Beloved knows everything, Hook-Beak,’ the little girl told him. ‘Everybody knows that.’
‘That’ll do, Eleria,’ the woman in gauze said. Then she turned to look at Sorgan.
Sorgan’s knees went weak at that point. She was by far the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
‘Don’t stare, Sorgan,’ she said primly. ‘It isn’t polite.’
‘Forgive me,’ he said, flushing slightly. ‘Your appearance startled me. You must be used to that by now, though.’
‘It does happen every so often,’ she admitted. ‘At least you’re strong enough not to swoon at the sight of me. That can be so irritating. I see you’ve brought Red-Beard with you.’
‘Actually, he’s the one who brought me,’ Sorgan replied, his voice still trembling a bit. ‘He showed me the way.’
‘Then you know each other. Good. He’ll be going with us when we return to Maag. We’ll have to stop and pick up Longbow as well, but we can go into the details later. Let’s get down to business here. I need warriors, and I pay in gold. Are you interested?’
‘The word “gold” is very interesting,’ he replied. ‘Who do you want me to kill, and how much gold will you give me after he’s dead?’
‘You’re a blunt man, Sorgan,’ she said.
‘It saves time,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Are we talking about some kind of war here?’
‘Well, sort of. How much do you know about the Land of Dhrall?’
‘I’d never even heard of it until I met Longbow about three days ago. Red-Beard here was telling me something about some people that live over beyond the mountains. I gather that they’re the ones you’d like to have me kill. Is this some sort of tribal squabble? That sort of thing happens in Maag all the time.’
‘It goes a long way past “squabble”, Hook-Beak,’ she said. ‘The people of Dhrall dwell mostly along the coastline where the fishing’s good, but there are other creatures who dwell in the Wastelands of the interior. They’re starting to grow restless, and we want you and your warriors to persuade them to go back home where they belong. That’s why I sent for you. I want you to enlist your fellow Maags to come here and help us drive the creatures of the Wasteland back across the mountains. We’ll tell the Maags that I’ll give them gold if they come here and help us.’
‘It’s easy to say gold, Lady Zelana,’ Sorgan said, ‘but I think I’ll need to see gold before I’ll be very convincing when I talk with the other Maags.’
‘That sounds reasonable.’ Zelana turned to the little girl. ‘Take him back to where the gold is, Eleria,’ she said. ‘Let him see how much there is.’
‘Of course, Beloved,’ the little girl replied. ‘It’s back in the cave a ways, Hook-Big,’ she told Sorgan.
‘That’s “Hook-Beak”,’ he corrected her.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That does make a little more sense, doesn’t it? I must have misunderstood the Beloved when she told me your name. It seemed to me that it was backward, but ‘Big-Hook’ wouldn’t make sense either, would it? How much of this gold did you want to look at?’
‘As much as possible,’ Sorgan replied eagerly.
‘I don’t think we have that much time,’ Eleria said. ‘The Beloved’s in sort of a hurry.’
Then the gauze-draped Zelana made a kind of squeaking sound, and Eleria responded in the same fashion. Sorgan gathered that it must have been some sort of foreign language.
Then Zelana reached out and took a glowing lump of fire out of the empty air and handed it to Eleria. ‘It’s dark back in the cave,’ Eleria told Sorgan. ‘This little sun will light our way. You should feel honored, Hook-Beak. The Beloved was going to have this for lunch.’ She held out the glowing lump of fire. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You can carry it, if you like.’
Sorgan put his hands behind his back. ‘No, that’s all right,’ he said, perhaps a bit too quickly. ‘You can carry it.’ So far as Sorgan was able to determine, the lump was not enclosed in glass – or anything else, for that matter. It appeared to be raw fire, but the little girl seemed very casual about the whole thing.
‘All right. Come along, then.’ She led him back into the cave, holding up the fire to light the way.
‘Doesn’t that burn your hand?’ Sorgan asked Eleria as they went back into the rocky passageway.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘The Beloved asked it not to.’
‘Why do you keep calling her “the Beloved”?’ he asked curiously.
‘That’s what the pink dolphins call her,’ Eleria replied. ‘I used to play with the pink dolphins when I was younger.’
‘We saw some of those when we were coming here from Longbow’s village,’ he said.
‘I know. The Beloved asked them to show you the way. She didn’t want you to get lost. The gold you want to look at is right around this corner.’
Sorgan followed her, but then he stopped suddenly, his eyes almost starting out of their sockets. The rocky passageway he and Eleria had been following was blocked by a solid wall of what appeared to be gold bricks.
‘Will this much do for now?’ Eleria asked him. ‘The Beloved can send for more, but it might take Red-Beard and the rest of the villagers a while to carry it here.’
‘How far back does this passage go?’ Sorgan asked in a trembling voice.
‘I’m not sure,’ Eleria replied. ‘Quite a long way, I think. Hold me up in the air and I’ll take a look.’
Sorgan picked her up and sat her on his shoulder. She held out her ball of fire and peered back into the cave. ‘The light doesn’t reach all the way back,’ she reported, ‘but there’s gold back as far as I can see. It’s nice enough, I suppose, but it’d be prettier if it was pink instead of yellow. Yellow’s sort of tiresome, don’t you think?’
‘It doesn’t tire me out much,’ Sorgan disagreed.
‘Let’s go back,’ Eleria suggested. ‘The Beloved’s sort of impatient.’
‘Would it be all right if I took a couple of these bricks to show my men?’ Hook-Beak asked her.
‘I’m sure it would,’ she said with a sunny smile. ‘There are lots of them here, aren’t there?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Sorgan said fervently.
They went back to the front of the cave.
‘Was there enough gold there to suit you, Hook-Beak?’ Zelana asked.
‘It looks about right to me,’ he replied. ‘I could probably buy the whole Land of Maag with that much. I’ll have to take some of it with me to show to the other Maags, though. They probably
