'Move,' the voice suggested.
'Don't want to,' Gorge might have said. 'Just got here.'
'Oh, but a big move,' the voice insisted. 'A migration, Highbulp, a great, grand, glorious migration. Lead your people to the Promised Place.'
'What Promised Place?'
'Far,' the voice whispered. 'Very, very far. A long journey, Highbulp. Destiny… the Highbulp of Destiny. What is the name?'
'Great… Gorge III…'
'The great Highbulp who led his people to the Promised Place… destiny, Highbulp. YOUR DESTINY.'
'Des'ny,' the Highbulp mused and might have whispered. 'Great Highbulp. Highbulp of Desi… Den… Density.'
'Destiny.'
'Right. Destiny. Where this Promised Place?'
'West, Highbulp.' The voice receded, became faint. 'Far, far west of here. Very far away.'
The voice seemed to continue, but it was no longer speaking to Gorge. It spoke only to itself. 'So does the mightiest torrent,' it said, 'begin with a single drop of rain.'
'Drip?' the Highbulp might have wondered.
'Drip,' the dream voice agreed.
Once they had crossed the lake of wine, it wasn't far at all to where Lady Grund remembered finding the bit of Tall armor that made such a nice tureen. With Lady Drule in the lead and Lady Grund guiding, the Aghar ladies made their cautious way through the old seeps to the lowest of the middens, through pantries and stowages, to a hole where a cracked stone had settled into eroding clay. The hole opened into a crawl space behind an ornate cabinet in a huge, vaultlike room where a hundred or more sleeping cots were ranked along the walls. Tables and benches stood in neat rows beyond them, and the open central area was a forest of wooden racks where suits of armor hung.
Dozens of the cots had human men sleeping in them, and the rack nearest each occupied cot glistened with armor.
Drule peered from behind the cabinet, listened carefully to a chorus of snores, then nodded to her followers. With a finger at her lips, she said, 'Sh!'
Quietly, methodically and efficiently, the Aghar ladies crept from rack to rack, collecting burnished iron codpieces.
Skitt came near to drowning in pulp before he found solid matter in the wine mine. The pulp shifted and flowed around him as he pushed forward through it, threatening to swamp him. But he kept going and, after a time, bumped into something solid. A wooden wall.
' 'Bout time,' he muttered, feeling the surface with his hands. It was like the other wood that had produced the first gusher. With maul and chisel, he went to work.
Beyond was solid stone, and he wondered for a moment if he had gone in a circle and was tunneling out near where he had tunneled in. He was tempted to forget the whole thing and take up rat hunting or something, when a revelation came to him.
'This Off Day,' he told himself. 'Off Day means don't have to do anything… not even quit.'
Fortified by this insight, Skitt renewed his efforts, chiseling away at the stone in reeking darkness. Beyond the stone was more wood. 'Give it one more shot,' he muttered, 'THEN go hunt rats.' In his mind, he fantasized that — if he could make a name for himself as a wine miner of note — possibly the lovely Lotta might consent to go rat hunting with him.
At least the wood was easier to chisel than the stone. It was very old, seasoned wood, and he enjoyed the shaping of it as he carved a tunnel, an inch at a time. Gradually the sound of his maul changed, becoming deeper, more reverberant with each blow, and intuition prickled at his whiskers.
'Might have somethin' here,' he whispered. 'Sounds like maybe pay dirt.'
The maul thudded and the chisel cut, and abruptly the wood before him bulged and splintered. Skitt had only time to gulp a breath before a roaring tide engulfed him and carried him, tumbling, back the way he had come — back through the tunnel of wood, of stone, of wood; back through the mushy path of reeking pulp, through wood again, through stone and flung him outward to splash into the frothing, tossing waves of the wine lake in the cavern.
He bobbed to the surface, gasped for air, and stared at the entrance to the mine several yards away. A vast torrent of dark wine was pouring from the hole, roaring and foaming as it met the lake's rising surface.
'Wow!' Skitt gasped. 'Whole 'nother gusher!'
Still clinging to his maul and chisel, Skitt bobbed and eddied on the tormented purple surface, trying to stay afloat. His head bumped something solid and he found himself looking up at a raftload of Aghar ladies carrying laden nets and sacks.
'You fall in?' one of them asked him.
'Lake's a lot bigger than before,' another commented.
Lady Drule was kneeling at the raft's edge, dipping wine with an iron bowl. She sniffed at it, took a dainty sip, let it roll on her tongue for a moment, then nodded. 'Good,' she decreed. 'What you say this is?'
'Wine,' another told her.
'Wine, huh? Pretty good.'
Lady Drule bent to look at the barely floating miner. 'Skatt — '
'Skitt,' he corrected, blowing spume. 'See any dry land?'
She looked around. 'Sure. Grab on.'
Skitt clung to the raft. The ladies poled for the far shore. A curious crowd of Aghar had gathered on the bank, some to see what the latest expedition had produced and some who had already been there, sampling the wine.
As the ladies waded ashore with their loot, Lady Drule remembered the miner in tow. 'Get Skatt,' she ordered, pointing.
'Skitt,' burbled the clinging Skitt. Half-drowned and becoming more inebriated by the minute, he was having trouble keeping his head above wine. Strong, small hands reached for him, took firm hold on his ears, and lifted him until he could climb onto the raft, then steadied him as he crawled across it to the safety of dry ground.
He sprawled there and looked up into bright, concerned eyes. It was Lotta.
'Skitt all right?' she asked.
'All right' He belched. 'Fulla wine, though. Hit 'nother gusher.'
Several other young gully dwarves were intently aware of the attention being paid to the wine-logged miner by the fetching Lotta.
'He got somethin' goin',' one of them said.
'Got Lotta goin',' another agreed. 'You know anything about mine? Or wine? Or work?'
'What's to know?' A third shrugged. 'Just dig, keep diggin'. Somethin' bound to turn up.'
With one final gaze at the recumbent Skitt, basking in the glow of Lotta's undivided attention, the other young Aghar dashed away and went looking for tools. This being Off Day, and having nothing better to do, they had decided to go into the mining business.
The acolyte Pitkin thought that yesterday had been a bad day. Today turned out even worse. His morning duties now included the inspection of only eight vats — the ninth had been sealed the day before by the chief warder — but nagging intuition made him more and more nervous as he worked his way along the catwalk.
It couldn't happen again, could it? Not again?
Somehow he knew, even as he opened the sampler port on Vat Eight, what he would find. Nothing.
Vat Eight was empty.
It was a pale and shaken messenger who ran all the way from the chief warder's quarters in the lower temple to the vast upper halls with their radiant stone, to hand a sealed message to the captain of the guard
