Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

"Second." Vorn’s voice was climbing. "A general levy is raised upon every household of the under-tier, called by district, beginning with the galleries. Smiths are exempt, being required at the anvil."

"Exempt." Old Dain said it from his bench, both hands on his cane, testing whether the word worked any better out loud. It did not. "They’ll take my sister’s boys, and leave me here to arm them."

"Third. Wages of all crown craftsmen are to be paid in scrip until the war is decided." The hall’s rumble began somewhere around the word scrip.

"Which war?!" a journeyman shouted down from the second tier. "We haven’t got an army! We buried it in the passes!"

"Fourth," Vorn said, and then he stopped.

He had read ahead.

"Read it, lad."

"The elves." Vorn’s voice came out flat and careful. "Having broken faith with the mountain and delivered their whole race unto the Primordial Villain, are declared treacherous, and hold no treaty of ours."

The rumble stopped.

"And the Villain is declared enemy of the mountain, to be resisted and eliminated, for he will come with the long-ears at his back to break our gates and put our people in chains."

At the back of the hall, Brokk’s thumbs went into her belt.

"Ah."

"They’re preparing for war against him."

"With what?!" a smith growled, hurling his wadded shift-rag at the post. "Our armories are not fit for war!"

"This is so pointless! Have they lost their minds?! Everyone knows numbers mean nothing against his Necromancy, and they plan to throw our friends and families at him?!"

Line by line, at full volume, the hall took the notice apart.

A shield-veteran named Halvar came down with the off-watch, still in his harness, and the stair behind him filled with more of the same.

"They cut the passes’ pensions," he reported to the hall at large. "Scrip. For the living. The widows get... they get nothing. And now they’re raising a levy off the same galleries."

Journeymen drifted in behind the soldiers, then porters, then a pair of tunnel-wardens still carrying their lamps. Every trade of the under-tier was collecting in the one hall where somebody they trusted held authority.

"Treacherous," one of the tunnel-wardens repeated, setting his lamp down on a cold anvil.

Vorn was still up on his bench with the paper in both hands, and he had gone a color no apprentice should ever see on a master. The smith who raised him from his first nail had marched out with the army and never marched back.

"Kaelira chose hearth-steel," Vorn said. "With the crown’s adamantite lying open right behind her. Because... because the piece has to deserve the metal." He shook the notice once. "She hammer-tested by ear. In our hall. And she taught it to anyone who asked." His voice went. "That’s not a traitor."

"And this." Old Dain didn’t move off his bench. "This says the man is coming to put us in chains."

"Ahaha! Those imbeciles don’t even know that he was already here!"

"They’re clueless," a master agreed. "He stood where you’re standing and asked me about my flue draw."

"And when he went, he left the hammer."

Old Dain set both hands back on his cane. "He could’ve killed every soul in this hall, but instead he asked us about quench oil." He looked up at the notice. "You don’t leave a gift on the anvil of a place you mean to chain."

"Where’s Elowen?" an apprentice said, from somewhere along the second-tier rail.

The hall looked around itself and found a gap in it.

Then something came up out of the tunnel-wardens’ alcove, which answered the separate question of where the wardens’ good barrel had gone.

Elowen of the elven royal guard arrived at the top of the steps at a list, one hand on the rail, the other around a dwarven drinking horn that had not been issued to her by anybody.

"I heard," she announced to the entire under-tier, with enormous care, "a WORD."

"Which word, lass?"

"Treacherous." Her ears went flat. "Treach... treh..."

*Buuurp.*

"...Forgive me."

"I was ON that bench." She swung the horn at the guests’ bench and lost a third of it over the stone. "I watched them fold those damned metals, and then they left it sitting on that anvil and went home. And your lords have written down that he is coming to CHAIN you."

"Aye!"

"He was here for a whole DAY!" One finger came up, on the second attempt. "If he wanted your mountain he would simply have taken your mountain, you magnificent short people!"

Half the gallery mouth started laughing.

"He takes what he wants," Elowen went on, warming to it, gesturing broadly enough to endanger the nearest apprentice. "That is the entire..."

She stopped.

Her own words caught up with her, slowly, the way things do at the bottom of a horn.

"...He forgot about me."

"Aye, lass."

"He left me HERE." The ears came up. "That MOTHERFUCKER left me here!"

The royal smithy of the dwarves roared its approval, and a second horn was pressed into her free hand before she could put the first one down.

Brokk had not said one word since the gallery mouth. She stood in the middle of her own hall and read the notice for herself, top to bottom, while every soul in it watched her do it.

Behind her, the Copper Vaults’ siege-plate order sat racked by the quench basin, ground and fitted and waiting on the final quench. That call was hers, and nothing left this mountain as finished steel until she made it.

A master smith cleared his throat and put it to her formally, the old form, with a nod at the racked plate.

"The Vaults’ order’s suspended, First Hammer. Council wants the pattern-book on these anvils by the next shift." His beard worked once. "They’ll want your call on the first crate."

Brokk looked at the plate, then at the notice, then at her hall.

Her thumbs came out of her belt.

"Light the forges."

Nobody moved.

"All of them," Brokk said. "Every hearth on every tier, and dig the old die racks out from under the sand bins."

She was already walking toward the nearest cold hearth.

"First Hammer-?!" Vorn was down off his bench without noticing he had left it, the notice crumpled in his fist. "They want axes! You heard what they wrote about her. You heard what they wrote about him. And you’re going to-"

"Move, lad."

"You’ll stamp out their axes, then." Old Dain said it from his bench with no heat in it at all, and the hall went quieter than any shouting could have made it.

Brokk stopped.

She came back through her own smiths and put her boot on the notice where it had fallen.

"They want us to make weapons."

She let them have that.

"So be it. We’ll make weapons."

The hall went still.

"And every one of them will be used to protect our loved ones and the future of the dwarven people."

"First Hammer!" The roar started at the racks, took the second tier with it, and did not stop until it had the rail.

Brokk talked straight through it, and it fell away to let her.

"They take!"

"AYE!"

"And Take!"

"AYE!"

"And take even more!"

"AYE!"

"And when there’s nothing left to take, they write down that we owe them more, and they sign it the defense of the mountain! I’m done."

"AYE!!!!"

"Done." Old Dain got his cane up off the floor and held it there with both hands shaking on it.

"And then what?"

It came from a journeyman near the front, and it was not a heckle. The lad looked frightened, and he said it anyway.

"Who rules us at the end of it? You, First Hammer?"

"No. I don’t have the strength nor the will. But there’s a man who already beat them," Brokk said.

Three hundred smiths knew exactly who she meant, and not one of them said the name.

"He asked me what we could make." Her thumbs went back into her belt. "No lord has ever asked me that. They tell me their demands."

"And when the talk came round to my smiths, he said we sounded like the kind of people any sane ruler would want to support."

Then the First Hammer of the royal smithy put it to them flat, tier by tier.

"I already asked you this, and the answer was divided back then. So let me ask again. Wouldn’t it be better to be ruled by the Primordial Villain?"

This time the hall answered her.

"YES!"

Brokk let them have it for as long as it took her to cross her own floor.

Her smiths opened out of her path without being asked, and the noise went out behind her tier by tier as they worked out where she was walking, until three hundred dwarves were following her with their eyes and nothing else.

At the heart of the hall stood an anvil nobody had worked in a season.

Everwright, squared to the light where an elf had set it down before she went home. It had been humming there through every shift-bell since.

The First Hammer’s fingers closed, and she lifted the Villain’s gift off the anvil.

Three hundred smiths pulled in one breath and held it.

She raised it over her head. The elf had stood on this same floor to do that, with her ears blazing and her spine straight, and the lamplight ran the length of the water-grain now exactly as the forge-light had run it then, waking the rune-script where it crossed.

"Magma."

Brokk reached into the hammer instead of into herself. She had watched it done from four feet away, once, and she had not forgotten a single thing about it.

The rune-channels answered a dwarf.

The head woke red, then deeper, then molten, and the light came up the grain until the whole tool ran the color of a fresh pour and brought the First Hammer’s face up out of the dark.

"I hereby declare the dwarven rebellion against tyranny!"

Brokk brought Everwright down.

*KRAAANG!!*

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