Blood of the Emperor (15 page)

“King Aerkan!” Wadex shouted.

Dalgrin’s eyes went wide.

The dwarven guardians instantly followed Wadex’s example, suddenly falling to their knees in homage.

“It is good to see you once more,” Jugar said as he stepped up to where the Marshal knelt, lifting him by the hand as permission to stand.

“By the gods of the deep,” Wadex muttered. He removed his cloak at once, wrapping it around Jugar. “We had received word that you were walking beneath the sky but there had been silence for the last two months. We feared you were lost to us forever. Yet here you stand with us once more.” Wadex turned to one of the guardians kneeling near the still-open stela access. “Kelva! Run at once with all haste and spread the word throughout the warrens! The Last King has returned!”

“I have returned,” Jugar said, gathering the warm cloak about him, “but not for long. I must walk under the sky a while longer, old friend. But we have three days before I must leave again and there is much that must be done in that time.”

“Then let us waste none of it,” Wadex said, gesturing toward the opening in the stela.

Jugar nodded. He took a step toward the entrance, longing to get below ground and feel dwarf-hewn stone about him once more, but he stopped as he passed Dalgrin. The young dwarf was bowing so low that his face was almost planted in the snow. Jugar reached down with his left hand and lifted up the chin of the dwarf.

“Cheer up, Dalgrin,” Jugar said with a strange smile. “You are about to become a Hero of the Dwarven Thrones…if Wadex doesn’t execute you first for insulting the last remaining of the dwarven kings.”

Dark Heart

J
UGAR LEFT THE WORLD of light behind.

It was taking him longer to get used to the darkness again than he cared to admit, even to himself. Dwarven eyesight was particularly suited for the underground, capable of seeing clearly even in the dimmest of light. They were perfectly comfortable either aboveground or below but dwarves who had stayed aboveground for extended periods of time occasionally became “sky-blind” as it was known among those who dwelled beneath the mountains of Aeria. Their transition back underground took somewhat longer than those who moved freely between the world above and the world below.

A king blind in his own realm,
Jugar thought grimly as he peered into the blackness ahead. He could hear the anxious voices echoing from the space before him.
Will they follow me blindly as well?

Jugar had been traveling for nearly a day under the mountain, its tunnels, caverns, passageways, and chambers leading him ever deeper beneath the mountain. A single day’s travel was all he could afford: he only had three days before Pyrash returned to fetch him. That left him only one day to accomplish his mission before he would have to start once again for the bright surface of the mountain bowl above him.

The dark was framed by the dim outlines of an ornate arch with a carved label above it proclaiming the space beyond to be the Council
Chamber of a dwarven settlement called Fedrith-nar. The place could barely be called a village but it was within a single day’s journey from the Hammer of the Sky. Its location, therefore, dictated that Fedrith-nar become the place where Jugar—here known as Aerkan, Last of the Dwarven Kings—would triumphantly appear before the surviving dwarves. The warrens immediately surrounding the stela were certainly grand enough for such an occasion as were three grander cities than this minor and otherwise forgotten town but each of those were too far for the dwarven Thanes to reach in a day’s time. It had once served as a waypoint for dwarves on pilgrimage to the stela but this otherwise undistinguished dwarven township was now overflowing with dwarves rushing from diverse redoubts deep within the mountain to hear the will of the Last King. He would address them all in time but first he had one very important gathering to command.

“Thanes of the Seven Peaks,” boomed the voice of Wadex standing just beyond the dark portal. “Gather to hear and be heard by Aerkan—King of the Ninth Throne of Aeria.”

Jugar heard the Thanes rise from their chairs in the darkness, their boots stomping against the stone in perfunctory welcome.

The king almost did not recognize his name as he was announced. When he realized the stomping was for him, he smiled. He had been Jugar for so long that his true name was foreign to his ears. Jugar reflected that the original bearer of the name would have appreciated the humor in all this. He had, indeed, been the king’s court jester; a position that doubled as his personal guard. It had been his greatest performance and his final joke to exchange clothing with the king as the elven armies assaulted the Yungskord. The king then hid in the secret treasure trove beneath the Ninth Throne while the jester took his place. It was the jester Drakis had killed atop the embattled throne while the king waited unseen beneath the carnage. The jester had been a trained and able warrior as well as a capable performer. The king missed his old companion but had all this time taken solace in knowing that the joke lived on in him.

A joke for which the king was determined to have the last, bitter laugh.
The Jugar is dead; long live the new Jugar!

The last of the dwarven kings stepped through the dark portal. Still partially sky-blind, he could make out the extent of the room. It
was a modest hall so far as dwarven craftsmanship was concerned, suitable for its town council duties without taxing the capabilities of the local community. It was round after the common practice of any dwarven meeting hall but plain to the point of embarrassment. The floor was slightly uneven and the wall carvings practically nonexistent. There were nine pillars evenly spaced against the wall of the curved room climbing only fifteen hands to the shallow dome overhead. Each pillar was topped by a carving of one of the nine kings as was typical for such ceremonial rooms throughout the dwarven realms but the figures were obscured to his eyes and Jugar could not pick his own out from among them. What he could see more clearly were the twenty-five Thanes who had gathered within the room, most still stomping their left feet against the ground.

Most
, Jugar noted,
but not all.

Jugar raised both of his hands above his head in acknowledgment of their welcome but his thoughts were troubled.

Twenty-five Thanes under the mountain. That’s five by five. Nine Kings…seven peaks…five Thanes by five…the rhythm of the dragon’s song resounding beneath the mountain. A warning from the gods…

Jugar shook his head and smiled brightly at the Thanes.

It was no gods that made Drakis,
he told himself.
Only a fool believes a myth of his own creation.

Jugar stood in the middle of the hall, turning around as he faced the Thanes who were seated in two rows around the room. At last he faced the empty throne that had been set in the hall by enthusiastic guardsmen. It was not as grand as the one he had last occupied in the Stoneheart but in many ways far more important. It sat on a platform just three steps above the rough-hewn floor. He climbed those short steps, turned and sat.

The platform itself had been hastily erected and its surface was also uneven. The throne wobbled slightly as he sat on it.

Thrones,
Jugar reflected,
can be particularly precarious perches to maintain.

Jugar waited until the Thanes had all stopped their display of welcome and, no longer stamping their feet, had all taken their seats. Only then did Jugar address them. “Thanes of the Seven Peaks, I have
returned from the lands beneath the sky but I cannot stay. I must return and finish what I have started—for your sakes and for the sake of all dwarvenkind.”

“And what has our remaining king started?” asked Gorfend, Thane of Bekra, standing abruptly from the second row.

“I have started a war,” Jugar answered simply.

“A war?” Gorfend tilted his head, the three braids of his long beard quivering. “Must I remind King Aerkan that we just went through a war—a war that cost us the thrones of each of our Nine Kingdoms and thrust the refugees from those kingdoms upon the outlying Thanes?”

“Does Thane Gorfend seek to educate me regarding the battle,” Jugar said. “I was there and do not recall his presence.”

“I may not have been at the battle,” Gorfend rejoined, “but I have born the burden of its results daily since. And now the Last King returns to us so that having lost our last war he may start another?”

“We will be victorious,” Jugar stated. “We have the advantage.”

“Advantage?” Evon, Thane of Osath scoffed as he stood up to join in the argument. Evon was a stocky, fat dwarf with a red, wide beard that he preferred to leave splayed out rather than braided. His region lay deep under Mount Heparion and had been largely untouched by the battles to the south. “What advantage? Our armies are but a fraction of their former strength, most of them filled with new and untrained warriors and the elven Cohorts continue to occupy and sack our lost cities. We are a nation in exile and you talk of advantage?”

“Yes, I say advantage,” Jugar asserted. He reached inside his leather coat and pulled out an ugly, multifaceted stone that looked like onyx but seemed to absorb even the dim light of the subterranean room. Several of the Thanes cried out, holding their arms up as though to shield themselves from the stone.

“It is an abomination!” Evon cried out.

“It is our salvation!” Jugar rejoined.

“The Aer Crafters have whispered about the Heart of Aer,” Thane Baldron of D’ras said in awe as he, too, stood to address the gathering, his luxuriously long, black beard separated into two braids that he had draped back through epaulets over his shoulders. D’ras was beneath
Devon Fel far to the north, and it was where most of the dwarven Aer masters had congregated after the fall of the last city. “They spoke of how the kings had demanded their mages mimic the Aether magic, to channel the natural Aer of earth and sky as the elves now did and the humans did before them. It was in their sight a corruption of the natural power of Aer but they forged the Heart in a desperate hope to keep the elves beyond the dwarven gates. Now the wizards all believed the Heart to be cursed and to have caused the fall of the kings, dooming them for creating it in the first place! They said it had been lost but it…it exists still?”

“It more than exists,” Jugar said, holding the stone high above his head. “It is the key to bringing the elves to their knees before us. I have used the power of this device, channeled its energies and seen its wonders. The Aether Wells of the enemy cannot stand against it. It shatters them utterly, robbing the Rhonas of the very Aether by which their entire Empire is ruled.”

“It is an atrocity against the very nature of Aer,” Evon asserted. “It should be destroyed.”

“When the towers of the Imperial City lie in ruins!” Jugar shouted, his face suddenly filled with rage. “When the last elf takes his final breath! When the souls of our dead can join their ancestors with their heads held high because their sacrifice has been avenged! Then…THEN you may do what you will. I am KING…and with the Heart of Aer we will bring down our enemies with a fall so great that its sound will echo to the very end of the world!”

“How?” Thane Evod demanded. “You would bring down the might of Rhonas with one magic stone and a decimated army of dwarves?”

“No, not with our army but with a gift,” Jugar said, regaining his composure. “I have these last few months been busy in the world above. In this the gods have smiled upon us for they have brought us a human legend.”

“Drakis?” Baldron scoffed.

Jugar raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’ve heard of this?”

“We trade with the Hak’kaarin from time to time,” Baldron said. “They have been full of tales of this Drakis-human coming back from
the dead to free the world from the elves. We thought they had made it up.”

“Not them,
I
made him up,” Jugar’s voice boomed proudly. “He was a slave—an Impress Warrior of a backwater elven household—nothing to anyone. But I started a small stone rolling down that most fortunate hill and it has grown into an avalanche. Most of the northern continent seems convinced that he is the fulfillment of their foolish prophecy. Now there is an army being raised in his name that is bent on doing exactly what we wish: to march on Rhonas and destroy the Empire.”

“Then to vengeance and war!” Wadex shouted. “If the King commands it, we shall march with this Drakis and his army.”

“No,” Jugar said, shaking his head with a smile. “I most certainly do not command it.”

“Then why have we been summoned here?” Thane Gorfend asked in astonishment. “You say you start a war and now you do not want us to join it?”

“That is correct, my good Thanes,” Jugar stated calmly as he sat back down on his wobbling throne. “I will be leaving you again tomorrow. I will return to this Drakis and make sure that his devoted and fanatic army will march against the Rhonas Empire. I will help them destroy the Aether Wells as they advance, robbing the Empire of its magic. Without its magic…Rhonas cannot stand.”