"Greetings, O Dark One," the Hound lowered her head. "We thank you for your permission to settle in these lands. Not an hour passes that we don't sing a song of joy. I don't remember ever having such an easy and glorious hunt! Our pups are bloated like the lazy gastropods in the Lord of Fire's own herds. They refuse to eat bones and cartilage, all they care for is freshly-killed meat!"
To show their agreement, the whole pack raised their heads and howled like some mad orchestra of chainsaws when they hit some hard gnarly bits. Their voices hit the supersonic waves that sent shivers up your spine.
I fenced myself off with my hands. "That's great! I'm so happy you like it! I can see you haven't wasted your time. Does it mean you've cleared the cellars and done what I asked you to?" I nodded at the mithril heap that was calling my name.
"We have, Priest. We've mopped up the cellars destroying over four hundred beings who believed the place to be their own. Many of them were indeed dangerous. But not many can still stand after my pack finished with them!" a note of smug boasting rang in her voice. "At first I thought you'd been mistaken. For a long time we couldn't smell a single crumb of the cursed metal. Then we discovered a whole heap of it piled up in one of the dead-end corridors. There we found this zombie, greedy as a dragon, crawling on top of it."
"I'm not a zombie!" the dwarf objected. "I am Durin the Smart, the Master of the Mithril Smithy, one of the defenders of these lands which suffered the steel invaders' ire. I was saved by the Element of Metal which I'd served all my life and which didn't let me die the final death."
"His greed didn't let him die," the Hound explained. "His soul couldn't leave his body after it obtained riches beyond the mountain kings' wildest dreams."
"Yes—greed!" the dwarf exploded. "The greed for knowledge! In all these hundreds of years I've studied every inch of the cellars collecting every crumb left by the steel invaders. Do you have any idea how deeply they'd delved into the secrets of metals? Can you fathom all the wisdom and the high secrets concealed in this heap of depleted ore?"
The dwarf boomed louder and louder, his voice reproaching: finally he had a chance to voice all the silent arguments he'd generated in all those lonely years of inner monologues. "You have any idea what this is? You really think it's a rock?"
Untangling himself from his harness, he sank his arms elbow-deep into the heap of junk, producing a smallish egg and shook it in front of my nose. The egg had a very recognizable body complete with a detonator and ring pull.
I shrunk, mechanically pushing Lena behind me, shielding her. "I believe I do," I said in a suddenly hoarse voice. "This is an offensive grenade. Looks remarkably similar to the famous RGD5."
"Pardon me?" the dwarf managed, speechless. "Offensive? Who would want to offend it? Actually, I called it the egg of the fire salamander. Have you ever tried to break one?"
I peered at the unfamiliar markings and fluorescent stripes that coded the grenade's type. "All you need to do is pull on the ring without letting go of the handle."
The dwarf sort of shrank in size. "I shouldn' have let go of it, should I? I didn't know that."
He opened his shabby cloak revealing homemade mithril armor plates peppered with ragged holes.
"Good job you kept your head attached," I sympathized.
"I didn't," he sighed. "Nor my arms. I respawned twenty-four hours later lying on a mithril heap. Your hound has a point. The Moon silver draws me and won't let me leave."
"Don't worry. We're going to melt it into nice neat ingots and lock it in the treasury. Maybe then it'll set you free."
The dwarf shook, hiding the grenade behind his back. I cast a meaningful glance at the empty space where it had just been. "How many of them have you got?"
He hastily shook his head and stepped back, stumbling against the hounds' noses. They growled; the dwarf recoiled, mumbling, "That's the only one! The only thing I have! You're not getting it!"
Greedy guts! He'd make a nice friend for my inner pig. I had to give it some thought.
"Sir Durin, I'm afraid you don't understand," I said. "I'm the Temple's First Priest and the owner of the castle. I have my men here with me and our alliance representatives. We can't allow zombies to roam these corridors unattended, nor can we let them sneak our mithril and ammo. As the castle's owner, I have the right of ownership to everything in these lands."
I almost felt guilty expropriating him. The dwarf was a sorry sight. He started shaking, recoiling this way and that with a haunted look in his eyes, stumbling against the hounds' bared teeth. Finally he froze, scowling like a cornered rat.
I reserved my compassion for the old idiot. It was time to make him an offer he'd find hard to refuse. "You could, however, stay in the castle. You don't even need to part with your treasure."
The dwarf pricked up his ears, looking at me expectantly. I screwed my face into an appropriately official expression. "Durin the Dwarf, Master of the Mithril Smithy, I hereby invite you to join the Children of the Night and accept the post of the clan's steward and treasurer!"
Why not? I didn't have enough people, did I? So I had to think of something pretty quick. At least he wouldn't be able to run off into the real world with our money. Nor would he fritter away the funds to the first so-called friend or honey trap.
"Your job will be to guard and increase the clan's property. Which doesn't mean I'll have to run after you begging you every time I need a nail to drive in the wall! You are the guardian; I'm the owner. You have a minute to consider my offer."
The ex-Master didn't hesitate. I don't think he expected to get a second similar offer from somewhere else. The alternative, however, was sad and unenviable.
He nodded. With a metallic click, he drew his hand from behind his back and offered it to me, palm up. On his thumb hung the pin ring he'd pulled from the grenade.
"Don't move," I said to him calmly. "Show me your other hand, very slowly, and please don't unclench it!"
Impressed by the seriousness in my voice, the dwarf pulled the other hand from behind his back, showing me the primed grenade. I lay my hand over his wizened fingers and squeezed it to prevent him from letting go of the safety clip. Gingerly I removed the ring, pinched the two ends of the split pin in my teeth and rethreaded it into the hole. Breathing a sigh of relief, I much more calmly let go of the clip handle. What a kamikaze. Had he just tried to blow us all up or was he really so clueless? I didn't ask. I motioned him to open his shovel-like hand, caught the deadly pineapple and cautiously put it in my bag.
The dwarf's greedy stare followed the disappearing treasure. "Do you understand the steel invaders' mechanics?"
"Sort of," I mumbled as I scanned the heap for any more hazardous junk. Trust them to unearth some tactical nuke so that this smartass could try to take it apart with a sledgehammer. How was I supposed to rebuild the Temple after that?
I wondered what the Vets would think when they noticed an atomic mushroom on the horizon? Would Dan and Eric immediately think about me? I seemed to be their prime suspect for lots of things.
"And who are you?" the dwarf squinted like a cop and—inconspicuously, so he thought—reached under his cloak. "Are you their servant or something?"
"Don't worry. It's been eight hundred years since anyone heard about them. Few still remember they existed at all. The world has new inhabitants now: the Immortal Ones. Millions are just visitors while hundreds of thousands have settled down here for good. I'm one of them. So please stop searching your pockets for whatever it is you're looking for, just surrender it to our ammo depot. Pointless trying to kill us: I've just told you we're immortal. So are you with us? Here's the invitation."
I selected him as target, crossed my fingers—no clan had ever hired a zombie before—and sent him an invitation to join. The Universe didn't shatter—apparently, the world's mechanics had been sufficiently changed the last time—but our clan counter grew by one.