The reign of Istar

Filling The Empty Places

The minotaur fell to his knees on the cracked, filthy cobbles of Beggar's Alley. Covered with rough red fur, the man-beast had the head of a bull, horns as long as my forearm, hair like a mane growing down between his shoulder blades. He foamed from the corners of his mouth like an animal.

I'd taken the minotaur two days before in an unexpected end to a fruitless search for heretics. He'd come at me like a storm, rising up out of the tall savannah grass, a knife in each fist; charged me roaring, dark eyes afire with battle-joy. Minotaurs don't much like humans or anyone else, and they do love to fight. But this one, it seemed, hadn't reckoned on my horse. The gray reared high, hooves flailing, and the minotaur went down before he knew what had hit him. He stayed senseless long enough for me to get the manacles, hobbles, and chains on. They have a strength beyond believing, those horned man-beasts. Bound and hobbled is the only way you can take 'em prisoner.

I never liked bringing live heretics to Istar, but sometimes — like in the heat of summer, when you don't really want to be traveling with the dead — you have to. That's the way of things and seasons, and that's the way I was working in that long, hot summer of my thirtyfifth year. By then I'd been fifteen years in the bounty trade. I'd had good times and bad, pockets filled with gold and just as often empty. In Istar they called me "Hunter-Doune," and I was good at my work.

Fair quiet it was in Beggar's Alley that evening, but for the minotaur cursing and panting on the cobbles. Rats ran in the filthy gutters. Tumbledown shacks and unpainted, drab houses huddled together, empty and looking lonely. At sunset the panderers and pickpockets did a better trade over by the great temple. From a distance — beyond the alley, beyond the market and the slave auction — rose a hymn, a gathering of elven voices, as soft and sweet as any dream of what song should be. The holy choir was beginning evening devotions. Elven women, famous throughout the world for their piety, lifted eerily pure voices in praise to the gods of good. Tonight they celebrated wise Paladine and his gentle, compassionate Mishakal.

The minotaur, struggling to his feet again, lifted his dark, homed head. He spat in the direction of the temple. I should have kicked him for it, but because no one was near to see what could be considered my own heretical omission, I let the minotaur have his way. I wasn't one for tormenting prisoners. It's bad business.

I had a partner once — a mountain dwarf. That was all right, no chargeable heresy in those days to be seen with a dwarf. Toukere Hammerfell, his name was. He'd been in the bounty trade longer than I had, and I remember all the advice he gave me.

"One thing you need to know in the trade, Doune, my friend," he once said. "Don't let feelings become part of the hunt. Now, some people think this means don't let softer feelings get in the way. No pity, none of that sweet nonsense. But the harder feelings are just as much a trap. If you want to do well in this business, you'll empty out all those places where your feelings are, the soft and the hard. Mercy costs you money, Doune. So does taking time to plague a man with kicking and beating when he's going to be dead soon anyway."

Toukere would pause to take a long drink of ale and wipe the thick foam from his black beard. We were taking our meal in the Hart's Leap that day, a tavern known for the goodness of its ale. He always liked his ale, Toukere did, and he held that no one could talk well or wisely unless he had some in his belly.

"A heretic's a heretic, Hunter-Doune, whether it's some woman weeping over her babe or some ugly minotaur all chained up and looking like an easy thing to kick. The only thing you want to worry about is how much you're getting paid for 'em. Worrying about feelings — theirs or yours — is a waste of time."

A heretic's a heretic.

As it happened, Toukere had found out that this simple definition worked to the Kingpriest's advantage, too. Not long after that night the Kingpriest spun a new twist in his religious logic: He decided that since most dwarves worshiped the gods of neutrality — the crafter-god, Reorx of the Forge the most honored among them — then the whole race must be evil because they would not worship the gods of good. Notice went up in the paymaster's den that a bounty hunter could make sixty gold on a dwarf. Now, I never knew how Touk worshiped — or even whether he did — but the night the notice went up, he parted with more gold than I'd ever known him to, got me and everyone in the Hart's Leap drunk enough to forget where we were — or who we were — and sneaked out the back door.

He left Istar without me, and with no word of farewell.

Ah, yes. He robbed a minor shrine to Mishakal on the way out of Istar, getting himself some traveling money, and likely needing it after his trick at the Hart. The cleric at the shrine resisted, was dead of his wounds before morning. And so the bounty on Toukere Hammerfell was larger than that on the average dwarf — one hundred gold, a sixty-forty split between heresy and murder.

That was years before. Since then, I'd heard a few rumors that someone over Xak Tsaroth way had finally claimed the gold on Touk. For the most part, I got over missing my partner, but I lost my taste for ale, learned to like wine. Ale didn't taste like ale after Touk left.

So at the end of that long, hot summer day, with sunset's gold shining on the broken cobbles of Beggar's Alley and the air filling with hymns, I didn't kick the minotaur. I took care of business as Toukere and I used to: jerked the chain and got my prisoner moving again.

I hustled him down the alley, out into the wide avenues where the wealthy and the pious live. The tall, beautiful towers of Istar rose gleaming and shining around us. I herded the minotaur along the broad, tree-lined street where flower beds made lush and fragrant medians, and hummingbirds danced in the air like living jewels. The street led to the great temple, and beyond that holy place was the jail.

People on their way to prayer stopped to cheer as we passed, and in an excess of zeal, a young man, dressed in brocades fashionably cut to imitate hunting gear, scooped up what my horse left on the cobbles and hurled it at the heretic. But the fancy bravo didn't know what to do about the mess on his hands after that. I laughed about it all the way to the jail, was still laughing when I turned the minotaur over to the guards and went to the paymaster's den to collect my gold. A small place, the den; a little wooden shack crouched behind the jail where the Kingpriest wouldn't see it. He didn't mind that his clerics and clerks paid bounty on heretics. He just didn't like to see it done.

The walls of the den were filled with the usual notices that reward would be paid for those who served the gods of neutrality or the gods of evil; for kender and elves and humans, dwarves and ogres and goblins, minotaurs, and any cleric who declined to worship the gods of good.

The bounty had been doubled again on Kell, the infa mous outlaw-heretic who professed to revere the gods of good, but who scorned the Kingpriest's practice of using torture and execution to convince people that they must worship those wise and gentle gods.

(Some holy defender of good that Kell was. Ask anyone about Kell and you heard the tale of how he robbed and murdered a whole family of pilgrims on their way to Istar to worship at the great temple. Or the one about him looting wayside shrines and slaughtering the clerics. A real favorite was that he liked to sneak into wakes and steal the silver pennies off dead men's eyes. All in all, Kell didn't sound like he was much better than the Kingpriest.)

Every bounty hunter knew that he could retire richer than an elf lord if he managed to capture Kell, but, though everyone knew what his crimes were, no one knew where in all of Ansalon this fellow, Kell, was hiding. No one even knew what he looked like. Was he a dwarf or human or elf? It depended on which rumor you liked best.

I didn't do more than glance at Kell's bounty sheet that day. There was a time when I'd been eager to hunt for Kell, but that was a while ago, and now I remembered what Toukere used to say about him:

"When you think on it, Doune, my friend, no one really knows whether this terrible heretic, Kell, is much more than a bad dream the Kingpriest has from time to time when his food is too rich. I like the gold as much as the next one — maybe more, eh? — but I stick to the easy prey. No sense wasting time chasing savannah-wind that's all the time changing direction."

Then he'd called for another tankard of ale.

There was a kender at the Hart's Leap. The race's heretical status didn't bother kender enough to keep them out of Istar, though no few of that free-worshiping kindred had met the heretic's fate there. Ah, but you know kender: those light-fingered thieves don't worry about much. This one was young, a likable-looking fellow, the way kender can be when they're not torturing you with their eternal chatter and endless nonsense. Red-haired and slim, with a thief's long, nimble fingers, he wore kender motley — yellow leggings, blue shirt, green cloak and purple-dyed buckskin boots. He had six or seven pouches and wallets about him, all stuffed full with pack-rat junk.

Except for me and the kender and the barman, the tavern was empty. Careful people were still at devotions or keeping discreetly out of sight. There were plenty of tables to choose from, but the kender was sitting at the table by the Hart's only window, the one with the knife-scarred top, where Toukere and I used to sit reckoning a bounty's split and drinking ale. Chance, the barman, always kept that table clear for me, no matter how crowded or empty the place was. Now he only shrugged when I scowled to see the table occupied.

"He's here lookin' for you, Doune."

That was thirty gold in kender topknot sitting at the table. Ah, life is mighty sweet, I thought, when the bounty comes looking for the hunter. I fingered the hilt of my sword, told Chance to get me some food, and said that I'd like to have it by the time I got back from hauling the kender's butt to the jail.

But Chance closed his hand round my wrist, gripping hard. "Maybe you should eat first, eh, Doune?"

The kender cocked his head, eyes alight and grinning as if he was expecting to have some fun.

Then someone told me — a woman's voice, as soft and deadly as a steel blade cutting cold air — that no one would be hauling kender anywhere tonight.

I turned fast on my heel, sword half drawn, and nearly spitted myself on her blade. The tall swordswoman set the point of her steel gently against the base of my throat. Chance never lifted voice or hand in my defense.

"How much did they pay you, Chance?" I asked bitterly.

"Just exactly enough," he said, not even bothering to try for shame. He said no more, and I heard him leave for the kitchen.

"Gently," the swordswoman said, smiling and flattening out her words so that they were a taunt. "Gently, Doune, if you like living."

I like living well enough. I dropped my sword point, but not the sword.

She was human, like me, but dressed and geared like an elf whose family had some means. Silk and buckskin and low-heeled riding boots of the finest cut. I'll tell you now, she was well made, long-legged and slender of waist. She was round in all the best places, and there wasn't much need to guess about that. The cut of her blouse showed more than the silver-and-sapphire necklace she wore.

I tried a question. "How do you know my name?"

"Who hasn't heard of Hunter-Doune?" She grinned, as cocky as a scamp bent on mischief. "You're a legend where I come from."

Light from an oil lamp gleamed on the steel between us, hers high, mine low and useless. She gestured to the kender.

"Peverell," she said, "relieve him of his weapons."

The kender did what kender love to do. He got my dagger, found the small knife I always kept sheathed in my boot, lifted the sword from my hand before I knew he'd reached for it. He also took the bounty notices I'd gotten at the den and the fee I'd collected not an hour ago. He would have taken the teeth from my head if his companion hadn't called him off.

"Now, Hunter-Doune," the swordswoman said, "come join Peverell and me for a drink and a bite, eh?" She sheathed her weapon. "It could be to your profit."

I eyed Peverell, back at the table and happily sorting through his take. "Hasn't been so far," I said.

"I suppose you're right. Pev! Give Doune his purse."

The kender screwed up his face in protest, but he emptied the gold coins onto the table, then tossed the purse to me.

"AND the gold," the woman said firmly.

Long eyes bright, the kender cocked his head. Something needing no words passed between the two and — for a wonder — Peverell scooped up the coins, came and gave them all to me. I took the gold, pursed it, and stashed it in my deepest pocket, watching him trot back to the table. He was uncannily quiet for one of his kind. I smiled sourly.

"Someone cut out his tongue?"

"No," she said, "someone slit it. Works out the same. A bounty hunter who took him and couldn't stand the chatter. Didn't keep him, though. Kender are hard to hold. But I expect you know that. Now," she said, cold and no longer pretending courtesy. "Do you want to know where the heretic Kell is hiding, or is that little bit of gold enough to keep you happy?"

Chance brought us platters piled high with mutton and cabbage and potatoes, a jug of wine for me, and a great pitcher of ale for the others. Fair pleased with himself, old Chance was, and acting like I should thank him.

Outside the window, high up in the sky, I saw the two moons — the red and the silver — shining brightly. Chance had barred the door, lighted only the few lamps we needed to see what we were eating. The swords-woman told me that her name was Alyce. She said she was a mercenary's daughter, that since her father's death she'd taken up the family trade, hired her sword to merchant caravans needing to make their way through the goblin-haunted passes of the mountains ringing the Plains of Istar.

Now some might think that mercenary work is a strange way for a woman to keep herself in sapphire necklaces, but I had no reason to doubt that Alyce was capable of the work she claimed to do. She'd gotten up behind me quickly enough, and that fine jeweled sword was no stranger to her hand, but, for all that, I'd heard no reason to believe that she knew more about Kell's whereabouts than anyone else.

"Well," she said, tucking into a second helping of mutton with a wharf man's appetite. "There's not much I can do to convince you that I know where Kell's hiding — except to say that a friend of mine tracked him to his lair not longer that two weeks ago."

"But this friend didn't kill or capture him?"

She laughed, and the kender clapped his hands in delight, his brown eyes kindling with merriment.

"My friend's not foolish enough to go out alone after a man who's supposed to have done all Kell is accused of." She smiled slyly. "If Kell were an easy take, surely some bounty hunter would have snatched him by now, eh? Pev and I were supposed to meet our friend here, go after him together, but our friend is… not available."

I snorted. "Not available to make himself rich?"

"He's been jailed." Alyce downed her ale, all business now. She nodded to Chance, who quickly refilled the pitcher. "The barman says you know the jail well — having helped fill it up often enough over the years. Help me break out my friend and you can come along."

"You want me to arrange a jailbreak? Sorry. I put 'em IN jail — I don't break 'em out."

"Exactly," she said, "that's why you're the perfect choice. You'd have it done before anyone even suspected what was going on."

I thought about that for a while, and she — impatient — leaned across the table, her blue eyes alight.

"A quarter share, Doune I Help me get my friend out of jail and we'll be on our way to claiming a bounty so great that no place you could stash the treasure will be empty."

Well, she wasn't much exaggerating about the bounty, and I was always tracking the gold. But I was also careful.

"Supposing I do this jailbreak? What's to keep you and your friend from getting rid of me and going after the bounty yourselves?"

Alyce's eyes grew sharp and cold. She drew her sword and I reached for where mine should have been. She made no threat, only laid the jeweled weapon flat on the table between us.

"This is my father's sword," she said, ignoring my own gesture. "I have never sworn an oath on this steel that I didn't mean to keep."

I believed her. Maybe it was the way her voice sounded, low and freighted with fierce pride. Or maybe it was the look in her eyes, straight on and unflinching, like the light gleaming along the blade's keen edge. Out of the comer of my eye I saw Peverell idly tracing some old calculation Toukere or I had carved in the oaken table-top.

I'M HONEST WHEN I WANT TO BE, DOUNE, MY FRIEND. AND WHEN A MAN RECKONS THE SPLIT WITH HIS PARTNER, HE'D BEST WANT TO BE HONEST OR HE'LL DESERVE TO BE DEAD.

Toukere had had the same straight-on look in his eyes as Alyce did now when he'd said that. By that look — its absence or its presence — I'd always judged a man's nature. Or a woman's. I guess I reckoned on it this time, too.

"Who's this partner of yours?" I asked. "A lover?" She tossed her head, and her short, dark hair swung and bounced. "Dinn's a friend. Sometimes he acts like a hotheaded fool, but I love him dearly. He comes from people who have only one word for both loyalty and honor. Hard enemies, these people, and good friends. My father earned his friendship, and Dinn says that I inherited it." Her voice dropped low. "On his soul and my father's sword I swear that I'll deal honestly with you, Doune."

It was a powerful oath. I knew none like it to offer her.

She asked if I had a father; I told her I must have at one time. A mother? Dead, I said. No sister or wife, she supposed. I told her she supposed right, and none of the women I knew had the kind of soul I'd care to swear an oath on. She looked at me with a mocking, exaggerated expression of pity.

"Well," I growled, "I don't expect they're swearing any oaths on my soul either."

The kender whistled a rising note, like a question, to catch Alyce's attention. When he had it, he hit his two fists against each other, then clasped both hands together. Alyce shrugged with the air of someone who has come to the bottom of the coffer and expects to find nothing but dust. To me she said: "I don't suppose people in your line of work have many friends."

"Not many," I said flatly, "and the one who was closest to me is a long time dead."

"Was he a good friend?"

A good companion, an honest partner, and one who made his escape from Istar in such a way as to leave plenty of witnesses to the fact that I'd had nothing to do with it.

"Yes," I said quietly. "He was a good friend."

She thought about that for a long moment, her blue eyes no longer bright and jeering, but soft and very serious.

"Swear by your friend's memory, Hunter-Doune. Swear that you'll deal honestly with me." Then I couldn't see her eyes at all for the veil of her dark lashes. Only her lips moving in a secret little smile. "It'll be well worth your while."

That's all I needed to hear. I placed my hand over hers and took an oath on a friend's memory.

Good thing she waited until I'd sworn before she told me that her partner was the minotaur I'd brought to Istar's jail only hours ago. Good thing for her, but not so good for Peverell. The mute little kender laughed so hard that he fell out of his chair. And not so good for me. I'd been two days in the minotaur's company and I suspected he'd not readily agree to become my partner in the hunt for Kell. But I was sworn now, and by Touk's memory.

Too, there was all that gold to consider.

Peverell was hot to pick every lock on every door in the jail. When I told him that we wouldn't get in that way, he showed me how deeply he resented this slight to his thievish abilities. Mute he might be, but he'd raised the skills of obscene and insulting gesture to high art. Alyce calmed him, and from there the night's work was no more than the usual game: Get some weapons for the minotaur, some mounts for Alyce and me — no sense getting horses for Peverell or Dinn; Alice said that neither would ride if you paid 'em — then bribe the right guard and pay off the right cleric. The bribe and the payoff were huge, took all the ninety gold pieces I'd earned on the minotaur and a lot more besides. Alyce had to part with her beautiful sapphire necklace.

"I consider it an investment," she said. She cocked a thumb at my empty purse and grinned coolly. "You should, too."

I did. A quarter share of Kell's bounty would make the gold I'd paid in bribery seem like the pittance in a beggar's cup.

I was right about Dinn. He joyfully would have given up all hope of freedom for even the slimmest chance of killing me. But Alyce managed him, and it was something to see her go toe-to-toe with that brute, harrying him in hissing whispers like an angry fishwife.

"Use your head, Dinn," she said. And she insisted — often — that he remember why they were here. She demanded — just as often — that he carry through with what he'd promised.

The kender, over his fit of the sulks, came up close to the tall, red-furred minotaur, gestured elaborately. Dinn growled and shook his horns at Peverell, sullenly asking Alyce to translate.

"He's saying just what you know is true, Dinn. We need you!"

That made some difference, caused the minotaur to subside. "Arr, well," he growled, glaring at me. "Let's do it then."

"Thank you, my friend." Alyce patted his rough-furred shoulder and rose up on tiptoe to kiss that ugly snout (which made him growl and HARRUMPH and shuffle his feet).

I kept one eye on Dinn, for all that everyone seemed happy and friendly together. I'd been the one to shame him by dragging him chained and hobbled into Istar. Minotaurs usually like to erase the memory of shame by killing anyone who knows about it.

An unwelcoming place, the savannah; hot and dry and without landmarks. This is the land of the nomad clans, and there are no borders to cross; nothing to warn you that you're in some clan's territory, for the nomads have no individual territories. Always moving, settling nowhere, the long-braids consider the whole savannah theirs. They have a hard greeting for visitors — a flint-tipped arrow, a lance's stony head.

We went carefully, Alyce and I riding; Dinn loping ahead, a tall, homed outrunner tracking steadily west to the blue-hazed mountains. Sometimes Peverell trotted beside him, unseen but for the parting of the high grass as he went, the wake of a small, mute kender. More often, he stayed by Alyce. Like all kender, he loved to talk, and she had more patience for his silent language — and clearly a greater understanding of it — than the minotaur did.

I was used to riding alone since Toukere and I had parted ways, and I was used to quiet. But soon I found myself liking the sound of Alyce's voice: low because of the danger, thrilling when she was keen on her subject, gentle when she was thinking aloud. Alyce did a lot of thinking out loud, about politics and history and gods.

"I'll tell you something, Hunter-Doune," she said, one blazing noonday when the savannah ran rippling under a hot wind. "I've always heard that gods are about balance, good and neutral and evil all lending their weight in the measure against chaos. I think it's politics that makes heretics, not wrong thinking. Which, if you believe what you hear, is just what this outlaw, Kell, thinks." She glanced at me out of the comer of her eyes. "If you believe what you hear."

She seemed to know a lot about Kell, and I wondered if she'd conceived some romantic fancy for the outlaw. I asked her about this, in a joking way. Peverell, trotting beside us, looked up at me, signing swiftly, laughing silently.

"What'd he say?" I asked.

"Kender nonsense," she said stiffly. "I have no fancies about Kell. A good hunter should know what she's hunting, how the prey thinks, what it will defend, where it goes to hide, where it is vulnerable." She smiled, as though to herself and over private thoughts. "Don't you agree, Hunter-Doune?"

I said I was a bounty hunter, not a boar hunter.

"So you are." She laughed, mocking again. "And a good one who wastes no time thinking about the heretics you hunt. Right?"

"No sense in it. They're nothing more than the promise of gold, payable on delivery." I slipped her a sideways grin. "Thanks to politics."

Again Peverell gestured, his whole bright face a question; this time Alyce translated.

"He wants to know whether heretics are people to you."

I shook my head. "They're profit."

The kender signed again, and Alyce looked at me for a long moment, her eyes all soft and gravely thoughtful, as if she were weighing the balance of me on a scale.

"Empty enough for the wind to howl through, aren't you, Hunter-Doune?"

"Did he say that?"

"No. I did. How'd you get so empty?"

"Tricks of the trade." I shifted uncomfortably to another tack. "Why are you worrying about how I feel? I don't see that YOU'RE holding a whole lot of mercy for Kell."

She looked away, out across the golden, shifting savannah. "My feelings for Kell are… personal," she said. "I'm not a bounty hunter by trade."

"Oh? What'd he do, steal the pennies off your dead father's eyes?"

She winced, and I was sorry I'd said it. I'd come close to some truth, one that hurt.

"Come on, Alyce," I said, and surprised myself to hear how gently I'd spoken. "Don't worry about me and my feelings. They haven't got all that much to do with you anyway, eh?"

The old, taunting light, brittle and bright, came back to her eyes. "Not much," she said, and she laughed.

I thought the laughter was forced.

That's the way we talked during those long, hot days on the savannah. Sometimes she mocked, as she'd done in the Hart; sometimes she was serious, and I liked that best. Soon I began to wish that the kender would stay with Dinn. I was getting to like Alyce's company, the nearness of her, her voice, even her thoughtful, considering silence.

There were possibilities in her silence. At night, as I slept — Alyce wrapped in rough woolen blankets with a tall fire between us — those possibilities changed into dreams in which the minotaur and the kender had no roles to play.

But the kender was with us more often than not, and so we three were together — Alyce, Peverell, and me — when, at the end of our third day of travel, the sun set in a blaze of red and ahead of us Dinn spotted the nomad woman and her child.

My horse danced skittishly, sidled away from the minotaur's horns. Dinn smiled thinly when he saw that, tossed his head so that a horn came dangerously close to the horse's shoulder… and my leg. He pointed to the tall grass where it parted counter to the wind's direction.

"Two," he said to Alyce. "Long-braids."

The nomad woman ran swiftly, though she went hunched over, burdened by the weight of the small boy clinging to her back. The boy's head bounced limply in rhythm to her swift, ground-covering stride. His sunbrowned leg was streaked with blood. The woman's course would take her right across our path.

Answering the instinct of fifteen years, I reached for the coil of rope hanging from my saddle. One good cast and I'd have her and the child roped, down, and trussed.

Alyce, seeing my gesture, said, "How much for those two, Hunter-Doune?"

Eighty gold, I told her. Forty for each, the woman not being worth more than the child.

Alyce smiled coldly. "Your share of Kell's bounty is worth ten times that. Are you with me, Hunter-Doune?"

I didn't answer. I was watching the woman run. Although the wind covered our whispering and our mounts were still, something — a silence of birds, maybe — must have spoken to her instincts. She threw a swift look over her shoulder and stumbled, startled to see us. Her eyes were large and dark, like empty holes in a mask of terror. The sight chilled me, squeezed my heart so that it was as if I felt the desperate fear myself.

The woman recovered quickly, hitched the boy up higher on her back, and ran faster.

I took my hand away from the rope, saw Alyce watching me — not weighing anything, not taunting. Rather, she smiled the way you do when you first meet someone and you're thinking that you like what you see. Peverell looked from one to the other of us, then gestured something. His hands flew too fast for me to get his meaning, but Alyce did. A dark scowl replaced her smile as she told him to stop talking nonsense.

They say that the red moon, Lunitari, is the daughter of Gilean, the deity who is the keeper of all the knowledge possessed by the gods. Solinari, the silver moon, is Paladine's son, and he watches over all the magic being done in the world. That night, while the others rested, I walked the first watch and saw these two moons — gods' children, if you will — rising. First to rise was Lunitari. When I squinted eastward across the plains, I thought I saw the tall towers of Istar silhouetted against the red disk, dark like a jagged bite taken out of the moon's rim. Second up was Solinari, and he rose a little north of Istar, avoided the teeth of the Kingpriest's city.

Foolish fancy, eh? Well, I had a lot on my mind — too much for sleeping — and I kept coming back to the memory of how I'd felt when Alyce smiled after I'd let the nomads go.

That was just more foolish fancy. Why should I care how I weighed out in her eyes? Aye, she was long-legged and lovely. Her blue eyes, when they weren't mocking, spoke of possibilities, inspired dreams. She was round — and surely soft and warm — in all the right places, but so was many another woman, and I knew that well enough. The only difference between Alyce and them was that she was a good hand with a sword, good to talk to… and she was leading me to a quarter share of a fine, large bounty.

Sometimes she looked at me in such a way as to make me want to be what she seemed to hope I was.

Empty? Maybe once. Maybe still, but Alyce, when she looked at me with her eyes soft, a little hopeful, and gravely thoughtful, made me think that she might be able to fill some of those empty places in me.

I shook my head hard, as if I was trying to shake out this nonsense. It was nonsense, I told myself. Isn't one woman just as good as another on a cold night?

I was looking at the silver moon when I thought that, so I guess you could say I was praying for something, maybe for an answer, or a way to understand why it mattered to me what Alyce thought.

Of course, Solinari didn't have much to say about it. The children of gods have their own business to tend.

When the moons were past their heights I left my watch, stepped carefully around the sleeping minotaur, and sat beside Peverell at the campfire. He gave me a sideways look, then signed something to Alyce. When I asked her what he'd said, she didn't answer right away. I had the idea that she wasn't thinking about how to translate, but whether to. Finally she repeated his gestures, slowly, the way you enunciate each word for the hard of hearing. A long reaching up with both hands to cup something, an abrupt dragging down motion.

"Sun setting," I guessed.

"Right."

She raised four fingers, and I suggested that this, coupled with the first gesture, meant four days passing.

"Right again." Her blue eyes danced as she made the fists-and-clasp gesture I knew to mean friend. "You know that one. How about this?"

She repeated Peverell's last gesture: slammed her right fist hard onto her level left palm. Then she mimicked his expression: wide-eyed, drop-jawed surprise.

"What do you think that means, Hunter-Doune?"

"I have no idea."

She moved her lips in a secret little smile. "It's the whole point of what Pev said. I'll leave you to consider it."

I spent the night listening to the wind sigh down the starred sky, thinking long and hard about Peverell's gestures. Might be, I thought, that Peverell's fist-in-palm gesture meant an ambush. If so, perhaps he and Alyce were anticipating Kell's surprise to find himself at last taken. And that in only another four days. But nowhere in that interpretation did Peverell's friend-gesture fit.

Last, before I made ready to sleep, I remembered Alyce's secret smile.

Now I remembered this wasn't the first time I'd seen her smile like that. The first time was in the Hart's Leap, right after she'd hunted around trying to find an oath for me to swear. An oath that maybe I wouldn't have given if I'd known it was Dinn I had to help break out of jail.

Cold and creeping came suspicion.

Might be, I thought, that there's another way to interpret Peverell's gestures and Alyce's secret smile. Might be they were having a laugh over how surprised I'd be to find that the oath she took on her father's sword signified nothing but a means to an end — the minotaur's release from jail, the capture of the heretic Kell, and a third share of the bounty instead of a quarter.

Four days. Friendship. And a violent, smashing gesture. Surprise.

Alyce — her considering looks, her soft eyes, her surprised pleasure when I let the nomads go? What were those things? Bait, maybe. Four are better than three on the savannah — until the three got where they needed to go.

Time to get out. Time to cut my losses and get out.

I stayed — for the sake of the gold, I told myself. What I didn't admit — didn't even know then — was that I'd foolishly come too far down the road of fancy to turn back.

Alyce kept to herself after that night. Quiet and brooding, she spoke to Dinn only when she had to, and spoke to me hardly at all. She had something on her mind, and if she talked to anyone about it, that one was Peverell — who seemed to know about, and maybe even sympathize with, whatever troubled her.

They conversed in his silent, graceful language of gesture, and so I had no idea why she'd grown so suddenly distant.

We left the savannah three days after we saw the nomad woman and her child. We made camp that night in a blind canyon, a long slot of stone and tall, rising walls. No need to post watch there. The only way into the canyon was in clear sight of our camp.

We'd no more than built a fire when Alyce looked around to find the kender missing. "Dinn," she said. "Where'd he go?"

The minotaur made the kender's fist-hitting-palm gesture.

"Damn! I told him — " She glanced at me, then took another tack. "Dinn, are you sure?"

Dinn shrugged. "I'm never really sure what he's trying to say, but that is my guess."

Ah, she wasn't happy with that answer. Nor was she very happy when I asked her what the gesture meant. Blue eyes glinting, she said, "It means that that kender's going to find himself in some big trouble next time I see him."

She said no more.

As we ate, the red moon cleared the high canyon walls, spilled light over the stone, made the shadows a web of purple. Alyce, who'd displayed a wharfman's appetite at the Hart, picked only absently at her food. When she tired of that, she bunched a rough woolen blanket into a pillow and stretched out before the fire.

She lay silent, staring up at the narrow sky, the gleaming stars. The fire's flickering glow made her pale cheeks flush rosy, her dark hair shine, but I only watched that from the comer of my eye. Dinn, sitting in the night shadows and honing his daggers, had the most of my attention. He worked with sure, even strokes and sometimes sparks leaped from the steel and stone. When that happened, the minotaur would look up at me, his dark eyes gleaming, his large yellow teeth bared in something like a smile.

"Doune," Alyce said after a while. "We're near Kell's hideout. Tomorrow, we'll be playing a whole different game."

I looked away from Dinn, not liking the sound of that. "What do you mean?"

She looked at me, her eyes neither soft and thoughtful, nor brittle and jeering. She wasn't smiling. Her expression was unreadable.

"Doune," she said. "Can I trust you?"

I answered evenly, though I didn't know where the question was leading. (And, no, it didn't remind me of my own doubt. Doubt had haunted me for the past three days.)

"I swore I'd deal honestly with you, Alyce."

She nodded. "On your old friend's memory."

I said nothing, remembering Peverell's fist-hittingpalm gesture, repeated again tonight. Ambush for Kell, or betrayal for me? I didn't know, and I waited to see where Alyce's questions would lead. Dinn put aside his daggers, watched and waited, too. But he wasn't watching Alyce. He was watching me.

Alyce said, "Doune, you also said that bounty hunting is just business. Can we trust you to stand by us, no matter what we find tomorrow?"

I laughed without humor. "Unless this Kell of yours has an army with him. Then you can trust me to do what anyone with sense would do — cut my losses and run. Live to hunt another day, eh? This is a strange time to be talking about that."

She shrugged. "Not really. Tell me, Hunter-Doune, what would you do if — "

A loud whistle — a sudden pattern of sharp notes, shrill enough to make the hair stir on the back of my neck — broke the night silence.

"Goblins," Dinn rumbled, reaching for his daggers.

I scanned the dark heights, saw nothing but shadows and the baleful eye of the red moon gleaming. I listened hard for Peverell's whistle, but heard only the ghostly echo of night wind trapped in the canyon. Then, darkness become solid, goblins lined the heights, black against the moonlit sky. I counted a dozen. Although distance might fool the eye about details, I knew that the least of them was taller than I and more muscular than even the minotaur.

You might think that none of this mattered much, that we could slip through the shadows and the dark, head for the mouth of the canyon and take our chances running and hiding until we lost them in the dark and the mountains. We couldn't.

A huge goblin stepped forward to the edge of the drop. It held something high, like a dark cleric offering sacrifice. Alyce cursed softly. The goblin held the kender above its head, had voiceless Peverell for a hostage and a shield.

Peverell writhed in the goblin's grip as if he wanted nothing more than to overbalance his captor and send him plunging to a bone-shattered death. So furiously did he struggle that I knew he'd not give a thought to his own bones until he was in midair himself. Yet he was lightly built and had not one tenth of the goblin's strength. His struggling was worth nothing but the goblin's annoyance.

Alyce gestured to Dinn, pointed to the canyon entrance. Wordless understanding passed between them in just one look, as though a whole plan had been unfolded and discussed. The minotaur didn't like it, whatever it was, but Alyce reached up, stroked his red-furred shoulder.

"Don't worry, my friend. I'll be fine. Now, go. Go."

He obeyed, as he always did, but in the fire's light I saw his eyes gleaming, all reflected animal glare and as red as Lunitari hanging high in the sky above the canyon's black walls. A dire warning, that look, and directed at me.

"Don't worry," I said, sarcasm not even thinly veiled. "I'll be fine, too, Dinn."

He exercised admirable restraint, did no more than feint a lunge at me as he passed by — and I still have two eyes today because I kept as still as stone when one of his twisted horns came close to my face. Alyce smiled in a cold, absent way.

"You shouldn't bait him like that, Doune. There might come a time when I'm not near to restrain him."

"Might come a time when I'd welcome that."

She said nothing, likely recognizing bravado when she heard it. I looked over my shoulder at the mouth of the canyon, yawning blackness with silvery stars hanging above. I turned back to Alyce, saw her studying me.

"Is this where a bounty hunter decides to cut his losses and run, Hunter-Doune?"

I snorted. "Could I?"

"Go and try," Alyce said flatly. With her sword's gleaming tip she pointed to the goblins. They'd found a narrow path, a winding way down the black canyon walls. They went slowly, being obliged to keep behind the one who was still shielding himself with Peverell. But they came on steadily, and I saw that my first count was wrong. There were more than a dozen of them; at least twice that. "There's no profit in this for you now, Hunter-Doune."

None at all.

In that moment the silver moon, Paladine's son lagging behind Lunitari as he always does, rose above the stony heights. By Solinari's light I saw Alyce's face in profile, as white as marble. All her attention was on the kender caught in the goblin's dutches.

The big goblin flung the kender to the ground, laughed when he saw him hit the rough stone and tumble the rest of the way to the canyon floor. Peverell lay where he fell, a pitiful jumble of arms and legs. When I looked at Alyce, I saw one thin line of silver on her cheek, moonlit tears.

"Are you with me, Hunter-Doune? Or will you leave me?"

She was not weighing me now, or taunting. She really didn't know how I would answer. By the light of wise Paladine's son, I saw in her eyes the knowledge that with me or without, she'd probably not get out of this canyon alive. I saw her wanting to believe that I would not abandon her here.

I'd be a fool to stay, but that would be nothing new. I'd been a fool for the last three days, should have gotten out when I knew I wasn't sure whether I trusted her. What had made me stay?

It was a jeweled moment, one of those spaces in the soul when you understand that something has happened to change you. Those moments have their sudden, unlookedfor absurdities to send you laughing, if only silently. Once I'd asked the silver moon why I cared what Alyce thought of me. A bit late in answering, was Solinari, but he answered me now, softly, like a whisper in my heart.

What adamned all inconvenient time to finally figure out that i've fallen in love…

Maybe Alyce heard the laughter in me. For one moment, swiftly fled, she smiled as though she agreed.

I hefted my sword, took comfort in its trusty balance. "I swore to deal honestly with you, Alyce. By my reckoning, that means sticking by you now."

We stood braced, back-to-back, when the goblins entered the canyon.

Night fighting is a hard thing, all shadows and moongleaming steel, all cold sweat and heart leaping in your chest. When the odds are good, it's hard to tell friend from foe, but that wasn't anything for us to worry about. The odds weren't good. There was only Alyce and me, with never the slim breadth of a steel blade between us.

She used her blade like a sword dancer, whirling the steel so that the whistle of it filled the canyon. Any goblin who got too close lost at least a limb. One lost his head. That was all very fine and flashy, but I like the dependable parry and thrust. I spitted the first two of the fanged goblins that came at me, was ready to take on a third when I heard Dinn roaring somewhere near the canyon's mouth. I couldn't turn to see what cause he had for bellowing, but I heard Alyce suck in her breath, a soft hissing counterpoint to her sword's whistle.

The goblin who'd come to take the place of the one I killed feinted from the side, dove in under my guard. He caught me around the neck and did what his fellows couldn't do — separated Alyce and me as he threw me hard to the stony ground. I heard Alyce cursing above me, saw the star-filled sky, felt the goblin's claws raking my face.

The goblin knew how to use his knees. In two thrusts he knocked the wind from me with a knee to the belly — and nearly all the sense with a knee to the groin. I twisted onto my side, hunched over the hurt. The goblin sank his fangs into the muscle between neck and shoulder, gnawed as though he'd like to have chewed his way to my heart.

A dagger whistled past my head, its cold steel stinging my cheek, drawing blood. And the goblin fell off me, the blade through its neck. I didn't stop to marvel over my luck.

I scrambled for my sword and saw Alyce ringed by three goblins — big as boulders, gray-skinned, clawed, long fangs dripping. Her sword flashed, singing as it cut the air. I ran to her. Limping and listing, still hunched over my pain, I didn't know what I could do for her. Still, I ran. Her fine silk blouse was splattered with blood, and the silver moon's light showed me that it wasn't black goblin blood. It was as red as rose petals, and it was hers.

Alyce cried me welcome. I severed a goblin's head with one chopping blow of my sword, kicked the corpse aside, and Alyce and I were again back-to-back. The goblins came at us howling, nightmares come to life. We were outnumbered, fighting only to kill as many as we could before we fell.

Close by, I heard a piercing whistle — sharp and high and urgent. Peverell? No. It couldn't be. Someone shouted "Kell!" as though it were a war cry, a call to arms.

I looked up, thinking, where? Then, as if we didn't have enough trouble.

That moment's distraction cost me. I went down under the weight of two goblins, and Alyce, kicking and hacking at my attackers, yelled, "To me! To me!" as though she were giving an army a rallying point.

The night exploded, as if the moons and every one of the countless stars had burst to rain red and shower silver down on me. In the storm of light, flaring and running, shadows leaped to thrice their height. Alyce's face shone as white as snow, her sword like ice gleaming. A rush and babble of shouting and screaming filled the wildly rocking night, just as though an army had come.

Too late for me, though, sword-cut and bleeding…

Peverell — bruised and scraped and grinning — threw himself down on his knees beside me, gestured wildly, but I couldn't figure it out. The light, the running, raining red and silver, began to fade, then vanished altogether, taking feeling and sound with it.

I awoke in another place, a sturdy cottage so light and bright and clean that if I did not have wounds and weakness to gainsay the thought, I'd have believed the canyon no more than a place in a nightmare. The first thing I saw was Peverell, and he was chattering to an elderly woman in his silent way, his hands swooping and flying. After a while, the old woman, her face wrinkled like a winter apple, shooed him away as though he were a pesky hen gotten into the house. I wondered, in a vague kind of way, what they'd been talking about, but I fell asleep again.

I slept often and long. One evening I awoke to find Dinn standing beside me.

"There is no longer debt between us, human," he said. "You kept her safe when I could not. They're right. You'll do, Hunter-Doune, if you live." He said that last grudgingly, with a sullen shake of his horns.

Dinn wasn't the only one who was unsure whether I'd survive my wounds. I wasn't all that certain about it myself, but Alyce wasn't having any of that. She was always near, and one morning I awoke to see her standing in the open doorway, looking out. Her left arm was bandaged above the elbow. She wore a soft blue gown of some light, widewoven fabric, the hem of it just brushing sun-browned ankles.

I don't know why I remembered it then — with her looking like a breeze-blown flower come to settle on the doorstep, but in memory I heard someone shout, Kell! And heard her yell, to me! To me!

"Are you Kell?" I asked her.

She turned from the doorway, her blue eyes darkly thoughtful. She was weighing a risk. Finally she said, "Yes. You see, Hunter-Doune, Dinn does know where that terrible heretic Kell hides out."

"But why — ?"

She shook her head, laid a finger on my lips, then she pressed her own lips to my forehead. To check for fever, she said.

Later that day I awoke and Alyce was not in the cottage, but I wasn't alone. I had a visitor. He sat in a chair pulled close to the side of the bed, a tankard of ale in his hand. His eyes, dark and a little flecked with blue, were soft-focused, as though his thoughts were far away.

On second look, I saw that what I'd thought was sunlight glinting in his black beard was the silvering of time's passing. He'd aged, and that shouldn't have been surprising. It had been about seven years since I'd last seen him. When he saw me awake, he turned in the chair, and I saw that he'd lost something since the last time I'd seen him: a leg. In its place, strapped to the stump where a knee should have been, was a carved wooden peg.

Although it hurt to move, I raised my left hand, palm up, and hit it with my right fist. Now I knew the meaning of Peverell's puzzling gesture: A hammer hitting an anvil.

Four days. Surprise. Friend.

Toukere Hammerfell.

"Touk," I said, though hoarsely for trying to sound calm. "Where am I?"

"Ah, well, that's a story." He raised the tankard, drank, and held it out to me.

"No," I said. "I don't drink ale."

Smiling a little, as if he were looking down a long road to an old memory, he said, "Guess you had your fill the night I left Istar, eh? Well, then, listen good, Hunter-Doune. There's a lot to tell about me and the Vale."

He told me there were two mages living in the Vale. They had made the sky over the canyon rain red and silver light. He grinned when he said that, held that those mages did a fine job of scaring the feeble wits out of the goblins with their little light game. He told me there were five clerics, and some declared their allegiance to the gods of good by their white garb. Others wore the red of neutrality. According to Toukere, it was one of the red-robed clerics who had healed the worst of my hurts.

"And there's enough people — young men and old, grannies and mothers and children — to fill up a small town," he said. "Some of 'em you saw in the canyon, which is no great distance from here. Good fighters when they have to be, but mostly they're farmers."

"But this is no town, Touk, is it?"

He allowed as how it wasn't, not exactly. The Vale was a deep, high-sided valley tucked between two rising mountain peaks. The people who lived there hunted the highlands, raised cows and chickens and pigs, had a fine forge at the broad fording place of the river. Kell's father had founded the place.

"Alyce — Kell — told me her father was a mercenary."

Touk shrugged. "He was, once, for a while, but he was a pretty good thinker, and he got to thinking that this habit the Kingpriest has of slaughtering in the name of goodness is a strange one. Once that idea got hold of him, it didn't let go. He opposed the Kingpriest's persecutions with everything he had — heart and soul. He did more than talk about it. He settled this place.

"You call his daughter Alyce," Toukere said, "but that's only a traveling name. Here we name her Kell, for that's what her father called her. Kell o' the Vale."

He told me that all the folk who lived in the Vale were free believers in whatever god or gods they chose. Many of them had come by way of dark paths, hunted for bounty and driven by desperation into the goblin lands. He said that every one of them — men and dwarves and elves, one kender and a minotaur — owed their lives to Kell, the heretic who, like her father, did not believe that torment and execution were fit ways to honor the gods of good.

"We get on well, Hunter-Doune. By which I mean we don't kill each other over the big matters, and we feel free to squabble over the small things."

"We?"

He finished off the ale and thumped the mug against his wooden leg. He winced a little when he did that, and I saw that the wood was newly carved. The amputation wasn't old enough to be used to.

"We're awfully close to goblin lands, here," he said. "That's good and bad. Good because it keeps the Kingpriest's spies and casual visitors away. Bad because we have to keep patrols on our borders against the blackhearted goblins. I am — " He ran his palm along the wood again. "I was the one who led those patrols. No more."

"What happened, Touk?"

He shrugged. "Just what it looks like. Lost my leg to a goblin's axe, lay too long for the cleric to heal me. But I'm not here to talk about me, Doune. I'm here to talk about you."

Now, go reckon this — because I can't. There he sat, my old partner whose advice I'd remembered and lived by even all the years after I'd thought him dead, the old friend whose memory I'd sworn by — and I was suddenly angry. Angry and wondering why he'd not found a moment to spare to let me know that he was not dead.

"You want to talk about me?" I said bitterly. "Why, I'm just fine, Touk. Sword-cut, my ribs broken, gnawed by goblins, and the rest of me feeling like I've been run over by a wagon. But otherwise, fine. How've you been?"

"Now hear me, Hunter-Doune," he said. "Hear me."

"Hear you? No, Touk Hammerfell. You listen to me — "

"Hear me!" His dark, blue-flecked eyes flared, as they'd so often done when — as he liked to say — I had the stubborn fit on me.

"It's me who told Kell to bring you here," he said, "and that was a risk. I knew you seven years ago, Hunter-Doune, but I didn't know what you'd become since then. Still I talked Kell into taking the risk. Ah, blackmailed her, I guess you'd say, told her she owed me for my leg."

"Why, Touk?"

He sucked in his cheeks, as he did when he was thinking, then spoke in a rush, as he did when he was trying to get past sentiment.

"I've never forgotten you, Hunter-Doune, and I hoped

… I hoped you'd still be the man I remembered. I'd have gone for you myself, but you see I couldn't. We need someone trusty, and someone keen-witted. Someone who — " He shook his head, then went off on another tack. "They're mostly all farmers here, not fighters. The minotaur wanted the job. He wants nothing more than to be killing goblins every chance he gets. But you know how minotaurs are. Hotheaded and not good at leading men. I'll tell you, he didn't much like being the bait in this game."

"Bait? For what? For me?"

"Well, I've been dead these seven years, haven't I? Caught by some bounty hunter in Xak Tsaroth." He grinned, an old familiar twist of his lips. "I don't reckon you'd have believed it if anyone came to say that your old friend Touk Hammerfell wanted to have a chat."

I gave him that.

"So we used Dinn for bait. A nice big minotaur — worth what, ninety gold these days? — wandering your usual stomping grounds and ready for the taking."

I sighed, and he gave me a sharp look.

"I'm not doing a very good job explaining, am I?"

"No," I said. "You're not."

There came a soft sound, a bare foot whispering against the floor rushes. Alyce stood in the doorway, as bright as a sapphire in a golden fall of sunlight. She came to stand beside Touk.

"Let me try," she said. "Doune, we need a new captain for our border patrol" — she rested a hand on Touk's shoulder — "and you come highly recommended."

"Why did Kell himself — herself — come after me?"

She laughed, her blue eyes sparkling. "I told you when we first met that you were a legend where I come from. Touk insisted that you were the man we need, but I like to make very certain about the people who are going to live here. There wasn't all that much danger for me in Istar. They're too busy spinning up legends about Terrible Kell to know who I really am. So, who better to decide whether you were trustworthy?"

"And if you'd decided that I wasn't?"

"Easy enough to lose our way in the canyons." She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. "They're very twisty and winding. You'd have had no trouble believing that Dinn had lost his way."

I looked at the ceiling, trying to get all this into shape.

No murdered party of innocent pilgrims? I asked. None, she told me. No looted shrines and slaughtered clerics? Not a one, she said. No silver pennies stolen from dead men's eyes?

She shuddered. "I hate that story worst of all. No. I have my ideas about what's right, and I see that they get heard out there in the world. That's all."

I nodded. "No bounty then, I suppose?"

"None. Just a job, Hunter-Doune, guarding good people and keeping them safe. A home with an old friend." She glanced away, her eyes hidden beneath the veil of her dark lashes. "And some new ones. Are you with us, HunterDoune?"

Touk looked from her to me, raised an eyebrow. "Well, well," he muttered. "So that's the way of it, eh? I thought the kender was just making it up."

"Oh, hush, Touk," she said, her cheeks flushing, but she didn't say it very insistently.

Touk laughed and slapped his knee — his good one. "So what about it, Hunter-Doune? Are you with us?"

Once Alyce had promised me a bounty so great that no place I could stash the treasure would be empty. I'd been thinking about gold; she'd been talking about a home, a place of trust, and an old friend. Now, watching her smooth white cheek coloring rosy, I understood that she was offering something more.

I told Touk that I'd sworn a good oath to deal honestly with Alyce, said that I reckoned that the oath held for Kell, too.

Later, when the sky was filled with stars and Solinari's light shone in though the window, Alyce — the terrible outlaw, Kell o' the Vale — brushed her lips against my forehead in such a way that I knew she wasn't thinking about fever.

"Once I thought it would be impossible to fill up those empty places of yours," she whispered. "I thought Touk was wrong, that you weren't the man for us. But when I saw you watching the nomad woman running, when I saw you feeling for her, really feeling so that you wanted to turn away but couldn't — "

She smiled, as she had then, as though she were seeing me for the first time and liking what she saw.

"Welcome home, Hunter-Doune."

She kissed me again, and I felt her lips move in a smile like a promise.

Off Day

Dan Parkinson

In a place of shadows, small shadows moved.

Sunlight filtered among tumbled stone debris, where great blocks of granite lay in mountains of rubble, braced one against another where they fell. The light shone down through cracks and crevices to illuminate the smooth, damp floor of a meandering tunnel far beneath the ground. Here centuries of rainwater had scoured gullies beneath the rubble, gullies that led downward to larger, cavernous sumps below the massive foundations of a great temple.

In the dim light, shadows wound their way upward — small, furtive shadows moving in single file, moving silently… or nearly so.

Thump. The line of shadows slowed, became shorter as trailing shadows converged on those in front. The foremost shadow spun around and said, "Sh!"

"Somebody fall down," a voice whispered.

"Sh!" the lead shadow repeated, emphatically.

Then they were moving again. The source of the eroded gully was a V-shaped opening between squared stones, a seep where stones had settled, pulling apart from one another.

The lead shadow paused, said, "Sh!" again, and disappeared into the cleft. The others followed, into darkness beyond.

Darkness, then dim light from somewhere ahead. With the light, the sounds of voices and the smells of cooking food. The light came through a narrow crack; the lead shadow stopped again. Others piled up behind, and again there were abrupt, soft sounds.

Thud. A hushed voice, "Oof!"

Another voice, "Ow! Careful!"

"Sh!"

"Somebody bump into somebody."

"Sh!"

Thump.

"Somebody fall down again."

"Shhh!"

Silence again, and the little shadows crept one by one through the crack and into a large, lamp-lit, vaulted room where ovens radiated, meat sizzled over coals, pots steamed on blazing grates, and people worked — people far larger than the shadowy little figures that darted across an open space and under a laden cutting table.

One of the tall people in the kitchen glanced around. "What was that?"

"What?" another asked.

"Did you see something just then?"

"No. What was it?"

"Nothing, I guess. Take a look at those loaves, will you?"

A large person turned away and bent to peer into an oven. "A few more minutes. I… now where did THAT go?"

"What?"

"Half a duck." The voice sounded mystified, then irritated. "Come on, now. These roast ducks are for the guards' hall. Who took it?"

"I didn't, so don't glare at me. It doesn't matter. Get that tray ready. You know how the guards are when they're hungry."

"All right, but I hope nobody notices that there are only eleven and a half ducks here."

Large people came and went, and the little shadows worked their way from cover to cover, across the kitchen to a half-open pantry door in a shadowed corner. Behind them, another voice shouted, "How many loaves did you put into this oven? I think some are missing"

Through the pantry the little shadows moved, fanning out, investigating everything. Here and there, small items disappeared from shelves and benches. Past the pantry was a wide hall, dimly lit, where linen robes hung from pegs on the walls and pairs of sandals lay beneath them. Curtained cubicles lined the hall. From behind some came the sounds of rhythmic breathing and an occasional snore.

"Oh!" a voice whispered. "Pretty."

"Sh!"

Tools and implements lay on heavy-timber benches in a stone-walled workshop. As the shadows passed, a few of these items disappeared. At the far wall of the workshop, tanned and treated hides stood rolled and bound. Other hides hung on the wall, and others were stacked in piles beside large, covered vats.

A shadow paused near a big elk hide, freshly cured. "Pretty," a whisper said. "Make nice sleeping mat."

"Gorge'! I take that for hisself," another whisper noted.

"After th' fight, he will," the first said, determinedly.

Candles lighted a wide eating hall, where large men sat at long tables, wolfing down food and ale as servants carried in laden trays, took them out empty.

"Burnish and polish, scour and shine," a deep voice growled. "I'm about worn out from rubbing armor."

"Captain's orders," another grunted. "Spit and polish all the way. Big things afoot."

"Whole council's here now," a third said. "The ninth delegation just came in. Kingpriest's birthday, the clerics say."

Between ranks and rows of large legs and big feet, small shadows scurried single file beneath a row of tables. Here and there, near the edge of the tables, bits of food disappeared.

Thump.

"Sh!"

"Somebody fall down again," a faint whisper explained.

Above the table a guardsman turned to the one next to him. "What?"

"What, what?"

"Who fell down?"

"Who did WHAT?"

"Never mind. I… owl Keep your feet to yourself, joker!"

Beyond the feasting hall, past a crack behind a tapestry, a wide, dim room held ranked cots. Here and there were sleeping men. Suits of armor hung on wooden stands.

Shadows moved about.

"Not much here," a voice whispered. "Nice stuff, but all way too big."

"Sh!"

"Here somethin'. Hey, nice an' shiny." Metal clinked against metal.

"Sh!"

After a time, the shadows were gone, back the way they had come. Except for the ordinary sounds of the temple, now there was only silence.

Through ancient seeps caused by ancient rainfall, shadows moved — small, hurrying shadows laden with bulging net sacks, armloads of various things, and objects of all descriptions. The seeps widened into caverns and ahead were glows of light and the muffled sounds of voices.

Thump… Clatter. Crash.

The line slowed. "What now?" the lead shadow demanded.

"Somebody fall down."

The shadows moved on, then stopped abruptly as a mighty roar came from somewhere — a roar like the rushing of water. A shout mingled with the sound, then stopped abruptly, only to return as a frantic echo of someone splashing and coughing.

The shadows had disappeared into hiding places. Now, as the sound subsided, they crept forth again, cautiously.

"What that?" one or more whispered.

"Who knows?" the answer came. "Gone now, though. Come on."

Again the shadows moved, hurrying toward the light. Again splashing…

"Stop!" the lead one ordered. "What this stuff on floor?"

"Dunno. Wasn't here before." "Not water. What is it?"

"Smells funny. Tastes good, though. What is it?" Slurping sounds. "Who knows? Stop wastin' time! Let's go!"

The Off Day was never planned. Like most historic events in This Place during the long and lusterless reign of His Boisterousness Gorge III, Highbulp By Choice and Lord of This Place and Maybe Some of Those, the Off Day just happened.

It began innocently enough, with a question posed by the Highbulp's wife and consort, Lady Drule. The lady, accompanied by a gaggle of other female gully dwarves, had just returned from an expedition into the Halls of the Talls, in search of something — some said it was roast rice and stew bones, which could sometimes be scrounged from the kitchens when the Talls were distracted; some said it was feathers; some said nice, juicy mice; and most simply didn't remember what it was.

Some things — as far as the Aghar were concerned — were worth remembering, and some were not. Reasons for actions already taken rarely qualified as worth remembering. It was the excursion itself that mattered.

Lady Drule and others had gone as far into the halls as they dared — through middens and pantries, rooms and shops, through a dining place where Talls were having a meal and talking about someone's birthday, and into interesting places where there were cots, personal effects cabinets, and various things just lying about.

The Aghar ladies, instinctively adept at scurrying through half-open doors and under tables, at hiding in shadows and creeping unobserved among the ranked feet of larger species, had quite a successful expedition, by gully dwarf standards. Most of them returned before nightfall — whether all of them returned was not known, because none of them knew for sure how many had gone in the first place — and the treasures they brought back to This Place were a source of great excitement for at least several minutes.

There were two clay pots with morsels of food in them; an assortment of gnawed bones; an ornamented sandal far too large for the foot of any Aghar; two white linen robes, each of which would make marvelous clothing for eight or ten Aghar; a keg nearly half full of Tall ale; half a roast duck; a mirror; a footman's pike three times as long as the height of Gorge III himself; two loaves of bread; a heavy maul; a potato; fourteen feet of twine; a chisel; a Tall warrior codpiece, which would make an excellent tureen for stew; and a complete dressed elk hide, with skull-pan and antlers attached.

This final treasure so delighted Gorge III that he claimed it as his own… after the scuffle.

Tossing aside his rat-tooth crown, Gorge pulled the elk hide over his shoulders, squirmed about beneath it for a bit, then emerged with the skull-pan on his head, huge antlers jutting above him. The remainder of the hide trailed far behind as he moved.

Never in his life had he felt so regal. He strutted around in a circle, demanding, "See! All look! Highbulp impres… pres… lookin' good!"

He was so insistent on showing off that a crowd gathered around him, elbowing aside Lady Drule and the others who had actually acquired the treasure. Murmurs of "See Highbulp," "Mighty Gorge," and "Who th' clown in th' elk suit?" arose among them.

"All kneel!" Gorge demanded regally. "Make obei… obe… make bow to Great Highbulp."

A few of his subjects dropped to their knees obediently, though most had lost interest and wandered away by then. Some of those behind him, kneeling on the trailing length of the elk hide, discovered that it was a very comfortable mat. Two or three promptly lay down upon it and went to sleep.

"Pretty good," Gorge nodded, satisfied at the attention he was receiving in his regal new garb. Then, "Uh-oh!" The weight of the great antlers above him tipped forward, off balance. The nod became a bow, the bow a cant, and with a tremendous clatter of antlers and oaths, the Highbulp fell on his face, buried completely beneath the great hide.

The opportunity was too much for some of his loyal subjects. Noticing those already asleep on its rearward expanse, others now crawled aboard and curled up for their naps.

With the hide thoroughly weighted down by sleeping gully dwarves, it was all that Gorge could do to crawl out from under it.

His wrath abated somewhat when a sturdy young Aghar came running from somewhere, shouting at the top of his lungs, and skidded to a halt before him. The youth was soaking wet and stained from head to toe — a deep, purplish red.

"Highbulp!" the newcomer gasped, panting for breath. "News from royal mine!"

"You from mine?" Gorge squinted at him. "What is mine?"

"Yes, Highbulp." The red-stained one grinned. "I Skitt. Work in royal mine."

"Fine." Gorge thought a minute. "What is work?" Shrugging, he turned away, trying to recall what had so irritated him just a moment before. Peering around, he walked into a splay of elk antlers and found himself thoroughly tangled.

Lady Drule hurried forward, shaking her head. "Highbulp clumsy oaf," she muttered, and began extricating her lord and husband from his dilemma.

"Highbulp listen!" the red-dripping miner insisted. "News from mine!"

Gorge was in no mood to listen, but Drule turned to the newcomer. "What news?" she asked.

"What?"

"News! News from mine! What news?"

"Oh" Skitt collected his thoughts, then stood as tall as a person less than four feet in stature can stand. "Hit pay dirt," he said. "Mother load. Real gusher."

"Pay dirt?" Gorge was interested now. "What pay dirt? Mud? Clay? Pyr… pyr… pretty rocks? What?"

"Wine," Skitt said.

Gorge blinked. "Wine?"

"Wine," Skitt repeated, proudly. "Highbulp got royal wine mine, real douser."

Drule finished the untangling of His Testiness from the elk antler trap, then strode to where Skitt stood and moved around him, sniffing. "Wine," she said. "From mine?"

"Whole mine full of wine," he gabbled. "Musta hit a main vein."

Drule stood in thought for a moment, then turned to the Highbulp. "What we do with wine?"

"Drink it," Gorge said decisively. "All get intox… intox

… inneb… get roarin' drunk."

"Dumb idea, Highbulp," a wheezy voice said. A tiny, stooped figure, leaning on a mop handle, came out of the shadows. It was old Hunch, Grand Notioner of This Place and Chief Advisor to the Highbulp in Matters Requiring Serious Thought.

"Drinkin' main-vein mine-wine not dumb, Hunch," the Highbulp roared. "Good idea! Got it myself!"

"Sure," Hunch wheezed. "Drink it all, then what? We all wind up with sore heads an' nothin' to show for it. 'Stead of drink it, trade it. Get rich."

"Trade to who?"

"Talls. Plenty of Talls pay good for wine. I say make trade. Get rich better than get drunk."

Drule found herself thoroughly taken with the idea of becoming rich. Visions of finery danced in her head — strings of beads, unending supplies of stew meat, matching shoes… a comb. "Hunch right, Gorge," she said. "Let's get rich."

Outreasoned and outmaneuvered, the great Highbulp turned away, grumbling, and began reclaiming his elk hide by kicking sleeping Aghar in all directions.

"Calls for celebration," Drule decided.

Hunch had wandered away, and the only one remaining to discuss such matters with her was the wine-stained mine worker. Skitt stood where he had been, not really paying much attention, because he had caught sight of the lovely Lotta, a pretty young Aghar female quite capable of making any young Aghar male forget the subject at hand.

Still, he heard the queen's statement and glanced her way. "What does?" he asked.

"What does what?"

"Call for celebration. What does?"

"Ah…" Lady Drule squinted, trying to remember. Something certainly called for celebration. But she had lost track of what it was. Like any true Aghar, Drule had a remarkable memory for things seen, and sometimes for things heard, but only a brief and limited memory for ideas and concepts. The reasoning of her kind was simple: Anything seen was worth remembering, but not much else was, usually. Ideas seldom needed to be remembered. If one lost an idea, one could usually come up with another. She had an idea now. Turning, she shouted, "Gorge!"

A short distance away, the Highbulp kicked another sleeping subject off his elk hide, then paused and looked around. "Yes, dear?"

It was then that Lady Drule asked the question that led ultimately to that most historic of episodes in the legends of the Aghar of This Place: the Off Day. The question came from a simple recollection of something she had heard in the Halls of the Talls, during her forage expedition with other ladies of the court.

"Gorge," she asked, "when your birthday?"

It was the acolyte Pitkin who discovered that Vat Nine had been drained of its blessed contents — drained down to the murky dregs, which were beginning to dry and crust over. At first, he simply could not believe it. Making the sign of the triad, he closed the sampler port and backed away, pale and shaking, reciting litanies in a whisper.

"I have been beguiled," he told himself. "It is only an illusion. The vat is not empty. The vat is full."

Murmuring, he knelt on the stone floor of the great cellar and did obeisance to all the gods of good, waiting while his prayers eased the tensions within him, letting the light of goodness and wisdom flood his soul. Still shaken then, but feeling somewhat reassured, he climbed the stone steps to the catwalk and returned to the sample port of Vat Nine. With hands that shook only slightly, he unlocked it again, muttered one further litany, and opened the lid.

The vat was empty. Candlelight flooded its dark interior, illuminating the draft marks at intervals on the inner wall. A dozen feet below, shadowy in the reeking murk, drying dregs lay crusting, inches below the lowest draft mark. Pitkin's pale face went ashen. The vat could not be empty. It was not possible. Yet, there was no wine within.

Easing the sampler lid down again, he locked it and stared around the cavernous vault. From where he stood, on the catwalk, the great vats receded into shadows in the distance. Nine in all, only their upper portions extended above the hewn stone of their nestling cradles. Each of them was many times the size of Pitkin's sleeping cell four levels up in the Temple of the Kingpriest. The huge flattop vats seemed a row of ranked monoliths of seasoned hardwood, their walls as thick as the length of his foot. Each one nestling into a cavity of solid stone, the vats were like everything else in this, the greatest structure of Istar, the center of the world. They were the finest of their kind… anywhere.

The wines they held were blessed by the Kingpriest himself. Not personally, of course, but in spirit, in somber ceremonies performed by lesser clerics on behalf of His Radiance. For two and a half centuries the wines had been blessed. Every Kingpriest since the completion of the temple, at every harvest of the vines, had blessed the wines of the nine vats.

Symbolic of the nine realms of the Triple Triad — the three provinces ruled directly by Istar, the three covenant states of Solamnia, and the Border States of Taol, Ismin and Gather — the wines were part of the holy wealth. The best of vintage, produced entirely by human hands and made pure by the blessings of the sun, these were the wines of the nine vats.

The wines that were supposed to be in the vats, Pitkin corrected his thought. The wines that vats number one through eight did indeed hold — Pitkin had inspected them himself, as he did every morning — and that Vat Nine somehow did not.

His mind tumbled and churned in confusion. How could Vat Nine be empty? No vat was ever empty. These were no table wines. Readily available elven wines were used for routine. No, these wines were sacred, used only on rare occasions and only in ceremonial amounts. What was used was replenished by the stewards at regular intervals — always by the finest of human vintage from each of the nine realms.

Made of sealed hardwood, cradled in solid rock, no vat had ever leaked so much as a drop of precious fluid. And there was no way to remove any wine from any vat except by unlocking the sampler port. And only he had the keys. Pitkin wanted to cry.

Slowly, on shaking legs, he made his way to the sealed portal of the cellar vault. A hundred thoughts besieged him — approaches to explaining what he had found, to formulating apologies for such an unthinkable disappearance, to the wording of a plea for clemency — but none had any merit.

There was only one thing for him to do. He must simply report the disappearance of Vat Nine's wine and pray for the best.

"Wizardry," the second warder muttered, staring into the empty vat. "Evil and chaos. Mage-craft. Spells."

"Mischief of some sort," the high warder agreed, "but

… wizardry? Within the very temple itself? How could that be? There certainly are no mages here… save one, of course, but he is sanctioned by the Kingpriest himself. The Dark One would use no such mischievous spells. All the other wizards are gone-driven to far Wayreth. All of Istar has been cleansed of their foul kind."

"Then how can you explain this?" a senior cleric from the maintenance section insisted. "An entire vat of wine — four hundred and, ah, eighty-three barrels' count, by yesterday's inventory — it certainly didn't get up and walk out by itself, and there has been no cartage below the third level for the past week, not even porters."

"Thieves?" a junior cleric suggested, then turned pink and looked away as scathing glances fell upon him. It was well known that the Temple of the Kingpriest was inviolate. In all of Istar, in all of Ansalon, there was no edifice more theftproof.

"Only dregs," the second warder muttered, still staring into the drained vat. He prodded downward with a long testing rod. Its thump as it tapped the bottom of the vat was muted. "Waist-deep, drying dregs. How could this have happened, unless…" He lowered his voice. "Unless by magic? Dark and infidel magic."

From below the catwalk a curious voice asked, "Brother Susten, are you aware that you are wearing only one sandal?"

"I can't find the other one," the chief warder snapped. "Please concentrate on the matter at hand, Brother Glisten. This is no time to count sandals."

Far in the distance, beyond the vault doors, a loud, exasperated voice roared, "I'm tired of this game, you bubbleheads! I want to know who took it! Now!"

Heads turned in surprise. Several clerics hurried away toward the sound, then returned, shaking their heads. "It's nothing, Eminence," one of them said to the chief warder. "A captain of temple guards. He, too, has lost some part of his attire, it seems."

Again the irritated voice rose in the distance, "This has gone far enough! What pervert took my codpiece?"

"Gone," the second warder muttered, staring into the emptiness of Vat Nine as though mesmerized. "All that wine, just… just gone."

"Sorcery?" The keeper of portals rasped, staring in disbelief at the assembled clerics before him. "Magic? Don't be ridiculous. This is the Temple of the Kingpriest. Mage-craft is not allowed here, as all of you very well know!"

"Our accumulated pardons, Eminence," the chief warder said, shifting his weight from sandaled foot to bare foot and back, "but we have given this matter the most serious of study, and we can arrive at no other explanation."

The keeper of portals glared at them in silence for a long moment, then spread his flowing robes and seated himself behind his study table. He sighed. "All right, we shall review it once again. One: Even if magic were somehow introduced into the temple — and what mage would dare such a thing? — what purpose would be served by draining a vat of blessed wine?"

"Evil," someone said. "The purposes of evil, obviously."

"Two: His Blessed Radiance, the Kingpriest himself, oversaw the evacuation of the Tower of High Sorcery in Istar. Every last mage and artifact was removed, and every magic-user of any degree driven away — not just from Istar but from the nine realms. The tower is empty, and its seals are intact."

"Dire evils have their way," someone said.

"There is the… Dark One," someone else whispered, then blushed and lowered his head, wishing he had not spoken.

"Three." The keeper of portals continued grimly, pretending not to have heard. "It is patently impossible for that wine to have disappeared — " He stopped, scowled, and blinked.

" — by any device other than sorcery," the chief warder finished softly, trying to look pious rather than victorious.

"Wizardry?" the master of scrolls whispered, shaking his head. White hair as soft as spidersilk trembled with the motion. Here in the shadows of his deepest sanctuary, where few beside the keeper of portals — and of course the Kingpriest himself — ever saw him, he seemed a very old man. Very different from the dignified and reverent presence who sat at the foot of the throne when the Kingpriest gave audience in the sanctuary of light.

Again the master shook his head, seeming very frail and sad as long as one did not look into his eyes. "After all these years… evil still confronts us in Istar."

"There is no other answer, August One," the keeper of portals said, sympathetically. For more seasons than most men had lived, the master of scrolls — next to the Kingpriest himself, the very epitome of all that was good and holy — had born upon his frail shoulders the weight of righteousness in a world far too receptive to wrong. Now he looked as though he might break down and weep… until he raised his eyes.

"Evil," the old man whispered. "After all we have done, still it rears its vile head. Do you know, Brother Sopin — but of course you do — that my illustrious predecessor, my own venerated father, died of a broken heart, realizing that even his strenuous efforts as advisor to His Radiance had not stamped out evil forever. He truly believed that such had been done, first with the Proclamation of Manifest Virtue, and subsequently by sanctioning the extermination of evil races everywhere. He believed, for a time, that we had succeeded, just as the third Kingpriest and his advisors believed that THEY had stamped out evil for good the day this temple was blessed in the names of all the gods — of good, of course," he added as an afterthought.

The master of scrolls raised rheumy old eyes — they seemed so at first glance — to gaze at his visitor. "He once even believed the tenet of the first Kingpriest, that by bonding the might of Solamnia with the spiritual guidance of Istar, the forces of evil could be driven from the world."

"It is regrettable, August One," the keeper said sorrowfully.

"Yes. Regrettable. I have said it before, good Sopin. Evil is an abomination. Evil is an affront to the very existence of the gods, and of men. Yet how to eliminate it, finally and forever?" His question was rhetorical. He obviously had the answer.

"Yes, August One?"

"We know now — the Kingpriest himself must know as well — that evil cannot be conquered by unifying states and building temples. Neither by driving away practitioners of chaos, nor even by eliminating evil acts and evil races… though that has yet to be thoroughly tested, I understand."

"Such things take time, August Brother. Even the vilest of races resist extermination. As to the practices of evil men, when they believe they will not be found out…"

"Time," the master of scrolls rasped, in a voice as dry as sand. "There is so little time, Sopin. This business of the wine missing, this willful and arrogant exercise of a sorcerous spell, right here in the holiest of places in this entire world… Don't you understand it, Sopin? Don't you see what it means?"

"Ah… well, it might be…"

"It is a challenge, Sopin. Worse, it is a taunt. Evil is gaining strength in the world, because we have yet to kill it at its source!" The rheumy eyes blazed at the keeper, and now he saw the fire in them, the eyes of a zealot.

"August Brother! Do you mean — ?"

"Yes, Sopin. As has been argued before. It is time to go to the root of evil. The very minds of men."

The keeper went pale. "August Brother, you know that I agree, but is this the time for so drastic a policy? People are — "

"People are children for us to lead in the true path, Brother Sopin, at the pleasure of His Radiance, the Kingpriest." The master of scrolls gathered his robes around him, shivering. He was often cold, of late. "The Grand Council of the Revered Sons, Brother Sopin… I believe they are all present now, in Istar? His Radiance has received their respects."

"They are all present, Highest. Each of the nine realms has sent a delegation for tomorrow's festivity, and all the members of the council are present, though I have word today that one of the high clerics is ill. None have been able to heal him. Perhaps tomorrow — at the time of the festivity — he will be better."

"As the gods of good will," the master of scrolls agreed, then looked up again at his assistant. "Ill? Which of them is ill?"

The keeper looked agitated. "Ah… it is Brother Sinius, August One. The high cleric of Taol."

The master of scrolls stared at him. "Taol? The ninth realm? The one from whose realm came the disappeared wine?"

"The same."

"By the gods of ultimate good! There lies evil's perfidy, Sopin. It lulls us with subtlety until we expect all of its machinations to be subtle. Then, when we are lulled, it strikes — simple and direct. Through the blessed wine, it strikes directly at us. None can heal him, eh? I must speak of this to His Radiance himself, Sopin. Tomorrow's council of light… there is business to discuss."

"It is the Kingpriest's birthday, August. Is such business appropriate?"

"The council is present, Brother Keeper, and so is the evil. Leave me now, Brother. I must prepare a petition. I shall suggest an edict — the same that I have submitted so many times before. But His Radiance must consider it, Brother Sopin. Beyond that, it must have the sanction of the Grand Council of Revered Sons."

"Yes, August One." Sopin felt a chill rise up his back. The Kingpriest require the sanction of council? Only one order of business could explain that. The master of scrolls meant to propose the opening of the Scroll of the Ancients.

It was the one artifact in the keeping of the priesthood that the first Kingpriest had so feared that it was sealed by a spell. It could be opened, but only by separate, secret incantations recited in unison by all the members of the Grand Council of Revered Sons.

The knowledge contained in the Scroll of the Ancients was a power that the first Kingpriest had found so fearsome that he trusted no man with it — not even himself, or any of his successors. The Scroll of the Ancients, it was said, contained the secret of mind reading. With its power, one could enter and adjudge — possibly even control — the minds of others.

Never in the history of Istar had the scroll been opened. Never had the high council agreed to it, though it had been proposed many times. Among the nine there were always those — notably those of the Solamnic Knighthood — who argued that the altering of free will was an abomination. And usually there were some — generally the elves — who worried that the gods themselves might not condone such a thing. It could, they pointed out, destroy the very balance upon which the universe relied.

Certainly the neutral gods would be outraged, for free will was sacred to them. Even the gods of good and light, some whispered, might consider the exercise of mind control as an arrogance.

The keeper of portals shivered again, realizing that the scrollmaster was looking directly at him now. In those eyes there was no touch of age, no frailty, no question of purpose. The ancient eyes blazed with a zeal as bright as fire and as cold as ice.

"The gods of good rely upon us, Sopin," the old one said. "They entrust us and empower us. We must not fail them again. The source of evil lies in the minds of men. It is there that we must stamp it out."

The great Highbulp Gorge III, leader of all the Aghar of This Place and Maybe Some of Those, was stumped by Lady Drule's question. He hadn't the vaguest idea when his birthday might be — wasn't altogether sure what a birthday was — and had far more important things to occupy his mind

… if he could remember what they were.

One of them, of course, was the wine mine. Gorge wasn't at all certain, but he suspected that wine was an unusual commodity for mining. Then again, the world was full of mysteries and it was usually best not to dwell on them.

He didn't even know where the mine was, exactly. The combined clans of Bulp always had a mine going somewhere (generally near the town dump), on the off chance of finding something useful, but the mine's location shifted as often as the location of This Place did.

This Place was portable, which served the gully dwarves' purposes. Years of abuse and misuse by other races had built certain instincts into the Aghar, and one was to not stay in any place long enough to be discovered. This week, This Place was here. A week or two ago, This Place had been someplace else, and a week or two hence, This Place might be in some other place entirely. This Place was wherever the Highbulp said This Place was.

Gorge didn't remember exactly why his tribe had left the previous This Place — past decisions based upon past circumstances were seldom worth remembering — but he was proud of his selection of the current This Place. A natural cavern in a limestone formation, its outside entrance was concealed by huge mounds of rubble left by the Talls who built the giant structures soaring above. This Place extended deep beneath the fortress parapets of the great temple of Istar and was joined by ancient, eroded seeps to the pantries of the great structure.

It was a fine place for This Place, and the fact that it had been discovered by accident — several gully dwarves had fallen into it, literally — was not worth remembering. To Gorge III, it was simply one more evidence of his personal genius as Highbulp, on a par with other accomplishments such as… Well, whatever they were, he knew there had been any number of them.

Probably the only actual act of genius the leader of the Aghar of This Place had ever managed was to proclaim himself Gorge III instead of simply Gorge. The enumeration had the desirable effect of keeping his subjects thoroughly confused — an accomplishment that all leaders of all nations and all races might envy. Few among the Aghar could count to two, and none could count as high as three. Thus, there was always a certain awe among them when they addressed their lord as Gorge III.

Simply by virtue of his name, they were never quite sure who — or what — he was. That alone eliminated any possibility of competition for his job.

Deciding to be Gorge III had been an inspiration. Now, many years later, the Highbulp sensed another inspiration coming on. He didn't know what it was, but its symptoms were not quite the same as indigestion and it had something to do with the way he felt when he put on his new elk hide with its enormous antlers. Somehow, the improbable attire made him feel like a Highbulp of Destiny.

So, when his beloved consort — what's-her-name — suggested a celebration in honor of his birthday, Gorge readily agreed and promptly forgot the entire matter. He was far more interested in strutting around in his elk hide and feeling important than in planning formalities.

Drule, on the other hand, had no such preoccupation.

"Hunch!" She summoned the grand notioner. "We celebrate Highbulp's birthday!"

"Fine," the ancient said, starting to doze off.

"Hunch!" she demanded. "Pay attention!"

He woke up, looking cranky. "To what?"

"Highbulp's birthday! Celebrate!"

"Why?"

That stumped Lady Drule for a moment, then she countered, "Highbulp say so."

Hunch sighed. "All right. When Highbulp's birthday?"

"Tomorrow," she decided. Other than today and yesterday, it was the only day that came to mind. And the

Highbulp certainly had not been born yesterday. "Make plan."

"What plan?"

"Who knows? Ask Highbulp."

The conversation was interrupted by a clatter and a flood of oaths. The great Highbulp, trying to wear elk antlers atop his head, had fallen on his back.

The grand notioner approached and stood over his liege, poking at him with the mop-handle staff. "Highbulp. What you want to do tomorrow?"

"Nothing," Gorge grunted, getting to his feet. "Go 'way."

With his answer, the grand notioner returned to Lady

Drule. "Highbulp say for celebrate, all go 'way, do nothing."

It was not exactly what Drule had in mind, but she was busy with other matters by then. Some of the court ladies were bickering over the new stew tureen, and it was obvious to Lady Drule that they should have more than one tureen. An entire table setting might be nice.

Hunch frowned and repeated the Highbulp's order. "For celebrate, all go 'way, do nothing," he said.

Drule glanced around. "No work? Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Off day, then." She nodded. "Tell everybody, tomorrow is Off Day."

Skitt, the miner, was one of the first to hear the news, and helped to spread word of it. "Tomorrow Off Day," he told everyone he could find. "Highbulp's orders."

"What is Off Day?" someone asked him. "What we supposed to do on Off Day?"

"What we do on Off Day?" someone else asked.

Skitt had no answer. He hadn't heard the details. For his own part, though, he intended to go to work.

Among the spoils of the ladies' foray, he had found a reaver's maul and a chisel. Skitt might have been only a gully dwarf, but he WAS a dwarf. The use of tools was strong in his simple soul. He couldn't wait to see what he might do with a reaver's maul and chisel in a wine mine.

Thus it was that on one fateful day, two birthdays were celebrated — one above, in the Temple of the Kingpriest in the city of Istar, seat of clerical power and center by proclamation of all the world, and one below.

The high cleric of Taol had been under the weather, owing to a pardonable excess of elven spirits used to counter the grueling effects of a long and arduous journey to Istar. But when it was announced that the pious festivity of the new day would be preceded by a petitioned meeting of the grand council, his health improved markedly. One did not send regrets when the Kingpriest summoned the grand council.

Thus all nine of the Most Revered Sons — the high clerics of the nine realms — were in attendance in the Hall of Audience when the panels of glowing stone were rolled back to flood the chamber with glorious light, light that seemed to emanate from the throne revealed there, and from the person who sat upon it.

None of them would remember afterward exactly what the Kingpriest looked like. No one ever did. There was always only the lingering impression of immense good, flowing upon waves of light.

In the entire great chamber, there was only one small comer where shadows lurked, a niche among the great floral carvings that rose from the radiant floor. To one who might notice such things — and few did, in the presence of His Radiance — it seemed only a slight anomaly in the magnificent architecture, an inadvertent cleft where the light was blotted out. But to Sopin, who lived daily in the sanctums of the temple, the corner was a source of dread. He glanced that way and thought he saw movement there, among the shadows. He could not be sure, but it seemed that the Dark One was present.

Sopin shivered and turned his eyes away, letting his troubled thoughts evaporate in the brilliance of the light from the throne of the Kingpriest.

There were the prayers and the rituals, the lavishing of appropriate unction toward each of the good gods of the universe, and then it began. "Revered Sons." The voice that came from the source of light was as warm and comforting as the light itself, as resonant as the rays of the sun. "Our beloved brother, the master of scrolls, has petitioned for audience, as is his right. He proposes an edict, one which has been considered before, and one which would require your sanction."

Sopin settled himself into his cubicle, ready for a long and learned debate. He had heard it all before, and now he would hear it again, and he wondered if the outcome would be any different.

Never had he seen the master of scrolls so determined, though, and he wondered if it were possible that evil itself might provoke its own final demise.

Time would tell.

Skitt had about given up on replenishing the source of the wine, which had run dry after an hour's flow. A large part of the cavern of This Place was now waist-deep in wine, but no more had come lately from the pay dirt vein. When he finally managed to widen the vein enough to squeeze through — it struck him as slightly odd that the tunnel had started in stone and ended in wood — he found beyond a sticky, reeking mass of pulp. His maul and chisel had little effect on the mess and, in fact, he very nearly lost them.

He had almost decided that the gusher was no more than a pocket with a dry hole beyond, when splashing sounds behind him caught his attention and he backed from the tunnel to see what was going on. Across a small lake of spilled wine, Lady Drule and a sizable entourage of other Aghar females had launched a makeshift raft and were poling themselves toward the dark seeps that led to the Halls of the Talls. Many of them carried empty sacks and bits of net.

Skitt waved at them from the mine entrance.

Some of them waved back, and Lady Drule called, "Why you here on Off Day, Skatt?"

"Skitt," he corrected.

"Skitt, then," she said. "Why?"

"Dunno," he admitted. "Somebody give me that name, I guess. Where ladies go?"

"Need more stew bowls," she called back. "Lady Grund remember where they are. Place where Tall guards stack metal clothes."

"Have nice day." Skitt waved again.

"Off Day."

"What?"

"Skatt supposed to say, 'Have nice Off Day.' This Off Day, remember?"

"Oh." Skitt waved again. The raft was past him now and approaching the ledge where the seeps began. Having nothing better to do, Skitt went back into his tunnel, took a deep breath, and plunged into the wall of sticky stuff. It had occurred to him that somewhere beyond there might be more wood or rock — something that he could cut with his chisel.

Gorge III was feeling grumpy. He glared around in the dimness of the central cavern, seeing only a few of his subjects here and there, all of them ignoring him. Everybody, it seemed, had decided to take the day off. No body was arguing, nobody was scurrying about bumping into one another, and worst of all, nobody was paying him any attention. He was surly and miffed, but he didn't know quite what to do about it.

"This insubor… insub… in… this no fun," he grumbled, and nobody seemed to care.

Even old Hunch was no help. The grand notioner simply had shrugged and said, "This Off Day, Highbulp. Nobody got to do anything on Off Day. Not even put up with Highbulp. Me, too." And with that he had turned his back and wandered off.

For a time, the Highbulp fumed and stamped around. When that gained him no attention, he got his elk hide, pulled it around him with the great antlers jutting upward atop his head, and sat down to sulk.

As usual, when Gorge III set out to sulk, he went to sleep. His eyelids drooped, he yawned, the great antlers teetered and swayed above him, then tipped forward, held upright only by the elk hide on which he was sitting. His mind drifted off into muddy visions of hot stew, cold lizard, stolen ale, and comfortable confusion.

It seemed that Gorge III was alone in the cavern of This Place. It seemed that the cavern had grown darker, and that there was no one anywhere except himself. Or maybe there was someone else, but he couldn't see who it was.

"So THIS is the answer," said a soft voice. Gorge couldn't remember the question.

"Poor Highbulp," the voice whispered. "Gets no respect."

"Right," Gorge tried to say, but it didn't seem worth the effort.

The voice soothed him, weaving its slow way through drifting dreams. "Need to do something special to get respect," it said. "Something grand and glorious. Something great."

"Sure," he thought about saying. "That nothin' new. Highbulp glorious all the time."

"But SPECIAL," the voice purred. "Need to do something special."

"Like what?" the Highbulp considered asking.

"Move," the voice suggested.

"Don't want to," Gorge might have said. "Just got here."

"Oh, but a big move," the voice insisted. "A migration, Highbulp, a great, grand, glorious migration. Lead your people to the Promised Place."

"What Promised Place?"

"Far," the voice whispered. "Very, very far. A long journey, Highbulp. Destiny… the Highbulp of Destiny. What is the name?"

"Great… Gorge III…"

"The great Highbulp who led his people to the Promised Place… destiny, Highbulp. YOUR DESTINY."

"Des'ny," the Highbulp mused and might have whispered. "Great Highbulp. Highbulp of Desi… Den… Density."

"Destiny."

"Right. Destiny. Where this Promised Place?"

"West, Highbulp." The voice receded, became faint. "Far, far west of here. Very far away."

The voice seemed to continue, but it was no longer speaking to Gorge. It spoke only to itself. "So does the mightiest torrent," it said, "begin with a single drop of rain."

"Drip?" the Highbulp might have wondered.

"Drip," the dream voice agreed.

Once they had crossed the lake of wine, it wasn't far at all to where Lady Grund remembered finding the bit of Tall armor that made such a nice tureen. With Lady Drule in the lead and Lady Grund guiding, the Aghar ladies made their cautious way through the old seeps to the lowest of the middens, through pantries and stowages, to a hole where a cracked stone had settled into eroding clay. The hole opened into a crawl space behind an ornate cabinet in a huge, vaultlike room where a hundred or more sleeping cots were ranked along the walls. Tables and benches stood in neat rows beyond them, and the open central area was a forest of wooden racks where suits of armor hung.

Dozens of the cots had human men sleeping in them, and the rack nearest each occupied cot glistened with armor.

Drule peered from behind the cabinet, listened carefully to a chorus of snores, then nodded to her followers. With a finger at her lips, she said, "Sh!"

Quietly, methodically and efficiently, the Aghar ladies crept from rack to rack, collecting burnished iron codpieces.

Skitt came near to drowning in pulp before he found solid matter in the wine mine. The pulp shifted and flowed around him as he pushed forward through it, threatening to swamp him. But he kept going and, after a time, bumped into something solid. A wooden wall.

" 'Bout time," he muttered, feeling the surface with his hands. It was like the other wood that had produced the first gusher. With maul and chisel, he went to work.

Beyond was solid stone, and he wondered for a moment if he had gone in a circle and was tunneling out near where he had tunneled in. He was tempted to forget the whole thing and take up rat hunting or something, when a revelation came to him.

"This Off Day," he told himself. "Off Day means don't have to do anything… not even quit."

Fortified by this insight, Skitt renewed his efforts, chiseling away at the stone in reeking darkness. Beyond the stone was more wood. "Give it one more shot," he muttered, "THEN go hunt rats." In his mind, he fantasized that — if he could make a name for himself as a wine miner of note — possibly the lovely Lotta might consent to go rat hunting with him.

At least the wood was easier to chisel than the stone. It was very old, seasoned wood, and he enjoyed the shaping of it as he carved a tunnel, an inch at a time. Gradually the sound of his maul changed, becoming deeper, more reverberant with each blow, and intuition prickled at his whiskers.

"Might have somethin' here," he whispered. "Sounds like maybe pay dirt."

The maul thudded and the chisel cut, and abruptly the wood before him bulged and splintered. Skitt had only time to gulp a breath before a roaring tide engulfed him and carried him, tumbling, back the way he had come — back through the tunnel of wood, of stone, of wood; back through the mushy path of reeking pulp, through wood again, through stone and flung him outward to splash into the frothing, tossing waves of the wine lake in the cavern.

He bobbed to the surface, gasped for air, and stared at the entrance to the mine several yards away. A vast torrent of dark wine was pouring from the hole, roaring and foaming as it met the lake's rising surface.

"Wow!" Skitt gasped. "Whole 'nother gusher!"

Still clinging to his maul and chisel, Skitt bobbed and eddied on the tormented purple surface, trying to stay afloat. His head bumped something solid and he found himself looking up at a raftload of Aghar ladies carrying laden nets and sacks.

"You fall in?" one of them asked him.

"Lake's a lot bigger than before," another commented.

Lady Drule was kneeling at the raft's edge, dipping wine with an iron bowl. She sniffed at it, took a dainty sip, let it roll on her tongue for a moment, then nodded. "Good," she decreed. "What you say this is?"

"Wine," another told her.

"Wine, huh? Pretty good."

Lady Drule bent to look at the barely floating miner. "Skatt — "

"Skitt," he corrected, blowing spume. "See any dry land?"

She looked around. "Sure. Grab on."

Skitt clung to the raft. The ladies poled for the far shore. A curious crowd of Aghar had gathered on the bank, some to see what the latest expedition had produced and some who had already been there, sampling the wine.

As the ladies waded ashore with their loot, Lady Drule remembered the miner in tow. "Get Skatt," she ordered, pointing.

"Skitt," burbled the clinging Skitt. Half-drowned and becoming more inebriated by the minute, he was having trouble keeping his head above wine. Strong, small hands reached for him, took firm hold on his ears, and lifted him until he could climb onto the raft, then steadied him as he crawled across it to the safety of dry ground.

He sprawled there and looked up into bright, concerned eyes. It was Lotta.

"Skitt all right?" she asked.

"All right" He belched. "Fulla wine, though. Hit 'nother gusher."

Several other young gully dwarves were intently aware of the attention being paid to the wine-logged miner by the fetching Lotta.

"He got somethin' goin'," one of them said.

"Got Lotta goin'," another agreed. "You know anything about mine? Or wine? Or work?"

"What's to know?" A third shrugged. "Just dig, keep diggin'. Somethin' bound to turn up."

With one final gaze at the recumbent Skitt, basking in the glow of Lotta's undivided attention, the other young Aghar dashed away and went looking for tools. This being Off Day, and having nothing better to do, they had decided to go into the mining business.

The acolyte Pitkin thought that yesterday had been a bad day. Today turned out even worse. His morning duties now included the inspection of only eight vats — the ninth had been sealed the day before by the chief warder — but nagging intuition made him more and more nervous as he worked his way along the catwalk.

It couldn't happen again, could it? Not again?

Somehow he knew, even as he opened the sampler port on Vat Eight, what he would find. Nothing.

Vat Eight was empty.

It was a pale and shaken messenger who ran all the way from the chief warder's quarters in the lower temple to the vast upper halls with their radiant stone, to hand a sealed message to the captain of the guard outside the portals of the great hall of council. The messenger knew what was in the message. The lower levels were buzzing with gossip, and everyone, from the highest maintenance personnel to the lowest cooks and keepers, was worried.

The messenger was almost too worried to notice the odd appearance of the captain of the guard… but not quite. As he returned to the lower levels, he wondered why such a magnificently attired soldier would wear one piece of armor so out of keeping with all the other pieces. From polished helm to burnished braces, from fine, oiled chain to fine-worked scabbard, from gleaming gauntlets to glistening plates, every piece of his armor was perfectly matched to every other piece — with one notable exception.

That particular piece looked as though it might have been borrowed.

Within the grand chamber, the sealed message was passed from the clerk of entry to the clerk of the vestry, then carried silently to the clerk of the keep, who handed it across to the aide of the keeper of portals. A moment later the keeper himself rose to his feet, bowed toward the throne and approached it, kneeling at the base of its pedestal. He lowered his eyes and raised the opened message toward the light.

"Share this news," the Voice of Radiance said.

Sadly, the keeper of portals turned toward the Grand Council of Revered Sons. Holding the message at arm's length, he read to them its brief contents.

Vat Eight of the blessed wines — the vintage from the border province of Ismin — was empty, as empty as the vat from Taol, discovered only the previous day.

"Evil strikes at us," the master of scrolls said when Sopin had finished. "So subtle a taunt, yet so direct a challenge. O Most Radiant — O Most Revered Sons — we must respond."

Somewhere beyond, where shadow dimmed the radiance, a quiet voice whispered, "Destiny."

Within hours, at least a dozen would-be wine miners were at work in the royal mine, and more Aghar were on their way. The earliest arrivals found a sizable lake of wine in the cavern below the mine, but only a trickle coming from the mine itself. Armed with various delving tools, they entered single file and traced Skitt's route, going through a long tunnel of rock and a short tunnel of wood, through a sagging tunnel of congealed sludge to another tunnel of wood, which led again to rock, then to wood, then to a seeping mass of wet pulp. Here, dim light filtered through from above and anxious Tall voices sounded muddled, muted by the pulp.

In silence, the Aghar waited until the light and the voices faded. They heard the distant boom of a heavy port being sealed.

When all was silent, the one in the lead said, "Come on. Maybe more pockets of wine. Let's get 'em."

In single file, they trudged through the cavern of sludge, only their heads and candles rising above it, and set to work on the wooden wall beyond. After some tunneling they encountered stone, then wood again.

The caverns of This Place roared with the thunder of released wine, flowing and frothing through two empty vats, spewing outward from the mine shaft into the growing lake beyond, carrying a round dozen gully dwarves tumbling with it. Their shouts and splashes resounded as they hit the roiling, rising surface of the wine lake.

When the commotion finally died down and the drunken gully dwarves had been fished out by their peers, several dozen others picked up tools and headed for the mine. It became a contest to see how much wine could be mined and who could produce the most.

It also was an interesting way to spend Off Day — as good a way as any, since nobody was sure what Off Day was all about, anyway.

By the time the glorious radiances of the grand chamber began to soften, to take on the pastels of evening, a visitor might have thought that the Temple of the Kingpriest at Istar — the most awesome piece of architecture in the entire world — was in a state of siege.

In the upper reaches, white-faced clerics and ashen functionaries rushed here and there, carrying messages, pausing for fervent prayer, gathering in clumps and clus ters to whisper among themselves. In the lower levels, daily routine was a shambles. Warders and coding clerks came and went from the wine vaults. A general, emergency inventory had been ordered, an audit of every artifact, every store and every commodity.

And to top everything else off, half a company of temple guards on the noon-to-night shift refused to leave their quarters.

In the evening hours, the final holdouts on the Grand Council of Revered Sons conceded. There was no reasonable explanation for what was happening within the temple, but things were becoming worse by the minute.

There would be no decision reached today regarding the unleashing of the power of the Scroll of the Ancients. Nor would such a matter be decided tomorrow, or even next week. But the zeal of the master of scrolls was having its effect upon the Revered Sons, assisted by the air of chaos in the temple.

It was only a matter of time before the Kingpriest himself conceded that the ultimate power was needed in the battle against evil. Thanks to the master of scrolls, when the power was called for, the council would sanction it.

"Destiny," the whisper in the shadows said again. But in the entire chamber, only the keeper of portals heard it. Intuition told him that it meant something, but reason could not define it.

"Drip." The Dark One in the shadows laughed.

Far beyond the temple, in the skies over Istar, thunder rolled.

In filtering light of dusk, Gorge III, Highbulp by Choice and Lord of This Place and Maybe a Lot of Others, glared at his subjects crowded around him. It wasn't his presence that had drawn them, as much as that this part of This Place was the only high ground left in This Place, and even here they were ankle-deep in wine.

His elk antlers towering over him and all the rest, the Highbulp muttered every curse he knew… which at the moment was two or three. "This abomin… abom… this no good!" he roared, his voice echoing through the cavern. "Too much wine! Wine all over everything!"

"Should'a traded it off when you had the chance, Highbulp," old Hunch snapped. "Prob'ly too late now."

"This place lousy place for This Place." The Highbulp snorted. "Inoccup… unoccu… not worth livin' in."

Most everyone else had watched the wine rising through the day, but it had come as a nasty surprise to Gorge III. After sulking for part of the morning, he had slept the rest of the day and it hadn't occurred to anyone to wake him. He had awakened only when he had rolled over and gotten wine up his nose.

Now he came to a decision. "Time to leave," he announced. "All pack up. Let's go."

No one moved. Some simply stared at him, others hadn't heard him at all.

"Matter with you?" he roared. "Highbulp say pack up! So pack up!"

"Don't have to," someone near him sneered. "Don't have to do anything. This Off Day."

"Who says?"

"Highbulp's orders," someone else explained.

"Happy birthday, Highbulp," another said, wiping wine-muddied feet on his lord's trailing elk hide cloak.

"Maybe Highbulp have some stew?" Lady Drule suggested. "Got real nice set of stew dishes…"

" 'Nough!" the Highbulp bellowed. "Off Day through! All over! Off Day off! Pack up!"

Status quo restored, everyone scattered obediently to do his bidding. Everywhere in This Place, gully dwarves scurried about, splashing through various depths of wine, stumbling over one another, packing up to leave. When the Highbulp said this place was no longer This Place, it was time to head for another place.

"Where we go this time, Highbulp?" Lady Drule asked, stacking codpieces. "'Cross town, maybe? Better neighborhood?"

When he didn't respond, she glanced around at him. He was standing very still, gazing off into nothingness, his elk antlers towering above him.

"Highbulp?" Drule said.

"Drip," he whispered, seeming puzzled.

Drule stared. "What?"

"Dest… des… destiny," he murmured. "Highbulp of Destiny. How 'bout that!"

"Highbulp!" Drule prodded him with a stick.

He turned. "Yes, dear?"

"Where we go from here?"

"West," he said, his eyes aglow. "Great migra… mig… big move. Long way."

Something in him said that, as of this day, nothing in the world would ever be quite the same again. Destiny was in motion and nothing now could alter it. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did. Without the words or the concepts to voice it, Gorge III had a feeling that the history of the entire world had just begun.

"Destiny," he said, for anyone who wanted to hear.