The next day, King Skilfil held an audience in the megaron with a group of ten dwarfs. The Heortling traders were invited to attend the audience and are allowed to offer to trade with the dwarfs. The dwarfs are short, stocky folk - if you were going to guess, the average dwarf is a few inches shy of four feet tall and probably weigh about 100 pounds. They are all bearded, with grotesque facial features (huge noses, large foreheads, and so forth), disproportionately short limbs and gnarled bodies. The dwarfs do not speak amongst themselves, nor do they make much extraneous movement - indeed, only seems to pay any attention to the king and his household (and then only to King Skilfil). The other dwarfs carry heavily laden packs.
Despite the obvious (at least to Heortlings) breach of hospitality, they bear weapons (axes and hammers) and are encased in *iron* armor of remarkable craftsmanship. Nonetheless, King Skilfil will greet the dwarfs in Balazaring, addressing the front dwarf with some sort of strange title ("Rock Heart Vein Seeker").
The king has his servants present many leather goods, meats and furs - as well as a few pieces of what appears to be corroded bronze work. Several of the dwarfs open their packs and lay out bronze spearheads, arrowheads, several greaves and vambraces and several round metal shields. The craftsmanship for each item is exquisite. Once the parties are satisfied with the relative amounts of goods presented, each takes the presented stack of goods.
King Skilfil then addresses the dwarfs again in Balazaring and commends Jorator "of Sartar" to them. The king says that he has authorized Jorator to speak with Rock Heart Vein Seeker, but that Jorator does not speak for him. This seems to confuse the dwarfs. Rock Heart Vein Seeker says (in Balazaring), "this differs from what was done," but the king reassures him by saying "I require this for the five hunters," which seems to satisfy the dwarf.
The dwarfs weren't interested in the trade goods Jorator offered. However, Rock Heart Vein Seeker said the dwarfs wanted the return of those items stolen from the dwarfs or imprudently given to lesser beings. In ages past, it appeared to some dwarfs that the world machine needed help from inferior things, even those who had broken the machine in the first place. Many tools were given to non-dwarfs to help them salvage the world machine. This was in most cases a mistake, which they now sought to rectify.
Jorator asked how the world machine had been endangered, and what
the tools were. Rock Heart Vein Seeker said that there were errors,
which kept cascading. This led to the destruction of the Central
Pillar, which introduced catastrophic error. Triage repairs were
successful, giving time for more substantial repairs. Rock Heart
Vein Seeker said some of the gifts were animals made of stone. (In
the Gods Age, the Mostali made many living creatures out of stone -
for example, they made the farancham to scout for the Stone Soldier
army, the garantarm to bring fear to the creatures of the Waste, and
they made the jolanti to provide brute power for their machinery.
Many have been destroyed since them and few Mostali now have the
ability to make creatures of living stone.) He said there was known
to be one in the citadel of Elkoi, and would pay 40 pounds of silver
(200 cows).
Ingkarthen reminded us that they would literally give a lump of
silver, so Jorator asked for worked goods instead. The dwarfs were
loath to give out more of their work, after what happened last time.
Jorator asked for lesser tools, to be used to fight the Chaos which
threatened the Machine. Rock Heart Vein Seeker replied that Chaos
was an easily maintainable anomaly, rather than a major threat. They
would however discuss among themselves the possibility of paying in
the tools of an iron dwarf. They didn't know the type of animal
(Rock Heart Vein Seeker and his companions do not belong to the Tin
caste and are not familiar with the taxonomy of Mostali stone
creatures), but once we retrieved it, we were to bring it up the
Vale of Hammers to the Greatway.
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