“You!” barked the mage, pointing a finger at the cringing Aghar. “Come!”
The word was not just a word, but a command of dark sorcery. The dimwitted creature could not have disobeyed even if he had been shrewd enough to sense the doom awaiting him.
So the Aghar numbly pushed himself to his feet and stumbled forward, into the aura of heat. His skin reddened from the blistering radiance, and his tattered shirt began to smoke. He howled miserably, but he endured the pain, compelled by the word of command.
Gorathian’s fiery tentacle released its caressing hold upon Willim’s foot, rearing like the head of a snake up from the floor. It waved and danced, almost as though it were sniffing the air, sensing the approach of its master’s gift. When the Aghar was six or eight steps away, the tentacle lashed out, slapping the stone floor, stretching to wrap itself around the hapless creature’s ankle. Flame seared the Aghar’s dirty skin, and the tendril of fire pulled like a whip.
The gully dwarf toppled onto his back. He shrieked in terror as the effect of the command spell was broken. Twisting, clawing the floor with his dirty fingernails, the terrified Aghar tried to break away but to no avail. Gorathian tugged, and the gully dwarf vanished over the lip of the chasm, trailed by only the lingering echoes of his screams.
Ochre quickly retreated from the heat to return to his daily task: crushing the coal that the wizard used to fuel his forge and ovens. The other apprentices-there were ten in all-had not even looked up from their labors. Willim nodded, pleased with their dedication, satisfied that they feared him and, more, feared him absolutely.
He glanced once more into the depths of the chasm. He could sense Gorathian seething down there. The morsel had not satisfied him, not at all. If anything, it had merely whetted his hunger.
Willim was pleased.
THREE
D ay and night were meaningless concepts in sunless Thorbardin, but an industrious society such as that of the dwarves required a method for keeping track of the passage of time. The typical convention among the Theiwar, Daergar, and other mountain dwarves involved counting intervals, each of which roughly approximated a twenty- four-hour cycle on the surface. That method allowed laborers to get paid for their time, rents to be charged, and other duration-specific matters to be calculated with remarkable accuracy.
The Aghar measured time in intervals as well, but it was fair to say they were a trifle less accurate than their more advanced cousins when it came to keeping track of the passage of hours, days, weeks, or years. To a gully dwarf, “one interval” was a short time, and “two intervals” was anything longer than a short time.
Thus, Gus calculated that it was two intervals later when he returned to the sludge pond and its dam in the ravine over his house. For once, he wasn’t terribly hungry. Birt had snared a bat that carelessly flew into the family’s house, and in the ensuing tug-of-war, Gus had claimed not only one wing, but a good portion of the furry little body. He had gulped it down before either of his brothers or parents had been able to snatch it away.
In a sense, it was that satisfying repast that had propelled him back to the ravine. The rest of his family had been more than a little outraged by his success, and after a dozen cuffs about his face and ears, Gus decided that he might be a little more comfortable-or at least less bruised-if he hung about somewhere else for a while. So he had scampered out the front door, chased by a stream of pebbles and abuse. Almost without thinking about it, he had emerged from the alley and crossed around the sludge pond until he found himself standing on the loosely piled rocks of the dam.
He got around to the place where he had accidentally knocked a couple of rocks out of the way, where the modest rush of slimy water had been pouring out of the pond when he was last there. At the moment, however, there was only a tiny trickle passing through the gap. Gus stared, scratching his head. Was there a flaw in his understanding?
“Everything goes down,” he reminded himself aloud, trying out the words. But there was not enough sludge in the pond to go down through the gap, for the simple reason that the surface of the liquid was two inches lower than it had been before. The muck couldn’t go down because it would have to go up first to pour over the dam.
“Bluphsplunger!” he cursed, the sound of the nice expletive making him feel just a little better. He sat down on a rock and rested his chin in his hand, thinking.
It had been so promising, his idea. If the sludge pond went down, into the lake, it wouldn’t keep going down into the Fishbiter house. But how could the sludge go down when it first had to go up to get over the top of the dam?
That was when the answer came to him in a flash: it was the dam that had to be lowered first! If the dam went down, then the sludge could go down again!
Eagerly Gus knelt on the crest of the dam. He tugged at a big rock, feeling it wobble slightly. Clawing at the edges, he dug at the gravel and sand, slowly excavating a narrow crack around the stone. His thumb still throbbed from the cavebug sting, and he momentarily stuck it in his mouth, thinking. Even by Aghar standards, his thumb didn’t taste very good, so he decided to ignore the pain and go back to work. Soon the rock was wobbling freely, and Gus hopped to his feet and grabbed the top with both hands. Straining for leverage, he planted his feet and leaned back away from the pond, swaying over the steep face of the rock pile where it tumbled to the bottom of the ravine.
He knelt, ready to exert himself on the next rock, when suddenly he was distracted by screams and sounds of commotion from nearby. Quickly Gus scrambled up to the top of the ridge and peered out over the next steep, narrow valley, a ravine that ran parallel to his own, like all the others along the slope spilling down toward the dark waters of the Urkhan Sea. Several figures were bounding around in the narrow space, and at least two of them carried big, sharp swords.
“I got this one… there goes another!” shouted a big dwarf-he sounded like a Theiwar-holding a squirming figure by the scruff of its neck. The captive, Gus saw at once, was a gully dwarf. Other Aghar had scuttled away, but at least one other was held down by the big dwarf’s foot on his belly.
“You get the little bitch!” the Theiwar called to a companion. “I’ll take care of these two.”
Several Aghar squirmed up the base of the ravine, with a second Theiwar chasing after them. The two attackers were marked by the exceptionally pale skin that was a feature of their race. Possessing true darkvision, the Theiwar had no difficulty following after his desperately fleeing quarry. Still another gully dwarf started scrambling up the side of the narrow trench, heading toward Gus’s vantage. He recognized her at once-Slooshy! — and was about to call out her name when his tongue froze in his throat. He could only stare, eyes bugging, at the scene in the bottom of the ravine.
The Theiwar was casually smacking the head of his captive on a rock, stunning him. Then he turned to the dwarf wriggling beneath his foot. Lifting his sword, he chopped down sharply, and the Aghar’s head came sliding right off his body! Gus tried to turn his eyes away, but he couldn’t, not before the Theiwar raised his bloody weapon a second time and decapitated the other helpless gully dwarf he had just knocked out.
Finally Slooshy was there, clawing frantically to climb up the last two feet, gratefully grabbing Gus’s hand as he reached down to pull her over the steep crest. She was breathing hard and sobbing, and he quickly pulled her down, out of the line of sight of the murderers.
“Slooshy! It’s me-Gus!” he whispered. Suddenly he felt terribly guilty for taking her rat and mocking her as she had thrown stones at him. “What happen?” he pressed.
“Big Theiwar! They come and grab my pop, cut him head off!” she wailed as Gus tried to muffle her mouth. Her terrible grief sent a cold shiver down his spine.
“Shh!” he urged. “We hide! Big Theiwar goofars go ’way soon!”
At least he fervently hoped they would. Slooshy sobbed against his chest, but she managed to stifle the noise of her grief, and Gus finally broke free, climbed to the crest, and peeked down into the neighboring ravine. The two dwarves were, in fact, heading away from them, descending toward the lake, where a large boat with one more Theiwar aboard had pulled up to the shore. The two killers carried their grisly trophies by the hair, and each bore several more small, lifeless heads dangling from each hand.
