them bringing captives, and now there were at least thirty in
the camp, and dozens of slaves in the pen.
A guard passed near the wood-barred enclosure, and a
human voice inside said, “If only I could get my hands on a
sword, I’d . . .”
The guard laughed. “You’d what, slave? Fight? By the
time we sell you, we’ll have beaten all the fight out of you.
Now shut up.”
Another guard strolled past on the gully dwarves’ side,
and the Highbulp and his followers cringed away from the
bars. They didn’t like the way these Talls talked, at all.
*****
At first dawn, the ladies packed as much bear meat as
they could carry, while the Lady Drule went looking for
tracks to follow. Krog tagged along, happy as a duckling
following its mother.
Drule searched northward, then stopped and scratched
her head. There had been tracks before, she was certain, but
now there were none. “Where they all go?” she wondered.
Krog squatted beside her, scratching his head in
imitation. “Who?” he asked.
“Highbulp an’ th’ rest,” she reminded him. “Ones we
been tryin’ to find.”
He scowled – a frightening and fierce expression, on his
face. “Mama want find those ones?”
“Sure,” the Lady Drule said. “Don’t know where to look,
though.”
“No problem,” Krog said, standing and pointing
northward. “They over there.”
“Where?”
“There. See smoke? That where other others go.”
He seemed certain of it, so Drule said, “Fine. We go
there, too. Highbulp prob’ly need ‘tendin’ to ’bout now.”
She called to the rest, and they set off northward – a
nine-foot creature guiding, a long line of three- to four-foot
creatures tagging after. In the distance, far across a wide,
sundered valley littered with the debris of nameless
catastrophe, was a ridge. Beyond the ridge, Krog said, were
their lost people. It would take all day to get there, Drule
guessed, but they had nowhere else to go.
It was midday when Drule and Krog rounded a spire of
rock that might once have been a mountaintop, and came
face-to-face with a stranger, a human, carrying an axe.
As any good gully dwarf would do, faced with an
armed Tall, the Lady Drule shrieked, turned and ran.
Behind her, gully dwarves scattered in all directions.
Krog looked after Drule for a second, thoroughly
puzzled, then looked again at the bug-eyed man standing
there, gawking up at him in terror. Krog shrugged
eloquently, then voiced a mighty shriek, flung up his hands
just as Drule had done, and pounded away after her. His
shriek drowned out the screams of the man, who was now
bounding away in the other direction, shouting, “Ogre!
Ogre!”
Some distance away, Krog found the Lady Drule hiding
behind a clump of grass. Krog did the same, though his
clump of grass covered no more than the lower part of his
face and maybe one shoulder. He stayed there until Drule
rose. Deciding the danger was gone, she went to regather
her followers. Krog didn’t know why they had been hiding,
but whatever suited Mama was all right with him.
*****
It was late evening. Hazy dusk lay in the long shadows of
the Khalkists, and the smoke of campfires hung in the air
when a gully dwarf named Bipp crept through the brush to
the shadowed slave pen and looked inside. He squinted.
“Highbulp?”
Several faces turned toward him. “Hey,” someone said.
“That Bipp.”
“What you doin’ out there, Bipp?” another asked.
Bipp put a finger to his lips. “Sh!”
“What?”
“Sh!”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Where Highbulp?” Bipp whispered.
“Right here, somewhere. Highbulp? Highbulp, wake
up. Bipp here.” A pause, then, “Highbulp! Wake up!
Highbulp sleepy oaf. Wake up, Highbulp! Bipp here.”
“Who?”
“Bipp”
“Shut up over there!” a human voice shouted. “Can’t
you little dimwits ever be quiet?”
At the sound, an armed guard at the far comer of the
pen looked around, and Bipp flattened himself in the
shadows. “Shut up in there, or you’ll wish you had,” the
guard ordered.
Then Gorge was there, peering through the lashed-post
bars. “What Bipp want?”
“Lady Drule send me. She lookin’ for you. Why ever’-
body here?”
“Can’t get out,” the Highbulp said, peevishly. “Talls got