Kender, Gully Dwarves, Gnomes (5 page)

“You gonna let him talk to you like that, Joss?” someone goaded the drunk.

“Kick that uppity dwarf in the teeth, if he's got any!” yelled one of the urchins.

The drunken bully sputtered a curse and raised a beefy hand. In the same instant, Lodston
muttered a single word with his bearded mouth pressed against the smooth shaft of his
heavy staff. The stick of rare bronzewood glowed suddenly with an inner light and began to
vibrate in the hermit's hand. The old dwarf seemed almost as surprised as everyone else by
the force within the enchanted weapon and nearly dropped it. He clutched its shaft more
tightly, feeling its inner power throbbing as it lifted itself in the air above the
bully's head.

Suddenly the staff descended repeatedly, faster than the eye could see, upon the head of
Nugold Lodston's assailant. It appeared to the astonished onlookers as if it were a
drumstick in the hands of a practiced drummer. Each blow landed with vicious force and
accuracy, producing lacerations and bruises on the startled bully's scalp and face.

“Run, Joss! It's a magical staff! He'll kill you!” The bully's eyes were blinded with his
own blood from the wounds on his forehead. He backed away from Lodston's flashing staff,
his hands raised in front of his face to ward off the unerring blows of the enchanted
weapon. To the hermit's failing eyes, the scene was a muddled image of fleeing shapes as
the street emptied. Digfel was a superstitious town, especially in the rough section where
Milo Martin kept his store.

“Get in here, Nugold, before they come back!” Martin's rotund figure was standing in the
doorway of his shop. He was gesturing frantically for the hermit to come inside. The staff
had already lost the aura summoned by the ancient command word, but the merchant's bulging
eyes were staring greedily at it.

The hermit grunted a minor dwarvish epithet to himself and pushed past the excited
shopkeeper into the store. Smells of candlewax, oil, and soap mingled with those of wood
smoke, spices, and leather - the comfortable and familiar odors of Martin's General Store.
Lodston came to Digfel no more than four or five times a year, and this was one of the few
places he liked to shop for provisions. Digfel was a rowdy human mining town on the
outskirts of the dwarven mountains, steeped in fears and prejudices dating to the
Cataclysm. Milo Martin's shop had a reputation as a brief haven amid the turmoil of the
times, perhaps because Martin himself was such a tolerant man. The jolly but enterprising
little merchant sold his goods to anyone with iron coins in his pockets, whether dwarf,
human, or elf. Only kender, those notorious shoplifters, were unwelcome in his store.

“You old fool! Don't you know you can't fight all of those bumpkins by yourself, with or
without a magic staff?” Milo's gentle reprimand was undercut by an excited sparkle in his
crisp blue eyes. The merchant was thrilled at the promise of something new to talk about
at the Pig Iron Alehouse. He was also bursting with curiosity about the mysterious
bronzewood stick that seemed to have a life of its own.

“Bah!” spat the dwarf. “You humans think that you know everything. My people mined these
mountains before you farmers learned how to grow your nauseating vegetables. We dig more
than potatoes out of the dirt, I'll tell you that much!”

Martin nodded judiciously, although he knew that the old hermit's dwarven pride was only
momentary. Lodston lived alone because he had alienated his own people as much as he had
the humans in Digfel. The merchant wanted to divert the conversation toward the staff. He
certainly did not want to provoke a long-winded discourse on past dwarven glories and
present human frailties.

“That's a fascinating quarterstaff, Nugold,” he probed.

“If you tell me how you came by it, I might pay good iron ingots for it. I've been needing
a fine old stick like that!” Lodston's bearded mouth curled in a sly smirk. Martin's face
was a mere blur to him, but the silkiness in the wily

human's voice betrayed his usual greed. “How much?” he demanded quickly, cocking his head
at

the shopkeeper's fuzzy features. "Enough to pay what you owe me, and maybe for this

trip as well - IF the staff is worth that much," Martin added shrewdly.

“Oh, it's worth ten times the trash you sell in this place,” vowed the dwarf. “I got it
from an elven wizard!”

If the hermit's vision had been sharper, he might have recognized the immediate frown on
the shop keeper's face as a look of disbelief.

“There aren't any elves in Hylar! No elf I've ever met would have anything to do with a
dwarf!”

“There's one who would, all right, and he lives in my cave!” Lodston retorted defiantly.
The hermit pulled a small keg of pickled fish closer to the fireplace and sat on it. He
clutched the magical staff in front of him as if he were guarding it from the merchant's
covetous gaze. Then he reached into a pocket and handed Martin a crumpled piece of
parchment.

“He wrote down what we need. You fetch all those things while I rest my legs, and I'll
tell you the strangest tale you'll ever hear in this ugly town of simpletons.”

Milo Martin's frown deepened as he grabbed the list from the hermit's filthy fingers. He
expected to see a barely literate scrawl, and was astonished when he recognized the fine
penmanship of a scholar on the crude parchment. Each character was fashioned with elegant
swirls, while the spelling and phrases were archaic.

"'Balls of twyne, a sette of three;

"Grinded millett, so fyne as to pass through a tea sieve;

“Twin hyves of honey, with compleat combs for the waxxe . . .'”

It was obvious that the old dwarf hadn't written the list. Martin doubted if the hermit
was literate at all, and he was positive that those gnarled hands and failing vision would
be incapable of such careful strokes of a nib.

“This is quite a list, Nugold,” he admitted. "I might not

have it all. Tell me about this 'elven wizard' who lives in your cave while I gather
whatever I can to suit you and your guest."

“His name's Dalamar,” the dwarf began. “I found him on the riverbank last month,
half-starved and out of his head. I knew he was strange, because of his white skin and
long hair as jet black as his sorcerer's robe. 'This ain't no human,' I says to myself.
Then I drug him into my cave and made him a bed by the fire. When he woke up, I thought
he'd be afraid, but he was just as calm as he could be. He acted like he knew where he
was, and like he knew me, too. Even called me by name, he did!”

Milo Martin paused with some candles in his hand. “Black hair, you say? Not just dark?”

“Nay!” Lodston replied irritably. “I said black, and I meant it! It be black as soot, and
his skin like white linen, so white that it shines like a full moon in a night sky.”

The merchant stroked his chubby chin, considering the dwarf's words. “Well, if he's an elf
as you say, I'd guess that he was from Sylvanesti. I've heard that the eastern elves look
like that, but I've never seen one of them.”

The dwarf nodded excitedly. “That's it!” he exclaimed. “Sylvanesti is where he said he was
from! You beat all I've ever seen with those wild guesses, Milo!”

The shopkeeper shrugged. It was no guess, but he decided to let the hermit believe that he
possessed such an unpredictable skill. People were more reluctant to cheat someone who
could “outguess” them.

“Go on with your story. Tell me about the staff,” urged Martin as he turned toward his
shelves to collect more items on the list.

"Well, he asks me right off if I found his box. When I tell him not to fret about some box
after I save him from drowning, he doesn't say anything. He just stares at the fire for a
long time. Then he gets up and heads for the door. 'Wait!' I calls. 'You ain't fit enough
to walk!'

'Come to the river with me,' he says in this strange voice. It was like his words were
stronger than I was! Before I knew what I was doing, I was up to my ankles in mud, helping
the elf find this staff and that danged box."

“What kind of box?” Milo Martin had stopped gathering items from the list and was leaning
against his counter. His curiosity had grown too great to bother hiding.

“A little wooden chest bound with brass strips,” Lodston replied. “I carried it back to
the cave after we found the staff. When we both was dry and warm again, he told me his
name and said he used to be a wizard for some king named 'Lorac.' ”

The name meant nothing to Martin. The enthralled shopkeeper motioned for Lodston to
continue.

“Dalamar said he got into some kind of trouble back at this Sylvanesti place for changing
his robes from white to black or something like that. Said he had to leave before the king
killed him. When I told him I didn't think a king'd worry that much about the color of a
man's clothes, he just smiled and laid his head back against the hearth.”

Martin knew very little about magic and wizards, but he did know more than old Lodston.
The shopkeeper's pudgy face flushed as he flaunted his superior knowledge of matters
arcane.

“Idiot! Don't you even know the difference between white-robed and black-robed sorcerers?
You ever heard of an evil elf, much less an evil elven wizard?”

“Evil?” demanded the hermit. “You mean like Joss out there and his scum-brained kids?”

“No!” Martin growled. “I don't mean simple pickpockets and drunks. If you'd ever got out
of that cave of yours, you'd know that some dark force is sweeping over Krynn, and it
sounds to me like your new buddy is part of it!”

The shopkeeper's crisp eyes clouded. The normally jolly and mercurial man seemed suddenly
overwhelmed with melancholia. “I thought Digfel was too little to get involved in this
thing,” he muttered sadly. “I thought everybody would leave us alone as long as we
supplied them with steel for their swords and spears.”

“What in Reorx's name are you mumbling about?” Lodston demanded.

“I'm talking about that guest of yours!” Martin replied angrily. “He and his evil friends
will bring the war to Digfel!”

“War? What war? I don't understand what . . .”

“Go on with your story,” the shopkeeper urged, interrupting the dwarf's flurry of
questions in a calmer voice. The hermit's naive ignorance of the outside world was
incorrigible. Martin could barely explain the sinister events of recent years to himself,
much less to the reclusive

dwarf. “Harrumph!” snorted Lodston. He was too old and

battle-weary to listen to human war stories. Vivid memories of THE war still lingered in
his aged brain, the war which had forced the mountain dwarves from their traditional homes.

“Well, as I was saying,” he continued, “Dalamar's been wandering around in the west ever
since they threw him out of this Sylvanesti place. He said he had to take some kind of
'test' at Wayreth to be a wizard, and it made him sick. I asked him if his stomach hurt,
but he just said I wouldn't understand if he told me. He was up at Solace when a Seeker
priest tried to kill him. So he made this raft and sneaked away on the river just before
they came to bum him as a witch.”

“Are they after him now?” Martin demanded quick ly. Digfel had been free of the Seeker
insanity, and he hoped that Lodston's refugee would not attract the zealous witch- hunters
to this rough but quiet comer of Krynn.

“You got me there,” Lodston replied. “I think they lost his trail during the storm that
wrecked his raft. Nobody'd ever believe that he could have drifted this far downstream,
all the way through the Qualinesti woods. I told him I'd hide him from them maniacs till
he was well enough to take care of himself. He didn't thank me or anything, just rolled
over and went to sleep.”

“Did you search his belongings while he was sleeping?” Milo Martin asked eagerly. The
opportunistic shopkeeper was imagining what he would have done under the same
circumstances.

“What am I, a kender?” cried the insulted dwarf. “Anyway, I didn't need to snoop. He
showed me what was in his box.”

The hermit paused to retrieve a blackened clay pipe from beneath his fur cloak and
gestured toward the tobacco jar on the counter.

“How's about some of that weed, the kind you sprinkle with honey wine? And maybe a little
ale and biscuits to go with it,” he added as Martin fetched the tobacco. The hermit might
have been nearly blind, but he knew when he had hooked a listener on a story. The
shopkeeper thrust a foaming mug of freshly brewed stout at the dwarf, who waited until his
pipe was well-fired before accepting it. He

was enjoying tempting Milo Martin's curiosity. “Ahhh!” exclaimed the hermit, wiping ale
from his

mouth with a sleeve. “Get on with it!” demanded the impatient shopkeeper.

“What was in the chest?” “Scrolls and books!” Lodston replied in a coarse whisper.

“Dozens of them! And a pair of funny old glasses with wire rims.”

“What was on the scrolls?” cried Martin.

“Spells, I reckon,” growled the dwarf. “How should I know? I can't read!”

The shopkeeper's pudgy face clouded. “Then how do you know they were magic?”

“ 'Cause I saw Dalamar using one to see the future!”

Martin said nothing for several moments. His eyes were wide with imagination as he
speculated to himself about the value of such a treasure - if the old dwarf was telling
the truth.

“It was a couple of nights ago. We just ate some fish stew and bread. I'm sitting by the
fire smoking some wild tobacco, nothing like this stuff, when Dalamar puts on them
glasses. He unrolls a piece of parchment like it was holy and stares at the fire for a
long time before he starts to read it. I ask him what he's doing, but he acts like he
don't hear me.”

Lodston took a long swig of ale and a few more puffs of the fragrant cured tobacco before
resuming his story.

“Dalamar reads the words out loud, but they's in a language I never heard before. The
words had a lot of 'ssss' and 'ffff sounds that ended in 'i's or 'o's. You ever hear
somebody talking like that?”