They waited a bit for the victim of the rat toss to emerge, then waited in growing alarm as he failed to make his anticipated appearance and exit.
“Perhaps they were right,” Morg suggested. His eyes were almost as large as his nephew’s, but without the benefit of magnification. “Let’s go and see,” he added, in a tone that seasoned travelers had learned to dread when spoken by a kender.
They crawled into the hole, Morg leading the way, the gnome bringing up a reluctant rear. They had only gone a short distance before they realized that they were no longer in the sewer. They had come through into a cellar somewhere, a place filled with casks and barrels. Judging from the ancient stone pillars supporting the roof, it appeared to have once been a catacomb.
The deeper into the hole that they went, the louder the contented purring snore became. It sounded like the enormous rumbling of a snoozing dragon-a thing Morg had actually heard, once upon a time. But the reek of stale beer and wet rat and, they now noticed, gully dwarf, grew stronger with each step forward. Finally, rounding a corner, they came to a section of the catacomb illuminated by torchlight shining through a grate in a large iron door. The flickering beam of light that slanted through the grate fell directly on a pile of gully dwarves. They were not dead, though they smelled like they might be. Instead, they were sleeping off a marvelous drunk. Nearby, a cask had been broached, and it was but one of many other empty ones. The owner of the cellar obviously had not been in this section for many days-weeks perhaps, or even months.
Morg saw a large iron door nearby, and his kender-curiosity got the best of him. Straining at the massive ring, he pulled the door open. An even larger cellar, this one lit by numerous torches, lay beyond it.
However, his opening of the heavy iron door had caused it to groan on its rusty hinges. The noise awoke the gully dwarves and sent them bolting in all directions. One gully dwarf bowled into Morg, almost knocking him off his feet. It was a good thing that he kept his balance, or the gully dwarf would surely have devoured him in its fright. Yellow teeth flashed and champed inches from his face. Finally, he had to whack the grimy creature with his hoopak just to settle him down. It worked. The gully dwarf settled down on the floor with a thump.
“Oh dear,” Morg grimaced while gnawing on his topknot.
Dr. Palaver brought the gully dwarf around by applying something he called “smelly salts, or bicarbonate of ammonia” to a kerchief and waving it below the gully dwarfs nose. The miserable little creature came fully awake in an instant, teeth already snapping together in defense. Morg gripped his hoopak in case he needed to reapply the anesthetic.
But the gnome managed to mollify the creature enough to talk to it. “What is your name?” he asked slowly, so the gully dwarf could follow his words.
“Rulf,” the creature belched.
“He sounds like he is about to be sick,” Morg said.
“Rulf, we have rescued you from the Hole. Doesn’t that make you happy?” the gnome asked.
The gully dwarf shook his head. “No. Me happy here. Plenty good beer, stinky cheese… this heaven. You rescue me from heaven. Go away.” He crossed his arms sullenly and chewed a remnant of cheese still stuck in his beard.
“Come now, Rulf. We have rescued you, so you must come with us. You must do us a little favor, and if you do, I will catch you a nice, big, fat rat with one of my mousetraps,” the gnome offered.
“How big?” Rulf queried.
The gnome held up two fingers (he had dealt with gully dwarves before). “This big,” he said, wriggling his stubby digits for emphasis.
Rulf sucked in his breath, which caused him to choke on the bit of beard he had been chewing. He spat it out. “That big, huh? Who Rulf gotta kill?”
“Rulf kill no one. All Rulf gotta do… er, ahem,” the gnome cleared his throat and blushed. “All we desire of you is to show us the scariest place you know.”
“Scarier than this?” Rulf asked, indicating with a wave the catacomb cellar around him.
“The scariest you know,” the gnome said.
“It better be big hog rat,” Rulf said as he rose wearily to his feet, rubbing his hoopak-knocked noggin with a grimace.
Deep beneath the city of Palanthas, below its sewers and deepest dungeons, lay a system of sea caves known only to a few scholars of Palanthian lore. The caves had not been explored by the surface-dwelling citizens of that city in many a century, but they were well known to those who inhabited them.
The denizens of the caves were, of course, the gully dwarves. Those who knew of the gully dwarves living in the city’s sewers knew only the tip of the dwarfs beard, as the saying goes. There is often a whole dwarf behind it. In this case, there were several thousand of the generally mistreated and wisely disliked race of aghar dwarves, all living out their private lives in their private desolation, deep beneath a city of a hundred thousand blissfully ignorant souls.
Rulf picked a silent way through these caverns, warily avoiding any large groups and generally keeping to the shadows. When Morg asked him why he was hiding from his people, their guide turned on him with a snarl.
“This not my people,” he spat in disgust. “These nasty stinky Gulps. Rulf is a Bulp, the highest Bulp. These lazy Gulps live like kings while we prince Bulps eat bugs. Good bugs!” he added. “But not so good as here.”
Indeed, the Gulps of Under Palanthas had been living as good a life as any gully dwarves in all of Krynn for many generations. There was plenty of room, for the caves were most extensive, and plenty of nice, slimy, glowing fungus grew on the walls and floors. Whenever the aghar were hungry, all they had to do was chew on a wall. Most of them could be seen even in the dark by the weirdly glowing streaks of phosphorescent fungus-impregnated saliva drying in their beards.
But the good life here had come to a screeching halt some thirty years ago. Rulf laughed as he recounted the tale.
“That when big boss come. Big boss tell Gulps make plenty torches, smoky torches, torches day, noon, and night, torches all the time. Big boss eat smoke, they say. They say he love smoke like you and me love rat.”
“Speak for yourself,” Morg said.
“That where me take you: to see big boss. They say he scarier than the Hole. They say he make the Hole look like just a regular old hole in the wall.”
At the mention of the Big Boss, Whort began to back away. Morg caught sight of his nephew just as he was about to round a corner. Despite his advanced age, he was easily able to run his younger nephew to ground and drag him back to the gully dwarf and the gnome. He arrived just as Rulf was explaining to Dr. Palaver how the gully dwarves made torches.
“They take sticks and bones-nice bones, waste of good bones-and dip them in pool of black goo. Black goo burns, makes lots of black smoke. Big boss happy. When torches burn out, Gulps take stubs and dip them in black goo again to make new torches. Big boss happy. He eat smoke and leave Gulps alone, but when he mad, he eat Gulps, too. Nasty, stinky Gulps,” he ended with a snarl.
Dr. Palaver turned to his patient. “This is the source of your fear,” he commented, seeing the way Whort’s eyes bugged even more grotesquely behind the spectacles. “You must face it and drink the potion of mighty heroes that I invented today. Now what have I done with it?” He frantically patted his pockets, then turned them inside out.