B3Ch82-Bronzeshoulder Clan (Patreon)

Ok finally caught up on the writing I've been working on the past few days. Getting into the fight for the goblin city here now. _________________Mors wanted to run, and Harold spent the first morning holding him to a canter so the rest of the column could keep up.

The high path ran north along the shoulder of the range, frozen hard and slick wherever the sun had touched it, and the stallion hated every stride of the pace Harold set. He tossed his head and snatched at the bit. Twice he tried to stretch out on a straight stretch, and he had to sit deep, haul back on the bit to stop him. Didn’t seem to help that Cassian’s horse was trying to do the same thing.

Behind them, Sarah’s team was a day into learning to ride, and it showed. Robert sat his horse with both fists knotted in the mane and his knees clamped so hard that the poor animal kept stopping to ask what he wanted. Jace had given up on steering and let his mare follow the tail in front of her, slumped in the saddle with the look of a man resigned to his fate. Theo rode stiffly, reading every step the horse took like instructions he didn’t trust. Mira had worked it out in about an hour, and now she rode up and down the length of the column standing in her stirrups, pointing at peaks and whooping at the scenery.

Dorgan rode near the front with his beard tucked into his collar against the wind, humming something low and tuneless that sounded like rocks rolling downhill. He had been humming since dawn. Every time the road climbed he leaned forward in the saddle, as if he could make the mountain come to him faster.

The first bridge was an old span of fitted stone over a gorge, with a long drop and the sound of water somewhere far down in the dark. Theo’s gelding took one look at it and stopped dead. But Theo kept going, over the horse’s ears and into the snowbank at the near end.

Elroy and Jenkins pulled up and stared at the hole he’d left.

“I’m fine!” Theo said from inside the snowbank. “Nobody look at me!”

Adeline brought her horse up beside Mors, knee to knee, and held out a flask without a word. He took it and drank. It was cold coffee with that cream she sometimes added, and it was perfect.

“You’re a saint,” he said.

“I made six.” She took the flask back and tucked it into her saddlebag, out of his reach. “Is this smart with the dwarves?”

“This is a risk, I admit. I'm putting a little more on the table than I like, but I have real leverage.” He nodded back at the pack horse with the casks lashed to its sides. “They like beer.”

“So you brought bribes.”

“I brought diplomacy. It just happens to be cedar barrel-aged.”

She laughed, and he rode on a while with the sound of it, and then he turned his eyes back to the road.

The afternoon brought them up into a pass between two white shoulders of rock, wind-scoured bare, with a long ridge running along the left side of the road.

Sarah went stiff in her saddle.

“Harold.”

She didn’t say anything else. A breath later Robert’s head snapped around toward the tall ridge, his eyes wide.

“Left. The highest ridge. There are two of them, and they’re big.”

Harold pushed his mana senses out along the rock and found nothing, and then he found them, two masses of heat and hunger tucked behind the crest, already moving. Robert had felt them before Sarah had. He filed that away for later.

The wyverns came off the high ridge together.

They were rime-scaled things, gray-blue and frosted at the wing edges, each one twice the length of a horse, with barbed tails held high and curved like scorpions’. The wind of their wings hit the column before the shadows did. Horses screamed. Mors screamed back at them, rearing, and Harold kept his seat and let the stallion come down on all four feet with his ears pinned flat.

“Guard, on me!” Carter roared. “Shields up on the second one!”

Cassian was already gone.

He came off his horse in one of those short ugly bursts, there and then fifteen feet up the road with no stride between, and planted himself square in the path of the first wyvern as it dove. It opened its jaws and spat a spray of frost. The dark, oily dome bloomed off Cassian’s free hand and stopped the frost, and the wyvern hit the barrier with its chest and broke it, and the barbed tail came over its own head in a striking arc straight at him.

The barb hit his shoulder and skated off gray stone.

Cassian used the moment the tail was committed. He drove his spear into the joint where the wing met the body, low and under the scale, and twisted. The wing came half off the wyvern’s frame and it crashed sideways into the snow.

Sarah’s team hit it from the flank before it could get up.

“Tail!” Sarah was out of her saddle and running, sword out, and she called it a full beat before it happened. “Tail, left, now!”

Theo was there with his shield up and snow still in his hair, and the barb slammed into the shield instead of into Jace, who had come out of nowhere at the wyvern’s hind leg and opened the tendon behind its knee. Mira put two arrows into its eye from the back of her horse. The thing reared up on its one good wing, screaming, and its neck came down low as it tried to bite.

Robert’s axe came down on that neck with his whole body behind it, and the sound was like a tree splitting in a hard frost.

Cassian stepped in and put the spear up through the soft part of the jaw into the skull, and the wyvern went still.

Behind them the second one had come down on the guard. Ren took the first strike of the tail on his shield and held. Elroy and Jenkins went in under the wings from either side, both moving in that loose, flowing way they had, and opened its belly between them. Carter took the head off with three hard swings and stood over it, breathing steam.

Harold sat Mors through all of it with his axe in his hand, and he watched Cassian.

The man had never looked to see where Sarah’s people were. He had used her warning, moved when she called it, and trusted Theo’s shield to be where it needed to be. He fought alone in the middle of a group, and he did it well. Watching him take that wing apart at the one joint it couldn’t protect, he was looking at a man who had already started the climb.

Jack had ridden up level with him at some point, bored, both hands crossed on the pommel of his saddle. Younger Wyverns. Their scales hadn't fully grown in yet.

“He’s still leaning on his tricks,” Jack said, looking at Cassian.

“He’s still alive.”

“So’s a cockroach.”

Out on the road, Cassian set his boot on the wyvern’s neck and worked his spear free. Then he looked across the carcass at Sarah, a beat longer than he had looked at anything else that day.

They spent an hour on the carcasses because he refused to leave them unlooted. He and Balfiel got to work immediately, cutting into the carcasses looking for the pieces they wanted, and he hummed as he worked. The nail kept him clean as he worked. He was a handy little fucker.

Frost glands came out of the throats in wine-skin-sized sacs, cold enough to burn through his gloves, and he packed them in snow and wrapped them in oilcloth. The barbs came off the tails. He was working the back scales loose with a knife when Balfiel came and stood over him with his hands in his sleeves.

“You’re cutting against the grain of the scale.”

“For gods sake, Balfiel, that's how you do it.”

“You’ll crack one if you do it that way. Half of those will be dust when one of your cheating crafters takes it.” Balfiel watched him work another one free. “That one, for instance.”

Harold put the cracked scale in the bag anyway and kept cutting.

Back on the road, Cassian brought his horse up alongside Sarah’s. The tall dun dwarfed her mare, and Cassian had to look down a fair way to meet her eyes.

“How did you know it’s tail was going to strike?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Twice?”

“I’m a lucky girl.” Sarah kept her eyes on the road ahead.

“I’ve known lucky people,” Cassian said. “Mostly they die early. You don’t fight like any of them.”

Sarah’s eyes slid sideways and found Harold three horses up. He kept his own on the road. After a moment, she lifted her chin a fraction.

“Practice,” she said. “Lots of it. My brother’s a slave driver.”

Cassian laughed, an easy, honest sound. “Seems to run in the family.” He touched his heel to the dun and moved on up the column.

Harold gave his sister the smallest nod over his shoulder, and she rolled her eyes at him.

Cassian fell in on Mors’s off side. The two big horses eyed each other and decided, for now, not to make it a problem.

“Your sister’s good,” Cassian said.

“Hm, she seems to think she is. She has a lot to learn still.”

Cassian rode beside him a while without saying anything. The wind came down the pass and bit at them both.

“My lord,” he said finally. “About what I asked you.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harold said. “It’s what I’ve got today. You said they were in no immediate danger; you need to give me some time.”

Cassian rubbed his jaw as he waited. Then he nodded, a short honest nod. “Fair, but not too long, sire,” he said, and let the dun drop back.

They made camp in a hollow under an overhang where the wind couldn’t get at them, and it was still cold enough to freeze the water skins solid. The guard pitched the tents tight in a ring around the fires and set a double watch without being told.

Jampa sat down cross-legged in the open snow beyond the firelight, in his robes, with his arms bare, and closed his eyes. Two of the younger knights stood wrapped in blankets and watched him for a long time.

“He’s going to die out there,” one of them said.

“He’s going to outlive you,” Corwin said, and went back to his stew.

Harold knelt at the center fire and coaxed it from damp wood, hands open over the kindling, feeding it a thread at a time until the flames stood up and held.

Balfiel watched from the log across from him. “You never told me about the Fire path you completed.” He sipped from a cup of Harold’s own beer while he said it.Harold sighed and reached for his own cup. “That path isn't something I’m interested in getting around. It’s powerful but…” He shook his head. “But there is only so much madness a person can take. And I am finally starting to recover, I think.”

Adeline had taken her tea into her tent. The Redcaps had set themselves around it at four points like standing stones. Robin sat on an upturned crate by her tent flap with his cleaver across his knees, looking at nothing.

The night got deep. The fires burned down to coals. Somewhere out in the dark Jampa was still sitting in the snow, and Harold had nearly talked himself into going to bed.

Then Robin was gone off his crate.

Harold never saw him move. He heard the cleaver land, a wet, hard sound like an axe going into a frozen log, and then a second blow right on top of it. Then he saw what Robin was standing over.

Something lay in the trampled snow three paces short of Adeline’s tent. It was long and thin and pale as old ice, with too many joints in its limbs, and he could see the shapes of the coals through its body. It hadn’t been there. He had been sitting thirty feet away with his mana senses spread over the whole camp, and there had been nothing there but snow and cold air.

Black blood was steaming out of it, and only as it died did it turn solid enough to see.

Harold had his axe in his hand and was halfway to his feet, a beat too late. The nail woke in his chest all at once and hissed.

Across the fire, Balfiel had gone completely still. The cup had stopped halfway to his mouth.

“I didn’t feel it; how could they be awake and moving already. What have you woken this cycle boy?” the old elf said quietly.

“Neither did I.”

The camp came awake around them, and knights came out of the tents with blades bare. Carter was barking for torches. Robin crouched and wiped his cleaver clean on the thing’s flank, unhurried, and stood.

The tent flap opened, and Adeline looked out, a shawl around her shoulders and the teacup still in her hand.

“Robin? What was that?”

“Nothing worth your sleep, my lady.” Robin tucked the cleaver into his belt. “Your tea’s gone cold. I’ll put another pot on for you.”

She looked past him at the thing in the snow, and her face went pale, and she looked at Robin again.

“Thank you,” she said.

The Redcap inclined his head. Then he looked across the coals at Harold, still on one knee with his axe half raised.

“You’d have been late, Count,” Robin said.

He went to put the kettle on.When the camp had settled again, Harold crouched over the thing with a torch, and Balfiel crouched on its other side.

Dead, it was easier to see. It was long, longer than a man laid out, and its limbs bent in four places where there should have been two. The skin had the cloudy look of river ice in early spring, and the torchlight went partway into it and reflected gray. The black blood had frozen where it pooled.

“Glasswalker,” Harold said.

Balfiel looked up at him sharply. “That’s how you know it?”

“I know the name we gave them. Last time, they came down out of the high ice peaks in year eight, I think.” Harold turned the narrow head over with the haft of his axe. The mouth was a ring of small flat teeth, made for scraping. “This is a very young one, I think. Impulsive to intrude on our camp. It should have known better. By year ten, whole companies would wake up short a man and never hear a thing.”

“My people called them sleep-thieves.” Balfiel put two fingers above the body without touching it and frowned. “Feel that.”

Harold reached out with his senses. The body felt cold. It felt like the snow it lay in, like the air above it, like nothing at all.

“It wears the mana around it,” Balfiel said. “Whatever the air is, it is. Cold air, cold beast. Your senses slide off it the way your eyes slide off a pane of glass.” He sat back on his heels. “Which is why I sat there drinking your mediocre beer while it walked past me.”

“It’s good beer.”

“It’s adequate beer.” Balfiel looked at the tent beside them. “Why hers?”

Harold already knew, and he didn’t like knowing it. “They take the weakest thing in the camp. The lowest mana in the herd.” He looked at the tent flap and the warm light behind it. “Everyone else here is a fighter. She’s the only one who isn’t.”

Behind him, the kettle started to hiss, and Robin poured it without looking up.

“How did you catch it?” Harold asked him.

“It has to eat, Count.” Robin set the pot down and wiped his hands. “It smelled of the last man it ate. It walked past your sentries and smelled like dead man.’ Robin looked up and smiled at him, revealing its sharp, pointed teeth. “And my people know that smell better than our own names.”

Harold remembered the red felt cap and decided not to ask a follow-up.

“They should not be this far down yet,” Balfiel said quietly. “Not for years.”

“I know what year it is.” Harold looked down at the thing a long moment. Things were waking ahead of their time, but this was too fast. Or maybe it was the Blackjaws? Already, the mana this deep within them was higher than the mana around the Landing. There was reason these mountains had been so dangerous in his first life. Why Sarah hunted these mountains. 

Then the alchemist in him caught up, and he leaned in closer with the torch.

“There has to be a way to use this carcass,” he murmured. “Jace would cry. Margaret’s people would cry. Every scout we have would sell their own mother for a cloak cut out of this.”

“Don’t touch it with your bare hands,” Balfiel said. “It will take the warmth out of your fingers the same way it takes it from the air, and you’ll lose them.”

Harold was already pulling his gloves back on.

He started on the hide at first light, once the thing had frozen stiff, and he didn’t put a knife near it for the first hour.

He had the guard drag the carcass onto a bed of coals raked out of the night’s fires, and then he had them pitch a tent canvas over the top, staked tight to the snow, with the coals banked underneath. He crawled in after it with his kit and sat cross-legged in the heat, gloves off.

It took a while. The hide sat in the warm, close air and did what it did, and slowly its cloudy ice-color softened to milky, then dull tan, like an old saddle. By the time sweat was running down his back, it looked like ordinary leather. He laid his bare palm on it, and it was warm as a sleeping dog.

The first cut went through like canvas.

He took it off in one piece, working fast while the tent held its heat. When he crawled back out into the snow with it rolled under his arm, the air hit the hide, and it went cold and gray and clear again in his hands. These monsters hunted the cold and winter for a reason. If he looked away from it for a breath, it took him a moment to find it again.

Balfiel was sitting on his log with his breakfast, watching the tent come down.

“Hm,” the old elf said. “Interesting method. But did you preserve its alchemical properties?”

Harold decided that was the nicest thing Balfiel had ever said to him and didn’t push his luck.

Behind the skull, where the neck joined, was the prize. It was a pale lump the size of a walnut, threaded into the spine, and it pulsed faintly with whatever mana was nearest. When he held his hand over it, it shimmered toward warmth. He cut it out carefully and sealed it in a jar of snow, and he already knew what he’d do with it. He was confident he could make a very good potion with that. It wasn’t an ingredient he had ever worked with, but he should be able to make something very, very good with it.

Jace had wandered over at some point and stood looking at the rolled hide with an expression Harold had never seen on him.

“Is that for me?”

“If the crafters and Jessim can imbue it,” Harold said. “Get in line behind Margaret.”

They rode hard all morning and came down into a long valley a little after midday. Sheer gray rock rose on the north side, with a frozen stream at its foot. The column reined in at a word from Harold, and the horses stood blowing.

Sarah rode up beside him and looked at the cliff, then back the way they’d come.

“Didn’t we pass this valley when we explored?” She pointed at the far ridge. “I know that rock. It looks like a goblin’s ass. There’s nothing here, Harold.”

Dorgan barked a laugh from his saddle.

“Good luck finding a dwarven hold that’s trying to hide, lassie.”

He swung down, handed his reins off without looking, and walked to the cliff. He stopped at a stretch of bare rock that looked like every other stretch of bare rock, pulled off one gauntlet, and rapped on it with his knuckles. There were three slow knocks, then two quick ones, a pause, and then one more with the heel of his fist.

Then he stood there.

Nothing happened for a long time. The wind came down the valley, and the horses stamped. Elroy leaned toward Jenkins with his mouth already open, and Jenkins put an elbow in his ribs without looking at him. Dorgan stood perfectly still before the rock with his hands at his sides and his gauntlet tucked under one arm.

“How long do we wait?” Mira whispered.

“As long as it takes,” Dorgan said, without turning his head. “Knocking twice is an insult.”

They waited. Harold felt it through the soles of his boots before he saw it, a deep grinding somewhere inside the mountain. Then a seam appeared in the rock where there had been no seam, and a slab as tall as two men swung inward without a sound.

The envoy came out in a block. There were twenty of them, broad even for dwarves, in heavy plate strapped over with bronze. The straps ran across their shoulders and chests in the pattern of a carrying harness, and their pauldrons were thick bronze plates that made their shoulders look wider than the door. They carried hammers and axes, and every one of them was looking at Harold’s column with frank, flat hostility.

The one at the front had a beard braided into two thick ropes and bound with bronze rings. He looked them over, lingering on the knights, the horses, and the Redcaps standing glamoured as men-at-arms. Then he looked at Harold.

Harold swung down off Mors and stepped forward. “I’m Harold Calder, Count of the Landing. I’ve come to speak with your thane.”

“I know who ye are.” The dwarf’s voice was deep and gravelly. “We heard ye. Every stone from here to the bottom of the world heard the Gemheart call grudmoot on all the Dawi, and heard a human count swear himself to it before the gods.” His eyes narrowed. “We know exactly who ye are.”

Then his eyes moved past Harold’s shoulder and stopped. The whole block of dwarves behind him shifted their grips at once.

“And ye’ve brought the oathbreaker.”

Harold turned. Balfiel sat his horse at the back of the group with his hands crossed on the pommel of his saddle. For a breath the old elf looked every year of his age.

“It has been a couple thousand years,” Balfiel said, and he sounded very tired and very agitated as he looked at Harold. “You would think the beards might find a new word by now.”

Harold looked between them and filed it away. He turned back to the envoy and set a hand on Dorgan’s shoulder.

“This is Dorgan, Guardian of the Gemheart clan. He speaks for Bram Ironhold.”

Behind him, Balfiel went stiff in the saddle. Out of the corner of his eye, Harold saw the old elf’s jaw tighten, and his eyes go to Dorgan and away again, quickly. The hell was his problem? 

The envoy’s lip curled up into his beard.

“The Gemheart are dead,” he said. “Yer reign ended the day yer hold went dark, and it’s been centuries since. Whatever ye are, Guardian, ye’re a ghost knocking on a living door. No matter what this human lord did to bring you back.”

Dorgan didn’t move. “Put yer hand on yer clan’s relic tonight, lad,” he said quietly. “Then tell me ye don’t feel it beat. Even now I can feel the beat in mine own heart.”

The envoy’s mouth closed.

The dwarves behind him had gone very still. Two of them glanced at each other. Then the envoy’s face hardened, and he set the head of his hammer on the ground with a heavy clank.

“Felt it or no, the Gemheart called grudmoot on us. On us, Guardian, by name, before the gods. And now ye bring a human army to our door, and the oathbreaker with ye, and ye expect us to open our halls.”

Twenty hands tightened on twenty hafts. Behind Harold, Carter’s guard shifted their weight in their saddles. He could feel Dorgan’s mana come up under his hand, hot and furious.

Harold stepped forward, and he kept his hands open at his sides where the envoy could see them.

“The Gemheart called grudmoot on the clans,” he said. “Yours was one of them for actions you took as is their right, dwarf.” He let that sit a moment. “But I didn’t ride two days through the mountains to collect a grudge. I came to talk business with your thane.”

“Business.” The envoy said it the way another man might say pox.

“Business.” Harold turned and walked back to the pack horse without hurrying. He worked the lashings loose on one of the small casks, hefted it onto his shoulder, and carried it back. He set it down on the frozen ground between himself and the envoy, right at the line where the open rock met the valley floor.

Then he pulled the bung, filled a horn cup from his own kit, and held it out over the threshold.

Humans last time had a hard time learning how to negotiate with the dwarves. It was simple, though. Dwarves were an honest people and appreciated honest gestures. And there's nothing more honest than sharing a pint.  A dwarf could refuse it, of course, but the envoy had no real reason to do so.

The envoy looked at the cup, then at the twenty armored dwarves at his back, then at Harold.

“Ye know our customs. The oathbreaker taught you that?”

He snorted, “Of course I do, and no, he didn’t, and you keep calling him that; I’ve a mind to call a grudmoot against you for it.” He didn’t know what the deal with Master Balfiel was, but he intended to find out.

The envoy’s jaw worked inside his braids. Then he reached out and took the cup.

He drank like a man doing a duty. Halfway down, he stopped. He lowered the cup and looked into it, and the hostility on his face disappeared. He drank the rest of it slowly.

“What is this?”

“Dark ale from a cedar barrel.” Harold refilled the cup without being asked. “Brewed it myself.”

The envoy held the second cup a while before he drank it. Behind him, one of the dwarves leaned out of line to sniff at the open cask, and his neighbor hauled him back by the harness.

“Thane Toki will see ye,” the envoy said finally. He handed back the empty cup. “Ye, the Guardian, and two more. The rest wait in the valley.” His eyes went past Harold to the back of the column. “The oathbreaker does not set foot under this mountain.”

Balfiel was already climbing down off his horse. He found a flat rock beside the frozen stream, sat on it, and arranged his robe around his knees.

“I have seen the inside of a dwarven hall,” he said. “It looks like the outside of a mountain, only darker. Go on, boy.”

Harold looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded to Dorgan, Jack, and Ren.

“Oh, come on,” Sarah said behind him.

“Babysit the old man,” Harold told her, and followed the envoy into the rock.

The Bronzeshoulder hold had been built for carts. Beside him he could hear Dorgan talking to Jack and Ren about the Bronzeshoulder clan and their role within Dwarven society.“The Bronzeshoulder are a lower tier clan. But don't underestimate them because of it. They are responsible for most of the freight the Dawi move around the world, and this is a relatively small outpost for their clan.”

The entry road was wide enough for two wagons to pass, and it ran down into the mountain on a long, even grade, with iron rails set flush into the stone floor and worn bright from use. Cranes and pulleys hung from the ceiling at every junction. The air smelled of axle grease and coal smoke. Every wall they passed had been cut with marks, rows of small, careful symbols with lines between them, and it took Harold a few hundred paces to understand they were routes, carved into the stone, branching and joining like the veins in the back of a hand.

Dwarves stopped working as they passed. A teamster leading a string of shaggy mountain goats under bronze-capped packs stood in an alcove to let them by and stared at Harold the whole way. A child was hauled out of the road by her collar.The industry they saw here must have taken them centuries to create. It was easy to see how industrious the people could be, and how much effort they put into their homes. The walls and pillars were filled with indescribable artistry. Dwarves slaying greenskins and dragons. Famous duels. Even one section of them farming. There was a reason dwarves were always people's favorites. There was always something so appealing about how they lived.

Dorgan walked beside him with his eyes moving over everything, looking strangely happy.

The thane’s hall sat at a crossroads of four tunnels, and the floor of it was a map. A great disc of polished stone filled the room, cut with the same lines Harold had seen on the walls but larger, with bronze inlaid along the main roads and small worn symbols marking holds and passes and depots. The thane stood at its center. He was old, white-bearded, broad as a door, and his beard was bound in a dozen bronze rings that clicked when he moved his head. He was talking to another dwarf when they entered but quickly turned when he entered.

“Count Calder.” His voice was dry. “Gemheart Guardian.”

“Speak, then. Why come to a Bronzeshoulder Hold?”

Harold walked to the edge of the map and stopped where the bronze line of a deep road ran under his boots.

“I’m marching three hundred thousand men into the Blackjaws to take the goblin city,” he said. “My supply lines run up through passes that’ll be choked with snow and goblin warbands for months. I want to contract your roads. Your haulers, your depots, and your carts, for the length of the campaign.” He named a figure in gold. Then he named the potions he would add to it, by type and by the crate, and watched the thane’s eyes when he got to the healing draughts. “Half on signing. Half when the city falls.”

The thane was quiet a long while, and he shook his head, shaking his braided beard. “That is generous,” he said finally.

“Yes it is.”

“Too generous by half. That kind of coin buys a great deal more than freight.” The thane’s eyes went to Dorgan and stayed there. “We carry for everyone, Count. Every hold, every clan, great and small. That is how a clan our size stays alive when we have to compete with the Mithrilmind and other clans. We do not take sides in a grudge between great ones. We profit from both sides.” He let the ring go. “And the Gemheart called grudmoot on us by name. The Mithrilmind are watching to see which clans jump. I will not be the first to jump into bed with the Gemheart’s human lord.”

He said it politely, but he could see his mind was made up. Harold nodded slowly. He’d expected that. Dwarven stubbornness was famous, and only extraordinary drink could change it. Or leverage.

“Could I have the room?” he said. “Your people. Mine can stay. I give you my word me and mine will abide by guest rules.”

The thane studied him. Then he lifted two fingers, and the guards and clerks along the walls filed out without a word. The heavy door closed behind them.

Harold walked out onto the map. He didn’t look at the thane. He looked down at the floor and followed the bronze line of the third ore road north with his eyes until it ran off the edge of the carved disc into blank stone.

“There’s a cut off the third ore road,” he said quietly. “It isn’t on your floor. It runs north under the Saddle and comes out behind the south forges of the goblin city. You’ve been running iron, coal and other ore supplies through it for years. It’s a part of why the Blackjaw goblins have expanded and gotten as powerful as they are.” He finally looked up. “To a smith-chief called Gutrak, who pays various gemstones and other valuables they find...”

The thane’s hand hung in the air next to his beard, perfectly still. An expression of horror on his face.

Behind Harold, there was a sound like a forge door opening.

He turned. Dorgan had gone dark red above the beard, and his mana was coming off him in a heat Harold could feel on his face from five paces away. His hand had found the haft of his hammer.

“Ye’ve been arming them. They are our sworn enemies!” Dorgan’s voice cracked on it. “The greenskins. Ye’ve been carrying iron to the greenskins while our holds—”

Harold crossed the distance in two strides and put his palm flat on Dorgan’s breastplate.

“Not today, Dorgan.”

“How long, Count! They—”

“I know.” Harold let a little of his aura out. “I know what they did. Not today.”

For a long moment the Guardian stood there with his chest heaving against Harold’s hand and his eyes locked on the thane over Harold’s shoulder. Then, slowly, the hand came off the hammer.

Harold turned back. The thane was looking at Dorgan, and his face had gone the color of old ash. He was seeing exactly what would come through his gates when the rest of the Dawi learned of his betrayal.

“Here’s how this goes,” Harold said, and kept his voice level. “In about a month my army surrounds that city. Every road in and out of it, above ground and below. Any caravan in that cut will get caught by my siege lines, in front of many, many witnesses and a Gemheart Guardian. Who will all talk. And what will happen when the other clans start asking questions? We both know they would love an opportunity to take your businesses.” He tipped his head at Dorgan. “You can stop running freight now and pray nobody looks backward. Or you come under the Gemheart’s protection. Your part of the Bronzeshoulder clan will join under the Gemheart clan. What you carried before is a matter for Bram’s grudmoot to settle among family, quietly.” He paused. “Outside it, it’s a matter for the Mithrilmind. The proof is there in the city, and I will have it when I take it. And I will take it.”

The thane said nothing. His eyes had gone down to the floor, to the blank stone past the edge of the carved disc where no road was marked.

“And I’ll want more than haulage,” Harold said. “I want every tunnel you’ve cut into that city, on paper. And guides who’ve walked them.”

“That burns us.” The thane’s voice was very quiet. “If the greenskins learn we showed you the underroads—”

“Then they learn you picked a side.” Harold shrugged. “Everybody’s going to have to pick one before this is over. I’m offering you the one that’s still standing at the end. Besides. You’ll be moving to the Basin to join the Gemheart, remember. It’s time for the Dawi to remember who they were.”

The thane was silent for a long time. Then he lifted his hand back to his beard and ran his hand through it.

“I’ll need time, Count. We are but a small section of the Bronzeshoulder. This isn’t a thing a thane decides alone. The elders will need to hear it, and some of them won’t like it. We have built wealth supplying the greenskins.”

He looked around the room, examining the carvings and work they had put into this mountain. “You have a day, Thane.”

The thane looked at him a long moment, as if he’d expected an argument and didn’t know what to do. Then he walked to a side table, came back with two cups, and held one out.

“Yer cask,” he said. “Since the warden’s drunk half of it.”

Harold filled both cups from the flask on his belt, and they drank together in the middle of the map, without a word between them. 

At the door, Harold looked back. “I’ll be with my people, Thane Toki. Thank you for the hospitality.”

He cocked his head as he looked at him while Ren furiously talked to a fuming Dorgan. “Everything we do follows us home, Thane. Trust me, I’d know better than most.” 

The thane hadn’t moved. He stood alone in the center of his floor with the empty cup hanging from his fingers, looking down at the blank stone north of the third ore road.