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, 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
