had been broached, and it was but one of many other empty ones. The owner of the cellar obviously had not been in this section for many days-weeks perhaps, or even months.
Morg saw a large iron door nearby, and his kender-curiosity got the best of him. Straining at the massive ring, he pulled the door open. An even larger cellar, this one lit by numerous torches, lay beyond it.
However, his opening of the heavy iron door had caused it to groan on its rusty hinges. The noise awoke the gully dwarves and sent them bolting in all directions. One gully dwarf bowled into Morg, almost knocking him off his feet. It was a good thing that he kept his balance, or the gully dwarf would surely have devoured him in its fright. Yellow teeth flashed and champed inches from his face. Finally, he had to whack the grimy creature with his hoopak just to settle him down. It worked. The gully dwarf settled down on the floor with a thump.
“Oh dear,” Morg grimaced while gnawing on his topknot.
Dr. Palaver brought the gully dwarf around by applying something he called “smelly salts, or bicarbonate of ammonia” to a kerchief and waving it below the gully dwarfs nose. The miserable little creature came fully awake in an instant, teeth already snapping together in defense. Morg gripped his hoopak in case he needed to reapply the anesthetic.
But the gnome managed to mollify the creature enough to talk to it. “What is your name?” he asked slowly, so the gully dwarf could follow his words.
“Rulf,” the creature belched.
“He sounds like he is about to be sick,” Morg said.
“Rulf, we have rescued you from the Hole. Doesn’t that make you happy?” the gnome asked.
The gully dwarf shook his head. “No. Me happy here. Plenty good beer, stinky cheese… this heaven. You rescue me from heaven. Go away.” He crossed his arms sullenly and chewed a remnant of cheese still stuck in his beard.
“Come now, Rulf. We have rescued you, so you must come with us. You must do us a little favor, and if you do, I will catch you a nice, big, fat rat with one of my mousetraps,” the gnome offered.
“How big?” Rulf queried.
The gnome held up two fingers (he had dealt with gully dwarves before). “This big,” he said, wriggling his stubby digits for emphasis.
Rulf sucked in his breath, which caused him to choke on the bit of beard he had been chewing. He spat it out. “That big, huh? Who Rulf gotta kill?”
“Rulf kill no one. All Rulf gotta do… er, ahem,” the gnome cleared his throat and blushed. “All we desire of you is to show us the scariest place you know.”
“Scarier than this?” Rulf asked, indicating with a wave the catacomb cellar around him.
“The scariest you know,” the gnome said.
“It better be big hog rat,” Rulf said as he rose wearily to his feet, rubbing his hoopak-knocked noggin with a grimace.
Deep beneath the city of Palanthas, below its sewers and deepest dungeons, lay a system of sea caves known only to a few scholars of Palanthian lore. The caves had not been explored by the surface-dwelling citizens of that city in many a century, but they were well known to those who inhabited them.
The denizens of the caves were, of course, the gully dwarves. Those who knew of the gully dwarves living in the city’s sewers knew only the tip of the dwarfs beard, as the saying goes. There is often a whole dwarf behind it. In this case, there were several thousand of the generally mistreated and wisely disliked race of aghar dwarves, all living out their private lives in their private desolation, deep beneath a city of a hundred thousand blissfully ignorant souls.
Rulf picked a silent way through these caverns, warily avoiding any large groups and generally keeping to the shadows. When Morg asked him why he was hiding from his people, their guide turned on him with a snarl.
“This not my people,” he spat in disgust. “These nasty stinky Gulps. Rulf is a Bulp, the highest Bulp. These lazy Gulps live like kings while we prince Bulps eat bugs. Good bugs!” he added. “But not so good as here.”
Indeed, the Gulps of Under Palanthas had been living as good a life as any gully dwarves in all of Krynn for many generations. There was plenty of room, for the caves were most extensive, and plenty of nice, slimy, glowing fungus grew on the walls and floors. Whenever the aghar were hungry, all they had to do was chew on a wall. Most of them could be seen even in the dark by the weirdly glowing streaks of phosphorescent fungus-impregnated saliva drying in their beards.
But the good life here had come to a screeching halt some thirty years ago. Rulf laughed as he recounted the tale.
“That when big boss come. Big boss tell Gulps make plenty torches, smoky torches, torches day, noon, and night, torches all the time. Big boss eat smoke, they say. They say he love smoke like you and me love rat.”
“Speak for yourself,” Morg said.
“That where me take you: to see big boss. They say he scarier than the Hole. They say he make the Hole look like just a regular old hole in the wall.”
At the mention of the Big Boss, Whort began to back away. Morg caught sight of his nephew just as he was about to round a corner. Despite his advanced age, he was easily able to run his younger nephew to ground and drag him back to the gully dwarf and the gnome. He arrived just as Rulf was explaining to Dr. Palaver how the gully dwarves made torches.
“They take sticks and bones-nice bones, waste of good bones-and dip them in pool of black goo. Black goo burns, makes lots of black smoke. Big boss happy. When torches burn out, Gulps take stubs and dip them in black goo again to make new torches. Big boss happy. He eat smoke and leave Gulps alone, but when he mad, he eat Gulps, too. Nasty, stinky Gulps,” he ended with a snarl.
Dr. Palaver turned to his patient. “This is the source of your fear,” he commented, seeing the way Whort’s eyes bugged even more grotesquely behind the spectacles. “You must face it and drink the potion of mighty heroes that I invented today. Now what have I done with it?” He frantically patted his pockets, then turned them inside out.
Finally, Morg produced the bottle from one of his own pouches. “You left it in the office!” he replied to the gnome’s angry remark about the kender race in general. “I thought it might be important. Lucky for you, you have got me with you.”
The doctor pressed the bottle into Whort’s hands. “When I say so, you must drink it down no matter what happens, do you understand?”
The younger kender nodded, swallowing a lump the size of a dragon egg in his throat.
Rulf led them along a series of winding passages and empty, torchlit chambers. The smoky torches provided an excellent cover for their secret entry into the lair of the Gulps and their Big Boss. Finally, they slipped around a corner and entered the largest cavern of all, a cave so big they could have parked a three-masted Palanthian galley in it and still had room for an Ergoth-ian river cog. One half of the chamber was brightly lit by at least a hundred torches, all smoking to high heaven. The other half of the cavern was as dark as a minotaur’s heart. The darkness was so thick and smoky that it seemed to be a substance in and of itself, like fog, only much thicker and blacker than even the sul-furous night fogs of Sanction.
Upon seeing this chamber, the first half of Whort’s cure was effected. His voice returned in the form of a wail, long and quavering like that of a banshee, and only ending with his head knocking against the floor. Morg tried to clap a hand over his nephew’s mouth, but it was too late. Dr. Palaver checked the inflatable sleeve and bug-eye goggles to see if Whort was experiencing any adverse reactions. The gully dwarf bit through the meat of his own thumb in his anguish.
Of course, all of this woke the dragon. At the horrendous noise, the big boss dragon unwound its great smoky coils and crawled from its niche in the far wall of the chamber. Its body seemed made of living darkness, smoke, and fog. It was a shadow dragon, one of the rarest and most temperamental of all dragons. Its body was made of the essence of shadow itself, a creature born of the substance between the waking and sleeping worlds.
“Kender, gully dwarves, and gnomes!” the beast roared when it spotted the intruders. It spread its great black wings, trails and tatters of shadow swirling from their edges.
Rulf cast himself on the ground and gnawed the floor, trying desperately to fill his belly before he died. Dr. Palaver held his smelly salts beneath Whort’s nose, while Morg edged closer to have a better look. Never had he
