by John Shirley
The three adventurers found him there, dozing in the late afternoon stillness and dreaming of Waterdeep.
The dandy poked him awake with one pointed toe. “What are you doing, boy?” he asked, but his eyes were bright with laughter and he looked as if he knew what Gustin would answer.
“I’ve come to help you to find the treasure,” Gustin said as boldly as he could with grass sticking out of his hair and a few dry leaves itching their way down his shirt as he scrambled to his feet.
“How do you know we are looking for treasure? Or your help?” said the dwarf, and his face was harder and more suspicious than his companions.
“You said … last night … well, I thought,” Gustin mumbled a little, staring at his toes, wondering if he’d been a bit rash.
“Of course, we are after treasure,” said Nerhaltan. “What else would three like us be doing here? The boy’s too bright for us to deceive.” The dandy nodded high over Gustin’s head at his companions. “We welcome your help, young wizard, welcome it indeed.”
“I’m no wizard,” Gustin quickly answered. “But I do know these ruins.”
“Does your uncle know where you are?” asked Wervyn. The fighter looked concerned and frowned when Gustin shook his head. “Maybe you should go back to your farm, boy.”
“Nonsense,” answered Nerhaltan for him. “The boy’s got too much adventure in him to be content on some farm. Lead on, lad, lead on. There’s plenty for all if we can find our prize.”
Gustin led the three men toward the ruins. The woods buzzed with the usual noise of a warm autumn afternoon, birds calling to mates, the deep rumble of frogs, the chittering of insects. It sounded so normal that Gustin paused.
“What is it?” asked the dandy.
Gustin shrugged. He felt as if a dozen ants were marching up and down his spine. A prickling of his skin unlike anything he had ever felt before.
“Are we going forward or going back?” said Tapper.
“Forward,” replied the dandy, giving Gustin a slight shove between the shoulder blades. “Go to, sirrah, go to.”
“There’s something wrong,” said Gustin.
“What?”
He shook his head. Suddenly he wondered if he should have listened to his uncle and stayed home. And then he was ashamed of his cowardice. Here he was, so close to discovering a lost treasure, and he stood trembling, afraid of a few birds singing in the tangled branches over his head.
Even as that thought tumbled through his mind, Gustin let out a great sigh of relief and enlightenment.
“It’s the birds,” he said to the three adventurers staring at him. “The birds. It’s the wrong time of year. They should not be singing like that.”
And the minute he said it, the woods fell silent. Not a cheep or a chirp could be heard.
The fighter drew his repaired sword out of the scabbard with a well-oiled hiss.
“It is close,” he said to his friends.
Tapper peered from side to side. “Keep everyone together now. No one out of sight.”
Gustin stared at the three now surrounding him in a tight knot.
“What is it?” he asked, with a sinking certainty that he would not like the answer he would receive from the adults.
“Nothing to worry about,” said Nerhaltan with a strained smile. “Go on, boy, go on ahead. There’s a hole, you see, down by the base of the wall. It’s too small for us, even Tapper won’t fit, but if you can wiggle your way in …”
A shout sounded to their left. It sounded uncommonly like his uncle calling “Gustin! Gustin!”
Out of habit, Gustin almost started toward the shouts, into the thickest part of the woods, but Tapper grabbed his shirttails and pulled him back. “To the wall, boy, to the wall.”
Silence fell again. Gustin listened but he heard no more from his uncle. Perhaps he was turning away and searching toward the village road.
They reached the walls of the ruin. The place seemed colder than before and more menacing than he remembered, the shadows clustering at the base of the wall and making a gloomy twilight inside the roofless rooms of the abandoned fort.
High above his head, a kitten mewed, a lost sound. Poor thing, thought Gustin, it must have climbed the wall and gotten itself stuck. Fond of cats, he chirped, hoping to draw it into the open.
“Hush!” Nerhaltan clapped a hand over Gustin’s mouth. “Don’t call to it.”
Gustin wiggled his way free and eyed the dandy with suspicion. “Why should I be afraid of a stray kitten?”
“Not a cat,” muttered Tapper, nervously looking around. “It just sounds like a cat. When it’s not trying to sound like your mother.”
“Or a flock of birds.” That from the fighter, who had put his back to the ruins’ wall and was staring out at the woods.
“Now, about this hole,” said Nerhaltan. There was a hole at the base of the wall, newly dug, as Gustin could tell by the fresh clods of dirt lining its rim. As the dandy had said, the opening was small, the stone blocks of the wall preventing it from being enlarged beyond the current opening.
Gustin went flat on his stomach and peered within. He snapped his fingers, concentrating on a useful spell that the widow had taught him, and made a light. The little glowing ball rolled away from his hand and dropped down the hole. It disappeared into a chamber located just under the wall.
“A safe room. All these little hill forts used to have them. A place to hide treasure,” explained Tapper, leaning over Gustin’s shoulder. “The original way in … well, we couldn’t use that. So I came around to the other side of the wall and broke in through the roof. But it’s too narrow a route for us to wiggle down and back.”
The air issuing from the hole smelled stale, dank, and uncommonly like a grave to Gustin.
“Is something down there?” Gustin asked. For the end of his sensitive nose caught another scent, a stink like an animal, but no animal that he could identify.
“Nothing down there now,” said Nerhaltan.
“Now that it is out here,” added Wervyn. The fighter was facing away from the wall, looking up the broad stone staircase that wound around the tower to the guards’ walk at the top of the wall.
“Go on, wiggle in.” The dandy gave Gustin a little push from behind. “Look for a box, a little gold box with brilliants around the edge of the lid. That’s all we need to pay our way to Waterdeep.”
The late afternoon shadows stretched from the trees to the base of the fort, like long black fingers reaching for the adventurers standing over Gustin. “Hurry,” said Nerhaltan. “We should be out of here as quickly as possible.”
For the very first time in his ten years, Gustin wished that he was back at the farm and his uncle was yelling at him about his neglected chores.
He slid headfirst into the hole, plunging his arms in front of him like a swimmer to drag himself forward. His feet kicked the air outside until somebody grabbed his ankles—Nerhaltan, probably—and shoved him all the way in. Gustin slithered forward, concentrating on his light spell. A faint glow began to strengthen before him.
“What do you see?” The shout sounded very far away and muffled to his ears.
“Nothing!” he yelled back.
Then he popped like a cork from a bottle, tumbling out of the tunnel and onto the littered, stinking floor of the room under the wall. Piles of debris cushioned his fall. For which he was grateful until he put his hand onto the half-rotted corpse of a mouse. With a yelp of disgust, he rolled away, only to land on a much larger pile of bones that crumbled and cracked under his slight weight.
Gustin sprang hastily to his feet and spat a hasty command to his spell. By the glowing light that he now made float in the center of the room, he could discern rib bones, leg bones, and a few vertebrae. After a squeamish moment, he came to the conclusion that these were the remains of a lost sheep or, possibly, a calf. It certainly could not be a ten-year-old boy. After all, if somebody his age had gone missing from the village, he would have known. Even i
f it had been years and years ago. Or so he told himself firmly.
Gustin began kicking through the trash strewn about the room, looking for the gold box that Nerhaltan described. Nothing glittered or gleamed. After one quick turn around the room, he decided the search was hopeless and that he would rather be above ground, no matter what lurked among the trees.
Crossing back to the hole where he had entered, Gustin found that it was just out of reach. Even pushing the larger bones, dead leaves, and other bits of rubbish in the room into a pile under the hole didn’t help. The material was too unstable. Every time he climbed up, the pile collapsed under his feet.
“Help!” he yelled. “I need a rope!”
There was no answer.
Gustin called again, louder and more urgent.
A faint cough sounded far above his head and then he heard Nerhaltan call, “Where are you, boy? Where have you gone?”
The dandy’s voice was muffled and strangely distorted and, Gustin shivered despite himself, altogether too eager for an answer. Especially for a man who should know exactly where he was. After all, Nerhaltan had pushed him down this hole.
All the magic Gustin possessed tingled up and down his spine. Something was out there and it meant him harm.
Something sniffed at the hole leading into the safe room. Something scratched at stone and dirt, as if something too big for the hole was trying to dig its way in.
Gustin drew a deep breath and concentrated as he had never concentrated before. Then he opened his mouth and let his voice sail out and away from him, using the very same spell that had so startled the adventurers in the tavern. “Here I am! Here I am!” His words should be sounding from the very top of the hill fort’s crumbling tower if his spell worked.
He held his breath, keeping perfectly still. Faintly, distantly, he heard the scrape of a heavy body moving away.
“We found a way but we could not use that,” Wervyn had said. Not a lock, not a barred door, Gustin decided. But a creature hunting in the tunnels under the fort? Is that what had driven the adventurers above ground and to this second, futile attempt, using him to rob the safe room?
He dashed across the room, running his hands across the dank and soiled walls. Solid stone scraped his palms. He ran a circuit of the room, banging heavily against walls, kicking at the foundations, looking in the waning light of his spell for any sign of a door.
When he found it, he practically tumbled through it. Rotted wood painted to look like stone gave way before his frantic blows. He kicked a hole large enough to crawl through and found himself at the base of a bare stone stair twisting up toward the fort’s main gate.
With as light a step as possible, Gustin speeded up the stairs to arrive, panting, at the top. By the slant of the shadows covering the courtyard, he had been below ground for barely an hour, perhaps even less. But he was acutely aware of the unnatural stillness of the woods beyond the ruins. Not a bird chirped, not an insect buzzed.
Above his head, he heard a cry, almost startling him from his crouched hiding place at the top of the stairs. Then he realized it was his own voice, still echoing among the stones: “Here I am! Here I am!”
“Where are you, boy? Why are you hiding?” A great shadow passed overheard as something huge and beastly clattered along the guards’ walkway that ran across the top of the fort’s wall. The voice was Nerhaltan’s but the shadow cast by the dropping sun upon the weed-choked courtyard was too large to be that of the slender man.
Gustin crept under the broken arch of the main gate. He slid around the gate’s main pillar, hugging as tightly to the wall as he could, hoping whatever prowled above him would not glance down.
The woods were very close, he told himself firmly. He only had to sprint a short distance with no cover at all before he could lose himself in the friendly shadows under the trees. Whatever hunted at the top of the wall surely could not leap down and catch him before he reached the trees. All these arguments made perfect sense in his head but he could not persuade his trembling body to leave the relative safety of the wall.
Then he remembered Nerhaltan pushing him down the hole with uneasy glances toward all sides.
Gustin stared in the direction of the hole where he first entered the hill fort. He could easily see the loose dirt piled outside the wall. Equally easily, he could make out the distinct shape of a man’s boot leaning against the wall. It looked very much like Nerhaltan’s leg. As for the rest of the dandy, there was no sign. Just the one leg leaning against the blood-splattered wall.
Fighting back the bile rising in his throat, Gustin prepared to run as he had never run before. Directly above him, he heard the beast cry out in Nerhaltan’s voice, “There you are, clever boy!”
Another shout sounded across the meadow: “Gustin!”
Emerging from the trees, his uncle ran toward him, shouldering the heavy crossbow that he kept over the mantle for winter’s wolves and other raiders of the chicken coop.
Behind his uncle strode the widow, her hands alight with flame. “Get down!” she yelled, even as his uncle dropped to one knee and fired an iron bolt over Gustin’s head.
Gustin flattened himself in the weeds at the base of the wall. He heard the beast above cry out in pain, no longer disguising its voice, but screaming with a ferocious roar of frustrated bloodlust.
The widow spat out the words of a spell and long ropes of flame streamed from her outstretched fingers. The beast howled louder. The stench of scorched flesh and fur rolled over the gagging Gustin as he crawled as hastily as possible away from the wall.
His uncle reloaded the crossbow and shot again. The second bolt also struck home. The beast coughed and called out weirdly in the voice of the dandy: “Ah, the blood, the blood.”
A heavy body crashed down from the guards’ walk at the top of the wall. Gustin rolled over and stared down the length of his body. Framed between his boot toes was a hideous blend of a stag’s legs with a lion’s body and a giant badger’s head. A tufted tail lashed from side to side as the wounded creature struggled to its hooves. It kicked out at Gustin but a blaze of fire from the advancing widow drove it briefly away from the boy.
Gustin scrambled to his feet. The badger head swayed back and forth, the open mouth blowing out a carrion breath that made him gag. Bony ridges lined the inside of its black lips, clearly visible, far too close to his nose.
Raising his own hands, Gustin repeated the spell being shouted by the widow. It was louder and longer than the one that she had taught him to light a candle. Smoke rather than fire blossomed at his fingertips. Cursing his fumble of the spell, he flung the smoke at the beast’s eyes. Baffled and choking on the thick black smoke streaming from Gustin’s hands, it wheeled around, racing away from Gustin to the safety of the trees.
A third bolt from his uncle’s crossbow pierced the creature’s throat. It tumbled over its hooves, crumbling into the grass.
With three strides, Gustin’s uncle reached him and swept him up in a hard one-armed embrace. Then he dropped Gustin with a thump. “I told you to stay away from magic,” he growled. “I told you to stay away from those men.”
“Ah,” said the widow, crushing Gustin in her own mint-scented embrace. “Leave the boy alone. How was he to know there was a leucrotta in these ruins?”
Gustin wiggled his way out of the widow’s hug. “Where are they?” he said, looking around for the tall fighter and his dwarf companion.
“Run off!” snorted his uncle. “We saw them on the road.”
“He’s been searching for you all morning,” the widow whispered in Gustin’s ear.
“But why?”
“Because you are family,” grunted his uncle, shouldering his crossbow and stepping around the dead beast in the meadow.
“That’s worth something,” the widow said, pointing at the leucrotta’s body.
His uncle shrugged. “Send them out from the village to fetch it. It’s magic and I’ll have none of it.”
“It wasn’t mag
ic that killed her,” the widow said. “And it won’t be magic that kills this boy.”
His uncle shook his head and stomped off. The widow sighed. “There goes a stubborn man. It wasn’t magic, that’s what I keep telling him.”
“Who? Who died?” But even as he asked, he knew the answers. It was as close to his heart as her book about Waterdeep.
“Your mother was always twice the wizard that I was,” said the widow. “And restless with it. That farm was far too small to hold her. But it stole the laughter from him when she took to wandering. She was all the family he had.”
“He has me.” Gustin knew even as he said it that the day was coming when he would follow his mother’s footsteps out of the village. The adventurers might have tricked him, even run off and left him, but it didn’t make their tales any less appealing. He would go to Waterdeep and see the City of Splendors for himself.
“Make me a promise,” said the widow as they walked through the woods. “The next time you leave, tell us both good-bye. Don’t make her mistake and go running off without a word.”
“I promise,” Gustin said, and with a whisper of magic, he made his words echo from all the treetops.
Rosemary Jones is the author of two FORGOTTEN REALMS stand-alone novels, Crypt of the Moaning Diamond and City of the Dead. Her short stories can be found in the FORGOTTEN REALMS anthologies Realms of Dragons II and Realms of the Dead as well as other science fiction and fantasy books. For more on her latest projects, check her website at www.rosemaryjones.com.
TO CHAOS AND BACK AGAIN
JODY LYNN NYE
Bab threw himself into the ditch just in time. The foul, gritty red dust went up his nose and sifted into his curly brown hair, but he held his breath until the urge to sneeze passed. Not that anyone could have heard it, of course. He gripped his hammer until his fingertips could have pierced through the thick leather wrappings on the handle. The solid metal gave him comfort. Passed down from his grandfather’s many-times grandfather, it was ingrained with virtues that helped him shape metal or slay enemies usually beyond the capability of a halfling.
