by Dragon Lance
“I came closer to that than you did.” Megistal turned away. “Fascinating,” he muttered to himself. “That dwarf could truly resist magic. He struggled against it and survived. I would never have thought that anyone could do that.”
“Stubborn,” Sigamon hissed. “Proud and stubborn and … and just plain selfish!”
“Selfish?” Megistal glanced at him.
“Of course, selfish! Magic is important! The channeling of magics – through the towers – is vital. Yet these dwarves have the effrontery to put their own interests ahead of the common good.”
“Oh.” Megistal shrugged. “Well, there is no need to worry about a Tower of High Sorcery here anymore. Without the Stone of Threes planted beneath its center, a tower would not respond to its occupants or know how to protect itself. It would be just another building. The Stone of Threes is the source of a tower’s life. And now the Stone of Threes is gone.”
“Then we’ll just have to get it back,” Sigamon snapped. “Where did they go with it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Megistal said. He turned away again, talking mostly to himself. “Is that dwarf exceptional, or are they all resistant? And just how resistant are they? I would like to make a study of those dwarves. …”
“Study!” Sigamon scoffed. “You study, then, red-strap! I have better things to do.” Standing erect on long, awkward legs, the white-robe crossed his arms in front of himself, lowered his head, and chanted, “Degat tonin ot …” He hesitated, taking a deep breath. “I hate this spell,” he whined. “It always makes me nauseous. Degat tonin ot tonosos! Chapak!”
Where he stood, the air shimmered, and abruptly he was gone. Megistal shook his head. To resort to a transport spell, the wizard must have been truly upset, because, wherever he was now, he was certainly upset as a result of it. Transport spells were hard on the strongest of stomachs, and Sigamon’s was not very strong.
Muttering to himself, Megistal gathered up a few supplies, put them into a pack, and stepped to the edge of the cliff. He paused, noticing movement in the distance, and conjured a viewing ring. When the image was clear, he frowned. It wasn’t the dwarves. There was no sign of them. The image in the view-ring was only a man – a plains barbarian of some kind, riding a horse.
But it occurred to the wizard that a horse might be a useful thing. Traveling by horse was faster than traveling by foot and was far more pleasant than a transport spell. Casually, the wizard pointed a finger at the image in the ring and muttered an incantation. Both the horse and the man seemed to freeze where they were and remained motionless. Megistal hoisted his pack and stepped off the edge of the cliff. With simple levitation he lowered himself to the ground below and set off eastward, toward where his horse awaited him.
Let Sigamon and those who followed worry about the Stone of Threes and the building of towers, he decided. A hundred and twenty wizards – a hundred and twenty-one, counting Sigamon – would certainly be enough to find the stone, recover it from the dwarves, and get on with the project. Megistal had found something more interesting to think about. He wanted to take a better look at this land of dwarves and at the people in it. He had come out from the first tower to take up higher studies of the magical arts. He believed – everyone he knew believed – that no sentient creature could resist the powers of magic without using magic to do so. Yet now, a simple dwarf had done just that.
When Megistal came to the place where the motionless rider sat on his motionless horse, the wizard waved his hand and muttered. The man was lifted from his saddle and dropped unceremoniously onto the stony ground. Megistal stepped up beside the animal, swung into its saddle, and released his freeze spell. Instantly, the horse took a step forward, then half-turned, looking around in confusion. Megistal gripped its reins and turned it, heading east. Behind him the fallen man scrambled to his feet, shouted, “Horse thief!” and set an arrow in his bow.
Megistal muttered, “Deme tosis.” The arrow humming toward him turned as though deflected by a shield and disappeared into high brush.
Megistal turned in the saddle. “Go away!” he shouted at the man running toward him. He mouthed another spell, and a tall tree appeared directly in the man’s path. The man ran into it and bounced off, sprawling on his back. The tree faded, and Megistal put heels to his mount. As the horse surged into a ground-eating run, Megistal told himself, “Well, magic worked just fine on him.”
Behind him, Quist Redfeather got to his feet, wiping blood from his face. Eyes as cold and angry as winter clouds looked after the receding mage. “A wizard,” the Cobar growled. “A horse-stealing wizard.”
Brushing himself off, he assembled his fallen weapons and turned to look westward – the direction he had been going. Then, with a fierce growl, he turned eastward again. His credentials from Xak Tsaroth were hidden between the leathers of the saddle on which the wizard now rode. Without them, he could not complete the mission the High Overlord had sent him on. Unless he could recover the little linen scroll with its seal, stamp, and marque of passage, there was no sense in going on.
Besides, Quist Redfeather was a horseman. He was a Cobar horseman. And the one insult that no Cobar could tolerate was for someone to steal his horse.
“Wizard or not,” he told himself, “that red-strapped thief is going to wish he had never seen me.”
He would never be able to catch the mage on foot, he knew. But the place where he had found the horse was not far away, and where that horse came from were two more. In all his years in the wild lands, Quist Redfeather had never encountered anyone or anything that he could not track, trail, and overtake with a good horse under him.
*
Inside Southgate, beyond Anvil’s Echo, the magma pit called the Shaft of Reorx was the center of intense, bustling activity – as it had been since the day of its first stoking several years before.
Here the delving dwarves, following plans laid out by the Hylar, had dug the deepest hole in all of Thorbardin. From the lowest floor of Gateway Hall, in the center of a wide concourse set with great foundries and hundreds of metalsmith shops, trade stalls, and manufactories of a hundred kinds, the shaft descended almost five thousand feet straight down, a circular hole thirty feet across at its top and ringed, eight hundred feet below the top, by a series of shaft caverns that housed immense smelters. At the bottom of the shaft, nearly a mile down, bright magma roiled and bubbled. It was not the natural magma that had been discovered beneath old Thorin, but dwarf-made magma, one of the greatest accomplishments of dwarven engineering in a hundred years. In building the shaft, the dwarves of Thorbardin had delved until they came to a stratum of stone that, once kindled and melted by intense heat, would sustain itself as magma for long periods.
The proper stone had been found halfway down. They knew by the taste of the stone, the taste of latent fires. It was not magma, but it could be made into magma – unlike the unsuccessful Shame of Reorx within Northgate, where no such strata were found. Carefully, and with great craft, the pit was ignited over a period of three years by focusing sunlight directly from the sun-tunnels above the great hall of audience, through a series of Hylar-crafted lenses. The largest of these lenses, an enormous glass convexity called the Temple of Stars because of the way it imaged the nighttime sky, was directly above the shaft.
Reignition once a year was adequate to keep the magma at the bottom of the shaft alive.
In a way, the Shaft of Reorx was the heart of Thorbardin. It powered all of the great smelters that converted ore – from the Daergar mines and from trade with the human orders of Ergoth – into the raw metals from which the goods of Thorbardin were made. In addition, the Shaft of Reorx was tapped by countless small tunnels and ducts to carry warm air throughout the underground realm. Every city in Thorbardin had a heat exchange, and all of them but one were fed from the Shaft of Reorx. Only the Hylar domain, Hybardin, standing above the center of the Urkhan Sea, could not be heated by the shaft. A main duct had been started, then stopped and sealed
when the delvers discovered that its route was perilously close to the bottom of the Urkhan Sea. The Hylar heat exchange now was based on direct radiation through sun-tunnels in the peaks of Cloudseeker, mirror-concentrated on the Life Tree’s main reservoirs.
A side effect of this, which some considered a blessing and others a nuisance, was in the Hybardin tap system. Every city in Thorbardin now had a channeled water system managed by tapwardens under the direction of Talc Bendiron, the general tapwarden of Thorbardin. Intricate labyrinths of aqueducts, reservoirs, troughs, and drilled shafts made clean water available to every part of every city. But, in Hybardin, the water at the taps was always hot water.
Other Thorbardin dwarves had to heat their water to bathe. The Hylar had to cool their water to drink.
In addition to firing the smelters and warming the lodgings of Thorbardin, the Shaft of Reorx also powered the lift stages of the main vertical transport shafts. There were lift stages everywhere in Thorbardin, but most of them were hand-powered, using pulleys and winches. Each lift stage was a continuous belt of layered cable running between great pulleys in a closed shaft, with an open gate at each level of the city it served. Stages like flat shelves were attached to the belts at eight-foot intervals, and each stage could hold as many as nine dwarves or one ore cart. When the lifts were in operation, a person desiring to go from one level to another had simply to step aboard a passing stage, then step off when it passed the level he wanted.
The main transport shafts, though, were far too large for hand-winches. These were powered by steam, generated in water vats at the bottom of each shaft with heat ducted from the Shaft of Reorx and trapped beneath spring-release valves. The resulting action, to anyone but dwarves, would have seemed terrifying. At each gate of each lift – lifts three times the size of the ordinary stages – a metal floor would appear from below and rattle to a halt as the great coil springs in the depths forced the valves closed. For about a minute and a half, the big stage would remain in place, while those aboard it got off and those waiting got on, then as the steam beneath the valves reached critical peak, a whistle shrilled, the gate crashed shut, and the stage roared upward at great speed, to stop abruptly at the next level.
The downward stages, appearing at gates opposite the upward gates, were simply the other side of the up-lifts, on the downward course of the great cable-belt.
To the dwarves, it was an enormously logical and practical system for moving large groups or large objects from level to level. The fact that the crashing, roaring abruptness of the steam-fed lifts would be deadly to anyone just stepping on or off when the valves released was of little concern. The practical-natured dwarves simply did not step on or off after the whistle sounded.
With all of its uses, the Shaft of Reorx was, in most people’s opinion, the finest tool in Thorbardin. Yet now, when Willen Ironmaul’s order went out, to look to the left side of all the tools, it presented an enigma. Talc Bendiron, the tapwarden, was the first of the wardens to arrive beneath the Temple of Stars to study the matter and was pacing around the great hole, pausing now and then to lean precariously over its railing, when Cambit Steelsheath, warden of ways, came to join him. Within minutes they were both pacing, gaping, and scratching their heads. Bell Brightluster, warden of trade, and Gem Bluesleeve, warden of the watch, joined them there, and even Bardion Ledge – who as wastewarden had nothing to do with the great shaft – came to observe.
The regent demanded that every tool in Thorbardin have an alternate use – in emergency – as a weapon of defense. Yet the Shaft of Reorx, the greatest tool of all, offered no such use that they could think of. As one, the senior wardens of Thorbardin paced, peered, and pondered. Crouch Firesear, clerk of the council of wardens, followed after them with cove and slate. After a time Pelt Bezel, keeper of forges, and Smoke Lodestone, master of mines, joined them.
“The Hylar’s theory is just fine,” the Daergar overseer rumbled behind his slitted mask. “Anything that can serve as a tool should be able to serve as a weapon. But this? I don’t see how.”
“I don’t, either,” Bardion Ledge conceded. “It’s a hole. Granted, it is almost a mile deep and has live magma at its bottom, but still it is only a hole.”
“It is a tool, though,” Pelt Bezel insisted. “It heats the smelters, drives the transport shafts, and feeds the heat exchanges. What is that, if not a tool?”
“Tool, yes,” Cambit Steelsheath agreed, “but it’s still just a hole. How can a hole be used as a weapon?”
“Very effectively,” Bardion Ledge said, grinning, “if we can persuade our enemies to jump into it. But I don’t see that as a practical plan for general contingencies.”
A crowd had grown at the rail of the pit, but now those on the outside turned and backed away as a reeking odor reached their noses.
“’Scuse us,” a high-pitched voice requested.
The wardens turned and stared. Just behind them, twenty or more Aghar – the dim, coarse little people usually called gully dwarves – approached the rail. It was not so much a group as a sprawl of gully dwarves, tripping over one another, tumbling here and there but still managing to carry among them – more or less upright – a large, battered copper barrel, open at the top and reeking of stench.
The one in the lead, a ragged and disheveled little gray-beard named Blemish, was the Grand Notioner of the Aghar clan of Bulp. “’Scuse us,” he said again, more urgently. “Stand’side, please.”
As the wardens stepped aside, the gully dwarves carried their noisome vessel to the rail and emptied it into the Shaft of Reorx, almost losing the barrel itself in the process.
“Here, now!” Talc Bendiron snorted. “What are you doing? What is that?”
The little Grand Notioner looked around at him. “Huh?”
“What is that you dumped into the shaft?”
“Highbulp say clean th’ sewer tank.” Blemish shrugged. “That stuff from th’ tank.”
“Why did you dump it into the Shaft of Reorx?”
Blemish shrugged again, staring up at the much larger full dwarves around him. “Gotta …” He gulped and tried again. “Gotta put it someplace.”
“Not in the Shaft of Reorx!” Talc Bendiron roared. “Sewer waste goes to the waste process pits! You Aghar have a waste pit. Why didn’t you put it there?”
“Not usin’ pit for stuff like this anymore,” the little Grand Notioner explained. “Too good a place for rat huntin’ to mess it up with sewer stuff.”
“Reorx!” Talc Bendiron shook his head. “I thought I’d seen everything. But this …!”
Far below, the sludge from the Aghar sewers, falling toward the magma, began to vaporize in the heat of the pit. A distant roar echoed up the great shaft, and a small cloud of rancid steam wafted upward.
“So that’s what’s been happening to our heat ducts,” Cambit Steelsheath muttered. “Gris Bolen thought there was rot in the system somewhere.”
“I’m going to put a stop to this!” Bardion Ledge growled. Glaring at Blemish, he demanded, “Where is your chieftain?”
“Who?”
“Your leader! The Highbulp! What’s-his-name!”
“Oh, him.” Blemish shrugged. “Name’s Just th’ First. Dunno where he is, though. Highbulp gets lost a lot.”
Gem Bluesleeve had returned to the rail around the Shaft of Reorx and was looking over it thoughtfully. He had the glimmerings of an idea about how the shaft might be used as a weapon of defense. But before voicing it, he decided to talk it over with Willen Ironmaul first.
(Continued in Volume 4)
filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share