Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

“Well, I know that,” replied her husband, peering at her with his watery, nearsighted eyes. “But what in Reorx’s name are you talking about then?”

“That spell!” Sadie replied, a wide grin brightening her nearly toothless mouth. “The spell on the scroll, the one that I’ve been saving for a very long time.”

Peat harrumphed. “I know what’s in the scroll cabinet. There’s nothing in there that will get a blind rat out of Thorbardin, much less a family of Hylar.”

“Ah,” Sadie said, her eyes gleaming in her wrinkled face. “But this is a special scroll! I have been trying to copy it for a while now, and I am almost done.”

With her husband tottering along behind, she led him into the storeroom at the back of the shop. With considerable effort, she bent down and tapped several times at a piece of rock that looked like the foundation of the bottom shelf. To Peat’s immense surprise, the rock swiveled away to reveal a dark aperture-the entrance to a secret compartment.

“Eh?” he said. “How’d that get there?”

“I made it myself,” his wife said smugly as she reached inside to pull out a long tube. She handed it to him and stood up with surprising alacrity, given her age and arthritic limbs. “Now take it over here to the worktable!” she instructed.

Peat, speechless for once, did as he was told. He unscrewed the cap on the end of the tube and pulled out a roll of parchment while Sadie muttered a quick spell, igniting the candle that rested in a wall sconce above the table. Under the bright yellow glow, Peat could make out the words at the top of the piece of parchment.

“A dimension door?” he asked in surprise. “You want to conjure a dimension door?” He had intended to ask how she had gained access to such a powerful spell, why she had hidden it from him, what she had planned to do with it. Instead, he just gaped at her, amazed at the idea and imagining the possibilities.

Sadie smiled so wide that her toothless gums were exposed. “Just imagine how much we could charge to use it,” she said.

“Aye,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “Pretty much whatever we want to for someone who really wanted to get out of here. And who had the money to pay.”

“Darn tootin’!” his wife rejoined, cackling gleefully. “Now get out of my way. I need to finish the copy so we can save the original. We’ve got a lot of work to do!”

He looked over her shoulder at the complicated magical scribing. It was a spell far beyond his ability, and he was slightly awed by the knowledge that his wife had kept the scroll a secret from him. But mainly he felt proud that she was capable of such magic.

“So … tell me again how it works,” he finally asked.

“It’s a dimension door,” she snapped, though a measure of pride softened her tone. “When I read the spell, the door will open-one portal here, wherever I cast the spell. We can step through the door and come out at the other end, which will be wherever I want it to be. Or we could let somebody else go through-somebody who could pay. And then I would have to make another copy for us to use later.”

“So we could actually leave, escape Thorbardin,” Peat said, scarcely daring to believe it. “Even the Master couldn’t-” He bit his tongue, unwilling to finish the thought. Yet even his partial admission scared his wife, who clocked him over the head.

“Don’t even think such things!” she hissed. “Think about the Hylar and how much they will pay.”

Only then did another, eminently logical, question occur to him. “But where would we send them?” he asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Sadie replied. “We don’t want them to end up in the wilderness somewhere or in some den of humans or draconians. That would be bad for business. I think the safest thing would be to send them to some mountain dwarf holding outside. I was thinking of Pax Tharkas.”

“Yes,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Pax Tharkas might work. There won’t be any war going on there, not now. We could even go there ourselves!” he added, surprised at how tempting the notion was.

“There won’t be many customers for us in Pax Tharkas either,” Sadie said tartly. “And we can’t exactly take our inventory through the door, in any event. We would hardly have enough steel to live there. We’d be paupers!”

Peat nodded, crestfallen.

His wife had started another scroll, copying the first one she had so laboriously created. He frowned and cleared his throat, looking at her questioningly.

“Think about it!” she barked at him. “These Hylar are not the only dwarves who want to get out of Thorbardin,” she said. “I’m going to make another copy of the scroll. It’ll take me a day or more to rewrite the scroll, but then we’ll use it for their escape, and they’ll pay us very well for the privilege. And they might not be the only ones willing to pay a hefty sum of steel to get out of here before the war sweeps his whole world away.”

“And we … we could charge them all to use the door?” Peat said. “How much could we ask?”

“How much is a rich dwarf’s life worth?” Sadie asked.

Willim snarled out loud as the remnants of the Black Cross regiment streamed away from the palace, fleeing across the great plaza, limping through the gaps that opened in the rebel line. His initial estimate was accurate: far more than half of the elite, highly trained troops remained where they had fallen. Those not already dead were dying or were quickly slain by the impetuous militia who raced forward to capitalize on the enemy’s sudden collapse. A few knots still held out, veterans battling back-to-back, but one by one, those stalwarts vanished under the relentless onslaught.

The survivors, the wizard saw with his magical gaze, bled from multiple wounds. Many of them limped, and the few able-bodied ones were trying to help their injured companions escape from the debacle.

The black wizard turned his back on the disaster, thinking furiously. With his eyes turned toward the plaza, he studied the rank of royal dwarves that extended all the way across the plaza. The troops of the Royal Division formed a solid wall, an obstacle blocking the rebel army from reaching Jungor Stonespringer’s palace.

“Master, I have returned.”

Willim heard the voice and recognized the speaker as his female apprentice, Facet. He spun around. She was kneeling on the floor at his feet, and her face was turned downward. He could see her black hair, shiny with a wetness that looked too much like blood.

“Facet! Look at me!” he commanded.

She raised her eyes, and he was stunned to see the blood smeared across her face. Her forehead was gashed, with a piece of skin hanging down over one of her eyes. The crimson liquid was everywhere, garish on her ice-white skin. He saw that she cradled one of her hands, also bloody, against her breasts, pressing it there with her other hand.

“What happened?” the wizard demanded vehemently. Facet’s beauty was marred, and he wanted nothing so much as vengeance against the ones who had done such a thing.

“Gypsum and I reached our position on the king’s balcony. But, Master, we were betrayed. Even before the king showed himself, we were set upon by guards. I wanted to teleport away, but Gypsum was caught in the grasp of the royal sentries. I tried to save him, my lord, I really did, but when I fought them, the guards struck me with their swords. I saw Gypsum fall, dead, and only then did I magic myself away.”

“Thank all the gods you’re alive!” Willim said sincerely, kneeling down and taking her good hand. His eyeless face, the stitched lids blank and scarred, was turned toward her, and the spell of true-seeing allowed him to study all of her wounds. She had been cut in several places, deep and bloody wounds, though fortunately none likely to prove fatal. He could sense the grief, sadness, and shame that burned within her beautiful flesh.