Just then he heard the clip-clop of hooves. Peering warily out of the narrow window, he uttered a strong dwarven oath. Five armed bandits had come to a halt beside the caravan. He flattened himself against the wall and hid behind the door: Concealment was his only hope of survival against a band of seasoned warriors. Unlike Boлndal and Boпndil, he wasn't ready to fight five against one.
Heavy footsteps approached, the ladder groaned, the caravan wobbled, and a shadow blotted out the sunlight falling through the door.
Tungdil gripped his ax with both hands.
A man entered, mumbling indistinctly, and knelt beside the corpse. "Someone's been in," he called to the others. "He wasn't lying like this before." He scrabbled around for his knife. "Don't let anyone near the caravan, and hide the darned honey pot," he ordered. "The last thing we need is for people to ask what we're doing with the head of an ugly groundling."
"Stands to reason what we're doing. Earning our money like everyone else," said one of the company, laughing coarsely.
"No need to shout about it," snapped the murderer. "The little fellows are hard enough to get hold of, without every last Tom, Dick, or Harry competing for the loot. Ah, here it is!" He picked up the dagger, wiped the blade on the corpse's jerkin, and returned it to its sheath.
Straightening up, he stood for a moment in the light of the window, his mail reflecting the sun. A beam hit Tungdil's blade and rebounded. "What in the…" The murderer whirled round.
Tungdil had to act while the element of surprise was with him. Rushing forward, he drove his ax into the man's boots, cutting through the leather and cleaving the bone. In his panic he struck with such force that the blade embedded itself in the wooden floor. It took all his strength to pull it out.
The brigand bellowed in pain. If his companions hadn't noticed the commotion, they were certainly aware of it now.
"It's no worse than you deserve!" Tungdil grabbed his ax and fled. Whooping and yelling to spook the horses, he leaped out onto the road.
The panicked animals shied away, unseating their riders, who had dropped their stirrups and were preparing to dismount.
Tungdil didn't wait for them to recover, heading instead for the dense forest to the right of the highway. He knew there was no room between the trunks for the men to pursue him on horseback and the undergrowth would slow their progress if they chased him on foot. For once his diminutive stature was an advantage. Besides, daylight faded quickly beneath the thick canopy of leaves and his eyes were accustomed to seeing in the dark.
"Catch the dwarfish bastard," the company's leader commanded. "We'll get a fortune for his head."
Tungdil tore through the forest, stopping occasionally to listen. Loud curses and snapping branches informed him of the brigands' dogged pursuit, but the gap between them was growing. After a time, their heavy footsteps faded entirely, and he knew that he had given them the slip.
Leaning back against a tree trunk, he stopped to recover his breath. No amount of marching could have prepared him for sprinting through a forest, laden with bags. He made a quick check of his things; the pouch with Gorйn's artifacts was still slung from his shoulder, rattling and jangling as soon as he moved. The bag had been making strange noises ever since his misadventure with the orc.
Still listening attentively for his pursuers, he took a sip of water. The brigands are hunting dwarves for a reward. He could scarcely believe it. Of all the terrible things that had happened, this new revelation shocked him to the core. Putting gold on dwarven lives ran counter to the laws of Girdlegard and it was hard to see the sense of it: What would anyone want with a disembodied head?
As soon as he had recovered sufficiently he made a beeline through the forest toward the nearest path. To his astonishment, Boлndal and Boпndil were coming the other way.
"About time too!" Boпndil called out to him. "You went the wrong way!"
"I went the right way," Tungdil corrected him. "You missed the turn to Porista!"
Boлndal took a closer look at him. "What happened, scholar? Did you run into trouble?"
"Just my luck to miss all the excitement," his brother grumbled moodily. Then he laughed. "I know, I bet a squirrel was after his n-"
"Headhunters," Tungdil cut him off. "They're decapitating dwarves in return for a reward."
"What?" screeched Boпndil, eyes rolling wildly. His voluminous beard billowed. "Where are they?"
"I don't know," Tungdil told him, "and to be perfectly honest, I'm just glad they've stopped chasing me."
They stopped in a clearing to decide what to do.
"Did they say who was paying them?" Boлndal asked.
"No, but I've seen them once before. They didn't lay a finger on me at the time-too many other people nearby, I suppose." Given half a chance, they would have killed me, he realized with a shudder.
"Sounds like the thirdlings are up to their tricks again. They're probably paying the bounty hunters to wipe out the rest of the dwarven race, or it could be a ploy to turn us against the long-uns so we end up feuding with them as well as the elves." Boлndal looked at his companions. "There'll be plenty to talk about when we get back to Ogre's Death."
They unpacked their blankets and spent the night under a dense roof of leaves. It seemed prudent to do without a fire: It was dark enough for the flames to be seen for miles around and the mere snapping of a twig seemed alarmingly noisy in the stillness. Tungdil snuggled down and put his hands behind his head, only to sit up abruptly and pluck a beetle from his thick shock of hair. "It's strange," he mused out loud, "but the two of you must have left Ogre's Death at roughly the same time as the headhunting began."
Boпndil, who had coiled his long plait into a pillow, frowned. "You mean it's nothing to do with the thirdlings? You think they were after us?"
His brother shook his head. "That hardly seems likely, Boпndil. No, our scholar thinks they were after him. Am I right?"
Tungdil sighed. "I'm probably making too much of it, but didn't you say I had a rival for the throne?"
Boлndal saw what he was getting at. "Gandogar Silverbeard would never do a thing like that," he said firmly. "He's an upstanding dwarf!"
"I don't know what you're getting so offended about," his brother said reproachfully. "He isn't even a secondling."
"No, but he's a dwarf, an honorable dwarf with some funny ideas." He thought for a moment. "Besides, Gundrabur didn't tell anyone about Tungdil until after we'd left. No," he insisted, "the headhunting is another nasty thirdling ploy. It's bad enough that one of our folks has turned against us, but we can't start suspecting Gandogar. Our race will be doomed if we can't trust one another; it mustn't be true, it can't be."
They lay in silence, pondering the matter uneasily until they fell asleep.
Tungdil's dreams were filled with all kinds of unsettling nonsense. Hordes of orcs and дlfar were pursuing him with shaving soap and razors, determined to cut off his burgeoning beard. In the end they caught him, held him down, and shaved his face; it was humiliating and infuriating to be lying on the ground with cheeks as naked as a baby.
The thought of it jolted him from his restless sleep and he got up, ate some of his provisions, and offered a fervent prayer to Vraccas, asking for protection from bounty hunters and safe completion of his mission.
You're not making it easy for me, Vraccas. Tungdil longed to be back in Ionandar's vaults with Frala, Sunja, and Ikana; even the prospect of seeing Jolosin no longer seemed so bad.
The long journey made friends of the trio and Boпndil devoted every spare moment to instructing Tungdil in the art of combat.
"So tell me, scholar," Boлndal said softly one evening when his brother was snoozing by the fire, "what do you make of the first dwarves you've ever been acquainted with?"
Tungdil grinned. "Do you want my honest opinion?"
"Of course."
"Boпndil has the fierier temper. His fists move faster than his thoughts and he generally acts on impulse, although once he decides himself on something, no one will convince him otherwise."