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
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
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.
