The Swordsheath Scroll Read online

  Cold winds sang through the valleys, low clouds hid the rising peaks, and spitting snow had begun to dust the marchers on the Stoneforge trail when those in the rear of the great caravan heard running hoofbeats behind them. A single rider, wearing the colors of Hammerhand’s personal guard, the Ten, came into sight.

  Then he was among them, dropping exhausted from his horse. A crude sling held his right arm close against his armored breast, and the right side of his face was crusted with dried blood.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” The Chosen gathered around him, their eyes bright with concern.

  “The truce was a trick,” the dwarf told them, his voice thin with anger. “Lord Kane attacked with his entire garrison. They used seige engines … catapults … We didn’t have a chance.”

  “And Derkin? Is Derkin …?”

  “Turn your column,” the messenger rasped. “We’re going back.”

  The DRAGONLANCE® Saga

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  The Second Generation

  THE SWORDSHEATH SCROLL

  Dwarven Nations • Volume Three

  ©1993 TSR, Inc.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Published by Wizards of the Coast LLC. Hasbro SA, represented by Hasbro Europe, Stockley Park, UB11 1AZ. UK.

  DRAGONLANCE, Wizards of the Coast, D&D, their respective logos, and TSR, Inc. are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the U.S.A. and other countries.

  All Wizards of the Coast characters and their distinctive likenesses are property of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  Cover art by: Tim Hildebrandt

  eISBN: 978-0-7869-6354-6

  640-A1857000-001-EN

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  U.S., Canada, Asia Pacific, & Latin America: Wizards of the Coast LLC, P.O. Box 707, Renton, WA 98057-0707, +1-800-324-6496, www.wizards.com/customerservice

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  v3.1

  Dedicated to the Captain and his Lady,

  Rob and Marianne Little.

  And dedicated

  —as always—

  to the lady who lives

  in all of my memories.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books in the Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: The Slave

  Part I: Master of the Pits

  1: The Mines of Ergoth

  2: Escape from Klanath

  3: The Reluctant Leader

  4: Assault in Small Force

  5: The Leader

  6: The Chosen Ones

  7: Battle of the Pit

  Part II: Master of the Chosen

  8: Out of The Wilderness

  9: Balladine

  10: Thorbardin

  11: The Kal-Thax Mandate

  Part III: Master of Tharkas

  12: A Cobar Outing

  13: First Blood

  14: The Reclamation

  15: Master of the Pass

  Part IV: Master of Kal-Thax

  16: The Turning of War

  17: Lord Kane’s Revenge

  18: A Time for Reprisal

  19: The Smoke of Klanath

  20: The Winter of Demolition

  Part V: Master of the Mountains

  21: The Emperor’s Road

  22: The Last Day

  23: Day of Reckoning

  24: A Place of Two Nations

  Epilogue: The First and Always King

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The Slave

  In the centuries following the “Wizards War,” the mighty achievement of the dwarven nation of Thorbardin was to establish a golden age in which the embattled thanes of Kal-Thax came together under a council of chiefs to construct the subterranean fortress of Thorbardin. This was a time of relative peace and prosperity. It was, though, a short-lived age. Without serious threat from beyond the dwarven realm, old jealousies and unresolved rivalries once again began to surface among the thanes.

  It had been resolved long since that there would be no king of Thorbardin. Thus all of the thanes within the fortress nation went their own way, held together in common cause only by the inspired wisdom of an aging group of chieftains serving as the Council of Thanes. But by the fiftieth year after Thorbadin’s completion, the Council of Thanes had begun to lose its force. Some said the old order ended the day Willen Ironmaul of the Hylar, who had once served as Chief of Chiefs, quit. He resigned his seat in disgust when, following the death of the old Theiwar chieftain, the Theiwar proved unable to agree upon a new chief and instead divided themselves into two warring camps.

  Olim Goldbuckle, the Prince of the Daewar, had died years earlier, and his successor was far more interested in enhancing the grandeur of Daebardin—the huge Daewar city on the northeast shore of the Urkhan Sea—than in the workings of the overall realm.

  The Daergar, no longer led by the wisdom of old Vog Ironface, had withdrawn to their mines and their smelters and rarely bothered even to send a representative to council. Within three years of the death of the old Theiwar chief, Slide Tolec, Thorba
rdin had become a dismal, dangerous place where steel rang on steel almost daily as rival bands of Theiwar stalked one another along the subterranean roads. Daewar and Daergar tribal leaders withheld their tariffs from the council coffers to maintain their own separate guard units for their own holdings, and even the wild, unpredictable Klar—who had surprisingly maintained their loyalty to the Hylar concept of a united nation longer than some other clans—were drawn from central concerns by the necessity of defending the farming warrens from becoming battlegrounds.

  Thus when the Hylar, Willen Ironmaul, resigned, the Council of Thanes all but ceased to exist, and the managing of Thorbardin’s mighty systems—its defenses, its waterways, its roads and ventilation systems, its stores and even its trade with the outside world—fell to the wardens, whose only authority consisted of continuing to do exactly what had been done before.

  The fortress nation, sprawling in dissolution beneath its mountain peak, became hardly more than a collection of squabbling cities and rivalrous tribes, bound together only by proximity.

  The dark ages of Thorbardin began then, and little would ever be known of those next centuries except for the occasional scribings of Hylar and Daewar scrollsters who kept sporadic records of the times.

  All through the turmoil of the Theiwar conflicts, the dark-sighted Daergar stubbornly continued their mining and smelting of ores, and the jovial, wily Daewar maintained a semblance of trade with the Neidar settlements beyond Thorbardin and with some of the human and elven traders who came to their borders. The Klar kept the farms going, and the wardens somehow kept the roads clear, the water flowing, and the lifts operating.

  But only among the Hylar, in their growing city of Hybardin, delved into a gigantic stalactite rising above the Urkhan Sea, were records of lineage kept which would survive the “warring times” of those centuries. And as time passed, even the Hylar records became sparse and less reliable.

  Of the four children of Colin Stonetooth, the visionary first chieftain of the Hylar who initially brought the mountain thanes together, only one had remained in Thorbardin after the Wizards War. Cale Greeneye was gone, preferring the Neidar life outside to the Holgar life within the fortress. His brother Handil had long since died and was buried beneath the rubble of the ancient city of the Calnar in the far-off Khalkist range, while the second son, Tolon Farsight, had remained there as leader of the Calnar. Only the old chieftain’s daughter, Tera Sharn, lived out her life in Thorbardin as wife of Willen Ironmaul.

  Their only child, Damon, married a Neidar girl soon after the Wizards War. Damon’s first son, Dalam Fireblend, became chief warden of Tharkas, far to the north of Thorbardin. Dalam’s younger brother Cort succeeded Willen Ironmaul as chieftain of the Hylar, then passed the role to his own son, Harl Thrustweight.

  Harl Thrustweight became known in Thorbardin as “The Iron Fist.” It was his stubborn intervention—backed by grim companies of armed Hylar streaming out of Hybardin—that finally put an end to the anarchy of the Theiwar battles and once again restored a semblance of order to the undermountain realm. With angry efficiency, Harl Thrustweight reestablished the Council of Thanes and the Halls of Justice.

  Beyond Thorbardin, among humans and elves, this dwarven leader—whom none outside of Thorbardin had ever seen—was known as Hal-Thwait. Many humans, and others, in surrounding lands came to believe—from comments passed by traders—that Thorbardin was a kingdom and “Hal-Thwait” was the name of the king of the dwarves. Even among the outside-dwelling Neidar, scattered throughout the protectorate of Kal-Thax, there were many dwarves who accepted that Thorbardin now had a king. Those who knew otherwise made no effort to correct the human and elven traders who referred to King Hal-Thwait. The humans and the elves were outsiders, and as far as the dwarves were concerned, outsiders could believe anything they wanted about Thorbardin. It was none of their business, anyway.

  The “Hylar Peace” in Thorbardin and the mountain realm it protected, enforced by Harl Thrustweight, lasted more than a hundred years, which was forty years longer than the reign of Harl Thrustweight as chieftain of the Hylar and senior member of the Council of Thanes. In the Year of Iron, of the Decade of Willow, Century of Rain, the great chieftain and seven of the ten members of his elite guard were crushed in a rockfall near the entrance to the city of Theibardin.

  A Daewar leader, Jeron Redleather, and a Hylar soldier, Dunbarth Ironthumb, took over the coordination of events in Thorbardin following Harl Thrustweight’s death. Through sheer determination, the two of them kept the Council of Thanes going and maintained a troubled peace in Thorbardin.

  Unfortunately, Harl Thrustweight’s only child, a grown son named Derkin Winterseed, disappeared on an expedition to Tharkas Pass.

  The iron shackles they had placed on his ankles, hammered into place and secured with hot rivets in the manner of bonds intended never to be removed, had been an agony to him for a long time. First there had been the deep burns from the riveting, then the open, bleeding sores caused by the constant rubbing of the rough iron against his skin. But what had lasted longest were the aches in his back and his legs, from hobbling around each long day, dragging the loose, eight-foot length of heavy chain which connected the shackles. That, and the deep, patient anger within him.

  He had borne the pains in stubborn silence, just as he bore the welts on his back from the overseers’ whips, and eventually the wounds had healed over and the pains had subsided. Now his ankles were toughened by bands of heavy callus that had formed over the scars there, and his legs and back had grown accustomed to the awkward weight of the chain clanking behind him as he labored up and down the dim reaches of rough-delved mine shafts, his hod filled with raw ore from the digs below, or with tools and torches on each return trip.

  Most knew him by his deep anger and stubborn silence. Neither the slave masters in these mines nor the other slaves knew more about him than that he was a sturdy, level-eyed young dwarf with a dark, backswept beard, that his name was Derkin, and that he would make trouble if he could.

  Three times in two years, his back had been striped until it bled, twice for trying to escape from his bondage, and once—the most recent time—after one of the human guards fell to his death in a refuse pit near the mine’s entrance. He had not been the only one whipped that time. The human slavers had whipped every slave within sound of the refuse pit, just on general principle. There was the suspicion that the dead man’s fall might not have been an accident, and the slave masters knew that a smartly applied whip sometimes loosens tongues. But they had learned nothing. Most of the slaves were dwarves, and bore their punishment stoically. The few human slaves in the area had nothing to tell their tormentors, because none of them had been nearby when the fall occurred.

  Like the other dwarves, all of whom he had ignored since his arrival as a captive of slave hunters, Derkin bore the torment in stony silence. The angry shouts of the humans, the crack and sting of their whips, he simply endured, and never made a sound.

  But later, when the mine slaves on that shift had been secured in their dungeon for a few hours’ rest, there was cautious movement in the shadows, and another dwarf crept close, to hunker down beside him. In the murky cell, Derkin could barely see the newcomer, but he recognized him. It was the one they called Tap, a young Neidar from one of the hill settlements. Tap had the broad shoulders and long arms of Theiwar ancestry, and his back, like Derkin’s own, was striped with bleeding cuts.

  For a moment, the hill dwarf simply sat beside him, gazing around furtively. Then he whispered, “I saw what you did.”

  Derkin ignored the whisper, pretending he had not heard.

  “I understand,” Tap whispered. “I’m not asking you about it. I just wanted you to know that I saw you kill that guard. You used your chain on him. I only wish I’d had the chance to kill one, too.”

  Still he made no response, ignoring the other dwarf.

  After a moment, Tap shrugged. “You’re Hylar, aren’t you,” he whispered, “fro
m Thorbardin?”

  “I am,” Derkin admitted, still not looking around.

  “I thought so. You look like a Hylar. And I’ve heard you called Derkin. That sounds like a Hylar name. What’s the rest of it?”

  The Hylar sat in stony silence, ignoring him.

  “No other name?” Tap prodded. “Just Derkin?”

  “I’m called Derkin,” the silent one muttered. “It’s name enough.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Derkin.” The other nodded. “I’m Tap. I’ve heard them talk about you. They say you’ve tried twice to escape.”

  “Obviously, I didn’t make it,” Derkin growled.

  “You never will, alone. You’ll need friends.”

  “I need no friends, and I have no friends.”

  “You could, though,” the Neidar said. “I wasn’t the only one who saw what happened to that human guard. Think about it.”

  When the Neidar had gone, back into a far corner of the big, low cell, Derkin sat motionless for a time. It disturbed him that anyone had seen how the human guard died. He had thought the incident went unobserved. He had waited and planned for a long time before the right moment came along—a time when the shift was late and the guards were sleepy, and more importantly, when one guard stood alone on the ledge above the pit as a line of hod-carriers plodded past, carrying tools to the lower shafts. It seemed that ages had passed while he waited, but finally the moment came. One guard, alone on the ledge, and a line of hod-carriers.

  In the shadows, Derkin had stepped aside and dropped back to the end of the line. Ahead of him were a half-dozen laden dwarves, their shoulder packs and hods filled with tools.

  As always on the ledges, the guard stepped back, away from the edge, forcing the slaves to pass precariously around him. Derkin stooped carefully, picked up a large rock, and went on, toward the guard.