Angry now, Bronwyn felt about for her fallen torch. Her finger closed on the handle, close enough to the pitch-covered wood to feel the lingering heat. She thrust the still-hot end into the duergar’s face.

He shrieked and released her, clutching at his eye with his one good hand. Bronwyn rolled aside and leaped to her feet, nimbly evading the grasping hands of the duergar leader. The two adults had shaken off the surprise attack, and were starting to gather their wits and reclaim their weapons. Bronwyn turned and fled for her escape tunnel.

Arms pumping, she ran full out down the path, the three duergar huffing along behind. The small tunnel came into view. She dropped to her knees and slid the last few paces, then flopped down onto her stomach and scrambled into the low tunnel. Frantically she dragged herself forward before one of them could grab her ankle and drag her back.

Almost through. Almost safe.

Something bumped her foot, startling her. Her head jerked up and connected painfully with the stone ceiling. Suddenly she realized why the duergar had brought the scrawny youngster with them. She was not the only one who had scouted the cavern. They must have anticipated this evasion—and brought along a duergar small enough to pursue her through the tunnel.

For some reason, that realization inspired more anger than feat The young duergar was already hurt, and this was far from over. She would kill him if she had to. Surely his elders knew that.

Bronwyn scrambled out of the tunnel and ran for the ravine, steeling herself for the swinging jump ahead. She reached the rope and crawled out to the marked spot. Grip­ping the rope tightly with one hand, she sawed at the rope behind her with her knife. The rope was almost shredded through when she heard the young duergar’s terror-filled scream. His wail rose in pitch as it faded away, and then ended altogether in a resounding splash. Bronwyn cursed under her breath. The young duergar, half blinded and no doubt off balance with pain, had stumbled and fallen into the rivet.

The shouts of the older duergar and their thundering footsteps brought Bronwyn an odd sense of relief. They had found another way into the cavern. They would save the youngster before he was swept too far downstream.

Suddenly her rope rose in a sharp, hard jerk. She dropped her knife and hung on with both hands as she gazed back in disbelief at the path. The duergar were focusing their atten­tion on her, rather than on the boy in the river below.

Anger swept through Bronwyn, chasing away the nearly paralyzing fear of the water below. She shouted a dwarven insult—one that was almost guaranteed to inspire a tavern brawl, retributive murder, or small-scale war.

Again they tugged on the rope, harder this time. The fray­ing rope gave way, and Bronwyn swung out over the ravine. She forced herself to keep her eyes open, her attention fixed on the rapidly approaching stone. As soon as she cleared the ledge, she released the rope and threw herself into a side roll.

The maneuver absorbed some of the impact, but still she hit the stone floor with bruising, numbing force. She rolled several times and slammed into the wall hard enough to leave her dazed and aching.

Another angry shout ripped across the divide. “You made a deal!” the leader howled. “The gold and the axe!”

Bronwyn rose painfully to her feet and glared across the divide at the dancing, hooting duergat After all this, he had the gall to accuse her of reneging on their deal.

Still, he had a point. She had the necklace, and she’d promised the axe in exchange. She went to where she’d left the weapon, then fisted her hand and drove it into the pile of pebbles that hid it. Raising the gleaming axe high, she hauled it back for the throw.

The axe spun across the divide, directly toward the angry duergar. They squawked and dived for cover behind a pile of boulders. When they heard the heavy thunk! of metal against rock—several feet below their position—they darted out and skidded to a stop at the edge of the ravine. There, on a small ledge perhaps ten feet below the path, lay the axe.

“Oops,” Bronwyn said casually.

Leaving the duergar to solve the dual problem of retriev­ing their axe and their young henchman, she turned and started up the steep path to the surface. There was little doubt in her mind which they would consider the more important.

* * * * *

Dag Zoreth had forgotten what the river sounded like when it ran wild in the spring. Faint and sweet, both impatient and laughing, the River Dessarin sang in the distance, its voice as familiar as a childhood lullaby. A wave of sharp, poignant memory assailed him, a memory almost powerful enough to drown out the remembered screams, and the terrible thunder of hooves.

He took a long, steadying breath to ground himself firmly in the present. “Wait here,” he curtly told the men with him.

They had not anticipated this. They tried to hide their surprise, but Dag saw it all the same. He didn’t miss much, and he gave away less—which was, in no small measure, the reason why he was the one giving the orders.

Dag understood the men’s reaction all too well. He knew what they saw when they looked at him. A slight man who stood a full head shorter than most of his guards, a man who had little expertise with the short, jeweled sword on his hip, a man exceedingly pale of skin from many years spent within walls; in short, hardly the sort of man who might venture off alone into the wild foothills. Usually, Dag Zoreth didn’t waste much thought on such matters. But here, in this place, childhood memories were strong—strong enough to strip him of his hard-won power and leave him feeling small and weak, once again the child despairing of ever reaching the mark set for him.

He felt the old despair now, a shadow in the memory of his father’s deep, ringing voice intoning, ‘When you hear the Dessarin sing just so, it is time to turn off the road.”

Dag Zoreth pulled his horse’s reins toward the south, tugging so sharply that the beast whinnied in pain and protest. But the horse followed his command, just as the heavily armed men behind him waited obediently on the eastbound road to Tribor.

He rode for several minutes before he got his bearings. The old path was still there, marked not by the passage of feet and horses, but by the slender trees that grew in the once-open space. It was remarkable, Dag Zoreth mused, how fast a tree could grow once it was out from beneath the heavy shadow of the older forest.

A song slipped into his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. It was a marching song, an old hymn of praise to Tyr, the god of justice. His father had often sung it to mark the passage to the village. The path and the song were of like length, his father used to say. Dag Zoreth knew that before he finished humming the final chorus, the forest would give way to a clearing, and the village would be spread out before him.

A small, cynical smile tightened his lips at the thought of actually giving voice to the song. He doubted that his own god, Cyric the Mad, had much of an ear for music.

But habit proved to be stronger than caution. As he rode, Dag recalled the verse and marked out the measure in the silence of his mind. When the remembered song was over, Dag Zoreth did indeed find himself in the clearing he sought. Along the edges young trees had made great strides toward reclaiming the forest.

Dag Zoreth slid down from his horse. He was unaccus­tomed to riding, and the trip had introduced him to a legion of unfamiliar muscles. Though the journey from his home in Darkhold had been long and hard, his body had adamantly refused to take on strength and muscle. There was nothing wrong with his will, however, and he thrust aside the throb­bing pain as a lesser man might flick aside a fly. He left his horse to graze and began to circle the clearing.