The dark elf lowered the spinning tablet. Then he drew glowing lines across the tabletop, and Torrin could detect the faint smell of charring wood. It drew a stern look from the cleric, who tsk-tsked and shook his head. The dark elf ignored him. The cleric half rose from his stool, then sat down again, as if deciding that chastising a wizard wasn’t a good idea. Snake-beard rolled up the map he’d been concealing from Torrin and shoved it under one arm. He slunk away down one of the aisles, grumbling.
Torrin tried to concentrate on his reading, but couldn’t. The wizard had snuffed out the glowing lines with a wave of his hand, and was holding up each of the tablets in turn and striking it with a tuning fork. The soft ping, ping, ping sound was exasperating, especially after a night of little sleep and much worry.
“Do you mind?” Torrin blurted out.
The wizard stared at him without blinking, saying nothing.
The cleric’s head jerked up. He glanced back and forth between Torrin and the wizard. Then he eased his chair back from the table, its wooden legs scraping the stone floor, and looked as if he were getting ready to leave. Torrin suddenly wondered if interrupting the wizard had been a healthy thing to do.
“Mind,” the dark elf repeated. He cocked his head to the side and lifted his left hand. Torrin shied back, but the wizard didn’t touch him. Instead, he pointed with a slender finger at the Ironstar symbol on the bracers Torrin wore.
“Your mind matches that mark,” he said in a soft voice.
Torrin blinked. “I… I am a dwarf, it’s true,” he said. He leaned forward. “You could sense that?”
The wizard’s fingers traced a star in the air. “Patterns,” he said.
The cleric snorted. Relaxing once more, he returned his attention to his reading.
The wizard touched the bracer on Torrin’s left arm, his finger briefly tracing the groove that had been gouged into the iron during Torrin and Eralynn’s scramble to get away from the red dragon. “Patterns,” he repeated.
Torrin inclined his head in a bow. “Torrin Ironstar,” he said, introducing himself a second time. “And you are…?”
“Zarifar,” the wizard replied, nodding at the tablets he’d been playing with. “A geomancer.”
Torrin hesitated. He was loath to trust a former drow, yet the wizard who studied earth magic might be able to tell him a few things. And for all Torrin knew, the Morndinsamman had caused their paths to cross. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” he asked.
The dark elf gave a vague wave of his hand. Torrin hoped that it meant yes. “What do you know about earth nodes?” he asked.
Zarifar smiled. “Everything.”
“How do they work?” asked Torrin. “How do they allow people to teleport, I mean.”
“You mean why do they work,” the wizard said. He stared across the room, as if looking at something far beyond it. “The lines. The angles they form where they cross. It’s all… in the numbers. The equations, the formulae. The vertex, and how the chords of the circle and the tangential lines align.”
The cleric chuckled and caught Torrin’s eye. “You’re sorry you asked, I’ll wager,” he said.
Torrin ignored him. “Could you explain that again, in lay terms?” he asked.
“I was a teacher once, you know,” Zarifar said. “At the College of Ancient Arcana, in Sshamath.”
The drow city. Torrin struggled to keep the distaste from his expression. He needed information from Zarifar.
Torrin was setting aside his principles a lot lately. But it was for the greater good. He might learn something from the wizard that would help Kier-help everyone. Surely Moradin would understand.
“What I want to know,” Torrin told the wizard, “is how to more reliably activate the teleportation magic of an earth node. I find that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Could that be due to a warding ritual, or some magical device that blocks teleportation, carried by the person I’m trying to teleport to?”
The cleric spoke again. “So now you’re a wizard, as well as a Delver?”
“I’m no wizard,” Torrin answered over his shoulder. “Although I am a dwarf. But that’s another tale.”
The cleric chuckled and set his book down, giving Torrin his full attention. “This gets better and better,” he said.
“I hoped to find the answer in these texts,” Torrin said, gesturing at the stack of books in front of him, “but the solution still eludes me. I was hoping that you might offer some suggestions. You must know a thing or two about teleportation.”
“Doors within doors,” Zarifar said. He placed his palms, fingers spread, each touching their counterpart on the opposite hand. “The patterns must match precisely. If they don’t-” he shifted one hand slightly, so his fingers were no longer lined up “-there’s only emptiness where an alignment should be.”
Torrin nodded respectfully. He already knew about the linked portals wizards could create: how the runes around each of the circles had to be inscribed in exactly the right order, using the same color of chalk, to forge a link from one to the next. But he was no wizard.
“What I want to know is this,” he continued. “Supposing someone wasn’t a wizard, but he had a magical device that could activate an earth node’s magic, and allow him to teleport? Could he go anywhere he wanted, or would the destination have to meet certain conditions?”
“You have such a device?” the cleric asked, his eyes glittering.
Torrin hesitated. If the fellow had been anything other than a cleric of the Delver’s patron god, Torrin might have hesitated. But he was a fellow dwarf, and one of the brotherhood. Torrin could trust him.
The cleric obviously sensed Torrin’s hesitation. He introduced himself. “Rathorn Battlehammer, son of Horatio Battlehammer and grandson of Rornathoin the Third,” he said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin repeated, clasping the cleric’s arm in the traditional dwarven greeting. “And no, I don’t have such a device-but I know of one.”
Rathorn chuckled. “No need for subterfuge,” he told Torrin. “As I said before, you can trust Zarifar. He’s no rogue, and he’s as honorable as any of the stout folk. I swear it, by the gleam in Dugmaren’s eye.” He touched the holy symbol that hung about his neck.
Torrin took a deep breath. “All right, then,” he said, after one last wary glance at the wizard. “Yes, I have such a device.” He pulled the runestone from his pouch and showed it to the cleric.
Rathorn studied it a moment, then pushed it back to Torrin. “Interesting. But Zarifar knows more about these things than I do, though I am chagrined to admit it.”
Zarifar started to reach for the runestone.
“It also draws spellfire,” Torrin warned.
The wizard’s hand jerked to a stop. He sat back, leaving the runestone where it was.
“But only when it’s in an earth node,” Torrin continued.
“Spellfire,” Zarifar said softly. He moved one finger back and forth across the table in a seemingly aimless fashion, mumbling to himself in a low voice, speaking in drow. He stared dreamily up at the ceiling.
Torrin waited while the wizard mused.
“Not possible,” Zarifar said abruptly, his hand jerking to a halt.
“What isn’t?” asked Torrin.
Zarifar traced lines across the table with his finger, each line ending at the tablet he’d spun in the air earlier. “Magic follows lines,” he said. “Spellfire…” He lifted his hand suddenly from the table and waggled his fingers. “Does not.”
Torrin gritted his teeth.
Rathorn chuckled. “What Zarifar means is that the lines of magical energy that come together at the locations we call ‘earth nodes’ each run along a fixed course through the earth,” he explained. “Spellfire, on the other hand, is wild magic that can neither be constrained nor channelled. It explodes into this realm at random, disfiguring flesh and grossly distorting spells. It is a force of chaos, and as such would be utterly antithetical to the tightly controlled and constrained magic of an earth node. That’s what Zarifar is trying to say-isn’t that right, Zarifar?”