through a cask of charcoal and filling the entire cavern with thick, acrid smoke. He stamped his foot, and a crack shivered across the stone floor, the jagged scar extending all the way to the edge of Gorathian’s chasm. He pounded his fist upon the massive stone workbench, and the granite slab shuddered and groaned before snapping in half.
Only at the last second did Willim come to his senses. As the table gave way, he remembered the two precious bottles of potion: the deadly poison that the Aghar was supposed to have tested and the elixir that had proved so effective in enhancing Ochre’s abilities. He must not destroy them. But where were they? His hand lashed out as the table fell and he tried to catch the vials before they came to harm. He snatched the black poison out of the air but couldn’t find the elixir in the bottle labeled as the dwarf spirits.
The pieces of the stone surface thundered to the floor, raising clouds of dust, scattering a spray of gravel- sized debris, and Willim frantically dug through the rubble. But there was no sign of the bottle. Nor, thankfully, did he see any broken glass or the Midwarren Pale label.
He drew deep breaths through his nose, forcing himself to grow calm. Despite his recent setbacks, he had splendid powers of control-one did not command the high art of the black robes without extraordinary discipline. Slowly, methodically, he reflected on all that had transpired, tried to reconstruct what had just happened to top his very bad day.
His spell of command had worked to perfection. The miserable little gully had been compelled to obey Willim by that enchantment, and thus, he had advanced to the table, had been reaching for the bottle and getting ready to drink the potion.
Then Gorathian had flared, and the wizard had turned away for a fleeting moment. When he had turned back, the Aghar was picking up the bottle-only it was a different bottle. The bloody fool gully dwarf had gulped the potion of teleportation instead!
Then, out of sheer terror no doubt, the wretch had blinked himself away. The wizard hissed an inarticulate shiver of rage, hoping that the worthless creature had blinked himself into the fiery depths of the Abyss or perhaps popped into sight in the middle of the ocean-or, even better, right into the bedrock of the earth, where he would be instantly crushed.
Good riddance to him. But where was the elixir?
Willim forced himself to concentrate, and he recalled the images of his spell of true-seeing almost as if they were playing like pictures in his mind, only slowed down, one after the other in a series. And that was when he saw: he saw the bottle fall into the gully dwarf’s pocket, then he saw the wretched creature disappear.
Blasted gully dwarf!
Suddenly, the question of the Aghar’s whereabouts assumed a whole new significance. The elixir represented a year of work and had consumed components that were, for all intents and purposes, irreplaceable (especially with so many apprentices out of commission). It was an innovative new recipe of alchemy, one that Ochre had proved worked as Willim had anticipated. And it was the key to his entire plan, the means by which he would create a company of undefeatable warriors for the master attack that would destroy Jungor Stonespringer and all his lords, allies, and guards in one blow.
All right. He knew what he had to do: the teleported gully dwarf would have to be found. It was with a steady hand and a cold, clear purpose that Willim the Black pulled down a spellbook and, ignoring the inconvenience of his eyeless sockets, began to read.
Several hours passed before he set the book down, having absorbed and memorized the ritual required to cast a very potent spell. He rose and stretched, ready to get to work-until he looked around, reminded of the chaos in the laboratory. The wreckage, the debris, the shattered crates and table would need to be cleaned up, but in due time.
The laboratory would have to wait. Indeed, Willim wondered if he might have to rebuild and move his laboratory to a new location. It seemed that the king had learned of his whereabouts, and it wouldn’t do to be continually bothered by raids and assassination attempts and other nuisances. But that decision, too, could wait.
The bodies needed tending, however. They already reeked and would soon begin to rot. With a grimace of disgust, he cast a spell and used his fingertip to whisk, one by one, the corpses of the company of Daergar attackers, as well as those of his slain apprentices, over to the crack leading to Gorathian’s lair. He let them drop into the depths, and with each additional bit of flesh, the monster flared and growled.
Willim knew that Gorathian preferred living flesh to carrion. Even so, the beast seemed content with the bonus feeding. Perhaps it even regretted the earlier impetuous hunger that had caused it to sweep Ochre, along with Willim’s enemies, to death. At least, Willim would like to think that the beast was capable of that kind of remorse. In any event, the fire in the deep pit was banked low, a dim crimson radiating like embers from the depths of the world. And the wizard was free to turn to his task.
He had a spell to cast. He found a large ceramic bowl and filled it with clear water. He removed a pinch of charcoal from the bottom of his storage cask-the part that hadn’t been incinerated by his blast of rage after the Aghar’s escape-and dropped it in the water.
He considered the next component he desired and cursed. If he had retained even a drop of the magical elixir, he could have cast his spell with guaranteed accuracy. Instead he would have to settle for an approximation. Using a small pinch of mushroom powder, he added fungus to the water, stirring the liquid with precise strokes of an ivory paddle. When the contents were mixed and swirling smoothly, he concentrated on the look, the smell, the feel of his missing potion, and cast the words to the spell of location.
Immediately the components in the swirling liquid came together in a snakelike mass, writhing against the direction of the water’s flow. A black image took on a solid aspect, first as a coil but gradually straightening itself into an arrow. The arrow spun like the needle of a deranged compass, but as the water’s swirl gradually settled, the arrow grew still. The tail dropped to the bottom of the bowl, and the tip pointed almost straight up.
For several seconds it remained fixed until the water ceased its movement and the arrow dissolved, leaving a pale-brown mixture, completely still, in the bowl.
And Willim had all the information he needed-at least, all he could gain from his imperfect components.
Thoughtfully he leaned his head back, turning his eyeless face toward the ceiling of the lofty cavern. So the idiot Aghar had teleported himself-and the potion he unwittingly carried in his pocket-almost straight up. That would simplify matters. Since the imperfect spell revealed the direction of the object sought but not the distance, a compass bearing such as north or south could have meant that the wretched thief had teleported one or even one thousand miles in that direction. However, since the direction was primarily upward, it seemed likely that the gully dwarf was somewhere high in the peaks of the Kharolis Mountains, the lofty summits towering over all of vast Thorbardin.
“Good,” Willim declared.
For a moment he considered teleporting after the Aghar himself, but he quickly discarded the tempting thought. No, it would take some searching, perhaps a lot of searching, before the fool was discovered. Much as Willim would have relished making that discovery himself, he had too many other things to do back there in his lair.
So he would have to cast another spell.
That one required heat, and again he grimaced, remembering that in his rage he had smashed his favorite granite worktable. He would have to use a bench that had been carved from the bedrock of the mountain, a stone cube near one wall of the laboratory that had once been intended as the dais for a thane’s throne. He touched it with his hand and murmured the spell, and immediately the stone glowed red. As Willim concentrated on the magic, the illumination gradually faded to yellow, and finally the stone was white hot. So intense was its radiance that the wizard, generally immune to such discomfort, was forced to take a step back.
Quickly he went about assembling the rest of his components, gathering them in a medium-sized iron cauldron. Scales and dried blood were tossed in, as well as the eyes of insects and other, even less pleasant, ingredients. When he came to the final, and most vital, ingredient, he cursed aloud, remembering the dwarf corpses he had fed to Gorathian. If he had only remembered to save one of them!
Searching around, he surveyed his chamber, his eyeless face turning this way and that as his spell of true- seeing swept the half-destroyed room. It came to the cage where the two elves had died, slain by the cloudkill spell, and immediately the dark dwarf nodded to himself: an elf corpse would work just as well as a dwarf.
With a flick of his finger and a muttered word, he lifted the rigid body of the male elf and brought it over to
