“Show me the top five hundred shareholders of the dragon’s hoard by volume and how many shares they own. The total value as well.”

The Wood Gnomes on her desk flew off as though blasted by a gust of wind. A storm of frenetic activity rippled across her shelves as books and binders were plumbed at impossible speeds. Moments later, the tiny workers began to return, and the system broke down entirely.

Spotted Mouse and Brown Rat had a collision as they went for the same spot. Gray Squirrel tripped over the fighting pair, and the squabble became a brawl. It would have devolved into a full melee had Feista not clapped her hands.

“All right, all right. This is how mistakes get made.” Feista’s tone became more calm and slow, and yet more dangerous—a voice that would have sent her pups scrambling for their beds. “Let’s try it with the drum, shall we?”

She pulled the old instrument from beneath her desk and set it between her legs. Its top was yellowed with age, as were the leather strings holding it against the wooden base. The drum’s colorful beads had dulled with time, but the beats it made as she tapped expertly on its surface were still crisp and loud.

“Right. You can hear it, can’t you?” Feista pointed to a cluster of Wood Gnomes. “All right, you three are on a research team. Take the top two shelves. And you, Gray Squirrel. Yes, you. You’re on point writing the first column…” She continued distributing tasks until everyone in the assembly had a job, then sent the research teams back out with her request.

“Write on the strong beat, move on the slow beats. You perform your tasks in step.” Feista tapped out the tempo on her drum, and the Gnomes began to bob and sway to the music. “Remember? Researchers, get the information. Then you relay it to the writers. Writers, fill in the first two columns. Then the math teams calculate the remaining columns and write them in. Then next line, and repeat.”

With their instructions clear and their tempo set, the Gnomes moved with the rigid precision of Lightling waltzers. The numbers materialized beneath their feet in perfect time with Feista’s tapping, spreading across the grid like frost over a windowpane. “Yes!” said Feista. “With the rhythm. You all go in rhythm.”

White Rat watched the dance from the arm of Feista’s chair. She squeaked something like a compliment and pointed at the Gnoll’s instrument.

“Oh, this? It belonged to the great-grandsire of my great-grandsire’s grandsire, Finnen Yarp.” Feista ran her free fingers across the beads of the drum while her other paw kept the beat. “He led the war drums for the armies of the Eight United Clans, back when they almost took the Ironbreakers, and he told our family’s history in these very beads.”

An impressed chirrup erupted from White Rat.

“Well, some beads very much like it. This is a replica my grandsire made after the original was lost.”

White Rat squeaked.

“Oh, yes, I’m certain it isn’t a real war drum. The original would have Finnen Yarp’s ears hanging from it.”

The Gnome’s chitter had a distinct air of incredulous horror.

“Well, it’s an old burial custom!” The question put Feista on the defensive, and she could feel her hackles rising. “The ancestors did it so he could hear the drums forever. Anyway, how do you people honor your⁠—”

She noticed the Wood Gnomes scattering a moment before the door to her office burst open. Borpo shouldered his way into the room behind the ringing wood. “Mrs. Hrurk! With whom do you speak?”

Feista’s eyes searched for any exposed Domovoy, but found none. Wood Gnomes that couldn’t stay out of sight often wound up underfoot, even if it took a few stomps. “Uh… just—just speaking to myself! Who else could it be?” She gestured lamely at the three empty desks around her own. “It helps me think.”

“And are you playing a war drum? In the office?” Her boss had found an advantage, and there was a note of eagerness in his voice.

“It, uh, also helps me think.” The Gnoll cleared her throat and tried to reassemble her composure. “I wasn’t aware there’s a rule against drums in the office, sir. I saw that you keep one on your shelf.”

“That is different.” The huge Orc’s perpetual scowl deepened. “I do not play it in the office.”

“Then why⁠—”

Borpo’s fists flew into the air, and his flexing muscles strained the threads of his suit. “It is for the purpose of inspiring excellence as a visual decoration! Music can be distracting to others in the work environment!”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll make sure my war drum is silently inspiring from now on.”

Her supervisor stared at her from beneath the manifold creases of his knit brow, struggling to find the high ground once again. Failing that, he changed the subject. “I expect your analysis of the current threat market by the end of the day,” he growled.

“Yes. It’s in your inbox.”

“So quickly? You must take the time to prevent mistakes!”

“I did triple-check the numbers, sir.” Feista fought to avoid sounding smug, but it was a losing battle.

“It is very fast,” Borpo muttered to himself, shouldering his way toward the drawer.

“Perhaps the drum helped.” It was a mistake to say it. Feista saw the miscalculation before the words were out of her mouth, but they spilled out like papers from a dropped file.

The Orc half-turned back to the Gnoll. His eyes narrowed to crimson slits as he glared at her, and his massive jaw worked as though chewing the retort before he spat it at her. “You will regret this insolence!” he hissed. “My eye is upon you!”

He slammed the door with enough force to shake every book and binder on Feista’s shelves. It took her a moment to push away the fear and the thrill creeping up her spine. Her voice shook as she stowed her drum. “Let’s… let’s be a bit quieter, shall we?”

She resumed her rhythm with a pencil tapped against the corner of her desk. The whispering of papers filled the room as the Gnomes took up the dance again. Numbers poured into the grid, and soon enough the tiny workers were gathered around the lines and triple-checking the sums.

Feista looked at the bottom line and sighed. “No, there must be an error. You have too many digits there.”

White Rat chirruped a reply, filled with doubt and fear.

“I appreciate that, but we need to check it again. This can’t be right.” The incredible sum spilled out of the bottom of the neat grid and down into the margins of the page. Feista turned her attention to the lines above it, scanning for anything that might be out of place. “Maybe we’ve included something that doesn’t belong here.”

“Doesn’t make sense.” Gorm leaned against a jagged boulder already slick with water as he waited, peering across the barren, rocky terrain. “Nobody builds in the Winter’s Shade. There shouldn’t be anywhere to go out here.”

“Shouldn’t be.” Kaitha kept her gaze locked on the distant wagon. “That’s different from ‘isn’t.’”

Gaist nodded at something on the horizon.

“What do ye see?” The Dwarf peered out around the boulder at the distant, obscured silhouette of the wagon. Four indistinct figures circled the cart—mercenaries, Gorm knew. The hired swords had met the cart on the road to Scoria on the first night out of the city, and the next morning they had taken an unexpected turn off the road and into the barren, rocky fields of the Shade.

“They’re moving again,” Kaitha said. “They stopped to wedge a rock in a gap in the road, but⁠—”

The wagon lurched. All four mercenaries dove to the ground. The world held its breath for a moment, waiting for the cart to erupt in a fiery bloom. When the barrels within failed to conflagrate, the heroes took the opportunity to dart into a cleft in the stone ahead of them.

“Guess they didn’t set that rock right,” Gorm said, his lips twitching up into a smile. Few Dwarves could completely suppress their hereditary smugness when Human stonework failed.

“They can’t go much farther,” the ranger said as they crouched down. “We’re almost to the foot of the mountain, and it’d be suicide to haul those barrels up the north face of Mount Wynspar.”

“There’s some who say it’s suicide to pass through the Winter’s Shade, but that didn’t stop ’em,” said Gorm.

While the southern slope of Mount Wynspar housed the most diverse and vibrant city in the Freedlands, its northern crag had watched over a wasteland for ages. The Winter’s Shade was gray and desolate, abandoned by even the carrion flies. The Sixth Age explorer Weevil Half-Burrow once claimed the blighted area was defined by the mountain’s shadow on the winter solstice, and the name had worked its way into popular legend.

Or perhaps shoved its way in; popular legend grew quite crowded around the Shade. It had been decades since any foolhardy farmers had tried to work the gray, dead soil, but local mythology was full of tales of crops that bled and fruit trees that screamed and burst into flames a year after they were grown. Heroes sometimes crossed over the cursed land in an effort to shave time off a quest, and every year or so a party taking the shortcut would go missing without a trace.

“Plenty of people survive the Shade,” Kaitha’s quiet reassurance sounded like it was intended as much for herself as for Gorm. “At least there’s no monsters.”

“I can deal with monsters,” he said. “A good axe will solve just about any monster problem. Not so for creepy old curses.”