Song of the First Tiding
By Robert Terry WatsoniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Robert Terry Watson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-0795-9Contents
Prologue.........................................xiii1. N'nak.........................................12. First Warning.................................73. The Kingdom...................................124. Antarcus......................................195. Vizar.........................................266. Bital.........................................307. Opening Moves.................................358. The Republic..................................439. Counterweight.................................5110. Intercalations...............................5711. First Blood..................................6312. The Kingdom Come.............................6913. Impact.......................................7414. Brindalut....................................7915. Oxitan.......................................8316. Coalescence and Conflict.....................8717. The Gathering Storm..........................9118. Breakpoint...................................9419. Encounter....................................10020. A Quest Is Born..............................10621. A World at War...............................11022. The Betrayer.................................11623. The Journey Begins...........................12024. Sangti.......................................12525. Recoil.......................................13026. Reunion......................................13727. Caincairn....................................14228. The Way Forward..............................14729. Interlude....................................15230. Land of the Masters..........................15731. Return of the Dwarf..........................16332. Winterlude...................................16833. Nadir........................................17234. Land of the Ancients.........................17735. Prelude......................................18536. Spiral.......................................19237. Circle.......................................19838. Ellipse......................................20339. Countdown....................................21040. Reset........................................21541. The Black Demon..............................22242. The Final Call...............................22743. Questpoint...................................23244. Inversion....................................23645. For Whom the Bell Tolls......................24146. Fortune......................................24647. Convergence..................................250Epilogue.........................................252
Chapter One
N'nak
"I-I'm sorry, N'nak." Esmeralda's soft, brown eyes looked to the earth that she wished would open and swallow her. Her cream hempen dress, the best her family could afford, flapped softly against her budding voluptuousness in the gentle afternoon breeze. N'nak could feel the pit of his gut tighten, as his world seemed to dissolve around him. He already knew what was coming, but it didn't make it any easier to bear hearing the words.
"Dream boy strikes again," he thought bitterly. The fading autumn sunlight glinted in the tears swelling in the corners of the young girl's eyes.
"Your music makes my heart soar, and I love the tales of your adventures with the dwarves and Freeholders," she said quietly, her words lined with pain. "But I can't live on music and tales. I've known you for most of our lives and I love you, but in the fourteen years since your Bloodrite, you haven't changed a bit. By the time you're fifty, you are supposed to be a man. That means responsibility and hard work, but you show no interest in either."
"B-but I can change. I just need more time," the youth muttered as he fought back the assault of his own tears.
"Sweetheart, you're out of time. It's all my family can do to put food on the table, working in the mines all day and the forges half the night. You are luckier than most here. Your father was able to build a successful business and work his way out of the mines. As his eldest son, you were all set to take it over, but instead of taking advantage of your special relationship with the dwarves to improve the tools your family makes and sells, you run off to Petralut to play, and return with useless toys for your precious bag of tricks. You left Jarak with no choice but to turn what should have been yours over to your younger brother."
N'nak winced inwardly as he recalled the pain on his father's face, and his own as well, at disappointing him, but also his relief and indifference at the loss of his inheritance.
Esmeralda burst loudly into tears as she covered her face with her hands and began to tremble uncontrollably. Her outburst shocked the youth back to the present. "Andrus has asked me to marry him."
"What? But we ..." he stammered. "You can't! He wouldn't!"
"I can and he did and I will," the girl replied, her bottom lip trembling, but her eyes now hard with determination.
N'nak erupted in rage. "My own brother! How could he?"
"He's earned it," she replied defensively. "He's done all the hard work while you've spent fourteen years playing around!"
The youth bolted upright from the fallen log on which they had been sitting, his self control completely lost to guilt and umbrage. "You can't do this! It isn't right! I won't let you! I'll ..."
Suddenly, a horrified gasp escaped through the cascade of Esmeralda's weeping. N'nak wheeled about to discern the source of her abrupt change of mood. There stood a being who seemed wrought of stone and steel. His skin was blue-white. He was as wide as he was tall, he wore shining armor so tight and flexible it seemed a second, silvery skin.
"Grrumpf, what are you doing here?" N'nak asked, all else forgotten.
An impossibly deep, gravelly voice replied, "N'nak, you must come with me now!"
* * *
N'nak frowned back at the distant, glowering eye of flame, its sullen redness spidering the jet intensity of the autumn night with bloody streaks that greasily highlighted the craggy peaks that framed it. Moving with the fluid stealth of a cat on the hunt, the muscular youth brought the magnascope to his face. Its design not only brought the distant scene right to his eyes, but lightened the nocturnal veil as well. The meaning of what he spied reflected itself in the grim faces of his companions. The broad dwarven faces, deeply lined, were scarcely expressive at the best of times, but now their thick, bluish lips were all distinctly set in deep, inverted crescents, their metallic, pupiless eyes a duller grey than normal. "Do you concur with our assessment?" rumbled the one called Grrumpf. His normally bluish-white face was flushed to a ruddy hue and his eyes showed a coppery cast, even at this distance from the flames. His voice was like low, distant thunder with a harmonic of rockslide. "I see a vast gathering of weapons and a mustering of bodies so great I can see no end to the streaming of them even with my foreyes on its strongest setting. You are right my friend. They are massing for imminent attack."
As one, the other dwarves in the party regarded the leader of their small, volunteer militia. Although N'nak, unlike most men, spoke Dwarventongue as intelligibly as the limitations of his vocal apparatus allowed, Grrumpf's subordinates looked to their captain for a response. Despite the healthy trade that went on between Dwarf and Man, there was much mistrust between the two Folk of the First Tiding. The dwarves, like their elven cousins, loved the human Arts, and their amazing machines as well, but they distrusted human passions and the divisiveness that seemed to attend them at every turn.
Although the dwarves found the blood-food of man pleasurable, they had no actual need of it, for they could draw the sustenance of Life from the very earth itself. Neither had dwarves need of procreation, nor did they suffer any of its attendant urges, for they were virtually immortal. Their mountain mines provided them with all the gold and precious gems they could possibly require or desire. Thus, they shared few of Mankind's overriding internal pressures. Nevertheless, the danger that now plainly presented itself was something they all very clearly shared.
The demons, strong as dwarves, quick as elves, and joyously destructive, had pushed out of the hinterlands of the far north three hundred years ago, no longer content to rule over the emptiness of sulfur and phosphorus in the Far Place where the Fall of the Star had first stricken the Earth. As the mountains pushed up out of the Great Green, the demons poured forth with the new volcanoes that regularly erupted in the far north.
The dwarves had held dominion over all the mountains since the time of the Fallen Star, and greatly prized the inexhaustible mineral wealth in continuous creation there. The savage and bitter Pyrogean War raged for two hundred years between dwarf and demon. The dwarves were implacable, courageous and stubbornly determined beyond human capacity of understanding. However, the demons were quicker, more numerous and utterly ruthless.
The dwarves were able to contain the demons in the heroic Battle of Blood River Pass and the Truce of Pyrogea left them with the southernmost ridges of the Dwarfline Mountains, the oldest and least volcanically active of the chain. This truce had stood, albeit uneasily at times, for a hundred years. The agreement to exclude heavy armament from the borderlands was now here clearly and brazenly broken. The dwarves had but two choices, to remain unresponsive and be overrun, or challenge the violation, which would be an irreversible invitation to war.
The dwarves had been observing this gathering force all autumn long, but N'nak, on Grrumpf's recommendation, was the first man they informed. He was special to the dwarves, especially to Grrumpf, whom he had known almost all his life. Born in the mining country of the northern Republic, N'nak's father, Jarak, had worked his way out of the mines to become a shopkeeper selling supplies and equipment to the subsistence miners in the foothills bordering the Dwarflines. Their village was not far from the outlying districts of the Freeholder entrepot of Petralut. Here, man and dwarf traded machines, merriment and meat for the finest armor, hand tools, weapons and jewelry that Andeluvia had to offer.
As for N'nak himself, he was paralyzed with indecision. It was clear that inaction was not an option, but he was at a loss as to what he should do, or indeed, what could be done. The very existence of the demons was not a commonplace of human knowledge. From the green softness of the human domains of Andeluvia, the Pyrogean War was perceived as nothing more than the habitual geological restlessness of the northlands.
For all of his short life, the doughty dwarves had kept the roiling, demonic threat bottled up beyond their borders. N'nak, as an eldest son, was expected to assume the cares of his family's business, and thus of the wider world in general, but his overriding predilection was to play his spritepipe and wander the foothills of his north Republic home.
Even as a child of scarce twenty suns, N'nak had a flair for the spritepipe, a small copper tube which he could make sing like the birds in the open woodlands surrounding his family's village. On one such afternoon frolic after his chores were done, N'nak wandered off fluting a joyous air of boyhood. A silvery glint happened to catch his eye. Following the direction of its source, the boy came upon Grrumpf, poorly concealed in a thicket of firethorn. His silvery eyes regarded the boy impassively, but his wide, wrinkled face radiated a gentle expression that was as close as a dwarf could get to a smile.
This had been the beginning of the friendship between the two, which had led inevitably to the present moment, one for which the youth was completely unprepared. After all, who was he but an irresponsible dreamer whose flighty comings and goings drove his parents to distraction and his siblings to resentment over the extra burdens his unreliability created for them?
N'nak roused himself back to the stark reality of the present, his head spinning with the disorientation of his newly acquired knowledge of the situation.
"We have been marshalling our forces to the passes, strengthening our fortifications there, and have mounted our best cannon as well, but that can only buy time; we are overwhelmingly outnumbered." Grrumpf's usual rumble carried the undertone of a growl as he continued, "You must rally your contentious folk to arms. If we fall, so will the Freeholds. The Kingdom will be easily overrun; their primitive weaponry will be useless, even with the depth of their numbers. The demons are the absolute deadliest of foes. They are as strong as we are; they can break a man to pieces, literally pull him apart, with no more effort than you would expend in stretching a kink out of your back. Their cursed hides are as tough as an elephant's. However, they are as quick as elves, far faster than any man is. Blood makes them stronger, but they can live by eating dirt as we do. They are totally without mercy, they love pain and death; wails of anguish are their very heartstrings. If we lose the passes, the whole of Mankind could be soon reduced to the islands of the Emerald Chain, for the demons cannot forebear The Deep, or indeed any water."
N'nak shivered inwardly at the recollection of what he had witnessed through the foreyes. He had never even seen a demon before. In the world of men, they were a rumor, a legend, a superstition to build a cult upon, or a bedtime story to frighten naughty children. And now he had seen not one, but more than he could count! Grrumpf looked at his friend with as much sympathy as the blank silver balls of his eyes could express as he saw the light of full realization write itself into N'nak's face.
Chapter Two
First Warning
Without bothering to take the time to don the regalia appropriate to a royal audience, Grrumpf brought N'nak before his king, Petchrok. They seem to have been expected, for there was none of the usual officious delay common to such procedures. Grrumpf had led his friend down through the exquisitely sculpted tunnels. Recurring rectilinear patterns lined the walls in multicolored metals that threw back iridescent reflections of the elvenlight globe that N'nak kept in what he called his bag of tricks. Its soft gleam revealed great, vaulted arches and vast chambers ringing with the blows of hammers and the roar of forges. He wondered how the dwarves could execute such magnificent craft in total darkness. He knew they could see without light, the only folk who could do so, but he still could not imagine it.
The dwarf king's voice was even deeper and more gravelly than Grrumpf's. "Refresh your strength while we talk, for you must leave no sooner have we done here."
Petchrok indicated a golden platter on a round stone table full of cheese, slices of cold meat, a loaf of bread and some raw carrots. A pitcher of ale and two tankards adjoined the platter. Man and dwarf ate and drank noisily while the king continued, "We have done everything we can. Every cannon, ballista, and catapult we have is in and above the passes and along Dwarfline Ridge. The approaches to the Ridge from the other side have been mined for a tenth of a league. Our pumps are primed to direct the water from our subterranean springs into the enemy, or in extremis, to flood these very chambers."
A muscle imperceptibly twitched in his bald, blue-white face. The silver balls of his eyes stared forward impassively, yet there was a whisper of a quaver in the basso rumble of his voice and his tiny, pointed ears seemed to cling even more tightly to his skull.
"Our number is ten thousand in all the dwarven lands. The elves are of like number. Even our allies, the Freeholders, with all their marvels, are no more than fifty thousands. The demons are twenty times our number and still their encampments grow. They openly, baldly flout the Truce without fear of discovery or reprisal. Our only choices are to attack or await attack ourselves." The deep reverberation of his voice fell silent as he awaited a response.
"What would you have me do?" N'nak shrugged his ample shoulders in bemusement. "I am but a merchant's son, no warrior nor grand personage of any kind."
"You must warn the bulk of Mankind," rumbled the king. "There are a million souls between the Republic and the Kingdom. They will all be lost if we fall. And fall we will, one by one, if we make belated, separate stands."
"You've got to be kidding, I don't know anybody, I carry a cheap bronze sword I've never used ..." the man interrupted, forgetting himself and losing the formal tone with which he had been addressing the monarch.
Ignoring him, Petchrok thundered on, "We are too slow and have uneasy relations with men. We trade our goods and seek and admire your stories and songs. But your fellowship with Grrumpf (his pronunciation of the name sounded like a rockslide during an earthquake) is unique among both our peoples. The diplomatic machinery of Brindalut is designed to deal with the disputes among the signatories of the Great Accord, but the pressure of so great an external threat could strain the very mistrust that made it necessary in the first place. Few men outside the Freehold even know of the existence of the demons. Now they are going to have to learn."
"I take it you have a plan." N'nak responded with a jocularity that belied the terror cramping his guts. "If I'm the best we've got we are in even deeper trouble than I thought."
"I sure don't have a clue." Grrumpf chortled like a contrabassoon. "Your spritepipe gladdens my heart, but you are hardly more than a boy and certainly no warrior," he added gravely.
Briefly, a line of what might have been exasperation crossed the king's forehead. "A warrior would be perceived as a threat. The fear and jealousy that divides the Three Nations of Man would counter the element of trust necessary to the rapid formation of an effective alliance. Your very lightness of heart and freedom of spirit are what are called for here. The rigidity of mutual suspicion is our greatest enemy now. You will go to Republic City to warn the Regent. He will have to find an accommodation with the Kingdom if either is to survive."
"Oh sure, nothing to it.", the youth responded, an edge of sarcasm seeping into his voice. "The Regent is a personal friend of mine."
"You will not go unaided or alone." The king's metallic eyes glittered in time to his voice's cavernous resonance. "Grrumpf will go with you for companionship, protection and credibility. I will give you an extra mount with full saddle packs, a large sack of gold to grease the squeaky wheels of your acquisitive system and more."
The king then removed a small metal box from a compartment in the right armrest of his gem-encrusted throne. The box shimmered in an indeterminate hue that seemed to shift unpredictably. Petchrok opened it. "This is the signet of the dwarven kingdom." N'nak saw a small, round, gold medallion with a pattern of gems in an inverted 'T', all joined by threads of platinum. At the top was a diamond, below it an alexandrite, bright blue in the elven light. Directly under them, in the middle of the crossbar, was a topaz, to the right, an emerald, on the left a ruby. N'nak could only gape in stunned amazement. Th ere was more wealth in this one, small object than in the whole relatively prosperous town where his family now lived.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Song of the First Tidingby Robert Terry Watson Copyright © 2010 by Robert Terry Watson. Excerpted by permission.
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