Thornhold - Elaine Cunningham [62]
Grief numbed him, mercifully slowing his wits and numbing his heart. He moved in a daze through the devastation, tending the dead, marking their names in his memory. Time slowed down, became utterly without meaning. His face was as set as granite, his eyes dry and hard as he gathered the bodies of kith and clan into a single grave.
Hours passed. In some dim corner of his mind, Ebenezer marked the time, and knew that far above him, a plump waxing moon rose over the Sword Mountains. But in this place, the dwarf knew only darkness and the terrible task before him. He did not stop for rest until all of Clan Stone-shaft had been decently laid to rest beneath a pile of mountain stone.
When the task was done, he slumped to the ground and tried to put words to the nagging fear in the back of his mind.
The ruined face of young Frodwinner rose up in memory Of all the Stoneshaft dwarves, he had died the hardest and best. He’d taken enough wounds to kill a trio of dwarves and kept on fighting. Seven humans and four half-orcs had fallen to his axe. Of course, Frodwinner had more to lose than nearly anyone else in the clan. He was just two days into a wedding feast, wed to the prettiest, feistiest dwarf maid in a hundred warrens. Frodwinner and Tarlamera should have had centuries of life before them. Frodwinner had been barely fifty. He was just a kid. Just a kid.
And with that lament, Ebenezer found words for his concern:
There had been no children among the slain.
This realization slammed into Ebenezer like a hobgoblin’s fist. His first response was relief-like most dwarf clans, his had not been blessed by many children. He loved kids, loved every one of the rowdy little scamps. But if they were not here, where were they?
As the dwarf thought about this, he also realized that he had not accounted for several adult members of the clan, including some of his own near kin. His Da rested in the cairn, beside the cantankerous, beloved dwarf woman who had borne him nine stout children. Most of these offspring, Ebenezer’s brothers and sisters, also slept beneath the stone. Tarlamera was not among them.
He sat upright. Why hadn’t he realized that earlier? Tarlamera was the sibling closest to him in age and temperament. They’d fought their way through a happy childhood, and hers was the face he always sought first in a crowd of his kin. Why hadn’t he looked for her and noted that she was not to be found?
Ebenezer had heard tell of people who got through rough spots by blocking out important things, not thinking about them until they were armed and ready, so to speak. Maybe that was what he was doing. Funny, but until now he would have called that sort of thing soft-headed.
But the time for protective denial was over. Ebenezer began to sort through the grim facts, and a pattern became clear. Most of the clan’s best fighters had been slain, as well as those who spent their days tending to the practical needs of the clan: hearth mothers, brewers, coopers, cobblers. All of the elderly dwarves were dead, and the few that had had the odd infirmity. The missing members were those who had special skills-skills that no one could master quite as well as could a dwarf Their best miners were gone, including Tarlamera, whose instincts for the stone were so keen Ebenezer suspected she could smell deposits of ore and gemstones from fifty paces. The best gem workers were missing, and the finest smiths. A few of the females of breeding age. The children.
In short, everyone who had value in some distant slave market.
Rage, cold and fierce and all-consuming, rose like bile in the dwarf’s throat. There was yet another thing he’d conveniently blotted out: his own capture by a passe! of Zhents. Suddenly he realized the true and devastating nature of his fear.
Slavery.
Ebenezer hauled himself to his feet, grabbed some weapons, and left behind the graveyard that had been his home. He struck out for a secret tunnel-a steep, curving passage that led up to the stronghold some humans had built on the mountain above a few decades