NOVEL FROG Dragonhunt 65: Hardrick's Regret
The Mountain of Halajatbast stabs up through the horizon like the point of a spear. Vanerak accelerates. His boots are trembling on his feet, their metal straining, their runes screaming silently. He ignores their pain. Zathar is within reach—he has to be!
And he is Vanerak's alone to claim. Wharoth the fool, who so desperately tried to keep hold of him, yet at the same time allowed him to split from the guild, is now dead.
This has been quite the stroke of luck—or so the other dwarves might be thinking. Vanerak believes in chance, but he does not believe in luck as most dwarves do. To them, luck is a resource, like copper and iron, that can be gained and used up.
A foolish belief. Copper and iron are not used up either, but refined, made purer, greater, transformed to create the secret that only the greatest runeknights come to understand, and which only Runethanes have the ability to tap. Chance is different. It simply exists, and those who can take advantage of it.
A black circle, like a wound through the heart of the mountain, comes into view. Vanerak licks his lips behind his mirror-helm. Through there they will climb to get at the power within.
And Zathar will be given no chance to slay the dragon.
Hardrick sits hunched over in a dark corridor somewhere near the summit of the mountain. His head is in his hands.
“Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”
Over and again he whispers this through his fingers. Once every few minutes or so he will peer down and up the corridor, searching for a patch of darker black in the blackness. But he sees nothing.
“Where are you?” he repeats. “Where are you?”
“Here,” comes a sudden whisper.
Hardrick spins around. He feels a cold sensation in his chest, and he gasps in pain, fear, and relief all in one.
“Where were you?” he whispers. “Why did you leave me?”
“I never left.”
“You did! You lie!”
“I am bound to you. I cannot leave. But if you stand before a light, where does your shadow go?”
“Don't do this again!”
“Where does it go?” repeats the shadow.
“You cannot leave me!”
“It goes behind,” the shadow hisses. “It stretches. I did so—because something crucial has come into the mountain.”
“Crucial?”
“Yes. A piece of something. It lies north and down of here. Come now, we must go.”
Hardrick looks down the corridor. A piece of what? The darkness suddenly frightens him.
“I can't go.”
“And why is that?”
“My orders are to supervise the mining. Make sure it gets done quickly.”
“You've already abandoned those orders.”
“I have to get back to them.”
“Why? Whether the dragon lives or dies—irrelevant! We have more important things to accomplish.”
Hardrick turns and starts to hurry back along the corridor. He thinks he can remember the random twists and turns that brought him here.
“Stop! That is the wrong way!”
“I need to get back!”
He is suddenly in absolute terror. It is as if every fear, every worry, every thought that he might be a fake, that this blessed life of his could be a delusion—all those things he ought to have been feeling this past decade and a half during his time as the Silver Legend—suddenly they are pouring into him.
This power he's pretended is his own for so long is not his. He does not control it. The rumors were correct. He's been possessed by a demon from the deepest, hottest depths of the magma oceans.
“Demon?” laughs the shadow. “I am beyond those. Halt, Hardrick. Halt!”
Hardrick continues to run. He comes to the stairs at the end of the tunnel, begins to sprint down them three at a time. Shit! What possessed him to try and become a runeknight? Wasn't he doing just fine as a miner?
Sure, the work was dull—but not so strenous, so long as the overseers were drunk, which was often. The company was mixed—but he had been popular, had had friends. Drinking buddies who laughed at his jokes. His family had been a right pain, true, but all things considered he'd never had to spend so much time with them.
The money had been good as well. The materials he'd spent on that shitty little knife had paid for themselves many times over. Robbery, conducted properly, had been lucrative.
It had been a life a great deal more fun than the lives most miners led. While they wallowed in pity, or else let their hope kill them, Hardrick had accepted his station, and in doing so, he had become the best of them. He knew he was never going to rise above mining, so he'd never over-reached—like that idiot Zakath and his little brother—and instead he had done as best as he could within the circumstances. And through this he'd become a first degree miner: as respected and well-off as one could ever be.
So why, back then, had he decided to make that sword?
He glances back. There's a patch of darker darkness on the wall. The shadow is still behind him, moving at the exact same speed he is.
“Get away from me!” he screams. “I was doing fine. Why did you have to—”
The stairs come to an end. His foot comes down at an odd angle and he collapses onto the stones with great force. He sprawls out backwards. Upon the wall beside him, the shadow is standing tall.
“Get up, Hardrick!” it snaps. “You can't get away from me. We are together now, whether you like it or not.”
“I have to get back to the Runethane.”
“You will do no such thing. You will do as I say—or I will make your life very difficult.”
“You already have!” Hardrick screams back.
The shadow laughs. “You live an easier life than any runeknight yet has, and trust me, I've seen a lot of them come and go. All you have to do is relax and do as I say, and all the gold and fame and ladies and everything you could ever desire fall into your lap like stalactites after a quake. And they will keep on falling.”
“If the Runethane becomes angry—”
“A mere runethane is no threat to me. What is a runethane, Hardrick, ay?”
“More powerful than us!”
“So far, so far. Your muscles haven't quite gotten used to obeying my commands yet. The precision with metal that surpassing him requires still hasn't quite come to you. But we're getting there. And behind those golden links he is just flesh.”
Hardrick's eyes widen. “You mean to kill him?”
“I mean for you to kill him, yes. We need more power, more metal, if we're ever going to accomplish what we need to do. Much more.”
“He is guarded. Braedle—she is stronger than us too.”
“Not for long. Not once we get what I'm searching for.”
“What is it?”
“A piece of something important.”
“Another shadow?”
“Just know this: be ready to fight.”
“Where the hell is he?” Broderick yells. “Where'd he go?”
“He ran off that way!” the terrified runeknight yelps back. “Up there, up those stairs!”
“Did he say why?”
“He was looking for someone. Asking where he went.”
“Looking for whom?”
“I don't know. No one knows!”
“Shit.”
Broderick scowls at the rubble-field. He can't see much, for everything is obscured by a thick haze of choking dust, but he can see one thing—that the mining is nowhere near completion. At this rate the dragon will wake before the roof falls in on it, and then it'll take only one blast of flame upward to destroy what's left of his forces.
“He was meant to make you all work faster!” he spits.
The runeknights around him cringe back. They're all holding their pickaxes by the very end of the handles, and as loosely as possible.
“You aren't working hard enough,” he says. “Get back to mining! All of you! I want every wall and pillar destroyed by the time I return, or you'll taste my axes. Understand?”
“Understood!” his dwarves scream back.
Broderick storms through them on his way to the next group of mining runeknights, a couple of adjoining walls away. Braedle hurries after him.
“Father, I'll search for him myself.”
“What?”
“I'll search for him. He's hiding out somewhere close, I can feel it.”
“No. I know what you'll do if you find him.”
“Isn't this all the proof you need? He's after you!”
“He's just had a bit of a breakdown. Too much stress. He was a miner before he became a runeknight—this job must have stirred some bad memories.”
“What are you saying? Maybe he was a miner once, but he's the Silver Legend now. You've seen him in battle just as I have. He's a runeknight through and through; his past is dead.”
“How would you know?”
“I just do!”
“Fine!” Broderick snaps. “If you insist, I won't complain. Go and look for him—and ask him what in hell he's doing. But do not touch him! Not a single beard-hair!”