The Diamond - J. Robert King [27]
"… they did it again. Yon candle sconces on the casket must be forged from the candlesticks that brought the bloodforge warriors here. They must've melted them down again-trust Waterdhavians-and made the coffer for the hand from some of it. It's a conduit for the soul in the gem. The soul has sensed its own body…"
The gem tumbled through the hole it had melted, falling into the puddle of liquid metal. There, it flared so bright that even Khelben fell back, dragging Piergeiron with him. Shaleen's casket became opaquely brilliant. All assembled Waterdeep winced away from it. Then just as suddenly the casket went black.
Piergeiron pulled free of the Lord Mage and stumbled to the foot of the coffin. He saw hands moving, pressing against the inside of the glass.
"Shaken!"
His heartfelt shout shattered the shocked silence, and a thousand throats took up the name in a thunderous chorus. The one they called on clawed at the inside of her coffin just as her husband had done before.
"Right," Khelben called calmly, reminding all who heard it that he'd been through this before. "Crafters, bring your pry bars and augers! Priests: prayers and gauze." He turned to smile at a mop-haired man-giant. "And, yes, Madieron, see if you can't lay hands on a plow horse somewhere."
In the ensuing bustle and excited roar, Piergeiron spun away from the coffin. His eyes were sharp again and piercing. The fog was gone from him. He sought one man: a certain silver paladin with a penchant for hidebound heroism and a hammer as large as all outdoors.
"Miltiades!" Piergeiron cried, reaching the man he sought and clapping him on one ornamental epaulet, "how's about I have a look at your hammer?"
The paladin gaped at him, bewildered. "What?"
"Come now, Miltiades, don't be stingy," Piergeiron roared. "The lads and lasses of three continents are talking about this golden hammer you wield. It's not as though I'd dent it."
Blinking, as stiff as always, Miltiades blurted, "Well, of course not. It's not as if… I mean to say, if you can't be trusted… er, that is-" He unslung the mighty weapon. "Here."
"Thanks," said Piergeiron, his old humor sparkling in his eyes.
He strode back through the carnival of crafters and clergy and gawkers, crowded eight deep around the casket where his wife struggled. His very presence cleared a path.
Knees against the still-warm gold, Piergeiron hoisted the great sledge over his head and cried out, "If ever there was Justice, in the name of Tyr-!"
And the hammer fell.
Some say it was not the paladin's golden hammer but a crack of lightning sent by Tyr himself that leapt down through the chapel to strike the glass-covered coffin. But such folk were often enough wrong about daily weather predictions to call into question their grasp of divine thunderstorms.
Others said Khelben the Blackstaff worked an enchantment so powerful that it not only left the Lord Mage drained for three days but gave Halaster in Undermountain a splitting headache and temporarily enhanced the power and endurance of another smaller though no less mythically proportioned hammer in the possession of one Old Mage of Shadowdale.
Those with honest eyes, more interested in one man's simple passion than all the Tyr-storms and spells on Toril, say that the hammer blow was borne home by nothing more than Piergeiron's love for Shaleen.
A crack like thunder… a burst of glass… and as the shining fragments flew skyward, Piergeiron lifted his lady free.
Glass showered down.
A great cheer fountained up.
Even Miltiades was elated. He would later describe the event as nothing less than a divine epiphany.
Piergeiron swung his lady around into an embrace. "Shaleen! You're alive!" He clutched her tightly, driving the new breath from her lungs. "I went down into death to find you. I dreamed of you entrapped in a great diamond, and here you are!"
"Here I am," she replied, wondering and solemn. There was a moment of distance, of silent abstraction, and then the wide, lopsided grin