“I believe,” Azzie said, “our tribes are currently at a state of peace. In any event, I have come only for something which will not even interest you, since it is not a precious gem.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” Rognir asked.
“Felixite,” Azzie said.
In those days, charms and talismans still had great power in the world. And there were many of them about, though the dwarves hid them in secret places, to keep them from the dragons, without much luck, since dragons knew that where you find dwarves, you find gold. Dwarves and dragons go together like lox and bagels, herring and sour cream, good and bad, memory and regret. The dwarves worked hard to extract felixite luck stones from the depths of the earth. Felixite is found only in small quantities, in beds of Neptunic basalt, the very oldest and hardest kind.
This stone of good omen, felixite, was much in use back when everything was happier, better, dearer, truer, the Golden Age, which ended just before true humans came on the scene. Some say that the deposits were laid down by the ancient gods who ruled the earth in the distant long-ago time before things had names. Even then felixite was the rarest mineral in the world. A tiny amount of it could transmit its own inherent joyous and buoyant karma to the holder thereof, thus predisposing a favorable outcome to whatever enterprise he was engaged in. That was why men killed for it.
One thing is sure. If you want a magic good-luck charm, you must either steal one (which is difficult, since a real good-luck charm preserves itself for its owner, and thus tends to be more than a little theft-resistant), or you must find a lode of felixite in the bowels of the earth and fashion one for yourself. You might think that all the natural felixite would be gone by now, since dwarves have been looking for it (among other things) under the earth for as long as mankind has been on the face of it; but you would be wrong; felixite is so lucky that even the earth feels blessed by it and tends to produce more of the stuff from time to time, ecstatically, as it were, but always in small amounts.
“Felixite!” Rognir gave a small, unconvincing laugh. “What makes you think there’s any around here?”
“A little mouse told me,” Azzie said, making a clever allusion to Hermes’ former occupation as Mouse god, before he was abolished or transformed along with the rest of the Olympians. This was completely lost on Rognir.
“There’s no felixite around here,” Rognir said. “The place was mined out long ago.”
“That hardly explains what you are doing here.”
“Me? I was just taking a shortcut,” Rognir said. “This place happens to be on the underground great circle route from Baghdad to London.”
“If that’s the way it is,” Azzie said, “you won’t mind if I look around?”
“Why should I mind? Dirt’s free for everybody.”
“Well put,” Azzie said, and started nosing around. His keen fox’s nose soon picked up the faintest strand of a smell that once, not long ago, might have been associated with something else, itself associated, perhaps only fleetingly, with felixite. (Demons have great powers of smell in order to render their time of service in the Pit all the more onerous.)
Sniffing like a fox, Azzie followed this elusive scent around the cavern and directly to the lemur-skin bag that rested at Rognir’s feet.
“You don’t mind if I take a look in this, do you?” Azzie asked.
Rognir minded very much, but since dwarves are no match for demons in equal contest, he decided to let discretion reign and to hell with valor.
“Help yourself.”
Azzie emptied out the bag. He kicked aside the rubies which Rognir had garnered in Burma, ignored the Colombian emeralds, pushed aside the southern African diamonds with their sinister future connotations, and picked up a small piece of pink-colored stone, shaped in a cylinder.
“Looks like felixite to me,” he said. “Would you mind if I borrowed this for a while?”
Rognir shrugged since there was nothing he could do about it. “Just be sure to give it back.”