thousand pieces. Where it hit was where Glitch had been standing just moments before. Panicked gully dwarves, carrying armloads of sifted pyrite away from the fall zone, scurried this way and that. High on the wall, a chorus of Aghar voices said, “Oops!”
“Oh, yeah,” Lidda remembered. “Want Glitch stay out of way when rocks fall.”
“Oughtta write that down,” Scrib suggested, to nobody in particular.
Lidda ignored him. Thoughtfully, she gazed at her husband, and came to a decision. “Time for you give up bein’ Highbulp, Glitch,” she said. “Let somebody else do it.”
Glitch clambered to his feet, gawking at his wife. “Give up bein’ Highbulp? Mean I should jus’ abdica … termi … res … quit?”
“Sure,” the Lady Lidda answered. “Why not?”
“I Glitch th’ Most!” Glitch blustered. “Highbulp, noble leader. Main pain! Biggest cheese aroun’. Been Highbulp long time! Always been Highbulp! Why quit?”
“Not much fun anymore?” Lidda suggested.
Daunted by the logic of this, Glitch subsided a bit, muttering to himself. “Quit an’ do what?” he asked, finally.
Lidda only shrugged, but Gandy pointed his mop handle staff at the growing pile of gleaming pyrites beneath the wall dig. “How ’bout new career?” he suggested. “Clan got big, new mine here. Need somebody in charge of shiny rocks.”
“Pretty big job,” Glitch admitted. “Not jus’ ever’-body know ’bout shiny rocks.” He thought it over for a moment, then removed his crown of rat’s teeth and dropped it on the floor. “Okay, somebody else be Highbulp. I quit. Hey, everybody! Bring shiny rocks over here!”
Grumbling at the aches in his old bones, the Grand Notioner picked up the dilapidated crown and thrust it at Bron. “Here,” he said, “You be Highbulp now.”
Bron didn’t even look around. He was busy. Pert had him stirring the stew. “Nope,” he said. “Don’t want to.”
“Gotta have a Highbulp,” Gandy insisted.
“Get somebody else,” Bron said.
With a determined sigh, Gandy hobbled away a few steps and thumped his mop handle on the stone floor until the clamor around him subsided. This was not going the way the Grand Notioner had planned, but it was too late to turn back now. “Glitch not Highbulp anymore,” he announced to all who were listening. “Need a volunteer.”
“For what?” several of his clansmen wondered.
“For be Highbulp,” Gandy explained. “Crown up for grabs. Who want be Highbulp?”
Only silence and blank stares answered him. Then from high on the wall, a voice said, “Let Bron be Highbulp. Bron got nothin’ better to do.”
“Bron a hero!” Pert protested.
“Don’t need hero.” Gandy said. “Need Highbulp. But Bron says no.”
“Don’t wanna be Highbulp!” Bron insisted, still stirring stew. “Dumb job, bein’ Highbulp.”
“Any other nomina … sugges … any takers?” Gandy called, turning this way and that, holding up the crown. By threes and fives, the gully dwarves of Clan Bulp turned away, expressing their disinterest.
“
“You do it, then,” a gully dwarf snapped, carrying an armload of pyrite to Glitch’s pile.
“Make Bron or Clout do it,” several said.
With an eloquent shrug, Gandy returned to the fireside. “Bron Highbulp now,” he proclaimed. Standing on tiptoe, he tried to set the old crown on Bron’s head. “Majority rule.”
Bron glared at him, avoiding the crown. “How many majori … maj … whatever?” he demanded.
“Two.” Gandy said, sagely.
“No way,” Bron said. “Let Clout do it.”
“Clout not here.”
“Crown here. Jus’ say, ‘Clout Highbulp now.’ ”
“Okay.” The Grand Notioner gave up. “Clout Highbulp now. Anybody see him, tell him so.”
With that task completed, the Grand Notioner turned his attention to getting some stew. He retrieved an old wooden bowl from its hiding place in his garments, stooped … and stopped. Bron was still stirring with his broadsword, muttering to himself about the injustice of it all, but he was stirring nothing. Where the stew had been, simmering in the legendary Great Stew Bowl, now there was nothing. Even the great iron pot was gone. The whole mess had simply vanished, as though it had never been there.
At first, Lord Vulpin did not recognize the ancient figure sprawled beside the battered telescope cabinet in what was left of the Tower of Tarmish. Then the rheumy old eyes, staring at him with livid hatred, told him who this relic was. “Clonogh,” the Lord of Tarmish purred. “So your tarnished magic has reduced you to this. Where is the Fang of Orm that you were to deliver to me?”
The old mage glared at him, despising him but helpless to harm him. Vulpin glanced around, wrinkling his nose. A foul stench seemed to pervade the atmosphere here, and he heard tiny, muffled lapping noises that seemed nearby. The din of battle below-the remaining forces of Gelnia and Tarmish were hand to hand and blade to shield now in the courtyard beneath the tower-almost drowned out all other sound. Then he turned crimson eyes on the cowering Clonogh again, and raised his black visor. A cruel grin split his beard. “The Fang or your life, mage. The choice is yours.”
“Kill me,” Clonogh hissed. A wavering, bony finger pointed at Vulpin’s blood-stained sword. “I want nothing more than death.”
“It is no matter,” Vulpin sneered. “The Fang is here. I saw the creature that brought it. But no clean death is yours, master mage.” From his tunic he withdrew a little, glassy sphere, holding it casually between finger and thumb of a gauntleted hand. “Your soul, old man,” he purred. “I said I would return it one day. So here it is.”
“The Fang is no good to you without a wishmaker,” Clonogh spat, struggling to arise. “An innocent. Where will such as you find an innocent, now that your captive girl is gone?”
“Gone?” Vulpin grinned, barked a command and a huge, armored brute stepped out of the stairwell into daylight. One of Vulpin’s cave-vandal guards carried a struggling girl under his arm as casually as a smaller man might carry a puppy. The girl was Thayla Mesinda. “I found her just below,” Vulpin said. “Apparently she and some others had been hiding in the cellars beneath this place. She will speak the wish I want, Clonogh, the wish that will rid me of all annoyances.” With a sneer, Vulpin stepped to the precipitous edge of the broken tower and raised the glassy bauble in his fingers. “You have earned your reward, Clonogh,” he said. “The return of your soul. Here it is. If you want it, go get it.”
With a chuckle, Vulpin tossed the glass sphere outward.
“My soul!” Clonogh shrieked. With the last of his strength he darted past Vulpin and dived outward, trying to catch the falling sphere. It was falling free, at the limit of his reach. With his last strength he reached for the little sphere, and with his last breath, as he plummeted toward the cobbled courtyard, Clonogh voiced a spell. It was his last, and now the ravages of it no longer mattered. He put into it every shred of his energies, every trace of his hatred, and the arcane words still echoed above the tumult of battle as the old magician’s fingers closed around his falling “soul” and his withered body shattered upon the stones of the court. “You will never leave this place,” the echoes seemed to say.
A thin, dark cloud might have floated for a moment above the gore of the splattered corpse, then swirled and wound around the standing tower, darkening the stones. It might have, or it might have been no more than a trick of light and shadows.
Inside the telescope cabinet, Clout was sipping stew from a huge vat of the stuff that had suddenly, for no reason he could understand, appeared there beside him. The gully dwarf was aware of a great deal of commotion just outside the cabinet. There were Talls out there, arguing and shouting. But it meant nothing to Clout. He had wished that he had some stew. Now he had stew, a whole pot-full of fresh, hot stew, and the pot itself seemed to be none other than the legendary Great Stew Bowl of the Bulps.
Another person, even some other gully dwarves, might have found all this puzzling. But Clout had never been one to wonder about things beyond his understanding, and thus he rarely ever wondered about anything at all. The
