Canticle

by R. A. Salvatore

  "Uh oh," moaned Pikel.

  "Ye're right," Ivan said to his brother. He looked up at Cadderly. "Ye should've left the fighting to us," he said. "Be keeping that thought in yer head in the future. Now they're waiting for the other group, the one we shouldn't have left behind us, to catch up."

  Cadderly rocked back on his heels. Skeletons were not thinking creatures. If Ivan's appraisal was correct, then some one, or something, else was in the area, directing the attack.

  Shuffling noises proved the dwarves' guess right only a few moments later and Cadderly nodded grimly. Perhaps he should have left the fighting decisions to his more seasoned companions. He took up his appointed position behind the dwarven brothers, not sounding his concerns that the undead seemed to have some organization.

  The skeletons came at them in a rush, a score from one side and at least that many from the other, and when they found the single opening to get at their living enemies, they banged against each other trying to get in.

  A single chop from Ivan's axe dispatched the first one that made its way down. Several more followed in a tight group, and Ivan backed away and nodded to his brother. Pikel lowered his club like a battering ram and started pumping his legs frantically, building momentum. Cadderly grabbed the dwarf's shoulder, hoping to keep their defensive posture intact, and it was Ivan, not Pikel, who knocked his hand away.

  "Tactics, boy, tactics," Ivan grumbled, shaking his head incredulously. "I told ye to leave the fighting to us."

  Cadderly nodded again and pulled back.

  Pikel sprang away, battering into the advancing skeletons like some animated ballista missile. With the general jumble of bones, it was hard to determine how many skeletons the dwarf actually had destroyed. The important factor was that many more still remained. Pikel wheeled about quickly and came rushing back, one skeleton right behind him.

  "Down!" Ivan yelled and Pikel dove to the ground just as Ivan's great axe swiped about, bashing Pikel's pursuer into little pieces.

  Cadderly vowed then to let the dwarves handle any future battle arrangements, humbling himself to the fact that the dwarves understood tactics far better than he ever could.

  Another small group of skeletons came on, and Ivan and Pikel used alternating attack routines, each playing off his brother's feints and charges, to easily defeat them. Cadderly rested back against the wall in sincere admiration, believing that the brothers could keep this up for a long, long time.

  Then, suddenly, the skeletons stopped advancing. They milled about by the entrance to the crate run for a moment, then systematically began dismantling the piles.

  "When did those things learn to think?" asked a disbelieving Ivan.

  "Something is guiding them," Cadderly replied, shifting his light beam all about the passage in search of the undead leader.

  * * * * *

  No light could reveal Druzil's invisibility. The imp watched impatiently and with growing concern. Counting the skeletons back in the earlier passages, these three adventurers had destroyed more than half the undead force.

  Druzil was not normally a gambling creature, not when his own safety was concerned, but this was not a normal situation. If these three were not stopped, they eventually would get into the altar room. Who could guess what kind of damage the two wild dwarves might cause in there?

  Yet, it was something about the human that bothered Druzil most of all. His eyes, the imp thought, and the careful and calculating way he swept his light beam, reminded Druzil pointedly of another powerful and dangerous human. Druzil had heard of dwarven resistance to all magic, even potent ones such as the chaos curse, so he could understand how the two had found their way down, but this human seemed even more clear-headed, more focused, than his companions.

  There could be only one answer: this one had been Barjin's catalyst in opening the bottle. Barjin had assured Druzil that he had put spells on the catalyst that would keep the man from remembering anything and from posing any threat. Had Barjin, perhaps, underestimated his foe? That possibility only increased Druzil's respect for Cadderly.

  Yes, the imp decided, this human was the true threat. Druzil rubbed his hands together eagerly and stretched his wings. It was time to end that threat.

  * * * * *

  "We've got to charge them before they rip it all down!" Ivan declared, but before he and Pikel could move, there came a sudden rush of wind.

  "Oo!" Pikel yelled, instinctively recognizing the sound as an attack. He grabbed the front of Cadderly's tunic and pulled him to the ground. A split second later, Pikel yelped out in pain and grabbed at his neck.

  The attacker became visible as it struck, and Cadderly, though he didn't recognize the creature precisely, knew it was a denizen of the lower planes, some sort of imp. The bat-winged thing flew off, its barbed tail trailing behind, dripping Pikel's blood.

  "Me brother!" shouted Ivan, but, though Pikel seemed a bit dazed, he warded off Ivan's attempts to see to his wound.

  "That was an imp," Cadderly explained, keeping the light beam in the direction the creature had flown. "Its sting is―" he stopped when he looked at the concerned brothers "―poisoned," Cadderly said softly.

  As if on cue, Pikel began to tremble violently and both Cadderly and Ivan thought he surely would go down. Dwarves, though, were a tough lot, and Pikel was a tough dwarf. A moment later, he growled loudly and threw off the trembling in a sudden violent jolt. Straightening, he smiled at his brother, hoisted his tree trunk, and nodded toward the skeletal host, still at work taking apart the crate defenses.

  "So it was poisoned," Ivan explained, looking pointedly at Cadderly. "Might've killed a man."

  "My thanks," Cadderly said to Pikel, and he would have gone on, except that other things demanded his attention at the moment. The imp had targeted him, he realized, and it most probably would be back.

  Cadderly released a latch on his walking stick and tilted the ram's head backward on cleverly hidden hinges. He then popped off the stick's bottom cap, leaving him a hollow tube.

  "Eh?" asked Pikel, wording Ivan's thoughts exactly.

  Cadderly only smiled in reply and continued his preparations. He unscrewed his feathered ring, the one filled with drow-style sleep poison, and showed the dwarves the tiny feather, its other end a cat's claw dripping with the potent black solution. Cadderly winked and fitted the dart into the end of his walking stick, then grabbed a nearby plank and waited.

  The fluttering sound of bat wings returned a moment later and both dwarves hoisted their weapons to defend. Cadderly had anticipated that the imp would be invisible again. He determined the general direction of the attack and, when the flapping grew near, tossed out the plank.

  The agile imp dodged the heavy board, just nicking it with one wing tip as he passed. While the hit hadn't done any real damage, it did cost Druzil dearly.

  With his walking stick blow-gun held to pursed lips, Cadderly registered the sound of the nick, aimed, and puffed. A slight thud told him that the dart had struck home.

  "Oo oi!" Pikel squealed in glee as the invisible imp, stuck with a quite visible dart, fluttered overhead. "Oo oi!"

  * * * * *

  Druzil wasn't sure if he or the corridor was spinning. Whichever it was, he knew, somewhere in the back of his dreamy thoughts, that it was not a good thing. Normally poisons would not affect an imp, especially on a plane of existence other than its own. But the cat's-claw dart that had struck Druzil was coated in drow sleep poison, which was among the most potent concoctions in all the world.

  "My skeletons," the imp whispered, remembering his command, and feeling that he was somehow needed in some distant battle. Druzil couldn't sort it out; all he wanted to do was sleep.

  He should have landed first.

  He hit the wall before he realized that he was flying, and fell with a heavy groan. The concussion shook a bit of the slumber from him and he remembered suddenly that the battle was not so distant and that he was indeed needed ... but the thought of sleep felt so muc
h better.

  Druzil kept enough of his wits about him to get out of the open corridor. His bones crackled in transformation, leathery skin ripped and reshaped. Soon he was a large centipede, invisible still, and he slipped in through a crack in the wall and let the slumber overtake him.

  * * * * *

  When Druzil fell, so did any semblance of organization in the skeleton forces. Now the imp's intrusions into the undead creatures' predetermined commands worked against the skeletons, for they were not thinking creatures and their original course had been seriously interrupted.

  Some skeletons wandered aimlessly away, others hung their bony arms down by their sides and stood perfectly still, while others continued their methodical dismantling of the crate barricades, though they no longer followed any purpose in their actions. Only one group remained hostile, rushing down the narrow channel at Cadderly and the dwarves, their arms reaching out eagerly.

  Ivan and Pikel met them squarely with powerful chops and straightforward thrusts. Even Cadderly managed to get in a few hits. He stood behind Pikel, knowing that Ivan's antlers probably would foul his spindle-disks. Pikel was only about four feet tall, with another few inches added for the pot helmet, and Cadderly, standing at six feet, snapped off shots whenever the dwarf's clubbing maneuvers allowed him an opening.

  At Cadderly's suggestion, they worked their way down the channel, leaving piles of bones in their wake. The imp had been controlling the skeletons, Cadderly realized, and with the imp down―Cadderly had heard it hit the wall―Cadderly suspected that the monsters would take little initiative in the fight.

  With the one attacking group dispatched, Ivan and Pikel moved cautiously toward those breaking down the barricades. The skeletons offered no resistance, didn't even look up from their work, as the dwarves smashed them into bits. Similarly, those skeletons still remaining in the area, those standing still and showing no signs that they had even been animated, fell easy prey to the dwarves.

  "That's the lot," Ivan announced, blasting the skull from the last standing skeleton, "except for those that are running away. We can catch them!"

  "Let them wander," Cadderly offered.

  Ivan glared at him.

  "We have more important business," Cadderly replied, his words more a suggestion than a command. He moved slowly toward where the imp had crashed, the dwarves at his side, but found no sign of Druzil, not even the feathered dart.

  "Which way then?" asked an impatient Ivan.

  "Back the way we came," Cadderly replied. "I will have an easier time finding the altar room if we return to tunnels I know. Now that the skeletons have been defeated..."

  "Oo!" chirped Pikel suddenly. Cadderly and Ivan looked around anxiously, thinking another attack imminent.

  "What do ye see?" asked Ivan, staring into the empty distance.

  "Oo!" Pikel said again, and when his brother and Cadderly looked back at him, they understood that he was responding to no outside threat.

  He was trembling again.

  "Oo!" Pikel clutched at his chest and went into a series of short hops.

  "Poison!" Cadderly cried to Ivan. "The excitement of battle allowed him to fight it off, but only temporarily!"

  "Oo!" Pikel agreed, scratching furiously at his breastplate, as if he were trying to get at his heart.

  Ivan ran over and grabbed him to hold him steady. "Ye're a dwarf!" he yowled. "Ye don't go falling to poison!"

  Cadderly knew better. In the same book he had found the drow recipe, he had read of many of the Realms' known poisons. Near the top of the potency list, beside the deadly sting of a wyvern's tail and the bite of the dreaded two-headed amphisbaena snake, were listed several poisons of lower plane denizens, among them one from the tail stingers of imps. Dwarves were as resistant to poison as to magic, but if the imp had hit Pikel solidly ...

  "Oo!" Pikel cried one final time. His trembling mocked Ivan's desperate efforts to hold him steady and, with a sudden burst of power, he threw his brother aside and stood staring blankly ahead for just a moment. Then he fell, and both Ivan and Cadderly knew he was dead before they ever got to him.

  Ghouls

  They had heard the call of the necromancer's stone; they had sensed the dead walking and knew that a crypt had been disturbed. They were hungry now―they were always hungry―and the promises of carrion, ancient and new, brought them running, hunched low on legs that once had been human. Long tongues wagged between pointy teeth, dripping lines of dirty saliva along chins and necks.

  They didn't care; they were hungry.

  They came up along the road, darting in and out of the deepening afternoon shadows as they made their way toward the large building. One man, a tall human in long gray robes, was up there milling about the great doors. The lead ghoul bent low over its bowed legs and charged, arms hanging low, knuckles dragging on the ground, and fingers twitching excitedly.

  Long and filthy fingernails, as sharp and tough as a wild animal's claws, caught the unsuspecting priest on the shoulder. His agonized cries only increased the frenzy. He tried to fight back, but the chill of the diseased, ghoulish touch deadened his limbs. His features locked in a horror-filled, paralyzed contortion, and the pack fell over him, tearing him apart in seconds.

  One by one, the ghouls drifted away from the devoured corpse, toward the great doors and the promise of more food. But each of them veered away, shielding its eyes with raised arms as it approached, for the doors were blessed and heavily warded against intrusions by undead creatures. The ghouls wandered about for a moment, hungry and frustrated, then one of them heard the call of the stone again, to the south of the structure, and the pack swept off to find it.

  * * * * *

  It was a damp place, with pools of muddy water dotting the earthen floor and mossy vines, covered by crawling things, hanging from the evenly spaced support beams. Danica moved cautiously, the torch far out in front of her, and she kept as far from the sinister-looking moss as possible.

  Newander was less concerned with the hanging strands, for they were a natural growth, as were the insects crawling over them, and so were within the druid's realm of understanding. Still, though, Newander seemed even more anxious than Danica. He stopped several times and looked around, as if he was trying to locate something.

  Finally his fears infected Danica. She moved beside him, studying him closely in the torchlight.

  "What do you seek?" she asked bluntly.

  "I sense a wrongness," Newander replied cryptically.

  "An evil?"

  "Your Cadderly told me of undead monsters walking the crypts," Newander explained. "Now I know he was telling me true. They are the greatest perversion of nature's order, a wrong upon the earth itself."

  Danica could understand why a druid, whose entire life was based on natural order, might be sensitive to the presence of undead monsters, but she was amazed that Newander could actually sense they were nearby. "The walking dead have passed this place?" she asked, fully trusting that his answer would be correct.

  Newander shrugged and looked around nervously again. "They are close about," he replied, "too close."

  "How can you know?" Danica pressed.

  Newander looked at her curiously, confusedly. "I... I cannot," he stammered, "and yet I do."

  "The curse?" Danica wondered aloud.

  "My senses do not lie to me," Newander insisted. He spun about suddenly, back toward the tunnel entrance, as if he had heard something.

  Just an instant later, Danica jumped in surprise as a screech sounded from the tunnel entrance, now no more than a gray blur far behind. She recognized the cry as Percival's, but that fact did not calm her, for even then the hunched forms appeared at the entrance, the sound of their hungry slobbers carrying all the way down to the woman and the druid.

  "Run, Danica!" Newander cried and turned to go.

  Danica did not move, unafraid of any enemy. She saw eight man-sized shapes distinctly, though she had no idea if they were priests from the library o
r monsters. Either way, Danica saw no advantage in stumbling down the tunnel, perhaps running into a waiting enemy and having to fight both foes at the same time. Also, Danica could not ignore Percival. She would fight for the white squirrel as surely as she would fight for any friend.

  "They are undead," the druid tried to explain and, even as he spoke the words, the rotted ghoul stench filled their nostrils. The odor told Newander much about their enemy, and his desire to flee only increased. It was too late, though. "Do not let them scratch you," Newander advised. "Their touch will freeze the marrow of your bones."

  Danica crouched low, feeling the balance of the torch and tuning all her senses to her surroundings. Above her, Percival skittered along a wooden beam; behind her, Newander had begun a low chant, a spell preparation; and before her, the pack came on, hissing and sputtering, but slower now, out of respect for the blazing torch.

  The pack came to within a dozen running strides of Danica and halted. Danica saw their yellow, sickly eyes, but unlike those of a corpse, these shone with inner, hungry fires. She heard their breathless gasps and saw their long and pointy tongues, flicking like a reptile's might. Danica crouched even lower, sensing their mounting excitement.

  As a group, they charged, but it was Newander who struck first. As the ghouls passed under a crossbeam, the moss came to life. Like the vines that had held Danica to her bed, the moss strands grabbed at the passing ghouls. Three of the creatures were fully entangled; two others scrambled and spat in horrifying rage, their ankles hooked, but three came right through.

  The lead ghoul bore down on Danica, who stood poised and unafraid. She held her unthreatening posture until the very last moment, luring the ghoul right in on her, so close that even Newander let out an alarmed cry.

  Danica was in perfect control of the situation. Her torch shot out suddenly, its fiery end slamming the ghoul right in the eye. The creature recoiled and let out a shriek that sent tingling shivers along Danica's spine.