“Good,” Willim declared.
For a moment he considered teleporting after the Aghar himself, but he quickly discarded the tempting thought. No, it would take some searching, perhaps a lot of searching, before the fool was discovered. Much as Willim would have relished making that discovery himself, he had too many other things to do back there in his lair.
So he would have to cast another spell.
That one required heat, and again he grimaced, remembering that in his rage he had smashed his favorite granite worktable. He would have to use a bench that had been carved from the bedrock of the mountain, a stone cube near one wall of the laboratory that had once been intended as the dais for a thane’s throne. He touched it with his hand and murmured the spell, and immediately the stone glowed red. As Willim concentrated on the magic, the illumination gradually faded to yellow, and finally the stone was white hot. So intense was its radiance that the wizard, generally immune to such discomfort, was forced to take a step back.
Quickly he went about assembling the rest of his components, gathering them in a medium-sized iron cauldron. Scales and dried blood were tossed in, as well as the eyes of insects and other, even less pleasant, ingredients. When he came to the final, and most vital, ingredient, he cursed aloud, remembering the dwarf corpses he had fed to Gorathian. If he had only remembered to save one of them!
Searching around, he surveyed his chamber, his eyeless face turning this way and that as his spell of true-seeing swept the half-destroyed room. It came to the cage where the two elves had died, slain by the cloudkill spell, and immediately the dark dwarf nodded to himself: an elf corpse would work just as well as a dwarf.
With a flick of his finger and a muttered word, he lifted the rigid body of the male elf and brought it over to the cauldron. A few more manipulations placed the heart and the brain of the corpse into the vat; the rest of the drying flesh was discarded. Finally, he set the metal kettle on the white-hot stone of his workbench and stepped back to work another incantation.
The raising of a minion was not something to be done casually or quickly. For more than an hour, Willim stood before the cauldron, working the spell, sweat pouring from the Theiwar’s face, trickling through his beard, causing his robe to stick to his skin. Never, however, did his intense concentration waver, and finally the kettle began to smoke then to burn. Flames shot upward, at first yellow and bright, then gradually fading to pale blue flickers barely extending over the rim, and at last fading away.
The cauldron continued to smoke, however, and that smoke grew thick, black, and strangely opaque. It rose in a column, but instead of dispersing through the chamber, it held together, coalesced, and in fact seemed to concentrate in on itself as more and more churning vapor surged into the cloud. Very slowly, the smoke emerging from the cauldron diminished as all of the components were consumed. Finally, there was nothing left save for the tall, amorphous pillar of black murk lingering in the air over the black kettle.
“Minion-awaken!” Willim commanded, his voice booming through the chamber. At the same time, he clenched both fists, and the smoke column contracted, writhing and, increasingly, wailing as the magic wove it into a physical presence. It floated to the side, then settled down onto the floor of the chamber. Two slender legs, ending in taloned feet, extended downward to support its weight. A pair of black, batlike wings extended from its shoulders. Finally eyes appeared: almond shaped and wide set, like the eyes of an elf.
But those eyes were red and glowing with hellish heat like the blazing coal within a hot forge.
Willim concentrated his thoughts; then, without speaking, he conveyed to his minion a mental image of the gully dwarf and instructed it to follow in the direction the Aghar had gone away from there. Only then did the Black Robe give voice to his command.
“Pursue the gully dwarf until you catch him. When you do, kill him and bring me everything he carries.”
The minion bowed deeply, those eerie elf eyes pressing all the way to the floor, in obeisance. Then the black wings spread and the horrid creature, taller than a tall man, took flight. It rose, met the stone ceiling of the vast cavern, and continued on through the bedrock of the world.
TEN
Garren Bluestone, pushing Brandon before him, rushed through the front door of his family’s manor. “Send for Harn Poleaxe,” he ordered his doorman. The young dwarf, a lanky Daewar, departed at once.
“Father!” complained Brand. “I was telling the truth; I deserved to be heard!”
“You deserved to be heard, maybe. But your actions were more likely to get you arrested, even killed!” declared the elder in exasperation. “Don’t you understand who wields the power in this nation? The power, whether you want to believe it or not, of life and death?”
“I saw the death part,” growled the son.
His father’s face fell, looking as though he had been struck a physical blow, and Brandon immediately regretted his tone. But Garren’s voice when next he spoke was steady, almost calm.
“I only have one son left. We have to get you out of Kayolin,” he said bluntly. “As soon as possible.”
“Do you think the governor will try to kill me right here in Kayolin? First they’ll have to arrest me, give me a trial!” Brandon blurted in disbelief.
His father glared sternly at him. “The king, I keep telling you, can do anything he prefers to do. And if it can’t be done legal and nice, Lord Heelspur has plenty more of his thugs to throw at you. One will pick a fight; others will be lurking. Your temper is not without some renown.” Garren looked wistful as he regarded his youngest son. “And everyone knows about the Bluestone luck. Whatever your fate, many people will say that you provoked it and you got what you deserved. Others will say it’s simply the curse that follows our house. We are in a real pickle here. My son, I would like to fight them too, but we have to keep you safe while we build up our case, muster allies and supporters.”
“But- leave? You tell me I must leave Kayolin?” Like most of the nation’s mountain dwarves, he had done his share of exploring the peaks and valleys of the Garnet Range. But the land beyond those lofty summits was completely unknown to him. “Where would I go?” he asked, finally.
“That’s where Poleaxe comes in. Now collect a few traveling things-just the essentials-and be here the moment he arrives. I’ll have a purse of about eighty steel coins for you; you’ll have to use it pay expenses, book passage on a ship, and so forth. We have no time to waste. And Brandon-”
“Yes, what?” he asked, numbly.
“Take your axe, and remember your house. It has not always been a legacy of bad luck, you know. Balric Bluestone was carrying that weapon when he set off to climb Garnet Peak. He was lost in the Cataclysm, but his axe was returned to us-the rescuers found it immediately, as soon as they went to look for him.”
“I… I know the story,” Brandon replied, confused.
“The point is, I’ve always felt that discovery meant something to us, to our family. It’s a symbol of hope, a sign that if we look toward the future, there is a promise of better things ahead. Bear it proudly, and find that future. Now go.”
Brandon’s heart was pounding as he went to his rooms and looked at the tunics, trousers, cloaks, boots, and belts that made up his wardrobe. Buy passage on ship? He couldn’t even imagine floating on an ocean! He had a chest of tools, another of weapons, each containing implements he had used during the nearly five decades of his life as he grew to adulthood. How could he shrink it down to the few items he could carry on his back?