hardly the vile doom predicted by the thundering prophets who'd railed against his sins. None of them had ever said, 'You shall spend your eternity in a colorless void.' Pinch rather wished they had; perhaps if he'd known he'd spend his eternity adrift in a blank, he would have amended his ways. The prospect of being trapped here-wherever here was-was not a promising prospect.
But what, it dawned on him, did he mean by the end of time? Cut loose from his moorings, what was now and what was then lost all meaning. He tried to guess the timed drops of a water clock or the sweep of a sundial's shadow, but without his body to set the rhythm, it was no use. His second could be an hour, a day, or an eon someplace else.
A panic roiled his thoughts-that alone was curious. His thoughts fled in all directions and refused to be marshaled, but he never felt the clutch of jolted nerves that would normally signal his desperation. It was fear on ice, intellectually there but unacknowledged by the primal signals that made it live.
What if there is no end to time? What if time ends, but I live on? If one can't feel its passing then how can it end-or start? Without time, is there a forever?
Pinch knew that whatever the answer was, he would go mad in this empty hell.
A glare of brilliant light brought the end of his speculations, followed by a rush of sensation that overwhelmed his mind. Sight, scent, feeling, and sound- the echoing crack of a shattering. Pinch's sight was all skewed. He was too close to the floor and everything was brighter than it should have been; even the darkest corners the room were well lit. I must have passed out and this is where I fell, he thought. How much time has passed? was his second thought.
With great care he tried to look around, barely turning his head just in case Manferic and Ikrit were watching. He must have fallen harder than he thought and banged his head, because his joints were stiffer than they ought to be. He noticed that, except for his sight, all his senses were curiously dulled. His mouth was salt-dry, too.
From where he lay, Pinch caught sight of Ikrit just at the unfocused rim of his vision. The big creature was pulling on something. At first Pinch couldn't tell what, but then the grate of stone made it clear. The quaggoth was going through the secret door, leaving him alone.
The rogue didn't understand. According to Manferic, he was supposed to be trapped in a gem or dead, his spirit dissipated throughout the universe. He certainly did feel like either, not that he regretted the lich's error. Something must have gone wrong, ruined the spell, and driven Manferic away. Maybe the cavalry had arrived just in time. There had been more incredible strains of luck in his time.
Half-expecting and hoping to see his friends waiting behind him, Pinch started to rise. He set his bony, half- rotted hand-
A squirming maggot plopped to the floor by his thumb.
It couldn't be his thumb, not this gray-green, decaying thing. It was Manferic's hand, it was…
Slowly Pinch raised his gaze and looked about the floor. There it was, the source of the cracking noise that had greeted him when he woke: a scattering of crystalline shards and razorlike powder. It was the remains of Manferic's stone. It had trapped him, and Ikrit had crushed it, just as the lich had promised.
But now he was in Manferic's rotting body and that wasn't supposed to happen.
The regulator stumbled to his feet, struggling in the unfamiliar body. Everything about it was the wrong length, with the wrong play of muscles. He lurched to the great mirror that hung over traveling chest. The light that was painfully bright to his eyes was a gloom in the glass and barely enough to reflect his features. After one look, Pinch was thankful for that.
Pinch calculated himself only mildly vain, but such an estimate was impossible when a man couldn't look truly outside of himself. Intentionally or no, Manferic had give the rogue that opportunity. The mirror reflected a horror- the wriggle and twitch of the things that lived under the skin, the peeling patches of the scalp, the black shredded ruins that were once lips; even the tongue was a swollen, oozing mass. A grave worm wriggled through a small gap in his teeth.
Pinch choked. He wanted to throw up, but his body wouldn't obey. There was nothing inside him, not even breath on which he could gasp. Liches didn't eat, didn't breath. They had no blood in their veins.
Now he knew the level of his vanity. If condemned to remain like this, he would rather die. His face and his hair, no amount of fine clothes would ever hide these. This was more than just a branding of his hand. He had railed against that, but when it was over he knew he would live-even keep his old trade. This compared not at all to that. He wasn't Pinch anymore; he wasn't even a man. Life as a monster was intolerable.
Perhaps Pinch had inherited more from his father than he ever knew, for when he finally pulled himself away from the horror that faced him, he did not give up. The choice came to him-to end it, though he was uncertain just how a lich might die-but he rejected that plan in favor of another. So long as Manferic walked, there was hope that he could force the creature to reverse what it had done. If he died trying, he could certainly be no worse than he was now.
Determination filled him, gave him a glint of the light that had filled Manferic's eyes. Holding back the disgust that it filled him with, the rogue tested his new body, rose to his feet, and resolved to repay the monster for what it had done.
It did not matter where it had gone wearing his own shell; there was only one place he could go in its. That was back underground. If Manferic was wandering the halls of the place, he could not follow. His last hope lay in Ikrit. If Tymora spun her wheel and it favored him, the rogue knew he just might be able to track Manferic's brute servant back to the dead king's lair.
Shuffling to the secret passage and shedding soft blobs of his borrowed body, Pinch forced the wall open and set off in search of his prey. As he descended the steps, his mind eagerly sought out the grandest punishment for vile Manferic it could devise.
19
The first thing the regulator noticed as he eased himself down the narrow staircase was the uncanny brightness of the place. Then he realized he hadn't brought candle or lantern with him. There was at least one advantage to having the lich's body, though it hardly compensated for the crime wrought upon him.
The next thing Pinch noticed was how much easier it was to track. He understood now how the quaggoth moved through the tunnels so easily. The dark passages had the appearance of an overcast day.
The question was, where had the beast gone? The creature had a considerable head start and could have chosen any number of paths. The rogue's only resource, the dust-laden floor, was a useless guide now. It was all churned and muddied by comings and goings till it was far beyond his ability to read anything in it.
In this the rogue's luck held, for the quaggoth was just in sight. The great white beast was ambling down the passage, not imagining it was being followed.
The second fortunate thing was that being dead had not robbed Pinch of all his skills. He still knew to creep and skulk about, though knowing was not the same as doing. It was one thing to know how to step lightly, but the rogue wasn't sure he could get the rotting hulk that was his prison to cooperate. There was only one way to know, and that was by trying. He set out as light-footed as he could, but in his desire for stealth every noise was agonizingly magnified. There was no time to gain a proper body sense of the lich, so every move was accompanied by a cluster of scrapes and bumps even the dullest novice could have avoided-and Pinch especially if he had been in his own flesh. His bone-bare feet went scritch-scritch over the hard stone. Little bits of his body splashed softly splashed into the puddles at the wet spots. They weren't loud noises, but they were loud enough to Pinch's ear and pride.
Nor did they pass unnoticed. Several times Ikrit stopped and eyed his back trail suspiciously, even at moments when Pinch swore he made no noise. The beast wrinkled his broad nose, and that's when Pinch realized he had another complication.
The corpse stank. It was 'the corpse' and not himself-the rogue refused to accept Manferic's body as his new identity. He remembered that Manferic's body could foul the air of a perfumery. The body's nose was apparently immune to its own fetor, for he could not catch a whiff of it, but apparently the quaggoth was not immune. Now not
