"Me, neither. I was sorry to lose Brimgrumph. He was a good hand at fighting, but he got too much in the habit of it. Didn't know when to quit," the duergar said piously.
It was the longest speech Bronwyn had heard from him, and the most self-serving. If the ambush that had capped their last transaction had succeeded, this duergar would no doubt have been quick to claim his share of the take. But it had failed, and his henchman had died. Bronwyn's steely gaze announced that she rejected his attempt to slough off the responsibility.
"Cross me once, expect me to watch you. But cross me twice, you best watch out for me," she warned.
The duergar shrugged. "Fair enough," he agreed. Too easy again, Bronwyn thought. As the silent duergar pocketed the gold, Bronwyn gathered up the necklace and loosened the strings on her bag. Not a common bag, but one that she'd bought from a Halruaan wizard at a cost that represented nearly a year's worth of sales. The thing was worth every copper. It was a magical tunnel that whisked whatever she tucked inside to a well-guarded safe in Curious Past, her shop in an elegant section of Waterdeep. Bronwyn had learned long ago one basic truth about the business of acquiring rare antiquities. Finding them was one thing; keeping them was another matter entirely.
A small movement caught her eye and stayed her hand. The stone knife she had borrowed moved of its own accord- not much, but a little, just enough so that the tip pointed to the amber in her hand.
Lodestone, Bronwyn realized. The knife had been carved from a stone that felt and followed the energies in metal- or in this case, in amber. The duergar meant to track her and reclaim the necklace once they thought themselves beyond the traps that she always lay to cover her retreat.
Cross me twice, she thought grimly.
She kept her expression carefully neutral as she rose from her stone seat. She even turned her back as she walked away, allowing the duergar spokesperson time to pick up the tattling stone knife. When she reached the mouth of the cave, she turned and stared coldly into the cunning eyes of the treacherous creatures, then dropped the amber necklace into the sack. It disappeared into a magical vortex. The stone knife spun in sympathetic flight, slicing deeply across the duergar's palm.
His shout of pain and outrage tore the smirk from his face. Bronwyn turned and fled, running like a deer for her escape tunnel.
She dashed around a sharp turn and stooped, dropping her torch to snatch up a stout staff she'd hidden among the rubble beside the path. The three duergar followed in a thundering crescendo of iron-shod boots. When she judged the moment right, she leaped out in front of the first two onrushing duergar, staff held level with the ground, held waist-high and firmly braced.
The duergar had no time to halt. They ran right into the staff, one on either side of Bronwyn, catching the wood just below the throat. Their heads snapped back, and their feet flew out from under them. A dull, deep boom rumbled through the cavern as the two hardy creatures slammed down flat on their backs, arms flung out wide. Bronwyn danced back.
The young duergar came on, trampling his fallen kin in his eagerness to get at Bronwyn. The gleam in his eye and the small, pitted axe he held high overhead announced his deadly intent.
Quickly Bronwyn pivoted to her right. Seizing one end of the staff with both hands, she hauled it back. Feeling like a child preparing for an extremely high-stakes round of stick ball, she swung out high and hard. The staff whistled through the air and connected with the duergar's weapon arm. Something-either arm or axe handle, Bronwyn wasn't sure which-shattered with a sickening crack. The youth dropped the axe on one of his dazed elders and kept coming.
Bronwyn stooped and reached for the cudgel that had rolled free of the adult duergar's hand. Too late she realized that she should have made a different choice; the iron-bound club was too heavy for her to lift.
There was no time to go for another weapon. Bronwyn came up in a springing lunge, her chin tucked. Her head connected hard with the young duergar's belly, stopping his charge. His breath wheezed out in a sharp, pained grunt, and they fell together in a tangle of arms and legs.
Bronwyn thrashed and kicked, but she was in too close to do much damage. The duergar youth did little better. Winded and favoring a garishly broken arm, he landed a few blows but couldn't put much force behind them. Suddenly he devised a better strategy. He seized one the bronze hoops in Bronwyn's ear and yanked it hard. The sudden, tearing pain surprised a scream out of her, and brought a wide grin to the creature's beardless face.
Angry now, Bronwyn felt about for her fallen torch. Her finger closed on the handle, close enough to the pitch-covered wood to feel the lingering heat. She thrust the still-hot end into the duergar's face.
He shrieked and released her, clutching at his eye with his one good hand. Bronwyn rolled aside and leaped to her feet, nimbly evading the grasping hands of the duergar leader. The two adults had shaken off the surprise attack, and were starting to gather their wits and reclaim their weapons. Bronwyn turned and fled for her escape tunnel.
Arms pumping, she ran full out down the path, the three duergar huffing along behind. The small tunnel came into view. She dropped to her knees and slid the last few paces, then flopped down onto her stomach and scrambled into the low tunnel. Frantically she dragged herself forward before one of them could grab her ankle and drag her back.
Almost through. Almost safe.
Something bumped her foot, startling her. Her head jerked up and connected painfully with the stone ceiling. Suddenly she realized why the duergar had brought the scrawny youngster with them. She was not the only one who had scouted the cavern. They must have anticipated this evasion-and brought along a duergar small enough to pursue her through the tunnel.
For some reason, that realization inspired more anger than feat The young duergar was already hurt, and this was far from over. She would kill him if she had to. Surely his elders knew that.
Bronwyn scrambled out of the tunnel and ran for the ravine, steeling herself for the swinging jump ahead. She reached the rope and crawled out to the marked spot. Gripping the rope tightly with one hand, she sawed at the rope behind her with her knife. The rope was almost shredded through when she heard the young duergar's terror-filled scream. His wail rose in pitch as it faded away, and then ended altogether in a resounding splash. Bronwyn cursed under her breath. The young duergar, half blinded and no doubt off balance with pain, had stumbled and fallen into the rivet.
The shouts of the older duergar and their thundering footsteps brought Bronwyn an odd sense of relief. They had found another way into the cavern. They would save the youngster before he was swept too far downstream.
Suddenly her rope rose in a sharp, hard jerk. She dropped her knife and hung on with both hands as she gazed back in disbelief at the path. The duergar were focusing their attention on her, rather than on the boy in the river below.
Anger swept through Bronwyn, chasing away the nearly paralyzing fear of the water below. She shouted a dwarven insult-one that was almost guaranteed to inspire a tavern brawl, retributive murder, or small-scale war.
Again they tugged on the rope, harder this time. The fraying rope gave way, and Bronwyn swung out over the ravine. She forced herself to keep her eyes open, her attention fixed on the rapidly approaching stone. As soon as she cleared the ledge, she released the rope and threw herself into a side roll.
The maneuver absorbed some of the impact, but still she hit the stone floor with bruising, numbing force. She rolled several times and slammed into the wall hard enough to leave her dazed and aching.
Another angry shout ripped across the divide. "You made a deal!" the leader howled. "The gold and the axe!"
Bronwyn rose painfully to her feet and glared across the divide at the dancing, hooting duergat After all this, he had the gall to accuse her of reneging on their deal.
Still, he had a point. She had the necklace, and she'd promised the axe in exchange. She went to where she'd left the weapon, then fisted her hand and drove it into the pile of pebb
les that hid it. Raising the gleaming axe high, she hauled it back for the throw.
The axe spun across the divide, directly toward the angry duergar. They squawked and dived for cover behind a pile of boulders. When they heard the heavy thunk! of metal against rock-several feet below their position-they darted out and skidded to a stop at the edge of the ravine. There, on a small ledge perhaps ten feet below the path, lay the axe.
"Oops," Bronwyn said casually.
Leaving the duergar to solve the dual problem of retrieving their axe and their young henchman, she turned and started up the steep path to the surface. There was little doubt in her mind which they would consider the more important.
Dag Zoreth had forgotten what the river sounded like when it ran wild in the spring. Faint and sweet, both impatient and laughing, the River Dessarin sang in the distance, its voice as familiar as a childhood lullaby. A wave of sharp, poignant memory assailed him, a memory almost powerful enough to drown out the remembered screams, and the terrible thunder of hooves.
He took a long, steadying breath to ground himself firmly in the present. "Wait here," he curtly told the men with him.
They had not anticipated this. They tried to hide their surprise, but Dag saw it all the same. He didn't miss much, and he gave away less-which was, in no small measure, the reason why he was the one giving the orders.
Dag understood the men's reaction all too well. He knew what they saw when they looked at him. A slight man who stood a full head shorter than most of his guards, a man who had little expertise with the short, jeweled sword on his hip, a man exceedingly pale of skin from many years spent within walls; in short, hardly the sort of man who might venture off alone into the wild foothills. Usually, Dag Zoreth didn't waste much thought on such matters. But here, in this place, childhood memories were strong-strong enough to strip him of his hard-won power and leave him feeling small and weak, once again the child despairing of ever reaching the mark set for him.
He felt the old despair now, a shadow in the memory of his father's deep, ringing voice intoning, 'When you hear the Dessarin sing just so, it is time to turn off the road."
Dag Zoreth pulled his horse's reins toward the south, tugging so sharply that the beast whinnied in pain and protest. But the horse followed his command, just as the heavily armed men behind him waited obediently on the eastbound road to Tribor.
He rode for several minutes before he got his bearings. The old path was still there, marked not by the passage of feet and horses, but by the slender trees that grew in the once-open space. It was remarkable, Dag Zoreth mused, how fast a tree could grow once it was out from beneath the heavy shadow of the older forest.
A song slipped into his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. It was a marching song, an old hymn of praise to Tyr, the god of justice. His father had often sung it to mark the passage to the village. The path and the song were of like length, his father used to say. Dag Zoreth knew that before he finished humming the final chorus, the forest would give way to a clearing, and the village would be spread out before him.
A small, cynical smile tightened his lips at the thought of actually giving voice to the song. He doubted that his own god, Cyric the Mad, had much of an ear for music.
But habit proved to be stronger than caution. As he rode, Dag recalled the verse and marked out the measure in the silence of his mind. When the remembered song was over, Dag Zoreth did indeed find himself in the clearing he sought. Along the edges young trees had made great strides toward reclaiming the forest.
Dag Zoreth slid down from his horse. He was unaccustomed to riding, and the trip had introduced him to a legion of unfamiliar muscles. Though the journey from his home in Darkhold had been long and hard, his body had adamantly refused to take on strength and muscle. There was nothing wrong with his will, however, and he thrust aside the throbbing pain as a lesser man might flick aside a fly. He left his horse to graze and began to circle the clearing.
The site was familiar and strange all at once. The buildings were gone, of course, burned to the ground in that terrible raid more than twenty years ago. Here and there he caught a glimpse of charred wood or scattered foundation stone under a tangle of spring-flowering blackberry brambles, but the village of his birth was irrevocably gone. And lost with the village was the heritage Dag Zoreth had come to reclaim.
Frustrated now, he looked around for something, anything, that would provide a market The years had changed him even more than they had altered the forest, and he no longer saw things with the eyes of a boy who had yet to weather his seventh winter. Then, his whole world had been comprised of this tiny village in the foothills south of Jundar's Hill. His world was wider now and vastly different from anything he could have imagined during his years in this sheltered enclave different from everything, of course, but the raid that had ended his childhood.
Dag Zoreth took another long breath, massaging his temples with both hands as he dredged his memory. A sudden, sharp image came to him: a red leaf framed with jagged points, drifting lazily down, and then disappearing against the brighter crimson of his brother's shattered chest.
He spun on his heel, quickly, as one might retreat from some chance-glimpsed horror. Tilting back his head, he scanned the treetops. There had been an oak tree over the place where his brother died. There were oaks in plenty, but none of them looked familiar. Perhaps he should have come in autumn, when the leaves turned color. He smiled slightly at the foolish thought and shook it aside as quickly as it came. He had the power to claim what was his, and the will to use it. Why should he wait?
But the years had changed and filtered his memories, just as the forest had closed in around his childhood home. There was no mortal way that Dag Zoreth could retrieve what was lost. Fortunately, the gods were less encumbered by issues of time and mortality, and they were occasionally willing to share their insight, one glimpse at a time, with their mortal followers.
Though he dreaded the task before him, the young priest's hands were steady as he pulled the medallion bearing the holy symbol of Cyric from beneath his purple and black tabard. Dag Zoreth wore the colors of his god at all times, even though he knew better than to go abroad flaunting the priestly vestments and symbols of Cyric. It was Dag Zoreth's opinion, based on his own experience and his own ambitions, that people who claimed no reason to fear and hate Cyric's priesthood, simply hadn't lived long enough to find one.
The young priest closed his eyes and clenched his fist around the medallion. His lips moved as he murmured a prayer for divine guidance.
His answer came suddenly, with a cruel force that slammed Dag Zoreth onto his knees, and into the past. "The hymn," he muttered though a rictus grin of pain. "Cyric must have heard the hymn." Then the thought was gone, swept away by more than twenty fleeing years.
Dag Zoreth was a child again, kneeling not in a new-growth forest, but in the darkest corner of a smoke-filled cottage. His small, skinny arms clutched a butter churn, and his black eyes were wide with terror as the bar on the door splintered and gave way. Three men strode in, their eyes burning with something that both repelled and fascinated the shrinking child.
One of them backhanded Dag's mother, who had leaped forward to defend her children with the only weapon that came to hand-a long-handled iron skillet. The ridiculous weapon fell from her hand and clattered to the hearth. Again the man struck out, and his mother's head snapped back. She went down hard, striking the hearthstone with an audible crack. Blood bloomed like an obscene crimson flower against her too-pale face. But somehow she found the strength to haul herself up, to dart past the man who strode purposefully toward the wide cradle at the far side of the room. There lay Dag's twin sisters, shrieking with fear and rage and flailing the smoky air with their tiny pink fists. His mother threw herself across the cradle, scooping both little girls into her arms and shielding them with her own body as she cried out in prayer to Tyr.
The man drew a sword and swung it up high. Mercifully, the churn obscured Dag's view and h
e never actually saw the blow fall, but he knew what the sudden silence meant. In the rough, angry exchange that followed the sword's fall, Dag read his own fate.
He shrank back, flattening himself into the indentation his impish little sister had carved into the thick wattle-and-daub wall. It was a hiding place for her "treasures"-smooth or shiny rocks, a bluebird feather, and whatever other small wonders she discovered around the village. Dag fervently wished that his sister had dug deeper, turning her trove into an escape doot. He held his breath and willed himself to disappear into the crevice, the smoke, and the shadows.
The men searched the cottage, tossing over the chests and beds in their haste to find the boy before they were overcome by smoke from the smoldering thatch roof. They did not move the churn, probably because there was no apparent place behind it for a child to hide. Finally they gave up the search, concluding that Dag had bolted as his sister had done.
She had left the cottage well before the fire had started. Ever curious, she had gone to investigate the noise caused by the approaching raiders, evading their mother's frantically grasping hands and wriggling through the one small window left unshuttered. Her old night tunic had caught and torn on the shutter hook. Instinctively she'd clapped her hand to the little crimson birthmark on her bare hip- no doubt a defensive gesture honed by Dag's frequent teasing. Then she was gone, the soles of her small feet flashing as she spilled headfirst out of the window. Dag wondered, briefly, what had become of her.
Dag waited until the men had left his home, then he slipped out of his cubby and crept over to the side window. He left his mother and his baby sisters behind without a glance, all the while hating himself for his cowardice. Though he was but a child, he was the son of a great paladin. He should have fought. He should have found a way to save his family.
His thin fingers shook as he tugged at the latch holding the shutters closed. For a few terrible moments he feared that he would not be able to open the window, that he would be forced to choose between dying in the smoldering building, or walking out into the arms of the men who had come to steal him away. Terror lent him strength, and he tore at the latch until his fingers bled.
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