Next, how we proved our resolve and broke a few hearts along the way

I dozed fitfully most of the day, in a hired chamber guarded by some of Gudrun’s arcane mutterings. Terrified or not, I was still an experienced man of fortune and knew to try to catch a bit of rest when it was on offer.

At dusk the moons rose red, like burnished shields hanging on the wall of the brandywine sky. The mountain loomed, crowned with strange lights that never came from any celestial sphere, and it seemed I could hear the hiss and rumble of the stone as if it were a hungry thing. I shuddered and checked my gear for the tenth time. I had come light from the Crescent Cities, in simple field leathers, dark jacket, and utility belts. I carried a sling and a sparse supply of grooved stones. My longest daggers were whetted, and I wore them openly as I headed for the northeastern side of town with my companions, pretending to swagger. Denizens of Helfalkyn watched from every street, every rooftop, every window, some jeering, some singing, but most standing quietly or hoisting cups to the air, as one might toast a prisoner on the way to the gallows.

Brandgar wore a fitted coat of plate under a majestically ragged gray cloak with parti-colored patchings from numerous cuts and burns over the years; he claimed it was as good as enchanted and that he had sweated most of his considerable luck into it. Gudrun had never offered a professional opinion on this, so far as I knew. She was as scruffy as ever, a study in comfortable disrepute. Strange charms and wooden containers rattled on leather cords at her breast, and she bore a pair of rune-inscribed drums on her back. Mikah were lightly dressed in silks and leather bracers, moving with their familiar fluid grace, concealing their real thoughts behind their even more familiar mask of calculating bemusement with the world. They carried a few coils of sea-spider silk and some climbing gear wrapped in muffling cloth. However detached they seemed, I knew they were fanatics about the selection and care of their tools, more painstaking than any other burglar I had ever worked with, and any professional jealousy I might have felt was rather drowned in comfort at their preparedness.

The only real oddity was the extra weapon Brandgar carried. His familiar spear, Cold-Thorn, had a bare and gleaming tip, and its shaft was worn with use. The other spear looked heavy and new, and its point was wrapped in layers of tightly bound leather like a practice weapon. When asked about this, Brandgar smiled, and said, “Extra spear, extra thief. Aren’t I growing cautious in my old age?”

At the northeast edge of Helfalkyn lay our first ascent, an unassuming path of dusty dark stone that was marked by a parallel series of lines, half a foot deep, slashed across the walkway. Though time and weather had softened the edges of these lines, it was not hard to see them for what they were, the claw-furrows of a dragon. An unequivocal message to anyone who wanted to step over them. I suddenly wished I could forget our mutual agreement to go up the Anvil with clear heads and find something irresponsible to pour down my throat.

One by one we crossed the dragon’s mark, your nervous narrator lastly and slowly. After that we walked up in silence save for the occasional rattle of gear or boot-scuff on stone. As the odors of the town and the harbor steam faded below us, the indigo edges of evening settled overhead and stars lit one by one like distant lanterns. It would be a clear night atop the mountain, and I wondered if we would be there to appreciate it. This first part of the climb was not hard, perhaps three-quarters of an hour with the switchback path offering nothing more than agreeable exercise. As the light sank the way roughened and narrowed, and when full dark came on it ceased to be a path and became a proper climb, up a sloping black rock face of crags and broken columns. Rugged as it was, this was the only face of the Anvil that could be approached at all. Brandgar shook Cold-Thorn and muttered something to Gudrun, who muttered something in return. A moment later the tip of Cold-Thorn flared with gentle but far-reaching light, and by that pale gleam we made our way steadily up.

“What happened to everyone else?” I asked on a whim during one of our brief pauses. When last I’d sojourned in the Never-Throned’s company, he’d had eight of his original boon companions yet unslain, enough to crew his ship and drink up truly heroic quantities of something irresponsible whenever they paid call to a landed king or queen. “Asmira? Lorus? Valdis?”

“Asmira was pitched from the mast during a storm,” said Brandgar. “Lorus challenged a vineyard wight to a game of draughts and kept it occupied ’til dawn. It killed him in its fury just before the first light of the sun slew it in turn. Valdis died in the battle against the Skull Priests at Whitefall.”

“What about Rondu Silverbeard?”

“The Silverbeard died in bed,” chuckled Gudrun.

“Under a bed, to be precise,” added Mikah. “The defenders dropped it on us at the siege of Vendilsfarna.”

“I hope our friends know joy in the Fields of Swords and Roses,” I said, for that is where worthy Ajja are meant to go when they die, and if it’s true I suppose it keeps all of our own heavens and hells a bit quieter. “Though I hope I give no offense if I wish we had a few more of them with us tonight.”

“They died to bring us here,” said Brandgar. “They died to teach us what we needed to know. They died to show us the way, and when our numbers dwindled and our duties grew lean, we three knew where we were called.” Gudrun and Mikah nodded with that sage fatalism I had long lamented in my Ajja friends, and though my presence on that mountain reinforced my assertion that I had never in my life behaved with any particular wisdom, neither was I boorish enough to voice my concerns with their philosophy. Perhaps they had always mistaken this tact for fellow feeling. No, I admit I could fight with abandon when cornered, but when I could see a meeting with Death obviously scrawled in the ledger, I always preferred to break the appointment. How any of the Ajja ever survived long enough to span the seas and populate their holdings remains a mystery of creation.

We resumed our climb and soon heaved ourselves over the edge of a cleft promontory where a hemispherical stone ceiling, open to the night like a theater, overhung a darkness that led into the depths of the mountain. The wind had risen and the air was sharp against my skin. We gazed out for a moment at the lights of the town far below us, and the white-foamed blackness of the sea capped with mists, and the hair-thin line of sunset that still clung to the horizon. Then rose a scraping, shuffling noise behind us, and Brandgar turned with Cold-Thorn held high.

Red lights glowed in answer, throbbing like a pulse beat within the cavern. Whether they were lanterns or conjurations I could not discern, but in their rising illumination I saw an arched door wide enough to admit three wagons abreast. I wondered whether the dragon had left itself ample room in setting this passage, or if it could tolerate a tight squeeze. Unhelpful conjecture! In the space between us and the door stood two straight lines of pillars, and beside each pillar stood the shape of a man or woman.

Brandgar advanced, and the man shape nearest us held up a hand. “Bide,” it whispered in a hoarse sickbed voice. “None need enter.”

“Unless you propose to show us a more convenient door,” said Brandgar, “this path is for us.”

“Time remains to turn.” There was enough light now to see that the hoarse speaker and all of its companions were unclothed, emaciated, and caked with filth. A paleness shone upon their breasts, where each on their left side bore a plate of something like dull nacre, sealed to the edges of the bloodless surrounding flesh by the pulsing segments of what seemed to be a milk-white centipede. The white segments passed into the body like stitches and emerged in a narrow, twitching tail at the back of the neck. From these extremities hung threads, gleaming silver, connecting each man or woman to a pillar. Atop those, in delicate brass recesses, pulsed fist-sized lumps of flesh. I’d been near enough death to know a human heart by sight, and felt a tight horror in my own chest. “The master grudges you nothing. You may still turn and go home.”

“Our thanks to your master.” Brandgar set his leather-wrapped spear down and spun Cold-Thorn, casting about a light like the sun’s rays scattering from rippling water. “We are here on an errand of sacred avarice and will not be halted.”

Some enchanted guardians never know when to shut up, but this one had a reasonable sense of occasion, so it nodded and proceeded directly to hostilities. Each of the heart-wraiths took up handfuls of dust, and in their clenched fists this dust turned to swords. Eight of them closed on four of us, and with a merry twirl of my daggers I joined most of my companions in making royal asses of ourselves.

It was plain to Mikah, Brandgar, and me, as veterans of too many sorcerer’s traps and devices to enumerate here, that the weakness of these creatures had to be the glittering threads that bound them to their heart-pillars. Dodging their attacks, we wove a dance of easy competence and with our weapons of choice swung down nearly simultaneously for the threads of our targets. What it felt like, to me, was swinging for dandelion fuzz and hitting granite. I found myself on the ground with my right hand spasming in cold agony, and was barely able to seize my wits and roll aside before a blade struck sparks where my head had just been.

“I had thought,” muttered Brandgar (shaking Cold-Thorn angrily, for either his rude health or some quality of the spear had let him keep it when Mikah and I had been rendered one-handed), “the obvious striking point—”

“So did we all,” groaned Mikah.

“Speak for your cloddish selves,” shouted Gudrun, who had cast lines of emerald fire upon the stones, where they flashed and coiled like snakes in response to the movements of her hands, and were holding several of the heart-wraiths at bay.

I sidestepped a new assault, rebalanced my left-hand dagger, and judged the distance to the nearest pillar-top heart. If the threads had been a distraction, the weakness of the magic animating our foes surely had to lie there. I was not left-handed, but I threw well, and my blade was a gratifying blur that arrived dead on target, only to be smacked aside by one thrown with even greater deftness by Mikah, aimed at the same spot.

“Damnation, Crale, we’re supposed to be better than this,” said the King-Shadow as they whirled and weaved between onrushing heart-wraiths.

“If I live to tell this story in taverns, I shall amend this part to our advantage,” I said, though you apprehend, my friends, that I have done otherwise and will sleep soundly in my conscience tonight. Mikah found a fresh dagger and made another cast, this time without my interference. The blade struck true at the visibly unprotected heart, and rebounded as though from an inch of steel. We all swore vicious oaths. Magic does from time to time so boil one’s piss.

Mikah rolled one of the silk ropes off their shoulders, and with a series of cartwheels and flourishes deployed it as a weapon, lashing and entangling the nearest heart-wraiths, quickstepping between them like the passage of a mad tailor’s needle. I had no such recourse, and my right hand was still useless. I scrambled across the stones, swept up a dropped blade in my left hand once more, and whirled toward the two wraiths assailing me. “Hold,” I cried, “Hold! I find I’m not so eager for treasure as I was. Would your master yet give me leave to climb back down?”

“We are here to slay or dissuade, not to punish.” The heart-wraith before me lowered its weapon. “Living with yourself is your own affair. You may depart.”

“I applaud the precision and dedication of your service,” I said, and as the heart-wraith began to turn from me, no doubt to join the fray against my companions, I buried my dagger in its skull with an overhand blow. The segments of the insectoid thing threaded into its abdomen shook, and something like creamy clotted bile poured from the mouth and ears of what had once been a man. It collapsed.

“That was a low trick,” rasped the other heart-wraith, and came for me. I wrenched my dagger free, which wafted a sickly vinegar odor into my face, and waved my hands again.

“Hold,” said I. “It’s true that I’m a gamesome and unscrupulous rogue, but I feared you were playing me false. Are you really prepared to let me go in good faith?”

“Despite your unworthy—”

I never learned the specifics of my unworthiness, as I took the opportunity to lunge and sink my dagger into its left eye. It toppled beside its fellow and vomited more disgusting yellow soup. I am the soul of pragmatism.

“Enough!”

I saw that only one heart-wraith remained, and before my eyes the sword in its hand returned to dust. I had slain two, Gudrun had scorched two with her fire-serpents, and Mikah had at last bound their pair tightly enough to finish them with pierced skulls. Brandgar had beaten one of his foes to a simple pulp, breaking its limbs and impaling it through the bony plate where its heart had once been. As for those hearts, I saw at a glance that those atop seven of the eight pillars had shriveled. Dark stains were running down the columns beneath them.

“You have proven your resolve,” rasped the final heart-wraith. “The master bids you onward.”

The eerie red lights of the cavern dimmed, and with the crack and rattle of great mechanisms the arched doors fell open. Brandgar advanced on the surviving heart-wraith, spear held out before him, until it rested gently on the white plate set into the thing’s chest.

“Onward we move,” said Brandgar, “but how came you to the service of the dragon?”

“I sought the treasure and failed, threescore years past. You may yet join me, when you fail. If enough of your flesh remains, the master may choose to knit watch-worms into the cavern of your heart, so be advised…to consider leaving as little flesh as possible.”

“After tonight your master Glimraug will have no need of us.” Smoothly and without preamble, Brandgar drove his spear into the wraith’s chest. “Nor any need of you.”

“Thank…you…” the wraith whispered as it fell.

“Did we amuse you in our stumblings, sister Sky-Daughter?” said Mikah, massaging their right hand. My own seemed to be recovering as well.

“Spear-carriers and knife-brains love to overthink a problem,” laughed the sorceress. “Feeds your illusionary sense of finesse. The truly stupid and the truly wise would have started with simply bashing at the damn things, but since you’re somewhere in between, you tried to kill everything else in the room first. Good joke. This dragon knows how adventurers think.” She looked up at the mountain and sighed. “Tonight could be everyone’s night to stumble, ere we’re through.”