Murder in Halruaa (18 page)

The adventurer and the jackalwere now turned their attention to the other poor monster. If the five-foot-tall Devolawk was a tragedy of magic, the seven-foot-tall mongrelman was a tragedy of nature. No sorcerer had created this misshapen beast. Only powers beyond life could have perpetrated this abomination. He was a combination of more than a dozen genetic types, from bugbears and bullywugs to ogres and ores… with just enough human hormones spooned in to make him rational.

His huge head was part hair, part hide, part scales, part flesh, and part fur. He looked vaguely like an unfinished wall of mortar, wood, and tile. His two eyes were wildly mismatched and accompanied by a stout, animal-like nose and a wide maw made up of at least three dozen different sizes and shapes of teeth.

“Geeeee,” he whistled. “Offfff,” he grunted. “Freeeee!” he shrieked, the rags that partially covered his flesh shaking. Or at least that’s what Pryce thought it said. His animal sounds left much leeway for interpretation and made both Pryce and Cunningham cringe with discomfort.

“He keeps repeating that,” Cunningham told Pryce. “I think that is what he wants to be called.”

“Gee, off, free?” Pryce echoed. The mongrelman nodded vigorously, reminding Covington of a horse. “Geeoffree,” Pryce said again. “Geoffrey! Of course!”

Cunningham smiled in recognition. “You must be correct, sir. He must have seen the name Geoffrey and thought it was pronounced gee, off, free.”

Pryce looked back at the rag-covered monster, which loomed large in the relatively cramped space of the cave. “Well, if it’s Geoffrey you want, Geoffrey it shall be.” The mongrelman lowered his head, shaking, and then, much to Pryce’s surprise, his eyes began to tear. “There, there, my fine fellow,” Pryce soothed, putting his hand on the thing’s shoulder. ‘There’s no need for that.” The mongrelman started, but when Pryce didn’t remove his hand, he finally grew still.

Cunningham shook his head. “Mongrelmen are seldom welcomed by humans. Often they are enslaved by scoundrels. Geoffrey must be overcome that you would accept his company so readily.” Pryce noted the jackalwere looking off into the darkness. No doubt he was thinking of all the human hatred he must have faced throughout his miserable life.

“Cunningham,” Pryce snapped, bringing back the jackalwere’s attention. “I’m sure that if you didn’t have an inhuman

need to kill people, drink their blood, and eat them, you would have more friends, too.”

The human beast blinked, then nodded curtly. “I don’t know what it is, sir. Your presence, power, and wisdom must be having—dare I say it?—a civilizing effect on me.”

Pryce shook his head in wonder. He was certain that if these three knew he was not who they thought he was, a third of him would already be residing in each of their stomachs. “Be that as it may, or may not, be,” he said to the jackalwere, “I need to know where they found me and what they saw. Perhaps we can elicit some sort of translation from their brethren.”

“They have no brethren.”

“No brethren?” Pryce said incredulously, leaning toward Cunningham. “How is that possible? I’ve heard that broken ones reside in groups of up to five dozen creatures. The mongrelmen who manage to avoid enslavement even create their own villages and communities.”

“But, sir,” the jackalwere retorted, “he is enslaved.”

“He is?” Pryce marveled. “By whom?”

“The same force that enslaves me,” Cunningham declared bitterly. “It lured me here with promises that would fill my heart’s desire, then sorely used me for my basest, most antisocial skills.”

At least one part of that statement sounded ominously familiar to Covington. He remembered that he himself had been lured to Lallor. “Cunningham!” he barked. “I couldn’t ask you this when we last met because of your bloodlust. You said that a misshapen one first enticed you here. Was that Devolawk?”

The jackalwere nodded shamefully, and Pryce’s eyes had finally adjusted well enough to the dark to see the affirmation. “Devolawk,” he asked the broken one, “who had you lure the jackalwere here?”

The broken one answered painfully and slowly through his rotting human teeth, but it was clear enough for Pryce to understand, despite the vole’s hisses and hawk’s cries. “Don’t…

knowwww. Woke … from death … with orders allllready… in myyyyy mind!”

Pryce pursed his lips. The poor thing had been created as a slave, with instructions already implanted in its polymorphed brain. But what was the mongrelman’s part in all this?

“Cunningham,” he continued, “I think I know now who actually enticed you here. But I need to know why. What did you have to do to get this so-called limitless supply of fresh, high-quality human meat?”

The jackalwere hung his head. “I was told … by the faceless wind … to find a mongrelman skilled in concealment.”

“Ah,” Pryce said. Mongrelmen were known for their skills in pickpocketing, mimicry, camouflage, and all the variations thereof.

“It’s obvious to me now,” Cunningham confessed, “that Geoffrey was brought here to guard these tunnels.”

“Why?” Pryce asked the mongrelman. ‘What is hidden down here, Geoffrey?”

The mongrelman shook his head vigorously, waving his part hand, part claw, part hoof in a warding-off gesture.

“Geoffrey,” Pryce pressed, “are you the one who saved me? Are you the one who found me unconscious?” The mongrelman stared at him, his head and hand movement slowing, then finally stopping. “You can trust me, Geoffrey,” Pryce stressed. “I swear on my … name … I won’t let your enslaver hurt you.” He blushed, hoping his quandary wouldn’t be too obvious in the darkness, night vision or no night vision.

The mongrelman finally nodded.

“Are you the one who dragged me here? Are you the one who carried me to safety?”

The mongrelman looked up with something approaching hope, then nodded more energetically.

Pryce looked toward the others. “He was concealing me as well. But why? What does he know that we don’t?”

Suddenly Devolawk started to speak. “Heeeee knewwwww you. Darliiiiington Blade! Only you … can heeeeelp us!” The mongrelman nodded again, even more vigorously.

Pryce felt a sudden pang of hopelessness. Now a trio of monsters were looking to him for help, a responsibility Pryce Covington from Merrickarta would have rejected as absurd and impossible from every standpoint.

“Pleeeease!” Devolawk screeched piteously. “I want to fly-yyyyy. I want to sleeeeep! I want to beeeee freeeee!”

Pryce moved quickly to his feet and put his hands on what served as the broken one’s shoulders. “Easy, Devolawk. Calm yourself.” He found himself standing in the middle of a monster triangle. They hemmed him in from every side.

“Devolawk sleeps in misery,” said Cunningham, “in various dark recesses of the tunnels. Geoffrey guards. What, I do not know.”

Covington’s mind reeled. “It must have been powerful magic indeed to create this poor broken one….” And what was the single most important magical consideration in Lallor at this moment? “Fullmer!” Pryce cried suddenly. His mind had finally cleared enough to remember who he had been supposed to meet when he was knocked out.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Cunningham inquired. “Is that some sort of magical incantation?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Pryce replied. “He’s a captain of industry on the pirate seas, remember?”

“The chin-spiked one? But what does he have to do with—”

“Just enough, apparently. He’s looking for what everyone around here seems to be looking for.”

Cunningham shrugged. “And what would that be, sir?”

Pryce’s pointed at the mongrelman. “Unless I miss my guess, it’s what he’s guarding.” The other two monsters looked at the master of concealment.

“Geeeee-off-freeeee!” Devolawk whistled. “Show usssss!”

“Show us what the humans are after,” Cunningham repeated urgently. “Now!”

*****

The section of wall the mongrelman led them to was not very impressive in and of itself. In fact, it looked just like any other part of the cave until Pryce noticed a bulge near the floor and another just below the stone ceiling. Covington looked at the mongrelman, who was jabbing his finger repeatedly at a place high on the wall. Cunningham and Devolawk looked at each other in confusion, then looked to Pryce expectantly. The human had no intention of disappointing them.

He stepped up onto the bottom protuberance, which was effectively a cleverly sculpted step designed to appear as a natural part of the rock. Pryce grabbed the top protrusion, which had been chiseled into a seemingly natural rock shape, but was actually a rung that could be held onto easily.

Slowly and carefully Pryce pulled himself up the length of the wall until he found himself looking down a cunningly camouflaged hole cut through the rock. Looking up from the cave floor, it would have been invisible, because its lower lip was carved upward, like a tankard set high in the wall. Until someone looked down at it, there was no hint that the opening was even there. Pryce stared down into the hole until he could see no farther.

He looked down at the mongrelman. “Is this your doing?” The beast shook its hoary head from side to side in reply. Pryce turned to look back down the tube-shaped hole. It couldn’t have been more than three inches in circumference and had to be at least three feet deep. Pryce placed his eye directly against the opening.

Pryce could just make out the other side of the tube. It ended inside a larger enclosure, one that did not have a rock floor, but Pryce couldn’t tell for sure what it was. He couldn’t make out the

details because something was obscuring his vision partway down the rock pipe. There was some sort of grating in the way.

“Cunningham?” Pryce said, lowering himself carefully down to the rock floor. “I wonder if you would do me a small favor.”

“Yes, sir, of course. How can I be of service?”

Pryce smiled tightly. “I need you to use your full jackal night vision, but without developing an overwhelming urge to open any of my arteries. Do you think you could do that?”

Cunningham found himself staring at Pryce’s neck much the same way he would look at a succulent roast. He grew noticeably pale. Then he swallowed. He looked to the other monsters for support. “I shall endeavor to do my utmost,” he promised shakily.

Pryce was fascinated by the change that came over the man-beast after he had lifted himself up to the hole in the wall. Suddenly his skin sprouted red, orange, and black hair, which mingled into a mat of fur from his upper lip to his forehead. His left eye changed with it, turning from a human sphere to an animal’s black orb. Its center seemed to glow yellow, and he… it… snarled menacingly.

Pryce stepped back nervously, but when the jackalwere dropped lightly to his feet and turned to face him, his face had transformed back to the innocuous features of the impoverished but cultured traveler. “Most unusual,” he commented.

‘Yes?”

“There is indeed a chamber of some sort on the other side of the rock tube.” ‘Yes?”

“But there is also a grating of some sort.”

“So far we’re in perfect agreement,” Pryce said impatiently, “but I thought it was worth risking unleashing your animal side for corroboration.” Cunningham looked at him with one eyebrow raised before Pryce exclaimed, “Details, man, details! What does the grating look like?”

‘Well, actually, it looks like letters.”

Pryce turned to the others. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Which letters?”

‘They are oddly shaped, sir, like some sort of artistic script. I could make out a U with a line over it… an underlined V… the top half of an 0,… and a P^with rounded bottoms.”

“U-V-O-W,” Pryce repeated the letters aloud. ” You vow’? You vow to do what?”

“Whatever vow it is, sir,” interrupted Cunningham, “it certainly seems to be a code of some sort.”

“Or a lock …” Pryce mused, fingering his cloak clasp. “Of course!” he realized. “A key!” He looked down at the clasp, seeing the letters D and B upside down and backward. “In a city of wizards, what sort of entry would you devise to protect your most valuable possessions?”

“One a sorcerer could not circumvent,” Cunningham said. “A magical lock.”

“Not magical,” Pryce insisted, realizing the clasp did not glow as it neared the opening. “No matter how great a magician you are, there will always be a greater one. No, to truly protect your valuables from sorcerers, the lock needs to be mechanical!”

“Mechanical?” Cunningham repeated as if the word was distasteful. “Can you open it, sir?”

Pryce held the cloak clasp between his thumb and index finger. He twisted it this way and that. “Not yet. I don’t have all the letters yet. But I think I will, very soon.” He turned to the misshapen ones. “I promise,” he said, “to do everything in my power to free you from your bondage. You have the word of Darlington Blade.” He marveled at the way it was becoming steadily easier to pass himself off as Blade.

The mongrelman tried to smile, his grotesque lips twisting and spasming. The broken one, however, fell to the joints that served as his knees, tumbling off-balance to lean heavily against the cave wall. “The skyyyyy,” it choked out. “The eeeeearth… to be reeeeeleeeeased…”

“But I need you to help me,” Pryce insisted, cutting off the creature’s agonized longing. “Keep our meeting secret from anyone, or anything, you make contact with. Continue to guard this antechamber, but not from me. Can you do that?” The two creatures nodded. “Good. Now, Geoffrey, show me where you found me.”

The mongrelman lurched down the cavern, and the others followed.

Pryce Covington wasn’t particularly surprised when they returned to the very rock in the wall that had moved just prior to his being knocked unconscious behind Schreders’s restaurant. It turned out that the flattened rock was a cleverly designed opening to a cave that ran from behind Schreders At Your Service to a patch of earth between the Lallor Wall and the Mark of the Question.

With a push from the other side, the mongrelman opened the partition, showing Pryce that the flat portal section of the rock was attached to the rest of the stone wall by two cunningly designed hinges, made to look like elongated pebbles. There was just enough room for Pryce to wriggle out.