Silence answered him.

“What do you wish of us?”

“I need an army,” I said. “What human army could stand against the dark men, the stone men?”

And so the negotiations began. Dwarves, perhaps because they are a long-lived race, do nothing in haste unless dire need forces them. My tired bones told me that the sun had risen again high in the sky before someone mentioned the dwarvenways casually. Another hour passed before I brought them up again.

Stories were told of dwarven bravery, and Oreg and Axiel told tales of my life to match them that were so blown up that several times they bore no resemblance to any memory I had of past deeds. Not that the stories were false . . . just exaggerated. Ihad carried a horse two miles in a blizzard—but it was a newborn foal. Blood and severed body parts played a role in most of the stories, each storyteller becoming more and more graphic as the hours trailed by.

In the end I had an agreement that I could transport no more than ten people at a time through the dwarvenways. The list of people who could use them was not long—no one wanted the ways to be common knowledge—but Kellen and his man, all those of direct Hurog descent whom I deemed trustworthy, Alizon, Haverness, Tisala, Stala, and Garranon were among them. Axiel was to come with me because he knew how to use the ways.

“Most gracious king,” I said with a bow that was more jerky than I would have wished, but at least my stiff muscles allowed me to rise. “I have a small gift for you, in thanks for this audience.”

A gift, the king’s note had said, would make it impossible for his courtiers to complain about human manners. An exotic animal, he’d suggested, as his menagerie was famous among his people. It had taken me about five minutes to come up with the perfect animal.

“I have in my lands,” I said, “a basilisk, sometimes called a stone lizard. Oreg, my wizard, has enchanted it truly to stone in order to keep it safe. If you have a sanctuary for it, I will have it brought to you. Oreg can dispel the enchantment when and where you wish it.”

Silence fell upon the dwarves. Shock rather than contemplation, I thought. The basilisk was the dwarven royal family’s animal, a totem second only to the dragon who belonged to no one family, but to all of dwarven kind. Axiel had told me that during our trip here when I explained what I intended to do—I was not such a fool as to give the king a gift that might be an embarrassment, so I checked it out with his son. The king even had the perfect place to release the basilisk, a huge island without a harbor that was reachable only by the dwarvenways.