The Savage Caves

16

Naull looked around, unsure what to do, then looked at the goblin. The little humanoid was looking around quickly as well, but when their eyes met, he grunted at her in a way that made Naull think he was speaking to her, then he slid into the still water of the little pool next to the cage.

The sight gave Naull a chill, and she shivered in the cool subterranean air, but she got the message: hide.

She had no intention of getting wet again, and there was the narrow passage she and Regdar had passed through when they’d first discovered the cages. It was a dark, confined space, and she backed into it quickly until she was cloaked in inky darkness.

She could see five goblins—all armed—accompanied by three of the huge brown spiders. She couldn’t help thinking she recognized one of the goblins.

The party paused in front of the cages, barking guttural grunts at each other, then they continued on, chasing the freed prisoners up the wide cave. Naull waited until their footsteps were barely audible echoes before she slipped out of the darkness.

The goblin came up out of the water, shivering and looking even more wretched and desperate than before. He looked at her, obviously waiting for Naull to make the first move.

In response, the young mage held both of her hands, palm out, and said, “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

She felt ridiculous for even speaking to a goblin whom she knew didn’t understand the Common Tongue, but she didn’t know what else to do. Strangely enough, the goblin tilted his head at her, almost seeming to understand. The gesture must have been just universal enough to assuage his fears.

Naull held her hand in front of her and tried to make the shape of Regdar in the air.

“The big guy,” she said. “My friend? The big human guy with the giant sword?”

She pointed down the cave in the direction of the goblin community, the fighting pit, and Regdar. The goblin glanced back in the direction she indicated then grunted at her in a questioning manner.

Naull stepped forward, trotting past him pumping her arms to indicate that they should run. She felt like a fool, but again, the goblin seemed to get the message. He let loose a long string of grunts, waving his arms in front of him in some odd pantomime that Naull couldn’t figure out at all.

“Come on,” she said, moving into the darkness.

The goblin grabbed the torch that was stuck in the wall next to the pool, and when Naull started running down the middle of the descending cave floor, he followed alongside her with grim determination.

They might have gone forty yards—passing two more little pools and the pitch-black entrance to a side-passage that made Naull feel strangely uneasy—when the goblin stopped.

The cave narrowed dramatically to less than ten feet, and as they passed through, a huge, hairy, gray-skinned arm reached out from behind a curve in the rock wall and smashed into the goblin’s chest. Naull skidded to a halt, almost losing her footing, just as the big hobgoblin stepped out in front of her, a remarkably well-crafted mace in one hand and her goblin companion in the other. He smiled at her in a way that made Naull want to scream.

“I don’t think they climbed down there,” Lidda said, standing at the edge of a sheer ten-foot drop on one side of the enormous cave. “Naull isn’t really a climber, and Redguy seems to take a more direct approach.”

Jozan sighed, peering into the darkness beyond the edge of Lidda’s lanternlight. There was a narrow opening to what looked like some sort of side-passage at the bottom of the depression. Regdar and Naull could easily have fit through, but Jozan thought Lidda was probably correct in her assumption that “Jump!” Lidda stage-whispered.

Jozan surprised himself by actually jumping off the edge. He hit the stone floor hard but managed a roll that surprised him more than the fact that he jumped. He scrambled to his feet, unhurt.

He had heard the sudden cacophony of echoing footsteps increasing in volume and intensity. It was obvious that whatever was coming was coming toward them. Jozan knew that his first reaction wouldn’t have been to jump off the edge and hide while whatever it was ran past. He felt embarrassed and more than a little angry.

“Lidda,” he hissed, looking up.

The halfling was hanging by her fingertips from the sharp edge of the drop-off. The distance between her feet and the floor was easily as tall as Jozan, if not a few inches taller.

Lidda turned her head enough to see him and winked. “I didn’t mean all the way…” she whispered.

Jozan opened his mouth to chastise her when the footsteps, mixed with guttural grunts and barks the priest recognized as goblin speech, moved past them.

Lidda bent her arms, lifting herself up just enough to peek over the edge, and Jozan moved as quickly and as quietly as he could to press his back against the wall. He could see Lidda’s head turn from the direction they had been headed, back to the direction of the waterfalls. She was obviously following a group of running goblins.

When the sound started to fade again into muddier echoes, Lidda looked down and said, “They looked scared.”

Jozan scanned the wall for any kind of hand- or toe-hold and found one he thought would help him boost himself up to the edge. His mind raced through the many things he wanted to yell at Lidda for.

“Two-to-one says Riptare’s down that way,” the halfling said, looking off in the direction the running goblins had come from.

The longer Regdar walked and the faster he pushed himself, the more his right leg actually loosened up. He heard and saw no sign of Naull or the goblin until he came up under the sinkhole that they’d climbed down from the cages.

A torch was laying on the floor, its flame reduced to a trace of orange glowing around the black stub. The thing had left a trail of scorched rock, and it looked to Regdar as if the torch had rolled from its original position. When he realized where the thing had rolled to, he hissed a sharp curse.

The torch had rolled into the spidersilk ladder. All that was left of the ladder was a length of the creamy white rope hanging a good two feet out of Regdar’s reach. The floor below it was littered with ash. The light from Regdar’s torch barely reached the rim of the sinkhole.

He scanned around him, but there was no way to climb it—not fast, and not in armor.

That’s when he heard the scream.

“Naull,” he said aloud, then cursed the burned ladder again.

He was sure it was the young mage who’d screamed, but the only choice he had was to go deeper down the narrow passage and hope it came out someplace he might recognize—someplace close to Naull.

Jozan was just pushing himself over the edge of the drop-off when the shrill scream echoed through the air around him. Startled, he almost lost his grip and fell back down into the depression.

“That was Naull,” Lidda said, concern creasing her grimy face.

Jozan wanted to tell her that she couldn’t be sure, that it might be a goblin, or anyone else but Naull, but he couldn’t.

He climbed up and got to his feet. Lidda skipped past him, then stopped a couple yards away, in the center of the big cave.

“Can you tell which way it was coming from?” the priest asked.

The halfling had her head cocked to one side, obviously listening, and she held up a finger.

Jozan had to work hard to remain silent, but he managed it.

“I think…” the halfling finally whispered. “I think…”

She glanced at the mouth of another side-passage on the other side of the cave, then back down the wider main tunnel.

“Naull?” she called into the darkness.

Jozan heard footsteps approaching, but with the echoes he couldn’t tell how many, how big, or even what was approaching. Either way, Naull didn’t answer. He hefted his mace and set his feet apart —and a goblin brushed right past him, yelping, obviously as surprised to see the priest as the priest was to see it.

Tzrg was so used to being scared that when he practically ran into the human, he wasn’t as terrified as he would normally have been, he was just sort of startled. For a moment, the goblin thought it was the same huge, armored human who had killed Rezrex’s pet ksr, but as Tzrg slid to a stop he saw the human’s mace, remembered that the other one had a really big sword, and knew that this was a different human.

Tzrg had never seen a human in his life, now there were two in one day. He couldn’t imagine that they were friends of the Cavemouth Tribe but if not, why would they be down there?

Maybe Rezrex had some old enemies. Tzrg had no trouble believing that.

The human brought his mace down toward Tzrg, who put his own sword up in front of his forehead to parry the blow. The mace banged into his sword with enough force to bend the rusty old blade almost in half. Tzrg’s arm followed the blow down and spun around out of control, almost hard enough to dislocate his shoulder.

Tzrg stepped back, holding in a scream so that Pwmk—one of his few remaining sergeants—and the less capable warriors Pvpj, Lkrt, and Kspf wouldn’t see him further humiliate himself.

The fact that Pwmk was with him, chasing down the freed Cavemouth prisoners, was a small consolation. Pwmk could fight and usually didn’t run away unless he got hurt. The other three, especially Lkrt, were undisciplined cowards-goblins after Tzrg’s own heart.

It didn’t surprise Tzrg to see Lkrt running right past the human, continuing on his way in the wake of the fleeing prisoners, but he was surprised to see the female. She looked like a human, but was much shorter—goblin sized—but ugly: smooth and kind of pink, with weird hair and tiny, unsettlingly alert eyes. She had a lantern, and Tzrg cursed his rash inattention at not having noticed that they were running into light past where they usually maintained torches.

Pwmk and Pvpj ran up to the female, obviously making to grab her, expecting no resistance. Tzrg hoped this little human was as timid as a goblin female. One of the hive spiders was on the floor in back of them, another on the wall behind them and to their left, and the third scuttled up next to Kspf, who was, as usual, taking up the rear.

The armored human said something in their impossibly complex, sing-songy tongue and swung his mace at Tzrg again. This time, Tzrg ducked and stabbed at the human from under his guard.

If his sword wasn’t bent in half, it might have had a chance of scratching the man’s armor, but instead it slid across the human’s steel-encased thigh with a painfully shrill screech of metal on metal.

From between the human’s legs, Tzrg could see the female kick Pvpj in the danglies—hard enough to drop him. Pwmk stabbed at her with his javelin, but Tzrg didn’t see if he managed to run her through or not. The armored human swiped across with the heavy mace in a backhanded attack Tzrg never saw coming. The giant weapon punched into his chest, driving the air from the goblin’s lungs. Tzrg tried to take a breath, but couldn’t. He took two steps backward, wondering what was causing all the flashing lights, then he blinked and felt as if the world was spinning around and around. He heard a high-pitched scream, thought it might be him screaming, then fell face first to the hard, cold stone floor of the cave, all the while hoping he would be dead soon.

Regdar heard a woman scream, “Ow!” but in the confines of the narrow side-passage it sounded more like: “Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow…

When that was followed by “You son of a bitch!” he knew it was Lidda, and he ran faster.

The tunnel ended all at once, and he came out into a wider space with a much higher ceiling—one well out of the edge of his torchlight. In front of him was a flat stone wall, and Regdar barely managed to skip to a stop—his wounded right leg protesting the maneuver with jolts of wicked pain—in time to keep from crashing into it.

Something about the wall seemed familiar, and all at once he remembered passing the steep depression in the side of the cave, not long after he and Naull had come out of the waterfalls and before they found the caged goblins.

Regdar looked up and saw Jozan standing on the edge of the drop-off above him. He heard the sounds of someone fighting, but couldn’t see Lidda. Jozan, who didn’t see Regdar, moved away from the edge with a purpose to his stride. Regdar could hear his loud, clanging footsteps recede at a run, then a goblin grunted and more sounds of battle echoed in the cave.

Regdar found a convenient toe-hold in the wall and, still holding his greatsword in his right hand, boosted up enough to grab the edge with his left hand.

He heard Lidda grunting and growling like a goblin, and there was the unmistakable tap-tap-tap of one or more of the spiders echoing through the cave as well. Regdar lifted himself up with a grunt and rolled over the edge, brushing past the fallen form of a goblin that was laying on its back, wheezing, its eyes rolled up into its skull.

Lidda was standing over another fallen goblin, this one rolling on the cave floor with its hands clutched between its legs. She’d taken a nasty cut on her right shoulder, and the blood on the tip of the javelin of the goblin facing her made the source of the wound obvious. She was batting the javelin away with her short sword, but this goblin had a fierce, almost confident look in its eyes, and Regdar was worried for the halfling.

Jozan, meanwhile, was making fast work of another goblin on the other side of the cave, at the far edge of Lidda’s lanternlight. That goblin looked more concerned with escape than fighting back, and Jozan took it down fast enough.

Regdar ran toward Lidda, purposely not saying anything for fear he would startle her into letting her guard down. She parried another jab from the goblin’s javelin, then another goblin, with a spider on each side of it, moved up toward her.

Regdar kept running and blew past Lidda close enough that her long braid whipped against his armor. The goblin who had cut her looked up only a second before Regdar ran it right over. The fighter stumbled as he trampled the goblin. He heard bones crack, and knew they were the goblin’s bones. To keep from injuring himself he had to fall into a roll.

The goblin who had been coming up behind squealed and jumped away, almost tripping over its friend that was still more concerned with the pain between its legs.

Regdar rolled onto his back and threw out his left arm to stop himself.

“Regdar!” Lidda squealed, obviously happy enough, or surprised enough, to use his real name.

He was about to chide her for that when something fell on his head. Sharp, pointed things scratched at his face, and he realized it was one of the spiders. He grabbed it with his left hand and saw the thing’s hideous mouth only inches from his face—then the tip of a steel blade even closer. He threw his head back to avoid being skewered in the eye and threw the spider off him.

“Careful,” he growled when he scrambled to his feet and saw Lidda stepping on the spider’s back, trying to pull her sword out of the thing’s twitching body.

“You’re welcome, Ratmor,” she said with a smile, and her blade came free.

Ignoring her, Regdar turned to the last standing goblin. He had to run several fast steps to catch up to the fleeing humanoid, but when he did, Regdar grabbed the goblin by its loose, ragged shirt, and smashed its face into the cave wall. Blood and teeth marked the impact, and the goblin went limp.

“Regdar,” Jozan said from behind him, “where’s Naull?”