Anthology: Kender, gully Dwarves, and Gnomes

"Hey, that's me!" Lodston croaked, peering at the drawing. Sure enough, Dalamar had drawn a crude caricature of the hermit's profile. The bulbous nose and bushy eyebrows were unmistakable. Beside the face, the wizard had drawn his own spectacles, equally obvious because of their curious hexagonal lenses and wire rims. A dotted arrow led from the glasses to Lodston's profile, and a solid arrow from his eyes to the text below the drawing. Even a child could understand the simple diagram.

"He wants me to put on his glasses, but where are they?" muttered the hermit.

He began rummaging through the room, his excited imagination blossoming into full-blown frenzy. After searching inside, under and on top of everything in the sparsely furnished chamber, the only thing he discovered was the absence of his oldest cloak, a tattered, floor-length garment of crudely woven wool. He sat down heavily in the chair and stared once more at the elf's drawing.

Suddenly he knew where the glasses had to be. He whirled around toward the basket of gold ore and began tossing the heavy nuggets on the floor. The wire-rimmed spectacles were at the bottom of the pile, wrapped in thick goatskin and wedged into a crevice between two huge nuggets to protect them from the weight of the ore. Lodston thrust the wire rims around his hairy ears and peered again at the parchment.

The black characters beneath the drawing began to swim and wriggle before his eyes. The motion was so distracting at first that Lodston felt a little lightheaded and dizzy. Soon, though, the characters settled into firmer images, more in the dwarf's mind than on the scroll.

"I can't read," he muttered in amazement, "yet I know exactly what this says!" The elf's message in wizard-scrawl was brief but clear:

THE QUALINESTI MAGE HAS FOUND ME. GUARD MY SCROLLS AND BOOKS WITH YOUR LIFE. IF I FAIL TO RETURN WITHIN A MONTH, YOU MUST TAKE THEM TO LADONNA, MISTRESS OF BLACK ARTS IN THE TOWER OF HIGH SORCERY AT WAYRETH. YOU WILL FIND THEM BEHIND THE OLD DOOR. GO INTO THE TUNNEL AND TURN LEFT AT THE FOURTH PASSAGE. WALK TWELVE PACES AND LOOK UP. MY STAFF AND THESE DWARVEN GLASSES OF TRUE SEEING WILL REPAY YOU FOR YOUR PAST AND FUTURE KINDNESSES.

DO NOT TRY TO READ THE OTHER PARCHMENTS! THEIR POWER WOULD DESTROY YOU AND ATTRACT MY ENEMIES.

Lodston removed the enchanted glasses, only to see the magical writing encode itself again in his mind. He experimented with them a few more times, feeling the message swim in and out of his awareness each time he donned and removed the spectacles. He also noticed that he could see his surroundings perfectly whenever he was wearing the magical lenses.

" 'Glasses of True Seeing,' huh? Now that's some piece of sorcery!" he exclaimed aloud. "Healing an old dwarf's eyesight and teaching him to read secret spells all at the same time!" Lodston could not have known that the «healing» effects were accidental. The lenses, which some unknown dwarven wizard had used to fashion the enchanted spectacles, just happened to have the right angle of refraction to improve Lodston's failing vision.

The jubilant hermit unbolted the inner door and ran into the tunnels, following Dalamar's directions to the letter. At the twelfth step in the fourth passageway, he looked upward, using the lamplight and his wondrous new glasses to study the shadows of the ceiling. The small chest was wedged between the tunnel roof and a loose timber, just as the parchment had promised. He quickly pried it loose and scurried back to the antechamber to study his newfound treasure.

Lodston opened the unlocked lid of the chest and dumped its contents on the table in the lamplight. Dalamar's voluminous robe tumbled onto the rough wooden surface, forming a black cushion for dozens of small parchment cases and several slender books covered in purple silk and bound with leather straps.

"So he traded me his fine black robe for my old cloak, huh? Sorcerers might be brainy, but they're short on common sense," Lodston muttered to himself. The hermit picked up each scroll separately, weighing it in his hands and examining it with his powerful new spectacles. Still he saw nothing unusual about any of them.

"Why didn't he put labels on them?" mumbled the curious dwarf. "What good are enchanted glasses if there's nothing to read with them? At least they should have titles so I'd know what I'm guarding 'with my life.'»

For several minutes of agonizing temptation, Lodston stared first at the scrolls, then at the note from Dalamar.Finally, he snorted and started returning the cases, one-by one, to the chest. He held the last one in his hand a moment too long, letting curiosity win the battle with judgment. With a muffled growl of surrender, he squinted behind the tiny glasses perched upon his huge nose and opened the scroll case.

Once again, the magical glyphs on the parchment writhed into a meaningful form, the words of an incantation in some unknown language forcing themselves from the dwarf's throat.

"DRISH FETTS, DRISH FETTS, LORGON TRITS," he heard his own voice pronouncing, but he could not understand what he was saying.

Lodston found it difficult to recall which of several things happened first at the instant he uttered the last syllable of the strange incantation. The scroll itself flared with a yellow light, then disintegrated into fine ashes in his hands. At the same time (it seemed) a huge sphere of orange flames formed itself from the yellow glow of the scroll and shot forward, away from the hermit. In a blinding, deafening explosion, the fireball struck the pantry wall with such stunning force that Lodston was slammed to the rock floor of the antechamber.

"Great Reorx!" he swore when he was able to stagger to his feet. The pantry, with its dirty dishes and utensils, plus some sacks of food, had been completely destroyed! The nearest comer of the ancient mine chamber was charred and bare of everything. The wooden shelves had disintegrated into smoking embers on the floor. Lodston looked at the pile of seemingly harmless scroll-cases in the chest and slammed its lid shut with a fearful cry.

"I won't touch another one of the damnable things!" he vowed in a ringing shout, as if he were promising the absent Dalamar that he would never disobey him again. "You and this 'Ladonna' can have these evil things to yourselves!"

The old dwarf's dreams that first night were filled with images of black-robed sorcerers who were fighting him with deadly magic. He had no way of imagining Dalamar's enemy, this "Qualinesti mage," but his mind constructed a spectral figure in a hooded white robe, the face hidden by the cowl except for terrible red eyes gleaming from its shadows. Lodston woke from his nightmare with a shudder and lay awake staring at the dying embers in the fireplace.

"What am I supposed to do if this mage from Qualinesti comes for your scrolls and books?" he cried in a hushed voice, as if Dalamar could hear and advise him. "I don't know anything about magic. I wouldn't even know which spell to read until it was too late. Why should I have to fight your enemy when you ran away from him yourself?"

The silence that followed his desperate cry for help offered no solace. Lodston fumbled in the darkness for the staff and the glasses. When he had found both magical items, he crawled to the door. The only thing he could do, it seemed, was leave this business to Dalamar and the mage from Qualinesti, whoever he was. He remembered stories from his childhood about the Kinslayer Wars between different elven clans and wondered fleetingly if that was the «war» that Milo Martin had mentioned.

"It's none of my business, any way you look at it!" he muttered at the door. Then he slid the wooden bar aside and stepped into the darkness outside his dwarf-made cave. By the silver light of the white moon, he could see the curious inscription on his front door which he hadn't been able to read before. The runes flowed together under the power of the Glasses of True Seeing, startling the hermit with their stark warning.