over its shoulder, almost in passing, it said one thing more.
“And that stone dies.”
They walked through the tunnels for three days.
Forty-nine dwarves had survived the fall of the fortress at the Greyhorn. Out of more than four hundred. Arnulf, son of Arn, was not among them. It was said afterwards that he had held the tunnel arch alone until the last had passed through, and then smashed the support beam above the entrance with his hammer before the orcs reached him.
Korrin believed it. It sounded like a commander whose name still stood fresh and bright above a gate.
Above a gate that no longer existed.
On the second evening, in a small hall deep in the mountain where the survivors rested for a few hours, Ottar sat beside him against the wall. His leg had been bandaged. He had not wept since they left the fortress. He had not said much at all.
“Korrin?”
“Hm.”
“Why did he let us go?”
Korrin did not answer at once. He looked at his hands, cracked and black with soot. He thought of a crack in the rock behind the third rock on the left. Narrow. Too narrow for an orc. Just wide enough for a dwarf, if he was thin enough.
For seven years he had believed that Durgan had saved his life. That the crack had been luck, the only luck on that day.
Now for the first time he wondered whether that crack had been a way out.
Or a door that someone had left open for him.
“Because he wants us to be afraid,” he said at last. “And because he wants everyone else to hear of it too.”
Ottar thought about that. “Then we don’t tell?”
Korrin looked at him for a long time. The thin beard, the pale face, the bandaged leg. Thirty-eight winters. For a dwarf barely more than a child.
“Yes. We tell. We tell everyone who will listen.” He leaned his head back against the cold rock. “He believes no one listens. That’s the only thing I still hope for, lad. That he’s wrong.”
Above them, miles away, the Greyhorn burned until morning.