Douglas Niles - Secret of Pax Tharkas

Brandon finally pulled his axe free and immediately pounded a lumberjack swing against the troll’s leg. The blade bit deep, and the monster went down to one knee.

Nailer brought his hammer around, bashing the troll’s good knee, and the hulking beast stumbled forward, braced on its hands, its head swaying dazedly. Already the wound in its side, where Brandon’s blade had bitten so deeply, was starting to close up, healing before the dwarves’ horrified eyes.

But Brandon didn’t let up. He raised his axe again and chopped down hard, slicing halfway through the creature’s neck. The monster went down, thrashing, and the dwarf made a second chop. Then the troll’s head tumbled free, rolling like a rock until it came to a rest on the stump of its neck. The soulless eyes gaped as dark and as wickedly as they had in life, but the great body at last lay still.

“Nice chopping,” Nailer grunted, clapping a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

Brandon felt the older dwarf’s weight, remembering that he’d been limping. “Are you all right?”

Nailer grinned at the troll’s head and nodded. “Never better,” he said cheerfully.

“What are you so happy about?” Brandon sputtered. “We could have died! Did that thing conk your brains around in your skull?”

The younger Bluestone followed his brother’s gaze and let out a whoop of joy. “I see what you mean!” he said, stepping forward and moving around the decapitated head. He was staring down at a thick vein of bright yellow metal, a line of gold running like a seam through the bedrock of the deep cave. He said the words he knew his brother was thinking.

“Maybe the Bluestone luck is about to improve.”

Gus’s hard labor paid off. The rocks he had loosened fell away from the barrier, and the releasing flow immediately widened the gap, allowing the contents of the pond to plunge downward in a single, frothing wave. The whole dam sagged away, and everything-Gus, Slooshy, and the three Theiwar killers included-went down.

“Me did it!” Gus crowed, though his voice was swallowed in the churning froth.

A great gout of syrupy goo enveloped the gully dwarf as the contents of the pond poured through the hole where the dam had been. Gus flailed his feet and hands, but for two seconds there was only that ooze and a sensation in his belly that was very similar to falling. Rocks crashed and tumbled around him-there seemed to be as much sliding stone as there was liquid in the spilling slide-and his flesh was bruised and battered by the crushing pressure.

“Gus!” he heard Slooshy call, and he reached out toward the sound.

Before he found her, he smacked into a rock and bounced out of the spilling debris, tumbling lazily through a somersault. Wiping his eyes, he saw a steady plume of liquid sludge bursting through the gap, carrying two rocks with it. Slooshy tumbled past, trying pathetically to swim. Then Gus bounced off the rocky ground again, and since he had landed on his head, he was a little groggy as he spiraled, tumbled, slid, and careened down the steep face of the rockslide.

As he slid on his back toward the bottom, he found himself looking up at the ceiling of Thorbardin. Something was wrong with his lungs, and he found it impossible to draw a breath. However, his limbs seemed to function. Gus lifted up his arms and kicked his legs just in time to see one of the Theiwar tumble past. The dwarf’s face was a mask of terror as he bounced out from the steep trough and hit the waters of the Urkhan Sea, where he promptly disappeared.

More rocks and debris spilled into the lake, pummeling the large boat that had drawn close to shore. Gus whooped in delight as one end of the boat, battered by rocks, slipped under water. Several terrified Theiwar leaped toward shore, but lacking the Aghar’s instinctive swimming skills, most of them vanished beneath the surface.

“Help!” Slooshy was clinging to a nearby rock as the slide, more liquid than rock, spilled around her. Gus slid down and held out his hand, which she took gratefully. Since he had neglected to hold on to anything with the other hand, however, his firm grip simply pulled him into the slide with her. Another wave of sludge washed into them, carrying them both down the slope.

His gaze shifted and he saw they were tumbling toward a big hole in the ground. It was a drain at the side of the lake, where the sludge from the Daergar sewers vanished into the bedrock-a drain installed hundreds of years ago so the effluent of the sewage pond did not pollute the pristine waters of the Urkhan Sea. At one time the drain hole had been protected by an iron grate, but the vagaries of time and the disruption of the Chaos War had done away with that barrier.

The gurgling and splashing and roaring got louder and louder all the time. Gus kept his hand tightly wrapped around Slooshy’s as he tumbled and whirled, trying to look up toward the ceiling, but all he could see was a churning froth of brown murk. It was all around them. Abruptly, Gus’s lungs started to work, and he drew a deep breath. Some instinct for survival (such instincts are second nature to the Aghar) caused him to close his eyes and hold that deep breath. Beside him, he sensed Slooshy doing the same thing.

In two seconds the flood reached the bottom of the ravine, the rush from the ruptured dam sweeping the two Aghars’ stubby little bodies right down the drain. Once again there came the sensation of falling, and it lasted for a very long time-two seconds, at least. Gus was surrounded by noise and propelled along by a gout of foul sludge. Occasionally he skidded against the side of the drainpipe, which only confirmed that he was indeed going down very fast. Still the Aghar pair clung to each other, somehow drawing close enough to clasp each other in their arms, holding their breath, a single bundle of terror as they plunged ever more swiftly downward.

Abruptly the sludge started to churn, and Gus plunged through it, his own momentum carrying him still deeper even as the sudden flood down the drainpipe started to back up. He panicked as the wrenching movement tore Slooshy from his arms. Then he rolled and felt the wave push him this way and that.

Suddenly he popped up to the surface, banging his head against a very low ceiling of smooth rock but discovering a narrow air space, a gap barely high enough to allow him to draw a breath. Slooshy was there too, her mouth open and eyes squeezed shut as she gulped precious breaths. For two minutes the liquid swept them along. It was more like dirty water than sludge, and Gus and Slooshy kicked and splashed and paddled with all the swimming strength a frenzied gully dwarf could employ.

The force of the flow pummeled and punished them. Gus’s head banged against low rocks on the ceiling. His shins and knees collided with jutting obstacles on the sides and bottom of what seemed to be some kind of pipe hewn from the bedrock of the mountains. He found Slooshy nearby during any chance he had to open his eyes, but the current was too violent for them to hold on to each other.

Occasionally the pipe narrowed and the water filled the entire circumference of the shaft, but each time, Gus managed to gulp air before he was submerged again, and fortunately none of the bottlenecks was more than about two feet long, so he was able to get his head out of the water now and then. And always he saw Slooshy there as well, swimming frantically along near him. His heart soared when he heard her curse the bluphsplunging water; he knew she was doing all right.

Abruptly the shaft turned downward again, and the two gully dwarves rode the gushing water through another drain hole. Once more they were dumped into a subterranean pipe, but it was much larger. Blinking, Gus spied an arched ceiling far over his head, and he was aware that the water flowed more quietly, more slowly there than it had in the narrow pipe. Even so, it was still moving along at a fair rush and carrying the soaked Aghar deeper and deeper under Thorbardin.