Bab had thrown himself into the middle of the discussion. He hadn’t heard any of the warnings that, for example, Dame May had voiced. “The star stone is evil!” she had cried. “A thing of darkness and mayhem!” The boarder who occupied her garden shed, Coran Halfway, agreed with her. He wasn’t a halfling, but a half-elf, and a mage at that. He hardly spoke up in village meetings, so after the nine days’ wonder of having an exotic stranger living among them, they treated him like part of the landscape. But for the elegant pointed ears, he could almost have been a halfling. He was shorter than Legg, with black curls and bright black eyes like a bird’s.
No, Bab hadn’t listened to a word. After all, until only a month or so before, he’d been in the wars under the generalship of humans and elves, four weeks’ march from his home. Daring deeds were his daily responsibility. He’d crawled into orc dens and come out alive, with an advance in rank, a fearsome scar on his neck, and a trophy or two that he didn’t show the kiddies, to prove he was brave and deadly. He had let himself be talked into leading the incursion to steal a piece of the stone, not that he had needed much persuading. Coran agreed to go along, to help protect the party. They and five others were feted as heroes until the day they set out for the Chaos Scar.
Vanity! It was like to kill a being. And it had. Two died, in fact. Of the seven of them who had gone in, only five had returned, and none of those unscathed. They’d outwitted wizards and fought monstrous creatures. But they had the stone, a thing of beauty, a smooth, imperfect sphere of blue-green twice the size of a halfling’s fist. The village was jubilant.
For a while. Ah, well, they were so good at telling themselves what brave folks they were, to have snatched a piece of the sacred stone, that they ignored the signs. Dame May hadn’t. She told them it was a Chaos Shard, and was full of peril for them. They should have listened to the witch.
So they used it to invoke protections around Wenly Halt. The mayor, who fancied himself a bit of a wizard because he was good at household cantrips, had used the stone. He declared that nothing should pass through its borders without permission. Well, it kept out the goblins that had been making nighttime raids on the henhouses and barns. Traders who liked to sneak in without paying the toll-gate fee were forced to stump up or spend hours more on the road marching toward the next inn. The mayor was well pleased with his magic-making.
Then the wind died down. No one noticed the eerie calm or the stuffiness that followed, not when the river dammed up at the same time and flowed all the way around the village like it was in a glass bowl. You could see fish swimming up against the edge and turning back again. A stag chased a doe straight toward town. Both of them rammed into the nothing that was there, and fell over. The children were like to laugh themselves to pieces over it, but it alarmed Dame May and those who were coming around to her point of view. Illicit lovers with their tunics half undone chased out of town by angry husbands couldn’t get home again without help. One of them was the son of the mayor himself. In embarrassment, the mayor had to turn to Coran to undo that spell. Well, they made plenty more mistakes like that, not so easily remedied with a night in the stocks or a plate of meat scraps.
Halflings, as good, decent folk, never realized what kind of dark thoughts some of them had about the others. The last straw, or so the village saw it, was when on behalf of the Moot Court, the monthly call for judgment, the mayor declared with the stone’s power behind him, that “the truth shall come out, no matter what!”
So money palmed by a thief screamed to be put back in the purse of the victim. That led to a few beatings. The bruises on the ruffians’ flesh spoke out in gasping, breathless voices as to the manner of their infliction. Then the dead rose to speak out against their killers. The trauma of having to face deceased loved ones nearly drove families to their own end. Bab felt that was what drove Adda to the final edge of madness, not that he hadn’t been going there for a long time.
Bab glanced over his shoulder at the locksmith. Adda ought to have stayed behind in Wenly Halt, but the others felt he was a good luck charm. He was lucky, but lucky for himself, not for them, if you asked Bab, because things that happened to other people just missed him, almost every time.
Still, Adda had a knack with a lock, magical or otherwise. In fact, the bespelled pouch that held their unwanted treasure had been tied and retied more than once, Bab could tell. He hoped that it had not lost any of the charm that kept the smooth rock safe. It was just that Adda couldn’t resist looking. Priest Nock said it was a holy madness, though under the auspice of what god, no one knew. No amount of Nock praying and bothering his own patron deity had proved enough to reveal it. Bab guessed that He or She was one of the ones who had gone insane from power, the very sound of whose name would result in the ground being heaved asunder-well, wait, that had already happened. But Nock assured them Adda was preserved by a benevolent god, not an evil one, as that who reigned in the Scar.
In the meanwhile, Bab and the others needed supplies, and maybe a rest. He swaggered toward the rough-beamed trading post where the human with one silver eye held court. Everything cost too much in the Crossroads because it had to be carried in by cart or enforced labor. A halfling couldn’t trust any food grown in the polluted local soil. Water for the foul-tasting beer in the Poisoned Chalice pub had to be distilled three times, but there was plain water, drawn from a couple of decently deep wells. It cost a toll to fill waterskins at them, but it was necessary. Each of them carried enough journeybread in their backpacks for a month’s wandering, in case no other food was available, but Bab hated to live on those dry mouthfuls for more than a few days. Still, it paid to be prepared. The last time they’d come, they ran out of provisions. He wasn’t risking it again.
The Scar was full of perils. Not only thugs and thieves waiting for a chance to jump helpless travelers and deprive them of valuables, life, or both. On their first journey inward, they had come up on an underground temple that just oozed ill will and death, but Coran’s prognostications showed that a star stone was hidden there, and they hoped to secure it.
It had, indeed, held one of the Chaos Shards, but the stone was not unguarded. At the heart of an arena smelling of blood, Adda had caught sight of a halfling woman in mystic robes seated upon a throne surrounded by armed male halflings, and he had fallen for her at once. She was a bonny one, to be sure, but a whistle of appreciation from Adda brought the entire bodyguard racing for him. They had only managed to escape by swiftness of foot and Coran spilling all his magic out in illusions.
The silver-eyed man in the trading post had thought the story wildly funny when they had stopped for provisions on their way home. Morgana, that was the halfling’s name, took slaves and tore the guts out of living captives. She rarely traveled to the neck of the pass, but it was always bad news for someone. At least they’d gotten out alive that time. Bab kept his one uncovered eye roving to ensure that Morgana was nowhere in sight.
A fist-sized rock whizzed toward Bab. He jumped to one side, in plenty of time for it to pass. He drew his small sword and showed the most vicious face he could in the direction of the line of buildings.
“Who did that?” he demanded.
The answer was a rain of stones. Bab lowered his face so that the old army helmet took the brunt. He waited until the clattering stopped and looked up. A pebble bounced off his shoulder and hit him on the nose. His eyes watered with the pain. Mad cackling echoed in the air.
“Who’s doing that?”
Bab heard at least three voices tittering. They sounded like insane children.