A Fist Full of Sand: A Book of Cerulea (Sam's Song 1)
Page 15
“They’re beautiful.” Most of the mushrooms were a phosphorescent green, with a slightly yellow glow in between the gills that made the softest blush of light against the walls, but some were more pink, or orange, or blue.
The tunnel led on, in good repair as far as I could see, until I eventually came to a branch where another sewer intersected and flowed into this one. I consulted my map. This second tunnel was ill-defined, leading me to wonder if it had been properly scouted yet. The dwarven candles dotted the receding darkness like a constellation, gleaming against the wet walls and seeping floor.
I turned upstream. This tunnel was wider, making the stream on the bottom wider as well, if shallower, and I found myself hopping back and forth over it, following the upward curve of the stone and trying to avoid slick patches of moss and silt. Hop, hop, halt, careful step! Hop, hop…
Ahead of me, I saw movement. Halt. I pressed my back against the curving wall and drew one of my daggers. The movement came closer, some kind of bobbing light. A torch? I waited.
The bobbing thing turned out to be a mushroom, gently tumbling downstream. It rolled over and over through the silt and muck, bruising and obscuring its dying glow. A smaller cluster, their caps carelessly ripped and torn, floated after. I listened, but heard nothing except the gentle trickle of water and the occasional ringing echo of distant drops.
After a moment, I peeled myself away from the wall and continued upstream, careful now not to splash. Every now and then I passed more pieces of dwarven candles, on their way to a watery grave in the sea, I supposed. I did not put away my dagger.
After about fifty yards, I came to another tributary tunnel, this one largely dark, and not marked on my map at all.
Huh.
It occurred to me that I had no pencil or pen with which to correct this. I searched my pockets for inspiration, and finally wedged the torch in between a couple of loose stones, pulled out my new quarterstaff, and used one of my daggers to carve a splinter off one end. I held the splinter to the torch until it, too, kindled, and then I blew it out. Spreading out my map on the driest spot I could find on the wall, I carefully I marked it with the scorched tip, indicating my new tunnel. There.
I turned down the new tunnel, my torch now very necessary. There was no light in this one at all besides the very slight blue moss mortaring the stones and the occasional floating mushroom. Ahead of me was a patch of darkness, with no glow of any kind. I stalked towards it as cautiously as a hunting sand cat.
The dark patch turned out to be a sharp bend in the tunnel. I peeked around it, and there on the walls were several squat, reptilian creatures, tearing out the dwarven candles by the fistful and throwing the remains down into the mud.
The other three obediently giggled, their identical voices making an eerie, stereo resonance in my ears.
My first impression of the creatures was of huge, scaled toads with teeth. The one that spoke peeled itself off the wall, its previously splayed legs rotating underneath it so that it stood bipedal, its squashed face and earless head balanced horizontally by a twitching, serpentine tail. Flat black eyes sat above a many-toothed, too-wide mouth. Its mouth opened, disgorging a long, grey, prehensile tongue, which lashed out at me like a whip, going for the torch in my hand.
Sting first! My hand rose up and slashed at its tongue. I didn’t try for a deep puncture, just let the edge of my dagger slice along the writhing mass, and it worked. The goblin squealed and snapped its appendage back in its mouth.
The other three goblins turned to face me, and abruptly leapt from the walls, launching themselves right at me. I swiped at one with the torch, deflecting its bite, and spun sideways away from another. The last one hit me right at shoulder height, toppling me backwards and sinking its teeth into my shoulder.
[-2 Hit Points: Piercing damage]
[Hit Points: 10/12]
Desperately, I tossed the torch onto the curved walls, away from the water. I hit the stream in an ignoble backflop; the torch hit the stone with a spray of sparks, and then began to slowly roll back towards me... and the muck. The goblin on my shoulder didn’t let go, instead using its teeth as an anchor while it tried to claw my face off with three-fingered hands. I flipped my dagger around into a reverse edge-in grip and brought it down precisely between the monsters ribs. It immediately let go and backed off, hacking up lungfuls of blood.
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest Update!]
[Slay the goblin scouting party: 1/4]
I rolled to my feet, dripping, and fended off another leaping goblin with a swift kick. I connected, but it grabbed onto my foot, giving my kick too much weight and momentum. The other two uninjured goblins had crept around behind me, obviously expecting me to go down again, but I had been dancing with the wind since before they were even eggs; I simply abandoned my current center of gravity and let me and the swinging monster find a new one. We found it: I landed --on the goblin-- and let my full weight down on the Talarian Sandal. There was a satisfying crunch under my heel, a goblinoid howl, and I flew upward towards the top of the tunnel while Foot-Grabber took the ambush meant for me from his two creeping friends. Beside them, the torch left scorch marks on the sloping wall as it rolled over; thud, thud, to the edge of the water.
At the apex of my jump I pulled out my second dagger and landed with a great splash amongst the mushroom bits, sending a wave of dark water crested with lambent fungi out from around me like a small, star-speckled tidal wave. It rolled over the limping Foot-Grabber, past the uninjured ambushers, and right under my abandoned torch.
Uh oh.
The head sputtered but did not go out. Instead, the wax soaked bundle bobbed on the wave and began to float away, dragging the heavier handle behind it like an anchor.
Foot-Grabber was still limping. He did not make another leap for my upper torso, but scurried up to my legs and swiped at me with his sharp, hooked claws, trying to get at the tendons behind my knees. Whoosh, whoosh! I could feel the puff of air from his swinging claws as I sidestepped his attack.
[Dodge check: Success]
Behind him, the Ambushers hopped to either side of the tunnel, silhouetted by the receding torchlight; dire-frogs with glinting microphthalmic eyes.
I could jump for it, but if Foot-Grabber got me, then I would go down under a pile of goblins and probably not make it back up again. Dropping into a fighting crouch, I growled at Foot-Grabber. “Get out of my way!”
“Our way!” he snarled back at me. “Our sewers! No place for squishy-skins!”
“Squishy-skins are trying to save these sewers! If they don’t, the rains will come and all of our homes will be washed away!”
The Ambushers, uninterested in debating the pros and cons of long term investment in civic infrastructure, started creeping up for another attack, their stealth somewhat foiled by one of them chanting “Squishy-skins, squishy-skins! Yummy yummy squishy-skins!”
“Lies! Squishy-skins lie, it not raining for, for hours!”
“Punishment for lies is eating!” giggled Ambusher Number Two.
“Yummy yummy squishy-skin!” obsessed
Ambusher Number One.
“Why would I lie?”
“Because…” Foot-Grabber paused, waiting for the next neuron to fire. “Because you taste good!”
With this logic, the goblin unhinged his tooth-fringed jaw and snapped his grey tongue out at me. It hit me full in the face, tangling in my hair, and drawing me stumbling forward towards a mouth larger than my head. I slashed at the tongue again, finding it easily by touch, and this time my strike severed the grey, ropy muscle, spurting cold green blood into the water, onto the walls. Foot-Grabber screamed and retracted what was left of his tongue, but I didn’t wait for him to strike again. Instead, I plunged forward and slashed at his throat.
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest Update!]
[Slay the goblin scouting party: 2/4]
Fine! I thought, bouncing my heels on the ground and covering the distance to the floating torch in a single bound. I landed in front of it, skidding to a halt on the mucky silt, sending another fungus flecked swell at the guttering light. Oops! I reached down and swiped as quickly as I could at the handle, grabbing it up just before the flame extinguished.
[Dexterity check: Success]
I spun back around. Ambusher Number Two was briefly distracted by the severed tongue of Foot-Grabber, which he picked up, sniffed at experimentally, and then ate. Ambusher Number One, still fixated on me, crouched in the water like a cat about to pounce. From the bubbles in front of him, I could almost make out a burbled “yummy yummy”.
Now freed of its watery confinement, the torch in my hand flared as the wax wick shed the last of its moisture. In the fleeting glare, Ambusher Number One was perfectly outlined. I flipped up my dagger, holding it by the tip. The goblin jumped, I threw, and my dagger met the goblin’s gaping mouth in mid-air.
“Yum-erk!” he said as he swallowed the blade, then crashed to the stream and didn’t move.
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest Update!]
[Slay the goblin scouting party: 3/4]
Ambusher Number Two, undeterred by the bodies of his comrades, crept forward. I moved my second dagger to my free hand and crouched myself. If I threw my dagger and missed, I was unarmed, unless I could get the quarterstaff out of my backpack in time. If I waited to engage in melee, I ran the risk of becoming entangled by the goblin’s tongue.
“And then what?” I muttered.
Holding myself lightly in my crouch, I watched, focusing all of my attention on the creeping reptile in front of me, who was watching me in turn. Burble, burble, creep. It took one step. Burble, burble, creep. Another. The torch in my hand made tiny popping noises in the damp, and the slow stream of water swished around my ankles. In the distance, the ubiquitous ringing drips sang against the stone walls. Here. They seemed to say. Here, here... Here, ere, er….
Burble blurk…
[Hunting check: Success]
I leapt just as Ambusher Number Two launched his tongue. The sticky grey length of it grazed by me, tasting the wrapped silk of my garment, but too late. I flew up and over and landed with both feet on the goblins head, and then struck the back of his neck with my dagger. It severed some important vertebrae and the monster dropped dead beneath my feet.
[Feat acquired: Mobility]
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest Update!]
[Slay the goblin scouting party: 4/4]
“Sure thing.” I agreed, distractedly. Sometimes it was best to just let Voice pontificate.
My first priority was getting my dagger back from Ambusher Number One. This proved to be difficult, as in his death throes he had somehow managed to swallow it whole.
“Seriously?” I asked, letting the many-toothed mouth fall back into the water as I drew my other dagger.
I ignored Voice while I gutted the goblin. It wasn’t much different than dressing lizards for dinner out in the desert, except that goblins turned out to have more stomachs than lizards. My dagger was in the first stomach, which happily did not seem to contain much in the way of digestive juices. Probably it was more like a holding sack, to see if whatever the goblin had just eaten was in fact edible; actually digestible things could be reswallowed into one of the other stomachs, while the rest could be regurgitated later.
“I’m sure they’d do that, too.”
Tumbling out alongside my dagger were several carved and polished stones, their shapes unrecognizable to me. I poked at them uncertainly.
“Really? How?”
If Ingenium wanted to send me awesome footgear in exchange for goblin guck, it was fine by me. I put the beads in one of my pouches.
I skinned and de-tailed the other goblins, remembering to check the stomachs. One of them had a pile of bones inside, but as I poked around the mismatched jumble, I saw something glint. I brushed aside the mess to discover a gold ring. Faint engravings on the inside read “To love as bright as gold, and more dazzling to behold”. I bet someone’s missing this. I put the ring in my pouch as well and moved onto the last goblin. Its stomach was almost empty, except for a well chewed scrap of dyed blue leather. A buckle on one end had mysteriously survived the gnawing. Stitched into the leather, in discolored thread, I could just read the faint remains of “Pequod”.
Oh no. I almost threw it away. Maybe it’s better if Ishàmae never finds out. I thought, remembering the portrait in the basement. Maybe it’s better if he just thinks his cat ran away.
Maybe… that wasn’t for me to decide. Reluctantly, I washed off the collar, and it joined the beads in my pouch.
The skins and tails were a bit more of a puzzle. Ideally, I’d like to stake them out in the sun and let them cure, but it wasn’t an option down here in the dark. Finally I wrapped the tails in the skins and put them in my backpack, under the rope.
Mental note: do not forget about hacked up remains of dead goblins in my backpack. Sell at first opportunity.
Last but not least, I waded upstream a bit and washed out the bite on my shoulder. It wasn’t bleeding that badly, so I let it be, and hoped goblins didn’t carry any really nasty germs.
Right. And to do that, I needed to get paid, and to get paid, I needed a completed map for repairs of this section of sewer. I pulled out my map and marked where the goblins had been tearing at the walls. By the time I was done, the first of the rats had appeared, drawn by the guts and blood. Time to go.
I continued on. The tunnels were now almost completely dark, and I was glad of my merry little torch. I stopped every now and then to mark new intersections on my map, and to admire the architecture. Most of it was stone, but the size and type and style of the stonework varied. Some of the bigger tunnels were flat-bottomed under peaked, arched ceilings, as if they were old roads that had been covered over and converted. The smaller tunnels (which were mostly t
he badly mapped ones) were usually tubular. All of them, though, were sturdily made, intelligently designed, and built to last.
“How about halflings?”
There had been all-halfling caravans out on the edge of the ElKylar; I had a caught a ride or two with them on my way into Triport. I thought about what it would take to make a halfling kingdom. Maybe I could found the first one ever. I thought. Only, we’d get dwarves to build it, ‘cause they do the best work. And then some humans, for variety. And maybe some elves to run things, ‘cause they live long enough to be really good at planning for the future…
<…and then all the halflings would get bored and wander off to see what other cool places were out there.> finished Voice for me.
“Well, some of them might stay.” I insisted.
“Umm, no. Probably not.” I imagined myself as Queen Samiel, with a throne and a scepter and everything. Probably you weren’t allowed to throw daggers in the throne room. Or bounce off of the royal tapestries in Talarian Sandals. “Definitely not.”
Voice sighed.
My stomach was reminding me it was about lunch time, and I had not packed anything to eat. How quickly I have grown used to Isha’s cooking. Still, I had gone days out in the desert without eating, and one skipped meal wasn’t going to hurt me. I could finish up this section of sewer and be back at La Baliene for dinner.