At this point, some kind of conference commenced among the gully dwarves. There was many a loud meaty smack, for like most of their race, they spoke more eloquently with the back of the hand than the mouth. They also tended to repeat the same two-word argument endlessly-"No! Yes! No! Yes! No! Yes!"- like a shutter banging back and forth in the wind.

Finally, one of them seemed to have gained the upper backhand, so to speak, for as he turned and the others started to protest, he raised one grubby fist and silenced them all. "Me know!" he said. "Give rat." He held out his hand, black palm upward.

"What is the most scariest place?" the gnome asked.

"Don't say, Grod," one of the other gully dwarves begged.

"Place called . . . The Hole!" the head gully dwarf said with the best dramatic flair he could muster. The other gully dwarves screamed and bit each other anew.

"What is the Hole?" Dr. Palaver asked. The gully dwarves screamed again.

"The Hole"-again with the screams-"is deep, dark place where no aghar ever come back from."

"Take us to it," Morg said, leaping into the conversation. The head gully dwarf backed away a step and shook his head until his yellow teeth clattered.

"No get rat until you take us to the Hole!" the doctor demanded as he hid the dead rodent behind his back.

The gully dwarves screamed.

"That Hole," the gully dwarf leader said, pointing to a small, collapsed section of the wall in another part of the ma.s.sive Palanthian sewer system. The other gully dwarves, too terrified by the sight of it, still managed to scream, even if it was a whisper.

"Doesn't seem much to me," Morg said as he approached the hole in the wall. He stuck his head into the dark aperture and shouted, "Tally-ho and view halloo!"

As he removed his head (still attached to his neck), and his bright kender voice came chirruping back to him by way of a magnificent echo, the gully dwarves breathed an awed sigh to kender bravery. "Do again," one whispered, but he was promptly attacked by his fellows for even suggesting anything so frightening.

Dr. Palaver approached and tilted his ear toward the opening. "I hear something," he said. "Some sort of deep rumbling. Could be the snore of a sleeping beast."

He sniffed. "And a smell like stale beer and dead rats. Definitely something in there," he concluded.

"Something, yes!" the gully dwarf leader agreed.

"Then go in there and find out what it is," the gnome retorted.

The gully dwarves backed away in horror, until Morg (who had gotten hold of the dead rat again) dangled the morsel before them. They stopped, and a few even managed a step forward, filthy bearded jaws s...o...b..ring hungrily.

Morg swung the bait before them, back and forth, back and forth, hypnotically, watching their eyes watch the movement of the rat, watching their bodies begin to lean side to side with each sway. Suddenly, he flung the rat into the hole, and the lot of them dived after it before they knew what they were doing. One managed to actually get through the hole. The others merely piled up against the wall, clawing and scratching at each other angrily until they realized where they were. Then, with a horrific yell, they pelted away, leaving the gnome and the two kender alone beside the hole.

They waited a bit for the victim of the rat toss to emerge, then waited in growing alarm as he failed to make his antic.i.p.ated appearance and exit.

"Perhaps they were right," Morg suggested. His eyes were almost as large as his nephew's, but without the benefit of magnification. "Let's go and see," he added, in a tone that seasoned travelers had learned to dread when spoken by a kender.

They crawled into the hole, Morg leading the way, the gnome bringing up a reluctant rear. They had only gone a short distance before they realized that they were no longer in the sewer. They had come through into a cellar somewhere, a place filled with casks and barrels. Judging from the ancient stone pillars supporting the roof, it appeared to have once been a catacomb.

The deeper into the hole that they went, the louder the contented purring snore became. It sounded like the enormous rumbling of a snoozing dragon-a thing Morg had actually heard, once upon a time. But the reek of stale beer and wet rat and, they now noticed, gully dwarf, grew stronger with each step forward. Finally, rounding a corner, they came to a section of the catacomb illuminated by torchlight shining through a grate in a large iron door. The flickering beam of light that slanted through the grate fell directly on a pile of gully dwarves. They were not dead, though they smelled like they might be. Instead, they were sleeping off a marvelous drunk. Nearby, a cask 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 ma.s.sive 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 phosph.o.r.escent 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 pa.s.sages 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 seen such a magnificent creature. The red dragons and blue dragons of the world paled beside this being of shadow. Only a death knight could possibly have been more frightening, and though Morg's mind still wanted to get a closer look, his feet wisely took another course and began to run the opposite direction. He swooped up his nephew as he pa.s.sed, dragging Dr. Palaver after him.

But not even kender feet could outrun the dragon. It breathed its black despair-inducing breath in a cloud that quickly overtook the fleeing intruders. Rulf, who had remained prostrate on the floor, felt it first. They heard him cry out in his sudden blindness, and then his cry was cut short by a sickening crunch. Before they could begin to feel sorry for the miserable creature, the breath caught up to them as well.

Dr. Palaver, who was behind the two kender, stumbled and fell, struck blind by the darkness of the dragon's breath. Then it overtook Morg. He dropped his nephew, then fell over him and caught himself against the wall. As he felt the will to live drain from his body like water from a leaky bucket, leaving him in a most uncomfortable black despair, he slid to the floor.

For the first time in his life, Morgrify Pinchpocket didn't really care about anything. He didn't look forward to anything. He didn't antic.i.p.ate the next moment with all the gusto of his diminutive race. He was blind, but the blindness was more than the physical inability to see. He was blind to the future, blind to all hope of what lay in store for him tomorrow or the next day or the next. With sudden insight, he realized that this was indeed fear, the selfsame fear that had stolen his nephew's voice and every aspect of his kenderness.

With that realization, he resolved not to lose his own particular kenderness, even if he had but a few more moments to live. Death, as his old Uncle Dropkick used to say, was the grandest adventure of them all, and Morgrify Pinchpocket determined then and there not to miss his own death, no matter how horrible it promised to be. Privately, he had always hoped for a horrible death-the more horrible the better. Dying in his sleep didn't appeal to him at all, not even now.

Morg roused himself. Since he was blind, he turned his attention to his other senses. He smelled his nephew. The boy seemed near at hand, well within spitting distance, while the gnome, by his groans and moans, was a bit farther down the pa.s.sage. Also within the range of his hearing was the sound of the dragon as it finished its meal of Bulp gully dwarf. The crunching of the bones and the way the dragon purred as it fed was particularly unnerving, but Morgrify was no longer afraid.

He crawled to his knees and felt around for his nephew, found him, and lifted the boy onto his old shoulder. Staggering away from the sound of the dragon, he paused only to grab a handful of the gnome's coat and drag him along. He b.u.mped and thumped his way down the pa.s.sage until he thought they might be beyond the area of the dragon's black breath. He was still blind, but the air here did not seem so close and smoky. He gently lowered Whort to the floor and tried to rouse him.

Slowly, the young kender came to his senses, then all at once he stood up with a shout. Although he was now able to put together a string of noises that sounded rather like the bellowing of a yearling calf with its foot stuck in the fence, he still had not freed his talk bone from its restriction.

Morg tried his best to calm his nephew, knowing that the boy's continued noises would only draw the dragon to them. By the tightening feeling in the air, he knew that the beast was not far behind.

"You must drink the gnome's potion, boy," he urged his nephew. "Have you still got it? No? Why, I've got it in my pouch here. Now how did that get there?"

He pressed the bottle into Whort's hands. Whort took it and looked at it with his goggle eyes as though he had no idea how it had got there.

Morg had been right. This area of the tunnel was beyond the range of the dragon's breath. A few torches smoked on the wall, providing a thick, yellow light. Morg lay on the floor, staring around as blindly as a newborn kitten. The gnomish doctor writhed nearby, a stream of incomprehensible babble pouring from his bearded lips as he banged his bald head on the floor in the blinding despair wrought by the dragon's breath.

However, Whort, who had been unconscious when the dragon breathed its black breath upon them, was not blinded by it, nor did he experience the despair now torturing his uncle and the gnome. His fear and affliction remained. He was almost paralyzed by it, but he was used to it, and the sight of his blind and helpless uncle projected new courage in his vines (as Dr. Palaver might say).

Whort looked again at the bottle and knew what he had to do. He had to drink it before the dragon appeared. Only the potion of mighty heroes, as Dr. Palaver had named it, might give him the courage to rescue his uncle and the good doctor from their predicament.

He uncorked the bottle, loosing a pleasant smell not unlike popcorn popping over a winter blaze. Encouraged, he tilted the bottle to his lips, but at that moment, the shadow dragon loomed around the corner. Whort's nerve almost abandoned him altogether, but his uncle's pleading cries to hurry, cries tinged with a fear he had never known in his redoubtable uncle, roused Whort enough to pour the contents of the bottle into his mouth and swallow.

It tasted like licorice, and when he had drunk it all, Whort tossed aside the bottle and tried his voice. To his horror, nothing happened, except that he hiccupped. But from this hiccup there fluttered a black b.u.t.terfly with yellow bands on its wings. Whort opened his mouth in surprise at this strange occurrence, only to experience something quite beyond the pale.

Sunlight streamed from his open jaws, poured from his nostrils, and waterfalled from his pointed kender ears. It spread like a pool of melting ice cream across the floor in an ever-widening circle. As it flowed over the gnome, he ceased his babbling and sat up, wiping his runny nose with a filthy sleeve and blinking blindly. On the other hand, Morgrify fell immediately into a deep and contented sleep, a heroic snore ripping across the chamber. The dragon paused, unsure of what this portended.

The magical sunlight reached his shadowy scales, searing their fleshless substance like white-hot iron. The scent of a warm spring morning in a rose garden a.s.saulted his nostrils, driving him back into the comfortable gloom of his lair.

Seeing the dragon retreat, Whort's talk bone was set free, erupting in a storm of expletives worthy of the crustiest sailor to sc.r.a.pe a barnacle from the belly of a ship.

Meanwhile, the sunlight from his mouth continued to swell across the floor. The dragon retreated before it, hissing and thrashing its mighty tail. Whort stepped toward it, a.s.saulting it with such a plethora of kender taunts as few before him had ever strung together in one sunny breath. Wherever he stepped, green gra.s.s sprang up in his footsteps. The dragon writhed with anger, but it dared not move into the kender-born sunlight. Finally, it retreated into its lair, belching up what it hoped would prove a protective wall of darkness to block the pa.s.sage behind it.

Whort returned to his uncle, who smiled up at him, the wrinkles around his blind eyes just a shade more p.r.o.nounced than Whort remembered them. Taking the elderly kender in one hand and the strangely silent gnome in the other, he led them from the sewers of Palanthas.

Many well remember that day. On the surface, the sun had set and people were just settling down to their dinners, when swarms of gully dwarves poured up from below the streets. Driven mad by the sweet scent of spring roses that streamed from Whort's every orifice, every Bulp and Gulp beneath Palanthas fled upward, the only direction of escape. Never in all its centuries had the city faced such an unexpected danger, and not since Lord Soth stood at the gates and the flying citadel floated over the walls had it been in greater danger.

The Knights of Neraka, ever prepared for almost any eventuality, were quickly overwhelmed, forced to retreat into their gate towers, palaces, and barracks, as the gully dwarf horde swarmed through the streets like a storm surge from the sea. Many later speculated that, had the Great Gully Dwarf Climacteric of 40 SC begun earlier in the day, the casualties would have been much higher. As it was, only one old beggar lost his life that night. They found his well-gnawed bones lying where he had fallen. Many folks mourned the loss of beloved family pets that had been left out of doors for the warm summer's night, but most counted themselves extremely lucky.

Everyone, that is, but the owners of twelve ships, and the fishermen who made their living plying the waters of the Bay of Branchala.

For as quickly as the invasion began, it ended. In ma.s.s, the gully dwarves swept down to the sea. Many were drowned outright. A few were rescued by the brave and the foolish, and twelve ships were sunk as the creatures gnawed through their hulls. However, perhaps the worst tragedy was revealed when hundreds of thousands of dead fish washed up along Palanthas's pebbly sh.o.r.e.

The next morning back at the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes, the first gnome to arrive-none other than the famous EET (Ears, Toes, and Throat) Doctor Whizbang-found a young, bedraggled kender sitting on the floor of the lobby beside an old, bedraggled kender and something resembling a gnome in a doctor's coat.

"My friend and my uncle are broken," the young kender announced loudly. "They are blind, and I would like to get them fixed, if I could."

Bond

KEVIN T. STEIN.

"d.a.m.n wolf!"

Karn dragged the leash, threatened with the rod. The wolf bared his teeth, head jerking against the leather rope. Karn wrapped another loop of leash in his palm and dragged the wolf inches closer. The animal barked, snarled, pawed the ground, and pulled back. His teeth were dirty yellow and brown.

Karn sweated, raised the stick, gathered another loop in his palm. The wolf jumped forward, jaws wide, and Karn kicked the wolf. Blood flowed from a shallow gash. The wolf yelped, turning from the attack, saliva spraying from his muzzle as he dragged himself sideways. The wolf thrashed his head, patches of fur missing, showing scars.