King Pinch (27 page)

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.

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 only did he have to be stealthy, he apparently also had to remain upwind of his prey. If not, he'd be the first thief ever discovered by his stench. Not the epitaph he wanted on his grave, that was for certain!

The stalking game of cat and mouse continued, although it was never clear who was the cat and who the rodent. Ikrit stopped far too frequently to suit Pinch yet never seemed to tumble to the rogue's presence. It was almost as if the quaggoth were hearing something else that eluded Pinch's dulled ears. The result was a maddeningly slow pace for the thief. He was of the utter conviction that time counted for everything, that his body had to be regained by the coronation. After that, reaching Manferic/Janol/Cleedis -it was impossible to choose a single name for the lich-would be well-nigh impossible. The privileges of the palace would surround the creature, and between the guards and the lich's spells it would be impossible to get close to the dread lord. Pinch's mind had already plotted that the best hope lay in the sheltering confusion of the festival. The lich was most apt to be distracted now before its triumph was complete.

But what then? Assuming he found Manferic, how was Pinch supposed to get his body back? The rogue had no idea. Manferic certainly wasn't going to give it up easily, not after all the trouble he'd gone to just to collect it, and Pinch had no spells to force the issue. Damnation, he wasn't even sure what had happened to him! All he had was his faith in improvisation, the belief that if somehow he saw his way through, something would give him a chance.

There was only one problem with his determined optimism. Ikrit wasn't cooperating. With his improved eyesight and his past experience, Pinch knew enough to say the ape-thing wasn't bound for Manferic. It was avoiding all the tunnels Pinch remembered and plunging into areas the thief did not recognize. Admittedly, there was only so much he could remember about darkened stone, but the haze of dust clearly meant that no one had passed this way in recent time.

This was not good, but what could he do? Short of marching through the halls of the palace, Ikrit was his only lead. He had to follow where the beast led.

Thus he was trailing the creature, slipping into a crack in the catacomb wall when it paused for the hundredth time, that Pinch was caught unawares. As he was peering carefully from his shallow hiding place, the angry buzz of a hornet sang loudly in his sense-clogged ears. A shadow hurtled past and skipped onto the stone between him and the quaggoth with a rattling clatter.

As the thief was held prisoner by amazement, trying to fathom what had just happened, the silence was rent by cries of war. Ahead of him, doing all things at once, the quaggoth bellowed with bloody rage, dropped into half-doubled crouch, and charged, talons bared, straight down the corridor for him.

Gods pluck a rose, Pinch panicked, he's seen me! With his instinct to run in full alarm, the regulator spun about as quick as the rickety body would let him –

And came nigh-on face-to-face with two hundred-plus pounds of charging dwarven hate. The barrel-chested, black-bearded little man had cast aside a crossbow and was in the act of whirling an iron-studded mace over his head for a furious blow. "Death to the king!" Iron-Biter roared.

Pinch flopped his decrepit body back into the niche in which he'd sheltered. He was barely fast enough. Just in front of him, all forces collided in the narrow passage. Iron-Biter's mace hit the wall scant inches from the rogue's forehead. Stone ripped in sharp splinters and ricocheted around his head. The shards tore into Ikrit's outstretched arms as the quaggoth slammed into the stocky dwarf like a brawling stevedore. The impact flung the dwarf backward, and it was only his warblood, which even a surplice couldn't change, that gave him the determination to hold his footing. Ikrit slashed with his broken claws, ripping ragged gashes through the dwarf's armor. Blood leaked over the rent chain mail.

Pinch squeezed into the scant hollow as deep as he could. The battle raged too damn close for him to be safe. Ikrit's back-cocked elbow slammed him in the chest, spraying rot over his tattered cloak. If he'd been Pinch and not this festering thing, the blow would have punched the wind out of him like a noisy sack. Fortunately, at this moment, he didn't breath.

"Clubs!" Maeve's familiar voice shrilled from down the passage. It was a warning to her friends to stand clear, a slang the mage used just before she was about to cut loose with a spell large and nasty.

"Maeve, for the gods' sakes -NO!" Pinch yelled with the realization that he was almost certainly standing at the blast center of whatever it was. The scream, though, was absurd: far too shrill, far too unbelievable to be heeded. Abandoning the wisdom of eyes to the foe, Pinch threw his cloak up and huddled against the wall.

Almost immediately, the clang and squeal of battle was complemented by a thunderous crack. The rogue had heard the sound oft before, and every time it reminded him of the bang of smoke powder rockets from Shou. The air exploded in a tingling concussion of heat and static, punctuated by first one metallic howl of pain and then a second, more bestial, squeal. Jagged ribbons of blue fire embraced the huddled thief, rippled the scant hair, and sparked in front of his eyeballs. The maggots and worms fell in roasted flakes from his corpse, but the electric agony Pinch awaited never materialized.

Staggered by amazement, Pinch rose from his huddle to confront the battle once more, except that there was no battle left. The passage in front of him was a bloody smear of white fur and broiled flesh. What was left of Ikrit had been flung a good rod down the passage. The body was there, but the quaggoth's flattened broad head was all but gone, transformed into a smoldering, blood-strewn blot. Ikrit was dead, without even a convulsive hint at life.

Even as he absorbed the sight, the battle began again all too fast. "Die, you thing of evil!" a shaky voice commanded. Iron-Biter was staggering to his feet even as he held forth the seal of his order. The dwarf was calling upon the majesty of his god to undo the evil that bound this undead thing to the world. The only problem was that, being undead only in the flesh, Pinch just didn't fit the mold. The words and the display had no effect on him.

Nonetheless, the dwarf gave it his best, screwing up his blood-splattered face in a grotesque mask of concentration. He was bleeding from gashes over his shoulders and chest, his leather and iron helmet was twisted black from the bolt, blood flowed from a loose flap in his scalp to soak his bearded cheek, and his whole frame shook with exertion, but the dwarf intoned his orison with a will. Behind him, well back and awaiting the outcome, were the rest of the ragtag band: Sprite, Maeve, Therin -and Lissa in their tow.

Pinch almost wanted to laugh at the futility of it, but there was no time. Realizing this monster was not to be turned, Iron-Biter threw aside the effort and changed his chant. The words and gestures were a spell. Pinch didn't know what, but it couldn't be good for him. The dwarf had death and murder in his eyes. Pinch had to stop him now or not at all.

Besides, there was the matter of old scores to settle.

Even as the dwarf raised his voice in the final binding of the spell's power, Pinch lunged forward. He had no weapons, little hope of besting the bear-sized dwarf in a hand-to-hand battle, and no particular courage for straight-up fighting, but it was a long sight better than standing still to be blasted to shreds.

His lunge startled the priest, who expected to fight with magic and not his hands. Pinch got one hand on Iron-Biter's arm, wrenching awry the intricate patterns he'd been weaving in midair. To the rogue's amazement, the skin beneath his corrupt fingers instantly turned an icy blue, the lines of his chilling touch tracing their way up the dwarf's veins toward his heart. Seizing on that opening, Pinch got his other hand closed around the throat, squeezing to a gurgle what would have been a scream if the rogue weren't crushing the little priest's windpipe. The frozen blue pallor spread underneath the dwarf's beard and emerged on his cheekbones.

Iron-Biter was far from defenseless, though. With his free arm he swung his holy symbol, a weighty replica of the Cup. It cracked against hollow ribs with enough force that Pinch knew it had caused harm. His mind told him that, but his nerves remained dead to the blow. No pain, he thought, a lich must feel no pain.

He squeezed tighter, and that's when he made his next discovery. Along with the icy touch, Pinch had inherited the lich's strength. His bloodless fingers squeezed down. Flesh tore and bones snapped within his grasp. Iron-Biter's eyes bugged as he corded his neck muscles to hold off the pressure. It was a losing battle and the dwarf knew it. He dropped the mace and scrabbled for something at his belt.

No mercy, Pinch knew. Iron-Biter would show him none, and he couldn't afford to give any. He squeezed harder, starting to hear the clicking grind of cartilage giving way.

Over the dwarf's shoulder, five motes of light hurtled from Maeve's fingertips to strike Pinch cleanly. With each he rocked a little, like the impact of an arrow, and like the mace he knew these were hurting him though he felt nothing. This had to be ended quickly or his friends would kill him, all the time believing him to be Manferic.

The dwarf pulled something from his belt -a short stubby stick of intricate workmanship. It was some kind of magical rod, Pinch knew, especially since the end glowed with magical fire.

The dwarf never got a chance to use it. Discovering his strength, the rogue heaved the massive dwarf easily from the floor and slammed him against one wall and then the other. It was exhilarating, hurling his tormentor about like a helpless rat. With each crash his grip on the dwarf's windpipe tightened until at last there was a loud crack as the vile priest's neck snapped. Triumphant against his own odds, Pinch hurled the body to the floor.

"Should have killed me in the tower, you bastard!" the rogue snarled in victory.

"Clubs!"

It was Maeve again. The target clear, she was readying another of her massive spells, one that Pinch knew in his heart he would not survive.

He did the only thing he could thing of. He dropped to his knees and threw up his hands in complete submission.

"Maeve -don't! It's me, Pinch!" His voice was a dry screech, ignoble but to the point.

The woman's hands raised –

And then dropped. It had worked. At least Maeve hadn't blasted him to shreds. He could see the four of them in hasty conference.

Finally Therin sidled to the front. "Move and she'll finish her spell. Understood?"

"Of course, Therin," Pinch croaked back, his heart in his mouth -if he still had a heart.

"Who are you?" Therin shouted, not coming any closer.

"I told you -Pinch. Manferic switched bodies with me."

There was another huddled conference at the far end of the passage.

"Impossible. That's bull -"

"It happened."

"Prove it."

Prove it? How in the hells was Pinch supposed to do that? He thought for some secret that only he would know. "Sprite," he finally called out, "remember Elturel, in the Dwarf's Piss Pot last summer? What did you do with those emeralds you lifted off of Therin?"