Secret of Pax Tharkas

by Doug Niles

  “Patience, my pretty one. But a morsel, for your pleasure.”

  He turned his eyeless face toward the far corner of his lair, where the cages were positioned. “Ochre,” he called, attracting the attention of one of his apprentices. That Theiwar, a young male with bristling black hair, broad shoulders, glowering visage and very long arms, looked up immediately at his master’s command.

  “Fetch me …” Willim’s voice trailed off as he inspected the occupants of the cages. The cells were solidly built, barred with steel, standing in a row of a half dozen along the floor a good distance away from the crevasse. He kept a variety of prisoners there since his work so often required fresh components, blood or tissues or organs drawn from living flesh. Currently the cages held a pair of elves, gaunt and hollow eyed, yet still projecting the stubborn dignity of that ancient race; a miserable goblin that, misunderstanding the wizard’s attention, clawed at the bars and yelped in an effort to nominate himself; a filthy gully dwarf, sleeping as usual; and several Klar prisoners, feral dwarves who had been captured by the wizard personally, and stared sullenly at their vicious captor.

  The elves were unique, too precious to waste. The goblin might be useful for something else, someday. Each of the Klar could be a valuable political pawn, each might find a place in the grand scheme of Willim’s that drew ever closer to fruition.

  “Fetch me the gully dwarf,” the wizard said with a slight sigh.

  “Up, you!” snarled Ochre, kicking the cage to awaken the filthy creature. The Aghar howled in fear, backing into the corner of his cell as Ochre opened the door. Seizing the gully dwarf in one meaty paw, the Theiwar apprentice dragged him from the cage and across the lair toward Willim the Black. Ochre threw a hand across his face to shield himself from the heat as he approached, but even so, he dared not come within twenty steps of the chasm. Instead, stopping as near as he could venture before the heat overcame him, he hurled the dwarf facedown onto the stone floor.

  “You!” barked the mage, pointing a finger at the cringing Aghar. “Come!”

  The word was not just a word, but a command of dark sorcery. The dimwitted creature could not have disobeyed even if he had been shrewd enough to sense the doom awaiting him.

  So the Aghar numbly pushed himself to his feet and stumbled forward, into the aura of heat. His skin reddened from the blistering radiance, and his tattered shirt began to smoke. He howled miserably, but he endured the pain, compelled by the word of command.

  Gorathian’s fiery tentacle released its caressing hold upon Willim’s foot, rearing like the head of a snake up from the floor. It waved and danced, almost as though it were sniffing the air, sensing the approach of its master’s gift. When the Aghar was six or eight steps away, the tentacle lashed out, slapping the stone floor, stretching to wrap itself around the hapless creature’s ankle. Flame seared the Aghar’s dirty skin, and the tendril of fire pulled like a whip.

  The gully dwarf toppled onto his back. He shrieked in terror as the effect of the command spell was broken. Twisting, clawing the floor with his dirty fingernails, the terrified Aghar tried to break away but to no avail. Gorathian tugged, and the gully dwarf vanished over the lip of the chasm, trailed by only the lingering echoes of his screams.

  Ochre quickly retreated from the heat to return to his daily task: crushing the coal that the wizard used to fuel his forge and ovens. The other apprentices—there were ten in all—had not even looked up from their labors. Willim nodded, pleased with their dedication, satisfied that they feared him and, more, feared him absolutely.

  He glanced once more into the depths of the chasm. He could sense Gorathian seething down there. The morsel had not satisfied him, not at all. If anything, it had merely whetted his hunger.

  Willim was pleased.

  THREE

  ROILING THE WATERS

  Day and night were meaningless concepts in sunless Thorbardin, but an industrious society such as that of the dwarves required a method for keeping track of the passage of time. The typical convention among the Theiwar, Daergar, and other mountain dwarves involved counting intervals, each of which roughly approximated a twenty-four-hour cycle on the surface. That method allowed laborers to get paid for their time, rents to be charged, and other duration-specific matters to be calculated with remarkable accuracy.

  The Aghar measured time in intervals as well, but it was fair to say they were a trifle less accurate than their more advanced cousins when it came to keeping track of the passage of hours, days, weeks, or years. To a gully dwarf, “one interval” was a short time, and “two intervals” was anything longer than a short time.

  Thus, Gus calculated that it was two intervals later when he returned to the sludge pond and its dam in the ravine over his house. For once, he wasn’t terribly hungry. Birt had snared a bat that carelessly flew into the family’s house, and in the ensuing tug-of-war, Gus had claimed not only one wing, but a good portion of the furry little body. He had gulped it down before either of his brothers or parents had been able to snatch it away.

  In a sense, it was that satisfying repast that had propelled him back to the ravine. The rest of his family had been more than a little outraged by his success, and after a dozen cuffs about his face and ears, Gus decided that he might be a little more comfortable—or at least less bruised—if he hung about somewhere else for a while. So he had scampered out the front door, chased by a stream of pebbles and abuse. Almost without thinking about it, he had emerged from the alley and crossed around the sludge pond until he found himself standing on the loosely piled rocks of the dam.

  He got around to the place where he had accidentally knocked a couple of rocks out of the way, where the modest rush of slimy water had been pouring out of the pond when he was last there. At the moment, however, there was only a tiny trickle passing through the gap. Gus stared, scratching his head. Was there a flaw in his understanding?

  “Everything goes down,” he reminded himself aloud, trying out the words. But there was not enough sludge in the pond to go down through the gap, for the simple reason that the surface of the liquid was two inches lower than it had been before. The muck couldn’t go down because it would have to go up first to pour over the dam.

  “Bluphsplunger!” he cursed, the sound of the nice expletive making him feel just a little better. He sat down on a rock and rested his chin in his hand, thinking.

  It had been so promising, his idea. If the sludge pond went down, into the lake, it wouldn’t keep going down into the Fishbiter house. But how could the sludge go down when it first had to go up to get over the top of the dam?

  That was when the answer came to him in a flash: it was the dam that had to be lowered first! If the dam went down, then the sludge could go down again!

  Eagerly Gus knelt on the crest of the dam. He tugged at a big rock, feeling it wobble slightly. Clawing at the edges, he dug at the gravel and sand, slowly excavating a narrow crack around the stone. His thumb still throbbed from the cavebug sting, and he momentarily stuck it in his mouth, thinking. Even by Aghar standards, his thumb didn’t taste very good, so he decided to ignore the pain and go back to work. Soon the rock was wobbling freely, and Gus hopped to his feet and grabbed the top with both hands. Straining for leverage, he planted his feet and leaned back away from the pond, swaying over the steep face of the rock pile where it tumbled to the bottom of the ravine.

  He knelt, ready to exert himself on the next rock, when suddenly he was distracted by screams and sounds of commotion from nearby. Quickly Gus scrambled up to the top of the ridge and peered out over the next steep, narrow valley, a ravine that ran parallel to his own, like all the others along the slope spilling down toward the dark waters of the Urkhan Sea. Several figures were bounding around in the narrow space, and at least two of them carried big, sharp swords.

  “I got this one … there goes another!” shouted a big dwarf—he sounded like a Theiwar—holding a squirming figure by the scruff of its neck. The captive, Gus saw at once, was a gu
lly dwarf. Other Aghar had scuttled away, but at least one other was held down by the big dwarf’s foot on his belly.

  “You get the little bitch!” the Theiwar called to a companion. “I’ll take care of these two.”

  Several Aghar squirmed up the base of the ravine, with a second Theiwar chasing after them. The two attackers were marked by the exceptionally pale skin that was a feature of their race. Possessing true darkvision, the Theiwar had no difficulty following after his desperately fleeing quarry. Still another gully dwarf started scrambling up the side of the narrow trench, heading toward Gus’s vantage. He recognized her at once—Slooshy!—and was about to call out her name when his tongue froze in his throat. He could only stare, eyes bugging, at the scene in the bottom of the ravine.

  The Theiwar was casually smacking the head of his captive on a rock, stunning him. Then he turned to the dwarf wriggling beneath his foot. Lifting his sword, he chopped down sharply, and the Aghar’s head came sliding right off his body! Gus tried to turn his eyes away, but he couldn’t, not before the Theiwar raised his bloody weapon a second time and decapitated the other helpless gully dwarf he had just knocked out.

  Finally Slooshy was there, clawing frantically to climb up the last two feet, gratefully grabbing Gus’s hand as he reached down to pull her over the steep crest. She was breathing hard and sobbing, and he quickly pulled her down, out of the line of sight of the murderers.

  “Slooshy! It’s me—Gus!” he whispered. Suddenly he felt terribly guilty for taking her rat and mocking her as she had thrown stones at him. “What happen?” he pressed.

  “Big Theiwar! They come and grab my pop, cut him head off!” she wailed as Gus tried to muffle her mouth. Her terrible grief sent a cold shiver down his spine.

  “Shh!” he urged. “We hide! Big Theiwar goofars go ’way soon!”

  At least he fervently hoped they would. Slooshy sobbed against his chest, but she managed to stifle the noise of her grief, and Gus finally broke free, climbed to the crest, and peeked down into the neighboring ravine. The two dwarves were, in fact, heading away from them, descending toward the lake, where a large boat with one more Theiwar aboard had pulled up to the shore. The two killers carried their grisly trophies by the hair, and each bore several more small, lifeless heads dangling from each hand.

  “Why the bluphsplunging Theiwar kill gullies?” he wondered aloud as he slid back down to Slooshy. “Never do that yesterday!”

  “They say ‘kill for bunty,’ ” she said angrily, sniffing, wiping her large nose with the back of her hand. She glared at Gus accusingly. “What is ‘bunty’?” she demanded.

  “Not know,” the Aghar had to reply. Whatever it was, “bunty” seemed a very frightening thing. “Come with me. We go hide.”

  She didn’t argue, instead taking his hand as he carefully started to lead her down the slope. They avoided the sewage pond, instead dropping farther down, coming along the face of the rock pile that was holding back the gallons of sludge. They heard hoarse shouts coming from here and there along the shore, and he guessed that many more Theiwar were roaming about, seeking to kill Aghar in the service of the terrifying “bunty.”

  Gus had all but forgotten he had been trying to destroy that dam when he had been distracted by the Theiwar, but he was startled to see that the front of the dam was very wet. Maybe the sludge was coming down, after all; in fact, he didn’t really care. Suddenly, the inside of the Fishbiter house—which was too small for any Theiwar to readily enter—seemed like the nicest, most welcome place in the world, leaky roof or not.

  Staying low, Gus and Slooshy reached the base of the dam. He looked up at the next ridge, knowing they would have to scale it in order to reach the mouth of the tunnel leading to his house.

  “When I tug, you run with me, really, really fast,” he said. “Bluphsplunging Theiwar never catch us!”

  “All right,” she said softly, looking at him with an unfamiliar expression. (No one had ever regarded Gus with adoring eyes before.)

  “Run!” he barked, jumping to his feet and sprinting around the curving base of the dam … and straight into the arms of a Theiwar dwarf who had been taking a break, sitting on a rock, slurping a drink from a flask that smelled like dwarf spirits.

  “Hah!” cried the Theiwar, reaching out a big hand toward Gus’s neck. “Gotcha!”

  He spoke just a second too soon. Apparently reluctant to risk losing the precious contents of his flask, he had juggled the bottle and quickly stuffed a cork in the mouth before he made his move. By the time he reached out to grab the Aghar, Gus had dropped down prone and found that his face was right in front of the other dwarf’s knee.

  Gus did what instinct has always compelled gully dwarves to do in such dire circumstances: he bit his enemy as fiercely as he could.

  Unfortunately, the knee did not prove a remarkably susceptible target for such an attack. The knobby joint was hard and resistant. The Theiwar jerked his leg forward, and Gus tasted blood—his own blood—as the dwarf’s knee smashed his teeth and lips. He tumbled back and, looking up, saw stars twinkling in Thorbardin’s roofed sky.

  “Hey!” shrieked Slooshy, closing in and catching the unbalanced Theiwar by surprise. She chomped down on his fleshier thigh, provoking a howl of pain. The big dwarf stumbled backward, cursing as the glass bottle flew from his hands and shattered on the rocks of the hard ground.

  “Damn you!” the Theiwar declared, reaching down and seizing Slooshy by her scraggly hair. Gus was sitting up by then, and he pounced to his feet and charged forward, driving the top of his head into his foe’s solar plexus.

  “Oof!” grunted the big dwarf, staggering backward and swinging a fist at Gus. The Aghar easily ducked the blow but looked for a chance to close in on the enemy who still held the wriggling female by her hair. “Gagger! Slice!” called the Theiwar loudly. “Help me out, here!”

  He was immediately rewarded by cries of alarm and the sounds of boots scraping across the rocks of the ravine slope. They were coming from up the valley but closing fast.

  Gus panicked. The tunnel to his house was only a short distance away, and he longingly thought of racing up the slope and diving through the narrow entrance like a cave rat running from pursuing lizard-wolves.

  Then Slooshy cried out. Still squirming, she managed to deliver a kick to the Theiwar’s groin that dropped the big dwarf like a toppled stone. Even as he fell, however, the fellow kept his fingers wrapped through the little Aghar’s hair, pulling her down to the ground with him.

  Gus knew he couldn’t run away. “You bluphsplunger doofar!” he cursed, leaping on the fallen Theiwar, driving his fist into the fellow’s nose hard enough to produce a spurt of blood. “You let go!” he shouted, drawing back his arm for another punch.

  But by then Gagger and Slice were there, sliding down the ravine wall in a shower of rocks. One grabbed Gus by the neck and threw him to the ground with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. The other hoisted the squirming Slooshy, holding her at arm’s length as she kicked and punched and flailed helplessly at the air.

  “Let me do it,” growled the first Theiwar, pushing himself to his feet, wiping the blood from his nose as he stared at Gus with cold hatred simmering in his black eyes. “This’ll all be over in a minute,” he sneered, pulling out a wicked-looking black blade.

  Gus, still pressed to the ground, wasn’t listening, though. Instead, he was thinking, wondering: why is the ground in front of the dam so wet? It seemed even wetter than it had been a minute earlier, when he and Slooshy had tried to make their escape. There came a sound added to the wetness, a groaning shift in the ground, wet rocks moving against each other, sliding, rearranging, everything going down.

  “What in Reorx’s name—?” the Theiwar swordsman demanded, looking up. “Run!” cried out another.

  “From what?” demanded the third, who still held the wriggling Slooshy.

  The answer came, quickly, with a swift collapse of stone, and a powerful gush of filthy wat
er that, despite its effluent stench, Gus found strangely cleansing.

  FOUR

  SONS OF KAYOLIN

  The body had decayed to the point where no flesh was visible on the death’s-head skull, though the matted remnant of a once-lush beard lay in a tangle over the shattered breastplate. The right arm was missing, and the splinter of bone distending from the shoulder socket suggested the cut had not been clean—more like the limb had been torn from the warrior at some point in the unknown past. The left arm still wore a shield, but that protective plate was split in two, the wrist beneath broken. The helm, of good Kayolin steel, was dented deeply at the crest, indicating where the mortal wound had fallen.

  Despite the signs of violence, the corpse seemed peaceful. As he studied the body that was seated against the cave wall, with its short legs—obviously a dwarf—extended outward, Brandon could imagine that the fellow had simply sat down there for a rest and had perished pleasantly during his deep delving, far under the Garnet range. He held his oil lamp high, letting the flickering illumination play over the grotesque corpse, but he couldn’t suppress a shudder. His involuntary movement only increased the flickering garishness of the spectacle.

  “How long d’you think he’s been here?” Brandon asked Nailer, trying for a brawny, carefree tone that somehow turned into a nervous squeak.

  “How in Reorx’s name should I know?” His older brother scowled, glaring at Brandon as if irritated by the question, and Brandon knew Nailer had been as deeply spooked by the discovery as he had.

  They had come upon the body by accident, almost stumbling over it as they pressed through the trackless caves with only the transient flicker of their precious wick to light their path. For many intervals they had explored with no sign of previous dwarf visitors. Then they had discovered that distinct sign, but it was not a good sign, not at all.