by T. H. Lain
Naull couldn't stop herself from yelling, "Hey!" at the goblin's receding back.
Rezrex, still growling, blind, responded to her voice, turning on her. Naull got to her feet, but the hobgoblin came at her. He swiped blindly with his mace and came within an inch of smashing Naull's skull.
She yelped, and the hobgoblin took his hands away from his face. Light blazed out from the hobgoblin's eyes, and Naull, her own eyes having grown accustomed to the dim lighting, found herself cringing away from the blinding magical luminescence.
Rezrex grabbed at her, and she tried to bat his arm away with her own hand. All that succeeded in doing was giving Rezrex a better indication of where she was. His hand closed around her waist with a crushing, bruising force.
She had to close her eyes—the light from Rezrex's eyes was so bright—but she could feel the hobgoblin dragging her up the cave.
"Goblins will come together as one under Rezrex," the blinded hobgoblin bellowed. "I start clearing out humans next!"
"I recognize this one," Regdar said, standing over the first goblin Jozan had taken down.
Regdar was certain it was the goblin who had been shaken around by Rezrex, then sent away with—Regdar looked at the scattered bodies—exactly this group of goblins and spiders.
Jozan, who was finishing off the last of the three spiders, looked up and asked, "Is he their leader?"
Regdar shook his head, looking down at the unconscious goblin as Jozan and Lidda came to stand next to him. "Their leader is a hobgoblin—much bigger, meaner—named Rezrex."
"You're wounded," the priest said.
"I know," Lidda answered, "and it hurts like a son of a—"
"I was talking to Regdar," Jozan answered.
The coldness in his voice made Regdar turn around. The priest stood behind him, facing the halfling, who was looking up at him with that expression Regdar had seen on a hundred faces—just before a tavern brawl broke out.
"Nice," the halfling said. "I wonder if Pelor will be able to get my foot out of your—"
"Naull might be dying out there somewhere," Regdar interjected.
Jozan and Lidda both looked at him, and their faces softened simultaneously.
"This might not be the chief," Regdar continued, gesturing at the unconscious goblin, "but I think he might be some kind of lieutenant."
Jozan considered the goblin and said, "Can you talk to him?"
Regdar was about to tell him no, when he realized the priest was talking to Lidda.
The halfling stepped closer to the goblin and said, "Sure, if we can wake him up."
Regdar unslung his backpack and took out his waterskin.
"Ask him where Naull is," Jozan suggested.
Lidda and Jozan stepped back, and Regdar started to pour water over the goblin's face.
Tzrg, certain his wretched soul had been sent to the Hell of Having Water Splashed in Your Face, sputtered and coughed, and tried to remember any kind of prayer he could use to impress Maglubiyet enough to keep the demon god of goblins from eating him alive.
He couldn't think of one, but he did manage to catch his breath and open his eyes.
Tzrg didn't know whether to be happy or disappointed to see that he wasn't dead. Maglubiyet wasn't going to eat him alive, but the three bizarre humans—two big armored males and the little female—who were standing over him might do something even worse.
He wanted more than anything to get up and run away, but he recognized one of the humans as the man who'd killed a hobgoblin, two krenshars, and a handful of hive spiders. The other male was the one who had knocked him out—damn near killed him—with a mace as long as Tzrg was tall. He looked at the female and instinctively put a hand over his crotch.
The human who had knocked him out looked at the female and spoke in their impossible-to-fathom language then turned to the other man and spoke some more. The human with the mace took a shield from his back and handed it to the other man, who took it with a smile.
The female leaned over him and cleared her throat. Tzrg winced at the sound. His chest hurt, his head hurt, and he was getting sick of being held prisoner by tall things with armor and maces. He hoped that they would decide to let the bigger human kill him. The giant sword should make fast work of a little goblin.
They didn't kill him, though—at least not right away. The female looked down at him and said something, followed by what Tzrg was sure was the Goblin word for "name."
She pointed at him and repeated herself, then said, "Gbn rblmg."
She wanted him to speak. Her accent was weird—stranger even that Rezrex's—but she was making sense, though he still wasn't sure what she wanted him to say.
He opened his mouth to say something—anything—but his chest hurt too much. One of the humans reached down for him, and Tzrg wished he was able to move, so he could roll out of the way, then he decided to let them kill him.
All the human did, though, was sit him up. His chest still hurt, but a lot of the pressure was gone, and he could breathe better.
The female said, "Lidda kgl." Her name was Lidda.
It was as hard to say as Rezrex, but it was a name—at least he thought it was. She wanted to know what his name was.
"Tzrg," he said, looking up at her and hoping that the look in his eyes would inspire them to kill him quickly.
The female smiled, and Tzrg had no idea how to take that. The other two humans didn't seem to understand.
"Lidda bktt," she said. "Bkn Lidda. Pmldl Tzrg."
She wanted a foreigner that belonged to her, and she wanted Tzrg to get it.
The female waved her arms at her sides and wiggled her fingers in a way that made Tzrg think of spiders, then she made curvy gestures with both hands like a female—a female spider. She wanted the Cavemouth Tribe's hive spider queen.
Tzrg couldn't begin to guess why, but at least he knew where that was, and it wasn't even far away. If that's all they wanted, they could have it. Of course, if they made off with the Cavemouth Tribe's hive spider queen, Rezrex would be angry and probably...
Tzrg decided not to think about that and started the painful process of climbing to his feet—only flinching a little when the human with the mace took his arm to help him—realizing that he would just have to go with whatever the big, mace-wielding outsiders who were closest by wanted him to do, and the humans were closer than Rezrex.
He wanted them to know he would do as they asked and that they should follow him, so he looked at the female and said, "Bkn gnrbt. Tzrgpzvmp."
Regdar's skin was crawling. He wanted to run blindly down the length of the cave in search of Naull. He wanted to do just about anything but trust a goblin to bring them to her.
"You're sure..." he said to Lidda, who was following closely behind the goblin, grunting at it.
The halfling sighed and said, "I want to find her as much as you do, Redjar. Unless you have some bright idea, we follow Tzrg."
"Tzrg?" Jozan asked. The priest didn't look any more confident than Regdar.
"That's his name," Lidda replied. "He was the chief of the Stonedeep Tribe before the hobgoblin Rezrex showed up and took over. They raided the Cavemouth Tribe, who live farther up near the surface, and kidnapped their mother or something...whatever that means. That caused some kind of problem, and they managed to capture most of the Cavemouth goblins and hold them prisoner. Rezrex wants to unite the tribes and be ... I don't know what King of the Goblins or something?"
They walked quickly behind the scurrying goblin who kept glancing over his shoulder as if afraid that one or all three of them were going to stab him in the back. He was leading them toward the dark mouth of one of the nearby side-passages.
"You got all that from grunting at this goblin?" Regdar said, unable to believe it.
Lidda didn't look back at him when she said, "Humans. Like it would kill you to learn a foreign language."
Only maybe half a dozen yards down the narrow side-passage, their way was blocked by stalactites and stalagmite
s tied together with spidersilk and fashioned into bars. Regdar made sure he stood in the middle of the passage at the back of the party in case their goblin prisoner decided to turn tail and make a run for it.
Lidda kept up her grunting conversation with the little humanoid, and when she stopped at the bars, she turned to Regdar and Jozan and said, "I think she's in there."
Regdar, his greatsword in his right hand and shield in his left, shifted his feet and tried to keep his blood from boiling.
"It can't be," he said.
Jozan turned to him with a questioning look.
"She was ahead of me," Regdar said. "She was free and clear. All the goblins were behind her, and the only group of them that ran up this way were this little guy and his friends. There wasn't anyone to capture her and put her in a cage."
Lidda opened her mouth to argue, then obviously thought against it. She turned on the goblin with an irritated scowl. When she grunted at him, the goblin's response was a string of guttural gibberish, but his manner was groveling and apologetic.
A sound echoed from the pitch darkness behind the bars, and Regdar stepped forward.
"Naull?" he called.
The only reply was another echoing sound like a heavy weight shifting against loose stones.
"Who's in there?" Jozan asked Lidda.
The halfling held up her lantern, hesitantly reaching between the crude stone bars. Jozan stepped closer behind her, and so did Regdar, but the big fighter made sure he was all but pressing the cowering goblin into the bars.
Regdar squinted into the darkness and saw something moving just at the edge of Lidda's lanternlight.
"What is that?" he asked.
"I don't know," Lidda said, backing away a little, "but it ain't Naull."
The goblin barked at her, and Lidda turned on him sharply, then backed even farther away from the bars.
Jozan asked, "What did he say?"
"It's a spider," the halfling replied.
As if in reply, the thing behind the bars drew itself slowly into the pool of light from Lidda's lantern. It was the same dull, pale beige color as the spiders they'd encountered before, but bigger—much bigger. Regdar felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. The creature pulled itself out of the darkness as if it was crawling from the womb, revealing two chitinous, segmented legs, then two more, then two more, and two more. Its body was bulbous, an irregular oval shape covered in coarse fur. The front of it was a mass of irregularly spaced jet black eyes. Its mouth was small, with fangs smaller than its cousins. It was impossible for Regdar to tell which of the four of them the creature was looking at—it might have been looking at all of them at once.
"It's the mother," Lidda said.
Jozan gave her a curious look, then his eyes widened as some idea seemed to dawn on him all at once.
"A queen," he said. "It's a hive queen, like a queen bee or a queen ant. The spiders we've fought must be workers...drones."
"They hold the queen prisoner," Lidda said, "and use her to control the spiders."
"Extraordinary," Jozan whispered.
Regdar felt his jaw tighten and said, "Should I kill it?"
Jozan was about to answer when they all heard the footsteps echo around them. Regdar was the first to react, pressing against the cave wall and using the back of his right hand to shove the goblin along with him.
He was gratified to see Jozan and Lidda follow his lead and press their backs against the opposite wall. Lidda drew the hood of her lantern down, dimming the light.
The footsteps grew closer and closer.
Naull was struggling just to breathe. Rezrex was holding her around the waist and squeezing. It was still hard for her to see where he was carrying her, dragging her feet behind them. Blind, the hobgoblin moved slowly, hesitantly, shouting orders in its own primitive language as it went. Sounds echoed all around her, and she couldn't tell where they were coming from or what they were. All that mixed with the pungent, horrid odor of the hobgoblin, making Naull's head spin, so she had to fight every second just to stay conscious.
She felt a hand on her—rough and forceful—and heard another voice. She opened her eyes and turned her head, silently cursing at the pain—and at the hobgoblin. There was another of the big humanoids that Naull could see, and she was sure she could hear a third hobgoblin approaching from behind them. They spoke to each other in urgent tones—like soldiers—that reminded her of Regdar.
"Regdar," she tried to scream but managed only a pained squeak, "Regdar...help me ..."
"Regdar?" Rezrex growled.
The hobgoblin grunted an order at one of his lieutenants, and Naull felt a strong hand wrap around first one wrist then the other. Rezrex let go of her waist, and she fell from his grip, only to be pulled back by the other hobgoblin. She could see Rezrex facing her, one hand clamped over his still blazing eyes. The hobgoblin that held her twisted one of her arms painfully behind her and blew hot, rancid breath on her neck.
"Regdar?" Rezrex said again. "I kill that man."
"No," Naull said, squinting at him, trying not to throw up.
She tried to bring to mind a spell but couldn't. She'd cast as many spells as she could in one day. She wasn't sure what happened to her staff and couldn't get to her crossbow with her hands held behind her. She was at the hobgoblin's mercy, and for the first time since walking out of Larktiss Dathiendt's tower, she wanted to go home.
"You his female?" Rezrex asked, his face twisted in pain and anger.
Naull said nothing.
"Not anymore," the hobgoblin sneered, and the one holding her wrists began to laugh.
The sound made Naull's skin crawl.
Rezrex stepped back, saying something to the third hobgoblin. That one stepped forward and drew his arm back, his big hand clenched into a fist. As the hobgoblin's knuckles rushed toward her face, Naull had just enough time to think, That's going to hurt, before finding out how right she was.
She could feel blood gush from her nose, her eyes closed tightly all on their own, and she was out.
Regdar could see by the dim silhouette in the sparse light of Lidda's lantern that it was a goblin. The humanoid ran into the cave and slid to a halt, turning and putting up its hands in a way that indicated to Regdar that the goblin had seen one, some, or all of them.
Without pause, Regdar kicked at the goblin's feet just as Lidda opened the hood of her lantern, filling the little cave with light.
The goblin, eyes wide, mouth open, hopped up over Regdar's sweeping leg, shifted in the air, and came down in an attempt to stomp on Regdar's calf. Though he doubted the little humanoid could put enough weight into the stomp to break his leg, Regdar reacted quickly and rolled with the momentum of his kick. The goblin came down way off the mark, stomping only onto the unforgiving rock floor. The jolt almost knocked it over, unbalancing it enough so that it couldn't dodge or deflect Jozan's mace, which punched into its right side hard enough to drive air from its lungs and drop it to its left knee.
Regdar continued his roll, changing direction, and smashed the goblin with his shield. The goblin fell backward, and Jozan caught it around the waist.
As Regdar leaped to his feet, the goblin Lidda called Tzrg started to move behind him. Regdar had intended to drop his shield and grab the goblin Jozan was holding, but when he saw the other goblin trying to make a break for it, he drew up short and shot his right elbow back. Tzrg didn't even see it coming. Regdar's elbow smashed him into the cave wall, and Tzrg tripped, sprawling onto the floor behind the big human.
The goblin Jozan was holding shook his head once and stood, slipping out of the priest's tenuous, surprised grip. Regdar stepped in front of the goblin and whipped his sword in a half-arc fast enough to make it whistle through the air. The newcomer skidded to a stop with the tip of Regdar's blade less than an inch from the end of its wide, flat nose.
Lidda said something in the goblin language as Jozan brushed past behind Regdar to help Tzrg to his feet and detain him at the same time.
Regdar finally had a chance to see the newcomer's face clearly, and he recognized the goblin at once.
"This is the one we saved from the krenshar pit," Regdar said. "Naull went after him."
Lidda spoke to the goblin, a look of stern determination on her face. Waiting for the grunting exchange to yield anything understandable was like torture for Regdar. He stopped short of trying to imagine what might be happening—or what might have happened—to Naull. He could feel his teeth grinding.
The huge, misshapen hive spider queen rubbed its bulbous form against the stone bars. The sound made all of them look in its direction. The creature tapped its needle-pointed legs against the stone and waved its hideous, asymmetrical head from side to side.
The goblin looked at the monster spider with an oddly soft expression Regdar associated with the way some people look at their horses or their dogs.
"The spider..." Regdar started to say.
"The queen recognizes this one as a member of the Cavemouth Tribe," Jozan said. "When they brought it down here it must have lost contact with its drones. The drones went wild..."
"And attacked the sheep," Regdar finished for him.
"It's what caused all this chaos in the first place," Jozan said. "Lidda...?"
The halfling stopped her grunting speech and looked up at Jozan.
"Is this goblin from the Cavemouth Tribe?" the priest asked.
"He is," Lidda answered. "I think he might be Kink's son."
Jozan drew in a breath and stood straighter, pulling the goblin Tzrg up with him. The prisoner whimpered and kept his eyes on the floor.
"He is Kink's son," Lidda said, her eyes searching Jozan's face for some idea what to do next.
"Who's son?" asked Regdar.
"Klnk," Jozan answered, pronouncing the goblin name with some difficulty. "He was the chief of the Cavemouth Tribe. He's dead."
Regdar watched Lidda tell the goblin that his father was dead. The goblin sagged visibly.
