Read King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth) for Free Online Page B

“Oh, by the Sword of Agni,” he whispered. “What have I done?”
    He knelt beside Bart and gently lifted his head. The red cap was wet with blood around the rim. He eased it off and saw the ugly cut on Bart’s forehead, near the hairline. The skin was darkening around the cut, and a lump was developing.
    Pong replaced the cap. It would help to stanch the flow of blood. And in any case, it was a bad omen for Bart to be without his emblem of gnomehood. For a while Pong knelt there, consumed with guilt, then it occurred to him that this forest path was probably frequented by giants. He must get Bart out of sight. More, he must get Bart attended to.
    Furthermore, he suddenly noticed a clump of cheesecups lurking at the side of the path, each plant taller than a gnome, waving menacingly. Their tubular flowers were a favorite haunt of the sluglike doodad—a particularly unpleasant gnomish creature. Doodads latched on to you and injected a fluid that turned you into a bag of soup. Then they sucked you dry. They had tremendous sucking capabilities, doodads did. Their skin was infinitely expandable. On Pong’s list of gnomedom’s most fearsome creatures, they ranked second only to the lopster.
    And one was sticking its pale, blind face from a cheese-cup now. The cup trembled as the doodad tensed itself for a leap.
    Hastily Pong dragged Bart out of leaping range and into the bush. The horrible creature plopped to the ground and slid around for a moment or two, then climbed back up the stem, disappointed. Pong deliberated his next move.
    Like most such settlements, Mara Zion gnomedom had its healer: a gnome called Wal o’ the Bottle. Wal was the latest in a long line of hereditary healers, although some said the strain had weakened over the centuries. Certainly Bottle’s patients rarely got better. But then they rarely got worse, gnomes having excellent constitutions. Pong was not sure where Bottlelived, but Fang would know. Hoisting Bart onto his back, he plodded back the way they’d come.
    The pattern of forest paths seemed to have changed since yesterday, with odd forks and intersections that Pong didn’t recall having seen before. Eventually, however, he came to a familiar circle of mushrooms. Fang had once shown him this place and told him it was some kind of a gateway between giantdom and gnomedom. Nyneve, the friendly giant, used it to get from one world to the other.
    Having got his bearings, Pong walked on. Gnomes are physically much stronger than humans in proportion to their size, so Bart did not represent an undue burden. Before long, Pong reached Fang’s dwelling.
    Except that Fang’s dwelling wasn’t there.
    At first he thought he’d come to the wrong place. Alarmed, he examined the nearby trees. They were not the trees he remembered. In particular the giant lurch, beneath whose roots Fang’s home had nestled, was nowhere to be seen. In fact, Pong realized, he hadn’t seen a lurch tree anywhere in the forest today.
    And yet it
had
to be the place. There was a moss-clothed granite boulder beside the path, facing south. He and Fang had sat with their backs against it many times, enjoying the sun through the trees. And the little stream where Fang dipped his water flowed nearby, as before. But the lurch was gone, and in its place stood an elm. He could see the dark entrance to a cave where the roots of the elm clutched at the ground, but it was not Fang’s cave. As the dread began to grow within him, he felt the ancient gnomish instinct to crawl into the nearest hole. So he crawled among the roots of the elm, dragging Bart after him. After a while, exhausted from the excitements of the day, he fell asleep.
    When he awakened, it was dark and the forest was alive with night sounds. A soft wind breathed into the cave, bringing unfamiliar smells. Pong wished he was back home where he knew the smells and could identify them. Any one of these sudden warm whiffs could be a gnome-eating animal. Even thelopster was