Lord Vulpin turned to face the mage, his eyes like points of glitter beneath the elaborate scrollwork of his helm. “You lost it, Clonogh. You will regain it for me. Out there is Chatara Kral. You will go there, and retrieve it.”
Clonogh flinched at the command, as though stung by a whip. “My lord,” he pleaded, “you know the cost of my magic.”
“I know,” Vulpin’s stare held no compassion, no relenting. “Each spell costs you a piece of your life. A year, or three, or five. You made a bad bargain for your magic, Clonogh. But it was your bargain, not mine. Your bargain with me is this.” He drew an amulet from his robe. It was a small, glass sphere with a single, bright speck of light inside it. Teasingly he tossed it upward, caught it in a casual hand and tossed it again. He enjoyed it when the mage whimpered. “Your living spirit, Clonogh. I hold your very existence in my hand and my price for its return is the Fang of Orm.”
“Pray your sister doesn’t have it,” Clonogh muttered. “Or, if she does, that she doesn’t learn its use before we get it back.”
“What if she does?” Vulpin squared his shoulders, seeming to fill the portal where he stood now, looking out at the Gelnian army. “Where is she going to find an innocent among that mob?”
In a hushed voice, Clonogh spoke a transport spell and was gone.
“Another year or so lost, Clonogh?” Vulpin muttered to no one but himself. “My, how time does fly.”
At the forest’s edge, small things moved among the shadows and small, curious faces peered out at the broad fields where armies of humans were doing mysterious things.
“Talls def’nitely up to somethin’,” Tag decided. “Runnin’ ‘roun’ like crazy out there.”
“All keep lookin’ at that big building,” Tunk observed. “Wonder what in there?”
Bron squinted, shading his eyes with a grimy hand. “Wish we had a better look,” he muttered.
The ivory stick in his fist shivered slightly, its wide end radiating a smoky, reddish glow, and abruptly they were no longer there. Where there had been a gaggle of gully dwarves, now there was only the still forest of the slope.
In a place of stone and silence, Orm opened slitted eyes and raised his great, flat head. He peered here and there, weaving impatiently. Again he had sensed his lost fang, but again it was only for a moment. Within the den behind him his mighty tail twitched, and husk-dry rattles buzzed. Someone was playing with him! These quick, taunting tastes of his fang, so brief, too brief for him to gather himself for a strike. Someone or something was goading him!
But whoever it was, would pay. To awaken his fang at all, required at least a vestigial intelligence. Its holder must be capable of wishing. And the weakness of intelligence, he knew, was its tendency to dwell upon its own thoughts. Sooner or later, a test of the fang must linger long enough for him to strike. Angry and hungry, Orm waited.
Scrib the Philosopher was on the verge of a great discovery when the flood came. The thought had started with a thing he noticed about mushrooms. Added to a pot of stew, they could give a pleasant flavor to the stuff, but only if the proper proportions were used. Too little mushroom, and nothing was achieved. Too much, and the stew tasted distinctly like wormwood. It had to be just the correct amount.
Only rarely, though, was that “correct amount” of mushroom achieved. Wouldn’t it be nice, Scrib had pondered, if somebody should happen to remember from one stew to the next how much mushroom should be included?
Like most Aghar, Scrib had almost no concept of numerical comparison. If anyone in the tribe knew how to count past two, no one was aware of it because there was no way to express such a notion. It was the nature of gully dwarves not to count for much.
But they did understand quantity, and Scrib had noticed that truly fine comparisons could be made on this basis. A bear was bigger than a rat, and a bug smaller than a bird. Talls were bigger than gully dwarves, and fire was hotter than sunlight and the Highbulp snored louder than anybody else.
Stew pots were of varying sizes, ranging from half a turtle shell or a dented helmet found on a Tail’s battlefield to the Great Stew Bowl, which was far older than yesterday and had something to do with the Highbulp’s legendary dragon.
Squatting on the sandy floor of the old cistern, Scrib drew doodles in the sand, sticking out his tongue in concentration as he labored with a stick, making circles of various sizes. By a stretch of imagination, the circles might be seen to represent stew pots.
By the time he had his circles completed, he had almost forgotten the rest of the equation, but he hit himself on the head a few times and it returned to him: mushrooms!
Mushrooms, numerically, had the same limitations as anything else. There could be one, or more than one. But in quantity they could be likened to a handful of dirt, or a mouthful, or a spadeful, or a pouchful.
A handful of mushroom would probably be too much for a mouthful of stew, but maybe not too much for a pouchful. Laboriously, Scrib drew squiggles inside his circles, hoping the squiggles might somehow resemble mushrooms.
And as he worked, a great understanding began to dawn upon him. If everybody knew that a circle meant a stew pot and a squiggle was so much mushroom, he thought, then anybody should be able to flavor stew by studying doodles in the sand.
Somehow the idea seemed to just miss the mark, but Scrib felt he was definitely onto something except that now he couldn’t find his doodles because they were under water. So, in fact, were his feet, and the water was rising.
Thus Scrib was well on his way to inventing the cookbook and, incidentally, the written word, when the flood came.
Ever since their arrival at This Place, the tribe of Bulp had been mining a crevice behind one of the old buildings. The crevice had been very narrow, and clogged with rubble, but they had cleaned it out and widened it in their search for pyrite-pretty yellow rock that the Highbulp was convinced must have some value.
The crevice led back into the hillside, to an old sinkhole with a lake at the bottom of it. The fact that the lake became deeper each time it rained in the hills, and it rained often in this season, seemed of no consequence, since the gully dwarves had all the water they needed in the little stream that flowed through the gorge of This Place.
Then, yesterday, there had been a particularly violent storm in the western hills. Lightning had danced a frenzied pattern on the high places, and the thunders had echoed like the roll of great drums. Then the entire western sky, along with the hills, had disappeared behind a slate-gray curtain of rain.
The highlight of the day had been when a huge, one-eyed ogre came stomping and muttering down the canyon, carrying a battered cudgel in one hand and part of a horse in the other. The gully dwarves had fled ahead of him, diving into hidey-holes to watch him go by. His running commentary as he passed indicated that he had been rained out. His cave, up in the hills somewhere, was full of leaks, and he had packed his possessions and was moving to a better climate.
By evening the little stream had become a roaring torrent, but it seemed to have reached its peak.
Today had dawned bright and cheerful, except for some ominous rumblings somewhere nearby. Glitch the Most, Highbulp and Legendary Dragonslayer, had awakened hungry and cranky, and promptly announced that he was tired of living in a cistern and wanted his breakfast out in the sunlight.
The simple demand had turned into a major undertaking. First the heaped pyrite had to be cleaned from the cistern’s stairs, then several dozen gully dwarves were required to get the Highbulp to the top. Somewhere along the line, Glitch had developed vertigo, and he kept blacking out and falling off the stairs.
Directed by his wife and consort-the Lady Lidda-they had finally blindfolded Glitch, then worked in teams to get him to the top. Some pulled, others pushed, while still others swarmed below to catch him if he fell.
“Glitch a real twit,” the Lady Lidda had declared, climbing the sheer wall to meet her lord and master when he emerged. “Still our glorious Highbulp, though.”
Another problem was the Great Stew Bowl, which was still at the bottom of the cistern. The big iron bowl was just plain heavy.
Sometime in the past, in a fit of inspiration, Bron had fashioned a sturdy leather strap for the thing. The stew bowl had protrusions on its rim-a pair of iron rings on one side that might have been half a hinge, and a hook-shaped knob directly across that might once have been part of a catch. The strap, stretched across the mouth of the bowl from one to another of these fixtures, had made the bowl fairly easy to carry … for Bron. Few others among them could even lift the thing.
After several attempts by various people, to hoist the bowl out of the hole, the Lady Lidda went and found the tribe’s burly Chief Basher, Clout.
“Clout,” she ordered, “Go get Great Stew Bowl.”
“Okay,” Clout muttered, yawning and getting to his feet. But before he could start on his errand, his path was blocked by the Lady Bruze, his wife.
Hands on her hips, Lady Bruze glared at Lady Lidda. “Lotta nerve!” she snapped. “How come you boss Clout aroun’, Lady Lidda? You wanna boss somebody, go boss what’s-’is-name. Th’ Highbulp.”
“Go sit on a tack, Lady Bruze,” Lidda suggested graciously. “Need Great Stew Bowl out of hole. Clout can go get it.”
“Okay,” Clout said. Again he started toward the cistern, and again the Lady Bruze blocked his way.
“Tell Bron go get it!” Bruze said, glaring at Lidda. “Great Stew Bowl Bron’s problem, not Clout’s!”
“Bron not here, though. Highbulp send ’im someplace.”
“Where?”
“Dunno, but Highbulp’s orders. So Clout go get stew bowl.”
“Okay,” Clout sighed. He started again for the hole, and his wife grabbed him by the ear.
“Lady Lidda got no business tell Clout what to do,” Bruze insisted. “Clout stay here!”
“Okay.” He sat down, rubbing his sore ear.
“Still need Great Stew Bowl,” Lidda pointed out. “How ’bout Lady Bruze tell Clout go get it?”
“Lot better,” Bruze conceded, backing off a step. She pointed toward the cistern. “Clout, go get Great Stew Bowl.”
With a pained expression, the Chief Basher got to his feet again. “Yes, dear,” he said.
Clout was gone for a time, then finally emerged from the cistern, sweating and puffing, carrying the iron bowl on his shoulders, and several of the ladies set about concocting a batch of stew.
Left alone in the hole, Scrib the Doodler squatted on dry sand, on the verge of inventing a written language.
It was then that the sinkhole up in the hills reached capacity and its walls gave way. The gush of water that roared through the crevice and out into This Place was a mighty torrent, spewing tumbling gully dwarves ahead of it. Within seconds the entirety of This Place was a raging cauldron of cold water, and the cistern was filling up.
The water was almost to the top when Scrib bobbed up and scrambled frantically for solid ground. “Wow!” he panted. “Some kin’ brainstorm.”
Not far away, the Highbulp found himself totally awash in floodwater, which seemed to be everywhere.
“ ’nough of this!” he roared. “This no fun at all! This place no good! All over water! This place uninhab … unliv … a mess! Not fit to live in! All pack up,” he ordered. “This place not This Place anymore. We go someplace else.”
It was a grim, soggy, deserted village that Graywing and Dartimien the Cat found when they reached the chasm.
Scouting around, they found faint traces of recent habitation, though not exactly human habitation. “Gully dwarves!” Dartimien spat, gazing around at the ruins. “Nothing but gully dwarves, and even they have gone.”
Graywing had paused by the bank of the swollen creek. He squatted there on his heels, studying faint traces on the muddy ground. It looked as though rabbits might have passed this way, very much like the sort of trail he had seen in the brush after the Fang of Orm had disappeared.
Scowling, he stood and glanced around at Dartimien. “Do you suppose?” he asked.
“At this point,” the Cat said, “nothing would surprise me.”
“Then I guess we’d better go have a look,” Graywing suggested. “That faint trace … can you follow it?”
“Like you can follow a herd of horses, barbarian,” the Cat grinned. “Or a toothsome wench. I swear, sometimes I believe you plainsmen can’t see your hands in front of your faces.”
“And you alley-crawlers can’t see past the ends of your arms,” Graywing snapped. “So you concentrate on where we’re going, and I’ll concentrate on what’s ahead.”
Chapter 14
The Designated Hero
Almost since the day seven years ago, when the Tarmite slavers had taken her, Thayla Mesinda had led a sheltered life. No more than a scrawny, coltish little girl then, she had been spared the squalid fates of most female Gelnians taken captive by the raiders. It might have been the innocence of her frightened blue eyes, or the flaxen hints in her unwashed hair, or it might have been pure chance that singled her out. But within minutes of her arrival at Tarmish, she had been hustled away by robed celibates and ensconced in her own, private quarters in the tower keep.
She had been selected by Lord Vulpin, they told her, and would say no more. With time and proper nourishment she had blossomed into a lovely young woman. She had been fed and schooled, protected and pampered, and she still had not the slightest idea what she had been selected for.
Her world was a comfortable apartment in the jutting fifth level of the tower, where wide ramparts skirted the upper spire rising to Lord Vulpin’s haunts. The great ramparts gave a wide, walled balcony to Thayla’s chamber, and she spent her waking hours there in good weather. Her companions were the flowers she nourished there, the songbirds that came to trill and twitter and sometimes to rest on her outstretched finger, and the tight-lipped, robed celibates who unbolted her door each day to bring her meals and clean clothing. There were always three of them, all very old, and she had the feeling that each was there to keep a wary eye on the other two.
Beyond the balcony was the rest of the world, vast and intriguing, so near she could almost reach out and touch it, yet impossibly remote-beyond the sheer drop from her balcony, beyond the locked and barred portal of her lonely apartment.
Often she longed for association with the people of the fortress and of the fields and hills beyond-for a chance to go down and mingle with them in the courtyards and on the walls, to hear their voices around her, to feel the warmth of their fires. She wished she knew the names of the sweating men who labored in the stalls and marched to and from the battlements, and the women who came and went among them.
Sometimes she literally ached for companionship-people who were not like the wizened, silent robed ones or the curtailed crones who taught her a smattering of the arts, or that ominous, frightening presence in the tower above.
Often she dreamed of a hero who would come to take her away from all this, though she had very little idea who or what a hero might be. It was a vague word, contained sometimes in the stories of the old women who schooled her: hero.
Heroes, she deduced, were those who came to rescue young maidens from captivity. Heroes were those who fought against evil. The more she dreamed, the more convinced she became that there would be a hero for her, too. There must be.
Yet each day was like those before, filled only with the robed old celibates with their silent glares and their baskets and bundles, the occasional “teachers” and now and then a glimpse of that dark, formidable figure on the tower above-the regent Lord Vulpin. He had spoken to her a few times, through the grillwork in her door, but each time it was only the brief promise: do for me what I command when that hour arrives, and you will be rewarded.
His presence was like a cold wind on a balmy day, and each time she glimpsed him, or heard his voice, she dreamed again of an unknown hero.
Sometimes it seemed that the only real things in her world were
the dreams and the flowers that lined her balcony and the birds who came to call. Aside from those, her only companions were loneliness and boredom. But things would change, she assured herself. A time would come when the sameness of the days would be altered, and then her hero would come for her.
Thus it was with a mounting excitement and a sense of destiny that she watched strange armies taking the field beyond the fortress. There were thousands of armed men, some afoot and some mounted on great, prancing beasts, moving to surround the battlements while horns blared and drums rolled in the distance.
Something entirely new was happening, something unforeseen, and Thayla Mesinda watched eagerly. Maybe, somewhere in that threatening horde, was the hero of her dreams. She was standing at the stone railing, gazing outward, when feet scuffed the pavement behind her. She turned, and gasped.
Where there had been no one a moment before, now there were at least a score of little people-short, almost-human creatures not much more than half her size, huddled in a motley mass on her balcony, gaping around with startled eyes.
As she turned, one of them-a fuzzy-bearded little person slightly larger than the rest with sturdy, broad shoulders, and an ornate ivory stick in his grimy hand-gawked at her. “Oops! Ever’body run like crazy!”
With a furious scuffling of small feet, the creatures erupted from their cluster. Some scurried for shelter behind flower vases and benches, some ducked into shadowed corners, and some collided with one another, rolling and tumbling this way and that. At least two squeaked with panic and dived over the edge of the balcony, clinging there high above the courtyard until others could pull them up.
Within seconds, there wasn’t a single one of them in sight, though she knew that every bit of shelter around her was packed with them.
Curious, Thayla Mesinda stepped across to a potted shrub and parted its fronds. “Hello,” she said to the wide-eyed, pudgy face staring back at her from the gap. “Are you a hero?”
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