The Search For Magic

The Great Gully Dwarf Clmacteric Of 40 S.C
Jeff Crook

At the corner of Globe and Market Streets, in the City of Seven Circles, Palanthas the Ancient, two kender skidded around the corner of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind-Local 458, Palanthian Division, the MMGGMN (mmggmn for short). Farther up Globe Street, from whence an angry mob surged, stood the ancient and revered Cartographer’s Guild, and it was no surprise that many in the mob brandished an assortment of compasses (the pointy kind), long metal rules, and T-squares. Even a few surveyor’s sticks bobbed in their midst, like pikemen in a ragtag army.

Neither was it surprising that, from the voluminous pouches of the elder kender, there protruded a shock of newly acquired rolls of parchment bound with green ribbons and bearing the great seal of the Cartographer’s Guild impressed in an official-looking red wax. The two kender were not aware that it was they who were the object of the chase. They were simply trying to get out of the mob’s way, while at the same time clambering for a glimpse of the two thieves who had so earned the mob’s ire.

The two kender ducked behind a stone staircase and watched the mob roll by, cross Market Street, and sweep onward along Poulter’s Lane, chickens rising before them like dust before a cavalry charge. The elder kender stepped into the street to watch the tail of the mob dwindle away, a grin on his face that seemed to continue all the way up to the tips of his pointy ears. His companion, however, remained seated in the shade of the steps, for it was an uncommonly hot day, and he looked miserable. His hair (if one could call it that) was a veritable rat’s nest, with an honest-to-goodness rat living in it. His clothes, leggings, vest, and even his pouches appeared to be held together by force of will alone (or maybe it was the dried mud). Likely, they had not seen a tailor’s shop, even from a distance, since the Second Cataclysm. Were the companion kender to sneeze, in all probability he would have emerged from the resultant cloud of dust naked as the day he was born. Contrary to popular belief, kender are not born fully clothed, their pouches already stuffed with other people’s belongings.

The elder kender was as unsurprising in appearance as his companion was exceptional. He was the living epitome of a kender, from his hoopak to his lime green leggings to his orange-furred vest, all the way up to a topknot that had grown beyond preposterous and was dangling over the edge of absurd. He’d been meticulously growing it every day of his eighty-odd years, and it was now as long as the tail of a beer-wagon horse. In winter, he wore it as both a hat and a scarf at the same time. He could also tie it under his nose and pretend to be a dwarf. If the kender race could be bothered with writing books about themselves, they might have put his picture on the cover.

Now that the fun was over, the elder kender looked around for something new to do. In Palanthas, there was always something new to do. But as his gray eyes fell upon his miserable companion, a spasm of sadness passed over his wrinkled brown face. Blinking back a tear and almost reaching for a handkerchief, his eyes strayed up the side of the imposing marble building looming over them. Suddenly, his face brightened, the wrinkles around his eyes writhed with glee, and he stuffed the hanky away before he’d finished drawing it out.

“Whort, my boy,” he said, “we’re here.”

Hearing the riot outside, Dr. Palaver set aside his delicate alchemical experiment for a moment, exited his office, and crossed the lobby to the front door. It being late in the day, all of the other members of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind, Local 458, Palanthian Division, had already gone home, and the doors were locked.

As he approached the door, he searched his pockets for the keys, found them, then dropped them. He bent to pick them up, heard a loud bang, and the next thing he knew, two kender were sitting beside him, patting his cheeks and waving various bottles of ointments, esters, and tinctures under his long bulbous nose, while going through his pockets as though they were their own. His keys had vanished altogether. He was flat on his back on the floor, with a large knot swelling on his enormous bald head. He slapped away their hands, sat up, swooned, and awoke again just in time to keep them from pouring some concoction of their own mixing down his throat.

“What’s all this?” the gnome managed to bluster.

“What’s wrong with your voice?” the elder kender asked, his jaw falling open.

“My voice? My voice? Does it sound confabulated? Oh, dear. I hope you didn’t pour anything unmaturated down my throat while I was napping. Say, what happened? The last thing l remember is bending over to pick-up the keys and hearing a loud bang…”

“Someone hit you on the head with the door,” the elder kender answered, interrupting him. “We found you here. I thought for a moment that you weren’t a gnome. You looked like a gnome, but you were talking much too slowly. It is very important that we see a gnome, but now I see that you are one after all, and so it is much better.” He helped the gnome to rise.

“By the way, my name is Morgrify Pinchpocket,” the kender said, extending his small brown hand.

The gnome placed a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose and examined the kender’s hand. “Whatap-pearstobethetrouble?” he asked, while removing a small rubber mallet from one of the two-dozen pockets in his long white coat.

“Nothing’s wrong with my hand!” Morg responded, snatching back his hand and stuffing it safely into one of his own pockets (as opposed to someone else’s). “It’s my nephew here, Whortleberry Pinchpocket. Show your manners to the doctor, Whort.”

The younger kender stepped forward and dragged his foot across the floor, his head bowed. “Erngh,” he said, or something very like that.

“Remarkable! I’ve never seen a case like it. What-doyoucallit?” The gnome dropped his hammer and pulled a rather large book from a rather small pocket in his coat, opened it, and began flipping through the pages. “Manners, do you say? Let me see… mumps, mouth-and-foot disease, melancholy measles, mealy mouth malthasia… Nope, no manners. Is it a partic-ulated kender confliction?”

“A what?”

“Is it peculiar, to your knowledge?” the gnome attempted to elaborate.

“Most peculiar,” the kender answered. “You see, he’s broken, and I’d like to get him fixed.” He leaned closer and whispered, “I think he’s been afflicted.”

“Anafflictedkenderohhowmarvelous!” Dr. Palaver exclaimed as he led them through his alchemical laboratory.

Several large pots galloped atop a small stove, which caused the whole contraption to rock and scoot slowly around the room. Morg stood on his toes to see what was cooking and very nearly set his topknot on fire. Meanwhile, the doctor led Whort through a door that opened into an examination chamber.

“I’ve never had the opportunity to study an afflicted kender before. How did he come by it? I have heard that it is caused by expostulation to some source of vaporous fear, like that induced by dragons or other… do you mind if I measure his skull?”

He took down from the wall a device that looked like a giant nutcracker and approached the younger kender. Whort backed away, shaking his head and moaning “Erngh!” most emphatically.

“What is he afraid of?” the gnome asked.

“Everything!” Morg groaned.

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Mostpeculiarindeed!” the gnome squeaked with a little gleeful spring. “Renderareafraidofnothingbuthe-isafr iadofeverythinghowmarvelous!”

He began opening cupboards, of which there were perhaps three score, and drawers numbering in the hundreds. In the middle of the room stood a squat white marble examination table covered with what looked to be the same paper a butcher uses to wrap pork chops or whatnot. The large drain in the floor also did not bode well.

Dr. Palaver rattled about the room, gathering his instruments onto a large wooden tray and spilling various gleaming metal contraptions in his wake. Morg dutifully followed behind him, picking them up, but most of them somehow ended up in his own pockets rather than atop the doctor’s tray. The gnome did not seem to notice, so intent was he on his “unprecedented opportunity maybe even an article in the MMGGMN semi-quarterly annual,” and with running about, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “Yes, I shall need that too!”

Whort crawled onto the examination table and curled up into a ball of dirt. His rat poked its head out of his hair and watched the doctor with growing alarm.

Finally, Dr. Palaver stood beside his patient and fingered through the instruments on the wooden tray. He picked up a small yellow card and held it at arm’s length from his face, peered down his nose and through his spectacles at it, reading aloud, “Now then, what seems to be the problem?” He dropped the card, lifted a device that looked like a flat piece of wood, and shoved it into Whort’s mouth. “Say ah.”

“Erngh.”

“He can’t speak,” Morg said.

“Cannot speak? Tch-tch. What a shame.” The doctor sympathized while trying to maneuver the beam of a bullseye lantern into the kender’s gaping mouth.

“It’s a tragedy!” Morg exclaimed.

“Erngh,” Whort agreed, choking on the stick.

The doctor removed the stick from Whort’s mouth and snapped the lid on the lantern. “Repeat after me. Big brown bugbear biting blue bottleflies.”

“Erngh.”

“You have been living with gully dwarves,” Dr. Palaver noted.

“Erngh.”

“That’s remarkable!” Morg said in awe. “I found him in the sewers in the company of about forty gully dwarves. You see, his mother sent me to look for him-”

“Elementary. The smell alone testifies to his modus homunculus,” the doctor said.

“Yes, I had noticed that. You see, his mother sent me-”

“The prognosis is obfuscated,” Dr. Palaver announced.

“She sent me- It’s what?”

“I know what is wrong with him.”

“You do?” Morg asked excitedly. “Can you fix him?”

“I am not a surgeon, and even if I were this boy’s cure is not to be found at the point of a knife,” Dr. Palaver said, as he dumped the tray of instruments on the examination table. He lifted a long butcher’s blade from the mass of metal and held it up to the light. “Not this one, anyway.”

“Erngh.”

“Whortleberry is suffering from acute panic psoriasis,” the doctor pronounced.

“It sounds horrible!” Morg cried. “Is it catching? Does it itch? Will he live? What is it?”

“It means that he is afraid.”

The elder kender’s face hardened. “We already know that! Are you sure you are a doctor?” he asked. “Don’t you fellows carry a badge or something?”

“There is the name on the door if you care to look,” the gnome answered, somewhat miffed. “In any case you did not allow me to complete my diagonal, concerning the gully dwarves. You see, the laborious odor of these creatures has permutated into his speaking glands, interrupting their normal effluvia of sound, while his fear-whatever its cause-has conscripted the muscles around his talk bone, preventing its ability to swing freely.”

“So what is to be done?” Morg asked.

“There is only one cure, and of course I have only just invented it today. That is why I was so late leaving, or you might not have found me on the floor,” the gnome said as he helped Whort from the table. The rat retreated back into Whort’s hair.

“The cure,” Dr. Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, “is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formula-of which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands. Since I speculum that the source of the fear originates down here in the sewers, where you first found your nephew, the cure for the fear must also lie in the sewers.”

“If you only just invented it today, how can you be sure it will work?” Morg asked.

“There is an old gnomish axiom which states that something will work until it doesn’t,” Dr. Palaver explained. “And since we don’t know that it doesn’t work we must assume that it does. It really is elementary if you think about.”

“I see,” Morg sighed, though he really didn’t see.

When they had reached a certain section of the tunnel that seemed significant to the gnome, but which was no different than any other they had passed along the way-except perhaps that there was a particularly vile smell wafting from a nearby passageway-the gnome paused and removed a strange-looking device from one of his coat pockets.

“This inflatable sleeve monitors the thickness of the vines in the arm,” the gnome said, as he wrapped a thing around the kender’s arm that looked like the air bladder of a large fish. A long tube ending in an onion-shaped bulb of similar material depended from one end of the device, while from the other hung three tiny brass bells of varying sizes and tones. “It is believed that the thickness of the vines in the arm is directly provisional to the state of health. Any sudden changes could indicate a converse reaction to the potion, but we will be alerted to such changes by the ringing of the smallest bell. This middle bell indicates that there is a problem with the first bell, and this largest bell indicates that there is a problem not associated with either bell.”

Next, the doctor removed a strange set of spectacles from the upper-middle breast pocket of his white coat. They were not ordinary reading spectacles like the ones perched on the tip of his own very large, bulbous nose. Instead, they seemed made of some kind of thick, dark, opaque material through which no light could possibly pass, and which wrapped completely around the face. “How marvelously hideous!” Morg exclaimed, as the doctor slipped them onto his nephew’s nose and wrapped the arms behind his pointy ears. Once on his face, the lenses magnified to grotesque proportions the size of his eyes behind them. He blinked, and it was like someone quickly opening and closing the shutters of a pair of dark windows.

“These spectacles measure the pupae reactions of the eyes for any changes which could indicate possible side effects such as a sudden onset of death-like symptoms. The lenses also prevent any outside influx of proprietary confluences which might construe the results obtained from the measurement of the potion’s benefits. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“Erngh.”

“Excellent! Shall we begin?” The gnome snapped open the cover of his bullseye lantern. Pointing a long narrow beam of light ahead of him, he led the two kender into a smaller passage of the sewer. He splashed heedlessly through the muck, while Whort trudged behind and Morg brought up the rear, leaping nimbly or pole-vaulting with his hoopak from dry spot to dry spot in a vain attempt to keep his bright green leggings clean.

Few but the most esoteric of scholars and thieves knew this, but the sewers of Palanthas weren’t really sewers at all. They were an ancient dwarven city, carved into the bedrock centuries before the first humans sailed into the Bay of Branchala, even before the wizards raised the Tower of High Sorcery with their magic. But the city was abandoned by the dwarves long before the humans took over the land above it. Those who first discovered it found it empty and desolate. Some say it was once part of the great dwarven empire of Kal-Thax, which vanished without a trace before Thorbardin was even a dream in the mind of Reorx.

As they rounded a bend in the sewer, the trio entered a much larger passage than any they had encountered so far. It was also by far the most pungent. Before them lay a small lake of sewage, in which floated as varied a collection of garbage as any city could boast-everything from a toy boat with a broken mast to a dead and very bloated pig to a whole wagon bobbing belly up with its wheels in the air. Large brown globs of thick and apparently solid foam bumped about among the more common rotting rinds of vegetables, slicks of oil, and shingles of congealed fat.

“We call this place the Gully Dwarf Stew Pot,” the gnome shouted over the smell, as he tied a bit of white cloth across the front of his face. “This section of the tunnel invertabrately clogs up during the rainless summer months, and gully dwarves find this place irrefutable. The Civil Engineering Guild Local 1101 is currently discussing a hundred and forty-three possible solutions, but in the meantime I can think of no better place to begin to effect a revolution of the patient’s melody.”

“I’ve never smelled anything quite so extraordinary,” Morg said, while pinching his nose. A burning and curiously itchy curiosity to explore every inch of this place and see what might be found floating in the water competed with a very real concern for the future state of his clothing.

The gnome hitched up his coat and jumped in, promptly sinking up to his white beard. Being a kender and thus somewhat taller than his gnomish companion, the sewage only came up to Whort’s pouches, but his uncle, being much weighted by his more recent acquirements, slipped upon landing and vanished below the surface. He came up spluttering and thrashing, while his maps spread around him like a jam of small logs. They quickly began to sink, many vanishing into the dark mucky water before he could recover his wits and grab them.

“Come along, this way. Follow me!” the gnome ordered as he started off, flailing the water to aid his progress. Morg stuffed his remaining maps into a shoulder pouch, making sure to tie it securely shut before continuing.

Though this section of the sewer was illuminated at irregular intervals by iron grates set in the roof, there was very little light to see by, and the water was so thick with muck that no light could pierce its depths. At each step, there was a danger of dropping into some deep hole. The three explorers felt their way along the slimy bottom as they slogged through the water, wary of sudden drops, or worse.

As the sewer merged with the Market Street tunnel, the grates in the roof gradually grew more frequent, providing more light and helping to speed their progress. Because this section of the sewer opened directly into Market Street, one of the busiest streets in all Palanthas, it was no wonder that citizens of Palan-thas desired some means of preventing it from clogging, or to clear the clog once it was, well, clogged. To this end, the local gnomes had been diligently working for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. One of their most promising devices, the very large SNAKE (Self Navigating Auto-Keyhole Eviscerator-the original design was much smaller and was intended to clean keyholes clogged with rust) proved unreliable and was last reported still burrowing away somewhere near the town of Lemish.

Their most recent design was originally thought too simple to work, but to date it had passed every test. It consisted of a large wooden ball only slightly smaller in diameter than the passage it was meant to unstop. The ball was deployed upstream from the clog, then carried to the clog by the flow of water, where it punched through by the force of its own weight combined with the mass of water that had built up behind it. Downstream, it would be caught and wrestled back up an access passage to the street, for redeployment or storage, as needed. For explorers of the Palanthian sewer system, often the only warning of this bowling disaster came when the sewer suddenly drained away, rather like the surf before an oncoming tidal wave. So it was with no small alarm that Dr. Palaver realized he was crawling along the bottom of the sewer rather than swimming through its sludge. He looked back and found his companions standing only knee deep in the water, with the level swiftly receding.

Whort, who had spent some time, years perhaps, living in the sewers of Palanthas, knew immediately that danger loomed. The bells on his sleeve commenced to tinkle quite vigorously in his agitation. He grabbed his uncle’s arm and pulled, but Morg was much too intent on what was, by the sound of it, bowling from behind them.

The thing filled all the passage, blotting out the light streaming from above and casting the passage into ever deepening darkness. It was constructed of circular layers of wood bolted together and coated by a hard slick varnish to keep out the water and maintain buoyancy. It ground along the passageway, pushed from behind by what appeared to be a wall of water reaching all the way to the roof.

“We’ll be crushed!” Morg remarked gleefully. Dr. Palaver had already fled, abandoning his patient, before Whort got his uncle turned around and headed in the right direction. But there was nowhere to run. They quickly caught up to the puffing old physician as he stood before the tunnel blockage-a massive dam of sticks, treelimbs, bones, bits of furniture and cloth, a wheel, the bodies of more rats than they cared to count, even a bathtub, all cemented together by the thick black sewer sludge.

“Trapped like gully dwarves!” the doctor cried, pulling at his beard.

But Whort had no desire to be flattened, crunch or no crunch. Turning his uncle once more, he shoved the elder kender into a hole in the wall barely wide enough to admit his pouches and hoopak. Complaining volubly of missing all the fun, Morg climbed inside. Dr. Palaver followed, with Whort dragging his feet to safety a bare heartbeat before the sewer ball cast the tiny upward-sloping pipe into pitchy darkness.

Of course, a moment later, raw sewage roared in behind them, blasting the two kender and their gnomish companion up the length of the pipe, disgorging them into a small, round chamber dimly lit by a grate in the low roof above.

“Ah. We have reached a safe room. Good show,” the gnome said as he wrung out the sleeves of his no-longer white coat. “We should be quite safe here. You see, the safe rooms lie above the highest level of the sewer. Even at flood time, we will have to wait a bit for the level to subsist, but then I think we may then continue our search for gully dwarves.”

“Won’t those do?” Morg asked while pinching his nostrils. With his free hand, he pointed into a dark corner, where a half dozen pairs of beady black eyes gleamed back at them.

“They will do admiralty,” the gnome answered. He rushed to Whort’s side. “I will minotaur your reactions as you approach the gully dwarves. Are you afraid?”

Whort shook his head that he wasn’t, almost dislodging the strange spectacles still clinging to his pointy ears.

“Approach them now,” the doctor ordered. “When I tell you, you must drink the potion. Do you have it?”

Whort shook his head that he didn’t. Dr. Palaver frantically searched his own pockets, until Morg produced it from one of his own. “You left it on the table back at the office,” he explained.

Whort took the potion, then stepped toward the gully dwarves, moving into a thin beam of light descending through a tiny grate in the roof. Perhaps it was his eyes, hugely magnified through the glasses, which frightened them, for the gully dwarves began to scream and bite each other. Whort backed away, hiding his features in the shadows opposite the room. “Erngh,” he groaned miserably.

The gully dwarves screamed again at the sound, and continued to chew one anothers’ ears, fingers, noses, and whatever was handy. Soon, the cries turned from fright to anger, and a fight broke out which threatened to engulf them all. The two kender and the gnome backed up against the wall, wary of flashing yellow teeth or grubby nails.

“Inflections! Inflections!” the gnome cried. “Do not let them bite you or you’ll get an inflection!”

Finally, the disagreement subsided, with only a few missing ears and one gnawed pinky finger. Like a shark-haunted bank of herring, in the blink of an eye the gully dwarves had turned, swirled, then collected back in their shadowy corner, all facing in the same direction again.

“I suppose I may have misdirected you,” Dr. Palaver said as he examined Whort’s sleeve and protective goggles. “I had hypostacized that agharaphobia might be the cause of your fears, but obviously you aren’t afraid of gully dwarves as I first surmounted. Say ah.” He whipped out another wooden plank (this one much begrimed and hardly very sanitary) and shoved it into the kender’s mouth.

“Erngh,” Whort gagged.

“As I suspected! The talk bone is still constricted. Well then, we shall just have to find the true source of your fear. As my tormentor used to say, when all other probabilities have been exploded, whatever remains, no matter how smelly, must be the truth.” Dr Palaver tossed aside his dipstick. “One of you wouldn’t have anything of interest to a gully dwarf?”

“Would a rat do?” Morg asked, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he withdrew the dead rat he had just discovered in one his pouches.

In answer, the gully dwarves began to slaver and creep forward, eyeing the limp, wet morsel dangling from the kender’s fingertips. Dr. Palaver took the rat from Morg and shook it temptingly before the gully dwarves, drawing them even farther from their shadowy nook.

Taking great care to speak slowly so that they could understand him (gnomes were notoriously rapid speakers), the doctor said in sweet tones, “Whoever shows me the scariest place in the whole sewer gets this rat. Do any of you know where the scariest place in the whole sewer is?”

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

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

“What is the most scariest place?” the gnome asked.

“Don’t say, Grod,” one of the other gully dwarves begged.

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

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

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

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

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

The gully dwarves screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Something, yes!” the gully dwarf leader agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deeper into the hole that they went, the louder the contented purring snore became. It sounded like the enormous rumbling of a snoozing dragon-a thing Morg had actually heard, once upon a time. But the reek of stale beer and wet rat and, they now noticed, gully dwarf, grew stronger with each step forward. Finally, rounding a corner, they came to a section of the catacomb illuminated by torchlight shining through a grate in a large iron door. The flickering beam of light that slanted through the grate fell directly on a pile of gully dwarves. They were not dead, though they smelled like they might be. Instead, they were sleeping off a marvelous drunk. Nearby, a cask had been broached, and it was but one of many other empty ones. The owner of the cellar obviously had not been in this section for many days-weeks perhaps, or even months.

Morg saw a large iron door nearby, and his kender-curiosity got the best of him. Straining at the massive ring, he pulled the door open. An even larger cellar, this one lit by numerous torches, lay beyond it.

However, his opening of the heavy iron door had caused it to groan on its rusty hinges. The noise awoke the gully dwarves and sent them bolting in all directions. One gully dwarf bowled into Morg, almost knocking him off his feet. It was a good thing that he kept his balance, or the gully dwarf would surely have devoured him in its fright. Yellow teeth flashed and champed inches from his face. Finally, he had to whack the grimy creature with his hoopak just to settle him down. It worked. The gully dwarf settled down on the floor with a thump.

“Oh dear,” Morg grimaced while gnawing on his topknot.

Dr. Palaver brought the gully dwarf around by applying something he called “smelly salts, or bicarbonate of ammonia” to a kerchief and waving it below the gully dwarfs nose. The miserable little creature came fully awake in an instant, teeth already snapping together in defense. Morg gripped his hoopak in case he needed to reapply the anesthetic.

But the gnome managed to mollify the creature enough to talk to it. “What is your name?” he asked slowly, so the gully dwarf could follow his words.

“Rulf,” the creature belched.

“He sounds like he is about to be sick,” Morg said.

“Rulf, we have rescued you from the Hole. Doesn’t that make you happy?” the gnome asked.

The gully dwarf shook his head. “No. Me happy here. Plenty good beer, stinky cheese… this heaven. You rescue me from heaven. Go away.” He crossed his arms sullenly and chewed a remnant of cheese still stuck in his beard.

“Come now, Rulf. We have rescued you, so you must come with us. You must do us a little favor, and if you do, I will catch you a nice, big, fat rat with one of my mousetraps,” the gnome offered.

“How big?” Rulf queried.

The gnome held up two fingers (he had dealt with gully dwarves before). “This big,” he said, wriggling his stubby digits for emphasis.

Rulf sucked in his breath, which caused him to choke on the bit of beard he had been chewing. He spat it out. “That big, huh? Who Rulf gotta kill?”

“Rulf kill no one. All Rulf gotta do… er, ahem,” the gnome cleared his throat and blushed. “All we desire of you is to show us the scariest place you know.”

“Scarier than this?” Rulf asked, indicating with a wave the catacomb cellar around him.

“The scariest you know,” the gnome said.

“It better be big hog rat,” Rulf said as he rose wearily to his feet, rubbing his hoopak-knocked noggin with a grimace.

Deep beneath the city of Palanthas, below its sewers and deepest dungeons, lay a system of sea caves known only to a few scholars of Palanthian lore. The caves had not been explored by the surface-dwelling citizens of that city in many a century, but they were well known to those who inhabited them.

The denizens of the caves were, of course, the gully dwarves. Those who knew of the gully dwarves living in the city’s sewers knew only the tip of the dwarfs beard, as the saying goes. There is often a whole dwarf behind it. In this case, there were several thousand of the generally mistreated and wisely disliked race of aghar dwarves, all living out their private lives in their private desolation, deep beneath a city of a hundred thousand blissfully ignorant souls.

Rulf picked a silent way through these caverns, warily avoiding any large groups and generally keeping to the shadows. When Morg asked him why he was hiding from his people, their guide turned on him with a snarl.

“This not my people,” he spat in disgust. “These nasty stinky Gulps. Rulf is a Bulp, the highest Bulp. These lazy Gulps live like kings while we prince Bulps eat bugs. Good bugs!” he added. “But not so good as here.”

Indeed, the Gulps of Under Palanthas had been living as good a life as any gully dwarves in all of Krynn for many generations. There was plenty of room, for the caves were most extensive, and plenty of nice, slimy, glowing fungus grew on the walls and floors. Whenever the aghar were hungry, all they had to do was chew on a wall. Most of them could be seen even in the dark by the weirdly glowing streaks of phosphorescent fungus-impregnated saliva drying in their beards.

But the good life here had come to a screeching halt some thirty years ago. Rulf laughed as he recounted the tale.

“That when big boss come. Big boss tell Gulps make plenty torches, smoky torches, torches day, noon, and night, torches all the time. Big boss eat smoke, they say. They say he love smoke like you and me love rat.”

“Speak for yourself,” Morg said.

“That where me take you: to see big boss. They say he scarier than the Hole. They say he make the Hole look like just a regular old hole in the wall.”

At the mention of the Big Boss, Whort began to back away. Morg caught sight of his nephew just as he was about to round a corner. Despite his advanced age, he was easily able to run his younger nephew to ground and drag him back to the gully dwarf and the gnome. He arrived just as Rulf was explaining to Dr. Palaver how the gully dwarves made torches.

“They take sticks and bones-nice bones, waste of good bones-and dip them in pool of black goo. Black goo burns, makes lots of black smoke. Big boss happy. When torches burn out, Gulps take stubs and dip them in black goo again to make new torches. Big boss happy. He eat smoke and leave Gulps alone, but when he mad, he eat Gulps, too. Nasty, stinky Gulps,” he ended with a snarl.

Dr. Palaver turned to his patient. “This is the source of your fear,” he commented, seeing the way Whort’s eyes bugged even more grotesquely behind the spectacles. “You must face it and drink the potion of mighty heroes that I invented today. Now what have I done with it?” He frantically patted his pockets, then turned them inside out.

Finally, Morg produced the bottle from one of his own pouches. “You left it in the office!” he replied to the gnome’s angry remark about the kender race in general. “I thought it might be important. Lucky for you, you have got me with you.”

The doctor pressed the bottle into Whort’s hands. “When I say so, you must drink it down no matter what happens, do you understand?”

The younger kender nodded, swallowing a lump the size of a dragon egg in his throat.

Rulf led them along a series of winding passages and empty, torchlit chambers. The smoky torches provided an excellent cover for their secret entry into the lair of the Gulps and their Big Boss. Finally, they slipped around a corner and entered the largest cavern of all, a cave so big they could have parked a three-masted Palanthian galley in it and still had room for an Ergoth-ian river cog. One half of the chamber was brightly lit by at least a hundred torches, all smoking to high heaven. The other half of the cavern was as dark as a minotaur’s heart. The darkness was so thick and smoky that it seemed to be a substance in and of itself, like fog, only much thicker and blacker than even the sul-furous night fogs of Sanction.

Upon seeing this chamber, the first half of Whort’s cure was effected. His voice returned in the form of a wail, long and quavering like that of a banshee, and only ending with his head knocking against the floor. Morg tried to clap a hand over his nephew’s mouth, but it was too late. Dr. Palaver checked the inflatable sleeve and bug-eye goggles to see if Whort was experiencing any adverse reactions. The gully dwarf bit through the meat of his own thumb in his anguish.

Of course, all of this woke the dragon. At the horrendous noise, the big boss dragon unwound its great smoky coils and crawled from its niche in the far wall of the chamber. Its body seemed made of living darkness, smoke, and fog. It was a shadow dragon, one of the rarest and most temperamental of all dragons. Its body was made of the essence of shadow itself, a creature born of the substance between the waking and sleeping worlds.

“Kender, gully dwarves, and gnomes!” the beast roared when it spotted the intruders. It spread its great black wings, trails and tatters of shadow swirling from their edges.

Rulf cast himself on the ground and gnawed the floor, trying desperately to fill his belly before he died. Dr. Palaver held his smelly salts beneath Whort’s nose, while Morg edged closer to have a better look. Never had he seen such a magnificent creature. The red dragons and blue dragons of the world paled beside this being of shadow. Only a death knight could possibly have been more frightening, and though Morg’s mind still wanted to get a closer look, his feet wisely took another course and began to run the opposite direction. He swooped up his nephew as he passed, dragging Dr. Palaver after him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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