The Cataclysm

by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman

  Then, atop a barren caprock hill, he heard voices. People — somewhere — talking among themselves. With a whimper of sheer glee, Krog searched for the source of the sounds, his eyes alight, his ears twitching. He saw no one, but after a time he heard the voices again and found where they came from. Amidst a pile of rubble was a hole in the ground, and somewhere below were voices, coming nearer. He knelt, peered into the darkness. He could see nothing. He tried to lower himself into the hole, but only his head would go in. The hole was far too small for his shoulders. He backed out, sniffling in frustration, and heard the voices again — various voices, close enough now that he could almost make out the words.

  Knowing nothing else to do, Krog lay beside the hole, listening. The sound soothed and comforted him. He was not alone after all. He sniffled again, and tears glistened in his eyes as he closed them.

  The old seep wound upward, and upward again, and the gully dwarves followed it, their candles casting weird shadows on the stone walls. It was slow going. Whatever had made the cavern shake and had sealed its entrance, had littered the tunnel with shards and slabs of broken rock. Footing was tricky, requiring more concentration than most of the Lady Drule's followers could maintain in a place with so many distractions — layers of fresh stone to be looked at and tasted, small, furry things to be noted in case there was time later for a rat hunt, and their own distorted shadows bobbing here and there.

  As a result, the journey was punctuated with thuds and bumps, trips and falls, and a running commentary up and down the line:

  "Look here! Pretty shine."

  "What that over there? Dragon?"

  "Not dragon, dummy, just bat shadow."

  "Oops!" Thud.

  "Hey, floor bouncy 1"

  "Not bouncy. You fall on me. Get off."

  "Somethin' shiny there? Nope, just Bipp's eyes."

  "Anybody bring stew?"

  "Where we goin', anyway?"

  "To find Highbulp."

  "Find Highbulp? Why?"

  "Dunno. Lady Drule say so."

  Then, from the head of the line, "Sh!"

  The Lady Drule had rounded a bend and saw light ahead. She stopped, and several of her followers bumped into her. "Sh!" she repeated.

  Behind her, around the bend, someone complained, "Hunch! Get staff off my foot!" Then, "Hunch? Hunch! Wake up, get staff off my foot!"

  There were sounds of a tussle, and the Grand Notioner's voice, "What? What goin' on?"

  The Lady Drule turned, frowning. She put a finger to her lips. "Sh!"

  This time the message was relayed back down the line, and there was silence. She turned again, peering toward the dim light ahead. The tunnel seemed to widen there, and something glistened. Raising her hand to keep the rest hushed, Drule crept forward. Another cavern was just ahead, its floor strewn with broken rock and glitters of pyrite, and the light came from overhead. She tiptoed into the open, peering around. The light was daylight and came from a hole in the ceiling. There was no sign of the Highbulp and his explorers, but among the glitters lay two or three candles, a forage pouch, and a shoe. The others had been here.

  The Lady Drule's ears perked at a sound that was like faraway thunder — or someone snoring. It came from overhead, and her eyes brightened. "Gorge?" she called softly. "Highbulp, where you?"

  "Lady Drule find Highbulp?" someone asked.

  "Must be close," someone else suggested. "Sure sounds like him snorin'."

  Drule looked up at the opening in the ceiling, then handed her candle to the one nearest her. "All wait here," she said. "Maybe they up there. I go see."

  Clambering onto a pile of fallen stone, she found handholds on the stone wall and climbed toward the light. The opening above was small — about two feet across — but it was big enough for any gully dwarf to go through.

  The Lady Drule climbed, then hoisted herself into the hole. The sound of snoring came again, very close. If that was Gorge snoring, he was outdoing himself. She had never heard even the Highbulp sleep so loudly.

  With a final pull, she raised her head above the hole and looked around. She was on a hilltop littered with stone. Fragments and grotesque shapes were all around, and a particularly ugly large boulder blocked her view on one side. She raised herself from the hole, dusted herself off, and started to climb over the boulder, then stopped in confusion. It didn't feel like stone. As she bent to look at it more closely, the snore came again, then cut off abruptly. A pair of huge yellow eyes opened directly in front of her. For an instant, Drule froze in panic, then she pivoted and tried to run… and had nowhere to go. A pair of enormous hands rose behind her, blocking her escape, and the big head with the yellow eyes came upright and gazed at her. Below the eyes, a huge mouth opened, exposing great, chisellike teeth. In horror, the Lady Drule gaped at the monster, and it grinned back, then the big mouth moved, and it spoke one word. "Mama?"

  In the cavern below, the rest of the ladies — and the few males with them — waited with growing impatience. They could no longer see the Lady Drule, and could no longer hear the snoring. There were voices somewhere above — or a voice and intermittent rumbles of thunder — but they couldn't hear what was being said.

  By threes and fives, they started wandering around the cavern, looking at the pyrite deposits, the fallen stone, anything of momentary interest. Several had nearly decided to go back down the tunnel to the lower cavern and put on a pot of stew, when the hole above darkened and Drule's voice came down. "Ever'body come up," she called.

  Hunch peered upward. "Lady Drule find others? Find what's-'is-name… th' Highbulp?"

  "Not here," she called back. "Tracks, though. Maybe we follow an' find."

  The first ones to the top glanced at the Lady Drule, started to hoist themselves out of the hole, then spotted the huge, ugly creature crouched nearby — its gaze fixed lovingly on Drule — and retreated in panic, dislodging those below them. Within seconds, there was a tumbling pile of gully dwarves on the cavern floor and nobody climbing.

  The Lady Drule appeared at the opening again, looked at them curiously. "What happen? Ever'body fall down?"

  "What that you got up there?" someone asked. "Big, ugly thing."

  "Oh." She glanced around, then looked down again. "That just Krog. Stop wastin' time! Come up."

  Several of them began climbing again. Heads reached the surface and poked out, wide eyes looking past Drule at the creature still squatting nearby.

  "That Krog?" someone asked.

  "Krog," Drule assured them.

  "What Krog?" another demanded.

  "Dunno," she shrugged. "Just Krog. That all he remember. All come on now. Got to find Highbulp."

  "Why?" several of them wondered. Then one added, "We don' like Krog. Make him go 'way."

  Drule stamped her foot impatiently, then turned and walked to Krog. "Go 'way, Krog," she said. "Shoo!"

  Obediently, the creature stood and backed away several steps.

  "More go 'way than that!" somebody called from the hole.

  "Shoo!" Drule repeated, waving her arms at Krog. "Shoo! Shoo!"

  Looking very puzzled, the creature retreated farther, then squatted on its haunches again, a smile of contentment on its face.

  It was some time before the Lady Drule got all of her people out of the hole. When she did, they crowded around her, staring at the creature she had found. She was so hemmed in that she could hardly move, and began pushing her way out of the crowd.

  " 'Nough look at Krog!" she commanded. "Come on. We gotta look for Highbulp!"

  A layer of dust had settled on the hilltop, and there were tracks all around. Three distinct sizes of footprints — gully dwarf prints, human prints twice their size, and Krog prints twice the size of the human prints.

  She showed the rest of them the tracks, then pointed. "Highbulp an' rest go that way with Talls."

  Hunch stared at the tracks, frowning. "Highbulp real dimwit to go with Talls," he declared. "Why do that?"

  "Dunno." The La
dy Drule shrugged. "We go see."

  She set out northward, the rest falling in behind her. Behind them, Krog realized that they were leaving. He stood up.

  "Mama?" he rumbled. "Wait for me." He hurried to catch up with the Lady Drule, and gully dwarves scattered this way and that to avoid being stepped on.

  Drule looked back at the confusion and shook her head. "Ever'body come on!" she demanded. "No time for fool around!"

  "It not us fool around. It Krog!"

  "Make Krog go 'way."

  After they had gone a few miles, the Lady Drule gave up on getting rid of Krog. She had tried everything she could think of to make the creature "go 'way," and nothing had worked. Faced with the inevitable, she accepted it and just tried to ignore him. It was difficult. Every time she turned around, the first things she saw were enormous knees. Even worse, he insisted on calling her "mama," and kept trying to hold her hand.

  Worse yet, Krog's presence tended to discourage the others from following closely. Sometimes, when the Lady Drule looked back, they were barely in sight. Then, when the smoky sun was setting beyond the mountains to the west, she looked around and couldn't see them at all.

  On the verge of exasperation, she climbed a broken stump and peered into the brushy distance. "Now where they go?" she muttered.

  "Who?" Krog asked.

  "Others," she said. "S'posed to be followin'. Can't see 'em."

  "Oh," he rumbled. "Here." Great fingers circled her waist, and he raised her high. "See, mama? There they are."

  A half mile back, the others had stopped at the edge of a fallen forest and were scurrying about. They had built a fire.

  "Oh," the Lady Drule said. "Time for eat."

  "Yeah," Krog agreed, setting her on her feet. 'Time for eat. What we eat?"

  "Make stew," she explained. "What else?" With a sigh, she started back.

  "What else?" Krog rumbled, and followed.

  Partway back, on a wind-scoured flat littered with fallen stone, Drule saw furtive movement among some rocks, and her nose twitched. "Rat?" she breathed. She circled half around the rocks, saw movement again, and dived at it, her fingers closing an inch behind the rodent's fleeing tail. She stood and shook her head. "Rats," she said.

  Krog watched curiously, repeated, "Rats," and squatted beside a boulder. With a heave, he lifted it, and several rats scurried away. The Lady Drule made a dive for one, missed it. Her hand closed around a stick. A second rodent raced by. Drule swatted it on the head.

  She picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the stick in her hand. It was a sturdy hardwood branch an inch thick and about two feet long. "Pretty good bashin' tool," she decided.

  "Bashin' tool," Krog rumbled.

  By the time they got back to the others, Drule had three rodents for the pot and Krog was busy fashioning a bashing tool of his own. He had found a section of broken tree trunk about five feet long, and was shaping it to his satisfaction by beating it against rocks as they passed. It was a noisy process, but the implement pleased him. It felt right and natural in his hand. He held the forty-pound club in front of him, studied it with satisfied eyes, tossed it in the air, caught it, and studied it again. "Pretty good bashin' tool," he said.

  By the time the stew was ready, daylight was gone. "Better stay here for sleep," the Lady Drule told the others. "Go on tomorrow."

  "Go where,S Mama?" Krog wondered.

  "Find others."

  "These others?" He indicated the crowd around the fire.

  "No," she said. "Other others."

  "Fine," the Grand Notioner said, picking out a stew bowl. He dipped it and sat down to eat as others made their way to the pot. There weren't enough iron bowls to go around — much had been lost when the cavern of This Place had collapsed — but they made do with vessels of tree bark, cupped shards of stone, and a leather boot that someone had found and cut down.

  Drule had just started eating when she heard a sniffle in the gloom, a very large sniffle. She looked up. "What matter with Krog?"

  "Want some, too," the monster explained.

  The Lady Drule filled a tree-bark bowl and gave it to Krog. He sniffed it, opened his mouth, and popped it in, bowl and all. He swallowed. "Good," he said. "More?"

  Hunch, the Grand Notioner, stared up at the big creature in disbelief. "Gonna need lots more rats an' greens," he said. "Bark, too, if Krog keep eatin' th' bowls."

  "Rats?" Krog's eyes lit up. "Krog get rats with bashin' tool"

  He stood, picked up his club, and vanished into the darkness. He was gone for a long time, and most of the gully dwarves were asleep when he returned.

  Drule saw him approaching and held a finger to her lips. "Sh!" she said.

  Quietly, Krog came to the waning fire, found a clear spot and dropped something on the ground, something very big. "Rats too quick for Krog," he whispered. "Can't catch 'em. This do?"

  Drule gaped at the thing. She had seen cave bears before, but never a dead one, and never up close. It certainly would make a lot of stew, she decided.

  The Highbulp Gorge III was not happy. First to be snatched up by armed Talls and herded cross-country with a rope around his neck, lashed with whips and insulted at every stumble, then to be thrown into a cage with the rest of his followers and dozens of Tall captives as well — Gorge was almost certain that his dignity had been offended, among other things.

  "This intoler… outra… unforgiv… this stink!" he grumbled, pacing back and forth in the comer of the roofed pen where the gully dwarves were huddled. "Slave, Talls say. Not slave. I Highbulp!"

  "Not slave either," several of his subjects agreed.

  A voice growled, "You gully dwarves pipe down or you'll feel the lash."

  "Hmph!" Gorge muttered, but lowered his voice. "Maybe dig out? Skitt? Where Skitt?"

  "Here," a sleepy voice said. "What Highbulp want?"

  "Skitt, you dig hole."

  "Tried it," Skitt said in the gloom. "Rock underneath. Need tools, no tools. G'night."

  "Might cut through bars," another suggested. "Bars are wood."

  "Cut with what?" still another pointed out. "Same thing. Got no tools. If had anything for cut, could — "

  "Shut up over there!" a human whispered from the other side of the pen. "You'll get us all in trouble!"

  "Hmph!" Gorge said, feeling helpless and hopeless.

  Armed guards patrolled around the pen. Nearby, the fires of the slavers' camp burned bright. They had been coming in all day, groups of four to eight at a time, most of them bringing captives, and now there were at least thirty in the camp, and dozens of slaves in the pen.

  A guard passed near the wood-barred enclosure, and a human voice inside said, "If only I could get my hands on a sword, I'd…"

  The guard laughed. "You'd what, slave? Fight? By the time we sell you, we'll have beaten all the fight out of you. Now shut up."

  Another guard strolled past on the gully dwarves' side, and the Highbulp and his followers cringed away from the bars. They didn't like the way these Talls talked, at all.

  At first dawn, the ladies packed as much bear meat as they could carry, while the Lady Drule went looking for tracks to follow. Krog tagged along, happy as a duckling following its mother.

  Drule searched northward, then stopped and scratched her head. There had been tracks before, she was certain, but now there were none. "Where they all go?" she wondered.

  Krog squatted beside her, scratching his head in imitation. "Who?" he asked.

  "Highbulp an' th' rest," she reminded him. "Ones we been tryin' to find."