The Revenge of the Dwarves (28 page)

“My precious,” he hissed, imitating the stance of the greedy rock gnome that grabbed and kept anything that looked valuable. Then he laughed and walked out of the chamber hand in hand with his wife. Soon their ways parted and he took a different corridor, using an oil lamp to light his path into the other gallery where once Lot-Ionan’s apprenticed famuli had had their quarters. Most of the iron doors were still in place. Behind them the student initiates had followed their studies of magic and had dreamed of one day inheriting Lot-Ionan’s enchanted realm.

Now nothing was left. No magic, no enchanted realms. No Lot-Ionan.

Tungdil entered the laboratorium.

It was in this very room that a trick had once been played on him that had resulted in most of the fittings and equipment going up in flames; it had not been his fault. The flasks full of elixirs, the pots of ointments, the glass tubes containing extracts and essences, all that priceless experimentation had melted into one dangerous mass. A powerful explosion had ensued and little had survived of the benches, shelves, tables and apparatus.

And that was still how it looked. He stepped over the splintered glass and the broken pottery, walking over to where a pile of glass was all that remained of what had been complicated distillation equipment. Before the explosion.

The dwarf bent down and rummaged around. He didn’t locate the diamond immediately. There was so much broken glass that it was practically invisible. Nobody would ever find it if they didn’t suspect it was hidden in the rubbish.

Tungdil took delight in the cold fire shining from the stone’s facets. His heart leaped. He turned it this way and that, so that it could blaze at its best, returning the lamplight, and throwing reflections onto the dark and somber walls.

Whenever he took the stone in his hand he waited for the jewel to show him somehow whether it was just a diamond or the most powerful, magic artifact in all Girdlegard.

And, as always, he waited in vain. He put the stone back in its mound of glass fragments and pushed it down to the bottom of the pile.

Girdlegard
,

Kingdom of the Fourthlings
,

Brown Mountains
,

Early Summer, 6241st Solar Cycle

A
shrill whistle sounded up through the broad shaft and straightaway the bell rang in the winch room. Apart from one alcove, the entire room was filled with a strictly logical system of pulleys, winches, winding gear, cogwheels and levers, weights and counterweights in every conceivable size, all carefully proportioned. The alcove was the lift master’s post.

Ingbar Onyxeye of the clan of the Stone Turners, faithfully carrying out his important duties, had recognized the signal. “Here it comes!” he shouted back down.

His hands worked the various iron levers in turn, each as big as a dwarf; these released the brake blocks from the rollers and the wheels. Machinery whirred loudly into action.

The rotating parts set up a draught that smelled of oil and lubricating grease; the sheer mass of weights on the end of their chains pulled the lift upwards without a single dwarf wasting his muscle power. By this means, forty hundredweight could be heaved up easily.

Ingbar closed his eyes to listen better. Responding to the sounds, he took his oil can and applied lubrication where the machinery needed it to run more smoothly. It was intolerable to know metal was rubbing against metal, causing lasting damage. Oil would prevent unnecessary wear.

Suddenly there was a sound the lift master had never heard before, and the whole winding gear came to a halt.

“What’s wrong?” he muttered, swiftly checking all the most vulnerable parts of the equipment. He couldn’t find anything untoward. The cogwheels were intact, as were the chains, and the pulley belts had not come out of their runners.

Ingbar went over to the shaft. Right at the bottom he could see a pale shimmer of light coming from the lift cage. It had to be at least fifty paces down. “Oi, you down there! Has the pulley jammed?” he yelled.

In reply the little bell rang wildly, somersaulting and ringing fit to bust, so loud that it hurt his ears. Then its cord broke and the bell fell silent. “What are you doing down there?” he called, worried now.

The chain jerked, started and stopped, the metal screeching as the load increased.

“Have you gone mad? What are you doing? Are you dancing down there in the cage?” Ingbar stared at the winding gear. The whole system was running in reverse and the lift was dropping down. He ran back over to the levers and applied the brakes. “You’re overloaded. Unload something quickly, otherwise…”

With a scream of grinding metal the first brake gave way. A high-pitched metallic clang resounded as the other holding devices failed one after another. The bolts shot out like bullets. One of them, sharp-edged, flew through the chains and pierced the lift master’s leg. Slowly the chains unwound, sending lift and cargo down toward the bottom.

“What the hell?” Ingbar clamped a hand over the gaping wound. There was no time to bandage it now. He had
to save the workers in the cage and stop them crashing to their deaths.

He limped over to the ramps where the extra counterweights were stored. They used these when particularly heavy loads were being transported; they would be applied to the winches, but nobody had ever tried to do that while the lift was already running.

Ingbar knew the winding gear very well indeed; he knew the ins and outs of the system and its peculiarities and foibles. He fixed new weights to a long chain, attached a huge hook and thrust it into the emergency slot on one of the winches that was still moving.

The hook sat firm. The chain came taut with a clank and pulled the new weights down toward itself. Because of the tons of extra ballast the chain was prevented from unwinding, so the lift came to a standstill.

“Are you all right down there?” he called down the shaft. The cage with the workers must be a hundred paces down, he reckoned, judging by the chain length. They’d stopped by one of the secondary galleries. “Good,” he shouted. “Now unload the shale-tailings or some of you will have to get out. Otherwise it’ll never move.”

He waited a while to be sure they had followed instructions, then removed the counterweights and set the winding-gear into action, to get the lift up at last. For brake power he took a long iron bar and inserted it into one of the smallest cogwheels; as soon as the cage arrived he jammed the bar all the way in to block the cog. The cage had come up.

“That was a near thing.” Ingbar wondered why the lights had gone out. The faint glow given by the lamps in
the engine room was not strong enough to show what was inside the cage. The iron door rattled open. “I’ll have to close the shaft down till we’ve renewed the brakes. What were you…?” What he saw robbed him of the power of speech.

Huge figures stepped out of the lift cage. They were armed to the teeth, carrying cudgels and shields with unfamiliar writing. But one glance at the brutal faces with the jutting tusks was enough to tell the dwarf what he had here: Orcs!

“To arms!” he screamed, drawing out his ax. “Greenskins!” Before he knew it, a missile flew toward him and hit him on the brow. It knocked him flying and he collapsed. Half conscious, he imagined he saw a pink-eyed orc bending over him, fingering his skull, then disappearing…

When Ingbar came round later he was still lying in the engine room. He could hear the rattle of chains. Groaning, he struggled upright and felt for the lump on his head. Next to him a stone lay on the ground. The orcs must have thought he was dead, no two ways about it. They would never leave a dwarf alive.

Footsteps were approaching and in the torchlight he could see a band of warriors coming up. “Ingbar! Did the greenskins come this way?” one of them asked him urgently.

“They came up here, but whether…” He looked for the lift cage. It was gone! “No… Look! They’re on their way down.”

The warrior stared grimly and helped him to his feet. “Then bring them up again!”

Ingbar limped over to the machinery, adjusted some of
the cogwheels and attached extra weights again. The orcs had collected a lot of booty during their raid on the Brown Mountains, it seemed. The cage was overloaded. “What happened?”

“We hoped you could tell us that,” replied the dwarf. His companions arrayed themselves in a semicircle round the shaft, crossbows at the ready; the enemy would be met with a hail of bolts. “The orcs appeared from nowhere, overcame the guards and stole the diamond.”

“
The
diamond?” Ingbar was horrified. “What are the monsters planning to do?”

One of the warriors took a look down the shaft. “Another twenty paces, and they’re up,” he reported, moving into place.

“We don’t know. Notice anything unusual about them?” asked the dwarf.

“No, not…” Ingbar hesitated. “Yes! One of them had pink eyes.” He gave a brief description of events. “And when I came round, you arrived.” He stopped speaking, for the cage had arrived. The door stayed shut. So maybe the orcs were afraid to come out.

“Come out and face us, you cowards!” called the warrior. “You can’t escape!” Nothing happened, so he sent one of his men over to open the iron door.

That was when Ingbar realized what had been bothering him: the cage was too heavy! Whatever was in there it couldn’t be the orcs; because before he’d pulled them up with the conventional forty hundredweight. Now he’d applied the forty plus the extra counterweights. No diamond in the whole of Girdlegard was that heavy!

The soldier who’d been sent forward to the lift freed the catch and pulled the door open a little way.

A steel arm shot out through the narrow gap and forced the doors wide. A cloud of steam hissed from the cage, enveloping the astonished dwarves. They staggered, fighting for air; the scorching fumes hurt their lungs and stung their eyes; water droplets formed on their cold armor.

Clicks, clanks and rattles; a rain of crossbow bolts shot through the air randomly, mowing down several of the soldiers. They fell to the stone floor, dead or injured.

“Get back!” cried Ingbar. He knew what it was that had got itself transported up in the lift. All the dwarf regions had by now received the warnings of the death machines wreaking havoc in the mines of the children of the Smith. There were at least a dozen of these machines now, that was for sure. And he knew there was little chance of combating them.

The mist cleared enough for him to see his immediate surroundings. “I’ll send it back down before it can get out of the cage,” he coughed into the vapor cloud. He unhooked the weights from the winch-pulleys and stretched out his arm for the iron rod blocking the vital cogwheel.

At that point a monstrous shadow appeared out of the fog next to him. An iron vice-grip snapped at him, biting down on his left arm.

Ingbar was lifted up and whirled against the roof as if he were a doll. It felt like being in the mouth of a dragon. From up here he could see the back of the devilish machine, as strongly armored as the front. Dwarf-warriors were
courageously attacking, but the machine rolled steadily forwards over the bodies of the dead and wounded.

He could see how the rod was slipping under the cogwheel. It was being forced out of true. The winch gave way under the sheer weight, having no ballast, and the cage shot down to the depths.

Pulleys, cogwheels and rollers worked faster and faster, chains unwound at great speed. But Ingbar’s plan had failed. The devil machine had already left the cage.

The metal grab-hand gave him another mighty shake, a sharp pain shot through his shoulder, then he was thrown to one side.

The death machine had aimed well. Ingbar was hurled straight into the mess of whirring cables and winches. He crashed against a speeding chain, landed under a huge rotating cogwheel and he and his chain mail armor were crushed to pieces.

Girdlegard
,

Kingdom of Gauragar
,

Porista
,

Early Summer, 6241st Solar Cycle

P
rince Mallen sat in his room on the top floor of the house he and his companions had been assigned. Through the window he observed the cranes on the site of the new palace, constantly in motion, turning, lifting, lowering. A continuous stream of carts loaded with stone rolled through the streets, and the army of laborers grew from orbit to
orbit. The breeze brought the sounds of a new beginning to Mallen’s ears: banging, clattering, sawing, hammering—and there was singing and the workmen’s shouts.

King Bruron was losing no time. The empty space in the middle of Porista was to be filled with a splendid building which promised to outshine Nudin’s palace in opulence. Five towers and three keeps were planned, arranged stepwise and connected by smaller transept buildings. The architects had estimated the work would take five cycles, and the foundation stone was already in place.

Mallen stood up, and now he could see the tips of the tent poles emerging from the top of the huge white canvas marquee erected in the center of the cleared site. This was where the kings and queens were meeting this afternoon. Bruron wanted the great monarchs assembled on the spot whence in former times the mightiest power of Girdlegard had issued. In the place of the magic wellspring they now had unity and harmony among the rulers—this was the sign for all of their peoples.