What was her power? Was it something Mith Barak hoped to use against him? But the king had already probed his mind and raked through his memories. There were no secrets for this human child to uncover.
Except the ones being kept from Zollgarza himself. By Lolth, if Mith Barak were to be believed.
Zollgarza clenched the book in his hands, resisting the urge to throw it into the flames. Knowledge and lore surrounded him, yet the answers he sought most were denied him. Who was he truly, and where did he come from? Had Fizzri altered him at Lolth’s command? To what end? Was there some dangerous knowledge he possessed that the mistress mother had stripped from his mind in order to protect Guallidurth? But why deny him his own identity, unless she simply meant to toy with him?
Zollgarza considered the girl. Frustration and rage made him tremble. He wanted to lash out, grab her by her slender throat, and demand her purpose here. He had already begun a search of the library for the sphere and turned up nothing. She would have no better chance than he had of finding the artifact, unless it somehow considered her a worthy recipient.
Perhaps that was what Mith Barak hoped. Was there something special about the girl’s character that he hoped to exploit? Zollgarza thought it might give him some satisfaction to try to root that information out of her, to play with the girl as he was being played, a pawn in some larger game. She might not be worth the trouble, but she was a mystery and a distraction. Zollgarza enjoyed a good mystery, and he certainly needed the distraction.
She tensed and looked up from her book. Zollgarza flicked his eyes to the page and pretended to read but continued to watch her out of his periphery. She pushed her chair back and stood up. Slowly, she walked to the bookshelves and began pacing in front of them, head cocked as if listening for something.
What is she doing? Zollgarza wondered. He almost called out to her to ask, but he clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t want to betray the fact that he’d been watching her closely.
“Do you hear that?” the girl asked, breaking the silence.
Zollgarza rubbed his eyes and adopted a weary tone. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“Just now, did you hear … I thought it sounded like voices … whispers,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down her arms as if she felt a sudden chill. “You heard nothing?”
Zollgarza listened, but all he heard was the crack and pop of the fire and the cave breezes coming down the chimney. The dwarves had a sophisticated ventilation system-he’d utilized it himself sneaking into the city-that kept the smoke emanating from the homes and forges from choking off all the fresh air in the city. “You’re imagining things,” he said, putting a hint of condescension in his voice.
As he expected, her lips thinned and she fixed him with an indignant look. “If you heard none of that, then the reputation you drow have for keen hearing is entirely undeserved. I’m telling you, we’re not alone in this room.”
“If you say so,” he said and turned his attention to his book. He continued to watch her, though. She approached the fire and stood with her back to it, still listening for mischievous phantoms. His attention taken up by her, he didn’t detect the movement out of the corner of his eye until a loud bang echoed in the library.
Instinctively, Zollgarza leaped from his chair and went into a crouch. Beside him, the girl tensed, but as she was in a better position to see the source of the noise, she was the first to relax.
“It’s all right … I think,” she said. Cautiously, she strode across the room to the bookshelves, where a particularly large tome bound in green leather had fallen to the floor near the ladder. “I must have knocked it loose when I pulled my book off the shelf.” She bent to pick it up.
Before she could touch it, the cover of the tome flipped open by itself.
Ruen followed Garn, Obrin, and a contingent of dwarves past the forges to a smaller cavern on the eastern edge of the city. The first thing Ruen noticed was the overgrowth of the glowing silver lichen hanging from the cavern ceiling and in some cases growing in patchy carpets along the ground. The light it created was uneven and pained Ruen’s eyes. No one had tended to the lichen in some time. Ruen soon learned why.
“We’ve evacuated these caverns,” Garn explained as they marched along, joined at intervals by more dwarves, until Ruen counted their group at least a hundred strong. They were a mixture of warriors and clerics. “The population was too thin on our outer fringes-we relocated everyone closer to the city to conserve resources. Water doesn’t have as far to travel, and people don’t have to feel isolated out here.”
Ruen saw the logic in the decision, but by Garn’s tone, he knew the dwarf didn’t like it. “It must have been difficult for so many families to leave their homes,” he said, and indeed, some of the stone dwellings looked as if they had not long been abandoned. Mushroom gardens still thrived around the fringes of the homes, and through open doorways, Ruen saw that much of the furniture remained in the homes, left behind as if their occupants anticipated that someday they would return.
Garn approached one of these open doors and pushed it shut with the toe of his boot, sealing it. “Some folk refused to leave,” he said without looking at Ruen. “A few dozen, maybe-they’re around here someplace, but they won’t show themselves while we’re passing through. They’re afraid we’ll make them pack up and leave. I wouldn’t do it for a dragon’s hoard,” he said and spat on the ground.
The dwarves at the front of the group had begun forming the others into three columns. Ruen watched them as two dozen more dwarves spilled into the cavern. “This is no scouting mission we’re undertaking,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Garn agreed. “Last night, a couple of scouts reported that the Hall of Lost Voices had been cut off by a cave-in. They claimed they heard fighting on the other side, but the debris was too much for them to clear alone. We’re venturing out to clear the passage and get our people out of there … if any are still alive.”
“What is the Hall of Lost Voices?” Ruen asked.
“A mining outpost three miles straight east of here,” Garn explained. “It’s got lots of long, narrow tunnels emptying out into wider spaces, like knots on a rope. We’ve been filtering troops to the outpost for a tenday now because we thought it one of the likeliest places for Guallidurth to assault.”
“Why would they risk fighting on a battleground like that?” Ruen asked. Small spaces and bottlenecks could cut soldiers off from each other quickly. While this would hamper both sides, the dwarves knew the sizes of their own tunnels better than the drow did and could better control the field.
“Because if they can take those tunnels, it cuts off one of our major supply routes to the surface and denies us access to a major source of ore,” Garn said. He and Ruen fell into step with the company, walking side by side in two of the columns. Obrin walked in the third column, but as usual, he remained silent. “We’ve tried to keep its importance a secret, but the damn drow spies are everywhere. Some of them are infiltrating the outposts in magical disguise. For all we know, they might have had their scouts in place for months.”
“New faces weren’t noticed?” Ruen asked. “With the diminished population, I’d have thought spies would be easier to detect.”
“Sometimes they are, but other times, the drow kill our people in secret and take their places. We don’t find the bodies until later, if at all.” Garn’s hand tightened on his axe. Ruen saw the rage barely contained by the gesture. The Blackhorn patriarch’s only comfort lay in the promise of spilling drow blood.