Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [22]
“It’s right there,” Emilo said, halting abruptly and pointing to a shadowy archway. “Y-You go in if you want. I think I’ll just wait here for-“
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Cantor’s suspicions, always bubbling near the surface, burst into full boil. He gave the kender a hard shove, ignoring the sharp yell of protest, and then clumped after Emilo into a small room.
Only it wasn’t a room at all. Instead, the corridor seemed to continue until it ended in a blank stone wall. At first the dwarf was convinced he had been tricked, but when he glared downward at the kender, he saw that Emilo was paying him no attention. Instead, the little fellow’s eyes were fixed upon an object at the base of the featureless wall.
Cantor shifted his gaze and then gasped as he beheld the eyeless skull, lying on the stone floor, gaping up at him from those empty sockets. It was just a piece of white bone, identical in appearance to any of a hundred other skulls that the dwarf had seen. Yet there was something disquieting, undeniably menacing, about the morbid object. The skull did not move, nor was there any visible trace of illumination around it; neither did it emit any kind of noise that the dwarf could hear.
But he could still not banish the sense that it was glaring, waiting, watching him. Shivering, he took a step back, his pale Theiwar eyes still fixed upon the piece of bone.
In fact, the fleshless visage was so distracting that it was several moments before the dwarf even thought to look at the other object lying on the otherwise featureless floor.
“The jewel!” he declared, suddenly wrenching his gaze to the side.
Trembling, he approached and knelt, though as yet he did not reach out to touch the gem.
A golden chain, still bright amid the dust of the floor, indicated that the thing had once been worn around a person’s neck. A filigree of fine gold wire enwrapped a single large stone, a gem of pale green that was unlike anything else Cantor had ever seen.
He didn’t need to identify the piece to know that it was tremendously valuable. This was an object unique in his experience, and that experience included very many encounters with precious gems of numerous varieties.
And then he knew, his memory triggered by thoughts of a few odd stones of a type he had not seen for many decades.
“It’s a bloodstone,” he said gruffly, greed thickening his voice. He reached out, touched the chain, then looped it over his wrist to lift the gem up to his eye level. “You can see traces of red fire-the same color as fresh blood-there, right below the surface.”
Avarice welled within the Theiwar’s cruel heart, and he knew that he was holding the most precious object he had ever seen.
“Maybe you want to look at it outside,” said Emilo, edging toward the door. “Right this way.”
But Cantor wasn’t listening. He stared at the stone, convinced that he was seeing flickers of light-hot, crimson bursts of illumination-deep within the gem. The pulses were faint, but visible to his keen eyes.
“Uh, Cantor?” asked Emilo. “Can we get going now?”
The dwarf snapped his head around to see that the kender had his back turned as he looked longingly up the corridor. With a snort of contempt, the dwarf realized that the little fellow was still nervous, unaccountably distressed by their presence here.
And finally the dark dwarf remembered his other intent, the determination that he would leave no witnesses, none who knew where he had found this treasure, or even who knew of its existence, its possession by the rogue Theiwar.
Cantor’s face was distorted into a leer as, grinning, he lifted his knife.
But then his eyes lighted upon the skull, the object that the kender found so discomforting. Enjoying the irony, the Theiwar sheathed his knife and reached down to pick up the bony artifact.
“What are you doing?” demanded Emilo, whirling back to stare, wide-eyed, as the dwarf raised the skull over his head.
“It’s called murder,” replied Cantor Blacksword, bringing the piece of bone down hard, feeling the satisfying crunch of the blow as the skull struck Emilo square between