Vergadain laughed at his own joke. The other deities joined in the merriment. Even the normally dour Clanggedin laughed so hard he had to transfer his paired axes to one hand, so he could wipe the tears of mirth from his eyes with the other.
Moradin suddenly leaned forward, his attention rapt as he stared at the identical axes Clanggedin held. His eye wandered to Sharindlar, who still had a hand on her belly, and he broke into a smile.
“My thanks, gods of the Morndinsamman,” he said. “You have given me my answer.”
Heads turned.
“They have?” Berronar asked.
Moradin rose from his throne. The graybeard who’d been the butt of Vergadain’s joke was at the head of the line. In a moment more, his soul would step into the Soulforge and be reborn. Moradin took the ghostly greybeard’s arm, and turned him. The soul, feeling the Dwarffather’s hand on his elbow, startled and turned. Then his eyes widened, and he trembled. A look of rapture flushed his face, and his eyes leaked tears of joy.
“Dwarffather!” he exclaimed.
Moradin held out a hand. “Clanggedin,” he demanded. “I have need of one of your axes.”
Clanggedin didn’t hesitate. He extended the weapon.
Moradin took the axe and raised it. The soul of the graybeard glanced up at the blade, not in fear, but in puzzlement. “Dwarffather,” he said in a voice as soft as mist. “Have I displeased you?”
“Quite the contrary,” Moradin answered. He looked into the graybeard’s soul and saw much that pleased him: a lifetime of hard work, honest words, and respectful worship. “I am going to reward you. Your soul will be reborn not once, but twice.”
Moradin released the graybeard’s arm. “So be it!” he cried, bringing the axe down in a powerful swing. It cleaved the graybeard in two equal, identical parts-two halves of the same mold.
Before either could fall to the ground, Moradin dropped the axe and caught each half of the soul in a hand. Like a father lowering a babe to bed, he gently placed them into the Soulforge, one at either end of it.
“Be reborn,” he intoned, his breath fanning the fires of the forge. “Not as one, but two. As twins.”
The souls disappeared from the forge, already on their way back to Faerun. As they streaked like bolts of lighting toward the realm where mortals dwelled, thunder rumbled through the skies above a dwarf clanhold. In that clanhold was a dwarf woman whose womb would quicken not with one life, but with two.
The Thunder Blessing had begun.
Chapter Seven
“Gold is tried by fire; men by adversity.”
Torrin dreamed.
In the dream, he sat at one end of a massive feast table in the great hall of Underhome, a place he’d heard the bards sing about. In his dream, it was still whole, not yet in ruin and overrun by drow. The walls were intact, and the furniture and chandeliers were unbroken. The intricate tapestry against the far wall, depicting the Morndinsamman grouped around Moradin’s throne, was vibrant and unfaded.
A host of dwarves was gathered around the table where Torrin sat, feasting and chatting. Though he spoke Dwarvish fluently, Torrin couldn’t make out a word they said. Their voices were muffled, indistinct. Nor could he see them clearly. Their bodies wavered like candle flames seen through thick, wavy glass.
His own body was clear enough, though. Glancing down at himself, he saw that his chest was thicker, his legs shorter. The fingers that gripped his feast cup were short and blunt.
He was a dwarf!
Before he had time to rejoice at that, someone tugged at his sleeve. He glanced to one side and saw-clearly-a dwarf whose white beard trailed so far behind him that it stretched out of the door. The longbeard wore a blacksmith’s leather apron and leggings, and bracers of solid gold. The smell of charcoal smoke clung to him. He placed a wooden strongbox on the table in front of Torrin.
“What’s inside?” Torrin asked, nodding at the box.
“A puzzle,” the blacksmith said.
Torrin opened the box. Inside was the runestone he’d purchased from Kendril-except that it was made not of stone, but of gold.
Torrin lifted it out.
Suddenly, the runestone turned red hot. Torrin gasped and dropped it on the table, where it turned into a puddle of molten gold. The chest and table became an enormous pile of kindling, which went up in flames. The dwarf revelers who had been seated around it likewise burst into flame and melted in an instant to glowing heaps of slag.
Torrin turned to the blacksmith, seeking an explanation, but the longbeard had turned into a statue. He stood, stiff and gray, with cracked-mud skin and eyeballs like chipped white marbles. Soon his statue crumbled into a heap on the floor, leaving only the apron, leggings, and bracers behind. A moment later, the bracers melted into twin puddles of molten gold, just as the runestone had.
Curiously, though the blacksmith was gone, he still could speak.
“You must help me,” the statue dwarf pleaded in a voice like cracking stone. “No one else can.”
“How?” Torrin said. “How can I help you?”
Silence whispered through the great hall, stirring up nothing but dust.
Torrin awoke with a start, his heart thudding. That dream! What had it meant? Trouble, obviously-he could feel it-but in what form? And from where?
He sat up in bed. The blanket lay in a heap in his lap. He stroked his beard fretfully. The blacksmith had worn golden bracers and had an impossibly long beard-he’d been a dream manifestation of Moradin. The Dwarffather himself was sending Torrin a warning. Something to do with the runestone. But what? Should Torrin use it? Not use it?
He glanced at the shutters. No light came through the cracks. It was still night. The middle of the night, judging by the stillness that hung over the clanhold.
He rose from the bed, splashed his face with water from the bowl on his bedside table, and dried his beard with a towel. A walk would help clear his mind, he decided. He pulled on his breeches and picked up a shirt, only half noticing, from the singed smell of the wool, that it was the one he’d been wearing in the Wyrmcaves. Ah well, no matter. At that time of night, he didn’t expect to run into anyone, anyway.
As he pulled the shirt on, something sharp scratched his arm. There seemed to be a shard of something caught in the fabric of the sleeve, near a burn hole. Torrin poked a finger through the hole and dug out a jagged-edged fragment of metal the size of a fingernail, soft enough to bend. His eyes widened as he saw what it was: a thin piece of gold, obviously once molten but hardened.
“Smite me with a hammer!” Torrin exclaimed, his hand trembling. “Was the dream real?”
No, he realized. That wasn’t it. Thinking back to the Wyrmcaves, he remembered he’d felt something hot splatter onto his bracer and run down it, onto his left arm. Not candle wax, as he’d thought at the time, but molten gold.
The cavern where the dragon had cornered Torrin and Eralynn had been heavily veined with quartz, a stone often found with gold. The dragon’s fiery breath had likely melted a vein of gold in the ceiling and caused it to drip onto the spot where Torrin and Eralynn had taken shelter. Some part of Torrin’s mind must have realized that, and woven it into the fabric of his dream.
“Except,” Torrin told himself, “that it can’t be that simple. That dream was a message from Moradin. I’m sure of it.”
He fingered the hardened splatter of gold. It held the answer to the question. Of that, he was certain. Yet the metal was mute. And he still didn’t understand what the dream message meant.
Haldrin was the one to ask, Torrin decided. Haldrin was the most learned person that Torrin knew, aside from a loremaster. That’s what came of being a scrivener-you picked up all sorts of odd bits of information from the texts you copied. What’s more, Torrin thought with a wry smile, Haldrin was also the most likely person to be awake at that time of night. He was always complaining about Ambril’s fretful tossing and turning. Odds were, his pregnant wife’s fretfulness had him up out of bed and pacing the halls, yet again.