“No stone of the passage meshes with those of the chamber!” It was an exclamation of discovery, albeit uttered in a hushed voice.

Darting back into the room, his mind working faster than his hands or feet could move, Gord turned his attention to the high-set sconces, ancient affairs with long prickets for the setting of massive candles. Bronze they were, and each of the four polished too.

“This is the one,” he murmured, noticing that the one immediately to the right of the tunnel entrance was more worn than the other three. Gord gave it a tug, then a push upward, then tried to twist it from side to side. It was unmoving, solid and firmly set.

“This cannot be…” Gord started to lament, his hands still working, and the words were barely out of his mouth when he hit the right combination, first pressing down the spike of the pricket and then pushing upward on the sconce. Accompanied by an almost inaudible grinding, the whole circle of the chamber slowly pivoted through a half-turn. Gord was briefly disconcerted, but because he had half expected something like this, he was not so startled that he forgot to draw his weapons as the chamber turned.

“Who dares intrude in my master’s sanctum?!” It was a question and a challenge at once. The voicing of it caused a foul graveyard odor to fill the little place where Gord stood, the reek nearly gagging him.

There was no choice available to him. Gord’s ears told him the sound of the voice had come from his right. Not eager to be trapped inside the small chamber, he sprang out into the left-hand area of the larger room that the rotation of the chamber had revealed. He hit the ground and spun to face the direction the voice had come from.

The body he saw before him looked at first glance something like a relatively small ogre-a monstrosity with a bulbous, barrel-like torso supported by thick, bowed legs. Its flesh had the pallor of death and a charnel stench to match its appearance. In the next instant he saw an even more gruesome aspect. Long, writhing worms issued from all over the creature’s head-mouth, eyes, ears, nose. They waved blindly. Independently, as If offering their own challenge to the foolish human who had violated this place.

“Hells’ handles!” Gord hissed, springing back in horror from the sight.

That move was fortunate, for the massive thing spat the worms out of its mouth at that moment, and where they fell to the floor the stones hissed and bubbled for a moment. Gord noted with a combination of awe and revulsion that where the things had struck and splattered, the floor was pitted. They were small holes, but if that had been his flesh…

“Hackkahhkk,” the terrible, rotten-fleshed beast coughed. It was bringing up more of the worms from inside its massive chest. And as it did so, it began to lumber toward the young thief, its splayed feet making a meaty, slapping sound on the stone floor.

Gord whirled to his left, slashed out and down with his sword, dived into a somersault, and came up behind the monster’s right shoulder. He was too far away now to strike effectively with either of his weapons, but at least he was safe for a moment.

“Plaaht!” The thing reflexively spat forth another mouthful of the worms, spraying them in an arc that was nowhere near him. Gord saw that but paid no attention. He flashed his gaze toward where he had felt his sword’s blade strike home, needing to know what his slash had done to the foul flesh of the thing’s thick, distended leg.

The yellow-gray flesh had parted under the edge of his weapon, all right, and a wound resembling an open mouth, with its lower lip drooping, was plainly evident there. But the cut shed no blood and oozed no ichor. The squat creature from the pits of the netherworld seemed totally unaffected by the wound. It was now shambling around, turning and hacking deep inside its throat once again.

Gord went into a circling, dancing, diving routine that kept the thing turning and lumbering. After a half-dozen attempts to splatter the young thief with the corrosive worms, the monster gave up that strategy-whether in frustration or because its innards were exhausted of the foul, writhing tubes, Gord neither knew nor cared. During that process he had managed to score several more hits upon the great beast’s legs, but although bone showed when one of these attacks had scored heavily, the monster still came on undaunted.

Now Gord was dismayed, even horrified, to find that the monster had weapons other than its foul worms. From somewhere beneath its mouldering garments the thing pulled forth a pair of sicklelike weapons. Its long arms and the curved blades gave it a reach of some six feet or more on either side. Then it spoke, the first words it had uttered since its initial challenge, while holding the sickles at the ends of its upraised, outstretched arms.

“Now, human, I shall have the pleasure of hacking you into small strips before I feast on your flesh and blood and bones!” Its voice was clogged-sounding, the words slightly mushy, as if the lungs of the creature were rotted and worm-infested too.

The thing was overconfident and, for all its fearsomeness, slow. As it gurgled the last words of its threat, Gord darted in toward the monster’s right side yet again, holding his dagger ready to parry a possible sickle-blow. With a backhand motion of his sword, he chopped at the bone exposed in the monster’s wounded leg and then tumbled away. As he sprang erect behind the creature, he slashed at the leg again and gave a speech of his own.

“Ogre-ghoul! Fiend! Whatever your spawning, I think clean steel will serve to blot your foulness from the world.”

The monster tried to pivot and slash out with the sickle in its left hand at the same time. The blade cut harmlessly through the air just above Gord’s head. Then the thing fell heavily, the weapon in its right hand clattering away as it toppled down upon the stones. The leg that Gord had chopped at repeatedly had finally given way!

As the thing floundered and attempted to support itself on the bloodless stump of its severed leg, Gord leaped in and struck the creature’s neck with all of his strength. The strength of his arms, coupled with the momentum of his leap, gave the short sword tremendous force. Its keen blade cut cleanly through the dead-hued flesh, sheared bone almost as easily, and still had most of its force unspent as it came out the other side of the neck to clang on the stone floor.

The severed head of the foul thing fell to the floor and came to rest a short distance away. A gush of the maggoty worms spouted forth from the body’s severed neck, just as blood fountains from a decapitated corpse. The stream of vile stuff engulfed the ghastly head as the body spewed forth its corrosive contents, and worms and head vanished in a cloud of noisome fumes. The body thrashed and jerked for a couple of minutes while Gord watched it warily, but the thing showed no signs of having regenerative powers. Then the corpse was still.

Carefully avoiding the stinking remains, Gord began a quick search of the area beyond the chamber where the battle had taken place. There were several rooms nearby-in fact, a whole suite of lavishly appointed subterranean chambers fit for the habitation of a great priest of Nerull.

What came next was almost child’s play to Gord. He located the secret repository of the cleric without difficulty, noted its warding signals, and effectively masked them with stuff from the priest’s own sacramental coffer-blue-purple unguent and a dark altar cloth served to mask and negate the forces bound within the sigils that had been enscribed to protect the cleric’s treasury from violation. Hidden needles coated with venom were even more easily blunted, and the locks on the huge coffer were a joke to the young thief. In minutes he had the chest open and its contents exposed for his examination.