"What are you thinking about?" she asked, and pressed her hand gently against the young priest's cheek, drawing his gaze from the mountains.
Cadderly smiled warmly, touched by her concern.
"Up there is an unguarded hoard of treasure greater than anything in all the region," Cadderly said.
"I've never known you to care much for material wealth," Danica remarked.
Again Cadderly smiled. "I was thinking of Nameless," he said, referring to a poor leper he had once met on the road outside Carradoon. "I was thinking of all the other Namelesses in Carradoon and all around Impresk Lake. The wealth of the dragon's hoard might bring great good to the land." He looked at Danica squarely. "The treasure might give all of those people names."
"It will be more complicated than that," Danica reasoned, for both of them knew well the equation of wealth and power. If Cadderly meant to share the riches with the impoverished people, he would find resistance among those "gentlefolk" of Carradoon who equated wealth with nobility and rank and used their riches to feel superior.
"Deneir is with me," Cadderly said calmly, and Danica understood at that moment that her love was indeed ready for this fight, ready for Thobicus and all the others.
Several priests worked furiously over Kierkan Rufo on the cold, wet ground outside the Edificant Library's front door. They wrapped him in their own cloaks, disregarding the chill wind of early spring, but they did not miss the brand on his forehead, the unlit candle above the closed eye, and even the Oghman priests understood its significance, that they could not bring the man into the library.
Rufo continued to gag and vomit. His chest heaved and his stomach convulsed, tightening into agonizing knots. Blue-black bruises erupted under the man's sweating skin.
The Oghman priests, some of them powerful clerics, enacted spells of healing, though the Deneirians did not dare evoke the powers of their god in this man's name.
None of it seemed to work.
Dean Thobicus and Bron Turman arrived together at the door, pushing through the growing crowd of onlookers. The withered dean's eyes widened considerably when he saw that it was Rufo lying outside.
"We must bring him into the warmth!" one of the attending priests shouted to the dean.
"He cannot enter the library," Bron Turman insisted, "not with such a brand. By his own actions was Kierkan kufo banished, and the banishment holds!"
''Bring him in," Dean Thobicus said unexpectedly, and Turman nearly fell over as he registered the words. He didn't openly protest, though, Rufo was of Thobicus's order, not his own, and Thobicus. as dean, was well within his powers in allowing the man entry.
A few moments later, after Rufo was ushered through the crowd and Thobicus had gone off with the attending priests, Bron Turman came to a disturbing conclusion, an explanation of the dean's words that did not sit well with the Oghman. Kierkan Rufo was no friend of Cad-derly's; in fact, Cadderly had been the one to brand the man. Had that precipitated the dean's decision to let Rufo in?
Bron Turman hoped that was not the case.
In a side room, an empty chamber normally reserved for private prayers, the priests pulled in a bench to use as a cot and continued their heroic efforts to comfort Rufo. Nothing they did seemed to help; even Thobicus tried to summon his greatest healing powers, chanting over Rufo while the others held him steady. But, whether the spell had not been granted or Rufo's ailment had simply rejected it, the dean's words fell empty.
Blood and bile poured freely from Rufo's mouth and nose, and his chest heaved desperately, trying to pull in air through the obstruction in his throat. One strong Oghman priest grabbed Rufo and yanked him over onto his belly, pounding at his back to force everything out.
Suddenly, without warning, Rufo jerked and turned so violently that the Oghman priest went flying across the room. Then Rufo settled on the bench and calmed strangely, staring up unblinkingly at Dean Thobicus. With a weak hand, he motioned for the dean to come closer, and Thobicus, after looking around nervously, bent low, putting his ear near the man's mouth.
"You . . . you invi. . . vited me," Rufo stammered, blood and bile accompanying every word.
Thobicus stood up straight, staring at the man, not understanding.
"You invited me in," Rufo said clearly with his last bit of strength. He began to laugh then, weirdly, out of control, and the laughter became a great convulsion, and then a final scream.
None in attendance remembered ever seeing a man die more horribly.
The Ultimate Perversion
There ain't no durned cave!" Ivan roared, and a rumble from above, from the unsteady, piled snow, reminded the dwarf that a bit more care might be prudent. If Ivan didn't get the point then, he got it a second later, when frantic Pikel ran up and slapped him on the back of the head, knocking his helm down over his eyes. The yellow-bearded dwarf grabbed a deer antler and adjusted the thing, then turned a scowl on his brother, but Pikel didn't relent, just stood there waggling a finger in Ivan's face.
"Quiet down, both of you!" Cadderly scolded. "Oo," replied Pikel, and he seemed honestly wounded. Cadderly, thoroughly flustered, didn't notice the look. He continued his scan of the ruined mountain, amazed that the opening - an opening large enough to admit a dragon with its wings spread wide - was no more.
"You are sure that it is not just snow?" Cadderly asked, to which Ivan stamped his boot, dislodging a chunk of snow from above that fell over him and Pikel.
Pikel popped up first, snow sliding off the edges of the flopping, wide-brimmed hat he had borrowed from Cadderly, and was ready with another slap when Ivan reappeared.
"If ye don't believe me, go in there yerselfT Ivan bellowed, pointing to the snow mass. "There's stone in there. Solid stone, I tell ye! That wizard sealed it good with his storm."
Cadderly put his hands on his hips and took a deep breath. He recalled the storm Aballister had sent to Nightglow, the wizard thinking that Cadderly and his friends were still there. Aballister had no way of knowing that Cadderly had enlisted the aid of a hostile dragon and was many miles closer to Castle Trinity.
Looking at the destruction, at the side of a mountain torn asunder by hurled magic, Cadderly was glad that Aballister's aim had been misplaced. That did little to comfort the young priest now, though. Inside this mountain waited an unguarded dragon hoard, a treasure that Cadderly would need to see his plans for the Edificant Library, and for all the region, realized. This had been the only major door, though, the one opening they could push carts through to extract the treasure before the next winter's snows.
"The whole opening?" Cadderly asked Ivan.
The yellow-bearded dwarf started to respond in his typically loud voice, but stopped and looked at his brother (who was readying yet another slap), and just growled instead. Ivan had bored through the wall of snow for more than an hour, pushing in blindly at several locations unlii the rock wall behind the snow curtain inevitably turned him away.
"We'll go around." Cadderly said, "to the hole on the mountain's south face that first got us into the place."
"It was a long walk between that hole and the dragon hoard." Ivan reminded him. "A lung walk through tight tunnels, and even a long drop. I'm not for knowing how ye're planning to bring a treasure out that way!"
"Neither am I," Cadderly admitted. "All I know is that I need the treasure, and I'm going to find some way to gel it!" With that, the young priest walked off along the trail, in search of a path that would lead him around Nightglow's wide base.
"He sounds like a dwarf," Ivan whispered to Pikel.
After Pikel's ensuing "Hee hee hee" brought down the next mini-avalanche, it was Ivan's turn to do the head-slapping.
The trio arrived on the south face early the next morning. Climbing proved difficult in the slippery, melting snow. Ivan got almost all the way to the hole (and was able to confirm that there was indeed a hole in this side of the mountain) before he slipped and tumbled, turning into a dwarven snowball and bowling Cadderly and Pikel down the hill with him.
"Stupid priest!" the dwarf roared at Cadderly when the three sorted themselves out far down the mountainside. "Ain't ye got some magic to get us up this stupid hill?"
Cadderly nodded reluctantly. He had been trying to conserve his energies since their departure from Castle Trinity. Every day he had to cast spells on himself and his companions to ward off the cold, but he had hoped that would be the extent of his exertion until he returned to the library. Cadderly was more tired than he had ever been. His trials, especially against Aballister and Fyren-tennimar, had thoroughly drained him, had forced him to delve into magical spheres that he did not understand and, by sheer willpower, bring torth dweomers that should have been far beyond hi^ capabilities. Now young Cadderly was paying the price lor those efforts. Even the weeks of relative calm, holed up in the cave, had not rejuvenated him. He could still hear Deneir's song in his head, but whenever he tried to access the greater magic, his temples throbbed, and he felt that his head would explode.
Pertelope, dear Pertelope, who alone had understood the obstacles facing Cadderly as a chosen priest of the god of the arts, had warned Cadderly about this potential side effect, but even Pertelope had admitted that it seemed as though Cadderly had little choice in the matter, that the young priest was facing enemies beyond anything she had ever seen.
Cadderly closed his eyes and listened for the notes of Deneir's song, music taught him from the Tome of Universal Harmony, his most holy book. At first he felt a deep serenity, as though he were returning home after a long, difficult journey. The harmonies of Deneir's song played sweetly in his thoughts, leading him down corridors of truth and understanding. Then he purposely opened a door, turned a mental page from his recollections of the most holy book and sought a spell that would get him and his friends up the mountain.
Then his temples began to hurt.
Cadderly heard Ivan calling him, distantly, and he opened his eyes just long enough to take hold of Pikel's hand and grab hold of Ivan's beard when the confused and suspicious Ivan refused Cadderly's offered grasp.
Ivan's protests intensified into desperation as the three began to melt away, becoming insubstantial, mere shadows. The wind seemed to catch them, and it carried them unerringly up the mountainside.