But then! Inkman’s finger froze in its track! For at that very moment a gigantic sound was heard—or rather, two sounds, following in close succession. All eyes in the room turned, to behold a terrifying sight.
At the far end of the room, a large door which led to the inner Embassy lay shattered, its splintered pieces lying on the ballroom floor. Such explained the first gigantic sound. And within the door, even now forcing its way through onto the ballroom floor, slouched an immense rock snarl, roaring all the while with demonic fury. Its eyes were fixed upon the person of Rupert Inkman with that flaming, intent, single-minded glare of rage and hatred which immediately reminded everyone present of nothing so much as, well, as the flaming, intent, single-minded glare of rage and hatred which rock snarls typically bestow upon those they intend to devour on the instant.
Chaos and stampede erupted in the room in such proportions as to make the earlier confusion seem like the very balm of Heaven. But in that brief moment before all thought was drowned in mass and mindless fury, two voices were heard to speak, one in a loud cry of distress heard by all in the room, the other in a shocked whisper heard only by a louse.
The loud cry of distress, it needs hardly be said, belonged to Rupert Inkman, whose posture was no longer that of one born to command. ‘Twas brief and to the point:
“Oh, shit!”
The shocked whisper belonged to the witch Magrit. For she alone, of the multitude in the room, had immediately spotted the one aspect of the rock snarl which was unusual. All others present had, perhaps understandably, fixated on those features of the monster which were altogether normal for a rock snarl in the grip of murtherous rage—I speak, of course, of the eyes blazing like the ovens of hell, the fangs like cutlasses, the talons like sabers, the lashing tail, the great haunches even now crouching for the death leap, and so on and so forth.
But Magrit had at once seen the oddity, the little hairy face which peeked out through the great neck ruff of the monster.
“I’ll be damned,” she whispered, “it’s Shelyid.”
And so it was! Shelyid the dwarf, perched atop the shoulders of the horrible beast like nothing so much as a child riding a hobby horse! How had such an event come to pass?
CHAPTER XXII.
Murals Examined. The Mage’s Critique Thereof. A Chamber Devoted to Love. A Dwarf’s Inquiries. A Melee. A Pathetic Scene. A Reconciliation. An Historic Event!
Greyboar was not a happy strangler.
“Couldn’t you have made these tunnels wider?” he grumbled.
“For what purpose?” demanded the Underground Artist, Paul Gauphin. “They were not intended for gorillas.”
A somewhat injudicious reply, this—so at least is your narrator’s opinion. I myself, were I a man rather than a louse, should have hesitated before labeling a man, to his face, a gorilla—especially a man who was, in actual fact, built like a gorilla.
Fortunately for the future of Art, the strangler was of a phlegmatic disposition. He satisfied himself with cracking his knuckles, which act, be it said, caused Gauphin no little terror.
“My God!” cried the artist. “The tunnel’s collapsing! We’ll be buried alive!”
“It’s just the big goon cracking his knuckles,” explained Ignace. Gauphin made a sour face, but eschewed comment.
Greyboar’s disgruntlement was perhaps inevitable. The strangler had had a most miserable time of it, squeezing his great body through the labyrinth of tunnels below the Ozarine Embassy. The worst of it, he was to say later, was that his discomfort made it impossible for him to fully appreciate the art work which decorated every foot of Gauphin’s burrows.
“Of course,” he would explain, “I was only interested in the still lifes—marvelous!—the flowers! the bowls of fruit! Pity you had to wade through such a lot of nudes to get to them.”
Ignace, on the other hand, due to his miniscule size, was better able to gain the proper perspective on the murals. One would not have thought, based on previously observed behavior, that the little agent was a devotee of the finer arts. But a connoisseur he proved to be, or such, at least, seems the only possible explanation of his reluctance to move at the rapid pace one would have thought more appropriate for daring adventurers on a perilous mission. Indeed, so slow and halting was his progress that his client finally resorted to dragging him forward by bodily force.