“Aye. He’s one who rewards his followers. Over a hundred years I’ve offered up my sacrifices and prayed to him for guidance. Far be it from me to guess the mind of a god, but I’m thinking he’ll not repay a century of service by letting us all die here.”

Ryslind strolled to the dwarf’s side. “Yet for all of your devotion, your magic is still limited to those powers your god grants you. To be so dependent on the whim of a deity would be disturbing, to say the least.”

“It’s called faith,” Darnak snapped. “And it’s a far cry safer than your wizardry. When’s the last time you heard about a priest blowing himself up after trying a new spell and waving three fingers instead of four?”

They glared at each other, the dwarf’s tiny eyes not leaving Ryslind’s glowing ones. They might have continued for hours had Barius not stirred.

“Forgive my interruption,” the prince said, “but could your time not be better spent by aiding one who still bleeds from his wounds?”

“Aye,” answered Darnak. He knelt next to Barius and began praying. One hand covered the stomach wound, which looked like the more serious injury. Between his prayers, so low that even Jig could barely hear, Darnak muttered, “I’d love to see your high and mighty wizardry cure this.”

After a while, he leaned back and said, “He’ll need a few hours of rest. Earthmaker has closed the cuts, but it’ll take a bit of Barius’s strength to finish the job.”

“Perhaps your god is busy with other matters,” Ryslind said.

“Aye,” Darnak answered agreeably. His easygoing nod contrasted sharply with his earlier grumbling. Perhaps relief at Barius’s recovery had put him in a better mood. “A whole world of prayers, and you think he can spend all his time on one dwarf?”

Jig ignored the rest of the discussion. Several times now, Darnak had healed wounds that would have crippled a goblin. What would it be like to have that kind of power available all the time? To know that, no matter how grave the injury, a journey to the closest priest could fix you in a matter of hours?

At first the idea seemed wondrous, and Jig had to fight off a surge of jealousy. The more he thought about it, though, the more he began to question if that sort of power would necessarily be a good thing. What would bullies like Porak do if they knew their victims could recover from almost anything? Instead of tossing rodents into the muck pot, why not set Jig himself on fire? Wouldn’t it be far more entertaining to spend the afternoon playing flame-the-goblin? Especially if the victim could come back the next day, good as new and ready to play the game all over again.