Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

Gretchan! At once his thoughts returned to the priestess, his lost companion. He thrust the torc into one of the pouches at his belt and hoisted his axe and the cleric’s staff again as he continued to search the large room.

Two minutes later he found a crack in the wall, opening into a tunnel marked with many horax tracks. Just a few steps inside the opening, he saw another telltale bloodstain, proof that the captured Aghar had been carried that way once, reasonable enough evidence to support his hope that Gretchan had been taken the same way.

He checked the ceiling and walls-clear-and started into the new tunnel. He wanted to shout Gretchan’s name again, to offer her some hope if she could hear him. But caution forced him to bite his tongue.

And fear made him hurry.

“Ouch!” Gus declared as a shard of pottery bounced off of his head. He kept running with Berta, her bare feet slapping on the cobblestones of the road, trotting behind him. Another piece of crockery flew over the heads of the two Aghar to shatter in the street, leading Gus to veer sideways into a narrow alley. With his lady friend beside him, he collapsed against a wall and sagged down to sit on the ground.

“Ow!” he repeated, rubbing his skull where a lump was already forming. “Why those bluphsplunging Hylar got to be so rude?” he groused.

“Prolly cuz we was stealing they bread,” Berta said sagely. She proudly held up a heel of crusty rye, from which a large bite had been torn off. “Look! Berta steal bread while highbulp Gus make Hylar mad.”

“Give me!” declared Gus, greedily snatching the piece out of her hand. He had to admit, she had some skills, Berta did. “Hey! Who bite this?” he demanded, looking at the generously sized, tooth-marked crescent that had been removed from the corner of the slice.

“Me!” Berta declared, unabashed. “Otherwise, highbulp eat whole thing. Berta go hungry!”

Gus glared ominously at her but couldn’t decide upon an appropriate response. So he took a bite of the bread himself, chewed, swallowed, and took another bite. The food felt good in his belly, which had been rumbling and empty for the past several days. In short order he polished off the rest of the piece, smacking his lips.

“You say lotsa food in Thorbardin,” Berta declared irritably, watching him finish off the last bite. “So far we not find lotsa food. Only little food. But lotsa big, mean dwarves.”

“Yep,” Gus agreed. So far Thorbardin certainly wasn’t as exciting, or bountiful, as he remembered it to be. “Maybe this only bad part of Thorbardin. We go look for big lake. There be cave carp-and Agharhome!”

“Like Agharhome Pax Tharkas?” Berta said, intrigued. At least in a town of gully dwarves they weren’t always getting smacked around by the big dwarves.

“Yep, only bigger. Two times big,” Gus said, remembering the tangled web of sewer tunnels, ruined caves, and steeply sloping lakeshore where he had been born and raised. His family probably still lived there, but he decided that wasn’t reason enough for him to stay away.

“Come!” he said, standing up, feeling the full authority of his highbulp status running through his diminutive stature. “We go find Agharhome!”

Berta was willing enough, so the two gully dwarves made their way carefully down the street, toward the big plaza that seemed to lie in the center of the big city, which they had heard called Norbardin. Fortunately, the street and the plaza were virtually empty, except for a bunch of dead bodies lying around. The Aghar ignored those and made their way to one of the large gates leading out of the city and down toward the Urkhan Sea-the body of water Gus remembered as the Big Lake.

There were some guards at the gatehouse, but they were gambling and talking, not paying much attention to the wide plaza. The gates themselves had been smashed, with no attempt having been made to repair them, so Gus and Berta simply skulked along the edge of the wall, staying low, darting from the cover of one chunk of rock to another. Soon they had passed under the city’s portal and were striding boldly down the long, subterranean road.

After two hours, or two miles, of walking, Gus estimated, they came around a gradual bend, and the whole of the Urkhan Sea spread out before them. Though they were underground, the vast cavern was illuminated, very faintly, by lanterns and fires dotting around the long, winding shoreline: the camps and dwellings of feral Klar, Theiwar hunters, and those few hardy survivors who still lived in the ruined cities that had been ravaged by the forces of Chaos.

Berta gasped audibly at the wondrous sight, and even Gus felt an unfamiliar tug of emotion. It was a majestic vision and, since no one was trying to kill them at the moment, they stopped and gawked for two full minutes. Finally they started walking again, striding along with real bounce in their steps. They heard a party of Daergar warriors coming, tromping boots and clanking armor, and quickly hid in a ditch beside the road. When the soldiers had passed, the two little dwarves resumed their trot toward the shore.

Several stone piers extended into the lake, and a couple of boats were moored there. Crewmen-more Daergar, though not heavily armored like the soldiers-lounged around.

“We not go there!” Berta hissed, grabbing Gus’s arm.

“No, this way,” he said, in complete agreement with her.

The place where the road met the lake was a wide cave mouth, some one hundred feet across and more than thirty feet high. To the right and left, the edge of the tunnel merged into a steep stone slope where the side of the great cavern plunged into the water. The wall of the vast cavern was not a sheer cliff, however. Instead, the lower side of the Urkhan cavern was a sloping grade, a series of ridges separated by equally steep ravines. The footing was precarious but not too treacherous, and Gus confidently led Berta out of the tunnel and onto the steep lakeshore. The ground dropped away to their right and climbed steeply to their left, but they traversed the first ridge, scrambled through the ravine beyond it, and made their way up the next elevated crest.

“Agharhome up here,” Gus realized, rather surprised to see that they had come to the lakeshore very near the place where he had lived most of his life.

They were coming down the next ridge when they discovered several fellow Aghar hunkered in the ravine some distance above the water. There were three of them, and they all stood up and watched curiously as Gus and Berta approached. Two of the strangers were males, but the other was a female, and she looked strangely familiar.

“Gus?” she asked. “Gus Fishbiter? Who died in the water?”

“Slooshy!” he cried, immediately recognizing her. “No! You died! In the water!” he said, rushing forward to embrace his old friend, remembering that the two of them had been trapped in a drainpipe and carried by a rush of water deep into the bowels of Thorbardin. Gus had escaped-only to be captured by the black wizard-but he had taken it for granted that Slooshy had drowned.

“Me not die! You not die!” Slooshy squealed, giving Gus a sloppy kiss.

Suddenly he was kicked, hard, from behind. He turned to look at Berta, who had delivered the blow.

“Who Slooshy?” Berta demanded with her arms folded across her skinny chest. She was glaring at the other female.

And, for some reason, she did not look pleased.

Brandon ran and ran through the darkened passages until it seemed as though his lungs and heart were ready to explode in his chest. Blindly keeping up the pursuit, almost sobbing with grief and fear, he could think of nothing except the sight of Gretchan being carried away in the terrible web of her buglike captors. Had they killed his dwarf maid already? Were they feeding on her warm flesh? By Reorx, he would kill them all! He would wipe them from Krynn, banish their spawn to the depths of the Abyss, where they could suffer forever in the fundamental flames of existence.