Pikel went through a series of strange growls, and it occurred to Regis that he was casting a spell. Then he barked, and spewed a small cloud of stinking green smoke, and the goblins recoiled.
Pikel growled more insistently and ambled toward them.
“Show us where she is,” said Regis. “The demon dog won’t wait!”
One goblin pointed down and to the left, the other turned and ran off, and the first, as soon as it realized that it was alone, did likewise.
Regis looked at Pikel and shrugged. They couldn’t go through the stone, but at least they now had a general direction.
So the goblin who was not a goblin and his demon dog who was not a demon or a dog started off down the dark corridors. They encountered more goblins and even a couple of the strange giants, and Regis always greeted them with, “The lady’s dog,” after which Pikel would bark a cloud of green, stinky gas, or whisper for all the roots in an area to tremble wildly, or coax some bats to fly around his head, or some other druidic trick that obviously seemed demonic to any onlookers.
With a bit more guidance, they came to a long, wide corridor bordered by several ramshackle doors, and with one large and perfectly fitted door made of bloodstone at the end. Two hulking guards that looked like a cross between a giant vulture and a huge man with great clawed hands and a beaked face that seemed as if it could peck through stone stood on either side. The demons weren’t as tall as the giants, but appeared far more formidable, and certainly less persuadable.
“Now what?” the halfling in goblin form whispered to his demon dog.
Pikel bit Regis’s pant leg and tugged him to the side, verily pulling him through a door. In that side chamber, the dwarf became a dwarf once more and rushed to the wall nearest their targeted room, feeling about the stone.
“What are you thinking?” Regis whispered. But he hushed fast and slipped very near the dwarf when a large form and several smaller ones passed outside the door. The companions heard female voices then, that of the demon posessing Concettina, they knew, and some others, melodic and lyrical and speaking the language of the drow.
“Pikel, what?” Regis mouthed silently and expressively, desperate to be away, but the dwarf just brought a finger to his pursed lips and stared at the door, then nodded and grinned as he heard the receding chatter. The group was moving away from the room and not toward it.
He went back to the crack in the wall, closing his eyes and feeling about, then shook his head happily.
“What?” Regis asked. “A root?”
Pikel smiled and grabbed his hand.
“It’s just a crack!” Regis argued, louder than he intended, trying futilely to pull away.
But Pikel was already into his spell, and his form twisted and contorted and was sucked through the crack and into the root, tugging a terrified Regis in behind him.
The root-walking was disorienting and unnerving enough, of course, but doing so through tiny cracks in solid stone proved perfectly terrifying. Regis spent the entire magical journey with his mouth wide open in an unending, and unheard, scream.
They came out of the stone wall soon after, as if vomited by the rock, their corporeal forms reshaping as they exited the druid’s root transit. Both of them tumbled down to the wet stone floor.
As soon as he collected his wits about him, helped by Pikel’s “Ooo,” Regis realized that they were in the demon’s room. To his left was the same bloodstone door, but now from the other side, and hanging to his right, directly across from that, was the leering, demon-faced mirror.
“No!” Pikel whispered harshly and he slapped his hand across to turn the halfling’s face as Regis looked at the mirror.
Regis stumbled aside and held up his hand, nodding to show the dwarf that he understood. Ivan’s remarks about Wulfgar being in the mirror served as ample enough warning.
“That has to be it,” Regis whispered. “The mirror that captured Wulfgar.”
“Woofgar,” Pikel agreed.
The halfling glanced around the circular chamber, noting the pool and a collection of strange furniture, including human-sized chairs and a table that all seemed to be made of mushroom stalks, and a circular bed with a grand red canopy all shot with golden designs, and with bed sheets the color of blood. The halfling shuddered as he noted shackles hanging from the headboard, and he thought, too, of Wulfgar’s remarks regarding the creature they thought to be Queen Concettina.
Regis figured that he owed his friend a huge apology. Then he snickered, despite the desperate situation, thinking Wulfgar would probably thank him instead.
“We take the mirror and get out of here,” Regis said to Pikel, who nodded happily.
The halfling untied his fine cape, thinking it wise to cover the glass.
PIKEL WASN’T THE only one nodding. In the shadows of a high alcove above the mirror, Inchedeeko heard every word. The quasit, bound to its mistress, telepathically conveyed every syllable to Malcanthet, who was not far away.
“You will excuse me,” the succubus queen told Charri Hunzrin and the others who had come to speak with her. “I have guests.”
She rushed out of the room, extending her wings and half-running, half-flying down the length of the long corridor. Passing a side passage, she called to a group of goblin miners, yelling at them to fill the hall so that none could escape.
REGIS HAD HIS cloak set in place over the mirror, which he and Pikel had lifted from its hooks and leaned against the hearthstone. Pikel slipped off to the side of the room to gather some vines to better secure the cloak for their desperate retreat, while the halfling congratulated himself for such a disciplined performance. Not once had he glanced at the glass.
“We’ll get you out of there,” he promised Wulfgar, and he thought to call to the man—perhaps the magic of the mirror would bring Wulfgar’s image back to the glass for him to see.
He grabbed the edge of the cloak, thinking to lift it just enough to whisper for his friend, but he knew enough about these sorts of magical devices to back away from that foolish course.
A dozen thoughts careened through his mind—would Pikel be able to carry them out of there with the mirror as they had come in?
Could Regis put it in his pouch?
He dismissed that notion almost as soon as he had it, for the mirror and his pouch were apparently both extra-dimensional items, the combination of which, so he had been told, could lead to very, very bad outcomes.
With that unsettling thought in mind, he was doubly glad he hadn’t accidentally looked at the mirror and been pulled in.
He sighed in relief then grunted in surprise as the room’s door banged open. Regis spun to see a pair of chasme charging his way, and with the demon Concettina out in the hall and coming fast, and a horde of goblins behind her.
He drew his sword and yelled, “Pikel, run!” and wondered what in the world his little rapier was going to do against the charging brutes.
His crossbow wouldn’t slow them, he knew he couldn’t get to his dagger in time and free up the living snake garrotes, and his rapier would do little more than sting the beasts as they tore him apart. And he couldn’t run, so he pulled his cloak off the mirror and fell to the side.
The vrocks skidded to a stop, their beaked faces swiveling, catching their own reflections in the mirror—which caught more than that!
In they went, and Regis staggered aside, running for the chamber’s right-hand wall, where he and Pikel had come in. He could get there!
But Pikel couldn’t. The dwarf was across the room, running hard behind the hearth and mirror, but the winged demon was in the chamber now, whip in hand.
“Pikel!” Regis screamed, and he drew out his hand crossbow and fired a dart at the succubus. He had no idea if he hit her, and if he did, it surely showed no effect. She cracked her whip into Pikel’s side, sending him spinning and falling weirdly and hard with a tremendous “Oof!” and then a long and agonized, “Oooo.”
The demon turned on Regis, hissing, her eyes blood red with fury.<
br />
And into the room came goblins, dozens of goblins.
“No!” the demon howled, but too late. There were the stupid goblins, and there was the exposed mirror.
Into the glass went a goblin, then a second, a third, a fourth until Malcanthet’s Mirror of Life Trapping held a dozen and a half extradimensional compartments, and they weren’t all filled with her prisoners.
Because when they were full, any additional creature caught by the magic and pulled in would expel, randomly, one of the other prisoners.
And powerful, malicious, cunning Malcanthet certainly had some prisoners she didn’t want freed!
Regis ran to Pikel, lying broken near the pool. He slid down to the dwarf’s side, begging Pikel to get them out of there.
“Oooo,” the dwarf moaned. He tried to reply more fully, but his mouth drooped. Indeed, half of the dwarf, the side where Malcanthet’s whip had struck him, seemed quite paralyzed. Regis tugged him to the wall.
In went a sixth goblin, and just an instant before Malcanthet could throw herself in front of the mirror to block any reflection, in went a seventh, the nineteenth prisoner.
And it became again the eighteenth prisoner as the mirror expelled a previous victim.
A hydra.
Huge and reddish in hue, the ten-headed creature came forth in fighting form, its necks swerving about each other, draconic maws snapping at the nearest goblins, biting off hands, arms, even a head before the goblins even realized it was there.
And then they scrambled and fled, but the hydra came after them, heads snaking out in all directions and breathing jets of fire.
“Oooo,” cried Pikel.
Regis pulled at him furiously, and goblins came rushing at them. A line of fire washed over them.
Pikel heard scuffling and screaming and a crash of bodies and the hiss of water as the flames swept over him, burning him.
He cried out for Regis, for his brudder, for Woofgar, and he scratched and pulled and squirmed for the wall, reaching for a crack in the stone.
“Idiots!” he heard the demon cry, and Pikel desperately looked for Regis.
But there were just bodies, so many bodies, lying about, burning, and the hydra between the hearth and the door, and the demon at the hearth with the mirror, and some dark elves—oh, could it get worse!—in the doorway and falling back in surprise and terror.
A pair of hydra heads swerved Pikel’s way. One swept back to the front of the room and spat a line of fire that dropped a group of goblins trying to get back to the door.
The other spat at poor, helpless Pikel.
In his hand, he felt the tip of a root.
DRACONIC HEADS SWERVED for Malcanthet, their jailer, the fiend who had stolen the pyrohydra and thrown it into a nondescript cell for decades uncounted.
But she stood there, hardly amused, holding her mirror.
Perhaps most of the ten heads avoided looking into the glass, but one, at least, did not.
Into the mirror went the hydra once more, and out popped a very confused goblin, standing remarkably near to where it had been when the mirror snatched it in the first place.
It looked at the bat-winged woman curiously.
Malcanthet’s whip cut the poor goblin in half before it could stupidly look into the mirror’s magical glass once more.
“You may enter now,” Malcanthet called to Charri Hunzrin and the others, which now included a group of spriggans, led by Toofless and Komtoddy.
“What was that?” the drow priestess asked.
“Intruders,” the demon said, fixing a judgmental stare on Toofless. “Your corridors are not as secure as you believe,” she added in withering tones, and the spriggans fell back.
“A fire-breathing hydra?” Charri Hunzrin asked, shaking her head. “Good fortune that you had the mirror in hand!”
“Good fortune that all that came out when the beast was caught was a goblin,” Malcanthet corrected. “I assure you, drow, there are worse creatures in my toy.”
“I have never seen such an item,” Charri said.
“Don’t look closely,” the demon quipped. “It was a gift from a powerful lich who resides in a tomb in a land you call Chult, who uses the souls trapped within the glass to feed his undeath.” She turned her head a bit, as if looking somewhere far away. “I should return it soon for my rewards and get another. Now that it is full, I cannot use it without releasing a prisoner, and some are better left entrapped.”
The dark elves backed away, and Malcanthet laughed at them.
PIKEL ROLLED OUT into the copse of trees beside the tunnel entrance. He couldn’t stand, and could hardly see, his eyes singed from the hydra fires, half of his body still numb from the lightning crackle of the demon’s whip.
He could hear the giants not far away, all excited and chattering about some disturbance deep within their home.
“Regis,” the dwarf muttered under his breath, and he pictured again the burning bodies all around him in the chamber and could smell that stench still—from his own beard.
How he wanted to go back in there and rescue his friend, and the other one, too!
“Woofgar,” he lamented.
But there was nothing he could do. Even if his body somehow healed immediately, what might he do against the likes of that mighty demon?
If he had known the truth of Malcanthet, that she was the succubus queen, consort of the godly Demogorgon, hated rival of Graz’zt, he would have realized that truth even more profoundly and hopelessly.
He tried to walk, but could not. He started to crawl, but it hurt him so. He thought of becoming a dog again, but what good might that do for him with half his side paralyzed?
He cast a spell of healing, and it felt good, but did little, and a moment later, he realized that the exertion of the spellcasting was worse than the healing it had accomplished. So again, Pikel focused on how he might get away and get some help. He wanted to become a bird and fly off, but he only had one arm. A one-winged bird probably wouldn’t soar very far.
And besides, his side was dead, killed by the whip, at least for now.
He heard the giant voices again, and realized that things within must be settling down. He was vulnerable, and he didn’t have the spell power left to take his druidic root journey.
But he could transform himself again, and so the clever dwarf became a snake. Even with half his body broken, Pikel found that he could slither.
He slithered out of the copse. He slithered down the rocky mountainside, making careful note of the markings so that he could find this place again.
The sun set and still he slithered.
He slithered onto a road and kept going.
Long into the night, he slithered, and then he slithered to the side of the road and coiled up, thinking he would be better in the morning and that he would have his spells renewed and so could slide through the roots back to Helgabal.
But his sleep was filled with nightmares inspired by the magic of the demon’s whip. When the rising sun came into his eyes, Pikel found that he was a dwarf once more, that he was worse off and not better. The poison or magic the demon had struck him with had flowed deeper within. He could not pray, could not ask for spells, could not think clearly enough to begin to remember anything or cast anything.
He couldn’t even become a snake again.
So he crawled and clawed.
He inched his way along the road, ignoring his breaking fingernails, fighting through his labored breathing as his lungs would hardly answer his call for breath.
The sun went high overhead, a hot summer day full of buzzing bees and chirping birds.
The sweating dwarf crawled.
He wanted to stop, to just surrender, to let himself die and be done with the pain.
“Woofgar,” he whispered through lips that would barely move, and he knew he had to crawl.
So he did.
SUNLIGHT AWAKENED PIKEL again, but to his surprise and confusion, he was in a bed and not on the road.
r /> A comfortable bed in a clean room. Pain wracked his body, demonic poison biting at him, whispering to him to let go and die.
He turned his head to the window and watched the rising sun and whispered for his brudder.
“Ah, ye’re awake!” he heard and he tried to turn his head.
A fat, red-cheeked face came over him, a wide smile and smiling blue eyes. “We thought we’d lost ye!” the woman said. “Oh Chalmer!”
“What, woman, what?” another voice said, a man’s voice, and Pikel managed to turn enough toward the open door to see an even fatter face, and one lined by great gray sideburns.
“Ah, so ye made it through another night,” the man named Chalmer said. He looked to the woman, who Pikel figured to be his wife. “I’ll go get him some soup.
“Woofgar!” Pikel managed to breathe.
“Oh, but he’s talkin’!” said the woman.
“Woo … woof …”
Chalmer laughed. “Or barking,” he said. “Ah, but keep him comfortable. He won’t live much longer, to be sure.”
“Woof …” Pikel whimpered, wheezed, and he began to cough.
He looked plaintively at the departing man, and into a common room beyond, with many folk milling about or sitting at tables and having breakfast.
Voices floated in, the sounds of life, and Pikel could only listen.
Chalmer and his wife tried to feed him, but he couldn’t swallow and nearly choked, coughing.
So they tucked him in tighter.
“I’ll sit with him,” the woman informed her husband, and he left the room, leaving the door open, as she bade him.
Pikel just lay still and listened to life, and knew that his own neared its end.
He perked up a bit sometime later, though, when a finely dressed halfling went by the door—Regis!
But no, it was not Regis. He could tell by the voice as the halfling woman chatted with her friend.
Pikel could only catch snatches of their conversation and of others in the room, but held onto them fiercely, wanting to live his last moments aware of the world around him.
He heard of an army mustering outside of Helgabal, and it gave him hope that King Yarin was going to find the demon, and maybe Wulfgar.