Secret of Pax Tharkas

by Doug Niles

  “I mean, come over here, to this bench,” said the Black Robe in irritation.

  The wizard was horrible to gaze upon. His eyelids were sewn shut, sealed with ghastly scars. His beard was filthy, matted with bits of food and possibly drool—though when he spotted a bit of mushroom tangled in the drool, Gus’s stomach momentarily growled. But terror quickly pulled his attention back to the magic-user’s commands.

  Gus, unable to resist the magical compulsion, did as told. His eyes widened as he saw the sinister black liquid. He could sense the evil power there, and it made him very afraid. Beside that bottle was another, of dwarf spirits, which Gus recognized as something that would make him very sick—he had tasted the liquor once before, when he had claimed a nearly empty bottle off the body of a dead Klar. And there was a third bottle too, the one that the wizard had taken out of his cabinet while the fight was raging in the laboratory.

  “Now listen carefully, you miserable little dimwit,” snapped the Theiwar wizard. He gestured to the bench where the black liquid and the other two bottles rested. “I want you to take a very small sip of this tasty potion. You must drink now.”

  Again, the compelling spell of command allowed no disobedience. Gus’s hand shook uncontrollably as the little dwarf reached upward—the top of the bench being as high as his chin.

  “Be careful! Don’t drop it!” snapped the dwarf wizard.

  At his words a burst of fire erupted from the crack in the floor, the flame and smoke billowing into the cavern as the great beast that lurked there seethed and burned. The mage turned his face, momentarily grinning at the horrific display of fiery power.

  Gus was reaching up, compelled to grab the bottle, to drink a small drop. The wizard’s command was insistent, magical, irresistible. But that black liquid terrified him so! His hand hesitated, terrified by the dark swirl of the bottle’s creamy contents. Even so, his fingers started to close around it, curling shut despite every effort he made to balk.

  Some tiny corner of his brain raised a good, pertinent point. The wizard had not specified which liquid he was required to drink. He said to drink “this,” but maybe he meant one of the other bottles. He moved his hand ever so slightly in that direction, pleased that the spell didn’t keep him from doing so. And the wizard didn’t notice. Gus quickly snatched up the bottle that looked like dwarf spirits, but then remembered the retching, the pounding headache, that had resulted last time he drank something like that. Nope, better not, he told himself at the last moment. So he let go of the dwarf spirits bottle, which dropped into the sagging pouch of his front pocket.

  The wizard was still distracted, admiring the glowing aura of his pet monster, but just then he started to turn back toward the gully dwarf.

  Eagerly, like a drowning swimmer snatching for a lifeline in a stormy sea, Gus grabbed the third bottle, the one the wizard had brought out of his cabinet. He raised it to his lips and took a small sip even as the Theiwar returned his stare to him and the potions.

  “No, you fool!” shrieked the mage. “Not that one!”

  But the liquid was already trickling down his gullet, a strangely bubbly sensation that tasted like water but was not. The wizard reached furiously for him, his eyeless face contorted, and Gus instinctively flinched away, wishing he was somewhere, anywhere, besides that horrible place. Besides terror and hunger, he felt the bottle of dwarf spirits flopping around in his deep pocket.

  Then suddenly, miraculously, the dread wizard was gone. His whole laboratory was gone. It was dark but not dark like the dark of a deep cave. Gus felt very cold, as air moved past his skin, a sensation he had never experienced before. Instinctively he looked up, seeking the ceiling, the upper wall of whatever chamber he was in.

  Instead, he saw a speckling of tiny lights, impossibly distant, and uncountably numerous. Around him were great mounds of rock, some of them dusted with a curious whiteness. Most of all, there was an undeniable sense of vast distances, of space above him and to either side, a feeling that he had never experienced before. Only gradually did the truth dawn:

  He wasn’t in Thorbardin anymore.

  Willim trembled with uncontainable rage. He shouted and shrieked, and fire flew from his tongue, searing through a cask of charcoal and filling the entire cavern with thick, acrid smoke. He stamped his foot, and a crack shivered across the stone floor, the jagged scar extending all the way to the edge of Gorathian’s chasm. He pounded his fist upon the massive stone workbench, and the granite slab shuddered and groaned before snapping in half.

  Only at the last second did Willim come to his senses. As the table gave way, he remembered the two precious bottles of potion: the deadly poison that the Aghar was supposed to have tested and the elixir that had proved so effective in enhancing Ochre’s abilities. He must not destroy them. But where were they? His hand lashed out as the table fell and he tried to catch the vials before they came to harm. He snatched the black poison out of the air but couldn’t find the elixir in the bottle labeled as the dwarf spirits.

  The pieces of the stone surface thundered to the floor, raising clouds of dust, scattering a spray of gravel-sized debris, and Willim frantically dug through the rubble. But there was no sign of the bottle. Nor, thankfully, did he see any broken glass or the Midwarren Pale label.

  He drew deep breaths through his nose, forcing himself to grow calm. Despite his recent setbacks, he had splendid powers of control—one did not command the high art of the black robes without extraordinary discipline. Slowly, methodically, he reflected on all that had transpired, tried to reconstruct what had just happened to top his very bad day.

  His spell of command had worked to perfection. The miserable little gully had been compelled to obey Willim by that enchantment, and thus, he had advanced to the table, had been reaching for the bottle and getting ready to drink the potion.

  Then Gorathian had flared, and the wizard had turned away for a fleeting moment. When he had turned back, the Aghar was picking up the bottle—only it was a different bottle. The bloody fool gully dwarf had gulped the potion of teleportation instead!

  Then, out of sheer terror no doubt, the wretch had blinked himself away. The wizard hissed an inarticulate shiver of rage, hoping that the worthless creature had blinked himself into the fiery depths of the Abyss or perhaps popped into sight in the middle of the ocean—or, even better, right into the bedrock of the earth, where he would be instantly crushed.

  Good riddance to him. But where was the elixir?

  Willim forced himself to concentrate, and he recalled the images of his spell of true-seeing almost as if they were playing like pictures in his mind, only slowed down, one after the other in a series. And that was when he saw: he saw the bottle fall into the gully dwarf’s pocket, then he saw the wretched creature disappear.

  Blasted gully dwarf!

  Suddenly, the question of the Aghar’s whereabouts assumed a whole new significance. The elixir represented a year of work and had consumed components that were, for all intents and purposes, irreplaceable (especially with so many apprentices out of commission). It was an innovative new recipe of alchemy, one that Ochre had proved worked as Willim had anticipated. And it was the key to his entire plan, the means by which he would create a company of undefeatable warriors for the master attack that would destroy Jungor Stonespringer and all his lords, allies, and guards in one blow.

  All right. He knew what he had to do: the teleported gully dwarf would have to be found. It was with a steady hand and a cold, clear purpose that Willim the Black pulled down a spellbook and, ignoring the inconvenience of his eyeless sockets, began to read.

  Several hours passed before he set the book down, having absorbed and memorized the ritual required to cast a very potent spell. He rose and stretched, ready to get to work—until he looked around, reminded of the chaos in the laboratory. The wreckage, the debris, the shattered crates and table would need to be cleaned up, but in due time.

  The laboratory would have to wait. Indeed, Willim wond
ered if he might have to rebuild and move his laboratory to a new location. It seemed that the king had learned of his whereabouts, and it wouldn’t do to be continually bothered by raids and assassination attempts and other nuisances. But that decision, too, could wait.

  The bodies needed tending, however. They already reeked and would soon begin to rot. With a grimace of disgust, he cast a spell and used his fingertip to whisk, one by one, the corpses of the company of Daergar attackers, as well as those of his slain apprentices, over to the crack leading to Gorathian’s lair. He let them drop into the depths, and with each additional bit of flesh, the monster flared and growled.

  Willim knew that Gorathian preferred living flesh to carrion. Even so, the beast seemed content with the bonus feeding. Perhaps it even regretted the earlier impetuous hunger that had caused it to sweep Ochre, along with Willim’s enemies, to death. At least, Willim would like to think that the beast was capable of that kind of remorse. In any event, the fire in the deep pit was banked low, a dim crimson radiating like embers from the depths of the world. And the wizard was free to turn to his task.

  He had a spell to cast. He found a large ceramic bowl and filled it with clear water. He removed a pinch of charcoal from the bottom of his storage cask—the part that hadn’t been incinerated by his blast of rage after the Aghar’s escape—and dropped it in the water.

  He considered the next component he desired and cursed. If he had retained even a drop of the magical elixir, he could have cast his spell with guaranteed accuracy. Instead he would have to settle for an approximation. Using a small pinch of mushroom powder, he added fungus to the water, stirring the liquid with precise strokes of an ivory paddle. When the contents were mixed and swirling smoothly, he concentrated on the look, the smell, the feel of his missing potion, and cast the words to the spell of location.

  Immediately the components in the swirling liquid came together in a snakelike mass, writhing against the direction of the water’s flow. A black image took on a solid aspect, first as a coil but gradually straightening itself into an arrow. The arrow spun like the needle of a deranged compass, but as the water’s swirl gradually settled, the arrow grew still. The tail dropped to the bottom of the bowl, and the tip pointed almost straight up.

  For several seconds it remained fixed until the water ceased its movement and the arrow dissolved, leaving a pale-brown mixture, completely still, in the bowl.

  And Willim had all the information he needed—at least, all he could gain from his imperfect components.

  Thoughtfully he leaned his head back, turning his eyeless face toward the ceiling of the lofty cavern. So the idiot Aghar had teleported himself—and the potion he unwittingly carried in his pocket—almost straight up. That would simplify matters. Since the imperfect spell revealed the direction of the object sought but not the distance, a compass bearing such as north or south could have meant that the wretched thief had teleported one or even one thousand miles in that direction. However, since the direction was primarily upward, it seemed likely that the gully dwarf was somewhere high in the peaks of the Kharolis Mountains, the lofty summits towering over all of vast Thorbardin.

  “Good,” Willim declared.

  For a moment he considered teleporting after the Aghar himself, but he quickly discarded the tempting thought. No, it would take some searching, perhaps a lot of searching, before the fool was discovered. Much as Willim would have relished making that discovery himself, he had too many other things to do back there in his lair.

  So he would have to cast another spell.

  That one required heat, and again he grimaced, remembering that in his rage he had smashed his favorite granite worktable. He would have to use a bench that had been carved from the bedrock of the mountain, a stone cube near one wall of the laboratory that had once been intended as the dais for a thane’s throne. He touched it with his hand and murmured the spell, and immediately the stone glowed red. As Willim concentrated on the magic, the illumination gradually faded to yellow, and finally the stone was white hot. So intense was its radiance that the wizard, generally immune to such discomfort, was forced to take a step back.

  Quickly he went about assembling the rest of his components, gathering them in a medium-sized iron cauldron. Scales and dried blood were tossed in, as well as the eyes of insects and other, even less pleasant, ingredients. When he came to the final, and most vital, ingredient, he cursed aloud, remembering the dwarf corpses he had fed to Gorathian. If he had only remembered to save one of them!

  Searching around, he surveyed his chamber, his eyeless face turning this way and that as his spell of true-seeing swept the half-destroyed room. It came to the cage where the two elves had died, slain by the cloudkill spell, and immediately the dark dwarf nodded to himself: an elf corpse would work just as well as a dwarf.

  With a flick of his finger and a muttered word, he lifted the rigid body of the male elf and brought it over to the cauldron. A few more manipulations placed the heart and the brain of the corpse into the vat; the rest of the drying flesh was discarded. Finally, he set the metal kettle on the white-hot stone of his workbench and stepped back to work another incantation.

  The raising of a minion was not something to be done casually or quickly. For more than an hour, Willim stood before the cauldron, working the spell, sweat pouring from the Theiwar’s face, trickling through his beard, causing his robe to stick to his skin. Never, however, did his intense concentration waver, and finally the kettle began to smoke then to burn. Flames shot upward, at first yellow and bright, then gradually fading to pale blue flickers barely extending over the rim, and at last fading away.

  The cauldron continued to smoke, however, and that smoke grew thick, black, and strangely opaque. It rose in a column, but instead of dispersing through the chamber, it held together, coalesced, and in fact seemed to concentrate in on itself as more and more churning vapor surged into the cloud. Very slowly, the smoke emerging from the cauldron diminished as all of the components were consumed. Finally, there was nothing left save for the tall, amorphous pillar of black murk lingering in the air over the black kettle.

  “Minion—awaken!” Willim commanded, his voice booming through the chamber. At the same time, he clenched both fists, and the smoke column contracted, writhing and, increasingly, wailing as the magic wove it into a physical presence. It floated to the side, then settled down onto the floor of the chamber. Two slender legs, ending in taloned feet, extended downward to support its weight. A pair of black, batlike wings extended from its shoulders. Finally eyes appeared: almond shaped and wide set, like the eyes of an elf.

  But those eyes were red and glowing with hellish heat like the blazing coal within a hot forge.

  Willim concentrated his thoughts; then, without speaking, he conveyed to his minion a mental image of the gully dwarf and instructed it to follow in the direction the Aghar had gone away from there. Only then did the Black Robe give voice to his command.

  “Pursue the gully dwarf until you catch him. When you do, kill him and bring me everything he carries.”

  The minion bowed deeply, those eerie elf eyes pressing all the way to the floor, in obeisance. Then the black wings spread and the horrid creature, taller than a tall man, took flight. It rose, met the stone ceiling of the vast cavern, and continued on through the bedrock of the world.

  TEN

  HEADING SOUTH

  Garren Bluestone, pushing Brandon before him, rushed through the front door of his family’s manor. “Send for Harn Poleaxe,” he ordered his doorman. The young dwarf, a lanky Daewar, departed at once.

  “Father!” complained Brand. “I was telling the truth; I deserved to be heard!”

  “You deserved to be heard, maybe. But your actions were more likely to get you arrested, even killed!” declared the elder in exasperation. “Don’t you understand who wields the power in this nation? The power, whether you want to believe it or not, of life and death?”

  “I saw the death part,” growled t
he son.

  His father’s face fell, looking as though he had been struck a physical blow, and Brandon immediately regretted his tone. But Garren’s voice when next he spoke was steady, almost calm.

  “I only have one son left. We have to get you out of Kayolin,” he said bluntly. “As soon as possible.”

  “Do you think the governor will try to kill me right here in Kayolin? First they’ll have to arrest me, give me a trial!” Brandon blurted in disbelief.

  His father glared sternly at him. “The king, I keep telling you, can do anything he prefers to do. And if it can’t be done legal and nice, Lord Heelspur has plenty more of his thugs to throw at you. One will pick a fight; others will be lurking. Your temper is not without some renown.” Garren looked wistful as he regarded his youngest son. “And everyone knows about the Bluestone luck. Whatever your fate, many people will say that you provoked it and you got what you deserved. Others will say it’s simply the curse that follows our house. We are in a real pickle here. My son, I would like to fight them too, but we have to keep you safe while we build up our case, muster allies and supporters.”

  “But—leave? You tell me I must leave Kayolin?” Like most of the nation’s mountain dwarves, he had done his share of exploring the peaks and valleys of the Garnet Range. But the land beyond those lofty summits was completely unknown to him. “Where would I go?” he asked, finally.

  “That’s where Poleaxe comes in. Now collect a few traveling things—just the essentials—and be here the moment he arrives. I’ll have a purse of about eighty steel coins for you; you’ll have to use it pay expenses, book passage on a ship, and so forth. We have no time to waste. And Brandon—”