Peat and Sadie worked through the night. He organized the chaotic mess in the shop while she labored over completing her copy of the scroll. Peat heard the steady scritch scritch scritch of her quill against the parchment but forced himself to stay away from her and let her work uninterrupted. Tempted though he was, he didn’t even try to peer over her shoulder.
The sounds of battle had, at last, faded away. Peeking out the door, he saw the streets were quiet; the fighting seemed to have ground to a halt. No one was walking around.
However, Horth Dunstone with his wife and two children returned to the Two Guilders Emporium promptly at the appointed hour. Peat, still wondering about his wife’s surprising possession of the powerful scroll, led them inside. He made sure that the Closed sign hung in the doorway and followed the customers toward the back of the shop.
The chubby merchant turned to him with an expression of almost pathetic hopefulness on his face. As his wife and children continued on inside, he whispered to Peat. “Do you have good news for me?”
“I believe we might be able to help you,” the Theiwar answered. He cleared his throat. “But, as I warned you, it will be expensive.”
“Oh, of course, of course!” the customer said. He pulled a fat purse from his belt and eagerly extended it to Peat. “I trust this will be sufficient. Mostly diamonds, of course, though there are some exceptional emeralds, sapphires, and rubies in there as well. It’s, well, it’s basically my life’s fortune, with only a few stones left to help us get established on the outside.”
“I see,” said Peat. “Please wait here.”
He left the fidgeting Hylar in the shop and went into the back area, where Sadie was just inscribing the last symbols on the copy of the spell scroll she had been laboring over for the previous sixteen hours. Beside her, illuminated by the same lamp brightening her worktable, was a smooth steel tray with raised edges. Barely able to breathe, Peat turned the purse upside down, and they both gawked in astonishment as a dazzling array of stones spilled onto the metallic surface. True to Horth Dunstone’s word, most were glittering diamonds, though a few red, blue, and green gems also glimmered in the midst of the crystalline treasure.
Peat immediately snatched up one of the largest diamonds, while Sadie picked through the stones to find a large emerald and another gem, a ruby of crimson red. Each of the Guilders held their stones up to the light, examining them critically.
“A bit crude in the carving but genuine,” pronounced Peat, setting the diamond down and picking up several more with shaking fingers. He quickly confirmed that they, too, were real.
“These are brilliant. This is a fortune right here!” Sadie declared, breathing hard. “More than we’ve ever held in our hands!”
“I take it the services we promised,” Peat asked hesitantly, “are ready?”
His wife nodded. “Bring them in here; we don’t dare do this out in the front room.”
Moments later the four refugees, each clutching a small bag of belongings, had gathered in the back of the shop. Sadie closed and locked the door behind them before picking up the copied scroll. She would read the spell from the copy, which would cause the magic to consume the writing, while preserving the original for future profit-as well as an eventual path of escape for themselves, if the time came for the two Guilders to leave.
“Where are we going to go?” the Hylar girl asked a little plaintively.
“Yes, where?” asked Horth Dunstone as if the thought were just occurring to him.
“Pax Tharkas,” Sadie declared, looking at the scroll. “There are dwarves there, refugees of Thorbardin from before the gates were sealed. They will make you welcome.”
Of course, there was no way she, nor anyone else, could predict what kind of reception the new refugees would find, but that wasn’t her problem.
That was enough for the Hylar. They were anxious to leave. “Let’s go, then!” urged the mother.
Sadie began to read the incantation on the scroll. The blue glow of arcane power emanated from the page, spilling through the small room. The thrum of magic pulsed through the air, and the family of refugees seemed to shrink together, each leaning upon the others for support. With each word spoken, the ink of that symbol burst into flame, chewing through the parchment so, as she reached the end of the spell, she was holding only a thin strip of charred material.
When she was done with the casting, a shimmering blue pattern began to appear on the wall of the shop’s back room. It pulsed and glowed with an eerie light, and all six dwarves couldn’t help but shrink away from it. Slowly the image expanded until it was a circle more than six feet in diameter. The glowing azure ring surrounded the vortex at its center, the true heart of the dimension door spell. It began to appear as a dark hole in the wall, a mysterious portal offering passage to an unseen destination.
“Now, now,” Sadie said, recovering to address the Hylar parents. “It won’t last long. I’d suggest each of you take one of the children by the hand and step through.”
With a last, frightened look at the two Theiwar, the Hylar couple did as Sadie suggested. With their children’s hands firmly clutched in their own, first Horst then his wife edged closer and finally stepped through the magical blue surface. The dimension door swallowed them quickly and silently took them away.
Not daring to believe what they had just witnessed, the two Guilders stared at the shimmering image in shock and disbelief. After a few moments, they shook themselves free of the trancelike fascination and went back to the worktable where they began to count their gems.
It was some minutes later before Peat, wealthier than he had ever been in his life, thought to look up at the place where the spell had glimmered on the wall.
The blue door was gone, the stone so cold and dark that it looked as if nothing had disturbed it at all.
SEVEN
The rebel army faced the royal troops across the wide swath of Norbardin’s plaza. For a number of hours, the two forces had remained frozen, two gigantic entities that had fought to exhaustion and could no longer move. Yet each understood that the battle was far from over and would resume when both were refreshed.
The king’s troops had spent the interval eating, repairing broken weapons, sharpening dulled blades, and strengthening defensive positions. They had piled makeshift ramparts along their front, forming barricades from the detritus of the stands and stalls that had once occupied so much of the square. The building materials of the stalls-usually stone slabs occasionally mixed with fibrous fungi-boards and rare planks of real wood imported, long before, from the surface world-formed walls and platforms.
With the notable exception of the ale vendors, whose goods had been confiscated by the combatants and quickly consumed, even the products of the sellers had been used in the manufacture of the barricades. The stock of the stonemasons had been hastily organized into solid walls; the finished products of the metalworkers were converted to use as weapons; even the raw ingots of iron and tin were stacked by the catapults to serve as ammunition in the face of the next enemy charge.
The rebel forces, alternatively, had spent little time picking over the battlefield except to clear paths and evacuate the wounded. The wounded warriors had been dragged back to Willim’s lines. Those with only minor hurts were bandaged and returned to their companies; the more grievously injured would be left to their own devices on the tables and floors of several inns that had been commandeered as infirmaries. Those who could recover were expected to do so; those who could not were left to die.
Willim’s troops, too, needed food and were given sustenance in the form of dried meat and mushroom bread. After the dwarf warriors ate, the black wizard ordered the rebel troops to assemble on the plaza in front of the city’s main gate. He, Facet, General Darkstone, and two other captains who had failed in their jobs mounted the steps to the highest platform, where the five dwarves stood in plain view of the assembled troops.