The Spine of the World - By R. A. Salvatore Page 0,117

refusing to meet any gaze.

"Fetch Liam," Lord Feringal yelled. Behind Wulfgar, a soldier rushed out of the room, returning a moment later with an old gnome.

"Oh, be sure it is," the gnome said, coming around to stare Wulfgar right in the eye. "You thinking I won't know you?" he asked. "You got me good, with your little rat friend distracting my eyes and you swinging down. I know you, thieving dog, for I seen you afore you hit me!" He turned to Lord Feringal. "Aye," he said. "He's the one."

Feringal eyed the woman beside him for a long, long time. "You are certain?" he asked Liam, his eyes still on the woman.

"I've not been bested often, my lord," Liam replied. "You've named me as the finest fighter in Auckney, which's why you entrusted me with your lady. I failed you, and I'm not taking that lightly. He's the one, I say, and oh, but what I'd pay you to let me fight him fairly."

He turned back and glared into Wulfgar's eyes. Wulfgar matched that stare, and though he had no doubt he could snap this gnome in half with hardly an effort, he said nothing. Wulfgar couldn't escape the fact that he had wronged the diminutive fellow.

"Have you anything to say for yourself?" Lord Feringal asked Wulfgar. Before the barbarian could begin to reply, the young lord rushed forward, brushing Liam aside to stand very close. "I have a dungeon for you," he whispered harshly. "A dark place, filled with the waste and bones of the previous occupants. Filled with rats and biting spiders. Yes, fool, I have a place for you to fill until I decide the time has come to kill you most horribly."

Wulfgar knew the procedure well by this point in his life and merely heaved a heavy sigh. He was promptly dragged away.

*****

In the corner of the audience hall, Steward Temigast watched it all very carefully, shifting his gaze from Wulfgar to Meralda and back again. He noted Priscilla, sitting quietly, no doubt taking it all in, as well.

He noted the venom on Priscilla's face as she regarded Meralda. She was thinking that the woman had enjoyed being ravished by the barbarian, Temigast realized. She was thinking that, perhaps, it hadn't really been a rape.

Given the size of the man, Temigast couldn't agree with that assessment.

*****

The cell was everything Lord Feringal had promised, a wretched, dark and damp place filled with the awful stench of death. Wulfgar couldn't see a thing, not his own hand if he held it an inch in front of his face. He scrabbled around in the mud and worse, pushing past sharp bones in a futile attempt to find some piece of dry ground upon which he might sit. And all the while he slapped at the spiders and other crawling things that scurried in to learn what new meal had been delivered to them.

To most, this dungeon would have seemed worse than Luskan's prison tunnels, mostly because of its purest sense of emptiness and solitude, but Wulfgar feared neither rats nor spiders. His terrors ran much deeper than that. Here in the dark he found he was somewhat able to fend off those horrors.

And so the day passed. Sometime during the next one, the barbarian awoke to torchlight and the sound of a guard slipping a plate of rotten food through the small slit in the half-barred, half-metal hatch that sealed the filthy burrow cell from the wet tunnels beyond. Wulfgar started to eat but spat it out, thinking he might be better off trying to catch and skin a rat.

That second day a turmoil of emotions found the barbarian. Mostly he was angry at all the world. Perhaps he deserved punishment for his highwayman activities-he could accept responsibility for that-but this went beyond justice concerning his actions on the road with Lord Feringal's coach.

Also, Wulfgar was angry at himself. Perhaps Morik had been right all along. Perhaps he did not have the heart for this life. A true highwayman would have let the gnome die or at least finished him quickly. A true highwayman would have taken his pleasures with the woman, then dragged her along either to be sold as a slave or kept as a slave of his own.

Wulfgar laughed aloud. Yes, indeed, Morik had been right. Wulfgar hadn't the heart for any of it. Now here he was, the wretch of wretches, a failure at the lowest level of civilized society, a fool too incompetent to