The Philosophical Strangler

by Eric Flint

  Again, he dismissed the matter with a wave.

  "But even the more advanced troglodytes are a trifle for my science. No, the difficulty will lie with other specimens stirred from their antediluvian slumber. I speak of such terrors as the Malevolent Magnetic Monopoles, driven to nihilistic fury by the transference of polar magnetism which is sure to accompany the planet's passage across the galactic plane; the insensate Thing From Beneath—not to be confused, mind, with the related but less disheartening Thing From Below—which, in its turn, must be distinguished from the more-distantly-related and yet-less-fearsome Thing Which Came From Below—which, in its turn—"

  "And what else?" I demanded.

  The wizard goggled. "What else? What else? Say better—what else will there not be stirred up?"

  He frowned. "I fear, my dear Ignace, that the timing is not good for our expedition. A perilous adventure at the best of times! But to essay the penetration of the earth's interior on the very eve of the crossing of the galactic plane—well! Perilous in the extreme, that. But barely possible, so long as we depart at once."

  He turned away. "At once, I say! At once! For, even as I explicate to an ignoramus, time wanes!"

  * * *

  So, we were off.

  What a crew! The mage led the way. Cowardly, Zulkeh is not. He's not brave, either. It's just—oh, you'll see. As the wise man says: "Never stand between a scholar and his subject. Stampeding buffalo would be trampled."

  Following the mage came Shelyid. The dwarf staggered about under the burden of the wizard's sack. Except for Greyboar, Shelyid's the only person that I know strong enough to carry that sack. You couldn't see anything but his little legs twinkling beneath the overhang.

  What's in the sack? Everything the wizard Zulkeh had ever collected in his long and lore-lust life:

  Instruments, scrolls, thick leather-bound tomes of great weight, clay tablets, stone figurines, vials, beakers, jars, jugs, amulets, talismans, vessels, bowls, ladles, retorts, pincers, tweezers, pins, bound bundles of sandalwood, ebony and dwarf pine, bags and sacks of incense, herbs, mushrooms, dried grue of animal parts, bottles of every shape and description filled with liquids of multitudinous variety of color, content and viscosity, charms, curios, relics, urns of meteor dust, cartons of saints' bones and coffers of criminals' skulls, and all the other artifacts of stupendous thaumaturgic potency crammed into every nook and cranny of every niche, room, closet and hallway in the abandoned death house in Goimr where Zulkeh and Shelyid used to live, not excluding the heavy iron engines in the lower vaults.

  Still—

  "It looks a little smaller than I remember," I commented to Shelyid.

  "Oh, it is!" came the dwarf's little voice, from somewhere below the sack. "We dumped all kinds of stuff out of it while we were on the sled trying to make it to the Mutt. The Godferrets were chasing us, you know."

  No, I didn't know, but I wasn't surprised. Bound to draw the attention of Godferrets, mucking around with Joe business.

  "I tossed the Great Newt of Obpont, too," came Shelyid's self-satisfied voice. "Nasty bugger!"

  After Shelyid came me and Jenny and Angela. Eagerly charging off to adventure.

  Oh, sure, I tried. I hate to admit it, given my reputation for firmness with womenfolk, but they hadn't paid my protests any attention at all.

  Then came Hrundig and Magrit and the Cat. The mercenary was as grim as ever—he still hadn't said a word. Magrit was her usual foul-mouthed self. Wittgenstein rode on her shoulder, making occasional comments on the plight of salamanders in a human-dominated ecosystem.

  "Hadn't been for that fucking comet," I heard him mutter, "we'd still be running the show. Wouldn't be any of this derring-do nonsense, let me tell you. Just loll about in the swamp, gobbling insects."

  The Cat, as often, was off in her own world.

  Finally, Greyboar and Gwendolyn brought up the rear. They weren't talking anymore. Just walking alongside each other, holding hands.

  Lester and Eddie and Frank came along, too, for the first part of the trip. It turns out that you can enter the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the dungeons of New Sfinctr from any of the main branches of the Underground Railroad.

  So our adventure started right there in our own basement. Lift the hidden hatch to our stop on the Railroad, down the ladder, and off you go!

  The first problem we faced was plowing through the mob of dwarves down there. I knew Jenny and Angela had turned our house into the main Railroad station for the whole city. But I hadn't ever gone down there myself. So I wasn't prepared for the population density.

  "There's half the miserable dwarves in Grotum down here!" I cried, surveying the scene.

  Dwarves, dwarves, dwarves. All over the place. Crammed into every nook and cranny of every little grotto and room carved into the bedrock. Papa dwarves, mama dwarves, baby dwarves. All wrapped up in blankets and rags and gathered about little pots of food. (I didn't inquire about the food, and who paid for it. I didn't want to know.)

  "Well, of course there's a lot of dwarves!" snapped Jenny.

  "What did you expect?" demanded Angela. "You know the pogroms are getting worse!"

  Well, yes, I did. But it's none of my business, that.

  Gwendolyn spoke up. "There's also the new secret camp which the Ozarines are building in the Baronies. Project Nibelung, they call it. They're rounding up dwarves all over the subcontinent and shoving them into that hellhole."

  I maintained a discreet silence, here. I happened to know about that little business, on account of—well, never mind. Let's just say they don't call Shelyid "The Dwarf From Disaster" for nothing.

  In the end, I shut up. Jenny and Angela tended to tolerate my own little quirks (rational self-interest, I call them), but they did get testy on the subject of dwarves. And those callous souls—rational men, I called them—who ignored their plight. Hey, look, I was sorry the little buggers got such a raw deal. But a guy had to look out for himself, push comes to shove. You started standing up for dwarves and, before you knew, it you were in the crapper yourself.

  Eventually, we made our way through the mob and started down one of the Railroad's branch lines. The one leading to Blain, I think. There wasn't much to see, even if the lighting had been better than the occasional lantern on the wall. Just a narrow tunnel carved through rock, with a couple of wooden rail lines running down the center. At one point, a train came through, and we all had to press ourselves against the wall. The adult dwarves hauling the carts paid us no attention at all. The little dwarves riding in them stared at us like apparitions, but they remained silent.

  Okay, okay, dammit. I admit the dwarves got a really crappy deal. As bad a taskmaster as Zulkeh was, Shelyid was probably better off sticking with the wizard than being on his own.

  Finally, we stopped. Eddie and Lester and Frank did some odd things at a section of the wall that looked like any other section, and within moments the wall opened up. A narrow passageway appeared, leading off to no place I wanted to go.

  "That's it, then," announced Lester.

  "The way to the infernal regions," added Frank.

  "As far as we go," concluded Eddie. No fools, they.

  For a moment, hope flared in my heart. There was no way Shelyid was going to fit that enormous sack through that opening, and I knew from experience that the wizard would rather die than be separated from his "necessities of science," as he called them.

  Alas. Somehow—don't ask me, it was geometrically impossible—Shelyid squeezed the sack through.

  So down we went. Down, ever downward. That's not a figure of speech, although it certainly fit my mood of the moment. The tunnel we had now entered did, in fact, slope noticeably downward.

  I didn't notice at first, lost as I was in gloom. But then—it was gloomy, lit only by lanterns held by Gwendolyn and Hrundig—I tripped on some outcropping and fell flat on my face.

  Hrundig hauled me up. "Watch your feet," said the mercenary.

  "Found your vo
ice, did you?" I grumbled.

  Hrundig smiled thinly. "Never lost it," he rasped. "Simply had nothing worth saying."

  Still don't! I almost snapped. But I held my tongue. He's not actually a good man to irritate, Hrundig isn't. So I settled on social pleasantry.

  "And what are you doing here?" I asked. "The Frissaults have already been rescued. I'm sure by now you got them off safely to the Mutt."

  Hrundig chuckled. "Oh, my. Aren't we testy? What's the matter, Ignace? Does the presence of a hard-bitten old mercenary on this damn-fool expedition upset your weltanschauung?"

  Yeah, his very words. I tended to forget sometimes, looking at Hrundig, that he wasn't stupid. He wasn't even ignorant. Unusual, that, for an Alsask barbarian. But, for all his harsh demeanor, Hrundig was generally a placid-enough sort of fellow. So he deigned to explain:

  "You know perfectly well why I'm here, Ignace. Two good reasons. First, I owe Benvenuti for rescuing my family. And second, he's a friend of mine. I don't have all that many friends that I can afford to lose one."

  I was a little touched, to tell the truth. I even started to utter some inane pleasantries on the subject of glorious friendship, but was brought short by bumping into Shelyid's sack.

  "Watch where you're going!" I chided the dwarf.

  "Watch where you're going," rasped Hrundig. "We've stopped."

  So we had. I hadn't seen it, because Shelyid's sack had obscured the view, but we had entered a rather large grotto. Shelyid now moved forward, slowly. More of the grotto came into view, lit by the lanterns.

  I proposed an immediate retreat. An immediate, hasty retreat.

  Large subterranean grottoes filled with bones call for that tactic, to my mind. Cracked, splintered bones; sucked dry of marrow; heaped about in piles. Crushed skulls; teeth scattered about like grains of corn.

  Greyboar lumbered past me.

  "What's the problem?" he asked. Jenny and Angela pointed mutely. (Pleased I was, too, to see that their earlier insouciance had disappeared. Wanted adventure, did they? Ha!)

  "What do you think, professor?" he now asked Zulkeh. "Is Ignace right? Should we try another route?"

  The wizard had advanced to the very center of the grotto, and was now poking at a pile of bones with his staff.

  "Bah!" oathed the mage. "Do I hear me aright? Has the proposal been advanced to thwart me in my forward progress because of a pile of bones?"

  "Lots of piles of bones," I protested. "Cracked, broken bones. Fresh bones, some of 'em. Sucked dry of their marrow."

  "Anthropophage of Reason!"

  (I wasn't offended. For Zulkeh, that's a mild expletive. Sort of like "drat" to the average man.)

  "Base cur of low degree!"

  (He was warming up.)

  "Dullard dunce of—"

  "Professor!" interrupted Greyboar.

  Zulkeh fell silent, still glowering at me. Then he made a disgusted gesture with his staff.

  "These—trifles—are no cause for alarm. Merely the typical residue of that loathsome creature known to the unwashed masses as the Great Ogre of Grotum—"

  Jenny and Angela gasped. (So did I.)

  "—thereby, in their gross ignorance, seeking to distinguish the beast from its lesser cousin, the Lesser Ogre of Grotum, but which detestable creatures are properly known by their scientific cognomens as—"

  "When will it come back?" interrupted Greyboar. (Let the mage go on, and you'll get an entire lecture in natural history.)

  Zulkeh frowned. "Do you trifle with me, sirrah? 'Tis well known that the Great Ogre of Grotum never leaves its lair for any reason."

  He thrust out his staff, pointing to a dark corner of the grotto. "Indeed, the miserable monster lurks yonder."

  Everyone had now entered the grotto. Everyone gasped. Everyone stared where the staff pointed. Gwendolyn and Hrundig held up the lanterns.

  A voice came from the dark corner. A horrible, dry, croaking kind of voice.

  "Don't hurt me," it whined.

  "Show yourself!" commanded the mage.

  "Don't hurt me," repeated the voice.

  The mage pounded his staff into the floor of the grotto. "Show yourself!" he commanded anew.

  "Don't hurt me."

  Smoke and lightning issued from Zulkeh's ears. (I'm serious. It astonished me too, the first time I saw it happen.) The wizard began stalking about the grotto, staff in his left hand, his right fist clenched above his head.

  "Oh, boy," said Shelyid. "You're in for it now, you Great Ogre of Grotum! That's the famed and dreaded peripatis thaumaturgae."

  So it was. I'd seen it before, in the chamber at Prygg where we—never mind. It's quite a distinctive tread, the peripatis thaumaturgae—counterclockwise, eleven steps to the circuit, with, of course, the semi-hop following each third completion of the circuit to throw off what demons might be tailing behind in the astral plane.

  "I'm coming! I'm coming!" squealed the voice from the corner. A moment later, the Great Ogre of Grotum scuttled into the light.

  I gaped. So did everyone. The damn thing wasn't more than two feet tall! Oh, sure, it was horrid looking, what with those bat ears and the bat fangs and the talons and the knobby limbs. But still—

  "Ah, excellent," spoke the mage. He turned and bestowed a cheerful smile upon us. "You are most fortunate, my fellow adventurers. Not often does one encounter such a perfect specimen of this breed!"

  Here the wizard began another impromptu lecture, pointing out the diverse features of the little monster which—to his mind—made it such a singular model of the famed Great Ogre of Grotum.

  Again, Greyboar cut him short. "But it's so little!" he protested. "Why's the thing got the reputation it does? It can't be more than two feet tall."

  Zulkeh spread his arms wide, exuding satisfaction. "Did I not say it was a perfect specimen?" he demanded. "Nowhere more than in this, I might add—that it demonstrates that absolute mastery of disguise which is the diagnostic trait of the Great Ogre of Grotum to all scientific taxonomists."

  Greyboar frowned. "What disguise?"

  "Its size, naturally. Marvelous, marvelous. I was familiar with the phenomenon, of course, from the literature. But not even the excellent monographs of the Grimm Brothers Laebmauntsforscynneweëld had truly prepared me for the wondrous—"

  "How big is it?" cried Jenny.

  "Yes!" added Angela. "Really, I mean?"

  Zulkeh examined the little ogre carefully. The ogre returned his gaze with a fearful scrunch of its beady red eyes.

  "I estimate—" The mage pondered. Then, with his usual sureness: "Eight feet tall. Possibly nine."

  "Nine and a half," said the ogre smugly. A moment later, the disguise vanished and the great slavering monster sprang upon the wizard.

  Or would have, if Shelyid hadn't lunged forward and interposed the sack. The Great Ogre bounced off like a rubber ball and sprawled to the side. But it was back to the attack in less than a second.

  The next few minutes were a whirlwind. Greyboar met the monster's charge with a roar and a choke. More precisely, a neck grip. The Great Ogre was so huge that even Greyboar's hands couldn't fit around its throat. Think of a baby strangling a mastiff and you've got the general picture. A very strong baby, to be sure. But at a certain point the exercise gets a bit ridiculous.

  Still, Greyboar was able to stop the monster. And while I didn't think he'd be able to actually choke the thing, he was certainly keeping its attention concentrated.

  This was wizard's work, as far as I was concerned.

  "Zulkeh!" I shouted. "You stirred this damn thing up—so deal with it!"

  "Bah!" oathed the mage. "Think you a pitiful Great Ogre of Grotum can withstand my powers? Bah!"

  He turned to Shelyid. The dwarf had already unlaced the sack and was climbing into it. "What'll it be, professor?" he asked cheerfully. "Quick Yerkil's Disogrement Made Easy? Angemar the Clear-Minded's Insta-Quick Talisman? Suleiman the Modest's Simple and Surefire Cantrips?"

  "Bah!" oathe
d the wizard. "Am I a novice? An apprentice fumbling at lessons? Get me Gastro's Iliac, insolent dwarf! The Gravid translation, mind you—I have no truck with the others."

  I had a bad feeling even before Shelyid's face fell. "But, professor," whined his apprentice, "that'll take—"

  "Do as I command!" bellowed the mage. Shelyid ducked and vanished into the sack.

  I started to argue with the sorcerer, but a glimpse of Jenny and Angela hurling themselves on the Ogre distracted me. Completely.

  "What are you doing?" I shrieked.

  The girls paid no attention to me at all. The next thing I knew, Jenny was perched on the horror's left shoulder and was biting one of its great bat's ears. The Ogre squealed and tried to swipe her off with a paw. But Angela was already on the other shoulder and met the paw with a swipe of the kitchen knife she'd brought with her.

  The knife bounced off the Ogre's knuckles and went sailing. A second later, so did Jenny. Angela shrieked and started biting the other ear. The paw swiped again, and off she went. Both girls wound up in a heap on one side of the grotto.

  "Are you hurt?" I wailed, racing over to them. "Are you hurt?"

  They bowled me over on their way back to the fray. I went sailing myself, head over heels.

  By the time I untangled myself, they were back up on the Ogre's shoulders and were resuming their ear-biting. Again, the Ogre broke off its grappling with Greyboar and started swiping at them. Ear-biting wouldn't kill the great monster, but I guess its ears were pretty sensitive.

  This time, however, Gwendolyn was up there with them. She was clad in that leather get-up that she'd always favored for what she called "real work." Leather jacket, sleeveless leather vest, tight leather pants tucked into knee-high leather boots. It's quite an outfit, especially filled with Gwendolyn's Amazon figure. She could have made a fortune as a professional dominatrix.

  She was straddling the creature's great back, with her legs around its rib cage. Gwendolyn's legs were just long enough that she'd been able to reach all the way around and lock her ankles together. If the Ogre had been inclined toward bondage and discipline, it would have been in sheer ecstasy. Even if the boots didn't have high heels.