B3CH83-The Death of Thane Toki (Patreon)

Harold shouldered the tent flap aside and stepped out into a morning cold enough to make his teeth ache. The first thing he saw was Robin pouring tea for Adeline.

She sat on a log by the center fire with a blanket over her knees and her leather folio open on her lap. The Redcap stood at her elbow with the kettle and filled her cup, not a hair over. Two more of his kind stood at the edge of the firelight behind her, still as fence posts, frost on their shoulders.

Balfiel sat across the fire with his hands wrapped around a cup he hadn’t touched. The skin under his eyes had gone the color of old ash, and his robe still had last night’s creases in it. Since Harold came back out of the mountain, the old elf had kept to himself and spoken to no one. Twice last night Harold had caught him staring across the camp at Dorgan and the other Gemheart guardians, and both times Balfiel had found something else to look at the moment he noticed.

Adeline looked up from the folio as he came over. “Morning, hun. I have news for you.”

“Good news?”

“News.” She turned a page. “Margaret authorized two strikes last night.”

That woke him up faster than coffee would have. Robin was already offering him a cup of tea, and Harold waved it off without looking. Disgusting plant juice. Coffee was different and he’d stand by that. The Redcap set the kettle down, went to Adeline’s pack, returned with the little hand mill and the press, tipped beans into the mill, and started grinding. 

Harold sat down on the log next to her. “Who?”

“Two lords on the western edge of the peninsula. They’ve been arguing over a stretch of river bottom since autumn. One of them decided to settle it by moving his boundary stones in the night, and the other one’s people caught them at it. It turned into a skirmish.” She traced a line on the page with one finger. “Nine dead between them. She sent the eagles for both steles.”

“Both?”

“Yep.” Adeline sipped her tea. “I don’t disagree with her. You were always going to need to make an example.”

“Neither do I.” Harold rubbed his jaw. “Fallout?”

“Some noise on the forums. There’ll be more once people wake up and read it.” She turned the folio so he could see a page of notes. “Most of it isn’t outrage, though. It’s lords asking each other how to protect their steles.”

“They’ll just get more careful about not being caught.”

“Mm. They’re building bunkers.” She tapped the page. “Stone walls around the stele, roofs over them, two or three layers deep. A lot of questions about if it's possible to move the stele. Guess people haven't caught on to your stele relocation token trick.”

A slow grin spread across Harold’s face. “Let them dig.”

“It won’t stop an eagle?”

“It’ll stop the first bomb. I’ll send a second.” He shrugged. “But if they are worried about protecting their steles, they aren't worried about their other schemes, so I’ll take it. Anything else?”

“Colonel Hale sent his report on the march.” She turned to a thicker bundle of pages tied with string. “The goblin city is fighting for time. They’ve built fortified positions across the approaches, stone fortifications on the high ground and a few walled villages they’ve turned into forts. In between, they’re hitting the columns with raids and ambushes at the passes.”

“Of course they are,” he grumbled.

“The scouts you trained are finding most of the ambushes before they spring, along with the adventurers who focus on perception perks. But clearing each position costs time, and the army’s moving slower than Hale planned.” She ran a finger down the page. “Casualties are light so far. About four hundred dead across all four columns.”

Harold grunted. “At least it’s that few. We don’t have the potions to keep the whole army on its feet. That is lighter than expected so far, though.”

“He also sent the results from the Battle Simulation Stone.” Adeline flipped to the next page and her mouth twitched. “He’s very thorough about it. The Legion’s perk gain was light. Most of what we got came from the newer men, the ones still missing perks the rest of the Legion considers basic. But the Legion as a whole earned one perk for winning a large-scale battle while taking less than 1% casualties. It's a rare perk and gives them an 8% boost to both damage and morale.”

“That alone was worth the stone.”

“He says so too. Then there’s the other side.” She read straight off the page. “Every man the lords fielded gained at least one perk on average, and that was while they were getting their hinnies kicked.”

Harold looked at her over the rim of the cup while waiting on his coffee. “Hinny?”

“His word. Underlined.” She smiled into her tea. “I think Margaret’s been editing his language.”

Robin poured coffee into Harold’s cup. It was black and hot and smelled perfectly made. He thanked the Redcap, and he held the cup under his nose and breathed it in deep before he drank.

“He recommends,” Adeline went on, “that we make the fights as even as possible from now on. The closer the match, the more both sides gain.”

Harold hummed into his coffee. “He’s right, and it doesn’t matter yet. That stone has to soak mana for weeks before it’s ready to use again. I’ll need to buy more next time I get into the System store.”

He pulled up his panel while he drank and checked the reputation board. He already knew what he would find at the top, and it was still there.

Reputation Rankings — Humanity 1. Count Harold Calder — The Landing — 19,640

The number had more than doubled since he last looked. The notifications that explained it were stacked in the corner of his sight, still unread, and he flicked through them.

Command — Lead a host exceeding 50,000. Reputation granted. Command — Lead a host exceeding 100,000. Reputation granted. Diplomacy — Broker an alliance with a Court of the Fae. Reputation granted. Defense — Defend the seat of your power against invasion. Reputation granted.

The next command threshold was five hundred thousand, and he wouldn’t see that one until the armies joined up in the north against the Velthari. He scrolled down. The lord in second place had climbed about two thousand points in the same stretch. Harold had more than tripled.

That would come to around another fifty merits in the store, and he was going to need every one of them.

He closed the panel. “Any word from Brennig?”

Adeline nodded. “He starts on the relic guardians today. He’s expecting four hundred Blackjaw berserkers, and he’s prepared for five.”

Harold hummed into his coffee again and turned that over. Four hundred berserkers in a fortified position were a lot of berserkers. But Brennig had his household century and a century of the Knights, plus Caswell and Urial and their people, and Brennig never walked into anything he hadn’t already found three ways out of.

“I’ll trust Brennig with it,” he said finally. “I’m more worried about the price he’s going to ask when he brings it out.”

Even Adeline winced at that.

“It won’t be cheap,” she murmured. “Though we can negotiate him down. He’s using the Legion’s knights to recover it.”

“He’ll argue the knights were a loan.”

“Then I’ll argue the interest.”

He laughed into his cup.

Boots crunched in the snow behind them. Harold turned to find Dorgan coming across the camp with two of the other Gemheart guardians at his back, all three of them in full plate. The other two looked frazzled, beards uncombed, eyes red at the rims, as if they’d spent the whole night arguing. Dorgan looked sheepish.

“Sire.” Dorgan stopped a pace short of the fire. “May we speak with ye?”

Harold looked the three of them over and motioned for him to go on.

“If this is about the Bronzeshoulder,” he said, “and telling them they’ll submit to the judgment of Clan Gemheart, that’s not negotiable.”

Something moved at the edge of his sight. Balfiel was on his feet, and somehow he was standing at Harold’s shoulder with his untouched cup still in his hand, listening hard. Harold looked at him sideways. The old elf didn’t look back.

The hell is wrong with him?

Dorgan’s hands went to his beard and twisted in it for a moment. Then his face firmed up, and he let it go.

“Sire. What that hold did would have the Dawi up in arms. Every clan under every mountain.” His voice was low and rough. “If the Bronzeshoulder seek shelter under the Gemheart, it won’t be seen as punishment. It’ll be seen as the Gemheart sheltering betrayers. The goblins and the orks are our blood enemies, sire. They’ve hunted us and killed us for more generations than ye’ve got words for.”

“I understand that,” Harold said. “But the rest of the Dawi are already against us. Bram called Grudmoot them. We stand to gain far more from adding dwarves to the Gemheart than we lose by angering clans who already hate us.”

“Boy,” Balfiel said, “you have it wrong.”

Harold turned and looked at him fully.

“The Dawi are against you right now. But they are not greatly moved to act against you.” Balfiel’s voice was tired but firm. “The Gemheart returning is momentous to them, but they have time. Centuries, by their way of counting. The Gemheart are a few thousand dwarves with a human lord. They do not have the numbers or the strength to truly compete, and the great clans know it.” He turned the cup slowly in his hands. “But if they shelter the hold that sold supplies to the greenskins and put them under your banner, and every clan from here to the bottom of the world will move together. They will not argue about it. They will simply come.” He let out a long breath. “You are making a long-term mistake based on faulty information.”

Harold looked between the two of them, frustrated, and not entirely sure what he’d missed.

“Then what would you suggest, Dorgan?”

Dorgan’s face went dark. His hand went back into his beard and wrenched at it. Then he brought the haft of his axe down on the frozen ground hard enough that the snow jumped around it.

“The guilty must be held to account.” His voice cracked. “They must die. It isn’t a thing that can be bargained, sire. They betrayed the Dawi to our blood enemies. They must die.”

The two guardians behind him didn’t say anything, but they both nodded together.

Balfiel shifted his weight. For a moment he looked uncomfortable, as if the words in his mouth tasted wrong.

“They will all be this unyielding about it, Harold,” he said. “In the Dawi’s past, during their crucible, they chose a boon. Increased strength, damage, and morale against goblins and orks, everything greenskin. It served them well in the war that followed.” He looked at the fire. “As with most things the System gives, there were side effects. They hate them, boy. It is in their blood now. In their bones.”

Understanding settled over Harold’s face. He’d known the dwarves hated the greenskins.

But he kept his eyes on Balfiel, and he didn’t look away.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” He said it quietly. “Now isn’t the time. But we will speak about it.”

The old elf held his gaze a moment, and he looked miserable. Then he nodded.

“Later, boy.”

Harold turned back to Dorgan. “All right. So the guilty die. That doesn’t mean the whole hold gets purged. There are children in that mountain, Dorgan.”

“Aye. I’m not asking for the bairns.” Dorgan’s eyes didn’t waver. “The guilty die. The rest forsake the Bronzeshoulder name. All of them, every last one, and they make the pilgrimage to the Gemheart on their own feet. The ones who survive the road, we take in, and they become Gemheart.” His jaw set hard. “Until then, they walk as part of no clan. Same as we did for three hundred years.”

Harold looked at him a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.

“Poetic justice it is, then.”

He knocked back the rest of his coffee and stood, and clapped his hands once in the cold. Across the camp, heads came up from bedrolls and cookpots.

“Get the boys up,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

The column came down into the valley a little before noon and drew up on the frozen stream in the same place they had stood the day before. No one needed telling to be quiet.

Harold swung down off Mors and walked to the cliff. He stopped at the stretch of bare rock Dorgan had knocked on yesterday, the one that looked like every other stretch of bare rock in the valley, and he pulled off his right gauntlet and handed it back to Ren without looking.

Then he let the mana come up.

He braided it the way he had in the Silent Cave and sank it down his arm into the bone, strand over strand, until his hand felt heavy as a forge hammer and the skin over his knuckles had gone tight. 

He knocked the way Dorgan had knocked. Three slow, two quick, a pause, and one with the heel of his fist.

Each blow went into the mountain like a ram into a gate. The first one cracked the frost off the cliff face in a sheet that came down around his shoulders. By the last, he could feel the knock going away from him through the rock, down and down, into halls he’d walked through yesterday, into rooms he hadn’t, and he knew that every dwarf in that hold had heard the Count of the Landing come back for his answer.

He stepped back and pulled his gauntlet on again.

“Stack up,” he said.

The guard came off their horses and formed on the rock face in silence, two files of them on either side of the place the seam had opened yesterday, shields up and blades bare. Carter took the left file, and Jack took the right, the old axe in his fist and the lava king’s crown already hammered into the brow of a new helm. Dorgan and his two guardians stood at the very front of Jack’s file, and none of the three had said a word since they left. Elroy and Jenkins stood behind them, bouncing on their toes.

Then they waited.

The sun moved across the valley. The horses stamped and blew, then the handlers took them back down the stream. Somebody’s stomach growled loud enough to carry, and three knights glared at Corwin, who glared back. Behind them, out by the stream, Adeline sat on Balfiel’s flat rock from yesterday with her folio on her knees and two Redcaps at her shoulders. The Redcaps would protect her. Harold stood off to one side of the seam, arms folded, and watched the rock.

“How long do we give them?” Carter asked, low, without turning his head.

“As long as it takes,” Harold said. “Knocking twice is an insult.”

Behind him, Dorgan grunted his approval.

Nearly an hour passed before the mountain moved.

Harold felt it in the soles of his boots first, the same deep grinding as yesterday, but slower this time and careful about it, the sound of somebody inside opening a door a finger’s width at a time. A line of shadow appeared in the bare rock where there hadn’t been a line, and it widened by a crack, and another crack, until he could see lamplight on the other side of it and the edge of a bronze-strapped pauldron.

Harold didn’t wait to see whose.

He threw everything he had into his legs, the braids snapping tight down his thighs and into the soles of his feet, and he kicked the door.

The slab tore out of whoever was holding it. It swung around on its hidden hinges so fast the air screamed through the gap behind it, and it hit the inner wall of the mountain with a crack he felt in his teeth. Rock dust came down off the ceiling of the entry road in a gray sheet. Somebody inside was shouting.

Dorgan went through the gap first, axe up and beard flying, with a roar Harold had never heard come out of him before.

“DEATH!” The word echoed down the entry road and bounced off the stone. “DEATH TO THOSE WHO BETRAYED THE DAWI!”

His two guardians went in on his heels, roaring the same thing, and the guard poured in after them in two files.

Elroy whooped as he went past. “Oh, now we’re having a day!”

Sarah’s team came up from the back at a walk, weapons out, with Cassian among them. Mira was bouncing on the balls of her feet, both hands wrapped around her bow, and Theo had his shield up in front of her before she could get ahead of him. Robert looked green, and he went in anyway.

Cassian slowed as he passed and nodded to Harold without breaking stride.

“Never a dull moment around you, sire.” He rolled the spear off his back. “Don’t forget my ask.”

Then he was through the door, and the dark took him.

Harold stood at the threshold of the mountain and listened. The fighting came back up the entry road at him, twisted around in the stone and broken into pieces. There was the ring of steel on bronze, a dwarf’s voice raised and cut off, Carter bellowing an order, and under all of it the steady, heavy sound of Dorgan’s war cry, still going.

Soft footsteps came up beside him on the snow. Jampa stood at his shoulder in his red robes with his bare arms folded, and for a long moment he only looked at Harold.

Then he cocked his head.

“You are settled on this course, then?” His voice was mild. “I sense no turmoil in your heart over these deaths.”

Harold let out a long breath. Balfiel came up on his other side and stood there, saying nothing, and watched the open door.

“No.” Harold kept his eyes on the open door. “This has to happen, for any real peace in these lands. Death is nearly always a bad thing.” The sounds of fighting came up the entry road at him, and he didn’t flinch from them. “But sometimes you have to cut out the tumor so the rest of the body can heal.”

Jampa looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment. Then he nodded slowly, turned, and walked back across the snow toward the stream.

“I think I will keep Ms. Adeline company,” he said over his shoulder. “It is such a pleasant day out here.” His eyes wandered up the cliff face, over the rock and the dark gap in it, and something passed across his face. “And I sense great turmoil in the mountain,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “Great turmoil.”

Adeline shifted on her rock to make room, and when he sat down beside her, she put an arm around him and pulled him in against her side. The two Redcaps at her shoulders didn’t move.

Harold closed his eyes. He let one breath leave him, and when he opened them again, his face had gone still and set. He nodded to Balfiel.

The old elf stopped at the threshold of the mountain. For half a breath he stood with the toes of his boots on the line where the open rock met the valley floor, and he looked down at it. Then he stepped over it and walked into the dark at Harold’s side.

The first dwarf they passed was dead.

He lay on his back against the wall of the entry road with his hammer still in his hand and his bronze pauldron split open, and the rails set into the floor around him were dark and wet. Ten paces on, two more sat against the wall bound wrist to ankle with their own harness straps, alive and furious and gagged, one of them with a lump rising on his temple the size of an egg. Then another dead, face down across the rails. Then another.

There were more dead than bound.

Harold had told his people to knock them down where they could and kill them where they couldn’t. These weren’t goblins. A Bronzeshoulder hauler in full plate with a hammer in his hands could take a knight’s head off at the shoulders, and Harold wasn’t going to lose men to a mercy the dwarves wouldn’t have shown.

Boots came up behind them, and a squad of the guard fell in around the two of them without a word, four in front and four behind, shields up. 

Somewhere deeper in, Dorgan was still roaring. The words broke apart in the long tunnels and came back in pieces, blood-traitors and death, over and over, with the clash of steel under them. Harold lengthened his stride.

They came to the crossroads where the four tunnels met. Two of them were quiet. Noise was pouring out of the third, and he followed it.

“WAIT!” That was Sarah, up ahead and around a bend, her voice cracking high. “Trap above! STOP!”

A heavy grinding came from the ceiling, then a crash that shook dust down onto Harold’s shoulders, and nobody screamed.

“PUSH!” Carter bellowed.

“Pot out!” That was Jack, perfectly bored. “PUSH!”

The tunnel ahead lit up white for a heartbeat and the sound of it slapped Harold in the face. Then came the shields, slamming forward together, and the short, hard, wet sounds of the blades going in.

It never stopped. Every time the noise faltered, somebody yelled the next thing, and the whole body of them moved on it without breaking stride. Harold’s people had been drilled for the big set-piece fights, lines and blocks and shield walls on open ground. But this was what they were built for. They had freedom to use their mana freely, and hit everything on the other side before it could get its feet under it, and keep hitting it until there was nothing left standing to hit. Small-unit fights were perfect for a unit like them.

The older men in his guard, like Ren and Corwin, were most of the way through the Bladeguard path, and they had finished the dwarven Guardian path on top of it. Very few fighters breathing anywhere on the continent in the human sphere could stand against them. Then on top of that, they were all armed with system weapons and armor. A small hold of haulers and teamsters from a support clan, however strong their arms were, never stood a chance.

Harold came around the bend into the smoke, and the squad around him spread out to cover him.

The tunnel opened into a hall, and the hall was full of dwarves.

It was a vaulted loading floor, wide enough to turn a goat train, with crane arms folded up against the ceiling and the iron rails running into it from four directions. The Bronzeshoulder held the far half of it. Three ranks of them stood shoulder to shoulder in bronze-strapped plate behind a wall of round shields, and more were still coming in from the side tunnels at a run, buckling on helms as they came. Behind the third rank, women were pulling hammers and mattocks off the racks along the walls and shoving their way into the line. One of them had a cleaver from a cookhouse. Two of them had beards bound up in war-knots.

Harold’s guard held the near half. Their shield wall had driven halfway across the floor and stopped dead. Bodies lay in the gap between the two lines, most of them in bronze. A few weren’t.

He could see it from the tunnel mouth. They would break the Bronzeshoulder. Jack and Ren and Corwin and the guardians would grind through those three ranks given time, but it would be ugly and slow.

His aura came out of him all at once, and his anger came with it.

He was furious. He had ridden two days through the mountains to bring these people in. He’d poured them his best beer and offered them gold and potions and a home in the Basin, and he was standing in their hall watching them die for a man who sold iron to goblins. Every bit of that went into the aura, and it rolled across the loading floor and came down on the Bronzeshoulder line like a hand pressing on the back of a neck.

Auras rose to meet it. He felt a dozen of them come up off the line, small and hard and stubborn as fists, and the other thing in him took over and snuffed them out one after another. It wasn’t hard either. It was so, so easy. He could feel the nails enjoyment and it sang within him. Like stepping on an ant. And he categorized them.

This one had iron in its mana, useful. That one’s was coarse, worth nothing. There was a woman in the second rank whose mana had a cold blue thread through it he’d never felt before, and part of him leaned toward her with something very close to appetite. Oh, there were some interesting components out there.

Then a new aura came up in the center of the Bronzeshoulder line, spread out over the dwarves around it like a roof, and pushed back.

It was an aura of earth. It was solid, set down on bedrock and sunk deep, and when his own aura hit it, nothing gave. It began to push, and his aura went back a pace, then another, slowly, steadily. He set his feet and pushed harder, and it kept coming.

Beside him, Balfiel snorted.

“What is the meaning of this, Count Harold?” Thane Toki’s voice filled the hall. He stood in the center of the second rank in heavier plate than anyone around him, his white beard bound in its bronze rings, and his mana stood up off him like heat off a forge floor. Harold could feel the weight of it from across the hall. None of his knights could stand under that. Not even Jack. “Ye promised we would decide! Ye gave us time!”

Harold looked at him across the bodies, and something cold settled in his chest.

“Knights!” he called. “Stand down! Back to me!”

There was the briefest hitch. Then his shield wall broke off the Bronzeshoulder line in good order and stepped back across the floor, rank by rank, shields still up, until they stood in a curved line with Harold at the center of it. Dorgan came back last, walking backward, his axe dripping and his eyes never leaving the thane.

Harold drew his aura back into himself. Then he walked out alone into the middle of the floor and stopped between the two lines, among the dead.

“I give my word of non-violence for this conversation,” he said. “Let us talk, Thane Toki.”

“Talk!” Toki spat on the stone. “So ye can sneak attack us again?”

“We gave ye guest rights!” someone shouted from the Bronzeshoulder ranks.

“And they expired when I walked out of your mountain yesterday,” Harold said. “You had your day, Thane.”

“Ye are a blood traitor!” Dorgan’s roar came from behind Harold and went off the vaulted ceiling. “Ye sold iron to the greenskins! To the greenskins!”

The Bronzeshoulder line flinched. It ran through them from the center outward, shields dipping, heads turning. Some of them looked at Dorgan in disgust. Others looked at Toki, some lost, desperate, waiting for their thane to laugh it off.

A dwarf stepped out of the line.

He was nearly as heavily armored as Toki, broad and young, and he wore a beard braided in the same bronze rings, though fewer of them. He pulled his helm off and tucked it under his arm, and his face was very pale.

“What proof?” He didn’t shout it. “Ye come into our hold without honor, Human, and cut down our kin by surprise. Then a Gemheart stands behind ye and calls us traitors. What proof do ye have that Clan Bronzeshoulder has sold anything to the greenskins?”

“He lies!” Toki’s voice cracked across the hall. “He’s a human! Look at him, standing beside the oathbreaker! Nothing he says can be trusted!”

Harold turned his head and looked at Balfiel. The old elf rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

Harold turned back to the young dwarf and reached into the pouch at his belt.

What came out was a small brass box no bigger than his palm, with a dial on the front and a little crank on one side. It was gnomish work. He had pulled it out of the ruin stash in the lower Blackjaws along with half a crate of other gnomish contraptions. This one he understood. The gnomes had built it to swallow a conversation, to soak up the sound of it so that nobody listening using the wind or with any concept magic could overhear. It had been sitting in his pouch at yesterday’s meeting on the thane’s floor.

It turned out it worked just as well in reverse.

He turned the dial and wound the crank, and his own voice came out of it into the silent hall.

“There’s a cut off the third ore road. It isn’t on your floor. It runs north under the Saddle and comes out behind the south forges of the goblin city.”

Toki’s head jerked up.

“You’ve been running iron, coal, and other ore supplies through it for years.”

“Lies! It’s a trick, it’s a gnomish trick, ye can’t trust—”

Harold put his aura on Toki and clamped down.

He didn’t spread it over the hall. He narrowed it and drove it at one dwarf and closed it over him like a fist, and the thane’s voice cut off in the middle of a word. Toki’s earthen aura came up to fight it, and this time Harold didn’t push against it. His anger rose while the box played, closer and closer, and he sank his aura into the thane instead of pressing on him.

Then he let it go to work.

He let Toki feel exactly what it was doing. It took the old dwarf apart in Harold’s head the same way it took apart a carcass. It picked up his beard and held it up to the light and judged it worthless, a waste of space, and threw it on the pile. His bones were dense from a life underground, worth keeping. His heart was too old and the fat around it useless, so it went on the pile too. It sorted him piece by piece, and in the middle of it Harold could feel the thane inside his own body, frozen, unable to move or make a sound, and he could feel him crying.

The box kept playing.

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

“That burns us. If the greenskins learn we showed you the underroads—”

The young dwarf had started to pace. He went back and forth in front of the Bronzeshoulder line with his helm crushed under one arm and his free hand opening and closing on his hammer haft, and his face had gone from white to red and back again.

“We have built wealth supplying the greenskins.”

He stopped pacing.

“Where is Elder Gero?” It came out of him like a blow. “WHERE IS HE? Bring him to me!”

The hammer came down on the floor. The stone shattered in a ring around the head, and cracks ran out across the loading floor all the way to the rails.

“Damn,” Elroy breathed somewhere behind Harold. “Don’t want to get hit by that.”

Two dwarves came out of the back ranks hauling a third between them, a grey-bearded dwarf in a clerk’s apron who was digging his heels into the stone. They threw him down at the young dwarf’s feet. The young dwarf reached down, grabbed him by the beard, and hauled him up to eye level.

“Is it true?” He screamed it into the elder’s face. “IS IT TRUE, ye sniveling worm?”

Toki couldn’t move. Harold’s aura held him where he stood, still chewing slowly through him, and his eyes were the only thing in his body that could still move.

Gero’s mouth worked. “It’s not,” he managed. “It’s not fake, lad. It’s—”

He didn’t finish it, and he didn’t need to.

The young dwarf let go of his beard, and the elder fell to the floor. Then the young dwarf turned to Harold.

“Human Count.” His voice was barely holding. “Do ye swear that what ye played is true? Unaltered?”

Harold looked at him a moment. Then he nodded.

“I swear on Gravesend that it’s true. They’ve been using that tunnel to sell ore and equipment and supplies to the greenskins. It’s how your clan’s been surviving in these mountains.”

Dwarfs had a special connection to the earth. They could feel the stone and dirt around them. They came from it; how could they not? Even more, when swearing to Gravesend, they could feel that oath resound in the earth as well. The young dwarf felt it land and Harold saw him feel it.

He started pacing furiously again. Behind him the Bronzeshoulder line had come apart. Shields hung from arms, a woman had sat down on the floor with her mattock across her knees, and somewhere in the back somebody was weeping openly.

The young dwarf stopped in front of Toki, who still couldn’t move.

“Father.” His voice broke on the word. “Ye’ve doomed us. The Dawi will never forgive this. Not in a thousand years. Ye’ve tarnished the Bronzeshoulder name forever. How could you do this to us?”

Toki tried to respond, but the young dwarf's hammer moved like lightning and came down on the Thane’s helm.

The helm folded. Toki dropped to the stone like a sack. Harold’s aura was still sunk in him, and he could feel that the old dwarf wasn’t dead.

The hammer came down again, and again, and again.

When it was done, the young dwarf stood over his father with his hammer hanging from one hand and blood on his face and beard. Harold drew his aura back out of what was left of the thane, and the other thing in him let go of it reluctantly. The nail was awake and watching the events around him like it was his favorite romcom.

The young dwarf walked out to the center of the floor. He let the hammer fall, and then he went down on his knees in front of Harold and put his forehead on the stone at his feet.

“Human lord,” he said into the floor. “Please. Spare my people. They didn’t know. Most of them never knew.” His shoulders were shaking. “End my line if ye must. End me. End my father’s warriors and every dwarf who took part in it. But please, I beg ye, don’t slaughter my people.”

Across the hall, half a dozen dwarves broke from the back of the Bronzeshoulder line and ran for the side tunnels.

“CAPTURE THEM!” Dorgan roared.

The guard went after them. A few of the Bronzeshoulder in the line stepped across to block the tunnels, and the rest only watched as the runners were dragged down and hauled back across the floor.

Harold looked down at the young dwarf on the stone. Tears were running down his face, cutting clean lines through his father’s blood.

Harold bent down, took him by the arms, and helped him up onto his feet.

“Gather everyone who’s guilty,” he said quietly. “They’ll die here, and now. For the Dawi.”

The young dwarf stood a moment, swaying. Then something firmed in his face. He wiped his eyes with the back of a bloody gauntlet, turned around to the wreckage of his clan, and lifted his voice.

“GATHER THE CLAN!” It went off the vaulted ceiling and down every tunnel. “Gather the outpost and the high places! Gather the horns and the goats! Gather every Bronzeshoulder under this mountain!” His voice cracked, and he kept going through it. “We are to be held to account!”