At first, Lord Vulpin did not recognize the ancient figure sprawled beside the battered telescope cabinet in what was left of the Tower of Tarmish. Then the rheumy old eyes, staring at him with livid hatred, told him who this relic was. “Clonogh,” the Lord of Tarmish purred. “So your tarnished magic has reduced you to this. Where is the Fang of Orm that you were to deliver to me?”
The old mage glared at him, despising him but helpless to harm him. Vulpin glanced around, wrinkling his nose. A foul stench seemed to pervade the atmosphere here, and he heard tiny, muffled lapping noises that seemed nearby. The din of battle below-the remaining forces of Gelnia and Tarmish were hand to hand and blade to shield now in the courtyard beneath the tower-almost drowned out all other sound. Then he turned crimson eyes on the cowering Clonogh again, and raised his black visor. A cruel grin split his beard. “The Fang or your life, mage. The choice is yours.”
“Kill me,” Clonogh hissed. A wavering, bony finger pointed at Vulpin’s blood-stained sword. “I want nothing more than death.”
“It is no matter,” Vulpin sneered. “The Fang is here. I saw the creature that brought it. But no clean death is yours, master mage.” From his tunic he withdrew a little, glassy sphere, holding it casually between finger and thumb of a gauntleted hand. “Your soul, old man,” he purred. “I said I would return it one day. So here it is.”
“The Fang is no good to you without a wishmaker,” Clonogh spat, struggling to arise. “An innocent. Where will such as you find an innocent, now that your captive girl is gone?”
“Gone?” Vulpin grinned, barked a command and a huge, armored brute stepped out of the stairwell into daylight. One of Vulpin’s cave-vandal guards carried a struggling girl under his arm as casually as a smaller man might carry a puppy. The girl was Thayla Mesinda. “I found her just below,” Vulpin said. “Apparently she and some others had been hiding in the cellars beneath this place. She will speak the wish I want, Clonogh, the wish that will rid me of all annoyances.” With a sneer, Vulpin stepped to the precipitous edge of the broken tower and raised the glassy bauble in his fingers. “You have earned your reward, Clonogh,” he said. “The return of your soul. Here it is. If you want it, go get it.”
With a chuckle, Vulpin tossed the glass sphere outward.
“My soul!” Clonogh shrieked. With the last of his strength he darted past Vulpin and dived outward, trying to catch the falling sphere. It was falling free, at the limit of his reach. With his last strength he reached for the little sphere, and with his last breath, as he plummeted toward the cobbled courtyard, Clonogh voiced a spell. It was his last, and now the ravages of it no longer mattered. He put into it every shred of his energies, every trace of his hatred, and the arcane words still echoed above the tumult of battle as the old magician’s fingers closed around his falling “soul” and his withered body shattered upon the stones of the court. “You will never leave this place,” the echoes seemed to say.
A thin, dark cloud might have floated for a moment above the gore of the splattered corpse, then swirled and wound around the standing tower, darkening the stones. It might have, or it might have been no more than a trick of light and shadows.
Inside the telescope cabinet, Clout was sipping stew from a huge vat of the stuff that had suddenly, for no reason he could understand, appeared there beside him. The gully dwarf was aware of a great deal of commotion just outside the cabinet. There were Talls out there, arguing and shouting. But it meant nothing to Clout. He had wished that he had some stew. Now he had stew, a whole pot-full of fresh, hot stew, and the pot itself seemed to be none other than the legendary Great Stew Bowl of the Bulps.
Another person, even some other gully dwarves, might have found all this puzzling. But Clout had never been one to wonder about things beyond his understanding, and thus he rarely ever wondered about anything at all. The stew he had wished for was here, and he was hungry. Lacking any other utensil, he dipped in with both hands, then stuck his bearded face into the mess to lap at the juices.
He had just come up for air, belching happily, when the great, helmet-framed face of a fire-eyed human filled the broken panel beside him and the man’s voice said, “Ah, there it is.” A large, armor-clad arm reached into Clout’s hiding place, swatted the gully dwarf casually aside, and gauntleted fingers closed around his bashing tool.
“Here, now!” Clout shrieked as the white stick was pulled away from him. With a lunge and leap that almost cleared the stew pot, but not quite, the Chief Basher of Clan Bulp caught his receding bashing tool and hung on. Half-submerged in noisome stew, he grasped the stick with both hands and clung to it. “My bashin’ tool!” he wailed at the top of his lungs. “How come ever’body tryin’ steal my bashin’ tool?”
Chapter 22
“I thought you were watching her!” Graywing’s Feral eyes blazed with fury. He towered over Dartimien the Cat, hovering in rage to confront the smaller man nose-to-nose. “I turn my back for a moment, only for a moment, and you lose her!”
“Back off or you’ll lose that yammering tongue, barbarian!” the Cat snarled, not giving an inch of ground. “Don’t blame me if you can’t keep track of your women. I was busy looking for a way out of this place!”
The stairs Dartimien had found, leading upward from the great catacombs beneath Tarmish, had brought them into a labyrinth of interlaced tunnels-sewers and storm drains for the city above. It was a maze of buried pathways, some wide and some narrow, most dark and winding, many rambling aimlessly, and all ripe with the accumulated refuse of generations of Tarmish history.
A gaggle of gully dwarves had followed the three humans up from the catacombs, it seemed the dim little creatures were everywhere, and these scampered here and there, exploring. Normally, the dim-witted little people were terrified of humans. The gully dwarves were, in fact, terrified of nearly everything, at first sight. But they were as adaptable as they were dense. Once having become accustomed to someone or something, anyone or anything, and accepting its presence, they merely assumed that it had always been there and was simply a part of the mysterious world in which they lived. Gully dwarves had been known to tolerate the presence of humans, goblins, turkeys, an ogre or two and even, now and then, a dragon, once they became accustomed to its presence.
For their part, humans generally paid no more attention to gully dwarves than they would to any other vermin. They were, after all, only gully dwarves-a nuisance, but seldom worth worrying about.
The tunnels wound and intersected, lighted only by occasional small grates, iron-barred and opening into the courtyards below the tower. There in the daylight, beyond the stone-bound slits, armed men marched and scurried, some of them searching for others, some locked in combat with those they had found. Gelnians and Tarmites, the warriors of the Vale of Sunder seemed oblivious to all but their ancient feud. Here and there, the seeps from above were red with fresh-spilled blood. And beneath it all, the sewers wound here and there in reeking gloom.
In such surroundings Graywing the Plainsman-skilled tracker and pathfinder of the wild lands-was hopelessly confused. His was a world of open skies and long winds. The cluster and stench of cities left him disoriented. So the city-born Dartimien, to whom sewers and rancid alleys were second nature, had taken it on himself to chart a path that might lead to an exit.
But at an intersection of several tunnels he had paused to read the markings on a wall (accompanied by an interested gully dwarf or two) trusting to the sound of the plainsman’s boots to lead him to the others. He had followed the sound, and found Graywing. But the plainsman was alone. There was no sign of Thayla Mesinda. They realized simultaneously that the girl was missing, when each discovered that she wasn’t with the other. The two warriors faced each other angrily in the dim light of a sewer channel, while here and there frightened gully dwarves scurried for cover.