by Mark Anthony
“Fleetfoot!” the dwarf protested as the smelly mule, lathered with sweat, pressed against him in the dark interior of the oak. Flint turned toward the gap in the trunk, half-thinking to shove the mule back through it.
But the opening was gone. Outside, the tylor roared and screeched in protest, pounding against the tree again and again. Then it began to chant magic words.
Flint found himself standing in utter darkness, short arms flung around the neck of a trembling mule. At least he thought it was Fleetfoot who was trembling.
“God’s thunder,” he muttered. “Now what?”
He groped along Fleetfoot’s back to the saddlepack and drew out flint and steel. Moments later, as the trunk continued to reverberate with the sound of magical chanting and the force of the tylor’s blows, Flint, groping, found a stick on the pine needle-littered floor of the tree and lit it. Fleetfoot cuddled ever closer to the dwarf, who swatted her aside with an irritable hand.
“Move over, stupid,” he hissed. Flint held up the glowing chunk of wood and examined the bottom of the trunk. There was a thin layer of soil, which he poked a stubby finger into—and felt wood.
That would not seem surprising in a hollow tree, except that his fingers also felt something carved into that wood.
Nudging Fleetfoot aside again, Flint brushed aside the rich soil until the carving stood exposed.
“Reorx’s hammer!” he breathed. “A rune!” He leaned closer, heedless of the torch, which suddenly spat out a cinder, smack into the dry pine needles. The needles flared up in a blaze, which soon spread in a circle to the wooden floor of the trunk. The mule stood and trembled in a cylinder of flame, disregarding Flint’s attempts to haul her out of the blaze.
Flint was never sure what happened next. One moment he was tugging at the halter of a stalled mule, and the next moment he was standing in a huge oaken chamber, seemingly below where he’d been just a second before.
There was no sound in the chamber but the harried breathing of a hysterical pack mule and an only slightly calmer dwarf. He held up his makeshift light. A regiment could have fit comfortably in the spherical chamber.
“By the gods, we’re in the heart of the oak!” he told the mule, who appeared unimpressed. The dwarf stooped and poked at the floor with his short sword. “This tree is still alive.” He stood erect again and gazed around the chamber.
Firelight flickered off coppery walls of living wood, leaving knots and burls in shadow but exposing the smoother, rounded portions of the tree’s interior. Several passages appeared to open onto the chamber, much like enormous hollow roots.
Off to his left, Fleetfoot sighed and nickered, seeming finally to be emerging from the panic of the moments before. The mule looked around, an expression of torpid curiosity rising in her eyes. Then the creature spied what appeared to be an enormous water trough in the very center of the oaken room, and, mulelike, she acted immediately upon her impulse. She shuffled over to the wooden trough and snuffled the edge with quivering nostrils.
Clear liquid filled the basin, which was about five feet across. On the surface floated a lily—a golden lily, with the leaves of a normal water flower but a blossom of pure gold. Flint reached forward and touched the blossom with a reverent finger. Something so beautiful could not be evil, he thought.
As he touched it, the blossom opened and the pure voice of an elven woman chimed through the chamber:
“Well met, well met, the portal is set, the star is silver, the sun is gold, cast your coin where you’re going, then take hold and touch the gold.”
Flint drew back, casting a suspicious glare around the room, as though expecting a beautiful elf with a voice like a bell to step out from one of the rootlike caverns. “What should I do?” he whispered and turned, as if for an answer, toward Fleetfoot, who gazed back dimwittedly. “Oh, of all the creatures to get trapped in a magic tree with,” the dwarf said disgustedly. “Well, it said to cast in a coin, that the portal is set. A portal’s a door,” he explained to Fleetfoot. “And it seems to me I see no real door hereabouts, so perhaps this flower will help us. As my mother would say, ‘A bird in the hand makes light work.’ ”
Flint dug into a pocket and drew out the sum total of his winter’s wages from Solace: one gold coin. “Well, if I starve here, it doesn’t matter if I’m broke or not,” he reasoned, and tossed the coin into the honeylike fluid.
The liquid lit up as though a lamp burned deep within it, within the woody flesh of the oak. “Reorx!” Flint muttered, and grabbed Fleetfoot’s mane for support. The sweaty animal nuzzled him again, as if to encourage him. “Oh, all right,” he snapped, then continued more thoughtfully. “Maybe I should’ve tossed the coin into the flower; the lily seemed to be doing the speaking.” He touched one golden petal and …
… Warmth suddenly flooded the dwarf’s body, and, turning to the mule—whom Flint now realized he had never appreciated for the dear, devoted creature that she was—he saw a similar warm glow glisten in Fleetfoot’s limpid eyes. Flint would later swear that the music of a hundred lutes filled the cavern at that moment. The room faded around them. Flint saw the mule’s heavy eyelids begin to close, and he let his own drift shut as well.
Suddenly the room grew noisy, and Flint felt stone, not wood, beneath his feet. His eyes flew open.
He stood, daubed in mud, pine needles, and mule sweat, embracing the odoriferous Fleetfoot. Around him, and slightly below, stood the open-mouthed figures of Tanis, Miral, and several elven courtiers. Flint gazed around him.
He was on the rostrum of the Tower of the Sun. With Solostaran, Speaker of the Sun. And a mule.
Fleetfoot opened her mouth and brayed. Flint took that as a suggestion to speak.
“Well,” he said. “I’m back.”
Chapter 8
Reunion
In a guest room at the palace, the dwarf lay floating in a huge bath mounded with blossom-scented bubbles, happily digesting the huge meal the Speaker had ordered prepared for him—wild turkey basted with apricot sauce, and robust Solace ale from Flint’s own saddlepack. All but one of the flasks had leaked; the rough ride certainly had not improved the last container of ale, but the beverage was drinkable, at least by Flint’s standards.
Off in the palace stable, the dwarf knew, Fleetfoot also was being treated to a fine feed. The animal, apparently still awash in warm feelings from being teleported with Flint, had initially refused to be separated from the dwarf. As Flint told his tale to Solostaran and the rest of the court—and heard Xenoth explain that other elves had spotted a rare, magic-wielding tylor west of the ravine during the past few weeks—the gray mule followed the dwarf around the Tower of the Sun, nuzzling him with a fond muzzle, resting her hairy chin on his shoulder, and aiming a deadly kick at anyone who came too close. She finally consented to leave the dwarf after he led her to the stable himself, fed her a carrot and half a peach, and introduced her to the stablehand who would wash her and give her a proper feeding.
Flint had paused in his tale only when the Speaker ordered a troop of Tower guardians out to hunt for the tylor. The search was made more difficult because the dwarf was uncertain exactly where he’d been attacked. He knew only that it was along a trail several miles from Qualinost, and the pell-mell pace through the underbrush had left him utterly confused as to where he’d encountered the oak tree.
The Speaker, worried about leaving Flint unattended so soon after such a potentially devastating attack, insisted that Flint rest for a few hours at the palace, attended by Miral, who, if need be, might be able to assist the dwarf. Flint protested, professing himself as hale as a dwarf half his years, but Solostaran proved astonishingly stubborn.
Now, as Miral lounged on a bench near the bath, Flint soaked in the bath water, holding his thick salt-and-pepper beard underwater and watching little bubbles escape through it to the surface. He wondered if he could equip his regular quarters at his shop with such a wondrous invention. Dwarves normally hated water—cold, running water, that
is, inhabited with fish and frogs and worse, and deep and dangerous enough to gather the unwary dwarf to Reorx’s smithy—but this was something else entirely.
“You encountered a sla-mori,” Miral explained to Flint.
“Oh, no, I don’t believe so,” Flint rejoined distractedly. “Lord Xenoth said that lizard was a tylor. Unless tylors and sla-mori are related?” He raised his brows in question.
The mage wiped a patina of sweat from his face and pushed his carmine hood back. His pale face appeared gaunt; circles smudged the skin below his eyes. Yet he spoke patiently. “Sla-mori, in the old tongue, means ‘secret way,’ or ‘secret passage,’ ” he explained. “Myth says there are many of them in Qualinesti, but they are nearly impossible to find. The oak tree was the entrance to one, apparently.”
He had Flint’s attention now. “Where do these … these ‘sla-mori’ … lead?” the dwarf asked.
“To important places, obviously,” Miral said matter-of-factly. “After all, you ended up on the rostrum in the Tower of the Sun.” He paused, seemingly gathering his thoughts, and his normally hoarse voice sounded raspier. “Some elves even say the Graystone could be found in a sla-mori somewhere in Qualinesti. But the most famous sla-mori is said to lead into Pax Tharkas,” he said, naming the famous fortress in the mountains south of Qualinesti. “Some believe that the body of Kith-Kanan lies in the Pax Tharkas sla-mori.”
“There’s more than one sla-mori, then?” Flint asked, sinking back in the perfumed water until his hair floated and spread around his face like a corona. He gazed at the roseate ceiling high above him and sighed.
Miral waited for the dwarf to surface. “There have been tales from the oldest elves that the area around Qualinost is host to several sla-mori, their entrances well hidden and accessible only to the elf—or dwarf, I see now—graced with the proper power to open them.” The mage broke off his account. “What’s wrong?” Miral asked.
The dwarf had sat up and was gazing about the luxurious room with a worried expression.
“I’m looking for the bucket,” Flint said.
“The bucket?” Miral asked. Suddenly, the mage laughed. “No, we don’t empty the water with buckets.” He stood and walked to the foot end of the tub.
“Magic, then? You know how I feel about magic,” Flint said, worry creasing his face again. “Is this bath magical?” Such a creation would almost have to be aided by magic, he said, suddenly sad. Hill dwarves distrusted magic.
Miral just shook his head. “I forgot that you had not been here since we had these contrivances installed. They were designed by gnomes.”
“Gnomes?” the dwarf demanded incredulously. “Reorx!” Nothing gnomes made ever worked right. In fact, he was probably lucky to be alive. Ignoring the mage’s chortle,
Flint vaulted over the edge of the tub and burrowed into the thick yellow towel that a servant had left on a stone slab.
Shaking his head and smiling, the mage pushed the sleeve of his heavy woolen robe up to his elbows. He plunged his arm into the bath water, fished around a bit, and yanked. With a damp belch, the water level began falling. Miral held up a cork with a chain attached.
“The water drains into the floor,” Miral explained.
Flint looked dubious. “With all respect, that doesn’t seem very practical,” he ventured. “Hard on the building foundation. It’s not surprising, coming from gnomes, I guess. But I confess I’d expected a bit more from elves.”
Miral rolled his sleeve down again and handed the dwarf a freshly laundered white shirt. “We redesigned it. The gnomes originally had the drain—the hole this cork fits into—at the upper edge,” the robed elf said. “It took forever to drain. You had to wait for the water to evaporate.”
“But still …” the dwarf protested as he drew on his russet leggings.
“The water goes into a circular, tubelike contraption under the floors.” Miral’s hands sketched in the air.
Flint dropped to his knees and peered under the tub. “How do you fill it?” he queried.
“Buckets.”
Later, Flint retrieved Fleetfoot, now clean, curried, shiny, and—the final touch by a livery elf with a waggish sense of humor—with her mane braided and adorned with pink ribbons. Flint made her comfortable in a makeshift stall in an outbuilding near his shop and forge—a job that required two extra trips between shop and outbuilding because Fleetfoot deftly chewed through the stall’s leather latch and arrived at Flint’s shop moments after he did.
He finally barricaded the beast in the stall by wedging a log between the building door and a small apple tree. He had almost finished unpacking his ale-soaked saddlepack when a figure appeared at the doorway.
The figure was not immediately recognizable, outlined as it was in the setting sun, but the silhouette of the container the figure carried was obvious enough.
“Elvenblossom wine,” Flint commented. “Only Tanis Half-Elven could get away with bringing me that.”
Tanis smiled widely and placed the bottle on the wooden table. “I thought you could use it to start the fire in your forge,” he said. “Quicker than kindling.”
The two stood apart, Tanis with his arms folded before his muscular chest and Flint with a stubby hand draped with unpacked tunics in brown and emerald green. They smelled wonderfully of ale, from the dwarf’s point of view, but Flint supposed he would have to wash them before he’d be accepted in court.
Flint finally spoke, his voice gruff.
“I suppose now that you’re a full-grown lad, tall as an aspen and nearly strong enough to lift me with one arm, you’re too good to hang around the forge with a middle-aged grouch of a dwarf.”
The half-elf replied, “And I suppose that because you’ve traveled around the continent of Ansalon and fought off a raging tylor, you don’t want me pestering you.”
A few minutes passed in silence as the two studied each other. Then, as though each was satisfied with what he saw, they nodded greetings. Tanis settled onto a granite bench, slung one leg up on its surface, and rested a curved, muscular arm across a bent knee. His human forebear was evident in the huskiness of his frame, Flint thought.
The dwarf set to fixing up his forge after a full season of disuse and congratulated himself on the job he’d done of cleaning out the place when he’d left it five months before, at the end of autumn.
The forge, which resembled a raised fireplace, took up much of the back wall of the tiny home. A stone-and-mortar chimney rose up through the back wall like a thick tree trunk, with an opening at the back large enough to accommodate a kender—although Flint would let himself be damned to the Abyss before he’d allow one of those perpetually curious creatures near his beloved forge. The front ledge of the forge, designed for someone of elven proportions, was just above waist-height for the dwarf, an awkward height that often prompted grumbles from him.
“So,” Flint said as he placed twigs and dry bark in the depression at the back of the forge, “what have I missed in the past five months?” He looked dubiously at the container of wine, then uncorked it and tossed a liberal splash on the kindling. “Hope this doesn’t blast us to Xak Tsaroth,” he muttered, patting his pocket for his steel and flint, then realizing he’d probably dropped both in the entrance to the sla-mori. “Got a flint and steel, lad?” he asked.
Tanis fished in his pocket, drew out the desired objects, and tossed them to Flint, one after the other. Mumbling “Thanks,” the dwarf cracked the two together. With a whoosh, the kindling exploded into flame, sending the dwarf backpedaling hastily. When the conflagration dwindled to a glow, he warily placed a few pieces of coal on the kindling and waited for them to catch fire. He looked over at Tanis, ready to hear the local news.
“Lord Xenoth is still chief adviser, though Litanas has been added as Xenoth’s assistant, at Porthios’s request,” Tanis explained, watching Flint reach to a nearby pile of coal and toss a shovelful onto the blaze. “The Speaker was unhappy at hurting Lord Xenoth’s feelings—after all,
Xenoth has been adviser to the Speaker of the Sun since Solostaran’s father held that post, and the Speaker would not want Xenoth to feel that he could no longer handle the duties alone. Although that certainly seems to be true.” The last words were uttered in a bitter tone.
“Grab the bellows, would you, lad, and give me a hand,” Flint said. Tanis leaped over to that instrument and directed air on the fire. Flint, meanwhile, mounded coal on each side of the blaze. “So Xenoth took it ill?” Flint inquired.
“He wasn’t happy.” The curt reply spoke volumes about how vocal the adviser had been about the change.
Flint shook his head and spared a sympathetic thought for Litanas, even though Porthios’s brown-eyed friend had never seemed particularly fond of dwarf or half-elf. Flint had long suspected that Porthios’s friends made a career of making Tanis’s life unhappy, though Porthios himself merely stayed aloof. But the dwarf rarely asked Tanis about that aspect of his life, and the half-elf never volunteered any but the most roundabout information on the subject.
Last autumn, before Flint had left for the winter, Litanas and Ulthen had appeared to be vying for wealthy Lady Selena’s hand. The elven lady adored the attention, of course, but the situation chipped away at the friendship between Litanas and Ulthen.
As Tanis worked at the bellows, Flint fed chunk after chunk of coal into the fire and wondered how the latest development would affect either elf’s suit for Lady Selena. Litanas had wealth, good bloodlines, and the position with Lord Xenoth. But Xenoth could easily destroy an assistant’s standing at court if he felt moved to do so.
Ulthen, on the other hand, boasted a fine old Qualinost family, but he—and it—were perennially broke; years ago, tight finances had forced the elf to take on the job of teaching weaponry to Gilthanas, Porthios’s younger brother.
At any rate, Flint wouldn’t want to be on the bad side of the irascible old adviser—though it seemed that the dwarf perpetually was, anyway. Lord Xenoth, whose age and tenure gave him protection of sorts for his criticism of some of the Speaker’s policies, was vocal in his condemnation of allowing any outsiders into the court.
