around his armpits.
With his elf reflexes, Coran was the first to act. He flung his hand toward the sorcerer. Tiny silver darts flew in a cloud. Mordint dashed them away from his face. Coran screwed up his face and launched a cloud of white mist from his open palm. That made the grimy human recoil and bat at his eyes. The halflings scrambled up and started running away.
The path was no longer unoccupied, though. Bodies, weirdly misshapen creatures, blocked their way with spears and polearms. Before Bab could stop, he ran straight into a filthy, wild-eyed form.
“It’s me!” Legg exclaimed, reaching out for him.
“No!” Bab shouted to the others, raising his hammer. “He made a zombie out of Legg!”
Legg moved in and knocked his arm upward.
“I’m not a zombie, you fool,” he said, grinning. His teeth gleamed ivory in his mud-splashed face. “He hasn’t hurt me. I told him why we’re here.”
Bab drew his hammer close to him and studied the other halfling. Under the layers of grime, Legg looked all right, but sorcery had deluded countless people before, and most of them were dead. He held the thread on his wrist close to Legg’s face. It didn’t glow. Bab tried it on the orc with the too-small helmet on his head standing beside his old friend, then on the hobgoblins and the who-knew-what-it-was snake-beast behind them. The thread burst into green light. Legg nodded encouragement.
“D’ye see? All he wants is his property back.”
Bab nodded slowly. He turned around. His eyes traveled straight up the looming figure of the wizard who was suddenly at his back. At this close a range, Mordint’s stench was near unbelievable. Bab breathed through his mouth. Very carefully, he reached into the pouch on his belt and removed the star stone. It felt smooth and cool, but hungry, as though it wanted to suck his soul out through his palm. Gingerly, he held it out to Mordint, who snatched it away and held it to his chest. The halflings stood trembling.
“Much better,” Mordint crooned. The stone burst into brilliant blue-green light, casting a sickly shadow on the wizard’s face. He raised the Shard over his head. “Kasin!” A beam of blinding white light lanced from the stone. Bab dropped to his knees. The beam passed over their heads and slammed into the nearby slope. Hot molten rock poured down the incline. Smithereens shot out in every direction. “Yes, good!”
He tucked it away in a pocket in his filthy sleeve. “Make ready!” he shouted. The ragtag force formed into an irregular square on the path.
Bab’s heart was in his throat, but he managed to get words out.
“So, er, master wizard, why are we still alive?”
Mordint turned back to him and smiled, showing a mouthful of large, square, yellow teeth.
“You shouldn’t be,” the earth wizard intoned, his voice sounding like the knell of doom. “You’re the cause of my present difficulty.”
“Difficulty, master?”
“Yes!” Mordint scowled down at him. Thunderclouds formed around his head, and miniature lightning struck at his shoulders. “It is all thanks to you that I have lost my castle!”
Bab blanched. “Uh, how’s that, master?”
For the first time, the mage looked discomfited. “When you removed the Chaos Shard from its setting, you caused my power to diminish. Without my stone minions I was too weak to defend it against the dwarf mage Hochster. How he heard of the theft, I don’t know.”
Bab blanched. Well, he and his companions hadn’t been any too subtle about bragging about their conquest in the trading post, he recalled, but he didn’t dare say so to Mordint. Word must have spread from there to this Hochster, whoever he was.
“No idea, master,” he said, crossing his fingers, hoping the gods would forgive him the fib.
“I fought for months to dislodge him, but to no avail. I realized I required a force of my own to take it back. I went to the Crossroads to enlist willing soldiers.” His eyes glowed like the Shard as he leaned over the halflings. “Welcome to my army.”
“Oh, but surely, now that you have the stone, you don’t need us,” Bab said hastily.
Mordint stretched out a hand. “Hoit!” Coran’s boot came flying and landed in the half-elf’s arms. The tentacles felt around for it, then subsided into the mire with a bloop. “Fall in,” he ordered them. “We have distance to cover. You know the way.”
“Never!” Scorri sneered.
Mordint shrugged. “Then you’ll die now.” He raised a finger and aimed it at the scout. She stood her ground, though her face went pale. Bab jumped between them.
“Hold on, hold on! We only came to return the stone, not fight, master.”
“And that you will do,” Mordint assured them. “The mystic force that placed it in the wall of my cavern should not have been broken by any force but mine. I want to see how you did it, so it cannot ever happen again. When my army rises again, you shall be free. You have my word,” he finished grandly.
Bab doubted that. The halflings all looked at one another. They knew. The moment the stone men came back to life, they were all dead. Though they wanted to repay the debt, they didn’t want to add their lives to the sum. But at that moment they had no choice. They fell in line. Bab had to think hard.
Mordint didn’t have any stone men along, but his powers and his mercenaries were fearsome enough. His gnoll master sergeant marched them hard upland toward the underground fortress, with a whip over their heads to hurry them along.
“We can’t work for him,” Scorri hissed as they were hustled along the ridge road. “He’s evil! You can smell it!”
“Can you think of an alternative?” Legg growled at them. “It’s help or die!”
Mordint wasn’t much for small talk. He didn’t stop them from discussing anything they wanted. It was futile, of course. In the midst of his makeshift army, they couldn’t get away.
Besides the soldiers they could see, including orcs, goblins, and hordes of slithering centipedes, were two enormous wagons driven by humans. One held food, and the other armaments and magical gear. Bab could feel the tempters around them, too. Once in a while an invisible tongue tasted his hand. Ugh.
It didn’t stop him from making plans to escape when they could. He calculated all the weapons with any magical virtue they had at their disposal: Legg’s bow, Scorri’s sling, his hammer, and whatever Coran kept in his pouch. None of it amounted to much. Still, a good general kept everything in mind. You never knew what would save your life.
Mordint left Thangrik, the orc with the ill-fitting helmet, guarding them under an overhang while he issued orders to the others at a planning session around a bonfire. Bab could hear only a little, but it sounded like Mordint had thought his plan well through. He split his force into three smaller squads under the command of two bigger orcs and the snake-thing. With a look over his shoulder at the halflings, Mordint lowered his voice.
“He’s talking about us,” Legg said, shivering in his cloak. An attempt by Coran to start a campfire had been stomped out by the orc. Their food, which came from the communal pot tended by one of the disreputable-looking humans, was always cold by the time it reached them, but there was plenty of it.
“Aye,” Bab said, trying to look at ease under the heavy-browed gaze of Thangrik and the worried eyes of his fellows. “Just thinking how he’s going to keep his promise to us.”
“Do you believe him?” Adda asked eagerly. Scorri looked up from her plate of stew with a scornful expression.
“As much as he deserves,” Bab said. He shared a glance with Coran. He didn’t want the locksmith going off on a crazy rant and drawing attention to them out of fear of death. Better to be gray shadows creeping in Mordint’s shadow.
Even the halflings’ sturdy feet were sanded smooth by the gritty roads by the time they heaved within half a league of the stronghold. The pathway looked different, notwithstanding the overcast sky showering it with misty raindrops. It had been straightened out and rid of its covering of rough grass. Grumbling, Mordint sent a couple of invisible tempters to spy out the scene. The rest of them waited out of sight of the cavern entrance.
Though no one could see them, everyone could tell when they returned by the soggy feeling in the air. Whispers went through the ranks as Mordint conferred. Thirty dwarves were below ground, with the lord and master, Hochster, in the grand hall.
Mordint strode over to loom above Bab and his companions. They sprang to their feet. He carried a pierced
