“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 here as well 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 really 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 backwards, 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, really,” 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 assumed that it was 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 should 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 on back into the rocky passageway.

“No, not really,” she replied. “The Beloved asked it not to.”

“Why do you keep calling her ‘the Beloved’?” he asked.

“That’s what the pink dolphins always 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 to get here. 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 really 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 on 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 on 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 won’t believe me when I tell them about it.”

“Not too much, Sorgan,” Zelana told him. “The Seagull isn’t built to carry a lot of weight, and we don’t want her to sink out from under us when we sail back to Maag, do we?”

“We?” Sorgan asked sharply.

“Eleria and I’ll be going with you, and so will Red-Beard and Longbow.”

“You don’t really have to come along, Lady Zelana,” Sorgan protested.

“I think I do, Hook-Beak,” she disagreed. “We need to hurry, and I can persuade the Seagull to go faster—and make sure that you don’t forget about your obligation to return.”

“But . . .” he started weakly.

“No buts, Sorgan,” she cut him off. “We sail on the afternoon tide. Go back to the Seagull and get her ready. I’ll have Red-Beard make the arrangements to put some gold on board before we leave. Take Eleria with you. I’ll have to talk with my brother before we leave.”