All of them looked at Gord. He nodded a curt agreement. "Very well, I suppose that will do. You have our man under surveillance?"
"Yes. Various of our operatives keep watch on his quarters night and day, and he is followed most discreetly wherever he goes. I don't believe that this... Gravestone? Undron Nalvistor?... has noticed any of it, either."
The substance of that last claim seemed quite unlikely to Gord, but he made no comment. "You can tell me then, at any given time, just where our object of interest is?"
"Yes, but the appropriate observer will have to be contacted first, of course."
"And you, wizard Allton — is there anything you can add?"
The man shook his head, looking squarely at Gord with his large, intelligent eyes of deep brown. "I came to this city only a few days ago at the behest of my lord, Tenser. Until this very night, I have avoided contact with anyone connected to the organization, so as to remain invisible to the foes of Balance. I know who — and what — we seek, and I am happy to be a part of the group who will accomplish the thing," he stated with pride in his tone. Then he paused for a second and added, "Glad too that I have strong allies, for this man is not one I would face alone!"
"Yes," said Gord. "To counter the malign power of this Gravestone, we have swords, stealth, and spells — I hope in sufficient quantity and of such quality that he and his vile servants will fall as grain before a scythe. If he gets an inkling of what we plan, though, that one will have such a force to greet us that we will be meat in his pot." Gord looked around at all their faces after saying that. None of them showed fear.
"I will get Brool," Chert boomed, referring to his great battle axe, "and we can take the scum before sunrise!"
"That's fine, my old comrade," Gord said with a smile that showed he meant to take the fight to their foes soon indeed. "Gellor and I will wait here while you and Curley go to our cache and bring everything there to this inn. You'll draw no attention if you hurry, for it isn't too late for honest folk to be abroad yet in this part of Greyhawk." They had left the hillman's axe and certain other bulky items in safekeeping with a friend, one who knew both Chert and Gord from the old days when the two had practiced their larcenous trade and roistered in the city. His quarters were but a few blocks distant, and the pair could be there and back inside an hour, even with the precaution of a circuitous route and careful observation for possible followers.
"Now, what about you two?" Gord continued, addressing the wizard and the cleric after Chert and Greenleaf had departed. "Do you need to go forth to gather up any materials for the expedition?"
"I am already prepared," All ton said. "What I do not have will probably be useless anyway."
The cleric looked resigned. "I am as ready as I shall ever be for work such as we must face," he ventured. "I have a foreboding feeling about this assault, but I am ready to do my utmost to see to its success. I have said my prayers and meditated, equipping myself thus. And I do have my stout mace," the man concluded, patting the object beneath his robes.
"Do we venture against the demonurgist when the others return?" asked Allton.
"I'll decide that when they come back," Gord responded. "Let's wait to find out what Chert and Curley might have run into before we make a plan of action." Both dweomercraefter and priest agreed that such was sound reasoning, so the four remaining members of the team settled back with their own thoughts to await the return of the big hillman and the half-elven druid and forester.
Not very much later the two came back. Chert lugging a large case and Greenleaf only slightly less burdened. They might well have been travelers laden with the baggage of their sojourning.
"Well?" Gord asked abruptly in greeting.
The thoroughfares are alive with evil ones," the half-elf said as he let his heavy satchel drop.
"Curley's right, Gord," the brawny hillman confirmed. "Every hard-hearted whore and gimlet-eyed cutpurse in Greyhawk is abroad tonight — and not on routine business, either. They're all about cruising to spot something for the thugs lurking in the background. Couldn't be any other reason than us."
"The word got out fast, then," Gellor said with a soft whistle. "Did any of them make you?"
"Pretty unlikely," Greenleaf said with assurance. "I had a cap on, so nobody would spot me as part elven, and Chert does a pretty good job of making himself smaller. My guess is that they have been told to look for a group of six, whether moving as a gang or broken into threes or twos and traveling loosely together. I'm sure they noticed us, but when nobody else was near us, they switched their attention elsewhere."
"Good enough," said Gord. "Judging by the looks of it, I'd say you returned with everything you went for."
"Yes — and then some," Chert replied with a bit of a scowl, hefting the case he had carried back. "Good thing I have such a strong back, or that little straw of yours might have broken it."
"Straw?" Gord was perplexed.
Chert unfastened the straps holding the case shut and pulled forth a weapon the big barbarian had not seen before this evening. "Are you trying to tell me this isn't yours?" he asked. "If I had known that—"
"Gods!" Gord gasped in amazement. "It is my blade! But how... ?"
"It was in our gear, that's all I know," said Chert. "You must have had it well hidden until now."
"Better than you could imagine, Chert," said Gellor with a thin smile.
Gord reached out, took the scabbard, and withdrew the sword it held. The blade was keen, long, and the blackest of black in color. It was the very weapon that had been presumed lost into the hands of Gravestone — the object that had indirectly cost Barrel and Dohojar and the rest of the crew of the Silver Seeker their lives.
"How... ?" Gord asked again, this time directing his gaze to Gellor.
"I could surmise," replied the one-eyed troubador, "but the how of the matter is of no real import right now. The important thing is that the blade has been wrested from the hands of Gravestone and returned to its rightful purveyor. A good sign for the coming contest, I'd venture."
"Possibly," said Gord, reflecting on the near-miracle that had just occurred. Despite Gellor's advice, he wondered just how the sword had been taken from Gravestone — and how many of their allies might have been killed in the effort.
"So let's go after the blaster!" Chert boomed. "I can give Brool some exercise, and you can show the rest of us what that ebony sword can do."
Gord raised a hand as though trying to calm down his companion. "It is also possible, Chert, that our adversary will be even more angered and doubly dangerous now, because he has lost the item that he went to such great trouble to gain. We must be especially cautious."
Chert sighed heavily. "I know what that means," he said. "We all might as well get comfortable." He flopped down on the floor, put his head on the hard leather of the case he'd brought, and closed his eyes.
"What is he saying?" Timmil asked the group at large.
Gord replied. "We can't move as a group tonight without being spotted and Gravestone likely being alerted. We'll wait until sunup to move. He'll not be expecting us to come in broad daylight." With that, he sat down, put his feet up on a low table nearby, and likewise closed his eyes. "Get some rest, everyone. You'll need to be at your best come morning."
In a few minutes all conversation died away. Each man did his best to relax and conserve energy for the coming confrontation. Soon only the sputtering of the lamp's wick as it burned could be heard; then that was drowned out by the barbarian's rumbling snores. One of the six watched the others through slitted eyes, but not one of the five stirred in unnatural fashion. They were, it seemed, strong in mind and firm in their purpose. That pleased the watcher, for although the principal burden of this mission was squarely on his shoulders, he knew he would need the help of all of them to succeed. Thinking that, Gord turned his head a little so that when the sun came up its rays would strike his face through the slats of the shuttered little window. Then, grasping the hilt of the black sword, he let his thoughts drift, and soon he too was asleep.
Chapter 7
AT FIRST GLANCE IT SEEMED a featureless, endless plane — not that anyone would wish to even glance at it in the first place. Its putrid hue was sufficient to make all but the most hardened guts writhe with nausea, the eyes to water, the mind to seek sanity in delusions so as to escape the thought of such an abomination actually existing.
The rotten dun of the plane was far from featureless. It was shot through with veins of stuff that looked like coagulated blood, and craterlike openings dotted here and there resembled massive, open sores in which pools of pus festered. Other portions of the landscape manifested themselves suddenly. Here a wormy thing suddenly rose up, splattering the noisome stuff of the place in reeking gobbets that splattered and rained down for seconds after its upheaval. Then the maggoty monstrosity was sucked back into the corruption, the putrescence absorbing the foul lumps greedily. There first one and then another strange growths shot up. Soon a forest of the ulcerous things had been extruded, so that their angry red and slowly dripping green stood out in stark contrast to the less colorful but no less disgusting flatness from which these excrescencies had been thrust.
In addition to the assault upon the visual and the olfactory senses, so too the very sounds of this place ravaged the ears. Disgusting slobberings, vile smackings and slurpings, terrible rendings competed with a cacophony of shrieks and teeth-paining screeches, accompanied by litanies of hollow groanings and gibberings along with sounds that could only be the slow splintering of bones.
Was this the floor of the lowest hell? No, not that pleasant a place by any means. This was the three hundred sixty-sixth layer of the Abyss, a place called Ojukalazogadit by those who cared to identify it.
As the expanse pulsed and twitched and parts of it grew or shrank, were silent, or gave out their horrid sounds, it geysered forth streams of thick, steaming liquid at unexpected places and of varying colors of revolting sort and appropriate odor. Parts of it took on lives of their own, dashed madly off as if trying to escape the place on stubby, misshapen appendages, only to be swallowed by some suddenly appearing maw or be caught and torn to stinking gobbets of gore by hands that sprang from nowhere.
A monstrous thing heaved itself up from a suppurating morass, wallowed forth, and began to trample and gore the very stuff it had issued from. The place grew lesser monstrosities, things all head and Jaw tusks, hungry answers to the behemoth. In a protracted pursuit and battle, the lesser things brought the greater to bay and devoured it alive, slowly, starting by eating only those portions that were nonvital so that the monstrosity's great bellows of pain and suffering might go on longer. This was Ojukalazogadit at its most splendid.
As the tusked victors howled over their triumph, a volcano thrust itself up nearby and vomited forth a sticky, acidic fluid that was both burning hot and sentient. The viscous tentacles that were spewed out quickly found and engulfed the now gibbering things that had devoured the behemothian monstrosity alive. The searing heat and burning acid had their own sport with the things, and then the plain was again relatively undisturbed. Vapors rose from the scarred place where the eruption had occurred, but even that was soon awash in a slimy lake of ichorous secretion.
Here was a place for demon wars. No king of the Abyss, no demon prince or great lord of Evil could work his will upon the stuff of Ojukalazogadit. The plane was itself a demon of sorts. It was uncontrolled, uncontrollable, and uncaring. Content in its madness to torment and devour itself, Ojukalazogadit heaved and pulsed, changed and re-formed, and quietly enjoyed its utter madness without caring, without feeling a need for revenge — for how can something avenge what it does to itself?
Either unaware or cunning In its insanity, the plane allowed vast armies to come upon it and do battle. And, of course, those not of it who caused it hurt would certainly pay for their deeds. Whether they were still alive or already dead, many of the interlopers would feed Ojukalazogadit before it permitted the survivors — if any — to depart.
This disgusting layer of chaos was also a gateway to many other strata of the abyssal realm. If counting downward made it three hundred sixty-six steps deep, that by no means meant that the law of orderly progression applied to it. Ojukalazogadit touched a dozen other layers firmly and impinged with varying degrees of tenuosity upon as many others. The eleventh and five hundred second were somehow firmly adjacent to it, as were other key strata seemingly above and below the reeking stretch of it. No other plane touched as many others in the whole realm. Thus, no other layer was so important in controlling the Abyss as Ojukalazogadit.
Into its very heart now marched a vast array from the deeper tiers that were the home place of demon-kind: a great mass of awesome proportion and terrible composition. Only demons could abide such a place, and they but for a short time. Nonetheless, march they did toward Ojukalazogadit. They came to conquer — not the place itself, but the other forces that had taken up temporary residence here, as if daring their foes to meet them on this most loathsome and important of battlegrounds.