“It’s striking down those of your order who handled the tithes paid by the city, isn’t it?” he continued. “Those who touched the gold bars that were identical to the one I gave you.”
Maliira stared up at him with unseeing eyes. “How do you know this?”
“Clues. Observations. Dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Never mind,” Torrin said. “The point is, the vast majority of those in Eartheart who fall ill are wealthy-people who handle a lot of gold. Several Peacehammers are also ill, I’m told-those who recovered the gold bars found in the earthmote. And then there’s Kendril. I wondered why he wanted his clanfolk paid in gems, why he seemed so certain I wouldn’t catch the ‘illness’ from him. Now I know.”
Torrin continued to pace. “I could list other clues: the fact that, for example, the stoneplague almost never strikes down children because they aren’t typically entrusted with gold. But it doesn’t matter. The stoneplague isn’t a disease; it’s some sort of necrotic magic at work. Those gold bars were cursed. They’re what we need to quarantine. Lock them away and never let anyone near them. They’re the source of the contagion.”
He heard a loud crash behind him. Maliira was standing, the table and soup overturned on the floor. She was trembling, a stricken look on her face.
“I’m so sorry,” Torrin said. He wondered if he should go to her side and comfort her. “Will you ever be able to forgive me?”
“We didn’t know,” she said in an anguished voice. “We didn’t know!”
“Of course you didn’t,” he replied. “Nor was it your fault. It was mine. I was the one who caused that gold to be found by the skyriders.” Kier and I, he thought, but he didn’t say that.
“That’s not what I meant!” she said, her face wild. She clenched her fists, tears streaming down her face. “You’re not an initiate in the mysteries, so you can’t know. The tithes we’ve been collecting… We use the gold in our rituals. Every full moon, we sacrifice a portion of what we take in. The tithes are melted down and poured as offerings.”
“Poured? Where?” Torrin asked.
“Into the sacred pools,” Maliira replied. “Here, at this temple. At the temple in Eartheart.” She sagged onto the bed. “No wonder our healing rituals haven’t worked. We haven’t been cleansing people-we’ve been cursing them. Sharindlar have mercy. We’re the cause of this!”
Torrin felt as if he were going to be ill. So that was how Ambril and her stillborn twins had become infected.
His thoughts turned to Eralynn. He hadn’t seen her since the day they had stood in line outside the temple. Surely she’d succumbed already-she’d had one of the gold bars in her possession and had, presumably, gone for a cleansing in the temple later that day. Or had she? Eralynn hadn’t returned to the clanhold, and no one seemed to know where she was. Maybe she lay ill somewhere, slowly dying?
The thought was too much for Torrin to bear.
“Forgive me for asking this,” he said. “Shouldn’t pouring the gold into the sacred pools have removed its curse?”
“Normally, yes,” Maliira said, shaking her head sadly. “I can only guess that the tainted offerings must have deeply offended the goddess. She has turned her face from us until we reverse our blunder.” She fumbled her way across the room. “We need to alert the High Maiden. Tell her what you just told me. We must drain the sacred pools, recover that gold, and perform rituals over it that will purge whatever curse it holds. Then we’ll be able to cure the sick!”
Though Torrin nodded, something still nagged at him. He knew he was treading on dangerous ground by even thinking it, but Sharindlar was the goddess of mercy. Punishing her worshippers for an error her clerics had made didn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d do.
Then again, who was Torrin to know the minds of the gods? Perhaps Sharindlar had been commanded by Moradin himself to withhold her healing. The Dwarffather was powerful. His command might have been heeded by the other gods, whose clerics’ rituals had also proved ineffectual in removing the curse. But soon penance would be done, and the stoneplague would end.
Or… would it?
Putting the contaminated gold from the earthmote under lock and key would halt the spread of the stoneplague within Eartheart. Yet Torrin had a gnawing suspicion that those bars weren’t the only source of the contagion. Dwarves in communities outside of Eartheart had fallen ill long before Kier had discovered the gold bars; there had to be more cursed gold out there, somewhere. That gold was likely still circulating and still spreading its fell curse. Like the gold that was poured into the temple pools, it wouldn’t necessarily be in its original form. It might have already been melted down and made into jewelry, or recast into coins. The cursed gold might be spread across the length and breadth of Faerun. Finding it and rounding it all up would be a near-impossible task. Some of it would always be out there somewhere.
For the moment, though, there was one gold bar Torrin knew about-the one that had spread its foul curse to Kier. At least Torrin could do something about that.
Torrin handed Wylfrid the gold bar Kier had taken from the earthmote. A tall, thin man with thick white brows that came together in a furrow over his nose, Wylfrid was not only an alchemist, but was also skilled at casting magical rituals. More to the point, he was human, and thus immune to whatever curse the gold held.
Wylfrid placed the bar on the pitted marble slab of his workbench and peered at it through his thick-lensed spectacles. Then he picked up a small vial of acid and opened it, letting a drop of the acid fall onto the bar. The gold sizzled, and an acrid stench rose.
“Well?” Torrin asked. “Has the gold been contaminated? What else is in it?”
“Patience,” Wylfrid said. With a rag, he wiped the froth of acid from the bar. Then he cleaned his fingers on the bottom of his shirt, which already bore holes and stains from his alchemical experiments.
Wylfrid’s home, just a few doors down from Torrin’s parents’ shop, looked equally ill-kempt. Scraps of moldy food dotted the plates and cups stacked in the sink next to the hand pump. In a corner, dust covered an untidy heap of sacks and crates. The ceiling was black with soot, and something sticky and sweet-smelling was smeared on the floor where Torrin stood. Torrin shifted away from it, hoping it wasn’t going to eat through the sole of his boot. Then again, he thought, it was likely spilled wine, judging by the smell.
Wylfrid liked his wine.
Though untidy and sometimes unsteady, Wylfrid was a highly competent alchemist. He picked up a fragment of unglazed porcelain and scraped a corner of the gold bar against it. The bar scritched against the porcelain, leaving a gold streak. He compared that streak to one on another piece of porcelain that he’d pulled from a drawer, then picked up a beaker of acid and poured it over the streak the gold bar had made. “No color change,” he noted.
Wylfrid set the porcelain aside and picked up a fist-sized dark chunk-a lodestone. He touched it to the gold bar, crouched so he was eye level with the workbench, and slowly lifted the lodestone.
“No other metals,” he said. “It’s not an alloy, either.”
“Are you certain?” Torrin asked. He’d expected the curse to be on some base metal that had been added to the gold.
Wylfrid sniffed. “I know my business,” he said. “This is pure gold. But there’s one more test, yet.”
Using a fine-bladed saw to cut a vellum-thin slice from one end of the bar, he then placed the slice between two sheets of fine cotton and used a mallet to pound the flake of gold even thinner. After several loud thumps, he lifted the top layer of cloth and used wooden tweezers to carefully lift the small sheet of gold foil he’d created. He pressed it against one end of a metal tube the thickness of his thumb and creased the edges over the end of the tube. Then he aimed the foil-covered end of the tube at a grimy window and peered through it.
“Interesting,” he said. He handed the tube to Torrin.
Torrin lifted the metal tube to his eye. “What am I looking for?”
“You understand how prisms work?” asked the alchemist.
Torrin nodded. “They split light into its constituent colors.”
Wylfrid gestured at the tube. “Light that passes through gold leaf normally assumes a greenish tinge,” he said. “The gold acts like a filter, blocking all of the colors of light except green.”
It took Torrin’s eye a moment to adjust to the dim light inside the tube. It wasn’t green at all. It was dull red, veined with black lines. And pulsing.
