Child Of Storms (Volume 1) (7 page)

He paused near a huge boulder, at least a dozen feet tall, overlooking the ever-widening stream. He reached into his satchel, took a swig from his canteen, and continued picking his way through the rocks and trees in the darkness. Anyone but a dwarf would have been hard-pressed to find their way through it all, but the little bit of moonslight which managed to make it through the clouds was more than enough for Ironhelm to make due.

A short way past the tall boulder Ironhelm heard a distant shout behind him and he quickened his pace. He passed another waterfall thirty feet tall and climbed down along one side of it. The water flowing under the thick ice burst through in a few places and turned the waterfall into a half-frozen wonder.

Ironhelm hurried ahead, finding a barely-visible old path along the edge of the stream. He ran along it, making good progress for several hundred yards.

The ground to his right grew steeper than before, rising to a sheer cliff. The trail ran between stream and cliff, stopping and making a swift turn right towards the cliff. In the dark, Ironhelm could make out a series of stone steps leading up the cliff. Carved right out of the stone, they were old and grown over with vegetation.

Ironhelm glanced along the stream. The river bank disappeared as the slopes on both sides became a deep gorge.

Turning, Ironhelm began to climb the stairs. The steps were shallow and steep and the footing precarious. Halfway up, he heard more shouts behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw nothing but darkness.

Ironhelm arrived at the top, a full hundred feet above the river. The stairs ended in a broad, flat area a hundred yards across covered with scattered patches of trees and piles of stone rubble. In the center of the clearing was a stone tower four stories high.

Ironhelm recognized it at once and was gladdened. The Hill Path, he knew, ended when it met a road running along the edge of the bay ten miles south of Swordhaven. He recalled his last voyage to Swordhaven, many years ago. He remembered seeing the pair of abandoned watchtowers that stood upon the hills overlooking the bay and towering over the road to Swordhaven. This had to be one of them, which meant he was less than a mile from the bay.

He recalled, as well, how all along the bay were tiny fishing hamlets. The villages were populated by stout fisherman of northern stock, the descendants of Frostheimic mariners who long ago settled these shores. They were formidable fighters, every man among them trained in sword and pike from a young age. They were well-disposed toward dwarves, as well, whose merchants often bought a large share of their catch of salt cod to haul back to their mountain realms.

Ironhelm knew that if he could make it to any of those villages he would be safe. In any one of them fifty men, shocked and angry at gruks so close to their homes, could assemble in minutes ready to fight. As word spread, men all along the Bachwy Bay would be roused.

Ironhelm started to make his way around the tower, looking for the old path that ran down to the Bay Road. He
remembered seeing the old track running towards the distant tower the last time he was near Swordhaven. He was told it ran up to the old watchtower, so he knew there was a path somewhere nearby. He cursed the foolish neglect that left the tower abandoned a half century ago.

Were it still garrisoned, he would be safe. The men of the watchtower would take him in and raise the alarm, setting ablaze the signal fire on the roof. But the tower lay empty, a forgotten ruin. Once, it had been an important stronghold overlooking gruk-infested hills and keeping the foul creatures away from the shores of the bay. It took a century of fighting to finally clear the hills of the gruk scourge. In the end, the baymen and the Westmarkers combined to crush the remaining gruk raiders and slew every last one of them. Then, as the years passed, men began to question the usefulness and the expense of manning watchtowers over peaceful hills. And so the towers were abandoned and allowed to slowly crumble. Ironhelm knew of no better way to encourage gruks to return.

He found the track, a grown-over path ten feet wide. It turned sharply to one side and then doubled-back along a steep ridge as it descended towards the bay. In the darkness below, Ironhelm saw the flickering light of several torches on the path. Listening carefully, he heard the grumblings of gruk voices. They were a hundred feet in front of him, moving his way. They did not yet see the dwarf, but they would in a moment.

             
Ironhelm considered fighting his way through for a passing second, but he could not tell how many gruks there were. Three or perhaps four he felt confident he could handle. Anything more would be too many.

             
He glanced quickly to either side of the old track. To his left, the ground rose sharply in a sheer cliff and there was no place to find cover. To the right, however, there was a cluster of rocks and trees. He wasted no time, scrambling down the steep slope and dashing behind a convenient cluster of pines.

Crouching down low, he hoped he was out of sight. The voices grew clearer as they neared him. Ironhelm remained still, listening intently.

“The damned bosses will all be sore for certain,” a voice grumbled. It did not sound like a gruk, and the language was not gruk but some debased dialect of Linlundic. “Einar wants that stinkin’ dwarf dead.”

They were right above Ironhelm.

“Never mind that,” a second voice said. “That damned dog’s got to be somewhere near. They’ll flush ‘em out. Keep your eyes open.”

They passed on.

As the voices grew farther away, Ironhelm carefully made his way back to the path. Stepping onto the little track, he glanced back where the voices had passed. They were gone, disappeared around a bend in the road. Turning, he continued down the track.

The road turned again and descended along a narrow ridge. Out in the darkness in front of him, Ironhelm saw a dim, distant light flash for a brief moment. He waited, and a moment later it flashed again. He nodded, scanning the darkness. To the left of the first light Ironhelm spotted two more. They flickered on-and-off again and again with a steady rhythm.

Ironhelm knew exactly what they lights were. There was a lighthouse near the entrance to the bay and two more at Swordhaven. They were situated so a ship’s pilot could aim his vessel between the lights and be guided right into Swordhaven’s harbor even in pitch blackness. Too far to either side of the twin lights risked striking dangerous rocks. Straight between the lighthouses was the only safe route. Those same lights told him where he was in relation to Swordhaven. If he had to guess, he would have said he was within three miles of the city gates. Turning, he trotted on down the path.

Out there in the darkness below lay the vast expanse of the Kingdom of Linlund. Ironhelm always thought it only nominally deserved the moniker of “kingdom”. True, it had a king whom all the local thanes acknowledged as such. But they gave him little more than lip-service as opposed to genuine obedience.

Every five years the thanes gathered and took council with the king in his great hall at Vistinar, but the whole thing struck Ironhelm as a sham. The king held little sway over most of the thanes, especially those most distant from Vistinar. Several ignored his rule completely, not bothering to even attend the assembly. It was the thanes who were the real power in Linlund, making for a patchwork quilt of a country. Linlund was more like a hundred small states, of which The Westmark was merely the largest. The nation – if such it could be called – was only loosely bound together by ties of language and custom. The thanes governed whatever territory they had carved out of the vast forests and marshes of their frozen land and paid little attention to the distant and ineffectual king.

Ironhelm considered the Linlunders barely civilized, especially by dwarven standards. He remembered his grandfather telling him of a time when Linlund was completely wild.

“A land of wild, painted men running naked through the forest fighting one another,” was how the old dwarf described it.

It had changed since Ironhelm’s grandsire’s day, to be sure, but there were still vast areas of Linlund as lawless and barbaric as ever.

              Then there were the men of Linlund, whom Ironhelm took for a particularly strange breed. They were a tall, fair-skinned people with an inflated opinion of their status all out-of-proportion to their surroundings. Mostly hard-scrabble farmers and herders barely surviving from winter to brutal winter, every man in Linlund was proud of his freeman status. There were no serfs or slaves in Linlund. They were a nation of free landowners, however modest their holdings usually were. Every Linlunder taught his son one of the few Linlundic proverbs, “A man without land is no man at all.”

These sons of Linlund were all taught to fight as soon as they could walk, and many of them would enter the employ of the local thane for a few years when they came of age. There was much in such service to appeal to a young man; he found camaraderie, he earned a few coins, he was fed and housed, and he got the chance to do some fighting. Most left formal soldiering behind after a few years to take a bride, buying a small plot of land or sometimes carving out a modest homestead at the edge of the wilderness. It was usually nothing more than a small cottage with a small garden plot and whatever swine or goats the young couple could manage to acquire. They supplemented their dinner of smoked goat shank hunting elk or wild boar, eking out a mean existence from year-to-year.

A Linlunder’s humble homestead was usually a sorry-looking thing, sometimes a mere stone hut or a cramped dugout, but it was
his
and he would fight to the death to keep it.

             
The Linlunders might have owed their thane loyalty and military service, but Ironhelm always got the sense they only went along with the system because it was in their own interest to do so. Banding together under a local chieftain provide more safety than an every-man-for-himself approach. Countless times over the years, individual thanes would try to oppress their people, leveling high taxes or imposing too many laws. Those thanes usually wound up slain by their own men or driven out into the snow to fend for themselves against the gigantic wolves and hulking trolls which still roamed the primeval northern forest. Wise thanes knew where they stood, and governed with restraint.

             
Ironhelm had known and fought both alongside and against various Linlunders for decades. He spoke their language and counted a few as friends. Yet he still did not fully understand them or their arrogant adherence to the notion that every Linlunder was a great lord in his own way. As a dwarf of Thunderforge, respect for established authority and the need for an orderly society were in his blood. There was an established order to things which had to be respected, above all else. Linlunders would have none of that. They were, at least to Ironhelm’s thinking, not unlike a bunch of overgrown children. They had potential, he admitted, but weren’t quite grown up yet.

_____

The track leveled off, turning again and then descending gently. As Ironhelm trotted along, he came to the end. A well-worn road cut across the path and in the darkness beyond Ironhelm could see the waves of the bay. He’d made it out of the hills.

Ironhelm heard movement from the far side of the road. From behind a group of trees, a pair of gruks stepped onto the road barely ten feet away. They looked surprised to see Ironhelm appearing out of the darkness and right in front of them and didn’t react right away.

Ironhelm sprang forward. He charged at the nearest one before it could react, felling it easily with an axe-blow to the chest. The second came at him, swinging widely with a crude-looking club. Ironhelm easily ducked the blow, countering with a perfectly placed attack of his own. The gruk fell, just as an arrow came flying in from the darkness. It struck Ironhelm’s shoulder but was stopped by his armor. He turned, spotting a third gruk standing in the trees off the road hurriedly reaching for another arrow from the quiver on its back.

Ironhelm dropped his shield and pulled his throwing axe from his belt and hurled it at the archer. It struck the gruk in the shoulder, sending it lurching forward in pain. Ironhelm lunged at him, finishing him off with a final blow to the neck. He reached down to retrieve his weapon and looked around carefully as he wiped off the blood on his cloak. All was silent and there did not appear to be any more attackers.

The dwarf felt his shoulder, examining the arrow. It had struck with enough force to penetrate his armor but barely enough to break his skin. Ironhelm pulled the arrow out and tossed it aside. He stepped back onto the road, surprised the enemy had the nerve to post any gruks there. He’d have to be careful until he reached the nearest village.

Ironhelm hurried down the road toward Swordhaven. He was no longer in the wilderness, but he wasn’t out of danger yet.

_____

             
Brundig knelt down next to the patch of snow, studying it carefully. He could see the boot prints running across it. Nodding, he stood and turned towards the small group of human warriors standing next to him. They stood before the abandoned watchtower, dozens of gruks in the clearing as the sky grew lighter with the coming of day.

             
“Those are his tracks all right,” he said, shaking his head in annoyance. “And they’re hours old by the look of ‘em. Damn!”

             
“By now the dwarf will have alerted the whole stinkin’ bay,” one of the other warriors said.