meals during the course of the exhausting day.
"Hee hee hee," the dwarf tittered when he found biscuits and sweet dough. He dropped the amulet Cadderly had given him into a pocket and rubbed his plump hands together briskly, his cherubic dimples revealing his glee.
The dwarf sported an armload of food as he ascended the makeshift stairway to the second level, each step on the stairs that he and Ivan had put back together helping him to justify his filching.
His smile disappeared before he got back to Cadderly's room, though, and, as a puny human approached him a moment later, half a biscuit fell out of his mouth.
Danica and Ivan struggled on the bed, the young woman proving, to Ivan's disbelief, that her concentration could prevent Ivan from taking her hand down in wrist wrestling. The mighty dwarf, his bright red face framed by his yellow beard, pushed and yanked vigorously to the side, but the woman's arm, tiny compared to Ivan's gnarly and corded muscles, did not budge an inch.
"You have met your better," Cadderly remarked to Ivan, which only set the dwarf into a deeper frenzy. He hopped up on his toes and pushed with all his strength, moving the bed several inches, but Danica's position remained unchanged.
The sudden and somewhat loud scrape of the bed set off silent alarms within Cadderly. The young priest had made no secret of the fact that he and his friends were back at the inn, but he didn't want to give his potential enemies too much information.
"Quiet!" he whispered harshly, and, remembering Pikel, he closed his eyes and sent his thoughts to the missing dwarf. He expected to find the same sensations - hunger mostly - waiting for him, but when Cadderly made contact, through the power of the telepathy-enhancing amulet, his eyes popped wide open. The sensations were vague, as expected, but instead of distant thoughts of muffins and ale, Cadderly visualized hunched black shadows.
It was not Pikel on the other end! Images of dead Bren-nan, and of poor Nameless, filtered through Cadderly's rising sense of panic. The young priest abruptly broke contact and jumped from his seat.
"I'll get ye yet!" Ivan snarled at Danica, oblivious to Cadderly's alarm. Danica, though, facing Cadderly's way, did not miss his actions. Ivan tugged her arm to the bed as she came from her meditative state, the dwarf growling victoriously until he noticed that Danica was paying him no heed.
Danica scrambled over the bed, past Ivan. The dwarf turned about to see her and Cadderly exit the room, and realized then that the trouble likely involved his absent brother. Not pausing even long enough to locate his axe, Ivan half-crawled, half-ran out the door in pursuit.
Poor Pikel had never felt so weak! He stared dumb-foundedly at himself, or at his body at least, or at whatever this monster was that had stolen him.
Holding the weakling body by the throat in one hand, Ghost heard the rumble down the hall and realized that Pi-kel's friends would soon be on him. The thought brought an evil chuckle to his dwarven lips. He slapped aside Pikel's skinny arm and reached into one of his pockets, producing a small packet.
"Oooo," Pikel wailed, and he nearly swooned, thinking the item to be some horrible magical thing and suspecting that his life was at its end, as Ghost brought the packet up between them. But Ghost broke the packet over himself, over the dwarvish trappings, instead.
"Eh?" Pikel queried, for the imposter dwarfs face was covered in blood, blood from the packet.
With one arm Ghost lifted the puny form from the ground and hurled Pikel across the room, where he slammed into a wall and slumped to the floor. ,
Ghost, too, fell back, leaning heavily on the wall perpendicular to the door, and groaned.
Enraged Ivan grabbed both Cadderly and Danica by the backs of their tunics and hurled himself past them as soon as he discerned where Cadderly was leading them. The dwarf, without his deer-antlered helmet, hit the door headfirst, bursting into the room.
Staggering, Pikel lifted a shaking finger and pointed accusingly across the room, to the slender human form crawling about the base of the wall.
"Me brother!" Ivan roared, and he charged across, hands leading to throttle the weakling killer.
Danica, too, followed the imposter dwarfs trembling finger, but Cadderly came into the room more slowly, warily, paying full attention to the apparently wounded dwarf.
He had brought the song of Deneir into his thoughts. He saw the shadows crouched on