Dark Thane

"Forbidden," Shnatz finished for him. "That why you got to be quiet, stay where I put you bunch of knotheads." Someone dropped a pickaxe clanging to the floor, and everyone, including Shnatz, cringed. The noise seemed to echo forever through the maze of dark, rubblestrewn halls and passageways that made up this part of the ruins.

When the sound finally faded, Shnatz fairly shrieked, "Who did that? Come on, who did it?" There was a brief scuffle among the huddle of gully dwarves until one, a large, dull-faced lout, was booted to the front by the others. He slipped on the dusty floor as he skidded to a stop before Shnatz, catching himself on a section of fallen stone.

"What the matter with you?" Shnatz demanded.

"It slipped," the gully dwarf answered sheepishly.

"Oh, yeah? That okay. Accidents happen. Like now." Shnatz lashed out and cracked the clumsy gully dwarf on top of the head with the hilt of a small dagger he carried concealed in his grubby fist. The gully dwarf clapped his hands to his pate and sank to the floor, moaning like a felled ox.

"You dumb puhungs got to be quiet. Somebody catches you here, I hate to think what they do to you. This place forbidden, and that means you no go here. 'Cept now you got to go here 'cause that's what I tell you to do. You not do what I tell you to do, I hate to think what I do to you. You unnerstand?"

The cringing gully dwarves stared at him blankly, unresponding. Shnatz sighed and said, "You got that?" They nodded, twenty grimy, knot-bearded faces bobbing so vigorously that it nearly made Shnatz seasick-even though he had never been to sea, unless you counted the great underground Urkhan Sea lying somewhere below him at this very moment. Shnatz got seasick every time he crossed the Urkhan Sea, despite the fact that it had neither wind nor waves, tides nor currents.

"Dumb puhungs not even know what 'understand' means," Shnatz grumbled as he turned and started up the passage once more. When he heard them surge into motion behind him, following at his heels, he stopped even trying to scout ahead. There was little purpose to scouting ahead, anyway. He'd been exploring this area for months, and he knew for a fact that no one had been to this part of the ruins in a dozen years or more. Dust lay thick among the crumbled walls and fallen pillars, and the only footprints he saw on the floor as he crept forward were his own from two weeks ago. Not even his fellow gully dwarves had taken up residence in the place, and that was saying something. Gully dwarves generally moved into any place where they would be left alone by the other clans.

But for some reason that not even Shnatz could name, gully dwarves had never invaded the ruins of Hybardin, the old home of the Hylar dwarves. There wasn't much left of it, for one thing. Weakened by the ravages of the Chaos dragons forty-one years ago, most of the great stalactite that had been the Hylar city had long since crumbled and fallen to the Urkhan Sea hundreds of feet below. This had led to the formation of a huge rocky island of jumbled ruins and broken stone that the Hylar called the Isle of the Dead. As with the ruins of Hybardin, the gully dwarves also avoided the Isle of the Dead. Only the Hylar went there anymore, and then only once a year, during the Festival of Lights.

Shnatz continued to follow his own old footprints through the dust. There were two sets of footprints-one going in and the other coming out. Shnatz was glad to have the footprints to guide him, because the map he had drawn had proven itself to be worse than useless. Jungor had forced him to draw a map, but Shnatz was a gully dwarf, not a kender. He wasn't much good with anything that had to do with paper or pens or desks or government clerks asking him what his mother's name was. His map had started in the wrong place and led in a big circle right back to it. After the third go-round, he had blown his nose into the map and tossed it aside.

Shnatz's footprints led through the dust of the cramped, broken passage, over piles of ruins and through narrow cracks into other halls and chambers filled with the charred bones of dead dwarves. Stripped of their flesh, one dwarf was as similar and as different as any other-Hylar, Daewar, Daergar, Theiwar, and Klar. You could not pick up any one skull and say this was the braincase of a noble Hylar lord. It might just as well be the skull of a scheming Daergar assassin, or a blood-mad Klar berserker with his face caked with white clay. Even a gully dwarfs bones might be mistaken for those of a Hylar youth.