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 gully 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 o
ther 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 water that, despite its effluent stench, Gus found strangely cleansing.
FOUR
Sons Of Kayolin
T he 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.
The elder shrugged and uttered a sound almost like a growl. “Let’s get on with it.”
“Shouldn’t we… I don’t know… bury him or something?” Brandon asked softly.
Nailer looked at him angrily but surprisingly did not make a contemptuous retort. Instead, he drew a breath, as if trying to be patient. “Look at his shield. Can you make out the sign?”
Brandon knelt and played the light over the shattered buckler. “No. Something black, some kind of shape. But it could be anything.”
“So it’s not the Bluestone Wedge, right? Right? He’s not from our house?”
The younger brother shook his head as Nailer went on. “And he’s got-he had-black hair. That marks him as maybe a Theiwar or Daergar, maybe a Klar. But he certainly wasn’t a Hylar.”
“No, not a Hylar,” Brandon agreed.
“Then he’s not even a dwarf of our clan. Let’s leave him for his own kin to lay to rest. If it makes you feel better, we can report the finding to someone once we get back to Garnet Thax.”
His brother was right, and in fact, Brandon only then reflected on how hard it would be to dig a grave in the solid bedrock. It could be done, of course-they were delving dwarves by nature-but it would take an awful lot of work. And the sounds of the digging would be sure to attract attention, he realized with a shudder.
“So do you think it’s true? That these caves are haunted down here?” he asked tentatively.
“Does it look to you like he was done in by a ghost?” asked Nailer, back to his old sarcastic self.
Brandon winced, not wishing to consider the question. “I guess not. Anyway, we’ve come pretty far below the Zhaban Delvings. It seems like we might be in the right cave. At least there used to be something in here that discouraged exploration.”
“Used to be?” Nailer snorted. “I’d give good odds that this poor fellow was done in by a cave troll and even better odds that the damned thing is still down here.”
Brandon tightened the chin strap of his helmet and gripped the haft of his venerable axe in both hands, trying not to let his excitement show. He had battled goblins before and even-with Nailer and his father-taken on a bull ogre in its mountain lair. But a troll was fiercer, shrewder, and meaner than any of those foes. A troll would be very exciting. He sincerely hoped they’d have a chance to find it, kill it, and bring its head home as a trophy for the king. That would get his family noticed at the royal court!
“You’re not so stupid that you want to meet a troll, are you?” Nailer asked in contempt, eyeing his brother warily.
Brandon bristled resentfully. “What if I am? We could take it, you and I.” With his axe head, he indicated his brother’s strong right arm, the hand that held the warhammer Nailer had recently purchased with its chiseled head of Kayo
lin steel. The length of that weapon’s mighty hilt was impressive, half Nailer’s height. Nailer had been carrying it in a sling across his back for most of the long weeks of their mission. Brandon saw his brother lift the hammer from its sling and hold it at the ready, easily balancing the heavy weapon in one hand.
“Wouldn’t that just be the Bluestone luck?” Nailer snorted again. “Why not make it three cave trolls?”
He drew a breath, clearly trying hard to contain his exasperation as he fixed his younger brother with a stern glare. “Listen, you fool of a lad. We’re down here because all the tests, every other cave we’ve explored, suggests there might be a true vein of gold in this rock. A real treasure, which would bring real rewards to mother and father-and to all of us. If we have to fight some cave troll to find it, so be it. But Reorx take my tongue if I’m going to go looking for the monster or let it distract us from our purpose.”
“Yeah, I know,” Brandon conceded. He adjusted the straps of his heavy pack and followed his brother as Nailer stepped past the decayed corpse and continued into the darkness. Still, the younger dwarf couldn’t suppress another rush of excitement, and his knuckles whitened around his weapon as he stared into the shadowy niches to either side of the descending cavern. “But did you ever think that, just maybe, winning a fight with a troll might start to change the Bluestone luck?”
Nailer ignored him, and Brandon followed him along, feeling surprisingly cheerful. Exploration was a far cry from the grinding tedium of the king’s court. He felt more at home exploring the dangerous passages with his brother than he ever did negotiating the banquets and ceremonies that attended the great throne room in Garnet Thax. There, he was keenly conscious of his role as a very insignificant member of a very insignificant, and notably unlucky, noble family, surrounded by swaggering wealthy merchants and captains, rich mine owners and shrewd traders.
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