flanked by an intricate mosaic of a forest, and at last passed through stout wooden doors into a cavern open to the sky.
The canyon walls were thick with ferns. A grove of oak trees wove their branches together high overhead into a natural lattice through which the stars peeped. Torrin smelled dew-wet grass and night-blooming flowers. The dark elves made their way to a white marble statue that gleamed in the moonlight. The statue was of a tall, thin elf wearing armor and carrying a shield. The elf’s face looked both male and female. It was Corellon Larethian, high lord of the elf gods.
Val’tissa gestured. The disc carrying Eralynn drifted to the statue and settled on the grass at the god’s feet. Imyr sent Torrin’s driftdisc slowly to the ground nearby.
“Up now, you,” he told Torrin. “Clothes and pack.”
Torrin rose and pulled on his shirt and trousers. After the long ride on the driftdisc, he felt as though he were still rising and falling, even though he stood on solid ground. As he fastened his belt and tied his mace to it, he watched as Val’tissa kneeled beside Eralynn. “Is she… alive still?” he asked, a catch in his voice.
Val’tissa gently pulled the blanket down from Eralynn’s face. It looked gray in the moonlight. “She lives,” Val’tissa said as she stood. “We will perform the ritual as soon as we are ready. Go with Imyr. He will take you to one of the local inns. We will send word to you there, once Eralynn has been healed.”
Imyr touched Torrin’s shoulder, but Torrin shrugged his hand off. “I’m staying,” Torrin protested. “Right here, with Eralynn.”
“The spellsong is a secret ritual,” Val’tissa said, gesturing at the forest. “We normally would not have allowed someone who’s not one of the faithful to come even this far. But we made an exception this night, for Eralynn’s sake. She and I have known each other for many years, ever since she saved my life-something few other dwarves would have done. I always said I’d repay her, if I could. Tonight I shall honor that promise.”
Again, Torrin felt a stab of hurt. Eralynn had known these dark elves for years, and had never once told him? All that time, he’d thought he was her shield brother, that she would confide anything to him. He’d been wrong. She was even more of a loner than he’d thought.
“Now leave her,” Val’tissa said. “And know that she’s in Corellon’s hands.”
“All right, I’ll go,” Torrin said. “But there’s something you need to know before you attempt your ritual. The stoneplague isn’t a disease.”
“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.”
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
