“Well, you hold it like this, and then point it like so—” I hastily moved out of the way “—and then make sure your thumb completes the connection over the little hematite bits here, and you say the magic word.”
“The magic word?” If he’d said anything as the goblins were attacking, I’d missed it in the chaos.
“The activation word. It’s different for every magic item, though there are some standard ones. In this case,” he moved his thumb away from the gems, “it’s ‘zap’.”
“Zap.” I repeated. It didn’t sound very magical to me.
“Yeah. Only, you have to say it like you mean it. Like a wizard would. If you slur or mumble or anything, the magic gets confused, and then weird stuff happens.”
I pulled down Cynric’s goggles. The wand of Lightning Bolt did indeed look rather depleted, as if it had once held many more charges than two, but much more worrying to me was Ramsey’s leg. I bent down to examine the wound. It was much deeper than I’d like, and bleeding.
“You should drink one of our healing potions.” I told him, rummaging in my backpack.
“What?” He craned his head over and looked at his calf. “Oh, no, I’m fine. Really. It doesn’t even hurt.” He wiggled his ankle, and then winced. “Much.”
“It doesn’t hurt yet because you haven’t come down off the adrenaline rush from the fight.” According to my examination via Cynric’s, he was about three quarter’s worth of ‘fine’.
If he’d had nothing else to do but sit in an easy chair for the rest of the day and prop his leg up, I wouldn’t worry about it, but Ramsey wasn’t as used to taking wounds as I was. I handed him a potion.
“It’s fine!” he insisted, again. “I’m tough! Really—”
“All right, I’ve got the little suckers ready to go, for a wonder. HEY YOU! DON’T EAT THAT—” Robyn’s voice, from the Bladesmen’s sirenstone. I held up a hand for Ramsey to be quiet. “Tasha, clear the way ahead, I don’t want any traps or surprises on the way to the lab. Then I can dump this whole troupe of them in there and be done with it.”
“Not a ‘troupe’.” put in Blaze, in his slightly superior tone of educating-the-lesser-masses. “What you have there, my dear, is called a ‘malignity’...”
The sirenstone clicked off.
I pointed at the bottle in Ramsey’s hand. “Drink up.” I told him. “We need to be at full capacity, and then we need to run.”
We ran. Ramsey stayed about ten steps behind me as I opened every sense I had to the fullest, alert for traps, bad guys, or wrong turns; the last of which might be the biggest danger. Twice I stopped, using up time we didn’t have, to disable a rigged pit trap or ceiling stone. Ramsey didn’t argue, but I could see him thinking, weighing the safety of the pursuing team against our mission. I weighed it too, but couldn’t find it in me to play fast and loose with the lives of Hel and her team, leaving them to wander blindly into something I could have saved them from. That’s not what being a hero means.
Voice’s directions led us eventually out of the old, dry mining tunnels and into the damp, less-maintained sewers. The water level was up, and rising fast, forcing us to cling to the sides of the tunnels when going against the current, and making frequent wild waterslides out of the downslopes we meant to take.
And a few of the ones we didn’t. I overshot one such turn and got whooshed away down a sewer leading off at no more than a gentle, twenty degree slope, and it took all of the effort of my Talarian Sandals to leap as high and as fast as I could out of the water, trying to bounce off the walls or ceiling before the algae coated incline sucked me away again. Each wild, pinging leap gained me no more than a foot or two, and by the time I made it back to the safety of the bank, Ramsey was laughing so hard he had to lay down.
“Sam the salmon!” he gasped, holding his stomach. “Sam the flying salmon! Hahaha, oh that was awesome. I haven’t seen such crazy acrobatics aimed at avoiding a dunking since the last time I tried to give Dragon a bath!”
I leaned over and rested my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. “Shut up.” I managed. “’S not funny.”
“Yes, it is,” he pointed out. “What would have been not-funny is if you hadn’t made it...” He tried to make it sound like a joke, but his voice cracked and betrayed him.
I stood up. “It’s ok.” I reassured him. “We’re going to make it, and we’re going to make it out of here. Anyway, I know where we are now.”
The last time I’d seen this particular tunnel, I was being dragged down it, hurt and helpless. Not this time. I thought, flipping my dagger a few times in my hand, making the light dance. I told you you’d never get away with this, Keen, but you didn’t believe me.
I cautiously led Ramsey onward, keeping an eye out for danger, but what I found instead was worse.
Footprints. No, clawprints.
I started running again. Past this part here, along the elevated grating (almost there!), around the corner... and where there should have been a blank stone wall awaiting a magic spell of passage, there was instead a pile of rubble, with a trashed laboratory behind it.
I gingerly stepped over the ruined rock, my stomach a hard, cold knot inside me. Ramsey followed, eyes wide. Admittedly, I hadn’t had a plan for bypassing the wall on my own, but it wasn’t because I had wanted someone else to get here first.
By the looks of things, Robyn and crew had beaten us here by less than ten minutes, along with a whole malignity of goblins.
The entire lab was a ransacked mess. If I had thought before I had done some damage by summoning a crazy flying demon skull, I was thoroughly schooled on the meaning of the word disaster; there wasn’t an intact stick of furniture in the room, the mailbox had been set on fire, and every single potion had been run off with, smashed, or licked off the floor. Grubby goblin footprints were everywhere. No way Hel’s team is going to be able to make heads or tails of this place.
The chain I’d briefly hung from was gone, and worst of all, so was the duping machine. We picked our way through the mess over to where it had been.
“So,” Ramsey said, looking at my face. “This is it then?”
I nodded, then swallowed. “I guess so. No more machine, no potions of Cure Disease.”
“Then I guess I have some explaining to do to the church. But since I’d rather not do my explaining to the City Guard as well, then, not to tell you your job or anything, I mean, you’re the adventurer, but I think we should go.”
I nodded again and turned away. “Yeah, there’s nothing here for us.” There wasn’t so much as a bolt or lever or glowing gemstone left.
Nothing left... I paused, and Ramsey bumped into me from behind. “There’s nothing left!” I cried, revelation dawning.
“What?”
“There’s nothing left of the machine! Not even a mess. How many goblins do you know that clean up after themselves?” I was hopping up and down with excitement.
“Err, none?”
“That’s because they don’t!” I spun back around. “They didn’t destroy the duping machine, they took it with them!”
Ramsey’s jaw dropped open, then broke out into a grin as hope dawned anew. He started bouncing up and down too. “Ok! Yes! We’re not doomed yet! So, where did they take it?”
I scanned the floor of the room. Cynric’s might show me the energy of things, but it was my old inst
incts which surfaced now and sifted through the chaos, the mess, and the sea of clawed footprints—
[Hunting check: Success]
—to find the parallel drag marks where the heavy machine had been pushed away from the wall, then tipped over and levered onto... something that left neither skid marks nor wheel treads. A float pallet. Now that I knew what I was looking for, there was an unusually high number of clawprints marching in unison towards the blank wall on the far side of the lab.
I followed them until I was staring at the unyielding stone. How did they get out, then, more magic? Robyn was a caster, I was sure, a cleric like Garret. Can divine magic melt stone?
I put my hands on the wall, feeling the smooth ashlar beneath my palms. “The Bladesmen aren’t going for subtlety here, they’re going for plausible deniability.” Cynric’s showed no magic inscribed on the wall. “They didn’t magic their way in here because they don’t want anything that can’t be blamed on the goblins.” There. One of the stones felt slightly different than its cousins. And so did the one above it, and the one above that...
[Perception check: Success]
[Secret door discovered]
I silently set my hand out, and equally silently, Ramsey placed the crowbar in it. My new favorite toy. I levered the crowbar between the stones, set my feet, and carefully pried the secret door open. On the other side, a whole damnation of goblin clawprints led away.
Chapter Fourteen
I kept an eye on the map, but this time we didn’t need it. The trail led ever downwards, out of the rushing stormdrains and into what was left of the old gnomish city. We went around, and sometimes through, strange machines of indiscernible purpose. We clambered over giant gears and through permanently dilated apertures, and along access ways that gave me the creepy impression we only stepped out of one machine to enter another, or maybe that we never left the machinery after all; that the whole place was one monstrous, mechanical assembly, as big as—and indistinguishable from—the city it served. Once we passed along a thin catwalk over a well preserved mess of toothed gears, each of them bigger than I was. Another tangle of branching catwalks led over to a massive clockwork... clock, I guessed, its face mostly stripped away, keeping time to a calendar I had never heard of.
From there, our path spiraled upwards, around and around, above the clock. Rust covered everything, disguising pitfalls in one pipe and runes on the next. Along the walls were crude nests of sticks and debris, holding the remnants of leathery eggshells. What surprised me most, though, was not so much that the place was dry—cool fogs obscured distant sight lines and eddied around our feet—but that it was well drained. No signs of flooding marked the walls, and the muddy bottoms on the nests were relatively even and deliberate.
“So,” I commented to Ramsey after poking apart one of the nests with my dagger, “goblins CAN manage drainage when they want to. They just don’t care to do it in the upper tunnels.”
“Hmm. Selectively stupid? Or subtly clever?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do goblins benefit from the surface of Triport flooding?”
I opened my mouth to say Of course not, and then closed it again, thinking. Goblins live off the waste of the city, don’t they? They would suffer as much as anyone from the sudden lack of resources accompanying a population drop.
If that happens, there will be less people making food, less things to steal, less of everything. Except corpses, and eventually, bones.
“What do goblins want, anyway?” I couldn’t get the image of Pequod’s cage out of my mind. Bones...
Ramsey shrugged. “To eat things?”
We were interrupted by a small damnation of the inscrutable creatures coming from behind us. We hid in the nests until they passed, my dagger buried deep in the muck so as not to betray us, but they stopped only a few paces ahead and opened a large, circular door into a firelit space beyond. I judged the room to be almost directly over the great clockwork gears from earlier, and in it were all the bones I could ever ask for, piled into a huge monstrosity of an altar. On top of the heap was the goblin I remembered from the leycrystal fiasco, decked out in feathers, rings, a familiar set of evil gloves, and holding a garnet-topped scepter. He was either chanting or giving some kind of inspirational speech (I couldn’t tell which) because my own attention was on the thing at the base of the pyramid; the glittering gears and gems of the duping machine.
I motioned to Ramsey and we snuck from nest to nest, hiding in the shadows, until we were opposite the great open doorway. There weren’t as many goblins in the room as I originally thought, and most of them were clustered around the machine, poking and prodding at its levers and trying to get it to turn on. One was trying to get a femur into the payout tray, and another was jumping up and down in the receiving slot.
“We found it!” I whispered to Ramsey. “Now we just have to go get it!”
“What, just walk in there and... walk off with it again? We could pretend to be the repair crew. ‘Howdy goblins, looks like you got a loose sproketymagig there, we’ll be right back with a new one!’”
I snorted. “They got it in there somehow, we should be able to find the float pallet, and, uhh, lever the thing onto it, and then get it back out again...” I tried to imagine Ramsey and me lifting the machine.
“Oh.” Understanding dawned.
“What?”
“Shaman Bisquik up there isn’t going to let me near the machine, he’ll remember me from running him off his last altar near the leycrystal. So, that’s your job. I’ll take on the goblins, you sneak up and get the potions made. Then you sneak back out, go hide in... the clock room, and if I haven’t killed all the goblins by then, I’ll lose them in the pipes and meet you there.”
Ramsey nodded. “Ok. Right.” He listened carefully while I told him how to operate the duping machine, then rubbed his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “Infamy, here I come.”
“Wait a bit until I have everyone’s attention, then follow me.” I looked back into the room, catching the glint of the cataract of the millioculi. Charge screaming into the fray... “Ready?”
“Ready.”
I pulled out my daggers and charged. I took huge, bounding leaps with the Talarian Sandals, and came into the room like I’d been shot from a bow. The first two goblins never even saw me coming.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 2/12]
The second two came out of the duping machine, and, undeterred by the fate of their companions, threw themselves at me, all claws and teeth and battle cries.
“Shaman say die!” screamed one.
“Death or glory!” yelled another.
“Death AND glory!”
“Wait, what?”
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 4/12]
And then the melee was on. I stabbed and slashed and sliced, and pulled them slowly away from the machine with the occasional Tumbling Pebbles. The room was massive and circular, with a... a lake in the middle of it, deep and still. A wide walkway ran all around the outside of the room, and in the middle was what looked like some sort of defunct pumping station. Bisquik’s altar of bones was set up in the largest clear space available—a protrusion of the stone walkway, with enough room around it to maneuver. I climbed the pile of skull
s with Sphinx Ascending, leaving goblins in my wake, and collecting the occasional scratch for my trouble. Now, Ramsey.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 7/12]
[Hit Points: 18/25]
Bisquik cursed and the goblins swarmed around me, but I made a spinning wall of steel with my daggers, my bright one leaving ribbons of afterimages in my vision, and then in front of me was a familiar face. I stumbled and missed an attack.
“Smart Mouth? What are you doing here?”
“Dragon boss?” Smart Mouth looked at me, then furtively glanced up at Shaman Bisquik. “Err, I mean, die infidel! This is Bone-licker tribe shrine!”
Smart Mouth waved his claws in the air, but did not seem excited about attacking me.
Unsure of myself, I brandished my dagger back at him, and then, with a last covert look between me and the shaman, Smart Mouth threw himself down on his back, writhing and clutching at his throat. “Ack!” he cried. “Oh noes, I am magicked! Infidel has cursed me to die! Arrrrrgggglllle!”
For a moment we all paused, watching as Smart Mouth wiggled and flopped and made coughing noises. “Arrrgg!” he said again, and then, “Cursed and dead!” for good measure, then slid down the pile of skulls. He came to a stop headfirst, upside down, limbs askew at every angle. One of the smaller goblins sniffed at him. Smart Mouth opened one eye and glared at the small goblin. “Cursed and dead and yucky yucky poisoned!” he chortled, one last time, and then finally decided to lay still.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 8/12]
“Infidel!” Shaman Bisquik’s voice cut through our collective astonishment. “Intruder! Stop the squishy-skin!” This produced a new wave of attacks from the goblins, while the shaman began chanting and waving his scepter in a complicated pattern. The garnet on the end began to glow a dark, sinister red.
For A Few Minutes More Page 23