Book: 4

  Chapter 16

  Tooth And Claw

  Shiro the Necomancer rolled over on the warm, sunlit windowsill and yawned, before returning to his nap with a soft and satisfied purr. His bonded companion was almost home… He could enjoy his sunbeam and the motes of gleaming dust flitting through the light for a few more minutes.

  The sun had moved just a little too high in the sky, when he woke next; making the once warm and comfy spot a little too warm for the tiny leopard spotted kitten, right on time. He rolled over and dashed for the foyer; purring loud and proud, his tail held up in a quivering, excited question mark.

  “Dad… boys, we’re home!” Amy shouted, while gathering her familiar into her bosom, snuggling the ever loving hell out of her spirit-kitty. “The last boss was an ogre mage; it was amazing! He threw lightning and ice bolts from his hands!”

  “Ugh, sounds awful!” Harry offered merrily, while helping unload the returning party’s gear into their father’s shadow.

  The process was as simple as it was bizarre; Gary would stand still, or at least move past slowly, while the kids dropped things in his shadow, without looking at what was happening to the stuff. If someone happened to slip up and look at the doings, any objects currently in play would drop to the ground and Gary would stumble as if he’d stepped in a hole.

  Camping gear, battered armor, dirty laundry and leftover foodstuffs all went tumbling into the space between the waking world, dreams and the endless void itself, to await his call.

  The loot landed on the inn’s biggest trestle table, spread on a sturdy tarp for cleaning and sorting. Small gems, gold and silver nuggets, trinkets, herbs, bones, stones, monster parts, hides and meat lay in orderly heaps on the worn cloth; the plunder of a successful dungeon run laid out for accounting.

  “Nice haul, kids…” Gary mumbled around an armful of warm, snuggly wife. “Let’s hit the baths first, so we can all hear your tales of daring-do.”

  A short while later, among clouds of drifting steam and the fragrant blossoms, Amy told the tale. “We entered through a cave a couple miles from town… Between a few boulders and down under the forest floor, deep in the earth!” She murmured happily, with a cup of tea perched on the curb beside her and her kitten piled atop her head, purring loudly.

  “We silenced the hidden sentry goblin by the entrance and disarmed a log trap, before heading deeper in, surrounded by walls of tight packed clay, soil and tree roots. The air was damp and close, really ominous under the low, oppressive ceiling in the dark.”

  “Yeah-yeah… very evocative and moody! Did you draw a map?” Larry interrupted the Admiral’s narrative with mundanity, heedless of her carefully curated mood.

  “Map will do nub-good for you, story interrupting boy.” Daisybelle offered from the other side of the pool, with her familiars. “Dungeon changes every time! Could be the mines, or the caverns, since it sounds like you entered the burrow. The only way to prepare for a dungeon run is to prepare for everything.” The cheery goblin knight lounged back on Jasmine, her oldest and the largest of her wargs and chuckled. “King-papa sends every pack of his knights to raid a dungeon in turn. Keeps us sharp!” She purred warmly. “I has done the Goblin March several times. Never has it been the same twice.”

  “Weird…” Harry mumbled, a look on his face that suggested he was considering the issue carefully. The youngest Ward boy often attacked difficult problems from angles only he could see. “So if we’d followed the Ragamuffins in, we’d have experienced a completely different dungeon?”

  “King-papa calls it an ‘instanced dungeon’... he’s weird. Nub too many people can enter at once and strong people keep the weak from entering… Like too many huge humans squeezing poor Daisybelle out of the bath.” That she was splashing about and swimming freely in the private pool, yards from the nearest bather, had no effect on her complaints about crowding. “Level caps, or something, king says.” She shrugged and smiled at Gandree, who was lounging in the lawn, soaking up the afternoon sun. “Goblin March is a newbie dungeon, so no powerful people or pets may enter. Is why, when uncle Fool takes Gandree and the lads in, lady Kree and Daisybelle must stay outside, just like Shiro had to.” She sighed sadly and shook her head. “Three days with no Gandree? Faugh!” She sagged down against her wargs and sighed again.

  “We don’t leave until tomorrow morning, Daze.” The dwarf mumbled, his face bright red and burning hot, even through the thick veil of steam.

  “Oh, yes! I’ll be sure to enjoy tonight to the fullest…” Daisy purred, displaying one of her frequent moments of lucid grammar and smiling hungrily at the dwarf. “Come to bed now, you must be well rested for your adventure!”

  “I don’t think he’s getting any rest…” Amy whispered sweetly, using her vocal arts to make certain everyone heard.

  Poor Gandree turned an even brighter shade of pink, transitioning to red as a damp, smiling, completely naked, bubbly little goblin dragged him out of the bathing facility with mischief on her wicked mind. “Nub rest at all; nub til I’m done with him.” Daisy agreed merrily, not even a little embarrassed.

  “On that note, I’m going to turn in…” Gary mumbled, his sidelong glance at Shai wasn’t even slightly subtle, nor was her answering nod and grin. The master and mistress of the house vanished in a swirl of steam and hastily conjured robes, leaving the kids in the bath, chuckling and talking shop until the moons rose high in the night sky of Goblin-Home.

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  /

  Flash stamped and stomped in annoyance at his rider, while she ignored his minor tantrum with good grace. “Can’t believe you’re crawling into some dark, damp, gross hole in the ground…” The gangly horsie grumbled in his way, which made all the boys in the party giggle a bit. They all understood his non-verbal, equine speech and took delight in watching her get scolded by her familiar during the whole march.

  Gary strode at the front of the party with the goblin king, chatting about stuff that the others barely understood. Their conversation seemed to leap from topic to topic randomly, with large sections of the discussion taking place in silence, transmitted in gestures and silent glances.

  They drifted through the pleasant hills of the king’s domain, under a dense tree canopy that cast everything in a dim twilight. King Ghnash wore dark tinted lenses over his huge eyes and squinted a lot, anyway as he led them through the woods to a small clearing that rose into a steep clay bank. Behind a pair of boulders, a dark chasm could just be seen by the keen eyed and alert.

  “No farther can I go… The dungeon lord can only enter the levels alone, for quality control. Once you go inside, I will be unable to perceive you at all; within a dungeon level, no interference or aid is possible, you will be truly on your own.”

  “All right, kids. Final safety checks. Triple check each other and your gear, confirm your formations and let me know when you’re ready.” Gary instructed firmly, while hugging Ghnash and re-checking his own kit. “No one goes off alone. Trios at minimum in the dungeon, no exceptions. That’s going to create some complications, but I don’t want anyone getting grabbed by gobbos while having a sneaky deuce.”

  The kids all groaned, but the musician remained unmoved by their complaints, striking a hard line. “Most of our sneaky debuffs and musical antics won’t work on them, since the goblins in the dungeon are magical beings, not living creatures. They should respond normally to poisons, irritants and such, but they aren’t subject to our musical mojo and tricks.”

  “Remember, children…” Ghnash warned them as he prepared to leave. “Just because you cannot die or be maimed in my dungeon level, that does not mean you cannot be harmed. Many-many bad things can happen to you… The foes you will face are figments of magic and dreamstuff, but they are also goblin men, with all that entails.”

  “We’ve fought goblins together…” Harry mumbled, sounding a little embarrassed. “We know they’re rapey little turds.”

  “That’s right, you boys watch your own tender buttholes too.” The king smiled, but it was without humor. “More than one Adventurer has learned hard lessons in my dungeon levels.” He shrugged and sighed at the team and his brother. “The open world and the monsters that dwell here are more dangerous, but my dungeon levels can get… intense. Be ready.”

  With that last nugget of advice from the king, Gary ducked under the low cavern entrance and vanished from sight, followed by the older boys, Lindsey and finally, Harry bringing up the rear.

  /

  Gary dropped down four feet of steeply inclined clay and mud, to land in a partially collapsed stone tunnel, very dimly lit by scattered clumps of glowing fungus and the occasional luminous stone. The kids slid down a few seconds later, landing quietly and forming up in good order around Lindsey, who was going to be at the center of the party for the duration. In goblin fighting, female party members were always a target for suicidal aggression.

  “This is where I start supervising, kids. Do your best and remember the fundamentals.” Gary whispered, before he slipped into a shadow and vanished entirely.

  “All right…” Harry murmured quietly to his team. “Barry and Perry, take point. Lindsey and I stay in the middle watching our flanks and backing up the front liners. Larry, you take rear; Gandree, back up Larry and follow his lead. Your job is to keep us from getting pinned down or surprised.” He paused while the team got organized and the frontliners decided who was taking point.

  “Let’s keep it low key as long as we can. Stay quiet.” Harry whispered, when Barry took the lead, armed with a bright, steel shortsword balanced by an iron bar mounted in a matching sword hilt in his left hand. Perry’s short, broad bladed spear and shield followed a few yards behind; trailed by the rest of the team, stepping quietly down a broad, hewn stone passageway leading deeper into the earth.

  The tunnel ended abruptly at a sheer rock face and a fissure that led up to the surface, somewhere high above, out of sight. “Not a dead end, but let’s head the other way.” Barry mumbled quietly, as he began working on something from a pouch at his waist.

  With care, the young warrior stretched a thin strand of braided spider silk across the chasm, anchored in small wads of sticky putty and re-crossing the narrow rift several times, creating a fragile web of silk and subtle spellcraft.

  “We’ll know if anything comes through here.” Harry whispered in Lindsey and Gandree’s ears. A moment later he spoke again, only slightly louder, his voice transmitted by the enchantments built in their helmets. “Reverse the line, same marching order.”

  Only the soft rattle of cloth, leather and wooden armor broke the underground hush, as the team got organized and began to prowl the passageway that sloped up into the mountain’s heart, somewhere above them. Slowly, the passage leveled out and widened into a chamber, the jagged and unworked ceiling lost in shadows above. The floor sloped and stepped up or down at random, where some long forgotten miners had pursued a now vanished vein of ore in its wanderings. A crudely hewn fissure split the chamber floor a few yards from the passageway they emerged from, dropping away into an underground river, far below.

  No trace of the mineral or metal they had sought so diligently remained; only bare dusty stone and the tracks of small humanoid feet along a narrow path along the rim of the deep crevasse that split the chamber floor.

  A few sturdy stone pillars and some rusty chains of truly impressive size marked where a bridge had once crossed the rift. Only a few rotted and splintered beams still balanced precariously across the chains where a thick deck of timbers once lay; offering little more than a suggestion of what had once been there, rather than a path across.

  The two main supports were ten feet apart, while two lesser strands of still impressively large chain ran above separated by six to eight feet of open space and a few cables running between the paired upper and lower chains.

  “That explains why there’s no gobbos in this section…” Barry mumbled softly, once the whole team had a good look at the situation from the concealment of their passageway.

  The stench drifting from across the rift and from the spattered, smeared rocks below, suggested that this was the goblin privy and waste dump. The team watched in silence as, a few minutes later, a lone goblin man wandered down the narrow path and pitched an armful of rubbish into the rushing waters, far below.

  The small, naked, filthy green man spat over the edge and paused to give his huge, pendulous balls a good scratch, before he wandered back up his steep path and vanished into a crack in the wall, just out of sight.

  “Barry and Perry, work together to string a safety line along the left pair of chains, we’ll cover you.” Harry whispered, once the goblin was out of sight. “Larry, you and Lindsey watch the left, Gandree and I will take the right side. Drop any hostile that appears and keep it silent.”

  The youngest Ward boy pulled a blowpipe from his sleeve and loaded a dart with a bright purple tuft of feathers into the tube, before handing it to the dwarf lad. “Fast acting paralysis toxin… we have an antidote ready, in case of accidents. I won’t hand you anything too dangerous, but don’t poke yourself.”

  Larry and Lindsey set themselves up to overlook the other end of the trail along the crevasse from behind some boulders, with a pair of shortbows and a brace of arrows ready.

  “Go!” Harry said softly, once the two sniper teams were in place.

  Lindsey let out a soft, involuntary gasp of fear and excitement, while watching Barry and his brother swarm across the chains, stringing up concealed safety anchors of nearly invisible spider-silk rope among the massive iron links. The two young men worked quickly and silently, with Barry climbing out on the gently swaying span, while Perry held a line attached to his brother’s armor and weapon harness. In a few short minutes, the rest of the team followed, crossing in near total silence.