I had long since lost any sense of the passage of time. I slept. When I could not sleep any longer, I woke. I tried to make the waking times as brief as possible. If I could not seek refuge from my misery in death, at least I could find some peace in the lesser oblivion of unconsciousness.

After a lifetime but before an eternity, I woke up to see a tiny gray woman sitting cross-legged on the floor next to my blankets.

We stared at each other, the woman and I. She was very small. Her eyes were pale, her hair was thin and white, and her skin was the dusty gray-brown of an old olive tree. She wore a robe of many small pelts all stitched together. A silvery chain hung around her neck, holding a wire cage in which a small, colorless gem was caught. The gem glowed softly, so softly that I was not even sure it was glowing at all.

The woman smiled at me. "Hello," she said. She pointed to herself. "Avulsteina."

"Er," I said. "Oh. H-hello." Belatedly, I remembered my manners. I pushed aside my blankets, sat up, and did my best to straighten my rumpled robes. I tried not to think about my hair. I opened my mouth to say something intelligent. Then I heard a snuffling noise and looked down.

The woman's hand was resting on a…a thing. That was the only word I had for it.

It had no eyes. It was fat, pink-skinned, wrinkly, and hairless except for a few white bristles. It had no eyes. Its nose was long and pointed. It had no eyes. Its ears were small round nubs. It had no eyes. It did not seem to have much in the way of legs, either, just four stubby appendages that ended in four black-nailed, spadelike paws.

I stared at the thing. It seemed to stare back, although what with, I did not know. "What is that?" I blurted.

The woman's smile widened into a soundless laugh. "Not what," she said. "Who. Schnelleck." She caressed the thing's eyeless head. "Make hello, Schnelleck." It twitched its nose at me and grunted.

"Oh," I said weakly. "I…I see." Actually, I did not. For that matter, neither does Schnelleck, I thought. I swallowed a nervous giggle.

The woman seemed to sense my discomfort. She reached over and patted my good hand. Then she nodded at my other arm. "How do?"

I followed her gaze. I lifted the arm. Then I let it drop with a wince. "Better," I said.

She nodded and leaned closer, her hands outstretched. "Please?"

I found myself nodding before I could think better of it. Gently, she stripped the bandages and splinting from my arm and began to lift and lower and bend it. She paused frequently to look at my face, and when I winced, she stopped what she was doing. Once done with that, her impersonal probing moved on to my collarbone and ribs. From time to time she would linger at the places where I was most sore and do something which made my skin feel momentarily numb but then left me with less pain than before. Then she swaddled my arm once again in fresh bandages and thin bone splints.

When she was done, she made a small noise of satisfaction and leaned back. "You heal, but…how you say." She made a vague gesture. "You weak. Sleep too much. You need move. A little. Work." She stood, holding her hands out to me. "Come."

Disagreement did not appear to be an option, and I was too weary to argue in any case. I went.

Xanos and Brown were on the far side of the chamber, near the outer door. They were surrounded by parchment. "How many words can someone possibly come up with to describe stone?" the sorcerer was asking. He had a smudge of ink on one cheek.

"Several hundred, apparently," the dragon answered. He sat like some great winged cat, his rear feet tucked along his belly and his forepaws crossed almost daintily in front of his chest. "It's sort of like how the Bedine have-" His head swiveled. "How many different words do you have for sand, Nadiya?"

I stared at them blankly. "Um. That depends. What kind of sand?"

The dragon's head swiveled back to the sorcerer. "There. See what I mean?"

The gray woman herded me along, gentle but inexorable. "We go," she said. "To temple. Back-" She fluttered her hand vaguely. "Later."

The others barely looked up. I should not have felt hurt by this, but I did. Granted, the woman had healed me and probably did not mean to cook me and eat me after all she had done to keep me alive, but it would have been nice if the others had shown some concern. And I was almost certain that I was being ridiculous. "Have fun," Brown said. He pushed a sheet of parchment over to Xanos with one clawtip. "Here. Why don't we go over the near future imperfect pseudo-subjunctive again?"

"Xanos would really rather stick his feet in a meat grinder," the sorcerer replied, but reached for his quill.

There was another antechamber beyond. Two guards stood at the far end, in front of a closed brass door. Avulsteina stopped and held up a strip of cloth. "Sorry," she said. "But none from outside see Riftenstone. Understand?"

I still did not entirely know whether to trust her, but if Xanos and Brown did, then I supposed I might as well. Besides, what did it matter? Anything she did to me could not be as bad as what had already been done. Some of it I had even done to myself.

I allowed her to tie the cloth around my head. She settled the blindfold over my eyes, then took me by the hand and led me through the door.

I had a sensation of space – cavernous, echoing, with the musty scent of damp stone and mold and fungus drifting to my nose on cool currents of air. Here and there I heard footsteps, though I could not tell whether they were near or far. Straining my ears, I thought I could hear the lap of water against some rocky shore. I heard voices, too, but rarely. Even Avulsteina did not speak, only guided me with a tug on my hand here, a nudge of my shoulder there.

In spite of myself, I felt curious. I rolled my eyes up, then down, trying to catch a glimpse of my surroundings through the upper- and lowermost gaps in my blindfold. My efforts yielded little. I saw a smooth stone floor. My own hair. My own feet. Here and there I thought I saw lights twinkling.

Eventually, we went through another door into a chamber filled with noise, and Avulsteina removed my blindfold.

I saw chaos.

We were in an enormous round room with many doors. The room itself was plain, but all over there were plinths and shelves and tables overflowing with all manner of beautiful things. There were sculptures in stone of every color and texture, and some in metal which flowed and swooped like blown glass. There were carvings in something like wood, and others in old yellow bone. There were brightly colored carpets and paintings which glittered as if diamond dust had been mixed into the pigment. There were gems and precious metals both raw and worked into ornaments of all kinds. Many of the gems glowed, and I realized that they were the source of the soft light which suffused the place.

And then there were the creatures – small white mice with red eyes which perched, squeaking, on the sculptures, bats which rustled in the shadows overhead, rats which chittered from the shadows beneath tables on which wealth beyond imagining was displayed. Things like Schnelleck snuffled and drooled on fine silken carpets. A creature with a long, black-and-white striped face lumbered past, forcing me to step back or be stepped upon. Shrews and voles slept in furry piles on top of huge, pale things with long, thin noses and floppy rabbit ears.

I found Avulsteina watching me. Her eyes wrinkled at the corners in a quiet almost-smile. "Welcome to home of Earthcaller," she said. Then she reached behind one of the tables and produced a shovel and a bucket. She gave them both to me, and took another two for herself. "Now work."

She did not leave me to work alone, but worked alongside me in silence, a gesture which I appreciated – I did not know what to say and did not feel like talking. There was also a great deal of work to do. I did not mind the work, even though it was difficult to do it all with only one good arm. There was a comfort in the familiar rhythms of cleaning, and I was able to lose myself in those rhythms. After the dung was cleaned up, there was fur and dust to beat from the carpets, and floors to scrub, and tarnish to buff from silver, and wood to polish with a strange, rich-smelling oil.

Eventually, I straightened, knuckling my aching back. There was a strange weight on my shoulder which, on closer inspection, appeared to be a small gray-furred mouse. It also appeared to be sleeping, which was only the – I calculated quickly – eighth strangest thing to happen to me since I had woken up.

I felt a tug on my hand and looked down to see Avulsteina holding out a folded flatbread and a cup of what looked to be water. I took it, feeling quite strange to be seeing the top of someone else's head. I was not used to being taller than other people. I wondered if this was how it felt to be Xanos. If so, I did not envy him.

We sat cross-legged on the freshly swept floor. Avulsteina ate with a vole perched on her left knee and a small bat hanging from her elbow. Neither the priestess nor the bat seemed to find anything unusual about this, so I decided not to make an issue of it. The flatbread was gray, rubbery, and very salty. It was wrapped around shreds of equally salty meat which tasted like beef. The cup appeared to contain water, which was cool and pleasant if oddly musty-smelling.

Once we were done eating, I helped Avulsteina place dishes of food out for the animals, which grew even noisier at the prospect of food. The mouse on my shoulder woke with a squeak. Then I felt the brief dig of its tiny claws as it sped down my arm and jumped onto the nearest table. It did not look back. I felt a little sad to see it go.

I spent our return sunk in thought, so much so that I barely noticed ugly, hairless Schnelleck grunting and snuffling along at our heels.

There were fewer guards on our chambers than there had been when I had left, but Xanos and Brown were exactly where I had left them. The only difference was that the pile of parchment surrounding them had grown.

Brown was the first to look up and acknowledge me, which for some reason irritated me to no end. "Nadiya! There you are. Did I tell you? I'm teaching Xanos to speak gnomish," he said happily. "And he's teaching me to speak Dwarven and play a game he calls stones which I think is just splendid, although we had to talk the guards into letting us trade a few pretties for some real stones. And some more ink. Fortunately, they all seemed very impressed when Xanos asked them himself, in gnomish. At least, they were once we had cleared up a few misunderstandings. Would you believe that there's only one letter of difference between the svirfneblin word for ink and the svirfneblin word for blood?"

That explained why there had been fewer guards on the door. "How many of them ran away?"

"Only three or four," Brown said. "Fortunately we were able to clear everything up and learn the proper word and I'm sure one day we'll all have a good laugh together over this little misunderstanding." He looked at Xanos. "Of course, some of us have already started laughing, though I really can't understand why."

The sorcerer was grinning. "The looks on their faces," he chortled. "Ah, gods. I have never seen anyone's eyeballs pop so far out of their skulls. Like snails cresting their shells. Hah!"

"Weren't you just saying that you wanted more allies?"

"Instilling a little mortal terror should go a long way to accomplishing that, shouldn't it?"

Brown sniffed. "Scaring the daylights out of people is not the proper way to make friends, Xanos."

"Ah? Well, lucky for us that there is no daylight in them to scare out."

"Oh, for goodness' sake, Xanos. I know you can be perfectly pleasant when you want to be. Why don't you do it more often? You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, you know."

"You can catch even more with a corpse."

"Xanos, that's awful."

"The truth usually is." The sorcerer seemed to take in the dragon's disapproving expression and relent. He rubbed at his cheek, further smudging the ink there. "Very well. So what approach would you take? Talking them into submission?"

Brown sniffed. "You may mock-"

"Thank you, I will."

"-but I am perfectly serious. I'm sure that there's nothing that can't be accomplished if two reasonable creatures of goodly hearts sit down together and discuss their differences civilly."

"Hah! You've never been to a town meeting in Hilltop when next year's taxes are up for debate, have you?"

"No. Why? Is there a lot of arguing?"

"You tell me. The last one Xanos saw ended with four men holding the miller down so the local druid could extract a meat fork from his ear. The barkeep was a big fellow and might have been of some use in the process if he hadn't been busy buttering a milking bucket."

"Er. I'm not sure if I should be asking this, but why would anyone want to butter a bucket?"

"It was stuck on the mayor's head at the time. A slim majority of townsfolk voted that it might be a good idea to remove it, if only so that he could see where to write the next time they needed him to sign something."

"Oh. I see." Brown blinked slowly. "No. Wait. Why was the mayor's head in a bucket?"

"The town clerk put it there, in response to the mayor's proposal to pay for certain tax cuts by reducing the clerk's salary."

"Oh. I see. I think."

"Shortly thereafter the town baker got into quite a rousing fistfight with the town butcher because the butcher made some choice remarks about the mayor while the mayor was otherwise enbucketed. I seem to recall hearing the words 'fat-headed codswallop', among others."

The dragon winced. "You're right," he said. "That does sound bad."

"Bad? Perhaps. Hilarious? Absolutely."

"You have a very strange sense of humor, my friend."

"I am not strange. It is the world that is strange. I merely appreciate its many absurdities."

I stared at them. Then, swaying, I decided that I was far too tired to deal with any of this.

I stumbled to the far side of the chamber, where I fell headlong into my blankets and into sleep.

Avulsteina was waiting for me the next morning, or day, or whatever time it was in this bizarre underground world. She stopped before we left and exchanged a few words with Brown and Xanos in her strange language. When she was done, I allowed myself to be blindfolded and led back to her temple.

Along the way, on a whim, I became curious to know how far we were walking and began to count my steps. I could not see where I was through the blindfold and dim light, and I could not judge the passage of time without a sun or moon or stars, but I knew the length of my own stride.

There was more cleaning waiting for me, and I went to it without complaint, though I found myself stopping often to catch my breath or rub my bandaged arm. I was still weak and tired and sore. I wondered what would happen if I put down my broom and walked away. Surely the cleric would not keep me here if I said I did not want to stay.

Avulsteina noticed my frequent pauses to rest. "What?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Arm hurts," I said, and picked up my broom again.

"Oh?" She looked at me. Then she picked up a fist-sized chunk of quartz from a nearby table and threw it.

I was so startled that I moved my good hand far too late to catch the stone. It bounced off of my injured wrist. I clapped my other hand to it to stop the stinging. Now my arm truly hurt. "Why did you do that?" I demanded, suddenly furious.

The cleric tsk'ed. "Bad," she said. "Again." Then she threw an ivory drinking horn at me.

This time my hand snapped up in time. I did not remember telling it to do so, but evidently my muscles had decided that they had taken enough of a beating for one day. I put the horn down with care – it was obviously valuable. "Are you mad?"

Avulsteina ignored my question. "Better," she said, and launched a vole at my face with surprising accuracy.

This one was harder to catch, mostly due to the wiggling. I did not know who was more startled – me, or the vole. I put it down on the floor while it scrabbled at my fingers and squeaked madly. "Why, you-"

A silver candlestick was next. I dodged it, grabbed my broom, and went after her.

I was not sure what happened next. One moment I had the broom raised, the moment after that, I felt a shock travel up my arm. I found myself holding two splintered sticks, one with bristles on the end and one without.

I stared at Avulsteina. She smiled at me calmly, then raised her hand and wiggled her fingers at me. "No weapons," she said.

I went for her barehanded.

A few moments later I was on my back, staring up at the dome of the ceiling through a haze of multicolored spots. They were flashing on and off. I closed my eyes. The spots were still there. I opened my eyes. Yes – still there.

Thus began one of the strangest experiences I had ever had in a temple, and that included the time when we were all attacked by zombies.

The cleric never seemed to move. Neither did she try to hit me. She simply stood and defended her small scrap of floor. I would move in to try to strike, and somehow, she was always there, ready, a forearm raised or a shin flung out to block me.

I tried to kick her in the knee. She tangled her ankle in mine, twisted, and dropped me to the floor.

I tried to punch her in the stomach. She grabbed my wrist, spun, and threw me to the floor, though I noticed she took care to make certain I landed on my uninjured arm.

None of my usual tactics worked. I was used to fighting things that were bigger than I was, but the svirfneblin woman was as tiny and quick as a mouse. I could not bring her down from below and I did not know how to take her down from above. Also, I was fighting with only one arm, which struck me as very unfair.

Eventually, I sank down against the wall, out of breath. "How?" I wheezed.

She knelt some distance away from me, resting on her heels with her hands braced on her knees. "I old," she said, and smiled. She did not seem at all winded. "Move less. Patient more." She pointed at me. "You young. Patient less. No…how you say?" She tapped the side of her head with one finger. "No use this."

I stared at her. Then, for no reason that I could name, I burst into tears.

Once I had begun I could not seem to stop. The sobs tore out of me, small at first but soon huge and heaving and messy. Then came the words, pouring out into the temple and into the ears of all its squeaking residents and its strange priestess.

I cried for all of the wretched setbacks and obstacles the spirits seemed intent on placing in my path. I cried for the aches in my body. I cried for the life I had known and did not think I would ever get back. I cried for the uncertain future. Most of all, I cried for my sister and my mother and for the unknown horrors I had left them to. I cried because our mother had trusted me to take care of Zebah, and I had failed.

Avulsteina clucked her tongue. I heard the rustle of her robes and felt her settle next to me. A cloth was pressed into my hand. I clamped it over my streaming nose without looking at it.

Eventually, the tears subsided, more because I had run out of energy than because I had run out of grief. I felt drained and empty, though the emptiness was more of exhaustion than despair. My head throbbed. So did the rest of me, but in a way that had more to do with bruises than sickness.

I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. "There," Avulsteina said. She patted me and gave me another cloth. I traded gladly. The old cloth had gone quite soggy. "Better?"

I blew my nose for what felt like the thousandth time and peered up at her through tear-swollen eyes. "How?" I asked. "How can it ever be better?"

She tilted her head at me. "How no?" she replied. Then she stood, and offered me her hands. "Come."

I accepted her hands, though not without a little suspicion. She did not throw any more things at me, however. Instead, she fed me some more of the salty flatbread and what, if I was not dreaming, must have been some sort of cave-ripened cheese. Then she dabbed my face, tucked another cloth into my hands, and led me back home. I managed to count a thousand and twenty steps, though my head ached and spun so that I could not be very sure of my count.

When I stumbled over the threshold to the cave where the dragon and the sorcerer were, Xanos looked up briefly. Then he looked down. Then he looked up again. His eyes swept me from crown to toes and back again. "You look terrible," he remarked without preamble. "What happened?"

I staggered to a halt and pointed a finger at them. "Which of you is responsible for the insane rodent-wielding gnome?"

Brown's head swiveled. He peered at me. "What? Avulsteina? She seemed perfectly sane to me."

Xanos snorted a laugh. "Why do I not find that reassuring?" he wondered.

"Oh, hush."

I swayed. "She decided to spar with me," I said, dazed. "She seemed to think it would be…beneficial." I tried to run a hand through my hair and gave up a third of the way through. Too many tangles. "Somehow."

The dragon's snout wrinkled in confusion. "I thought svirfneblin women weren't allowed to use weapons."

I grunted and touched one hand to my ribs. "I don't think they need any."

Xanos was watching me with his usual inscrutable expression. "Did you have fun?" he asked.

I stared at him. "She threw a vole at me."

"I see. In that case, did the vole have fun?"

Brown tittered. "Oh, oh! I have it! It's a vole…volant! Get it?" He nudged Xanos with his nose. "Eh? Get it?"

Xanos winced. "That was a singularly vile pun."

"No. It was a vole pun! Ha!"

I put my hand to my aching head. "I hate you both," I moaned. Then remorse hit me. I lowered my hand. "No," I said. "No. I am sorry. I did not mean that." I sniffed. I wondered when I had last given myself a thorough wash. Too long ago, I thought. "Is there any hot water?"

Xanos did not so much stand as unfold upwards. It was like watching a tree fall in reverse. "There can be," he said.

He led me to one of the small side chambers, where there was a table with two washbasins full of water and a folded towel. He put his hand in one, and at first I did not understand what he was doing. Then, after a few moments, tiny bubbles began to well up from between his fingers, and the water began to steam. Then he did the same to the second basin.

I peered around his elbow as he took his hand from the water and dried it on the towel. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "That is useful. I did not know you could do that."

He looked at me, sidelong. "Xanos is so glad to have earned your approval, princess." He turned. Then he stopped at finding me less than arm's length away. His eyes flicked downwards, then back up to my face. "We, ah. Should find you new clothes. That robe has more holes in it than some cheeses."

I flushed, pulling my old black robe more tightly around me. An odd, tingling tension was building at the base of my spine. It occurred to me that I should move, put a more modest distance between us. I struggled to remember why I should still care about modesty, after all that had happened. "I…I suppose you are right," I said hoarsely.

He stared down at me. "Yes." He cleared his throat. "So."

I stared up at him. "So."

The silence lengthened.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Idly, I wondered when his eyes had ceased to seem strange to me and begun to seem strangely beautiful. If I ever missed the sunlight, I would only have to look at him to see it captured in his irises. In contrast, his eyelashes were so dark and thick that he looked as if he was wearing kohl. This should have made him look effeminate. It did not.

Xanos twitched. Abruptly, he jerked his eyes away from mine. "I should go," he said. His voice seemed unnaturally loud after the long silence. "Leave you to your-" He waved his fingers in the general direction of the washbasin.

No. "Y-yes. Of course."

I listened to his footsteps go. When I thought he was well out of sight, I blew out a breath I had not known I had been holding.

I had no idea what to make of what had just happened.

After a moment, I decided that it might be best not to make anything of it at all.

I am not yet well, that is it. Just a touch of fever, I thought, and – made awkward by my splinted arm - struggled out of my robe, shivering as the cool air met my burning skin.

Washing was difficult with only one hand, especially when it came time to wash and comb my hair, but I managed. When I was done and wrapped again in my tattered robe with a less tattered blanket over it, I returned to the other room. The dragon and the sorcerer were once again absorbed in their work and apparently oblivious to me. I did not know what to make of that, either.

I trudged over to Brown, very carefully not looking at Xanos. Brown was safer to be near, just at the moment. He did not make me stand and stare at him as if I had just been hit over the head with something heavy.

The dragon glanced up at me briefly and wordlessly lifted his wing. Just as wordlessly, I crawled beneath it and curled up against his flank. He smelled like hot brass, smoke, and desert sage. He was also very warm while everything else around me was cold.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep in the shelter of the dragon's wing. My dreams, if I had them, were filled by the scratching of quills, the rustling of parchment, and whispered arguments over something called gerunds.

The next day – it felt strange to call it a day, but I did not know what else to call it - Avulsteina took me away again. We catalogued some raw stones and put them into boxes made of some kind of hard mushroom fiber. Then she showed me how to do that thing where she tangled her ankle with mine and knocked me on my backside. I did not manage to do the same to her, but I did manage to get knocked over less often when she tried to do it to me.

I counted a thousand and twenty-two steps there and a thousand and twenty-two steps back. Then I distracted myself by making a few calculations. At roughly three cubits per pace, that put the distance at roughly three thousand cubits, or one third of a league. I did not know how this knowledge might be helpful, but it was good to feel as if I knew something which I had not known before.

The day after that I returned from the temple to find a small gray-skinned man talking to Xanos and Brown.

The man looked up and broke off his talking when I entered. "Hello, hello!" He stumped toward me. I had never seen him before. I thought I would have remembered if I had. He only had one leg. The other had been replaced by some kind of complicated metal contraption. "What have we here?" He wore some kind of metal circlet around his head. Near his temple, a hinged metal arm led from the circlet to an oval-shaped glass lens. As he spoke, he snapped the lens down over his eye and peered at me through it. "Hmm. Too tall for a dwarf, too fat for an elf." He flicked the lens back up and snapped his fingers. "A-ha! You're a human. So you're that surfacer girl everyone's so fussed about, are you?"

I stared at his face, feeling somewhat stunned. He had no eyebrows. I looked down, but this was no help. He had so many pockets sewn into his clothing that it could be argued he was not wearing any clothing at all, just a series of pockets, loosely stitched together. "Er. Yes," I said.

He grinned at me. His teeth were small, white, and pointed. "I thought so. Good, good. It's been so long I'd almost forgotten the tricks I'd had to tell you tall folk apart. From down here you all look the same. Arses and nostrils, nostrils and arses – and they told me the surface would be scenic. Hah!" Then he clicked his heels together and bowed. Some of his pockets clanked. "But here I am chewing your ear off when I haven't even introduced myself! Thulwar Seamfinder, artificer, inventor, metallurgist, combat percussionist, poet, explorer, jack of many trades and master of all of them, at your service."

I stared at him, utterly at a loss for words. One of his pockets appeared to be smoking. The smoke was mostly purple but now and again it shed green sparks. I wondered if I should say something, or if it was best to simply back away slowly and hope I had imagined the entire thing.

Xanos shifted his weight. He was standing nearby with his arms folded over his chest, watching us. He was still robeless. Rings glittered on his fingers and necklaces shone at the open throat of his shirt, threatening to become irrevocably tangled with his shirtlaces as well as one another. "Thulwar," he said drily. "Focus. What news?"

Thulwar spun back to the sorcerer without missing a beat. "Oh, yes. Of course. Well, you will like to hear this." As he spoke, he reached into one of his pockets, pulled out a small paper packet, opened it up, and, without looking, poured it into the pocket that was smoking. Slowly, the smoke turned pink. "I think we have made some real progress in moving your ideas forward."

"You brought my-" The sorcerer glanced at Brown. "-our proposal to the king and queen?"

"Oh, no, no, of course not. One never does something so gauche as proposing an action to King Finnick. He gets terribly offended."

The sorcerer arched a skeptical eyebrow. "So what does one do?"

The little man waved his hand airily. "One mentions the possibility that a certain thing may happen," he said. "Delicately. Then one opines that it would be quite terrible for such a thing to happen. Then one waits for our esteemed king to disagree, which he always does because he likes to believe that he marches to the beat of a different drummer – an absolute truth, in fact, though possibly not in the way he thinks it is - and once he's disagreed he generally proposes taking steps to accomplish the exact opposite of whatever it was you mentioned in the first place. Then you say what a marvelous idea he's had, would never have occurred to you in ten lifetimes, and mention that now he brings it up you may know someone who might be of some assistance in the endeavour. It takes a little more time but leads to a far more peaceful existence for everyone involved."

"And so?"

"And so the king and queen have called a council. As the most senior of the city's artificers, I will of course be present, as will Avulsteina as the high priestess of Segojan. We both feel that Riftenstone is crippling itself with this isolation, and we'll make the best case we can that the advantages of concluding this deal outweigh any potential risks that might come from further association with outsiders. I'll certainly point out that we can hardly hope to gain any advantage from a pile of artifacts we can't even identify. Beyond that-" The gnome spread his hands.

Xanos nodded slowly. "Understood."

I finally found my voice. "I am sorry," I said. "What is happening?"

Brown answered. "Oh, well, as to that! While you've been away we've been talking to Thulwar here-"

"I've been to the surface and had truck with your kind before, much to the dismay of, oh, just about everyone else, so I suppose that when the powers that be found themselves with a pack of crazed surfacers on their hands, they decided to make you my problem," the gnome interrupted cheerfully.

The dragon nodded. "-yes, and he's been trying to get his people to help us find an exit to the surface near where Xanos thinks Thimm's hideout might be so we can sneak up on him for a change." Brown beamed. "Isn't that grand? We might even be able to find your family and whisk them away right out from under his nose! Of course, the gnomes didn't want to help at first. They just wanted to hurry us straight the nearest exit as soon as you were well enough to risk the trip, but then they found out that Xanos and I can read High Loross and Xanos knows a lot about Netherese history and magic, and it turns out they were digging a new mining tunnel and ran smack into this Netherese ruin and, well, they managed to break into it and find all sorts of books and scrolls and artifacts but the problem is that they don't even know what most of them are and can't read any of the writing. Svirfneblin don't read or write or keep any records as a rule, you see, so of course they're a little at a loss when it comes to thousands-year-old artifacts. And I said: well, why not let Xanos and I take a look and see what we can make of those old books and things?" The dragon preened. "They of course thought it was a marvelous idea, so now Thulwar is trying to persuade the king and queen of Riftenstone to make an exchange. We tell them what they've found in the ruin, they find us a way to get where we want to go. That sounds fair, doesn't it?"

I struggled to digest this mass of words, hardly daring to let myself think of their implications. "You…what?" I managed.

Thulward studied me critically. "She isn't very bright, is she?" he asked, and dropped a small metal spoon into his pocket, where it promptly began to sizzle.

Brown bristled. "She is too bright!" he insisted. "She's just been unwell."

I felt as if I had been hit in the gut. "You…you found…"

Xanos shook his head. "Potentially found," he corrected. "If we are allowed access to the svirfneblin maps of the region and if we are able to compare them to Brown's maps of the surface, then we may be able to find a way to the surface that puts us in or near Thimm's stronghold."

Brown was nodding in eager agreement. "Yes, you see, Xanos came up with the idea when we were talking about the coordinates he found. In the Hills of Scent, remember? And I said I thought I'd flown over there before and when we looked at the map I was sure I remembered the place. It's hard to forget – it's one of the biggest hills there, and there's this ruined tower on top of it. I remember it because most of the ruins there are barely more than rubble but this one was intact and had smoke coming out as if someone was living there, though I didn't dare get too close so I couldn't tell you much more than that. And then we thought, well, if you were a Zhentarim megalomaniac and you wanted an impregnable hideout, you could do a lot worse than a big stone tower on top of a really big hill."

My knees gave way. I sat down heavily. "I told you that you did not have to do this," I said. I looked up at Xanos. I did not know whether to cry or scream. "I freed you."

He shrugged, avoiding my eyes. "To the Abyss with that," he said. He met my eyes again. His own glittered. "Thimm tried to cage me and use me for his own ends. For that, I intend to make him eat his own liver."

I rubbed my face and took several deep breaths. "But what if-" I swallowed. I had to say it. I knew Xanos would not flinch from saying it. He seemed to make a point of saying things that were difficult or shocking to say. Well, if he was strong enough to face the truth, then so was I. "It has been months. My family is most likely dead by now, or as good as."

The sorcerer shrugged. "All the more reason to make the bastard suffer."

His words sank in. After a long moment, I felt my lips curve in a slow, vicious smile. "Very well. You may have his liver," I said. "But his head is mine."

The sorcerer's answering smile was as vicious as my own. It warmed me as no fire ever could. "That's my princess," he said.