Read Online Jak Barley-Private Inquisitor and the Case of the Seven Dwarves by Dan Ehl - Free Book Online Page A

do you know this is the way the assassins retreated?"
    "I can smell them. They passed this way."
    Oh no, I thought, I did get Hound Boy. I tried imagining what I would do if he went to his hands and knees and began sniffing about the floor.
    Snorg must have read something in my expression. He abruptly stopped and ordered, "Breathe deeply, slowly through your nose."
    I was nettled by the delay, but Snorg was intently staring at me and I guessed he would not go on until I had humored him. I drew in a long pull of air through my nose and was just about to impatiently exhale when I stopped and sucked just a bit more air into my lungs. What was that a faint scent that seemed to be lingering in the dank air of the burrow?
    Snorg smiled. "You smell that?"
    I did a few more test snorts and again caught just faint hints of a maddeningly familiar fragrance. "What is it?"
    "It be Old Spice."
    "What?"
    "The balm your friend, Lorenzo Spasm, wears. He gave a glass vessel of it to my grandfather. He said it be used after shaving, though my grandfather has a beard down to his knees," Snorg smiled.
    I now recognized the fragrance as that belonging to Lorenzo, but he had never worn it strong enough to detect other than as a hint. Snorg dropped to his knees and I feared he was going to do a hound boy routine. He instead rubbed a finger on the floor and brought it up to his nose, then offered me a sniff. It was this Old Spice odor, and very stout. My friend must be leaving dribbles of the strange scent as markers. Why couldn't Lorenzo just drop torn pieces of parchment or scratch arrows into the rock walls?
    Without warning, Snorg bolted into action and once again we were on the hunt. Each time we came to branches in the tunnel, Snorg would squat in one entrance then the other until he detected a pointer left by Lorenzo. I even found myself snorting about a side passage I had reached before the dwarf, thanking the fickle gods that no one from the King's Wart Inn was there to see me.
    I gradually became aware that our route was taking us through passages that were more crudely cut into the stone, as well as growing smaller. The air was becoming increasingly musty and the occasional support beams were showing signs of rot.
    We paused as Snorg exchanged the sputtering torch for one of several he had hanging from his belt. I felt unease, as if the walls were pressing in on me. I knew it only to be a whimsy caused by the narrowing of the passages and their growing state of disrepair.
    I bumped into Snorg when he abruptly halted. His torchlight revealed a half-collapsed shaft. We gingerly picked our way over a slide of splintered rocks.
    It was a tight fit at one point that took a bit of squirming. It did not get any better. We found ourselves in a cramped burrow. Snorg could still walk, though with a stooped gait. I was forced to crawl along the rubble-strewn floor. Though the smoke from the torch was making my eyes water, I still hated to think of traversing these shafts without light.
    "What is this?" I asked Snorg as we entered a small room carved from the rock. It was then I noticed a number of bones scattered about. I nervously fingered the hilt of my blade.
    "This be a stable."
    "Stable?"
    "For the ponies that pulled the mine carts," Snorg informed me.
    Pausing to examine remains, I could see the bones were those of very small horses or ponies. The creatures could not have been more than three feet high from hoof to head. Thinking of my own mount, Hazel, I could not help but feel saddened by the thought of the little ponies dying in this dark hole, far away from the wind and green grasses. Those thoughts in turn made me restless. I felt the tons of stone above me pressing down and the air seemed staler and more difficult to breathe. The small airshafts in the ceiling were becoming further apart.
    Snorg must have sensed my discomfort, for he again set off on the search. We came upon several more crossroads, each time pausing to find the scented