his focus on the precise tasks.
Around him, the laboratory was still. Many of his attendants were gone, hunting subjects in the dark caverns beneath Thorbardin; the rest were currently resting or gambling in their garrison quarters. His captives, the elves and Klar dwarves and goblin, sat silent and sullen in their cages; none of them wished to make any sound or disturbance that might attract the attention of their sadistic captor, so they made themselves as invisible as possible behind the bare steel bars of their cells.
When the hundredth stroke was completed, Willim put down his blade and returned to the vial containing the amanita powder, which had become hot. Long years of torture had destroyed the nerves in his stubby fingers, so he picked up the glass container without discomfort. Indeed, the faint whiff of burned flesh smelled pleasant in his nostrils.
He shook the vial, pleased to see the powder was suspended in the air within the container, swirling as a murky-and very lethal-gas. He set the vial on a shelf beside a wide variety of similar containers. Some of them contained liquids, while others appeared empty-an appearance belied by the dwarf wizard’s keen senses; his magical vision knew the lurking toxin or enchantment was masked by the clean air in the apparently-empty bottles.
For a moment Willim the Black allowed himself the luxury of relaxation. He breathed in his sulfurous air, expelling the warmth in an easy sigh while he strolled to the edge of the deep chasm, the pit where Gorathian lurked. He could feel the beast down there, waiting, hungry as always. In his mind’s eye, the wizard envisioned the creature’s powerful coils, its grotesque body and burning, hate-filled eyes. As if sensing his thoughts, Gorathian stirred, a billow of warmth, tinged with black smoke, rising from the depths.
“He fears me, you know,” he murmured as if Gorathian could understand his words. Or perhaps the beast did; at least, the sound of the wizard’s voice provoked a warm surge of energy, a glow of liquid fire that brightened the interior of the crevasse, casting a pale mirror of that shape on the lofty ceiling of the chamber once destined to be the council hall of the thanes.
“That one-eyed fool… he even named me in one of his edicts!” Willim actually giggled as he recalled his amusement.
On one of his many magical journeys into Norbardin, he had spotted the king’s new edicts. Moving invisibly, his flesh rendered into a gaseous form so he would not have to endure any physical contact, the black-robed wizard had traveled the streets and alleys and even the shops and homes of the great underground city. The dwarves appeared busy as ever, he had observed, but to him the masses also looked even more chagrined and depressed than ever before. Most walked with their heads down, avoiding contact with each other and studiously avoiding the swaggering enforcers, mostly Hylar and Daergar, who wandered about in groups seemingly everywhere, seeking any violations of the king’s increasingly long list of proscriptions and prohibitions.
Willim had been surprised to observe very few females in public, and those he observed were always escorted by a male and seemed in an unusual hurry to reach their destinations. There were none of the bands of young dwarf maids, formerly ubiquitous, who used to laugh and carouse together on the streets.
When, finally, the wizard had drifted up to the edicts posted in the city’s great central plaza, he had understood why the women and girls had become scarce. And he had read with delight that the king had specifically listed Willim the Black as a dangerous outlaw.
“If only he knew how dangerous.” The mage chuckled. Imagine if the king had known the wizard’s laboratory was right under his city, in the very grand chamber that had been excavated by order of the previous king! Oh, the irony of it all!
“I could kill him today if I wanted to,” the wizard continued, speaking aloud. “Perhaps he knows that. Perhaps that is why he names me in his edict-because he fears me, as he should.”
He giggled again, an oddly high-pitched sound emitting from his whiskered face with its sewn-shut eye sockets pinched like scars. “But I will not kill him. Certainly not yet. No, I have something special in mind for the one-eyed king. He will learn-they all will learn-in due time.”
Willim’s meditations were abruptly interrupted as magic shimmered in the upper alcove of the great chamber. It ws a spell of teleportation, but the wizard immediately realized there was no threat here. Instead, the door to his laboratory opened. Two of his apprentices returned from their hunting expedition, prodding a miserable-looking gully dwarf before them.
The mage sniffed disdainfully. A gully dwarf wasn’t much of a prize. For a moment Willim thought about Gorathian, ever hungry, ever burning, and he thought he ought to toss the empty-headed gully dwarf right into the chasm.
Then he sighed. Even gully dwarves could be useful, he knew, remembering several new potions he needed to have tested. And his Aghar cage was currently empty, the last hapless captive having been awarded to the beast several cycles earlier.
“Put him in the cage,” the black-robed wizard commanded. Already he was making a new plan, concocting an experimental recipe. “I will have something for him to do very soon.”
Without another look at their shivering captive, who gaped in awe at his new surroundings as his captors thrust him into a vacant cage, Willim returned to his workbench, warmed another section of the stone slab, and got to work with his ingredients and his plans.
SIX
T his could be bigger than the Haxx Delving!” Brandon declared, referring to one of the famous long-standing gold mines in the Kayolin caverns. “Let them try to ignore the Bluestone clan once we start to produce that gold!”
He and his brother were striding upward through the long dark tunnels they had so recently explored. The lamp, with the last bit of their carefully conserved oil, was burning low, but it still offered enough light that they could make good time as they wended their way back to the city.
The connecting passages to the Zhaban Delving were just ahead when the elder dwarf stopped and looked at his brother seriously.
“Remember, Brandon,” Nailer said solemnly. “We haven’t brought an ingot of gold out of this place yet. We haven’t even filed our claim in the king’s court.”
“Governor’s court, you mean,” Brandon corrected. “The only true dwarf king dwells in Thorbardin.”
Nailer chuckled grimly. “Well, that’s what tradition says. But if Regar Smashfingers wants to call himself the King of Kayolin, I suggest you don’t argue the point with him while we’re trying to establish our claim.”
“Right,” the younger dwarf agreed. “But between you and me, he’s claimed more than his due.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” Nailer declared. “But you must be discreet with such opinions.”
“By Reorx, Nail!” Brandon protested. “This is the best thing that’s happened to our clan since… well, since before the Cataclysm! We’ve just changed a run of bad luck that’s lasted four hundred years! I have a right to be excited.”
“Sure you do. I am too, whether you want to believe that or not. I keep picturing father’s face when I tell him we’ve discovered enough wealth to get the Bluestones a seat on the Kayolin council again. Just between you and me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to make that old dwarf proud.”
Brandon felt a flush of shame. He’d been thinking about dazzling the dwarf maids by wearing jeweled rings, ornate platinum breastplates, and exotic feathered plumes on his steel helmet. He had already mapped out the floor plan of the new house he was going to commission, a dwelling that would be excavated from the virgin bedrock of the Garnet range. The parties he would host! The cream of Kayolin society would rub elbows with him!
But Nailer was right. Their discovery, a new delving of tremendous prospective value, meant much more than mere trivial wealth. It would provide for the restoration of one of the great clans of Kayolin’s history. The Bluestones had produced great miners, generals, even a governor, in the long centuries before the Cataclysm. The dwarf nation in the Garnet range had been mostly immune to that violent act of cosmic revenge, but when the gods hurled the mountain down upon Krynn, there had been several cave-ins and collapses in Kayolin. The most
