Bab threw himself into the ditch just in time. The foul, gritty red dust went up his nose and sifted into his curly brown hair, but he held his breath until the urge to sneeze passed. Not that anyone could have heard it, of course. He gripped his hammer until his fingertips could have pierced through the thick leather wrappings on the handle. The solid metal gave him comfort. Passed down from his grandfather’s many-times grandfather, it was ingrained with virtues that helped him shape metal or slay enemies usually beyond the capability of a halfling.
His four companions stayed low as the file of chained orcs and goblins marched by, passing into the notorious Crossroads on the edge of the Chaos Scar. Whips cracked over their heads. The slave master in charge of the company shouted curses. Bab listened appreciatively to the language. Creative, he thought. A phrase or two like that would be useful to help keep the smithereens down while he was hammering metal on his forge in the middle of Wenly Halt. If he should ever see his forge or his home or the village again. A halfling like him should stay where it was safe, but he had no choice. All this was his own fault, sort of. He had been successful where others had failed, and that was the wrong thing to have done.
The tiny green thread tied around his wrist dimmed. He waited, counting to twenty before he raised his head.
The others sensed his movement rather than heard it. They were still within the hour affected by the silence charm given them by Priest Nock. Bab had three more of the precious blue beads still on the string around his neck. Besides costing a week’s wages, they were made from mystical ingredients including a precious stone and a hair from his sleeping baby daughter’s head, but he’d rather have them on hand than a hundred gems or an enchanted sword. While they were within the sphere of its magic, they could hear outside sounds, but no one could hear them. Three of his six had already been spent to get them past other perils in the wilderness. He guessed they would have no beads left to get them home again.
The lack of silencing spells would probably not matter. By the time they were through with their aim, he imagined, the question of getting home would be moot.
At least, if he didn’t go back, he wouldn’t have to paint the cottage again. Winter had been hard on the little house. The whitewash was definitely beginning to peel. But it was home. He imagined he could hear the swallows in the eaves chirping, his neighbor’s dog barking, his wife Nomi nagging… the fond, familiar sounds that kept him going. He could get a day’s worth of effort out of a good nag from Nomi. The woman had a gift.
Heartened by the memory, Bab gestured to the others. They scrambled out of the ditch one after the other: Adda, Scorri, Coran, and Legg. Legg’s mouth was moving, though no sound came out of it. Then the charm elapsed. The bead burst and sifted into powder down Bab’s chest. As it did, the old man’s sharp whisper cut through the twilight air like a claw.
“… I do not believe that I let you talk me into coming back here again! Not when we nearly died the first time. All of us! May your feet come apart between the toes! May your head…!”
“Shhh!” Bab hissed. “Don’t say those kinds of things here when we’re so close to the… You-Know-What! They might come true!”
Legg clapped a hand over his mouth. He was tall for a halfling, nearly a dwarf’s height. He had meant no harm. Bab knew it. They were all feeling the strain of gritting their teeth while doing something no sane man would ever do-nor insane man either-unless there was no other way. But there was no other way. The glowing blue-green chunk of rock in the pouch on Bab’s belt was a fact that gave them no choice.
Oh, the stone had sounded like a sending from the gods. The legend of the fallen star had been one that fathers told their little ones during the dark of the moon to make their hair stand up on the backs of their necks. Bab had loved those stories. He knew at least a few of them were true, since on a moonless night he could see the green fire in the skies to the west, over the cursed mountains beyond the king’s wall. There were also weird beasts that turned up on the outskirts from time to time, misshapen creatures that looked as if they’d been born of two species at once: spider-squirrels, owl-cats, and a piteous thing that was part halfling, but no one in the village dared guess what the other part had been. The priest had given it water and said a blessing over it, but it had died. Monsters and other horrors had come out of the deep valley, tearing up the countryside. Most of them had been turned away from Wenly Halt, by force of arms or by the blessed well at its heart.
But after so many incursions the village folk had come to be interested in the sacred rock at the center of the legend. It had fallen from the sky, undoubtedly, because there were still those living who had seen it happen. Magical it was, because odd things began to happen, all springing from the kingdom to the west. It didn’t take a scholar to put all the clues together. Power came from the sky, the realm of so many of the gods. It was there for the taking, as the legends said. Those who dared, won. And someone dearly wished, as fools will, that the people of Wenly Halt had some of the magic of their own-for the good of all, of course.
Bab rose from the edge of the road. Now that dawn had passed, they need not fear being jumped from behind. Instead, he and his companions could wreak fear in a few hearts. Halfling brigands were well known in the Crossroads, all brothers. He arranged a length of rag over one eye to masquerade as the eldest of the three chieftains and swaggered into the center of the throughway. The others scrambled to follow him. With their clothes dusty and torn they looked the part of the band of thieves. The deceit had worked the last time on the way in. Most of the humans and other things who lived in the Crossroads village were afraid of the halfling brothers-with good reason. Bab traded on the notion that people saw what they thought they saw. If they believed he and his men were those deadly, thieving brothers, then so be it. They certainly had stolen an item of value. Now they were sorry, and were desperate to put back what they had taken.
The elders of Wenly Halt had been the earliest to catch fire with the idea of having a piece of the fallen star. The village needed to defend itself against raids and attacks, and how better than to fight fire with fire? A rock had brought all that terror and evil to the cursed lands. What if they should secure a piece of it themselves? They’d have power, and to spare. Power in the hands of a halfling village? Sounded foolish when you said it out loud, but it had seemed like sense, a three-month ago.
Bab had thrown himself into the middle of the discussion. He hadn’t heard any of the warnings that, for example, Dame May had voiced. “The star stone is evil!” she had cried. “A thing of darkness and mayhem!” The boarder who occupied her garden shed, Coran Halfway, agreed with her. He wasn’t a halfling, but a half-elf, and a mage at that. He hardly spoke up in village meetings, so after the nine days’ wonder of having an exotic stranger living among them, they treated him like part of the landscape. But for the elegant pointed ears, he could almost have been a halfling. He was shorter than Legg, with black curls and bright black eyes like a bird’s.
No, Bab hadn’t listened to a word. After all, until only a month or so before, he’d been in the wars under the generalship of humans and elves, four weeks’ march from his home. Daring deeds were his daily responsibility. He’d crawled into orc dens and come out alive, with an advance in rank, a fearsome scar on his neck, and a trophy or two that he didn’t show the kiddies, to prove he was brave and deadly. He had let himself be talked into leading the incursion to steal a piece of the stone, not that he had needed much persuading. Coran agreed to go along, to help protect the party. They and five others were feted as heroes until the day they set out for the Chaos Scar.
Vanity! It was like to kill a being. And it had. Two died, in fact. Of the seven of them who had gone in, only five had returned, and none of those unscathed. They’d outwitted wizards and fought monstrous creatures. But they had the stone, a thing of beauty, a smooth, imperfect sphere of blue-green twice the size of a halfling’s fist. The village was jubilant.
For a while. Ah, well, they were so good at telling themselves what brave folks they were, to have snatched a piece of the sacred stone, that they ignored the signs. Dame May hadn’t. She told them it was a Chaos Shard, and was full of peril for them. They should have listened to the witch.
So they used it to invoke protections around Wenly Halt. The mayor, who fancied himself a bit of a wizard because he was good at household cantrips, had used the stone. He declared that nothing should pass through its borders without permission. Well, it kept out the goblins that had been making nighttime raids on the henhouses and barns. Traders who liked to sneak in without paying the toll-gate fee were forced to stump up or spend hours more on the road marching toward the next inn. The mayor was well pleased with his magic-making.
Then the wind died down. No one noticed the eerie calm or the stuffiness that followed, not when the river dammed up at the same time and flowed all the way around the village like it was in a glass bowl. You could see fish swimming up against the edge and turning back again. A stag chased a doe straight toward town. Both of them rammed into the nothing that was there, and fell over. The children were like to laugh themselves to pieces over it, but it alarmed Dame May and those who were coming around to her point of view. Illicit lovers with their tunics half undone chased out of town by angry husbands couldn’t get home again without help. One of them was the son of the mayor himself. In embarrassment, the mayor had to turn to Coran to undo that spell. Well, they made plenty
