Soon she was in the rocky foothills, moving more carefully, leaping straight up and lifting higher on beating wings to peer all around for some sign of the spriggan clan.
After many tries and with the sun now nearly halfway to its peak, the demon sat down upon a large boulder and summoned Inchedeeko to send him off to search out the smaller crags and crevices. Soon after that, she brought forth more servants, flying chasme demons, and sent them, too, scouring the mountainsides.
Still, it was nearly dark again when Inchedeeko finally returned with word that they had found some dwarves—spriggans actually—in guard positions along one boulder tumble just to the north.
The quasit led Malcanthet to the place, and the succubus, looking very much like a normal human woman, looking like Queen Concettina, actually, walked onto a flat stone in the midst of the guarded area.
“I seek Toofless and Komtoddy!” she called, her words echoing across the stones.
The response came in the form of a boulder flying for her head. She turned away at the last moment, and purposely let it just clip her. That sent her spinning, and she dropped to the stone as if it had been a lethal hit.
Malcanthet remained there, trying to hide her sneers and growls. She heard the heavy footsteps of her assailants nearing, and heard one giant mutter, “Bah, but ye killed her!”
She let the spriggans come closer. One even moved up and kneeled beside her, rolling her to see if she was alive.
He met her open eyes and she looked past him only for a moment to see the other half-dozen brutes climbing up onto the rock.
“Your friend there tried to hurt me,” she whispered to that giant, her voice thick with magic. “To make me ugly. You do not wish me to be ugly …”
“ ’Ere, but why’d ye trow da rock!” the kneeling brute yelled, leaping up and spinning to face another of the clan. “Ye stupid goblin!”
“Who’s ye callin’ a gobbler?” the other retorted, poking a finger at the first.
Malcanthet rolled to a sitting position, smiling at the spectacle.
“Hey, but she’s up!” a third behemoth said, but that didn’t stop the one who had first gone to her, the one she had charmed, the one outraged beyond all reason at the brute who had tried to mar this most beautiful creature in all the world. So the charmed brute punched the finger-pointer right in the mouth, and tackled him as he staggered backward, the two of them rolling right off the stone.
A couple of others started for the pair to break up the row, but stopped fast at the crack of a whip and the crackle of a thunderbolt.
The giant hit by that whip bowed awkwardly to the side and crumbled to the ground. He tried to rise but flopped like a fish on land, unable to control half his body
“Ah, ye dog!” the nearest spriggan yelled, and threw a stone at the woman’s face.
She slapped it aside, and when the brute followed up with a charge to bury her, she extended her free hand and stopped him as surely as if he had run into the side of a mountain. She closed her hand, bending his armor and pinching his skin under it. Then she casually threw him off to the side, launching him spinning through the air.
Her whip cracked again and the next nearest giant’s face ripped open. That spriggan, too, dropped straight to the stone, gurgling and rocking in uncontrollable spasms.
“Take me to Komtoddy and Toofless now!” the succubus demanded. “Or I will find them myself and present them with your severed heads!”
As she threatened, a swarm of chasme descended over the area, wings humming, grotesque, bloated human faces leering hungrily at the spriggans.
Unsurprisingly, Malcanthet didn’t hear any further argument.
“UH OH,” PIKEL said when Ivan crashed through their cottage door, the dwarf tumbling in and nearly falling on his face.
“Aye,” Ivan told his brother and Regis, who was sitting at the dinner table, a full plate before him. “Ye get out, both o’ ye. Get out and get runnin’!”
“Oooo.”
“Running where?” Regis asked, starting to rise, pausing, taking one last bite, then hopping from his seat.
“Something … bad,” Ivan stammered, and Regis helped him to a chair. “Something bad and they’re knowin’ I’m in it, and deep.”
“They found Wulfgar,” the halfling breathed.
“Oooo,” said Pikel.
“Nah, not them, but someone … something, and something bad,” Ivan tried to explain. “The queen—she ain’t the queen! No, some demon thing.”
“Huh?” Pikel and Regis asked together.
Ivan settled and patted his hand in the air to silence them. “Them guards came runnin’ like they knew Wulfgar was in there,” he explained. “They crashed through the queen’s door and found her, or something that looked like her, but with wings like a bat and horns, and with a whip that took ’em—took us, down like nothing I e’er seen, I tell ye!”
“Oooo,” said Pikel.
“And she had a mirror, and I seen Wulfgar in it!”
“His reflection,” said Regis.
“No, him … inside,” Ivan explained. “And she took it and flew out the window. Came down right in the garden, not far outside from here, but jumped away and flew out over the north wall. She got Wulfgar, whatever she might be, and ye got to get to her, and now.”
“We,” Regis corrected.
“Me brudder!” shouted Pikel.
“Nah, not me,” Ivan said, shaking his head. “They’re knowin’ and they’re comin’. Was meself who let Wulfgar in that room—if they knew he was in there, they’re knowin’ who put him there.”
“You can’t know that,” said Regis, but even as he spoke, a call of “Ivan Bouldershoulder!” sounded not far from the house.
Pikel whistled at a vine hanging by the door, and the plant swung a length, hit the door, and sent it swinging closed.
“I can put ’em off, but ye got to find out where that thing went runnin’,” Ivan explained. “I can tell ’em Wulfgar went in there to expose the demon, and if we can figure where the fiend went, they’ll be thankin’ me, not cuttin’ off me head!”
“Oooo, me brudder,” said Pikel.
“Go, go, go,” Ivan urged, pushing Regis and his brother toward a large plant at the side of the kitchen, one whose considerable pot had no bottom, by design.
“Go where?” Regis asked. “They’re right outside.”
But Pikel took the halfling by the hand and reached for the plant with the stump of his other arm. In an instant, even as the cottage door began swinging in, Pikel and Regis were pulled into the plant, traveling down its stem to the roots, then to connecting roots carrying them along and out into the garden.
They came out in the tangle of a lilac bush, and looked back to see Ivan being tugged out of the house, his hands bound behind his back.
“Grr,” said Pikel, moving, but Regis pulled him back under the leafy cover.
“The best thing we can do for your brother—”
“Me brudder!”
“Shh!” Regis begged. “Yes, the best thing we can do for your … for Ivan, is to find this … this … this whatever it was that took Wulfgar.”
Pikel wagged his head in agreement, but then crinkled his nose as if in disgust.
“What do you know?” the halfling asked.
“Stinky,” said Pikel and he climbed out of the lilacs and began hopping in circles.
“They’re not that bad,” Regis said, contorting out behind him and indicating the lilacs.
“No no no no,” said Pikel, and he rushed in a wide arc, then stopped and sprinted to a spot, pointing to the ground and repeating, “Stinky.”
When Regis got there, he saw the scar where a patch of garden grass was dead and rotted. He was about to say that it made no sense, as the rest of the lawn was healthy, but then he realized what Pikel was so excited about.
It was a footprint.
The demon imposter that took Wulfgar had left a trail that the plants knew about.
And Pi
kel could talk to plants.
“GIVE ME THE gemstone,” Malcanthet insisted.
Toofless Tonguelasher and Komtoddy exchanged nervous glances. How did this fiend know their names? She had asked for them specifically.
She thrust her hand out to Toofless emphatically. “I know you have it in your pocket,” the succubus said. “This body senses its rightful inhabitant and leads me to you. I will have it now, or I will tear you apart and take it.”
The spriggan was more than twice the succubus’s height, but had no doubt that she could do just that, to say nothing of the group of grotesque demons that looked like a cross between a human and a housefly that crawled about the ceiling. Toofless reached into his pocket and produced the gemstone that held the trapped soul of Queen Concettina.
“I need a chamber,” Malcanthet said. “When will the drow return?”
Again the spriggans exchanged confused looks, and both shrugged when they looked back at Malcanthet.
“Idiots,” she said. “What is the finest chamber in your complex? Lead me there at once, and know that I will scour the whole of this place in the coming days and if I find one more appropriate, I will furnish it with spriggan-skin rugs.”
The two spriggans had heard enough of the fight out on the rock to realize that she could, and probably would, do exactly that. So they led the demon off at a great pace to the lower levels of the Damaran side of Smeltergard. They moved swiftly and confidently to a specific room they had been fashioning for themselves.
Its door was iron-bound and made of a rich, green-gray stone flecked with bits of stark red: the bloodstone that gave this region its name. Toofless fumbled with a large key ring, locating the one for this particular door, which he began to insert into the keyhole.
But Malcanthet stopped him, roughly yanking the keychain from his hand and shoving him aside, a push that sent him skidding away. She considered the key, then another that seemed identical, and held that one out to the spriggan.
“Aye, dat one, too,” Toofless confirmed.
Malcanthet grabbed the two keys in her hands, held them out to opposite sides, and pulled the ring apart. The torn ring and dozens of other large iron keys bounced noisily to the floor.
“Are there any others that will fit this door?” the succubus demanded.
The spriggans shook their heads vigorously.
“See that I am not disturbed,” said Malcanthet. “Ever!”
The spriggans nodded emphatically.
Malcanthet unlocked the bloodstone door and swung it open, but paused before entering to look back at the intimidated pair. “Unless the Hunzrin drow return,” she said. “Then inform me.”
The two were still nodding when she slammed the door behind her.
Inside, the succubus found a large and roughly oval chamber comfortably lit by lichen and by some glowworms on the ceiling high above. The walls had been scraped and smoothed to minimize the shadows, and a chimney had been fashioned from the lone stalagmite-stalactite formation in the chamber, across from the door just more than halfway to the back wall. Its base had been shaped into an open hearth, with a pile of peat and logs nearby.
She could work with this, Malcanthet thought, scanning the place. Her gaze settled on the right-hand curving wall of the chamber and the most dominant and appealing feature of all: an underground pool some twenty feet across, the water still but clear enough for the demon to see fish occasionally flitting near the surface in the dim lichen and glowworm light.
She wasted no time in hanging her leering mirror over the hearth, facing the door, a suitable trap for any intruders.
She kicked a few logs into the hearth and created a ball of furiously burning flame in her upraised palm, then threw it in. The fireplace exploded into fiery life. And that served as the physical manifestation of Malcanthet’s magical gate, which she first used to bring back Inchedeeko. The quasit came bearing gifts: her favorite dress, a black and red affair that crossed at her chest and hips, but was joined at those two places only by fabric on one side, leaving most of her stomach, her legs, and her arms bare.
Seduction was often her strongest play.
Inchedeeko brought her magical rings, her magical bracers, the necklace that stored spells, and her protective cloak.
“Search the pool and see that there are no threats within,” she ordered, and the quasit leaped away.
Malcanthet rubbed her fingers and called again to the lower planes. This time, a large, vulture-like demon with a hooked beak and clawed arms hopped forth from the flames.
“Outside the door,” she told the vrock. She summoned a second one soon after to stand guard with the first.
She brought in the chasme from the hallway and sent them through the flaming gate in the other direction, back to the Abyss, to fetch her belongings.
“Yes,” she said when the buzzing fiends had gone, and she nodded. Already the chamber seemed more comfortable to her.
She could enjoy her visit here.
“UG,” PIKEL SAID to Regis, and the halfling understood to add “ly” to the truncated word.
The two crouched behind a wall of broken stones, staring down at the yawning entrance to a deep cave—a mining operation, they assumed from the piles of dark stone chips and dirt all about the tunnel. Goblins came up every so often, usually bearing another cart full of waste.
As ugly as the goblins were, though, Regis realized that Pikel was talking about the other creatures milling about. Some were giants, some dwarves, and all equally filthy and misshapen.
“Oooo,” the pair said together when one giant moved to the side, trembling, his bones shaking violently and cracking with loud popping sounds as he shrank down to become, to their astonished eyes, a dwarf.
“How?” Regis whispered.
“Spriggan,” Pikel answered, but Regis had no idea what that might mean except, of course, that Pikel had seen what he had just witnessed: the creature in front of them, other than the goblins at least, could change their size dramatically, from dwarf to giant, and quickly, and with their armor and other items appropriately shifting to accommodate the new size.
The two crouched back down behind the rocky berm.
“You are sure?” Regis asked quietly. “The demon creature went into that cave?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe she went by it,” the halfling reasoned, trying to avoid having to sneak in there.
But Pikel quickly retorted, “Uh-uh,” shaking his head emphatically.
“We should go back and tell the king,” Regis remarked.
“Uh-uh,” Pikel insisted, wagging his finger at the halfling.
“I don’t know how we can get in there,” Regis replied. He shifted and peeked once more over the berm, noting the dozens of dwarves and giants. “They’ve got the place fully guarded …”
He stopped when Pikel tugged at his arm, and when he looked at the dwarf, Pikel motioned to some trees beside the rocky entrance, on the side of the mound and down the side of the mountain.
The dwarf winked and led Regis away, taking a circuitous route to the copse. Grasping Regis’s hand fully, Pikel started for the nearest tree.
“No, we can’t,” Regis whispered emphatically. “We might come up in the middle of a hundred of them!”
But Pikel just giggled and cast his spell, and he and Regis went right into the nearest tree and fell into another disconcerting root slide, flowing down through the rocks and to a darker place. They came out the exposed end of one root, some ten feet from the floor, and dropped down hard to a mossy bed.
Collecting himself, Regis took a deep breath of relief to discover that they were alone in this stretch of passageway. But that relief proved short-lived, for the sound of gruff voices came at them from around a close bend.
“Pikel!” the halfling breathed, and he tapped his beret, his form twisting and shifting in aspect and in hue, disguising him with the facade of a goblin.
“Hee hee hee,” said Pikel, and before Regis could warn him t
o hide, and just before the approaching monsters came around the bend, the dwarf giggled and snapped his fingers, and in his place stood a mangy-looking dog, with one of its forelegs stubbed to match the dwarf’s arm.
“You can do that?” Regis breathed, his eyes seeming as if they might just roll out of their sockets. Pikel had always called himself a druid, and so he was, and amazingly accomplished at it, it would seem!
Pikel’s hackles went up and he began to growl as around the bend came a pair of goblins. They paused, clearly caught by surprise, and both settled their gazes on the dog.
One addressed Regis, though he could hardly understand the guttural language, given the dialect and the speed with which the little wretch was speaking. Regis did pick out the goblin word for “dinner,” though whether the goblin was talking about dinner for the dog or of the dog, he couldn’t quite be certain.
The latter, he thought, so he responded with a stern denial. Apparently Pikel had understood as well, Regis noted, for that little dog could certainly growl.
The goblins backed away a step, but just a step, and both brought forth mining picks.
Regis grabbed his dog by the tuft of its neck and held up his other hand to diffuse the situation.
“The dog is nervous since she returned,” he said in his best goblin, which he knew wasn’t very good.
The goblins eyed him suspiciously and did not relax, making him wonder if he’d said what he’d meant to say.
“She,” Regis reiterated, and he lifted his arms out to the side to mimic great wings.
Both goblins nodded, and one asked him a question.
“She brought us,” Regis answered. He thought the creature wanted to know who he was or why he was here, or, likely, both. “I am to deliver to her this demon dog,” he improvised, “but I cannot find her.”
The goblins looked at the three-legged dog with clear suspicion.
“Demon dog?” one asked.