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 any 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.
