' 'Who's not here?' I asks him, but he just comes back inside and sits by the fire again. That's when I looked at the scroll he was reading.'
'Well? What did it look like?' Martin prompted.
'Nothing,' the dwarf answered. 'There was nothing on it at all. Dalamar wrote that list on it this mom- ing!'
The startled shopkeeper dropped the parchment onto the counter as if it were a hot coal. Then he retrieved it and studied the writing more carefully. He even held it near a candle to see if the heat would reveal hidden characters of any kind. Regardless of the events at the hermit's cave, the 'magic scroll' was now nothing more than a grocery list.
'See what I told you?' said Lodston. 'The spellwords are gone. All I know is that whatever he saw last night scared him.'
'Why do you say that?'
'Because he didn't go right to sleep. He made a sign with some ashes on the inside of the door and then bolted it like he thought somebody was going to try to break in. In the morning, he gave me that list and told me to get the stuff in a hurry. He handed me his staff and said I needed to take it with me; that's when he whispered the secret word in my ear to make it work.'
'What secret word?' demanded Martin, his eyes riveted to the enchanted weapon.
'None of your business,' replied the dwarf, 'and I can't give you this staff. It's the elf's, not mine. Now give me those goods, and let me get back to the cave before dark. I don't know why he wanted all this stuff, but he told me to hurry.'
'You promised me…'
'I never promised you anything, Milo Martin!' countered the hermit. 'But if you want me to tell Dala-mar that you wouldn't loan him the things on that list…'
'All right, all right!' growled the cautious merchant. Martin was angry with himself for letting Nugold Lodston trick him into another extension of his credit, but he was also hoping to find a way to acquire much more than just the staff.
'Tell this Dalamar that I want to meet him,' the shopkeeper said in a calmer voice. 'I have a few business ideas that may interest him. Knowledge like this can be a valuable piece of merchandise. I know of several people who would pay fortunes to get a single glimpse of the future.'
'Like you?' Lodston snorted sarcastically. He collected the provisions in a bulky sack and headed for the door.
'Don't forget to tell him what I said!' Martin called as the hermit stumbled into the empty street without looking back.
Lodston's 'cave' was actually an abandoned dwarven gold mine. For centuries before he was born, the hermit's people had tunneled into the mountainside near the Meltstone River, enriching both themselves and the local human merchants with great amounts of the yellow metal. When iron ingots replaced gold and silver as the most precious substance on Krynn — to make weapons of steel — the rich Hylar dwarves near Digfel became paupers. Only a handful of the sturdy miners remained in human towns in the foothills of the dwarven highlands, becoming blacksmiths and armorers. Human prospectors took their place as miners, but of iron ore rather than softer metals such as gold and silver.
Nugold Lodston chose to remain in the Hylar hills, making cheap golden toys and baubles for local children. He cherished the gleaming metal more than he had ever loved anyone, dwarf or human. He also could not bear the tedium of toiling over a blistering iron forge to produce weapons and tools of burnished steel. Humans craving such products of the dwarven metallurgists regarded Lodston as a traitor, one who had critical skills but refused to use them. Even the few of his own race left in Digfel spat on the ground whenever he passed, a sign of ultimate rejection among the Hylar dwarves.
'Dalamar! Come help me!' the hermit called from the trail by the river. 'I've carried these things far enough already!'
Lodston waited, staring up the riverbank toward the entrance to the mine shaft, but there was no sign of movement. Then he noticed that the door was ajar. The worried elf had slammed and barred the thick portal behind him seconds after Lodston had left for Digfel. Why would Dalamar be leaving the door open now?
Dropping the heavy cloth sack on the sandy trail, the old hermit broke into a doddering run up the hill to his cave. He sensed that some terrible event had befallen the elven sorcerer even before he saw the footprints in the dirt outside the shaft entrance. There were scores of boot marks with low heelprints in the soft earth, as well as the tracks of several large hounds. The dwarf dropped closer to the ground to focus his failing sight on the muddy threshold where the searchers had entered his home. Four large symbols had been drawn in black soot on the timber over the gaping door, but the illiterate hermit could not understand the inscriptions.
'Dalamar!' he called softly, hesitant to push the door. In his nightmares, unseen evils always lurked within silent doorways like this one. 'Are you in there?'
Only the constant sound of the river below the shaft broke the ominous silence. Lodston finally mustered the courage to squelch his imagination and kicked the door open wide enough to peer into the antechamber of the ancient mine shaft.
It was empty. The fire was still warm, and a lamp had been lit beside the small table. There were no remnants of death and dismemberment, as he had expected to see — not even a sign of a struggle. The door leading into the abandoned network of shafts was bolted securely on the antechamber side. Dalamar and his box of scrolls had vanished, perhaps taken without a struggle by the strangers with the dogs. The enchanted staff in Lodston's gnarled hands seemed to be all that remained of his strange guest.
The hermit scrambled down the steep bank in the failing light of dusk and retrieved the sack of provisions. When he returned to the mine shaft, he slammed the door and slid the heavy wooden bar into place to guard it from whomever had come for the elven sorcerer. Then he threw another log on the fire and fumbled among the large ingots of gold in a basket beside the table for one to melt into a toy figure. He saw the end of a parchment case as soon as he moved the first bar of gold. It was one of the elf's scrolls!
'Ah! They left one behind!' he exclaimed aloud. The familiar echoes of his own voice inside the mine's entry chamber was a friendly, reassuring sound. Lod ston's tension melted, giving way to excitement. The old hermit fumbled clumsily with the scroll case, finally managing to dump the neatly rolled white parchment into his filthy hand.
Trembling with anticipation, he pressed an end of the scroll to the table and unrolled it beneath the light of the lamp. There was a hasty line drawing at the top of the page, just above some undecipherable characters in Dalamar's flourishing script.
'Hey, that's me!' Lodston croaked, peering at the drawing. Sure enough, Dalamar had drawn a crude caricature of the hermit's profile. The bulbous nose and bushy eyebrows were unmistakable. Beside the face, the wizard had drawn his own spectacles, equally obvious because of their curious hexagonal lenses and wire rims. A dotted arrow led from the glasses to Lodston's profile, and a solid arrow from his eyes to the text below the drawing. Even a child could understand the simple diagram.
'He wants me to put on his glasses, but where are they?' muttered the hermit.
He began rummaging through the room, his excited imagination blossoming into full-blown frenzy. After searching inside, under and on top of everything in the sparsely furnished chamber, the only thing he discovered was the absence of his oldest cloak, a tattered, floor-length garment of crudely woven wool. He sat down heavily in the chair and stared once more at the elf's drawing.
Suddenly he knew where the glasses had to be. He whirled around toward the basket of gold ore and began tossing the heavy nuggets on the floor. The wire-rimmed spectacles were at the bottom of the pile, wrapped in thick goatskin and wedged into a crevice between two huge nuggets to protect them from the weight of the ore. Lodston thrust the wire rims around his hairy ears and peered again at the parchment.
The black characters beneath the drawing began to swim and wriggle before his eyes. The motion was so distracting at first that Lodston felt a little lightheaded and dizzy. Soon, though, the characters settled into firmer images, more in the dwarf's mind than on the scroll.
'I can't read,' he muttered in amazement, 'yet I know exactly what this says!' The elf's message in wizard- scrawl was brief but clear:
