Hero Page 6

  “And to what’re we owin’ this honor?” Ivan asked soon after. “If ye’ve come for good food and better tales, know that ye’re in the right house! But aye, there’s more, I’m guessin’.”

  “I cannot deny the fine food and hospitality,” Andrus agreed. “Perhaps I’m far too long in coming to see you here, good dwarf.”

  “Me brudder!” Pikel said happily, and Andrus smiled widely.

  “But it’s them dwarfs, aye?” Ivan asked.

  Andrus’s face went somber. “You didn’t know them, it seemed.”

  “Ne’er heared o’ them,” Ivan confirmed. “Clan Bigger?”

  “Hee hee hee.”

  “No one has, as far as I can tell,” Andrus explained, casting a sidelong glance at the green-bearded dwarf.

  Pikel, used to such looks, beamed more brightly.

  “They have promised to return,” Andrus explained.

  “I seen the chest o’ jewels and gold.”

  “Oooo,” said Pikel.

  “I’m guessin’ King Yarin’s not for tellin’ them no,” Ivan finished.

  Captain Andrus shrugged, not about to disagree. “We will get more warning next time they come in,” he explained. “They will be held out by the wall, and there, you will go to them, and escort them.”

  “And get ’em talkin’,” Ivan replied, catching on.

  “Anything we can learn,” said Andrus. “King Yarin will be pleased indeed to add a clan of rugged dwarves to his subjects.”

  “And to his army,” Ivan reasoned.

  “Boom!” said Pikel.

  “Do you find their story believable?” Andrus asked with another sidelong glance at the curious one-armed dwarf.

  “What, that they been walking in circles underground and only now come up for air? Aye, heared many a tale akin to that afore. Mirabar’s half dwarfs, and half o’ them ain’t been aboveground in a hunnerd years. Many’s the clan just not wantin’ such things.”

  “We’re guessing they took to the depths in the time of Zhengyi,” Captain Andrus explained, referring to the witch-king who had long ago ruled the neighboring kingdom of Vaasa and who had ravaged the land with his army of monsters and flights of dragons.

  “Aye, good time to hide under a mountain, I’m thinkin’,” said Ivan, who knew well the tale.

  “Did they not impress you as a bit strange?” Andrus asked.

  “More’n a bit!”

  “Hee hee hee,” said Pikel.

  “Aye, and I know strange,” an exasperated Ivan said.

  “So we should watch them closely,” said Andrus. “And we understand each other?”

  “Aye.”

  “And do see if you can clean them up a bit before they are presented to the king.”

  “Aye … what? Nay!” said Ivan, and a puzzled Andrus stared at him.

  “Worse thing ye can do,” Ivan explained, “is to be offerin’ a tunnel rat dwarf a bath.”

  “Oooo,” said Pikel.

  “And that clan’s tunnel rats, to be sure,” Ivan explained.

  Captain Andrus grinned. “Well, do what you can. Make of them friends, and learn what they have to say. Then report to me.”

  “Aye,” Ivan started to reply, but he was cut short.

  “Uh-uh,” Pikel said, waggling his finger and shaking his head.

  Captain Andrus scrunched up his face and looked from Pikel to Ivan, at a loss.

  “He’s tellin’ ye that ye’re comin’ to me for me report,” Ivan explained. “Back here for a pot o’ stew.” He ended with a tremendous burp.

  “Boom!” said Pikel, and Captain Andrus laughed, agreed, and Pikel farted.

  “Hee hee hee.”

  FIVE DAYS’ MARCH west-northwest of Helgabal, Toofless Tonguelasher and his band of dirty dwarves came to the rocky passes into the wall of mountains called the Galenas, which separated Damara from the wilder lands of Vaasa.

  The troupe climbed late into the night of that fifth day, following small trails they had carefully and secretly marked on their earlier descent.

  Under a full moon, they came to a flat, wide stone, and Toofless went out onto it holding a torch and waving his arms. In the multitude of rocky bluffs above loomed sentries wielding crossbows that would launch him halfway back to Helgabal in his current diminutive state.

  “Aye, Toofless,” a voice boomed down at him. “Ye been to see the fancy king, then?”

  “Aye, and what a pretty pair o’ things he and his queen be,” Toofless replied.

  “No troubles?”

  “None.”

  “So we be Damarans now, do we? Loyal dwarflings fer the fancy king,” the loud voice answered.

  “Aye, and he’ll prolly put us in his army—might to roll o’er Vaasa, eh?” said another resonating voice, and the comment brought an explosion of laughter from the high places around the flat stone and from Toofless and his band, who came forth to join him in the open.

  “Ye gots a vis’tor comin’,” the first unseen sentry called.

  “Her again?”

  “Aye, I’m guessin’.”

  Toofless looked at his companions and shrugged, and they did likewise. They weren’t happy about having that type in their home, of course, but she had brought them fine payment of gold and jewels for the last load of bloodstone, after all, and said she’d be back with more precious pieces this time.

  “Well, push the stone out and let me in,” Toofless called up, and barely had the words left his mouth before a massive boulder began to shudder and shift, revealing the dark entrance to a deep passageway, the entrance to a place called Smeltergard.

  In went Toofless, the others close behind. Before they had gone twenty paces down the corridor, the massive stone shifted back into place behind them, sealing the cave.

  “Taller halls!” one of the band complained many steps later. “Feel like I’m to bust through me head ’ere!”

  “Aye, been too long,” said another. “Too long!”

  “We stay small for the drow, eh?” Toofless ordered to a chorus of groans. The dwarf leader sighed in reply. He, too, felt the itching. It had been a full tenday and more, after all.

  “Come on, then, but fer this night alone!” he said, turning down a side corridor. The others cheered.

  The band soon came into the first of a series of chambers, wide and spacious and with high ceilings. There they began to shed their clothing and armor, and their boots—these weren’t the magical suits they usually wore. They wouldn’t bring that trove into Helgabal with them.

  Toofless was the first to get naked. He fell back against the wall and sighed again, and fell deep within himself to call upon his familiar magic.

  He began to shudder, to jolt and gurgle, his bones crackling, tendons popping—and every one eliciting a groan of pain. But it was sweet pain, because he knew where it would end.

  Finally, he sighed again, this one a sigh of relief. He pulled himself off the wall to consider his companions, many of whom were very near the completion of their own transformations.

  Toofless, now more than twelve feet tall and looking very much like a tall and thin hill giant, nodded to each of his fellow spriggans as they came back to their more comfortable forms.

  “Feelin’ good to stretch,” said Komtoddy, perhaps the best fighter in the clan.

  “Aye,” Grommbollus agreed. “How long we gots?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a nap in this skin,” Komtoddy said.

  “No nap,” said Toofless. “Put up a beat and we’ll dance a few jigs, then down to the meetin’ woom with the wot o’ us.”

  “Bah and snorts,” Grommbollus said.

  “Well, any not wantin’ in on the talk can go take watch back outside,” Toofless conceded, and that brought some claps and cheers. Komtoddy picked up a couple of heavy stones and began drumming on the heavy wooden door at the back of the chamber. The spriggan giants began to dance, kicking up their heels and leaping around, a ghastly sight for any cultured onlooker, particularly since the hairy and
dirty creatures still wore no clothes.

  “MOST DISAGREEABLE LITTLE creatures, even for dwarves,” Queen Concettina said to King Yarin when the two retired to their private quarters that same starlit night.

  “Them again?” Yarin asked with obvious exasperation, and he added some response that sounded more like a dismissive “harrumph” than anything else, and waved his arm in the air, never looking back at the queen.

  “But the jewels were well-cut, I am told, and one can never have enough gold, I suppose,” she said, again with a slight titter in her voice. She didn’t really care much for gold, they both knew, and they already had all the luxuries they could enjoy, and more.

  King Yarin swung around and fixed her with a cold stare.

  “And soldiers!” she blurted, misreading his obvious disdain. “Dwarves do make fine soldiers, from all that I have heard …”

  “I care nothing for that which you might have heard, good lady,” Yarin replied.

  Concettina swallowed hard and bit back any impulsive response. So they were back to this again? She looked around, feeling trapped at that moment, then sought the only escape she knew and shrugged off her queenly robe. Only the offer of hope could assuage Yarin when he was in one of these moods. She began untying her decorated gown.

  “The chest of gems and jewels does so excite me,” she lied.

  Yarin snorted at her derisively.

  “Perhaps this time …” Concettina started to say.

  “This time?” Yarin roared back at her. “This time? Why would this time be any different than the hundred before? How many years has it been, foolish woman? Bah!”

  He pulled the crown from his head and threw it across the room, then spun away from her, his hands going petulantly to his hips.

  “Is every woman in this accursed land barren, then?” he lamented, and that wasn’t his true frustration, of course, but one that hit him much more to the heart of the matter. Concettina was King Yarin’s seventh queen. He had divorced his first four after they had failed to produce an heir, though two of them, at least, were later rumored to have borne children to new husbands.

  All of which had further embarrassed King Yarin, of course, and so his last two wives before Concettina had not been so fortunate. One was found guilty of treason, the other of murdering a baby in her bed. Neither charge held any substance, so said the rumors of court.

  Their true crimes had been the inability to give King Yarin his heir, and their punishment exacted to make certain the monarch would not be further embarrassed by their subsequent relationships … and children.

  He had memorialized those last two queens in the form of headless statues in two of the palace gardens. Indeed, the guillotine had been built specifically for Driella, Concettina’s predecessor, after the beheading of his fifth wife had been botched, the headsman’s axe striking a bit too low and so getting stuck on the poor, screaming woman’s spine.

  When the wind blew through the gardens in just a certain way, Concettina thought she could still hear the echoes of those agonized, dying screams.

  “I will never bear you a child if we do not try,” Concettina said, fighting back tears. “And you enjoy the trials, I daresay, so is it such a terrible thing that we must work harder?”

  She dared to move over and put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. She felt him tense under her grip, but he didn’t yell at her, or even swing around to glare at her again. She began to gently knead his old shoulders, and gradually, he relaxed.

  Soon after, she was able to coax him into her bed. She held no illusions that they would conceive, of course, but she had to maintain in King Yarin some measure of hope, at least.

  She tried to keep the image of the blood-stained guillotine out of her thoughts as he rode her.

  And she dearly hoped that her father, Lord Corrado Delcasio of Aglarond, would receive her letter and would find some way to help her.

  Even that thought gave her pause, though. Penning the letter was tantamount to treason, and could she really trust anyone to deliver it half a thousand miles away?

  That image of the bloody guillotine filled her thoughts as King Yarin shuddered above her.

  MANY HOURS LATER, Komtoddy and Toofless, back in their diminutive dwarf forms, sat on blocks of stone in front of a slender drow priestess who wore a fitted garb of some translucent material that resembled the work of an industrious, lecherous spider. Indeed, very little was left to the imagination of the spriggans, but their imaginations, one and all, were more fixated on the small coffers their visitor had placed on the floor at her feet than on the obvious charms of the seductive drow.

  “Lady Chawwi,” Toofless greeted.

  Charri Hunzrin, First Priestess of House Hunzrin, nodded and replied, “Good dwarf.”

  “What have you brought for us this time, dwow? Your chest looks smaller.”

  Charri laughed and considered the small coffer at her feet. “Just two pieces this time,” she explained, “but ones of extraordinary value.”

  “Bah, a bauble’s a bauble.”

  Charri Hunzrin bent low and lifted the coffer. She turned to the dark elves around her, all of them wearing knowing grins and nodding as if this was some important revelation.

  “I will require two tons of bloodstone in return for these, good dwarf,” she said.

  “Two tons?” Toofless balked. “Ye best be showin’ me a weapon full o’ dwow murder magic fer that!”

  “Oh, this is a weapon, do not doubt,” Charri Hunzrin replied. She moved forward and slowly lifted the cover from the coffer, revealing a pair of gem-studded necklaces, one delicate and beautiful on a silver chain, the other heavy with large and varied gemstones held by an ostentatious chain of gold.

  Toofless shrugged. Unlike dwarves, the spriggan weren’t overly fascinated by gems and jewels. Of course, Toofless thought, Charri didn’t really know the truth of Clan Bigger, though, did she?

  “Looks like a pwetty thing,” he said. “Should be on yer own neck, eh? Yerself likes pwetty things.”

  “I do, but there is nothing pretty about these,” Charri said, snapping the coffer shut as Toofless reached for the gems. “The smaller of them, at least.”

  The spriggan dwarf looked from his nearly snapped fingers to the drow priestess. “Looks pwetty,” he replied, confused.

  “You went to greet the king?” Charri asked.

  “Clan Bigger o’ Damara,” Toofless happily replied.

  “And you wish to serve this human?”

  Toofless spat on the floor at her feet, a long green wad of disgusting sputum.

  “So your goal is not to be good citizens of Damara, then?”

  “Ye might not be as stupid as ye wook,” Toofless replied.

  “Then what is your goal here, good dwarf?”

  “To not get taken for a fool by a damned dwow!” said a suddenly animated Toofless.

  “Not here,” the drow replied, indicating the room. “What is your goal in Damara? Why did you and your people decide to tunnel out of the Galenas?”

  “Bored,” Komtoddy remarked, and others nodded.

  “Looking for adventure and a bit of a fight?” Charri Hunzrin asked. “Looking for fun?”

  “Said as much,” said Toofless.

  “Well these necklaces will give you all the fun you could ever desire,” Charri replied. From her pocket, she pulled another gemstone and tossed it to Toofless. The spriggan dwarf held it up to his good eye and studied it carefully for a few moments before shrugging.

  “Nuttin’ special,” he said.

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “Bad cut.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “So says yerself.”

  “It is not the appearance of the gem that matters, good dwarf, but that which it might hold,” Charri explained.

  “Hold?” Toofless and Komtoddy asked together.

  Charri brought forth the coffer again and opened it. She pointed to a gem on the more delicate necklace within, one that very mu
ch resembled the gemstone Toofless held in his hand. Noting that, the dwarf reached out, but again, Charri snapped the box shut.

  “Oh, do not touch it, good dwarf,” the drow priestess explained. “For the gem on the necklace is not empty, like the one you are holding.”

  “Empty? What?”

  “Deliver these to the king, as gifts for him and his pretty queen,” Charri instructed. “Then, my friend, you will find some fun. Grand fun!”

  Toofless and Komtoddy exchanged looks and nods. “Okiedokes, then, dwow,” said Toofless. “We’ll see yer fun and then figger what it’s worth in bloodstone, eh?”

  “Two tons,” Charri Hunzrin insisted.

  “We’ll be seein’.”

  “I already know, and that is the price.”

  “And if it’s not that worth o’ fun?” Komtoddy asked.

  “Oh, it will be, but if not, then you can argue again when next I return,” Charri Hunzrin replied.

  “Sounds like ye’ll be takin’ our bloodstone and running off fer yer deep tunnels to me.”

  “Then you are a fool,” the drow replied, and turned back to Toofless. “I expect a long and mutually beneficial relationship here in trade. It isn’t in my interest to put off my best supplier of bloodstone, now is it? How many in the region mine the stuff these days? And nowhere else in Faerûn can it be found!”

  “Others dig the stuff,” said Toofless.

  “Others who would bargain with drow?”

  “She’s got herself a point,” said Komtoddy.

  Toofless regarded him for a bit then nodded. “Two tons, dwow Chawwi,” he told Charri Hunzrin. “For now. Ye got the haulers?”

  “I do.”

  Toofless motioned for the coffer, but Charri held it back.

  “Do not touch the necklaces,” she warned.

  “Bah,” snorted Toofless, motioning again.

  “I am serious, good dwarf,” she said. “Deadly serious—and by that, I mean your own death.”

  “Are ye thweatenin’ me?” Toofless demanded, coming forward.

  “I am telling you that that which is pretty is also deadly, and in a most profound sense.”