The Rod of Seven Parts Read online

  The tanar'ri coughed, but there was a glimmer of realization in its pain-wracked arrogance. With a clenching of jaws, the spyder-fiend spasmed, spewing a stream of black bile. Arquestan stepped back warily, watching the monster's death throes. Then, with a gurgling sigh, the tanar'ri collapsed into a motionless tangle of twisted limbs and fur-covered body.

  Bayar's growl was the only warning, and it came nearly too late. The outcast heard the noise and spun on his heel as a second spyder-fiend burst from the shadows in the corner of the lair. This tanar'ri had a torso of rust red, considerably more sleek than the lycosyd's bloated abdomen. Even in the instant of reaction, Arquestan recognized a raklupis, the most powerful of the queen's tanar'ri, the potent master of the cruel lycosyds.

  Brandishing a long halberd in its knotty human hand, the spyder-fiend swung the weapon in a deadly strike toward the outcast's head. Arquestan blocked the attack with his long sword, staggering to the side under the force of the blow. Crouching, both swords held ready, he prepared to meet the monster's follow-up attack.

  But instead, the raklupis, with a single powerful spring, pounced over the body of the lycosyd and spun to face Arquestan. The tanar'ri growled viciously while its free hand groped under the slain spyder-fiend.

  Understanding came instantly, and Arquestan flew into the attack, knowing that he was so close. His two swords whirled, driving the raklupis back, but already the tanar'ri clutched a black stick in its hand.

  With a snarl, the raklupis snapped at him, but the outcast bashed aside the attack and lunged. Arquestan's heart pounded, desperately inflamed by the sight of the ebony stick clutched in the tanar'ri's fist. He had to stop the monster before it could teleport away.

  The wind duke stabbed, dodging away from the crimson, hate-filled eyes. Teeth snapped shut just beyond his arm, and the spyder-fiend reared back. Hacking in a savage blow, Arquestan nicked the twisted hand with his long sword, but, abruptly, the outcast's opponent was gone.

  A wisp of acrid smoke, fouled by a being of great power, lingered in the air as Arquestan gasped for breath. A stench wafted through the gate, and the wind duke knew that the raklupis had returned to its mistress. This time there would be no pursuit through the planes.

  Bayar growled, pawing at the corpse of the lycosyd, and only then did the wind duke realize that there was another spoor, an aura suggesting that the raklupis had not been entirely successful. Gingerly, using both of his swords, the wind duke flipped the gory body of the lycosyd onto its back.

  There, clutched in its other hand, was a telltale gleam of blackness—another segment of the precious shaft! Carefully, reverently, the wendeam reached down and took up the segment, knowing that he was the first vaati in over seven hundred years to handle this rare treasure.

  Arquestan could scarcely believe his eyes as he looked at the shaft of ebony. The stick was perhaps a foot long, with a geometric pattern carved into each end. That pattern, he knew, was part of the key needed to link the piece to its neighboring segments. Careless attempts would cause the segment to become lost again, perhaps for centuries. Remembering the way the monster had carried the pieces, the outcast suspected that the lycosyd had been aware of the danger. That was why it had held one segment in each hand, and taken care to keep them well separated from each other. Doubtlessly, after its critical wounding, the lycosyd had gated in the mighty raklupis, intending to pass the treasures on to the Queen of Chaos with its last gasp of life.

  Yet the raklupis had arrived too late to claim both pieces; the presence of the outcast vaati had seen to that. Arquestan deeply regretted his inability to slay the second tanar'ri, the raklupis. At the same time, Arquestan possessed a segment of the scattered artifact, something no wind duke had done for hundreds of years. He knew by its size that the piece he held was one of the largest, undoubtedly the sixth, since the seventh and longest piece had the geometric locking pattern on one end only.

  And because of the guiding power in each segment, with the sixth piece, he would be able to locate the seventh when the time was right. He knew of the great powers imbued into the Rod of Seven Parts. Among these was a minor function: Each segment of the rod possessed an arcane directional sense that gave its bearer unerring guidance to the next larger piece. Since she held only the largest piece, the queen and her agents would not be able to find the rest of the rod!

  Delaying only long enough to clean his weapons on the lycosyd's fur, Arquestan turned from the corpse and faced the brackish, eternal waters. His lips mouthed a silent command, and immediately a wind surged through the trees. Nearby, the swamp water rose into a sheer spray, funneling upward, whipped by the swirling whirlwind. In a heartbeat, the vaati's chariot materialized, two ghostly horses of white wind prancing eagerly above the frothing, fetid water.

  The hound, Bayar, once again floating as a bubble of soft light, rose to the edge of the compartment as Arquestan climbed into his chariot and took up reins of air. With a twist of his wrist, the wind duke urged the whirlwind into the sky, into realms of gray fog and ether.

  The words of the lycosyd remained in his mind, wrapping his thoughts in a shroud of apprehension. The rod was adrift among mortals. It was a development fraught with peril, but hopeful as well. Indeed, this seemed to be the best opportunity in many centuries. Perhaps, with the aid of those mortals, the segments of the potent artifact could be gained.

  Still thinking, Arquestan turned toward the globe that was his hound. "Bayar, my faithful one, you shall have to seek this world where the rod has been scattered. I commend you to the planes, onto the spoor of foul tanar'ri. You must strive to pass the gates before them, giving warning at least to the mortals who may encounter the rod."

  The bauble of brightness flickered and disappeared; already Bayar was intent upon her mission. Arquestan turned through the featureless fog, reluctantly contemplating his own task, a thing he had postponed for too long.

  Now, with the trail of the artifact fresh before him, it was time for the outcast to return to Aaqa.

  CHAPTER 1

  GOOD LIVES DOWN THE DRAIN

  Calm... cool... collected...

  I reminded myself of these desirable traits, tried to concentrate on the slender wires of my picks working through the keyhole of the massive, iron-clad lock. Shifting my feet, I sought to avoid the spreading pool of blood on the floor, but the corpse of the damned ogre just kept bleeding. Resigned to getting my boots wet, I probed for the workings of this crude but effective clasp.

  "Hurry!" Barzyn hissed. The dwarf's beard tickled my ear as he leaned over my shoulder, taut with urgency. His breath reeked of stale beer and the raw garlic he so enjoyed, but the stench was just one more distraction I tried to shrug away.

  A twist and another probe, and suddenly there was resistance—the wire had snagged on the lock's tumbler. Gingerly trying to retain that precious catch, I started to bend the pick.

  "C'mon!" Barzyn repeated.

  "Shhh," whispered Saysi sternly, laying a comforting hand on my other shoulder. The touch of her delicate fingers soothed me, helped me focus on the lock. Barzyn and my other companions, plus the dead ogre and the strewn bodies of his goblin pals, the whole vast, stinking lair of ogres and goblins, ceased to exist. My life became this lock, these wire tools, and the gentle priestess who silently, calmly urged me to proceed.

  The snap of the catch echoed like a thunderclap through the silent corridors. Instinctively I froze, expecting goblins, ogres, or worse to charge toward the sound. Instead, the dungeon of Scarnose Ogre and his band of cutthroats remained quiet around us.

  "Good work," declared Barzyn, squeezing my shoulder and reaching for the door.

  "Wait! I didn't check for—"

  My warning was interrupted by the sound of about a million bells going off at once. Jangling in an unmelodious cacophony, the noise crushed my eardrums like a physical force, echoing with dissonant volume that must have been audible for miles—or at least into every corner of the teeming ogre den.

  "
—alarms," I finished lamely, the word swallowed in metallic resonance.

  Even the clanging couldn't overwhelm the noise of heavy footsteps—ogre footsteps—pounding toward us. Or maybe I just felt the floor vibrating underfoot. In any event, we all knew that our once-surreptitious party had just called a lot of attention to itself.

  "Which way?" demanded Hestrill. I knew the scrawny wizard wasn't lacking in courage, yet the quaver in his voice matched the terror I shared with him.

  "Not there," Saysi shouted over the bells, pointing along the wide passageway we'd followed to this door. Already I could see torches, a dozen or more of them, rushing toward us like very deadly fireflies bobbing through the darkness.

  "This way's no good either," Dallzar, the other dwarf, snorted. He'd been guarding the approaches from the opposite direction, and now he trotted up to us, shaking his head grimly. "Unless you want to fight a hundred ogres."

  "Through the door!" I snapped, grabbing Barzyn and trying to shove him ahead of me. Of course, when a halfling tries to push a dwarf, not much of anything happens, and for a second or two, we were all jammed in the portal.

  Barzyn made the decision and plunged ahead, the haft of his battle-axe held in both hands, the blade raised menacingly over his head. "Follow me—damn!"

  The dwarf tumbled headlong, armor clanking and helmet clattering as he plunged down a steep flight of stone steps. His shield banged loose, adding another dissonant note to the ringing of the bells, which had finally begun to fade. It seemed as though they'd been jangling for the last several years, but I guess it was really more like five or six seconds—just enough to attract every killer monster in the dungeon.

  Grabbing Saysi's hand, I pulled her after Barzyn, squinting through the darkness and picking out the dank steps of stone. Hestrill came next, then Dallzar and Benton, the strapping giant of a barbarian, who pulled the door shut behind us.

  "Kip!" shouted Benton, his voice a growl that rumbled as deeply as the ogre footsteps. "How do you lock this thing?"

  "Go on!" I urged Saysi before turning back to the door. Dallzar slipped past, giving me room to work, while Benton leaned against the metal surface. The big fellow was obviously determined to hold it by brute force if I couldn't lock it in time. Heavy boots pounded the floor beyond the iron barrier as I reached for the bolt—luckily it didn't need a key—and slammed it into the socket in the stone doorframe.

  A thunderous clang nearly knocked me off the landing as the door vibrated under the smash of a heavy body. The ogres pounded against the stout sheet of iron with furious force. For Benton and me, it was like being trapped inside some kind of huge, thundering drum.

  "Down the stairs!" I shouted at the barbarian, though my words vanished into the general dissonance of fading bells, pounding ogres, and the deafening thumping of my own heart. Surrounded by dark shadows, I smelled, acutely, the raw stench of my own fear and that of my companions.

  Fortunately Hestrill chose that moment to bring out his magical light gem. Stuck into a claw on the end of his wand, the stone flared into bright illumination, casting shadows up the narrow, stone-walled stairwell and showing that our companions had progressed far down the narrow flight of steps.

  Beyond Hestrill and his glowing gem, the mightily cursing Barzyn picked himself up on a landing maybe thirty steps below. The fuming dwarf, his long red hair whirling wildly, dusted himself off and glared upward as Hestrill, Dallzar, and Saysi slipped past him. With a curt gesture, he summoned Benton and me to follow—not that we needed the suggestion.

  Even my short legs covered three or four steps with each downward stride as the barbarian and I plunged after our companions. Naturally we had no way of knowing what was down these stairs, but we knew what was at the top, and that was enough to propel us along.

  A long, long time ago—it was at least a minute and a half—we had thought that the heavy iron door must guard the entrance to Scarnose's treasure room. After all, the barrier had been heavily locked, guarded by a strapping and unusually alert ogre, and was far more solid than the doors of rotted planking that had been the norm throughout the rest of Scarnose's lair.

  Of course, just because we'd found a stairway didn't mean that there wasn't a treasure room down here. Still, my heart sank even faster than the rest of me as Benton and I raced over the first landing and started down the next flight. After all, there was a lot of truth to the old saw about gold: No matter how much of it you possessed, it was never more useless than when you were spending it on your own funeral.

  The glimmer of Hestrill's light was a beacon in the darkness, drawing us after the others. Gasping for breath, flinging ourselves down more flights of stairs, Benton and I finally caught up to Saysi, the wizard, and the two dwarves. The pounding on the door above us had faded slightly with the distance, but still thrummed in a menacing cadence.

  "They've got a ram," Barzyn noted, remarking on the steady rhythm that had replaced the earlier stuttering bashes against the door. "Won't be long before they smash it down."

  "Why'd you stop?" I panted, leaning on my knees and drawing ragged breaths.

  " 'Nother door," declared the burly dwarf.

  For the first time, I noticed the metal slab blocking passage along the subterranean corridor. This barrier was even larger than the door at the top of the steps, and the black iron surface was studded with bolts the size of my fist. There was no keyhole to be seen, though a small grate blocked off the portion near the floor with steel mesh fine enough to stop a good-sized rat.

  Several metal brackets were mounted on this face of the door, but I wouldn't figure out the purpose of those for another few minutes. By then, naturally, it would be too late.

  With no lock visible, I reached out and pushed on the barrier. Shuddering and creaking, it moved a few inches inward—until my bare feet skidded off the damp paving stones and I smashed, face first, to the floor.

  "It's not locked," I muttered, crawling to my hands and knees as Barzyn and Benton put their shoulders to the task, swinging the door inward with a groaning, shrieking protest of rusty hinges.

  A clang loud enough to force all other thoughts from our minds suddenly resounded from above, and we all knew that the upper door had been smashed inward.

  "Through here!" hissed Hestrill, following the dwarf and the barbarian into the shadows beyond the second door.

  "Are you all right?" Saysi asked, helping me to my feet. Her eyes, as soft and liquid brown as melted chocolate, looked at me with concern. Though a fellow halfling, she hailed from the Tallfellow clans and thus stood a trifle higher than I; still, her gaze met me evenly, reassuring and hopeful and appealing in that way that no one else could ever hope to match.

  "Just a scratch," I grunted, wiping my nose—and bringing away a hand covered with blood. The gesture sent pain stabbing across my face, and I knew that my nose was broken. "However, I might have lost my boyish good looks," I groaned.

  Through teary eyes, I saw her reach forward, touching my nose with her own dainty hand.

  "Patrikon... my lord, benign god of law... please mend Kip's nose... cease his bleeding—and restore unto him his boyish good looks, such as they were."

  She smiled, her round face warming enough to take the sting out of her words even as her cure spell washed the pain from my face.

  "Thanks!" I whispered, taking her hand and pulling her through the big doorway after the others.

  "Hurry!" urged Hestrill as Benton leaned against the iron slab, pushing the doorway shut with renewed creaking and groaning of poorly lubricated hinges. Already the pounding footsteps of our ogre pursuers thundered from the stone steps. The mob of infuriated humanoids howled and bellowed toward the bottom of the shadowy stairway.

  "Double damn and feed me to the buzzards!" growled Barzyn, frantically groping over the smooth portal of metal. "There's no way to lock this thing!"

  My heart sank as I saw, in the reflected light of Hestrill's spell, that the dwarf had spoken the truth: The interior surface of
the door was studded with bolts to match the giant nuts on the far side, but there was no latch, no lock or hasp or fastening of any kind.

  It was then that I realized the purpose of the brackets on the other side of the door. They were latches to hold a bar, preventing the barrier from being opened from our side. It seemed a bad time to mention my deduction, but I began to feel a little sick to my stomach.

  "They won't be coming through!" declared Benton, grimly. The strapping barbarian leaned against the iron slab, and I could see the sinews tightening in the tree trunks that were his legs. "The rest of you go on—flee!" he spat.

  Spinning on my heel, I started for the darkness beyond. It was Saysi's voice that brought me up short.

  "No! Well all stay with you! That's the only way we have a chance of keeping them from coming through the door."

  Though the little cleric didn't come as high as Benton's waist, the barbarian reached out and touched her shoulder with a massive hand. "Thanks," he said thickly. "You always were a brave one for a wee lass, but there's no point in wasting more lives than one. Now, hurry!"

  "Come on!" I urged, holding out my hand to Saysi, acutely conscious of heavy footsteps thundering down the stairway beyond the door.

  A jarring bang sounded against the iron slab, but this was not the sound of a ram. With a curse, Benton grabbed one of the bolts and tried to pull the door open. It refused to budge, and I knew that my suspicion about the external brackets had been correct.

  "We're locked in," confirmed the barbarian, glowering at the door as if his own bluster might force it open.

  "But why would they—?" Saysi started to ask, then swallowed her words as the answer became clear even to her. "We're trapped," she gulped.

  She was a real sweetie, but at times like this, I wanted to grab her shoulders, shake her firmly, and yell "Of course we are!"

  Instead, I tried to distract myself by having a look around at our surroundings. The dank, stone walls of the dungeon were cracked, mossy, stained, and wet—the same as they'd been in the stairway and the upper corridors. The passageway beyond the door was somewhat wider than the stairwell, however, and extended inward for a dozen or so spaces before making a sharp turn to the left.