Book 6: Chapter 43 - The Heart of the Mountain (RAW)

Trust is the root of all dealings: when the root is firm, rites and bargains flourish drinking deep from hidden wells.

- A saying among the Nas Al-Rimal.

The next few weeks were a dance of steel and parchment, of bowed heads and bared teeth, as the new queen of Bronzegate set her sigil upon everything that she could claim authority over. Her edicts went out at dawn and came back at dusk signed, stamped, and enacted. When a Dwarf balked, the Runed stood behind, in front, or next to him—an unsubtle pressure clad in Adamantine Black. When a Captain of the City Guard balked, a Dragon of Mercenaries would add to Lakis’s persuasive notes. The bustling avenues under the mountain learned to lower their voices; the market crier softened his bell; even the breweries let their vats bubble a little quieter. The city still breathed, but shallowly. Worry had become a new constant for the citizenry. My shadow helped with that, my strong arm even more so. Word travels quickly in this place with no natural light. The man who had bested their justice, near naked and alone. And men, if the Dwarves could be called men, can only gossip so loudly when they think a monster sits a few streets across, sharpening an impossibly heavy blade that no mortal was meant to wield.

It was not for nothing. Through Lakis—Queen Lakis now, though her coronet had not yet warmed to her brow overly long—I learned of the Heart of the Mountain. One of the ingredients I needed for the elixir of immortality, yes; but more than that, a thing of old Dwarven dread and reverence, the crystallized essence of Mana, a lump of trapped wisdom and whispers. She told me it was made from the souls of ancient kings—condensed rulership, fossilized oaths. They would call it “wisdom.” I would call it fuel for my fire. The new queen believed in tradition, but she believed in breath more. Breath and power. Survival is a tradition older than any hymn, and the reach for greater power intertwined with it. She sent me to the sanctum away from prying eyes, in the deepest parts of the Hold, and there, beneath a ceiling etched with a thousand names, she set the Heart in my hand. It was not cold. That surprised me. It thrummed like a pulse against my palm, as if it recognized me. It was full of the magic of this world, an alien thing still, even for me.

“I will have a copy made,” Lakis said, voice steady, fingers clenched behind her back. “It will be imperfect, of course. But the mountain is patient. Our dead will fill it again, drop by drop, as they have always done.”

“So on your death,” I said mildly, “and on the deaths of those after you, the new false stone will drink.”

“Yes, it will drink. I will live on, in a way, on this mortal coil. My soul will cross the Shallow River,” she answered as her eyes flicked to mine. “If that is the price of a people’s continuance, then yes. I know you do not lie when you threaten the deaths of all for your hunger.” 

She was every inch a queen in that moment, and for a heartbeat I liked her for it. Then the heartbeat ended, and I took the Heart and slid it into my pack where none would dare look. I remembered that those in power liked to cling to it. My tacit compliance was the last signature the new queen’s reign required as she stabilized her rule. 

It is strange how little noise such a coup d'etat truly rendered. I had expected greater resistance. Anticlimax has its own texture: like the thin rain on a roof, the quiet after a house door shuts, the way a crowd disperses at the end of a recital—first in mutters, then in silence. I had wished for a final spasm of defiance: a last summoned thing, chiseled from rock and hatred, to fling itself to be broken by my armored fists; some noble fool leading a charge of the old guard screaming against tradition and foreign interlopers.

The Dwarves, however, were much too practical for that. Much to practical to be the feed for my fire.

Instead it felt much like the receipts handed over after a casual purchase at the supermarket, an experience that thinking upon seemed so alien and long ago. The keys to the kingdom changed hands. The old banners came down and the new went up without a single tear in the social fabric. It was so very efficient. I should have admired it. Instead I found myself oddly bereft, like a gambler whose opponent had folded before the turn.

Larynda, of course, was incandescent. Exuberant. I had found something attributed only to myth and legend, the quest was not just an abstract thing. It had become a possibility. She moved through the corridors with the spring of a puppy released, smiling at servants who had flinched from her crazy smile. Only I understand the shape of that joy. She did not love me as lovers love; the girl’s heart had been hammered on different anvils, nor I, for that matter, her. But she loved me as one loves a lighthouse in a turbulent sea: a thing that does not move in a world that does. To her I was a fixed star, proof that the sky remembered its own map. Protector, companion, sometimes the necessary ogre—yes. A monster, but I was her. More than any of those, a constant, something that not it looked like even the years could not steal. She would have bled gladly to keep me unchanging, because the alternative was to admit that everything she had lost would never return. It is a powerful kind of worship, the sort that pretends it is not. To me, she would always be my ward.

Damien was a different kettle of fish—bristling, eyes like a dog or cat that has learned to distrust the hand that feeds. We were no longer friends,yet not quite enemies. We had crossed blades, after all, and he had meant to kill me. I had not found it necessary to reciprocate, and in the end hold back. He could not forgive me for that mercy; it set him beneath me in a way he loathed. Nobles, or perhaps it was just him, are cut from a cloth that takes offense at the strangest of things.

There remained the matter of debt. If this land has taught me anything, it is that codes are for the strong. The weak endure other people’s rules; the powerful manufacture their own and call it virtue. I had been pretending at a virtue lately. A luxury I was allowing myself. A thing I had begun to call honor.

So I went to him at an hour that was probably late—time under the mountain is a rumor—walking through the alley of our camp just outside the gates of Bronzegate. His tent lamp made a buttery circle on oiled cloth, shadowing stacks of orders and manifests. He didn’t look up when I ducked under the flap.

“Damien,” I said, as if his name were a summons.

“Gilgamesh.” He did not stop scratching on a piece of important parchment. He had the work of seeing to the needs of a thousand men in front of him and the patience for all of it. I, of course, did not and in that de Savant had utility. Then the quill stilled. He glanced up, weighing which mask to wear to present to me.

“Queen Lakis has paid you in full?” I asked, cursing the nervous smallness in my own voice.

“She has.” He studied me for a heartbeat longer, as if I were a ledger that would not balance. “We’ll have new orders from the Guild by tomorrow if I ask for them. The men are rested, and restless. They wish to see proper action. Most of them feel unnecessary now. A small part, your doing.” A corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. “You make irrelevance contagious.”

A compliment wrapped around a thorn. I have learned to let both pierce me. “I should not have forced your hand,” I said. “That is the truth of it. I apologize.”

His eyes narrowed, like a visor does before it drops across a helm. He feared a trick. I am not above lying when it oils the hinges of a door I need opened, but I try to tell the truth whenever I can. I am not deceitful by nature.

“And thus,” I said, opening my empty hands, “I find that I owe you.”

“What is it you want?” he asked, as if the words tasted of copper.

“To repay you.” I leaned on earnestness the way a drunk leans on a rail. “And to clear the air between us, if such a thing can be done.”

Damien de Savant laughed—not merrily. It was a light sound with sharp edges. “One of the richest men in leagues… the great Gilgamesh himself in debt. Rich.” He shook his head. “For a blink, I almost believed you.”

Ah. A failed persuasion roll. I marked it, and decided to simply move on.

“I was thinking you would tell me,” I said, shrugging, offering him the dice again.

He looked for the lie and found none. It troubled him more than deceit would have. I could see him paging through possibilities: extortion, manipulation, or a trap. Finding only the bald fact of my offer, he set it on the table between us and weighed it like a strange coin.

“You’re actually serious,” he said at last, and the words came out thin.

He stared past me, thoughts going elsewhere, and when he spoke again there was something hollow in him, a room in his chest where furniture had been covered and left to dust. “I might… require help getting back something that is mine.”

A side quest. My pulse beat a little quicker. A story branching, a fresh inked path through the new pages of my epic, the Record of Ash and Ruin I had fancifully called it. Experience from the men and monsters in this world were dwindling, each new kill less satisfying than the last; numbers shrink when you hit them too hard and too often. Here was instead a chance to be a hero in a ballad I did not believe in, to put my blade to found a legacy instead of just achieving another level. Perhaps, somewhere along the detour, I fancied I would find a way back to my old world, a trial or gateway to something new.

Or find a way to make this world more bearable, to mold it more in the image that I wished it to be. With immortality no longer a theory but a profound realistic weight, options had proliferated like the desert after the rain. I could afford, for once, to take the scenic route and enjoy some of the game’s lore.

“—with my father’s men marching against the Empire when the snows lift,” Damien was saying, not noticing that my mind had wandered. “Even with just a Dragon of men, we might dare the Bastion de Lys. But only at the right hour. If I choose when the moon is at its weakest… or at its strongest…”

“I have no idea what you’re going on about,” I said, which was true. Nor, did I care much.

He blinked, then grimaced, as if he’d shown me too much. “Whatever you are,” he said, “you make arithmetic untrustworthy. With you, we could try it.”

“Very well,” I said, grave as a judge. “Just point me in the right direction.”

An ancestral keep, I surmised. A stolen legacy that when reclaimed would wipe the debt between us. That would serve. Experience is experience, whether it bleeds from man or monster. Or, for that matter, man or dwarf. My woman Estaza would approve of the detour; she mentioned before that she wished to visit Aranthia, the home of chivalric traditions.

“You’re actually considering this?” the beautiful man asked, and there was a shred of hope under the scorn. “Even so, I cannot pay you as—”

“Think nothing of it, de Savant.” I let a chuckle loose, low as gravel. “Call it entertainment. And a proving of my new weapons. Your smith, Delenzen, has finished the adjustments. The reshaping of my spoils.”

I set the haft across his desk. The lamp-light crawled along the new edges. Once it had been a Dwarven Runed’s axe, a slab of murder no human arm was meant to swing. Delenzen had thinned the cheek, drawn the beard, set an Adamantine counterweight at the tail, and married it to a pole of Adamantine banded Ironwood. It balanced now like a promise—heavy, yes, but eager to move. I had evolved into a halberd that it was always meant to be.

“I had to cancel the original commission I’d given him,” I said, almost apologetic. “Coin helped. It usually does. And the new project, he took to it quickly when he found out that I would also pay for him to work with Dwarven masters of the forges.”

By order of the new queen, none would have dared defy me. Those that had, were already considerably shorter.

Damien touched the black metal with two fingers and snatched them back as if he’d dipped them in a brazier. “Bastion de Lys,” he said, as if testing whether the name would break in his mouth. “Then we make ready.”

I felt the axis of fate tilt—another hidden gear locking into place, steering me toward a glory I could never step away from.