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exactly. If Cadderly had no care for money, then why were they up here in the middle of the dangerous mountains, freezing their stubby feet off?
    “I care about what this treasure might bring for us all,” Cadderly went on.
    “Wealth,” Ivan interrupted, eagerly rubbing his strong hands together.
    Cadderly looked at him sourly. “Do you remember that model I kept in my room?” the young priest asked, more to Pikel than Ivan, for Pikel had been particularly enchanted with the thing. “The one of the high, windowed wall with the supporting buttress?”
    “Oo oi!” Pikel roared happily in reply.
    “Ye’re thinking to rebuild the library,” Ivan reasoned, and the dwarf blew a huff of spittle into the frosty air when Cadderly nodded. “If the burned thing ain’t broke, then why’re ye meaning to fix it?” Ivan demanded.
    “I am thinking to improve it,” Cadderly corrected. “You yourself have witnessed the strength of the model’s design, and that with soaring windows. Soaring windows, Ivan, making the library a place of light, where books might truly be penned and read.”
    “Bah! Ye’ve never done any building,” Ivan protested. “That much I know. Ye’ve no idea of the scope of the structure ye’re planning. Humans don’t live long enough for ye to see yer new… What was it ye once called that thing?”
    “A cathedral,” Cadderly answered.
    “Humans won’t live long enough to see yer new cathedral even half finished,” Ivan went on. “It’ll take a full clan of dwarves a hundred years…”
    “That does not matter,” Cadderly answered simply, stealing Ivan’s bluster. “It does not matter if I see the completion, only that I begin the construction. That is the cost of, and the joy of, faith, Ivan, and you should understand that.”
    Ivan was back on his heels. He hadn’t heard such talk from any human before, and he’d known many humans in his day. The dwarves and the elves were the ones who thought of the future, who had the foresight and the good sense to blaze the trail for their ancestors to walk. Humans, as far as most of the longer-living races were concerned, were an impatient folk, a group that had to see material gains almost immediately to maintain any momentum or desire for a chore.
    “You have heard recently of Bruenor Battlehammer,” Cadderly went on, “who has reclaimed Mithril Hall in the name of his father. Already, by all reports, the work has begun in earnest to expand on the halls, and in this generation, those halls are many times larger than the founders of that dwarven stronghold could ever have imagined when they first began cutting the great steps that would become the famed Undercity. Isn’t that the way with all dwarven strongholds? They start as a hole in the ground, and end up among the greatest excavations in all the Realms, though many generations-dwafven generations!-might pass.”
    “Oo oi!” Pikel piped in, the wordless dwarf’s way of saying, “Good point!”
    “And so it shall be with my cathedral,” Cadderly explained. “If I lay but the first stone, then I will have begun something grand, for it is the vision that serves the purpose.”
    Ivan looked helplessly to Pikel, who only shrugged. It was hard for either dwarf to fault Cadderly’s thinking. In fact, as Ivan digested all that the young priest had said, he found that he respected Cadderly even more, that the man had risen above the usual limitations of his heritage and was actually planning to do something quite dwarf-like.
    Ivan said just that, and Cadderly was gracious enough to accept the sideways compliment without a word of argument.
    Two Oghman priests approached the square stone mausoleum butted against the cliff behind the Edificant Library.
    “Let them take care of their own, I say,” muttered the muscular chap nicknamed Berdole the Brutal because of his wrestling prowess and snarling demeanor. The other, Curt, nodded his agreement, for neither of them liked this detail.