Taker Of Skulls(2)

Overhead the massive peaks loomed, mocking all the human activity into insignificance. Grey clouds obscured their snow-clad tops and swirled in the sky in a way that he remembered well from his childhood.

His destination was the best looking tavern in town. Over the door hung a signboard depicting two crossed dwarvish weapons, an axe and a hammer. There was an inscription in what was meant to look like dwarven script but it was gibberish. Kormak doubted than many of the customers would be able to tell though. Very few people indeed could read that ancient tongue. Kormak knew dwarvish was really just a variant of the Old Tongue with its own runic script but whoever had made the sign had not. The lettering meant nothing.

He tied his mount to the rail then walked through the swinging doors. The smell of beer and tobacco and dreamsmoke assaulted his nostrils. The clamour of men drunk in the late afternoon fell upon his ears and then ceased.

The silence lengthened as everyone turned to stare at him. He stood in the doorway and glanced around, meeting the gaze of anyone who looked at him, taking in the full details of the common room as he did so.

The walls were old, and built of mountain stone and the bar looked heavy and ancient, but there were tapestries from Vermstadt and the trading cities of western Belaria hung over them. Some gaudy murals were on the ceiling, showing fanciful portraits of dwarves and heroic prospectors. The new stuff spoke of a lot of wealth gained quickly and splashed onto the walls to attract a certain clientele.

A massive man with a scarred, skeletal face stared at him. A good-looking woman sat with him. She adjusted the round glasses perched on the bridge of her nose and the fingers of her left hand flickered through a complex gesture of greeting.

He felt a shock of recognition. He had last seen this woman more than twenty years ago and she did not appear to have aged a day. Given what Kormak knew her to be, that was hardly surprising, but some of the ways that she could have achieved that ageless look would stain her soul black.

As he strode over towards them, a drunk stumbled against him. Kormak grabbed the drunk’s hand and snapped the fingers that fumbled for his purse. The man screamed and ran for the door, suddenly no longer quite so drunk but in considerably more pain. No one else tried to stop Kormak before he reached the booth.

“Mind if I join you?” he said. The man looked at the woman as if for instructions. He was big as Kormak. His head was shaved and a nasty scar marked his right cheek, cut all the way down to the jaw. She gestured at the table. “Be my guest.”

“You’re a long way from home, Lady Karnea” Kormak said. “The last I heard you were dwelling in Belaria.”

The woman had rosy cheeks and sparkling blue eyes. Her nose was small. Her honey-blonde hair was tied in a single braid bound by a clip of blue stone worked with what looked like an authentic dwarvish rune.

“At the Forlorn Tower, in the Silver Mountains,” she said.

“I see you retain your interest in dwarves.” Kormak spoke quietly. He glanced around. No one seemed to be paying them much attention, but you never knew.

The woman smiled. It transformed her face. Where before she had been merely pretty, now she was lovely. “I do indeed. It is good to see you again, Kormak,” she said. “I was told we would meet you here, if all went well.”

“Who told you that?”

“A mutual acquaintance.”

“You carry an interesting blade,” said the man, much more quietly. His voice had a hoarseness to it, as if he had spent too much time shouting orders on a battlefield. “Dwarf-forged, by the look of it.”

“Indeed, Boreas,” said the woman. “Look at the hilt. It is quite clearly Khazduri workmanship. A Stentarian era original, overlaid with late-Gromani fretwork unless I am much mistaken.”

The lovely smile widened. “As you surmised, I am still a scholar of the Khazduri,” the woman said. “That is why I am here.”

“Go on,” Kormak said. He doubted that this meeting was a coincidence. He had last seen this woman at Mount Aethelas. It seemed likely she was his contact. If she wasn’t, he still wanted to find out why someone like her was here.

Karnea removed her glasses, breathed on the lenses, polished them, held them up to the light and inspected them and then put them back on her nose. “There are things we need to talk about and Boreas tells me this is not the right place to do so.”

Kormak stared at her. She seemed unworldly but there was something about her, a sense of concealed power that made him edgy, that he had only been vaguely aware of when he was younger. Since then he had encountered many people like Karnea, usually when he had been sent to kill them.