Legend of the Runeforger: A Dwarven Progression Fantasy

It's a lot cleaner up here. The stones are clear of mud, there's no bare earth or weeds in sight, and even the air feels fresh. It feels almost intoxicating actually—Jerat is taking deep breaths of it as we walk.

The few humans not cowering in their houses flee at the sight of us, their gray and blue cloaks flapping in the wind. That seems to be the fashion up here at the top of their hill, closest to the sky. It's light gray right now.

“Where are we heading?” asks Pellas. “Up to the top?”

The humans' biggest building sits at the top of the hill. It's about four stories, judging by the windows, and topped by a tiled dome. A single copper rod juts from its center.

“No,” I say. “That would be pushing our luck. There's bound to be somewhere that supplies food here. These richer folk won't have what everyone else has.”

“They might just send servants down to buy for them,” says Jerat. “Humans like having servants to order around.”

“Maybe, maybe. But would you keep the really best stuff somewhere it might be stolen? I don't think so.”

“Well, we'll see.”

I lead them down a side-path. It's mosaic, with a regular geometric pattern, but to my eyes the angles don't quite line up with each other correctly. Humans just don't seem to have a feel for proper beauty, though I suppose maybe they're clever in other ways—like with that disturbing fountain.

A few minutes down the path, Jerat is proven wrong. We come to a circular plaza, tiled to show a bright white star, and at each of its points are entrances to shops. They are fronted with glass, which the humans do seem to have a little skill in working—it's very clear and smooth. Past the glass windows are closed curtains.

“Shall I?” says Jerat.

“No. We knock.”

I walk up to the nearest door and hammer on it loudly. No answer, not that I was expecting any.

“Right,” says Jerat. “Let's see what happens when—”

“Stop!” comes a shout.

It's in bad dwarvish. I turn and see a pair of guards rushing toward us. I raise Gutspiercer, and am about to strike—my pick is already mid-swing—when they stop themselves. One of them starts babbling in human. Is he warning me off? I take a step forward with Gutspiercer aimed at his chest, when the door behind opens.

I turn, half expecting an ambush, but it's just a human woman, dressed in a long blue, very fine cloak. Her eyes are wide with shock, and dark bags under them suggest she's been asleep. I wonder if today was some kind of a holiday—odd for shops not to be open at this time.

“Let us in!” barks Jerat. “We've shopping to do!”

The guards babble something at her. She tries to argue, but they shout her down. She disappears back into the shop. Jerat steps forward to follow her, and then the curtains behind the windows are pulled open wide.

Beyond are jars of pickles, dried roots, hard-tack looking bread, and slabs of dried jerky meat. I laugh.

We've hit a rich vein indeed here. What is this place? Do the horsemen of the humans buy their supplies here? We enter, metal boots scratching the tiled floor. It doesn't look much like a shop though. There's no counter, for one, and no prices seem to be labled.

Maybe they use no money here. I've heard some human places use a kind of bartering system, where one thing is swapped for another. Or maybe the woman is paid in some other way by the leaders of this town. Whatever the case though, gold never goes amiss. Even if they don't use it among themselves, there are others who will take it. Dwarves, and humans of the south too, probably.

The goods are stocked on wide tables. These are low to the floor, and shaped as heptagons. Candles flicker at their corners, which I think is an odd choice for the daytime. And the night-time also, come to think about it, if the shop was closed. There seems to be no order to what's place where—jars of pickles are mixed in with bundles of herbs, and beside these are large coils of rope.

I lay my purse down on the nearest table and begin to scrape everything edible in reach into my sack. Pellas and Jerat do the same, though Jerat with more enthusiasm. The human woman looks on, aghast.

I feel vaguely immoral, like I'm thieving. This isn't theft though—I'm paying triple what these supplies are worth. Far more than triple! Nine gold coins could get me a good deal of quality metal. What are mere foodstuffs compared to that?

Canvas sacks bulging, we make our way back to the door. The woman is huddled on the floor crying.

“Maybe we shouldn't have taken so much,” says Pellas.

“Maybe,” I say. “But we need to reach the dragon. That's all that matters.”

“Let's take a look at the other shops,” says Jerat.

“No,” I say. “We have plenty. You're just looking for beer. And I'm not even sure these are shops.”

“What else could they be?”

I look around the circular plaza one last time. These building set at the points of the stars are triangular, I notice, and at their tops are strange symbols. Religious? The humans have gods that they honor, don't they? I remember Jaemes telling me something like that. They leave things out for the gods, as a kind of sacrifice.

We left plenty of gold, I tell myself angrily. And the dragon matters over everything else. If we reach it and destroy it, that's worth any hardship these humans have to go through. They ought to thank us. Their gods also.

On our way out the gates, a dozen runeknights of another guild elbow their way past us. Their supply sacks are already full, but they've procured more from somewhere, and they look eager to fill them up—in their eyes is greed. I stop and turn, to tell them maybe going up here is too far, when I hear loud dwarvish shouting from behind.

More of us are already in the upper city. Quite a few more, by the sounds of it. The damage has been done. I've opened the floodgates.

“Ah, shit!” says Jerat. “Look at that.”

My attention is drawn back to the lower district. Halfway down the road, Xomhyrk's Dragonslayers are holding back a group of a dozen screaming dwarves. Opposite them, a line of spearman hold back a crowd of shouting humans. Between the two groups, lying on the steep paving, are two dead humans and a dead dwarf. Blood is running from them in a stream. The humans are hacked brutally and the dwarf has an arrow jutting from his eye.

“Let's get down to the plaza quickly,” I say.

We hurry down the road. The shouting and shoving of the two crowds grows more violent as we approach. Who started the fight, I wonder? Probably the dwarf. Fortunately no one from our guild seems to be involved, yet I don't think the humans are going to much care about what guild did what. In their eyes, we're all enemies now.

There's a path leading right; we turn down it to bypass the commotion. Soon we're back down at the plaza. About half of the guild is already gathered.

“What did you get?” asks Erak, our second degree. His red runes are bright and bloody-looking under the sun.

“Preserves,” I say.

“Preserves? Here?”

“In the upper part of the city. They let us in.”

He frowns, gray-brown brows furrowing tightly. “I think we're pushing our luck going up there.”

“The killing happened in the lower half,” says Jerat.

“Yes—bad business. I saw it.”

“Who started it?” I ask.

“Dwarves from the Copper-Bright Salamanders. They stole. Didn't pay. Disgraceful. But the one who did it has been punished for it. Then it got ugly.”

He looks up at the road. I follow his gaze fearfully, but things seem to be calming down. Xomhyrk himself is up there, raging at the dwarves.

“We need to leave soon,” I say.

“Yes,” Erak agrees. “As soon as the rest of the Association is here, we'll be first out the gates.”

Once the other half of us returns, Braztak with them, we hurry out. By the side of the tall wooden walls we trade around supplies so none of us are carrying less than our fair share—my pack becomes a good deal lighter, which I'm glad of.

The rest of the guilds emerge one by one, laughing and joking and comparing spoils. The Dragonslayers led by Xomhyrk are the last to emerge. His eyes are grim behind his dark blue visor. A dwarf and two humans dead, when he'd vowed no bloodshed if it could be helped, and the town basically ransacked when he said to give the humans fair treatment. He's made a misjudgment.

But what's done is done, and if these supplies end up getting us to the dragon, the humans really have no cause to complain. Xomhyrk gives the order and we march. By evening the town of Hillstone is hidden in the distance behind the many other hills of the rent, buckled landscape of north Tallreach.

Our path is no longer straight, but winding, nearly looping sometimes. We may want to leave these lands as quickly as possible, but we also don't want to stray too near other towns. Horses are quick, and I'm sure the leaders of Hillstone are sending out news of what's happened here to their ally towns, and maybe even their enemies as well. Humans may fight against each other a great deal, just as us dwarves do, but they'll happily band together in the face of a common foe.

Wind howls over the hilltops, and sometimes it even wails, through the stone ruins that crown many of the peaks here. Just as dwarves have lived in every cave of the underworld at one point or another, every peak and cranny of the surface has been inhabited by humans before—bar the forests of the elves, I suppose. Sometimes my boots hit something hard, and I look down to see a weathered stone block half-buried in the dirt.

Was this land still called Tallreach back then? I believe it was, though the sounds have altered as human tongues do over time. The meaning of the name has stayed the same. The land where humans reach for the sky.

I shiver. I recall reading that there are sorcerers among the humans. Wizards. Did one of them set the magic in that fountain, to make the waterdrops hang for a moment in the air like a raincloud? Surely such tricks are nothing compared to runes, yet even so, I don't like thinking about it.

For three days, a full long hour, we march without stopping. But even dwarvish legs must rest eventually. Our tread is heavy now, our backs bowed. The tenth degrees especially are suffering. Most have removed their helmets, and their hair and beards are drenched in sweat. My beard is heavy with sweat as well—I envy Pellas.

Xomhyrk orders us up a hill more heavily adorned with ruins than most. Maybe he intends for us to use the stone blocks as cover from arrows.

The steep climb, after so many hours march, is one of the hardest I've ever made. There's no tracks up this hill, and the long, rough grass impedes my movement. I stumble over the squarish stones, fall right over at one point, and the dwarves around me aren't faring any better. If we weren't so tired, the air would be filled with shouted curses, but instead the only sound I can hear is the wind and my own heavy, hot breathing inside my helmet.

We make it up to the top. I see some of my tenth degrees hunched over, puffing.

“Stand up straight!” I snap. “It doesn't matter how tired you are! We're at war!”

“At war?” one of them says, a panicked look on his face. “With the humans?”

“Maybe or maybe not. But certainly we're at war with the dragon, and likely with Runeking Uthrarzak's dwarves. And of course there are wild animals out here as well, you know. Wolves, bears, and other surface monstrosities. Be ready to fight at all times!”

He straightens himself and raises his axe and shield. “I apologize!”

“Accepted.”

Xomhyrk orders the tents set up and latrines dug, and we obey. Then the roster for guard duty is decided, and again I hit first watch.

This time I'm paired with Mulkath.

“You don't mind if we stand a little distant from each other, do you?” he says.

“Go ahead. Your runes don't like the cold, right?”

“That's right.”

We both know that's not the real reason.

He stands on one stone block and I another. The rains have fully cleared up, and the air is cold and still. Even though the moon is now closer to crescent than to full, I can see clearly across the hills. The one we stand on is one of the taller ones.

I wonder why the humans didn't build here. It's certainly defensible—some of the slopes we came up are close to unclimbable. Could it be cursed? I look nervously at the broken pillars and walls we've pitched our tents around.

I tell myself to stop being stupid. Ghosts aren't real, and I trust Xomhyrk's decision-making. Most Runethanes and leaders I've found myself under would've charged headfirst into the human town and plundered it without caring a jot for the consequences. But we only lost one, and the amount of gold we gave was significant. We dealt with them fairly. And the death of the dragon will pay for all! Xomhyrk has made no mistake.

The wind has died down a little, so much so that I feel confident in using my runic ears. I've brought them with me on guard duty, concealed in a leather satchel. I take them out.

“What the hell are those?” says Mulkath.

“Ears.”

“Ears?”

I fix them to my helmet, which has slots for them to attach to. “Ears,” I say again.

“What?” He laughs loudly. “What the hell? Ears?”

I wince. I'd forgotten how loud these make everything. “We used them in the deep,” I explain. My own voice nearly makes me lose my footing. I only just recover. “For when there's no light at all.”

“There's still a little light here.”

“But everything's hidden by the hills.”

“True, true.”

“Please speak a little quieter. Loud noises can be disorientating. At least, they are if you're out of practice.”

“Alright.” He lowers his voice. “If you say so.”

“Thanks.”

I shut my eyes and listen intently. Mostly I can hear the wind—the breezes sound as loud as gales—but here's other sounds carried on them. The howls of wild beasts. The occasional clatter of rocks—ruins collapsing piece by piece. Hoofbeats. Wild horses? I focus harder. They sound too regular for wild things.

I hear snatches of human voices too. There's villages on some of the hills, so this isn't too surprising, I tell myself. Yet there's something about the tone of the shouting that suggests orders. I think I can hear marching sometimes too. It fades in and out, but it's there.

I think. Is it? I listen more closely. Yes! I can hear the unmistakable sound of an army on the march.

“Shit,” I whisper.

“What is it?” says Mulkath.

“I don't think the humans are going to let us off so easy. I think I can hear an army.”

“An army?”

“I think so.”

“Where?”

“I can't tell. The wind jumbles everything up.”

I listen again. Now I know what to listen for, I can hear it everywhere.

“It might be more than one army,” I say.