This had gone far enough. Haplo whistled. The dog left off eating. Following its master’s gesture, it trotted over and, plopping itself down beside Alfred, gleefully began to lick the man’s face.
“Surely you—stop that! Nice doggie. Go … go away, nice doggie.” Alfred attempted to shove the dog aside. The dog, thinking this was now a game, entered into the spirit of the contest. “Down! Sit! Nice doggie. No, please. Do go away! I—”
“You’re right, necromancer,” Haplo struck in coolly. “These mensch are weak. I know something of them and they couldn’t have survived in a world such as this, a fact that some should have recognized before they brought them here. It sounds like you’d found the good life. What happened?”
Baltazar frowned, his tone dark. “Disaster. The blow didn’t fall at once. It came on us gradually, and that made it worse, I think. Little things began to go wrong. Our water supply mysteriously began to dwindle away. The air grew colder, fouler; poisonous gases were seeping into our atmosphere. We used up more and more of our magic in efforts to protect ourselves from the poison, to reproduce water, to grow food. The Little People—those dwarves as you called them—succumbed. We could do nothing to help them, without endangering ourselves.”
“But, your magic—” Alfred protested, having finally persuaded the dog to sit quietly at his side.
“Aren’t you listening? Our magic was needed for ourselves! We were the strongest, the fittest, the best suited to survive. We did what we could for the… these dwarves, but in the end they died as the other mensch died before them. And then it became more important than ever for us to resurrect and maintain our dead.”
Haplo shook his head in profound admiration. “A labor force that never needs rest, never eats the food or drinks the water, doesn’t mind the cold, hardship. The perfect slave, the perfect soldier.”
“Yes,” agreed Baltazar, “without our dead, we living could not have managed.”
“But don’t you understand what you’ve done?” Alfred cried in earnest, agonized tones. “Don’t you realize—”
“Dog!” Haplo ordered.
The animal jumped back to its feet, tongue lolling, tail wagging.
Alfred raised his hands in front of his face and, with a fearful glance at Haplo, fell silent.
“Certainly we realize,” said the necromancer crisply. “We regained an art that was, according to the old records, lost to our people.”
“Not lost. Not lost,” Alfred said sorrowfully, but he said it beneath his breath. Haplo heard it through the ears of the dog.
“Of course, you must not think us idle in attempting to discover what was going wrong,” Edmund added. “We investigated and came at last, and most reluctantly, to the conclusion that the colossus, which had once provided us life, were now responsible for depriving us of it. Warmth and fresh air had once flowed through the columns. Now our heat was being tapped and drawn off—”
“By the people in that city?” Haplo waved his hand in the direction of the buildings over which he’d flown. “That’s what you suspect, isn’t it?”
He barely listened to the answer. The subject didn’t much interest him. He would have preferred to pursue the subject of necromancy, but didn’t dare make his intense interest known, either to these men or to Alfred. Patience, he counseled.
“It was an accident. The people of Necropolis could have no way of knowing that they were harming us,” Edmund was arguing warmly, his gaze going to the necromancer Baltazar scowled, and Haplo recognized this as an old disagreement between them.
The necromancer—perhaps because there were strangers present—forebore offering an opinion contrary to that of his ruler. Haplo was about to attempt to turn the conversation back to the dead when a clatter and commotion in the cavern drew everyone’s attention. Several cadavers—soldiers by the remnants and fragments of their uniforms—came running from the direction of the cavern’s entrance.
The prince rose immediately to his feet, followed by the necromancer. Baltazar caught hold of the prince’s arm, pointed. The corpse of the dead king came shuffling forward, also intent on interviewing the guards.
“I told Your Highness this would be a problem,” Baltazar said in low tones.