Realgar’s laughter washed sickeningly up against the edges of Hauk’s soul. Like a miner with a sharp pick, the mage dug and scraped at Hauk’s mind and held each memory up to cold, white light.
Hauk smelled smoke in the air of a tavern’s common room.
Realgar laughed again. The white light vanished, it’s afterglare throbbing and pulsing. Between one heartbeat and the next, it leaped high, a column of flame. Stormwinds howled.
Hauk tasted ale in his mouth, the rise of bile in his throat. A silver flash cut the smoke. He saw Tyorl’s blue eyes, amused and tolerant of his young friend’s follies.
His dagger’s steel blade quivered in the exact center of a wooden serving tray. The sound of the blade’s vibration rose, high and humming, and Hauk felt it. The floor of the cell trembled as though an earthquake shook the stone.
Darkness fell hard, and Hauk, his heart trembling, let it settle over him and told himself that the darkness was good. It hid treasures. Realgar’s laughter became the raucous noise in the tavern’s common room. Hauk had found Tyorl in his mind, and he clung to the image of his friend. He filled his mind with all the memories of the years, boy and man, that he had known the elf.
Blood tapped on stone. It slid across a shadow-pocked, rock floor. Tyorl lay dead at Hauk’s feet. The elf’s fingers stiffened in death, still clutching the mortal wound in his belly.
Stormblade, sapphires breathing like soft twilight, hung from Hauk’s hand, blood hissing down the blade.
Where is the sword?
Hauk threw back his head and howled in grief and rage and denial. He never, not even for a moment, allowed himself to remember the girl with the copper braids and eyes like emeralds. She was no real girl to him now. She was only a light, bright memory in the darkness. That memory was his and he clung to it the way a drowning man clutches the last splintered board from a storm-whelmed ship. He had nothing else.
14
Before the moons had set, Stanach began to build Piper’s cairn. Tyorl, walking watch on the hill, thought the dwarf worked with all the dispassion of a mason constructing a wall. Stones littered the hill’s crest, and Stanach used these to lay the base for the mage’s tomb. The dwarf asked for no help, but he offered no protest when Tyorl asked Kelida to relieve him at watch and, instead of seeking his own rest, bent his back to dragging stones for the cairn. Neither said a word to the other, each was tired and wrapped in his own thoughts. By the time dawnlight turned the dark sky a soft, cool blue, the tomb was laid and ready to accept Piper’s body.
By that time, too, Tyorl had made some decisions. He gratefully accepted Kelida’s water flask, took a hard pull on it, and passed it to Stanach.
“Kelida, wait,” Tyorl said as she moved away from him to return to guard.
Stanach, his back against the pile of cairn stones, looked around. The dwarf’s expression was cool, his large forge-scarred hands moved restlessly over the broad flat rock he’d chosen for the cairn’s footstone.
“What now?”
Tyorl chose his words carefully. “It’s time we know what we’re going to do, Stanach.”
“I’m going to Thorbardin.”
Tyorl nodded. “I thought you would be.”
Tyorl looked for Lavim and found him sitting cross-legged next to the mage’s body. He wondered what so fascinated the kender that he would voluntarily sit watch for the dead.
“Tyorl,” Stanach said, “I’m going to Thorbardin with Stormblade.” He smiled and there was no humor in his black eyes at all. “If you don’t come with me, I’ll be pleased to give your greetings to Hauk. If he lives.”
“You’ve played that tune one time too many, dwarf,” Tyorl snapped.
“He could be alive. Care to risk it?” The dwarf jerked his head at the empty cairn waiting in the morning shadows for Piper. “You build these things awkwardly still. You’ll get better with practice.”
“You’re skilled enough at it,” Tyorl said coldly. “Your friends don’t seem to live very long, Stanach. How many cairns have you built since you left Thorbardin?’’
Kelida, standing in silence between them, clutched Tyorl’s shoulder.
“No, Tyorl, no.”
Stanach held up his hand. “People are dying for this sword. More will die because of it if I don’t fetch it back to where it belongs. True, Tyorl?”
Tyorl said nothing for a long moment. Stanach spoke truly and the elf would not deny it. He looked up at Kelida, still standing between them. The day’s new light ran like gold through her thick red braids, sent her shadow leaping out before her. In that moment, dressed in the gray hunting leathers he’d found for her in Qualinost, Stormblade at her hip, the frightened girl he’d known seemed to vanish. Mud-stained leathers, hand resting on Stormblade’s hilt she looked like she would be at home in Finn’s company of rangers.
Aye, but she wouldn’t be! The girl could barely use a dagger and had only yesterday learned how to walk with Stormblade on her hip without tripping over it. She was no ranger, no warrior woman. She was a farmer’s girl turned barmaid.
Tyorl shook his head and got quickly to his feet. “I’ll tell you this, Stanach: I don’t know if Hauk is living or dead, but I believe your tale about the sword. Stormblade is no longer his. The sword should go to Thorbardin.” He heard Kelida’s sigh of relief and saw it mirrored deep in Stanach’s dark eyes.
“However, it goes someplace else first.” He cut off the dwarf’s protest with with an angry gesture. “My ranger company is nearby. You weren’t the only one hoping to meet friends on the road, Stanach. Finn will want to know what’s happened to Hauk, and he’ll need to know something I was sent to Long Ridge to learn.”
Quickly, with spare detail, Tyorl told Stanach what he and Hauk had discovered in Long Ridge of Verminaard’s plan to move supply bases into the mountains.
Understanding moved like pain across Stanach’s face. “Verminaard plans to attack Thorbardin?”
“Oh, yes,” Tyorl said dryly. “Did you think your precious mountains would be safe forever? Did you think the war would part around them like water around an island? The first supply trains are likely moving around Qualinesti’s borders now. The season advances and Verminaard will want to have his bases in place for a strike before winter. It will be a good idea, don’t you think, if we get to those hills before a horde of draconians arrive? And before whoever killed the mage finds us?”
The sun, now above the tree line in the east, poured its light over the hill and gilded the stones of Piper’s cairn. The dwarf rose slowly and started down the hill with no word to either Tyorl or Kelida. Kelida watched as Lavim scrambled to his feet and went to meet Stanach. Her eyes were sorrowful and her expression softened by pity. When she looked at Tyorl, the sorrow was gone. The pity remained and Tyorl had the uncomfortable feeling that it was for him.
“That was cruel, Tyorl.”
“What was?”
“What you said about his friends dying.” She left him abruptly and jogged down the hill.
Standing alone, Tyorl shivered in the sunlight.
The high, tuneless squeal of a flute, soared up from the foot of the hill. Down in the hollow, Lavim yelped as Stanach snatched Piper’s flute from his hands.
Tyorl bounded down the slope, his doubts and misgivings forgotten. Draconians and murderous seekers after god-touched swords paled when compared with the nightmare of a kender with an enchanted flute. The dwarf Brek ran thick fingers along the side of his face. The tic near his right eye jumped again. “Where’s Mica?”
“I saw his tracks this side of the road. He’ll be back.” Chert shifted uneasily from foot to foot and offered the only piece of information he’d discovered. “The mage is dead.”