Puzzled, and a little insulted, Basalt demanded, "What are you laughing about?"
"You!" said Flint, his laughter slowing to a chuckle. "Aye, pup — you're a Fireforge, that's for sure! And what a pair we make!"
"What do you mean by that?" Basalt growled, unwilling to be teased out of his bad humor.
"Well, you're stubborn like me, for starters." Flint crossed his arms and squinted at his nephew, considering him.
"You're not afraid of standing up to your elders either. You even tell 'em off once in a while, though you'd best watch so that doesn't become a habit! And you didn't hesitate one whit before jumping into battle with an honest to goodness troll."
Flint looked at his nephew with affection. "And you didn't come out here to spy on me, anyway, did you?"
"No!" Basalt said quickly, sitting up. "You were right, Un cle Flint," the young dwarf said softly. "What you said about me being mad at my dad and at myself was true. I knew it when I threw that punch at Moldoon's — " He looked away sheepishly "- but I guess I didn't much like you being the one to point it out."
Basalt plucked nervously at his bootlaces. "I didn't like leaving things the way they were between us." He looked up now, clearing his throat gruffly. "I've done that once before, and it will haunt me for the rest of my days." Basalt's voice broke, and he hung his head. Flint sat quietly while his nephew composed himself.
"Even Ma doesn't know this," he began again, his eyes looking far away into the night now, "but Dad and I had a fight the night he died. She wouldn't be surprised, though — me and Dad argued almost every night. Always about the same thing, too. 'Stop drinking and get a decent job,' he'd say."
Basalt looked squarely at Flint. "The thing that always stuck in my craw was that, in addition to apprenticing to him, I had a job. He just didn't like me hauling feed for the derro's horses, that's all." Basalt heaved a huge sigh and shook his head sadly. "He tracked me down at Moldoon's that night and started up the old argument again, said the derro were up to no good and he would prove it. I told him to stay out of my business, and then I left him at the bar." Ba salt's eyes misted over as he looked into the dark distance again, focusing on nothing in particular.
Basalt's expression turned unexpectedly to puzzlement.
"There's just one thing I don't understand. Dad said he hated that the village was working with the mountain dwarves, said he'd never lift a finger to help a derro dying in the street." Basalt stroked his beard thoughtfully. "So what was he doing smithing for them the day his heart gave out? Why that day?" Basalt turned his face to the heavens.
Flint heard his nephew's grief and was wracked with inde cision about the secret suspicions he harbored over
Aylmar's death. Basalt's account of the fight with his father only bolstered his hunch. Could he trust Basalt? He squeezed his nephew's shoulder.
"Basalt, I don't think your father's death was an accident," he said.
Flint's nephew looked at him strangely. "Are you talking about 'fate' or some such hooey?"
"I wish I were," Flint said sadly. "No, I think Aylmar was murdered by a derro mage's spell."
"That's going too far!" Basalt said angrily. "I've heard Garth's mutterings, and I know my father thought the derro were evil. But why would they want to kill him? It doesn't make sense!"
"It does if he discovered they were selling and transport ing weapons, not farm implements, and enough to start a war!" When Basalt still looked confused, Flint pressed on, telling Basalt how he had searched a derro wagon and what he had found there. He left nothing out, none of his worst imaginings, and he told him about the derro he killed.
"Seemed like I had no choice," he added.
Basalt struggled to absorb the news. "You knew all this and yet you didn't tell anybody'? You just left?" Basalt asked, smoldering.
Flint snorted at the irony. "As Tybalt aptly put it, 'Who would believe the village idiot?' That's all the proof I have so far, Bas: Garth's 'mutterings' and what I saw with my own eyes in that wagon. And when they tie me into that derro I killed, Mayor Holden won't be likely to order a search of the wagons or a murder investigation on my say-so, either."
He shrugged. "Since these derro come from Thorbardin, there was nothing else I could do but go to the mountain dwarves myself and find the derro scum who killed
Aylmar."
Basalt no longer looked skeptical. "How are you going to find this one derro, when there must be hundreds of magic using derro there."
Flint gave a devilish grin. "Ah, but how many of them are hunchbacked? Garth, bless his simple heart, kept calling the derro he saw 'the humped one.' That's my only clue, but it's a good one."
Basalt jumped to his feet. "Well, what are we waiting for?
Let's go find the Reorx-cursed derro who killed my father!"
Flint patted the harrn's hand. "You're a true Fireforge, like
I said. But we aren't going anywhere in the dark." He sighed.
"I'm not sure that I want any help, but you can't go back the way you came — a clumsy pup like you'd be troll food for sure," he teased. "I guess you'll have to come along, but we'll leave in the morning."
Basalt smiled eagerly. "You won't be sorry, Uncle Flint!"
I'm not so sure about that, Flint thought inwardly. What would he do with Basalt when he got to Thorbardin?
A cold drizzle fell, then turned to light snow. They looked for an overhanging shelf of rock well off the Passroad, since a wagon or two was bound to pass in the dark, and made a crude camp. Uncle and nephew talked long into the night, about Basalt's father and Flint's brother, and even Flint's fa ther, too. Though he hated to see their conversation end,
Flint knew they would pay for their indulgences with ex haustion in the morning.
By late afternoon the next day, a snowy one, the road curved into a narrow valley and began climbing steeply.
Flint and Basalt wondered at the difficulty of maneuvering heavy wagons up and down these switchbacks, but the rut ted state of the road proved that it did carry steady traffic.
They were closer to the heart of the Kharolis Mountains now, and the surrounding hills had gained sharp definition.
The slopes towered thousands of feet in the air, with jagged precipices of bare rock exposed to the wind.
Flint groaned and struggled up the heights made all the more arduous by heavy snow. He cursed the sedentary life that had led him into this physical decline. He knew — or at least convinced himself — that this would have been no trou ble for him a short twenty years ago.
But the hills brought him a sense of exhilaration as well.
The view of jagged crests stretching for a hundred miles, capped by the snows of autumn; the sweeping grandeur of the valleys and the inexorable crushing force of the moun tain rivers — all of these returned a joy to his old heart that he hadn't even been aware he was missing.
The sun was dropping over their right shoulders when the road abruptly ended at a shallow stream, as if a giant broom had descended and swept the rutted trail away. The bank rose steeply on the opposite side, unmarked by a single rut or hoofprint, while the two-foot-deep stream, so clear and cold Flint could see the gravel bottom, teemed across their path. Big, fluffy snowflakes plopped into the stream and melted into the steady current. Flint smiled to himself; hid ing a trail in a riverbed was one of the oldest tricks in an ad venturer's book.
Flint looked downstream, then upstream to the right.
Kneeling near the edge of the water, he saw an almost imper ceptible curve to the right in the tracks leading to the stream. "See these, Bas?" he said, pointing to the ruts. "I think the wagons are turning off right here, where they en ter the water. They follow it upstream."