Slightly mollified, Rorik growled, “No-but you can look a little closer.”
Gnarl pointed at the battlehammer on the opposite wall. “Is that hammer also of such fine quality?”
Rorik turned to look. “What, that old thing? It’s just a skullbasher I carry around-”
“Don’t look away, Rorik!” Miriam cried. But she was too late. Gnarl had taken the opportunity to snatch up the many-tool. He backed out the door, thrusting it in his cloak pocket.
“I thank you for the loan of the tool!” he shouted. “I’ll bring it back!” Then he turned and ran. Shouting erupted behind him, a roar of invectives. An arrow sped past his right shoulder. Gnarl ran around the corner of a sausage shop and into the cobblestone street, heading toward the House of the Sun.
Probably the long-legged Miriam would be close behind. The dwarf had short legs, but he was strong and would not relent. Gnarl was counting on that.
3.
Across the road from the triangular, three-towered temple called the House of the Sun lay the northern arm of the Tombwood.
Lightfooted, Gnarl sprinted along the road, past the three-spired temple, and cut east into the woods, ignoring the laughing taunt of Miriam not far behind him. He suspected that she was not running full out-she was taking her time, enjoying the pursuit.
He ran onward and into the cool shadows of the thicket; boughs of resinous trees overhanging the path switched at his face. A whining sound behind him was followed by the chuk of an arrow burying its head in a tree trunk just to his left.
“Oh ho, almost pierced an ear with that one!” shouted Miriam.
Gnarl broke into a clearing cloaked in ground fog, and immediately stumbled over a stone jutting from the old cemetery. He caught himself and ran on, angling toward the age-eroded statue of a winged angel standing before a tumbledown crypt. It was just as Sernos had described.
The door of the crypt stood open and he skidded inside, gasping. Open the sarcophagus, Sernos had said, far too blithely, and climb within.
This was no time to give in to the dread clutching at him. He pushed back the lid of the sarcophagus-it was hinged, and surprisingly light-and saw a narrow iron ladder descending into the rectangular block on which the sarcophagus rested. He climbed onto the block, stepped into the opening, placed his feet on the top rung, gripped the rim of the pit, and And froze, hearing Miriam’s voice. “Don’t move, punkling, or I’ll split you with an arrow! I could have killed you twice already if I’d wanted to.”
Gnarl looked over his shoulder and saw her backlit by the light outside the crypt’s doorway, bow drawn, an arrow nocked, her bosom heaving but her hands steady. She chuckled and said, “This has been fun-I do get so bored, visiting Fallcrest. Now, climb out of there. Hurry! Rorik will be here in a moment. I suppose he’ll want to break your fingers with his battlehammer after he takes the tool back-but they’ll heal. Come along. It’s better than getting an arrow through the spine!”
“Very well,” Gnarl said. He braced himself, putting his weight on his hands, and removed both feet from the ladder rung. Knowing that he might fall ten feet or a hundred, he let go.
An arrow flashed over his head as he fell-literally parting his hair-and then he was in darkness. His feet struck a packed-earth floor about twenty feet down. He sprawled into clinging cobwebs and rat droppings, cursing under his breath. He got to his feet, dusted himself off, and glanced up at Miriam-she was peering down at him, her long hair like drapery as she leaned over the shaft. He couldn’t see her face well enough to read her expression. “Sorry!” he called up to her. “Well-I’m off!”
Then Gnarl turned down the murky passage, wincing at the bruises on the balls of his feet.
Gnarl paced rapidly toward the signal lantern in the distance. He pushed through tenuous curtains of cobweb, strode thirty yards past stacks of strangely-shaped phosphorescent skulls, beckoned by the lantern. It was held high by a pear-shaped man, the eunuch whom the warlock had described: Sernos’s minion, Qalimar. “Hurry!” Qalimar wheedled in a piping voice, as Gnarl strode up to him. The minion wore a long, intricately sewn caftan; he had a bisected nose and pendulously long earlobes. His head was shaved, eyebrows scraped away.
“Go through the door, into the portal!” Qalimar cried. “Quick, before something comes through it from the other side and finds me down here! Sernos does not pay me enough for the risk. How many times have I let mad suicides through this portal…”
“Two others will be coming!” Gnarl gasped, pushing past him. “Let them through!”
Then he stepped into the old dungeon under the forgotten, buried temple of Tharizdun, where a whirling dark purple energy lit up the rectangular stone chamber. He sprinted to the glowing portal, speaking the necessary words the warlock had taught him, hearing Rorik bellowing behind. An arrow clattered against a wall-and then he plunged into purple luminosity.
Passing through the portal, Gnarl was stretched out, remade into the form a portal required-he was an arrow himself, shot by the “bow” of the portal through space and outside time. His stomach contracted, his instincts protested.
Then he arrived at his first stop on the way to the Plains of Rust.
He tottered through another whorl of dark purple shimmer, out onto a small island of craggy stone floating in space itself. The air swirled around him, smelling of cinnamon and fish and daffodils and sulfur. The island was shifting under his feet, like a raft between waves, and he struggled to keep his footing. Then it stabilized, and he was able to look around-he saw that he was on the frontier of the Elemental Chaos.
Shapes formed and dissolved in the distance; the horizon rushed toward him, then recoiled-and then vanished completely. Spinning asteroids gouted fire from craters, spitting fireballs that contracted to become blue-red balls of frozen gas hissing randomly through space, capriciously changing direction. Melancholy melodies rose and fell on the troubled wind, music that spontaneously composed itself-and then decomposed. Great sunlike orbs of flame formed, igniting with a roar-only to stretch like taffy and burst apart into iridescent confetti, which then rearranged into living helixes-that were sucked away into nothingness.
He looked around at the stony island, and wondered if he’d been misdirected. Perhaps he was doomed to die there.
But a gleam of curving blue caught his eye. There, at the far end of the drifting island, was the bridge of water Sernos had described; it arced out over empty space, ending in a whirlpool of coruscating energy.
“Shoot him!” bellowed Rorik, behind him.
He turned to see Miriam stepping through the portal behind Rorik. The dwarf shook his iron battlehammer at him, teeth bared.
“This way!” Gnarl shouted, gesturing for them to follow. “Come on!” He waved the many-tool at Rorik, tucked it into a pocket of his cloak, and ran toward the watery bridge.
It’s impossible to cross a bridge of water, he told himself, even as he stepped out on it.
And it would be impossible, were this not the Elemental Chaos. But the pressure of rushing water, forced through some invisible sluice, dragged him onto the bridge-and he was sucked forward, pulled horizontally, tugged feet first across the translucent blue arc, and launched out into space-flung willy-nilly through another portal.
4.
Deep within the Abyss, beyond the Plain of a Thousand Portals, concealing the forgotten depths of a primeval swamp, lay the Plains of Rust.
Gnarl jumped from the portal onto the rust-colored plain. He steadied himself and looked around.
The Plains of Rust, at first sight, perpetually affected visitors in the same fashion, always bringing about gloom and depression. Gnarl was no exception. “Why did I even come here?” he muttered.