Perhaps Pinch had inherited more from his father than he ever knew, for when he finally pulled himself away from the horror that faced him, he did not give up. The choice came to him-to end it, though he was uncertain just how a lich might die-but he rejected that plan in favor of another. So long as Manferic walked, there was hope that he could force the creature to reverse what it had done. If he died trying, he could certainly be no worse than he was now.

Determination filled him, gave him a glint of the light that had filled Manferic's eyes. Holding back the disgust that it filled him with, the rogue tested his new body, rose to his feet, and resolved to repay the monster for what it had done.

It did not matter where it had gone wearing his own shell; there was only one place he could go in its. That was back underground. If Manferic was wandering the halls of the place, he could not follow. His last hope lay in Ikrit. If Tymora spun her wheel and it favored him, the rogue knew he just might be able to track Manferic's brute servant back to the dead king's lair.

Shuffling to the secret passage and shedding soft blobs of his borrowed body, Pinch forced the wall open and set off in search of his prey. As he descended the steps, his mind eagerly sought out the grandest punishment for vile Manferic it could devise.

Walking Dead

The first thing the regulator noticed as he eased himself down the narrow staircase was the uncanny brightness of the place. Then he realized he hadn't brought candle or lantern with him. There was at least one advantage to having the lich's body, though it hardly compensated for the crime wrought upon him.

The next thing Pinch noticed was how much easier it was to track. He understood now how the quaggoth moved through the tunnels so easily. The dark passages had the appearance of an overcast day.

The question was, where had the beast gone? The creature had a considerable head start and could have chosen any number of paths. The rogue's only resource, the dust-laden floor, was a useless guide now. It was all churned and muddied by comings and goings till it was far beyond his ability to read anything in it.

In this the rogue's luck held, for the quaggoth was just in sight. The great white beast was ambling down the passage, not imagining it was being followed.

The second fortunate thing was that being dead had not robbed Pinch of all his skills. He still knew to creep and skulk about, though knowing was not the same as doing. It was one thing to know how to step lightly, but the rogue wasn't sure he could get the rotting hulk that was his prison to cooperate. There was only one way to know, and that was by trying. He set out as light-footed as he could, but in his desire for stealth every noise was agonizingly magnified. There was no time to gain a proper body sense of the lich, so every move was accompanied by a cluster of scrapes and bumps even the dullest novice could have avoided-and Pinch especially if he had been in his own flesh. His bone-bare feet went scritch-scritch over the hard stone. Little bits of his body splashed softly splashed into the puddles at the wet spots. They weren't loud noises, but they were loud enough to Pinch's ear and pride.

Nor did they pass unnoticed. Several times Ikrit stopped and eyed his back trail suspiciously, even at moments when Pinch swore he made no noise. The beast wrinkled his broad nose, and that's when Pinch realized he had another complication.

The corpse stank. It was "the corpse" and not himself-the rogue refused to accept Manferic's body as his new identity. He remembered that Manferic's body could foul the air of a perfumery. The body's nose was apparently immune to its own fetor, for he could not catch a whiff of it, but apparently the quaggoth was not immune. Now not only did he have to be stealthy, he apparently also had to remain upwind of his prey. If not, he'd be the first thief ever discovered by his stench. Not the epitaph he wanted on his grave, that was for certain!

The stalking game of cat and mouse continued, although it was never clear who was the cat and who the rodent. Ikrit stopped far too frequently to suit Pinch yet never seemed to tumble to the rogue's presence. It was almost as if the quaggoth were hearing something else that eluded Pinch's dulled ears. The result was a maddeningly slow pace for the thief. He was of the utter conviction that time counted for everything, that his body had to be regained by the coronation. After that, reaching Manferic/Janol/Cleedis-it was impossible to choose a single name for the lich-would be well-nigh impossible. The privileges of the palace would surround the creature, and between the guards and the lich's spells it would be impossible to get close to the dread lord. Pinch's mind had already plotted that the best hope lay in the sheltering confusion of the festival. The lich was most apt to be distracted now before its triumph was complete.

But what then? Assuming he found Manferic, how was Pinch supposed to get his body back? The rogue had no idea. Manferic certainly wasn't going to give it up easily, not after all the trouble he'd gone to just to collect it, and Pinch had no spells to force the issue. Damnation, he wasn't even sure what had happened to him! All he had was his faith in improvisation, the belief that if somehow he saw his way through, something would give him a chance.

There was only one problem with his determined optimism. Ikrit wasn't cooperating. With his improved eyesight and his past experience, Pinch knew enough to say the ape-thing wasn't bound for Manferic. It was avoiding all the tunnels Pinch remembered and plunging into areas the thief did not recognize. Admittedly, there was only so much he could remember about darkened stone, but the haze of dust clearly meant that no one had passed this way in recent time.

This was not good, but what could he do? Short of marching through the halls of the palace, Ikrit was his only lead. He had to follow where the beast led.

Thus he was trailing the creature, slipping into a crack in the catacomb wall when it paused for the hundredth time, that Pinch was caught unawares. As he was peering carefully from his shallow hiding place, the angry buzz of a hornet sang loudly in his sense-clogged ears. A shadow hurtled past and skipped onto the stone between him and the quaggoth with a rattling clatter.

As the thief was held prisoner by amazement, trying to fathom what had just happened, the silence was rent by cries of war. Ahead of him, doing all things at once, the quaggoth bellowed with bloody rage, dropped into half-doubled crouch, and charged, talons bared, straight down the corridor for him.

Gods pluck a rose, Pinch panicked, he's seen me! With his instinct to run in full alarm, the regulator spun about as quick as the rickety body would let him-

And came nigh-on face-to-face with two hundred-plus pounds of charging dwarven hate. The barrel-chested, black-bearded little man had cast aside a crossbow and was in the act of whirling an iron-studded mace over his head for a furious blow. "Death to the king!" Iron-Biter roared.

Pinch flopped his decrepit body back into the niche in which he'd sheltered. He was barely fast enough. Just in front of him, all forces collided in the narrow passage. Iron-Biter's mace hit the wall scant inches from the rogue's forehead. Stone ripped in sharp splinters and ricocheted around his head. The shards tore into Ikrit's outstretched arms as the quaggoth slammed into the stocky dwarf like a brawling stevedore. The impact flung the dwarf backward, and it was only his warblood, which even a surplice couldn't change, that gave him the determination to hold his footing. Ikrit slashed with his broken claws, ripping ragged gashes through the dwarf's armor. Blood leaked over the rent chain mail.