The Gilded Rune

by Smedman, Lisa

  Torrin touched the cloth bandage on his leg. The bolt wound still ached, but when he worked a finger under the bandage, he felt puckered skin, rather than a fresh wound. “Did you heal me?” he asked.

  Val’tissa nodded. “Eralynn insisted on it.”

  The drow walking beside Torrin’s driftdisc said something in his own language, a growl of anger in his voice.

  “Tzoth wanted to kill you,” Val’tissa said. “Especially after you barged in on us like that, and tried to kill him.”

  “He shot at me!” Torrin protested.

  “He aimed for the arm, then for the leg,” she said. “Non-vital spots. We were going to render you senseless and leave you where you were, but out of the water, so you wouldn’t drown. But Eralynn recognized you, and said you were her friend. She urged us to bring you along.” Val’tissa shrugged. “It’s her decision. If she wants us to drag you along, that’s up to her.”

  They were climbing a slope. At the top, the drow said something to the two dark elves. Coin changed hands. The drow departed the way they’d just come, slipping off into the darkness.

  “Imyr,” Val’tissa said, catching the other dark elf’s eye. Torrin guessed that to be his name. Val’tissa spoke quietly, and her companion moved to the side of Eralynn’s driftdisc. Then he pulled the blanket up over Eralynn’s head.

  Torrin sat bolt upright, causing his driftdisc to bob up and down. “What are you doing?” he cried. “Is she …”

  “She sleeps,” Val’tissa said. “Now be silent. Say nothing that will give Eralynn’s condition away, or the dwarves will panic. If anyone asks, your leg was broken in a fall from a ledge, and Eralynn died of a broken neck after falling while trying to rescue you. Now lie still, and pretend to be in pain. Say nothing of the stoneplague.”

  Torrin chafed at the blunt instructions, but did as she suggested. He lay back down on the driftdisc, allowing himself to be borne along. If Eralynn had arranged matters—and there was no reason to believe she hadn’t—he didn’t want to spoil whatever chance of healing the strange elves could offer. Perhaps they would succeed, where all others had failed.

  They emerged into a wide canyon whose high walls had been carved into a series of switchback stairs punctuated by balconies—the settlement of Sundasz. Windows, some filled with soft yellow candlelight, dotted the canyon walls. Far overhead, the canyon closed to a narrow crack, through which Torrin could see the starry night sky. A warm breeze blew down from above, carrying the smell of woodland. Closer at hand, the air smelled of coal smoke.

  A handful of dwarves made their way back and forth across the canyon floor. Others were climbing or descending the stairways, or could be seen through the windows, inside the residences above. As the dark elves made their way through the canyon, Torrin spotted people of other races: humans, some fair-skinned elves, more than one person who was an obvious mix of elf and human, even a tiefling or two. Though several people turned to stare at Torrin and sadly shook their heads at the driftdisc that held Eralynn’s “corpse,” no one seemed at all surprised to see the two dark elves in their settlement.

  Val’tissa and Imyr continued across the canyon floor to one of the staircases, with the two driftdiscs floating between them. It was a long climb up the stair. Close to the top, they turned into an arched tunnel just wide enough to accommodate the discs. From there, they entered a wider corridor, ascended a broad flight of stairs flanked by an intricate mosaic of a forest, and at last passed through stout wooden doors into a cavern open to the sky.

  The canyon walls were thick with ferns. A grove of oak trees wove their branches together high overhead into a natural lattice through which the stars peeped. Torrin smelled dew-wet grass and night-blooming flowers. The dark elves made their way to a white marble statue that gleamed in the moonlight. The statue was of a tall, thin elf wearing armor and carrying a shield. The elf’s face looked both male and female. It was Corellon Larethian, high lord of the elf gods.

  Val’tissa gestured. The disc carrying Eralynn drifted to the statue and settled on the grass at the god’s feet. Imyr sent Torrin’s driftdisc slowly to the ground nearby.

  “Up now, you,” he told Torrin. “Clothes and pack.”

  Torrin rose and pulled on his shirt and trousers. After the long ride on the driftdisc, he felt as though he were still rising and falling, even though he stood on solid ground. As he fastened his belt and tied his mace to it, he watched as Val’tissa kneeled beside Eralynn. “Is she … alive still?” he asked, a catch in his voice.

  Val’tissa gently pulled the blanket down from Eralynn’s face. It looked gray in the moonlight. “She lives,” Val’tissa said as she stood. “We will perform the ritual as soon as we are ready. Go with Imyr. He will take you to one of the local inns. We will send word to you there, once Eralynn has been healed.”

  Imyr touched Torrin’s shoulder, but Torrin shrugged his hand off. “I’m staying,” Torrin protested. “Right here, with Eralynn.”

  “The spellsong is a secret ritual,” Val’tissa said, gesturing at the forest. “We normally would not have allowed someone who’s not one of the faithful to come even this far. But we made an exception this night, for Eralynn’s sake. She and I have known each other for many years, ever since she saved my life—something few other dwarves would have done. I always said I’d repay her, if I could. Tonight I shall honor that promise.”

  Again, Torrin felt a stab of hurt. Eralynn had known these dark elves for years, and had never once told him? All that time, he’d thought he was her shield brother, that she would confide anything to him. He’d been wrong. She was even more of a loner than he’d thought.

  “Now leave her,” Val’tissa said. “And know that she’s in Corellon’s hands.”

  “All right, I’ll go,” Torrin said. “But there’s something you need to know before you attempt your ritual. The stoneplague isn’t a disease.”

  “How do you know this?” Val’tissa asked. “That’s not what Eralynn told me.”

  “She left before we discovered the true cause.”

  “Which is …?

  Torrin hesitated. Should he tell her the truth?

  He thought back to what the Lord Scepter had said to him on the staircase. The Deep Lords had acted sagely when they’d kept secret the reason why gold was suddenly being confiscated. Letting the general populace know that gold was the source of the stoneplague would indeed have thrown the city into panic, despite the natural stoicism of the dwarf race. What’s more, it would have opened the door for unscrupulous rogues to buy gold—especially cursed gold—at a fraction of its value. Gold that would later come back into circulation, spreading the stoneplague once more. And should people learn the unwitting role Sharindlar’s temples had played in the spread of the disease, clerics like Maliira would be in danger.

  All that meant there was a need for secrecy. Yet the Lord Scepter hadn’t ordered Torrin to remain silent. Instead, he’d set him free to do as he saw fit, just as he’d freed the star in his prophetic dream.

  Torrin glanced at Eralynn’s gray face. If it would help, he decided, he’d speak. Her life wasn’t the only one hanging in the balance. Kier needed a cure, as did hundreds, perhaps even thousands of others.

  “A curse caused the stoneplague,” Torrin began. “A curse that was placed on gold.” He told the dark elf about the gold bars from the earthmote, and the unusual way in which the “stoneplague” had spread throughout Eartheart, a pattern of infection unlike any regular disease. He paused at that point, loathe to reveal how Sharindlar’s clerics had inadvertently exposed supplicants to the gold, but after a moment’s hesitation he plunged on. He would tell all, he decided. Eralynn’s life might depend upon it. He wound up by describing the experiment Wylfrid had performed, describing the way the gold foil had pulsed with red, and the strange black pattern that looked like veins he’d seen through the tube.

  “Thank you for that information,” Val’tissa said. “But curse or plague, with Corellon’s blessing, our s
pellsong will remove Eralynn’s affliction.”

  Though far from certain, Torrin nodded.

  “Now go,” Val’tissa said. “I’ll send word when we’re done. But know that it may take some time. The rest of the night, at least.”

  Torrin saw movement in the forest. About a dozen other women, dark elves like Val’tissa, moved toward them through the trees. Val’tissa called out a greeting in drow, and they answered.

  Once again, Imyr took Torrin’s shoulder, his grip firm.

  Torrin let the dark elf lead him away from the statue. Away from Eralynn.

  Torrin glanced back at her, lying so still under that blanket. As he left, he whispered a fervent prayer to Moradin, begging the god to permit one of his own to be healed by those strange, dark elves.

  “Truth, like gold, is to be found by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

  Delver’s Tome, Volume I, Chapter 87, Entry 12

  TORRIN WAS TIRED OF WAITING. FOR THE REMAINDER of the night, he’d sat in the inn, nursing an ale and using it as an excuse to nod off at his table and get some much-needed rest. Fortunately, the barkeep hadn’t thrown him out. Unfortunately, Imyr hadn’t yet returned to tell him how the spellsong had gone, and whether Eralynn had been cured. Torrin had eventually tried to return to the grove-filled cavern, but its doors were locked, and none of the people he’d spoken to had known how to contact Val’tissa. Torrin had considered trying to force his way in, but decided against it. With Eralynn’s life hanging in the balance, he didn’t want to anger the dark elf clerics.

  Torrin restlessly walked the canyon floor of Sundasz, watching the orange-pink light of dawn filter down through the fissure that led to the surface. Several of the doors he passed had the hourglass-shaped rune for Q painted on them, and the distinctive smell of the stoneplague leaked out from behind them. As before, there were few people out on the main thoroughfares. Most were likely cowering in their residences, fearful of the stoneplague.

  Torrin needed a way to pass the time, something that would occupy his fretting mind.

  Absently, he touched the coin pouch that hung at his belt. It held few coins—that was why he’d been forced to doze in the inn’s taproom, rather than in a soft bed—but it did hold something even more precious: the runestone that had conveyed him to Eralynn. What with the stoneplague, Torrin had set aside his quest to find the Soulforge. But with time on his hands and desperately needing something else to think about, perhaps it was time to pluck at that thread.

  The Delvers didn’t have a chapter in Sundasz, but the settlement did have a library dedicated to the scholar god Dugmaren Brightmantle, the patron deity of Delvers. Poking through its texts would keep Torrin’s mind occupied. He made his way there.

  The library was deep inside one of the canyon walls, at the bottom of a spiral staircase. Its low ceiling forced Torrin to stoop as he entered a room containing a marble statue of Dugmaren Brightmantle. The god was seated cross-legged atop a runestone, staring down as if reading it. One finger pointed to the word “truth.”

  “May my wanderings bring me wisdom,” Torrin intoned as he bowed to the statue. As he crossed the room, he bent down to stroke the edge of the runestone on which the god sat. His fingers slid along a groove worn by countless other hands.

  The entrance to the main part of the library was a diamond-shaped doorway. The inscription framing it emitted a low hiss of magic—a ward that prevented visitors from removing the texts. The doorway opened into a large, hexagonal room with a high ceiling, illuminated by magically glowing spheres of light that bobbed in mid-air. The room smelled of old leather, dust, and ink. The outer walls were lined with tall wooden bookshelves and rolling ladders to access the books and scrolls written by humans and elves, shelved up high. Lower down were drawers that held the baked-clay tablets preferred by dwarves. A second floor-to-ceiling hexagonal arrangement of shelves stood just inside the first, and a third inside that. Narrow openings pierced the shelves, none much higher than a dwarf’s head, connecting each hexagonal aisle to the next, and on into the heart of the library.

  Torrin wandered along the outermost aisle, getting a sense of how it was organized. Or rather, disorganized. Books were stacked haphazardly on the floor, in towering piles that threatened to tumble over as Torrin squeezed past. A runic tablet clattered as Torrin accidentally kicked it. Like the rest of Sundasz, the library was a disorderly place. Torrin had no idea which section might hold the texts dealing with earth nodes and teleportation rituals.

  He heard a murmuring, deeper in the library. He bent down to peer through one of the openings that led to the center of the room and saw three figures seated on stools around a hexagonal table. Two were dwarves, but the third was too tall, judging by the way the knees bumped up against the underside of the table.

  One of the tallfolk, at Dugmaren Brightmantle’s library? That boded well—the two dwarves likely wouldn’t question Torrin’s presence, either. Crouching, he made his way to the center of the room.

  One of the dwarves was a cleric of Dugmaren Brightmantle. He wore the order’s distinctive bright purple sash and a silver pendant in the shape of an open book. He was elderly, with sparse white hair, and his beard was tucked into a beard bag. Gold rings adorned several of his ink-stained fingers. He briefly glanced at Torrin, then returned his attention to the book he was reading.

  The second dwarf had the look of an adventurer with his frayed clothes and weather-stained knapsack. He was younger, with unruly black hair and a short beard with at least two-dozen braids that twisted at odd angles from his cheeks and chin, like rearing snakes. He had several maps spread across the table in front of him. As Torrin approached, he pulled one of them over a section of the largest map, as if he didn’t want Torrin to see what he’d been looking at.

  “Greetings,” Torrin said to the dwarves. “Are either of you Delvers, by any chance?”

  Snake-beard stared at Torrin’s beard, with its tinkling silver hammers. “Who wants to know?” he asked.

  “Torrin Ironstar,” Torrin replied. He turned slightly, so that they could see the D on his own backpack. “Member in good standing of the Order of Delvers, Eartheart chapter. I’m looking for information on earth nodes. Can you tell me what section of the library holds texts on that subject?”

  Snake-beard responded by narrowing his eyes. He nudged the top sheaf of vellum a little further over the map he’d been studying. “Find it yourself.”

  Torrin felt his face flush. Such rudeness from a fellow dwarf!

  “Aisle one, right two, third shelf from the bottom,” the third man at the table said.

  Torrin turned. The speaker was yet another dark elf. Sundasz was thick with them, it seemed. The fellow was tall and thin, even for an elf, with tightly kinked hair that stood out from his scalp in a steel gray fuzz. He was dressed in a black robe with thread-of-silver embroidery that kept shifting from one geometric pattern to the next: a wizard’s magical robe. He had a number of runic tablets spread out on the table, but instead of reading them he kept rearranging them, sliding them back and forth across the table. He slid one midway between the others and spoke a word in what sounded like High Drow. The tablet rose into the air and started to spin. The dark elf stared at it, nodding and muttering to himself.

  Torrin stared at him. Had he, like Val’tissa and Imyr, once been drow? Torrin’s hackles rose; he’d have to be careful around the fellow.

  The cleric glanced up from his book. “You can trust Zarifar,” he said. “He’s as close to a bibliothecary as we’ve got.”

  “Are you serious?” Torrin asked incredulously. He could understand the tallfolk races patronizing the library, perhaps even serving as its unofficial bibliothecary. They were in Sundasz, after all. But not someone of a race that—if Val’tissa was to believed—had once been drow.

  Still staring at the spinning tablet, the dark elf flicked his fingers in a complex gesture.

  This way, a voice whispered from a different exit. Torrin blinked in
surprise, then realized the dark elf wizard had created the magical voice. This way, it said again.

  Torrin swallowed down his distrust. If one of Dugmaren Brightmantle’s clerics vouched for the dark elf, that bode well.

  Torrin ducked through the exit and followed the whispering voice to a section of the library in the outermost aisle. It led him to the second wall to the right of the main entrance, then faded away. There he found a handful of texts with titles like Magical Pathways of Faerûn and Forces of the Four Elements. A leather-bound volume of the Delver’s Tome—the one dealing primarily with wayfinding and mapmaking—was also in the section, shelved separately from the rest of that great work. Torrin picked it up as well. As he did so, a couple of smaller books tumbled from the same shelf. Torrin put one of them carefully back into place, but couldn’t find the second. It was lost, he presumed, somewhere in the jumble on the floor.

  Torrin gathered up an armful of scrolls and books, balancing the tablets he’d chosen on top, and returned to the center of the library. He placed the pile opposite the suspicious black-bearded dwarf. Torrin didn’t want to rile him further.

  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.