The Gilded Rune (forgotten realms)

by Lisa Smedman

  “How do you know this?” Val’tissa asked. “That’s not what Eralynn told me.”

  “She left before we discovered the true cause.”

  “Which is…?

  Torrin hesitated. Should he tell her the truth?

  He thought back to what the Lord Scepter had said to him on the staircase. The Deep Lords had acted sagely when they’d kept secret the reason why gold was suddenly being confiscated. Letting the general populace know that gold was the source of the stoneplague would indeed have thrown the city into panic, despite the natural stoicism of the dwarf race. What’s more, it would have opened the door for unscrupulous rogues to buy gold-especially cursed gold-at a fraction of its value. Gold that would later come back into circulation, spreading the stoneplague once more. And should people learn the unwitting role Sharindlar’s temples had played in the spread of the disease, clerics like Maliira would be in danger.

  All that meant there was a need for secrecy. Yet the Lord Scepter hadn’t ordered Torrin to remain silent. Instead, he’d set him free to do as he saw fit, just as he’d freed the star in his prophetic dream.

  Torrin glanced at Eralynn’s gray face. If it would help, he decided, he’d speak. Her life wasn’t the only one hanging in the balance. Kier needed a cure, as did hundreds, perhaps even thousands of others.

  “A curse caused the stoneplague,” Torrin began. “A curse that was placed on gold.” He told the dark elf about the gold bars from the earthmote, and the unusual way in which the “stoneplague” had spread throughout Eartheart, a pattern of infection unlike any regular disease. He paused at that point, loathe to reveal how Sharindlar’s clerics had inadvertently exposed supplicants to the gold, but after a moment’s hesitation he plunged on. He would tell all, he decided. Eralynn’s life might depend upon it. He wound up by describing the experiment Wylfrid had performed, describing the way the gold foil had pulsed with red, and the strange black pattern that looked like veins he’d seen through the tube.

  “Thank you for that information,” Val’tissa said. “But curse or plague, with Corellon’s blessing, our spellsong will remove Eralynn’s affliction.”

  Though far from certain, Torrin nodded.

  “Now go,” Val’tissa said. “I’ll send word when we’re done. But know that it may take some time. The rest of the night, at least.”

  Torrin saw movement in the forest. About a dozen other women, dark elves like Val’tissa, moved toward them through the trees. Val’tissa called out a greeting in drow, and they answered.

  Once again, Imyr took Torrin’s shoulder, his grip firm.

  Torrin let the dark elf lead him away from the statue. Away from Eralynn.

  Torrin glanced back at her, lying so still under that blanket. As he left, he whispered a fervent prayer to Moradin, begging the god to permit one of his own to be healed by those strange, dark elves.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Truth, like gold, is to be found by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

  Delver’s Tome, Volume I, Chapter 87, Entry 12

  Torrin was tired of waiting. For the remainder of the night, he’d sat in the inn, nursing an ale and using it as an excuse to nod off at his table and get some much-needed rest. Fortunately, the barkeep hadn’t thrown him out. Unfortunately, Imyr hadn’t yet returned to tell him how the spellsong had gone, and whether Eralynn had been cured. Torrin had eventually tried to return to the grove-filled cavern, but its doors were locked, and none of the people he’d spoken to had known how to contact Val’tissa. Torrin had considered trying to force his way in, but decided against it. With Eralynn’s life hanging in the balance, he didn’t want to anger the dark elf clerics.

  Torrin restlessly walked the canyon floor of Sundasz, watching the orange-pink light of dawn filter down through the fissure that led to the surface. Several of the doors he passed had the hourglass-shaped rune for Q painted on them, and the distinctive smell of the stoneplague leaked out from behind them. As before, there were few people out on the main thoroughfares. Most were likely cowering in their residences, fearful of the stoneplague.

  Torrin needed a way to pass the time, something that would occupy his fretting mind.

  Absently, he touched the coin pouch that hung at his belt. It held few coins-that was why he’d been forced to doze in the inn’s taproom, rather than in a soft bed-but it did hold something even more precious: the runestone that had conveyed him to Eralynn. What with the stoneplague, Torrin had set aside his quest to find the Soulforge. But with time on his hands and desperately needing something else to think about, perhaps it was time to pluck at that thread.

  The Delvers didn’t have a chapter in Sundasz, but the settlement did have a library dedicated to the scholar god Dugmaren Brightmantle, the patron deity of Delvers. Poking through its texts would keep Torrin’s mind occupied. He made his way there.

  The library was deep inside one of the canyon walls, at the bottom of a spiral staircase. Its low ceiling forced Torrin to stoop as he entered a room containing a marble statue of Dugmaren Brightmantle. The god was seated cross-legged atop a runestone, staring down as if reading it. One finger pointed to the word “truth.”

  “May my wanderings bring me wisdom,” Torrin intoned as he bowed to the statue. As he crossed the room, he bent down to stroke the edge of the runestone on which the god sat. His fingers slid along a groove worn by countless other hands.

  The entrance to the main part of the library was a diamond-shaped doorway. The inscription framing it emitted a low hiss of magic-a ward that prevented visitors from removing the texts. The doorway opened into a large, hexagonal room with a high ceiling, illuminated by magically glowing spheres of light that bobbed in mid-air. The room smelled of old leather, dust, and ink. The outer walls were lined with tall wooden bookshelves and rolling ladders to access the books and scrolls written by humans and elves, shelved up high. Lower down were drawers that held the baked-clay tablets preferred by dwarves. A second floor-to-ceiling hexagonal arrangement of shelves stood just inside the first, and a third inside that. Narrow openings pierced the shelves, none much higher than a dwarf’s head, connecting each hexagonal aisle to the next, and on into the heart of the library.

  Torrin wandered along the outermost aisle, getting a sense of how it was organized. Or rather, disorganized. Books were stacked haphazardly on the floor, in towering piles that threatened to tumble over as Torrin squeezed past. A runic tablet clattered as Torrin accidentally kicked it. Like the rest of Sundasz, the library was a disorderly place. Torrin had no idea which section might hold the texts dealing with earth nodes and teleportation rituals.

  He heard a murmuring, deeper in the library. He bent down to peer through one of the openings that led to the center of the room and saw three figures seated on stools around a hexagonal table. Two were dwarves, but the third was too tall, judging by the way the knees bumped up against the underside of the table.

  One of the tallfolk, at Dugmaren Brightmantle’s library? That boded well-the two dwarves likely wouldn’t question Torrin’s presence, either. Crouching, he made his way to the center of the room.

  One of the dwarves was a cleric of Dugmaren Brightmantle. He wore the order’s distinctive bright purple sash and a silver pendant in the shape of an open book. He was elderly, with sparse white hair, and his beard was tucked into a beard bag. Gold rings adorned several of his ink-stained fingers. He briefly glanced at Torrin, then returned his attention to the book he was reading.

  The second dwarf had the look of an adventurer with his frayed clothes and weather-stained knapsack. He was younger, with unruly black hair and a short beard with at least two-dozen braids that twisted at odd angles from his cheeks and chin, like rearing snakes. He had several maps spread across the table in front of him. As Torrin approached, he pulled one of them over a section of the largest map, as if he didn’t want Torrin to see what he’d been looking at.

  “Greetings,” Torrin said to the dwarves. “Are either of you Delvers, by a
ny chance?”

  Snake-beard stared at Torrin’s beard, with its tinkling silver hammers. “Who wants to know?” he asked.

  “Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin replied. He turned slightly, so that they could see the D on his own backpack. “Member in good standing of the Order of Delvers, Eartheart chapter. I’m looking for information on earth nodes. Can you tell me what section of the library holds texts on that subject?”

  Snake-beard responded by narrowing his eyes. He nudged the top sheaf of vellum a little further over the map he’d been studying. “Find it yourself.”

  Torrin felt his face flush. Such rudeness from a fellow dwarf!

  “Aisle one, right two, third shelf from the bottom,” the third man at the table said.

  Torrin turned. The speaker was yet another dark elf. Sundasz was thick with them, it seemed. The fellow was tall and thin, even for an elf, with tightly kinked hair that stood out from his scalp in a steel gray fuzz. He was dressed in a black robe with thread-of-silver embroidery that kept shifting from one geometric pattern to the next: a wizard’s magical robe. He had a number of runic tablets spread out on the table, but instead of reading them he kept rearranging them, sliding them back and forth across the table. He slid one midway between the others and spoke a word in what sounded like High Drow. The tablet rose into the air and started to spin. The dark elf stared at it, nodding and muttering to himself.

  Torrin stared at him. Had he, like Val’tissa and Imyr, once been drow? Torrin’s hackles rose; he’d have to be careful around the fellow.

  The cleric glanced up from his book. “You can trust Zarifar,” he said. “He’s as close to a bibliothecary as we’ve got.”

  “Are you serious?” Torrin asked incredulously. He could understand the tallfolk races patronizing the library, perhaps even serving as its unofficial bibliothecary. They were in Sundasz, after all. But not someone of a race that-if Val’tissa was to believed-had once been drow.

  Still staring at the spinning tablet, the dark elf flicked his fingers in a complex gesture.

  This way, a voice whispered from a different exit. Torrin blinked in surprise, then realized the dark elf wizard had created the magical voice. This way, it said again.

  Torrin swallowed down his distrust. If one of Dugmaren Brightmantle’s clerics vouched for the dark elf, that bode well.

  Torrin ducked through the exit and followed the whispering voice to a section of the library in the outermost aisle. It led him to the second wall to the right of the main entrance, then faded away. There he found a handful of texts with titles like Magical Pathways of Faerun and Forces of the Four Elements. A leather-bound volume of the Delver’s Tome — the one dealing primarily with wayfinding and mapmaking-was also in the section, shelved separately from the rest of that great work. Torrin picked it up as well. As he did so, a couple of smaller books tumbled from the same shelf. Torrin put one of them carefully back into place, but couldn’t find the second. It was lost, he presumed, somewhere in the jumble on the floor.

  Torrin gathered up an armful of scrolls and books, balancing the tablets he’d chosen on top, and returned to the center of the library. He placed the pile opposite the suspicious black-bearded dwarf. Torrin didn’t want to rile him further.

  The dark elf lowered the spinning tablet. Then he drew glowing lines across the tabletop, and Torrin could detect the faint smell of charring wood. It drew a stern look from the cleric, who tsk-tsked and shook his head. The dark elf ignored him. The cleric half rose from his stool, then sat down again, as if deciding that chastising a wizard wasn’t a good idea. Snake-beard rolled up the map he’d been concealing from Torrin and shoved it under one arm. He slunk away down one of the aisles, grumbling.

  Torrin tried to concentrate on his reading, but couldn’t. The wizard had snuffed out the glowing lines with a wave of his hand, and was holding up each of the tablets in turn and striking it with a tuning fork. The soft ping, ping, ping sound was exasperating, especially after a night of little sleep and much worry.

  “Do you mind?” Torrin blurted out.

  The wizard stared at him without blinking, saying nothing.

  The cleric’s head jerked up. He glanced back and forth between Torrin and the wizard. Then he eased his chair back from the table, its wooden legs scraping the stone floor, and looked as if he were getting ready to leave. Torrin suddenly wondered if interrupting the wizard had been a healthy thing to do.

  “Mind,” the dark elf repeated. He cocked his head to the side and lifted his left hand. Torrin shied back, but the wizard didn’t touch him. Instead, he pointed with a slender finger at the Ironstar symbol on the bracers Torrin wore.

  “Your mind matches that mark,” he said in a soft voice.

  Torrin blinked. “I… I am a dwarf, it’s true,” he said. He leaned forward. “You could sense that?”

  The wizard’s fingers traced a star in the air. “Patterns,” he said.

  The cleric snorted. Relaxing once more, he returned his attention to his reading.

  The wizard touched the bracer on Torrin’s left arm, his finger briefly tracing the groove that had been gouged into the iron during Torrin and Eralynn’s scramble to get away from the red dragon. “Patterns,” he repeated.

  Torrin inclined his head in a bow. “Torrin Ironstar,” he said, introducing himself a second time. “And you are…?”

  “Zarifar,” the wizard replied, nodding at the tablets he’d been playing with. “A geomancer.”

  Torrin hesitated. He was loath to trust a former drow, yet the wizard who studied earth magic might be able to tell him a few things. And for all Torrin knew, the Morndinsamman had caused their paths to cross. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” he asked.

  The dark elf gave a vague wave of his hand. Torrin hoped that it meant yes. “What do you know about earth nodes?” he asked.

  Zarifar smiled. “Everything.”

  “How do they work?” asked Torrin. “How do they allow people to teleport, I mean.”

  “You mean why do they work,” the wizard said. He stared across the room, as if looking at something far beyond it. “The lines. The angles they form where they cross. It’s all… in the numbers. The equations, the formulae. The vertex, and how the chords of the circle and the tangential lines align.”

  The cleric chuckled and caught Torrin’s eye. “You’re sorry you asked, I’ll wager,” he said.

  Torrin ignored him. “Could you explain that again, in lay terms?” he asked.

  “I was a teacher once, you know,” Zarifar said. “At the College of Ancient Arcana, in Sshamath.”

  The drow city. Torrin struggled to keep the distaste from his expression. He needed information from Zarifar.

  Torrin was setting aside his principles a lot lately. But it was for the greater good. He might learn something from the wizard that would help Kier-help everyone. Surely Moradin would understand.

  “What I want to know,” Torrin told the wizard, “is how to more reliably activate the teleportation magic of an earth node. I find that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Could that be due to a warding ritual, or some magical device that blocks teleportation, carried by the person I’m trying to teleport to?”

  The cleric spoke again. “So now you’re a wizard, as well as a Delver?”

  “I’m no wizard,” Torrin answered over his shoulder. “Although I am a dwarf. But that’s another tale.”

  The cleric chuckled and set his book down, giving Torrin his full attention. “This gets better and better,” he said.

  “I hoped to find the answer in these texts,” Torrin said, gesturing at the stack of books in front of him, “but the solution still eludes me. I was hoping that you might offer some suggestions. You must know a thing or two about teleportation.”

  “Doors within doors,” Zarifar said. He placed his palms, fingers spread, each touching their counterpart on the opposite hand. “The patterns must match precisely. If they don’t-” he shifted one hand slightly, so his
fingers were no longer lined up “-there’s only emptiness where an alignment should be.”

  Torrin nodded respectfully. He already knew about the linked portals wizards could create: how the runes around each of the circles had to be inscribed in exactly the right order, using the same color of chalk, to forge a link from one to the next. But he was no wizard.

  “What I want to know is this,” he continued. “Supposing someone wasn’t a wizard, but he had a magical device that could activate an earth node’s magic, and allow him to teleport? Could he go anywhere he wanted, or would the destination have to meet certain conditions?”

  “You have such a device?” the cleric asked, his eyes glittering.

  Torrin hesitated. If the fellow had been anything other than a cleric of the Delver’s patron god, Torrin might have hesitated. But he was a fellow dwarf, and one of the brotherhood. Torrin could trust him.

  The cleric obviously sensed Torrin’s hesitation. He introduced himself. “Rathorn Battlehammer, son of Horatio Battlehammer and grandson of Rornathoin the Third,” he said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin repeated, clasping the cleric’s arm in the traditional dwarven greeting. “And no, I don’t have such a device-but I know of one.”

  Rathorn chuckled. “No need for subterfuge,” he told Torrin. “As I said before, you can trust Zarifar. He’s no rogue, and he’s as honorable as any of the stout folk. I swear it, by the gleam in Dugmaren’s eye.” He touched the holy symbol that hung about his neck.

  Torrin took a deep breath. “All right, then,” he said, after one last wary glance at the wizard. “Yes, I have such a device.” He pulled the runestone from his pouch and showed it to the cleric.

  Rathorn studied it a moment, then pushed it back to Torrin. “Interesting. But Zarifar knows more about these things than I do, though I am chagrined to admit it.”

  Zarifar started to reach for the runestone.