the sergeant to the front of their column. As he’d done the previous day, he sneaked down the ramp and cautiously stole a peek across the reservoir. The scaffolds and bowls shone with their glamourous light, inciting awestruck gasps from his companions. Unlike the previous day, however, the cavern swarmed with activity. Workers were on the scaffolds and at their bases, hauling buckets up from the shore and adding who-knew-what to the simmering sludge. Beyond the workers stood a ring of guards—Pavek counted eighteen—all with their backs to the scaffolds and with their poleaxes ready.
Sometimes there was just no satisfaction in being right.
The sergeant swore and crawled back with him to the tunnel passage where they could confer. The plan they made was simple: Leaving the nontemplars behind with the sealed sacks; the rest of them would fan out along the shore and advance as far as possible before they were spotted by the dwarves among the Codeshites. Once they were seen, they’d charge and pray there were no archers hiding in the darkness. Even if there were, the plan wouldn’t change.
Someone was sure to run for Codesh. Ruari and the red-haired priest had their orders to watch which way those runners went. Then, with Zvain and Mahtra’s help, they were to carry the sacks to the scaffolds whatever way they could.
“With luck, we’ll have those bowls burning before reinforcements arrive from the abattoir,” Pavek concluded.
The war bureau templars commended themselves to Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy. Pavek embraced his friends. In the darkness it didn’t matter, but his eyes were damp and useless when he joined the other templars on the shore.
* * *
Cerk sat in the rocks near the entrance to the tunnel leading back to the village. Among themselves in the forests, halflings weren’t daunted by physical labor, but on the Tablelands, where the world was overflowing with big, heavy-footed folk, a clever halfling stayed out of the way whenever there was work to be done.
He’d earned his rest. Gathering all the bones for the scaffolds and the hides for the bowls had taxed his creativity to the limit. Simply getting everything into the cavern had been a challenge. The Codesh passage had collapsed sometime in the distant past. When Brother Kakzim had first found it, the twisting tunnel was barely large enough for a human and broad enough for a dwarf. There wasn’t enough clearance to maneuver the long bones Cerk needed for the scaffolds. He’d hired work-crews every night for a week to clear away the debris before the longest bones could be manhandled into the cavern.
Brother Kakzim had raged and stormed. Elder brother wanted monuments of stone to support his alabaster brewing bowls. By the shade of the great Black-Tree itself, Cerk could have kept those crews excavating for another year, and there wouldn’t have been enough room to get the bowls Brother Kakzim wanted into the cavern—assuming he’d been able to find any alabaster bowls, much less the ten that elder brother swore he needed. Cerk had worked miracles to get enough hide to make the five wicker-frame bowls they did have.
A little appreciation would have been welcomed. Instead Brother Kakzim had assaulted Cerk both physically and mentally. The lash marks across Cerk’s back had healed shut, but they were still sore and tender. In the end—at least before the end of Cerk’s life—elder brother’s madness had receded and reason prevailed. The contagion could be successfully brewed in the five bowls Cerk provided, and their scrap-heap origin could be disguised with a well-constructed glamour.
Cerk still didn’t understand why the glamour had been necessary. It had taken every last golden coin in the Urik cache to create it: half to find a defiler willing to cast such a spell and the other half for the reagents. They’d gotten some of the gold back when they’d slain the defiler after he raised the glamour, but most of their money was gone, now. And for what? The workers who saw the illusion were the same folk who’d lashed bones together to form the scaffolds and stitched their fingers raw making the bowls. Cerk certainly wasn’t impressed by it, and they weren’t going to invite the sorcerer-king to the cavern to witness the spilling of the bowls, the destruction of his city.
The only other folk who’d seen the illusion were that scarred human, Paddock, and his companions. At least that’s what Brother Kakzim had said yesterday when the foursome appeared in Codesh and headed like arrows for the old