The War Of The Lance (13 page)

that?“ ”Not me," Gandy shook his head. He pointed an

accusing mop handle at Tagg. “His fault. He do it.” “Do what?” “Snakebite.” Feeling that
he should explain, Tagg pointed up the

corridor. “Somethin' stickin' out over there. Like half a snake. Tasted it to see if it
bitter.”

The Highbulp squinted at the twitching thing. “Is it?”

The earlier roar had faded into echoes, leaving an angry, hissing sound that seemed to
come from nowhere in particular.

“Is now, sounds like.” Tagg nodded.

Cautiously, the clans of Bulp gathered around the green thing protruding from the rubble.
Glitch scrutinized it carefully, first from one side, then from the other, then beckoned.
“Clout, come here. Bring bashin' tool.”

A squat, broad-shouldered gully dwarf stepped forward uncertainly. On his shoulder he
carried a heavy stick about three feet long.

Glitch pointed at the twitching thing. “Clout, bash snake.”

Clout looked doubtful, but he did as he was told. Raising his stick over his head, he
brought it down against the twitching thing with all his might. This time the roar that
erupted, somewhere beyond the rockfall, was a shriek of sheer indignation. Stones trembled
and grated, dust spewed from crevices, and the entire wall of fallen rock began to shift.
The twitching green thing disappeared, withdrawn into the rubble, and massive movements
beyond sent fragments flying from the rocks there. All around, the debris shifted and
settled, closing crevices and escape tunnels.

As gully dwarves scampered back, falling and sprawling over one another, the entire wall
of rubble parted, and in the settling dust a huge, scaled face glared out. Slitted green
eyes as bright as emeralds shone with anger, and a mouth the size of a salt mine opened to
reveal rows of dripping, glistening fangs. The scale crest atop the head flared forward,
and the head was raised to strike.

Then the emerald eyes widened slightly and the mouth closed to a grimace.

“Gully dwarves,” Verden Leafglow hissed, her voice laced with pain and contempt. “Nothing
but gully dwarves.”

*****

For a time, she simply ignored them. Their pleas for mercy, the smell of their fear, the
cowering huddles of them here and there in the shadows, were dimly pleasant to her, an
undertone like music, soothing in its way.

A gaggle of gully dwarves. They could do her - a powerful green dragon - no harm. They
could not get away - all the exits they might reach were sealed by rockfall - and at the
moment, she decided, they were not worth the effort it would take to crush them. So she
ignored them, concentrating instead on her wounds. The indignities of a bitten and thumped
tail rankled her, but she could deal with the perpetrators later, when she was stronger.
They were trapped here in the rubble with her. They had nowhere to go.

The saw-edged disk had ripped into her body, bringing her down in the rubble. In the
darkness of the fallen castle, almost buried by debris, she had lain bleeding as the
armies of the Dragon Queen passed by - passing, she thought bitterly, and leaving her
behind. For that, she would not forgive Flame Searclaw. The huge, arrogant red dragon with
his preoccupied human rider, had known she was there. In her mind, clearly, had been his
dragon-voice, chiding and taunting her.

Her left wing hung useless beside her, her left foreclaw was terribly maimed and it had
been all she could do - through spells and sheer concentration - to close the gaping slash
at the base of her neck. That wound alone could have killed her, had her powers been less.

Still, the healing was slow, painful, and incomplete. In ripping through the armored
scales at her breast, the disk had cut her potion flask - hidden beneath the scales - and
carried away the precious self-stone concealed there. It was gone, somewhere among the
rubble, and without it the powerful green dragon lacked the magic to reshape her maimed
parts. The ultimate healing power was beyond

her, without her self-stone. Focusing all of her concentration upon the damaged

parts of her, she drew what strength she had and applied it to healing. And when the
effort tired her, she slept.

*****

When their initial blind panic began to fade, replaced by simple dread and awe, the
subjects of Glitch I - Highbulp by Persuasion and Lord Protector of This Place, Etc. -
turned to their leader for advice. They had to find him first, though. At first sight of
the apparition that had appeared in the shifting rubble, Glitch had darted through the
first several ranks of his subjects, crawled over, around and under several more layers of
panicked personnel, and finally wedged himself into a crack behind all of them. Getting
him out was a task made more difficult by the fact that he did not want to come out.

Finally, though, he stood among them, gawking at the huge, green, sleeping head of the
thing in the hole only a few feet away. “Wha . . .” He choked, coughed and tried again.
“Wha . . . what that thing?”

Most of them looked at him blankly. Some shrugged and some shook their heads.

“That not snake,” Tagg informed his leader. “Not stew stuff, either.”

Emboldened by the Highbulp's restored presence, old Gandy, the Grand Notioner, crept a
step or two closer to the sleeping thing and raised his mop handle as though to prod it.
He changed his mind, lowered his stick and leaned on it, squinting. “Dragon?” he wondered.
“Might be. Anybody here ever see dragons?”

No one recalled ever seeing a dragon, and most were sure that they would remember, if they
had.

Then Tagg had a bright idea. “Dragons got wings,” he said, adding, doubtfully, “don't
they?”

“Right,” Gandy agreed. “Dragons got wings. This thing got wings?”

Some of them crept about, trying to see around the huge head in the hole, to see what was
beyond it. But the dim light filtering in from above did not reach into the hole. There
was only darkness there. They couldn't see whether the creature had wings or not.

“Somebody bring candle,” Glitch I ordered. “Highbulp find out.”

With glances of surprise and admiration at such unexpected courage, several of them
produced stubby and broken candles, and someone managed to light one. He handed it to
Glitch. The Highbulp held it high, stood on tiptoes and peered into the darkness of the
hole. Then he shook his head and handed the candle to Tagg, who happened to be nearby.
“Can't see,” he said. “Tagg go look.”

Taken by surprise, Tagg looked from the candle thrust into his hand to the fierce,
sleeping features of the thing in the hole. He turned pale, gulped and started to shake
his head, then saw Minna in the crowd. She was gazing at him with something in her eyes
that might have been more than the candle's reflection.

Tagg gulped a shuddering breath, steeling himself. “Rats,” he said. “Okay.”

The huge, green head almost filled the hole in the wall of rubble. As Tagg eased alongside
it, his back to the stones at one side, he could have reached out and touched the nearest
nostril, the exposed dagger-points of the great fangs, the glistening eyelid. The spiked
fan of the creature's graceful crest stood above him as he crept deeper, edging alongside
a long, tapered neck that was nearly as wide as he was tall and seemed to go on and on,
into the darkness.

“Tagg pretty brave,” Minna whispered as they watched him go. Instinctively, her hand went
into her belt pouch and clutched the pretty bauble Tagg had found for her. Her fingers
caressed it, and the great, sleeping creature stirred slightly, then relaxed again in
sleep.

“Not brave,” Gandy corrected. “Just dumb. Highbulp gonna get Tagg killed, sure.”

Tagg crept through sundered rubble, just inches away from the big green neck that almost
filled the tunnel. Then he was past the rubble, and raised the candle. The place where he
found himself was some kind of cavern, beneath a rise in the sundered hill above. It was
dim and smelled musty, and was nearly filled by the huge body of the green creature.

Where the thing's neck joined an enormous, rising body, Tagg spotted ugly, gaping wounds
in the scales. He

stared at them in awe, then beyond them, and his eyes widened even more. The green thing
was huge. Arms like scaly pillars rested below massive shoulders, and ended in taloned
“hands” as big as he was - or bigger. The nearest shoulder had another ugly wound, and the
hand below it was mangled as though it had been sliced apart.

He raised his eyes, squinting in the dim candlelight. Above the thing, on its far side,
stood a great, folded wing. Nearer, a second wing sprawled back at an angle, exposing yet
another gaping wound.

“This thing in bad shape,” Tagg whispered to himself. “Pretty beat up.”

The huge body towered over him and its crest was lost in shadows above. Farther along, the
body widened abruptly, and he realized that what he was seeing was a leg - a huge leg,
folded in rest. Beneath it was a toed foot with claws as long as his arms. Beyond, curled
around from behind, was the tip of a long tail. He recognized that appendage now. It was
what he had bitten, when he thought it might be half a snake. The recollection set his
knees aquiver and he almost fell down.

Tagg's nerves had taken all they could stand. He had seen enough. He headed back.

Just as he was edging past it, the nearest eye opened an inch, and its slitted pupil
looked at him. With a howl, Tagg erupted from the hole, bowling over a half-dozen curious
gully dwarves in the process. Behind him, the great eyelid flickered contemptuously, and
closed again.

As Tagg got to his feet, Glitch stepped forward. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well . . .” Glitch hesitated in confusion, trying to recall what he had sent Tagg to do.

“That thing got wings?” Gandy rasped.

“It got wings, all right. Got claws an' tail an' gashes, too.” Recovering his candle, Tagg
handed it back to Glitch. “Highbulp want any more look, Highbulp go look. I”ve seen
enough."

“Gashes?” Gandy blinked. “What kind gashes?”

“That dragon all sliced up,” Tagg told him. “Somebody hurt it pretty bad.”

Minna eased up beside him, gazing with sympathy at the hideous face of the green dragon
asleep a few feet

away. “Poor thing,” she said. As she spoke, the dragon's eyes opened to slits, then

closed again. It shifted slightly, sighed, and seemed to relax, as though the pain of its
wounds had somehow eased a bit.

For an hour, then, they searched for a way out of the rubble trap. They found nothing - at
least, nothing they could reach without going past the dragon. The shifting of the beast
in its lair had resettled the fallen stone, blocking every exit. One after another, the
searchers gave up, shrugging and gathering into a tight little group as far from the
dragon as they could get.

When it was obvious that they were truly trapped, Clout asked - of no one in particular -
“So, now what?”

Gandy scratched his head and leaned on his mop handle. “Dunno,” he said. “Better ask
what's-'is- name.”

“Who?”

“WHAT'S-'is-name. Th' Highbulp ” He turned. “Highbulp, what we do now?” He peered around
in the dimness. “Highbulp? Where th' Highbulp?”

It took a few minutes to find him. With nothing better to do. Glitch I had curled up
beside a rock. He was sound asleep.

*****

They were all asleep when Verden Leafglow awakened - gully dwarves everywhere, scattered
in clumps and clusters about the dim recess, most of them snoring. At a glance, she
counted more than sixty of the little creatures in plain sight, and knew there were more
of them behind rocks, in the shadows, and beneath or beyond the sleeping heaps. One of
them, she knew, had even crept past her into her lair, thinking that in sleep she might
not notice. But it had only looked around and returned to the others.

Her first inclination was to simply exterminate them. But she had a better idea. They
might be useful to her, if she kept them alive for a time - and if she could make them
serve her.

Gully dwarves. Her contempt for them was even greater than the contempt most other races
felt for the Aghar. As a dragon, she loathed ALL other races, and

these were certainly the most contemptible of the contemptible. Even compared to the
intelligence of humans, full dwarves, and others of the kind, the mentality of gully
dwarves was so incredibly simple that it bordered on imbecility. And compared to dragon
intelligence, it was nothing at all.

Still, the pathetic creatures had certain instincts that might be useful. They were
excellent foragers, adept at getting into and searching out places that others might not
even know existed. And they were good at finding things, provided they managed to
concentrate their attention on the effort for any length of time.

Somewhere here, among the rubble of the destroyed city of Chaldis, was her self-stone. In
her sleep she had sensed its presence. With her self-stone, she could heal herself
completely. Properly motivated, the gully dwarves might find and deliver the self-stone.

Closing her eyes, she thought a spell, and her dragon- senses heard the beginnings of tiny
movements among the rubble beyond the rock-fall cavern where the gully dwarves were
trapped. Tiny, scurrying sounds, hints of movement carried more by vibration in the stones
than by any real noise. She concentrated on the spell, and the hints of movement increased
in number and volume. She added a dimension of difference to the spell, and other
movements could be sensed; slithering, scuffing movements seeming to come from the soil
above her lair.

The vibrations became true sound, and things scuttled in the deepest shadows within the
chamber. From cracks and crevices everywhere, small things emerged, coming toward her.
Rats and mice, here and there a squirrel, a rabbit or a hare - they emerged by the dozens,
answering the call of her spell.

For a moment it seemed the place was filled with rodents, darting around and over the
tumbles of sleeping gully dwarves, then they were all directly in front of her. Moving
carefully, ignoring the pain of her injuries, she thrust out her right paw, and its talons
sliced downward, slaughtering great numbers of the rodents. Using her tail, she scraped
the ceiling of her lair, and brought forth the herbs and roots that hung there, drawn
downward from above by her magic. These she pushed from tail to foot to forepaw, and
deposited them in front of her hole, beside