The Goblin Corps (43 page)

The steps finally stopped in a brief corridor—really more of a narrow room—that itself ended in an ancient wooden door. At least the ceiling was high enough for Belrotha to stand upright; let’s hear it for ceremonial grandeur. “So what’s behind the door?” Cræosh asked their native guide.

“Well,” Josiah said slowly, “we know that there’s a long cavern beyond, that eventually leads to the great altar itself. You’ll see a couple more doors, one on each side of the passage. One leads to a ritual bathing chamber, the other to a series of changing rooms where priests donned their ceremonial garb once they’d been purified. There’s probably not a whole lot of interest in either of them, but—”

“But Emmet could be hiding anywhere,” Gork said.

The druid nodded. “Precisely.”

“All right,” Cræosh said. “Then let’s get this door open and get on with it.”

Josiah assured them, over and over, that however paranoid they were, the druids of old would never have warded the main entryway. It was used too often, there was too much risk of accidental harm. Nevertheless, Katim, Gork, and Gimmol had all gone over the door inch by inch before they were willing to let the others open it. And then, of course, when the young druid tried, he found that the portal was barred or barricaded from the opposite side. No amount of twisting the key or shoving at the door could make it budge so much as an inch.

Cræosh put a hand on the human’s shoulder and pulled him away. “This,” he told Josiah, “is why we carry a magic door-opener.”

“A what?”

“You heard me. A magic door-opener. Belrotha?”

“Yeah?” the ogre asked.

“Open the door.”

Josiah’s shout of protest was completely buried by a resounding crash. Door, bar, brackets, lock, even part of the stone frame hurtled a few dozen yards, landed with a second crash, and skidded a few dozen feet more.

Cræosh blinked the dust from his eyes. The ogre was cupping one fist in the other and spewing a veritable diatribe (which, for her meant more than six words strung together) in her native tongue.

“Hey, you okay?” Gimmol asked, honest concern in his voice.

“Me got splinter in knuckle!” Another moment or two and she’d calmed enough to examine the wound. Gingerly, she plucked a sliver of oak the length of a sewing needle from her skin. “Lucky,” she told the others. “It not go very deep.”

Cræosh shook his head and proceeded into the corridor, dragging the benumbed acolyte behind him. It was the smell he noticed first: a strong scent, musky in a way, combining rot, mildew, and perhaps three or four hundred different types of mold and fungus. It had an edge, that aroma, stabbing at the upper nostrils. The sound of dripping water surrounded them, distorted enough by its own echo that they couldn’t possibly pinpoint the source.

The cave—for indeed it was a cave, despite the ancient druids’ attempts at carving it into a more friendly shape—was wide enough that the circle of torchlight barely brushed the walls. As Josiah had anticipated, each wall boasted a smaller version of the door Belrotha had just obliterated.

“All right,” Cræosh said, once the others had followed them in. “I want…” He stopped as a sudden thought stuck him. “Josiah, which door is which?”

The druid blinked, staring off into the darkness where the formless wooden pulp that had once been a door had disappeared.

“Josiah!” Cræosh smacked him—very, very lightly, as they didn’t want to kill him, not yet—across the face. The acolyte staggered, then shook his head.

“Oh! Umm, ceremonial baths on the left, cloakroom and changing rooms on the right.”

“Okay.” Cræosh mulled that over. “Right. Belrotha, you and Gimmol check out the bath. Everyone else, pick a dressing room. I want this place scoured fast so we can move on.”

The ogre and the gremlin finished quickly enough, having found nothing at all of interest in the bathing chamber. A natural pool, glistening with very cold mineral water, sat in the center of the room, fed by a small waterfall—a “watertrickle,” really—running down the far wall. A thin stone ledge ran around the pool about two feet down, and a ring of rotted wooden benches and stools circled it on dry stone. And that was it. They went to join the others.

Said others, it appeared, might have had a bit more luck. Three of the tiny cubicles—which Josiah laughingly called changing rooms, but which were, as Cræosh put it, “Not even big enough to get hard in”—had proven as boring and useless on the inside as they had appeared without. But Katim and Gimmol, who were searching the northernmost room and the southernmost room, respectively, each found a loose cloak peg on the wall. Both pegs were designed to rotate a half turn to the left, and both of them triggered a portion of the wall to slide open. The squad piled through the northern exit, eager to see what secrets might be stashed away in the hidden chamber. What they found, however, was a walkway that did nothing more interesting than wind its way around to the southern of the two rooms.

“So what was the fucking point?” Gork muttered angrily.

Cræosh shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was a fuck passage.”

The kobold blinked. “What?”

“For trysts,” Katim explained. “Male goes to one…room to change, female…to the other, and they…meet in the middle.”

“The druids would never do such a thing!” Josiah huffed.

“Yeah,” Cræosh, Gork, and Katim all said as one. “Right.” Disappointed at their lack of progress, they moved on up the corridor.

And with a single exception, that was the most interesting thing that happened for the next hour. They encountered said exception about a hundred yards into the cave, when Jhurpess stuck his head through a sizable crevice in the rock. Coming running in response to his startled—and avaricious—yelp, the others found gold. Once made up of an array of smaller ingots, it had been smelted into a single gargantuan block: a near-perfect cube, in fact, and just about a yard across! Had it been the source of the ancient sect’s funding? A holy relic? An emergency stash?

The squad didn’t know, and they didn’t care. They just knew it was theirs now…Or it would have been, if they could only have taken it with them.

But alas, try as they might, they couldn’t find a way to make it happen. Not even Belrotha could haul around a slab of gold that size, and they lacked both time and tools to carve it up. Finally, though it practically broke their hearts—and required them to literally drag Gork from the crevice, kicking and screaming—they left it behind.

More weary trudging through more darkened cave. Cræosh was giving real thought to grabbing the acolyte and literally tossing him ahead to see how much farther the passageway ran when they heard echoes from up ahead. Not the pathetic little reverberations that had played upon their voices and their footsteps to this point, no. These could only indicate an
enormous
cavern. Heartened, the goblins quickened the pace.

They became somewhat less heartened when the corridor came to a sudden end. Oh, it was a large cavern all right; the meager light they carried couldn’t even begin to reach the far walls. What they
hadn’t
counted on was the lake. The corridor simply halted, forming a small lip jutting out into the water. And from there, there was simply no place to go. They stood, exposed and uncertain, all but the furriest of them shivering in the damp chill.

Cræosh felt a growl congealing in his throat. He snagged Josiah by the front of his robe and yanked him around so they stood face-to-face. “As a guide,” he said, his breath bringing tears to the acolyte’s face, “you make a pretty good rock.”

“There were supposed to be stepping-stones,” Josiah whispered, his gaze flitting constantly between the orc and the sloshing waters. “That—that’s how the druids of old crossed to their main altar. Stepping-stones.”

“Maybe once,” Katim said from the edge, staring out over the lake as best she could, “but…not anymore. I see nothing except…water.”

“Fuck,” Cræosh informed them. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, and maybe even fuck. What do we do now?”

“Well,” Josiah began, “if you’re willing to risk—”

The orc jerked the acolyte off his feet and held him dangling over the dark depths. “Listen, you little daisy-plucking candy-ass! If you even
suggest
swimming, you’re the first one in the water—headfirst, with two broken arms. Even assuming we all knew how to swim, that water’s colder than a vampire’s tit! Plus, I don’t have a clue what’s taken up residence in there since this place was used last, and I’m not willing to trust that you do either.” Slowly, he lowered Josiah back to the ledge. “Now. Did you have a suggestion?”

“No,” the druid said, brushing himself off and straightening his wrinkled robe. “Not really.”

“I’m so glad. Anyone else?”

For once, he didn’t get the complete silence he expected. “Actually,” Gork said, “I might.”

You wouldn’t think that you could
hear
the rolling of eyes, but that was the sound that followed, from several different angles. “And what would that be, oh wise one?” Fezeill asked.

“We just need another raft.”

Cræosh’s fist clenched. “And just where are we supposed to get that, you insipid little turd? Snap our fingers, tap our heels, and hope the cheerful fairies decide to help us out?”

“Not really,” the kobold replied, “although it might be fun to watch.” Then, as the twisting of the orc’s face suggested that it might be time to get to the point, he continued, “But wood floats. Especially flat wood. And between the bathing chamber and the changing rooms, we’ve got over half a dozen doors that nobody’s using.”

“What?” Josiah asked weakly. They ignored him.

“I don’t know,” Cræosh said after a moment. “You don’t think those doors might be pretty rotted through by now?”

But now it was Katim shaking her head. “They all appeared to be in…fairly decent shape when we…were examining them. I imagine the…druids used some of their…magic, or perhaps some…herbs and salves, to preserve their…furnishings.” She shrugged. “It certainly couldn’t…hurt to find out.”

Fezeill snorted. “Funny how that sentence is invariably followed by copious quantities of pain.”

“What ‘copious’ mean?” Jhurpess asked.

“It mean you copy something,” Belrotha explained. “Dumb bugbear.”

As they had no better ideas, and as neither the druid’s protests nor the ogre’s grammar lessons were worth listening to, they trudged all the way back and examined the doors more thoroughly. Sure enough, they were in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. Some rotten spots, some speckles of mold, but by and large they remained quite solid. If they could be secured together, they might indeed make a serviceable raft. Like a procession of ants, they toted the doors
back
to the ledge and began unwinding several lengths of rope.

“See, Fezeill?” Gimmol taunted. “You were wrong, back in Jureb Nahl. It
is
as easy as simply tying some logs together.”

Again the doppelganger snorted. “You’re not just an idiot, you’re a
stupid
idiot. A guppy could capsize this thing. It wouldn’t have lasted twenty yards in the swamp.”

“Maybe,” Cræosh said, digging a hole in the wood with a dagger so he could thread the rope through. “But the water here’s pretty calm, and we’ll be going really damn slow, and you’re gonna shut the fuck up as of right now unless you got a better idea.”

“I can turn into something that can swim here,” the doppelganger said smugly.

“Yeah? If it’s a mermaid, make sure she’s stacked.”

Fezeill lapsed into silence, quite possibly overcome with revulsion at the thought of becoming an object of orc lust.

But he did, much as Cræosh hated to admit, have a point. When all was said and done, their “raft” looked none too solid. They would have to lie on their stomachs, try to spread out the weight, attain
some
measure of stability. They’d have to make the crossing in multiple groups. And there was simply no way at all the rickety thing would support Belrotha’s massive frame. They tried to make her feel better about staying behind—”The rearguard is the most important position,” Gimmol told her—but even she wasn’t
that
stupid. There was, however, not a damn thing to be done about it.

Leaving behind half the squad and a sulking ogre, the first group carefully boarded the raft and set out for the center of the lake, where, according to Josiah, their destination waited. They paddled in brief, unpleasant bursts as one or the other dipped a hand into the frigid water just long enough to provide some slight momentum.

The cavern was even colder than the corridors had been, and the icy spray sloshing over the sides of the makeshift vessel didn’t help matters. Even the troll and bugbear found themselves shivering. Sporadic ripples nearby suggested the presence of something moving beneath the surface. It was, Josiah assured them, nothing more threatening than cave fish, and while they didn’t precisely trust him on that, nothing came close enough to bother them.

Damp but determined, uncomfortable but unharmed, they arrived. Katim, Jhurpess, and Gork disembarked, while Josiah took the skiff back for the others. One hand resting idly on the haft of her axe, Katim began exploring the tiny islet.

It wasn’t really anything more than the tip of a rock that either rested on, or protruded from, the cavern floor. Vaguely hexagonal in shape, it rose only a few inches above the surrounding waters; one good wave would have swamped it, had the lake actually produced any waves.

In the island’s center, safe from whatever tiny tides the placid lake
might
generate, was a low-slung table. About as long as Cræosh was tall, it was carved from black marble and fused with the rock of the island itself. Definitely magic, for what Katim had first taken to be expert craftsmanship revealed itself, upon closer inspection, to be a true and seamless melding of the two types of stone. Etchings ran the length of the marble, nearly invisible in the feeble light. They appeared to be more primitive versions of the patterns in the wood upstairs.

And then, having deliberately examined everything else first, the troll turned to the islet’s most prominent feature. Behind the table, or altar, or whatever it was, rose a ponderous statue of the same black marble. It was carved to resemble a human (or at least a humanoid), clad in robes not dissimilar to those worn by Josiah and the other acolytes. The face within the hood was a flat expanse of stone, reminding Katim of Rupert, Queen Anne’s seneschal.