again, down and down, bouncing and tumbling over the lip of the drop to splash heavily into the thick, scummy ooze of the drainage pond.
Gully dwarves tend to be natural swimmers, and Gus was no exception. He instantly popped to the surface and paddled over to the edge of the pond without really thinking about what was happening. Instead, he was still trying to grasp the intricacies, the beauty of the brainstorm that had dawned on him.
Everything goes down.
His hand brushed against something in the ooze, something limp and furry. In triumph he pulled it out to reveal the rat! Clutching his treasure, Gus climbed out of the sludge to find that he had unwittingly crossed the small pool and was perched on the loosely piled rubble left by the rockslide-the rubble that formed the dam that held back the sludge. To one side was the pond, the murky liquid lapping against the rim of the makeshift barrier. To the other side, Gus could see that the rocky slope tumbled steeply away. He recoiled from the edge, realizing that if he lost his balance, he would tumble all the way down to the dark hole where the sludgy stream disappeared into the ancient sewer extending under the Urkhan Sea.
Everything goes down, he knew, and that would include himself.
“Look! Got rat!” he crowed, hoisting the gamey morsel. Unfortunately his movement was too abrupt, and the slippery thing slid from his fingers, through the air, and back into the pond.
“You one funny bluphsplunger gully dwarf, you are!” Slooshy cried, still sitting on the ground, holding her sides from the force of her laughter.
Glumly, Gus looked at the place where the rat had vanished. He saw that more of the liquid, churned by his fall and subsequent swim, had spilled over the lip of the dam, running in gooey rivulets down the surface of tumbled stone.
Even as the thought possessed him, the loose pile of rocks underneath him shifted slightly. Gus scrambled to the side, kicking frantically to climb higher. He made it to safety with a single lunge, but his efforts knocked a couple of stones off the pile. They clattered downward, chased by a small spill of sludgy liquid as a bit of the pond scum trickled through the notch in the dam created by the falling rocks.
And in that instant, everything became really, really clear to the startled gully dwarf.
The sludge in the pond, like everything else in the world, wanted to go down. But the dam was stopping it from following the course of the stream. Instead, it sat there in the bowl of rock, and tried to go down a different way-the way that led through the ceilings of all the Aghar houses that happened to lie directly beneath.
“Hey!” he cried, hopping to his feet, quickly circling the small pond. Slooshy looked at him in confusion. “Hey! The sludge wants to go down!”
“That not so funny,” she replied. “You fall in again?” she added hopefully.
“Everything falls down!” he shouted, throwing back his head.
A few Aghar were higher up on the sides of the ravine, climbing or descending within his view. They stared at him in surprise, startled by the outburst. Most of them simply ignored him, though one hefty, young fellow tossed a sharp rock in Gus’s direction. He ducked, then shouted out in glee as the stone hit the liquid and, naturally, vanished.
“See! Everything goes down!”
“What? You crazy bluphsplunger now, you are!” Slooshy said, backing away. “Go away!”
She started climbing up the sloping ground, stopping to throw a rock at him every few feet. He gleefully skipped out of the path of each missile. “See! Goes down!” he cried when each errant stone vanished into the pond.
“That crazy talk! Stoop humpus bluphsplunger Aghar, leave me alone!” Slooshy shouted back. She threw one more rock-another he easily avoided-from the top of the ridge before vanishing from his view.
He didn’t care. He raced back up the ravine floor to the tunnel leading down to his neighborhood, skidding and sliding down the steep shaft. He almost couldn’t control his momentum until he caught a flash of movement on the ground, something slithering along at the base of the wall.
It was a cavebug!
Gus stopped the only way that he could: he sat down on the hard stone ground. Ignoring the pain in his bruised rump, he reached down and grabbed the bug with his stubby thumb and forefinger. Hoisting it, feeling the hunger gnawing at his belly, he almost popped it right into his mouth.
Then he remembered: sting thumb, not tongue!
That axiom of cavebug dining had been passed down through generations of gully dwarves, and Gus remembered it just in time. The little, wormlike bug wriggled in his grasp, the numerous legs-at least two on each side-flailing for purchase. At the tail he spotted the sharp stinger, erect and thrashing. Squinting, carefully concentrating, Gus held up his thumb and let the wicked-looking barb plunge into the pad of flesh.
“Ow!” he shouted as fiery tendrils of pain shot through his thumb, his hand, and up his arm. The stinger itself detached from the bug to jut from the gully dwarf’s skin. Knowing his prey was disarmed, Gus popped it into his mouth, breaking the segmented body with a crunch of his teeth and quickly swallowing the still-wriggling parts of the doomed creature. He smacked his lips and enjoyed the sensation of delicious food. If he was not exactly full, neither was he starving, and starving was a very pleasant thing not to be doing.
For a few moments, he inspected the floor of the alley, looking, hoping, seeking another one of the bugs. But he was lucky to have found the one creature and was unsurprised that no more were in view. He smacked his lips again, ignoring the searing pain in his thumb, wishing Slooshy would come along so he could brag about his precious discovery.
Only after two minutes did he remember that precious discovery, his mission, his crucial news. Then he hopped to his feet again and started down the steeply sloping alley toward his house, which was right around the next bend. Tumbling to a stop before the Fishbiter residence, he burst inside-fortunately, the Aghar family had no use for a front door-and immediately collided with Birt, who was lunging to outmaneuver Ooz to claim the rock that Pap, dripping with sludge, had once again vacated.
“Everything goes down!” Gus cried.
“Hey! That my rock!” Pap cried, knocking the momentarily triumphant Birt out of the way.
The patriarch resumed his place of honor, just as another dribble of goop gathered below the crack in the ceiling. Gus watched, waiting, knowing that it wouldn’t be long. The globule grew heavy, distended, drooping ever further downward while Pap, once more king of his household, glared sternly at his wife and sons.
Plop.
TWO
The chamber was far beneath the summits of the Kharolis, well below the reinforced bastion that was the north gate, underneath, even, the teeming city of Norbardin. In fact, the very lowest portion of that city, the slum known as Anvil’s Echo, was far above the deep and isolated cavern, the large space that had been excavated at great expense from the very solid bedrock under the nation of Thorbardin.
That place had once been intended as the new Council Hall of the Thanes, the seat of Thorbardin’s government in the wake of the Chaos War’s devastation. It had been designed at the commission of King Tarn Bellowgranite-he who was called the Failed King-and many years of labor, including complicated architecture and engineering, had gone into its creation. Though it had never been used for the purpose for which it had been intended, it had been almost completely finished before being abandoned. Each throne had a lofty dais that, even incomplete, overlooked the circular floor of the chamber. Proud columns lined the distant walls, and broad stairways provided access to the upper rim that extended around the whole periphery of the huge room.
Along one wall a broad ramp extended upward. At one time the ramp had connected to the environs of Norbardin, but no longer. Barely a quarter mile from the vast chamber, a solid wall of rock, tight-fitting stones installed by dwarf craftsmen, blocked all passage. The barrier was so well made that even air and water couldn’t penetrate and so thick that the pounding of a hammer on one side of the barrier would be inaudible to a listener on the other.
