The thing filled all the passage, blotting out the light streaming from above and casting the passage into ever deepening darkness. It was constructed of circular layers of wood bolted together and coated by a hard slick varnish to keep out the water and maintain buoyancy. It ground along the passageway, pushed from behind by what appeared to be a wall of water reaching all the way to the roof.
“We’ll be crushed!” Morg remarked gleefully. Dr. Palaver had already fled, abandoning his patient, before Whort got his uncle turned around and headed in the right direction. But there was nowhere to run. They quickly caught up to the puffing old physician as he stood before the tunnel blockage-a massive dam of sticks, treelimbs, bones, bits of furniture and cloth, a wheel, the bodies of more rats than they cared to count, even a bathtub, all cemented together by the thick black sewer sludge.
“Trapped like gully dwarves!” the doctor cried, pulling at his beard.
But Whort had no desire to be flattened, crunch or no crunch. Turning his uncle once more, he shoved the elder kender into a hole in the wall barely wide enough to admit his pouches and hoopak. Complaining volubly of missing all the fun, Morg climbed inside. Dr. Palaver followed, with Whort dragging his feet to safety a bare heartbeat before the sewer ball cast the tiny upward-sloping pipe into pitchy darkness.
Of course, a moment later, raw sewage roared in behind them, blasting the two kender and their gnomish companion up the length of the pipe, disgorging them into a small, round chamber dimly lit by a grate in the low roof above.
“Ah. We have reached a safe room. Good show,” the gnome said as he wrung out the sleeves of his no-longer white coat. “We should be quite safe here. You see, the safe rooms lie above the highest level of the sewer. Even at flood time, we will have to wait a bit for the level to subsist, but then I think we may then continue our search for gully dwarves.”
“Won’t those do?” Morg asked while pinching his nostrils. With his free hand, he pointed into a dark corner, where a half dozen pairs of beady black eyes gleamed back at them.
“They will do admiralty,” the gnome answered. He rushed to Whort’s side. “I will minotaur your reactions as you approach the gully dwarves. Are you afraid?”
Whort shook his head that he wasn’t, almost dislodging the strange spectacles still clinging to his pointy ears.
“Approach them now,” the doctor ordered. “When I tell you, you must drink the potion. Do you have it?”
Whort shook his head that he didn’t. Dr. Palaver frantically searched his own pockets, until Morg produced it from one of his own. “You left it on the table back at the office,” he explained.
Whort took the potion, then stepped toward the gully dwarves, moving into a thin beam of light descending through a tiny grate in the roof. Perhaps it was his eyes, hugely magnified through the glasses, which frightened them, for the gully dwarves began to scream and bite each other. Whort backed away, hiding his features in the shadows opposite the room. “Erngh,” he groaned miserably.
The gully dwarves screamed again at the sound, and continued to chew one anothers’ ears, fingers, noses, and whatever was handy. Soon, the cries turned from fright to anger, and a fight broke out which threatened to engulf them all. The two kender and the gnome backed up against the wall, wary of flashing yellow teeth or grubby nails.
“Inflections! Inflections!” the gnome cried. “Do not let them bite you or you’ll get an inflection!”
Finally, the disagreement subsided, with only a few missing ears and one gnawed pinky finger. Like a shark-haunted bank of herring, in the blink of an eye the gully dwarves had turned, swirled, then collected back in their shadowy corner, all facing in the same direction again.
“I suppose I may have misdirected you,” Dr. Palaver said as he examined Whort’s sleeve and protective goggles. “I had hypostacized that agharaphobia might be the cause of your fears, but obviously you aren’t afraid of gully dwarves as I first surmounted. Say ah.” He whipped out another wooden plank (this one much begrimed and hardly very sanitary) and shoved it into the kender’s mouth.
“Erngh,” Whort gagged.
“As I suspected! The talk bone is still constricted. Well then, we shall just have to find the true source of your fear. As my tormentor used to say, when all other probabilities have been exploded, whatever remains, no matter how smelly, must be the truth.” Dr Palaver tossed aside his dipstick. “One of you wouldn’t have anything of interest to a gully dwarf?”
“Would a rat do?” Morg asked, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he withdrew the dead rat he had just discovered in one his pouches.
In answer, the gully dwarves began to slaver and creep forward, eyeing the limp, wet morsel dangling from the kender’s fingertips. Dr. Palaver took the rat from Morg and shook it temptingly before the gully dwarves, drawing them even farther from their shadowy nook.
Taking great care to speak slowly so that they could understand him (gnomes were notoriously rapid speakers), the doctor said in sweet tones, “Whoever shows me the scariest place in the whole sewer gets this rat. Do any of you know where the scariest place in the whole sewer is?”
At this point, some kind of conference commenced among the gully dwarves. There was many a loud meaty smack, for like most of their race, they spoke more eloquently with the back of the hand than the mouth. They also tended to repeat the same two-word argument endlessly-”No! Yes! No! Yes! No! Yes!”- like a shutter banging back and forth in the wind.
Finally, one of them seemed to have gained the upper backhand, so to speak, for as he turned and the others started to protest, he raised one grubby fist and silenced them all. “Me know!” he said. “Give rat.” He held out his hand, black palm upward.
“What is the most scariest place?” the gnome asked.
“Don’t say, Grod,” one of the other gully dwarves begged.
“Place called… The Hole!” the head gully dwarf said with the best dramatic flair he could muster. The other gully dwarves screamed and bit each other anew.
“What is the Hole?” Dr. Palaver asked. The gully dwarves screamed again.
“The Hole”-again with the screams-”is deep, dark place where no aghar ever come back from.”
“Take us to it,” Morg said, leaping into the conversation. The head gully dwarf backed away a step and shook his head until his yellow teeth clattered.
“No get rat until you take us to the Hole!” the doctor demanded as he hid the dead rodent behind his back.
The gully dwarves screamed.
“That Hole,” the gully dwarf leader said, pointing to a small, collapsed section of the wall in another part of the massive Palanthian sewer system. The other gully dwarves, too terrified by the sight of it, still managed to scream, even if it was a whisper.
“Doesn’t seem much to me,” Morg said as he approached the hole in the wall. He stuck his head into the dark aperture and shouted, “Tally-ho and view halloo!”
As he removed his head (still attached to his neck), and his bright kender voice came chirruping back to him by way of a magnificent echo, the gully dwarves breathed an awed sigh to kender bravery. “Do again,” one whispered, but he was promptly attacked by his fellows for even suggesting anything so frightening.
Dr. Palaver approached and tilted his ear toward the opening. “I hear something,” he said. “Some sort of deep rumbling. Could be the snore of a sleeping beast.”
He sniffed. “And a smell like stale beer and dead rats. Definitely something in there,” he concluded.
“Something, yes!” the gully dwarf leader agreed.
“Then go in there and find out what it is,” the gnome retorted.
The gully dwarves backed away in horror, until Morg (who had gotten hold of the dead rat again) dangled the morsel before them. They stopped, and a few even managed a step forward, filthy bearded jaws slobbering hungrily.
Morg swung the bait before them, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotically, watching their eyes watch the movement of the rat, watching their bodies begin to lean side to side with each sway. Suddenly, he flung the rat into the hole, and the lot of them dived after it before they knew what they were doing. One managed to actually get through the hole. The others merely piled up against the wall, clawing and scratching at each other angrily until they realized where they were. Then, with a horrific yell, they pelted away, leaving the gnome and the two kender alone beside the hole.