“Hold on, stop for a moment! We can get out of here if we don’t panic!” My words came out hollow and mumbled around the light, which flickered and splashed on the walls, adding to the chaos.
“Yucky goblin yucky goblin yucky yuckyaaaiieeeee!”
Smart Mouth was absurdly fast, and the rope was winding around me in spite of my rat-hampered efforts. “Climb the beams!” I yelled at him. “Climb up, we can both—
Smart Mouth made a wild leap, worthy of the Talarian Sandals, and landed halfway up the moss covered timbers, gripping into the wood. I emulated him, landing just a bit below, but without claws I immediately began slipping back. Digging his hind claws into the beam, Smart Mouth leapt again, this time launching out his sticky tongue for the pipe above us.
“No, wait—” I cried as I fell back, but it was too late, Smart Mouth was moving forward as I was moving back, and the rope between us went taut, jerking me to a stop and snapping my head back and my jaw shut. “—ulp!” I swallowed reflexively.
The world went dark.
Dark, but not silent. The rats were a scraping, screeching, throng, and the goblin above me went “Urk!” as he was caught, suspended between his tongue and the rope attached to me. Bereft of any orientation but away from the rats, I scrambled at the slick beam, to no avail. Two more crawled off the backs of their fellows to bite me on the legs; I kicked off one, but the other sank its teeth deep into my calf.
[-1 Hit Point: Piercing damage]
[Hit Points: 3/15]
This isn’t working. I thought. I need, I need….
<…to be the jumping mouse.> Voice finished for me.
Yes. Courage. I took a deep breath, let go of the beam, and rolled downwards, unspooling a few feet of rope as I did so, and landed right in the middle of the mangy swarm. I felt a couple of them crunch under my sandals, and I could hear the rest massing up and around, like a wave, about to envelope me. The rats underneath me clawed and bit.
[-1 Hit Point: Piercing damage]
[Hit Points: 2/15]
I stomped down my heels, as hard as I could.
[Jump check: Success. -2 penalty for lack of traction. -2 penalty for disorientation. -4 penalty for weight encumbrance]
Even with my loaded backpack, the sandals sent me up, towards the distant and invisible sky. Up! Up, and into… one wildly swinging goblin, himself rising as my weight was lifted. I crashed into Smart Mouth, our limbs intertwining in the dark confusion, both of us grabbing onto the only other solid object around, which was each other.
“Ahhhh!’ I yelled.
“Eeeeeehhhh!” he cried, around an open mouthful of tongue.
We bungied upwards, hit the apex of our leap, and began to descend.
“AHHHH!” I yelled again, with rather more urgency.
“EEEEEEHHHH!” Smart Mouth agreed, as his tongue was stretched back downwards.
With my free hand I swung the trailing rope blindly, lassoing it up towards the pipe, hoping by some desperate chance it might entangle itself.
To my giddy delight, it did.
The rope was only entangled, not properly anchored, but between it and Smart Mouth’s tongue, we swung sideways before we swung down. We hit the side of the shaft at a corner where two of the incoming tunnels intersected, crunching into the narrow brickwork with rib cracking force.
[-1 Hit Point: Bludgeoning damage]
[Hit Points: 1/15]
We were about to bounce off and fall back down into the pit, losing any chance to swing into one of the side tunnels.
“Let go of the pipe!” I yelled to Smart Mouth, and got my sandals between me and the brick.
“Aaaaiiieeeee!” he howled back at me.
I kicked off the corner, twisting us through the air, and we hit the sweetly horizontal floor of one of the tunnels, rolling over and over before sliding to a stop. I sat up, battered and blind, trying to catch my breath, and heard the scritch and squeal of the swarm, unimpeded by the slick moss of the fallen beams, come up and over the lip of the pit.
“Yucky goblin!” Smart Mouth yelled at them, and then, unhandicapped in the stifling blackness, sniffed the air and bolted down the familiar passageway.
“Oof!” I grunted again, jerked after Smart Mouth, and stumbled to my feet just as the rope was drawn tight.
It took every ounce of my concentration to stay upright as we dashed madly through the dark. The Talarian Sandals gave spring to my step, the backpack weighed me down, and Smart Mouth and his nose led the way. Behind us, the swarm followed, seeming every moment less like a collection of individual creatures and more like some maleficent entity in its own right. We sprinted through the tunnels, slipped in the muck, and careened wildly off the walls as we rounded corners, my only warning the occasional echoing squeal from Smart Mouth and Voice’s monotonous swearing.
Ahead of us there was a light. A tiny, pale blob in the darkness, one lone Lucerna Nanorum, and the ominous humming of a steel pipe under pressure.
“Wait!” I called. “Be careful! Remember the valve—”
In his panic, Smart Mouth did not remember my warnings, and charged blindly ahead. I dug my heels into the silt at the bottom of the tunnel, but the Talarian Sandals just sputtered and slipped, dropping me heavily onto my butt. Pulled along by his momentum, I skidded forward just as Smart Mouth tripped over the rusty valve.
It turned with a brief, tortured creak... and then snapped, jetting a slicing geyser of superheated steam between us. I only knew Smart Mouth survived because he was still scrambling against the rope, trying to pull me forward. Ahead of me, the rivets in the steel pipe began to give way with gleeful little cascading pings, shooting off to embed themselves in the hardrock masonry of the tunnel. Desperately, I drew one of my daggers and severed the rope between us. The last thing I heard of Smart Mouth was the receding cry of “Yuuuuuucky gooobliiiiiin!” echoing from the distant tunnels ahead.
Behind me was the ever persistent approach of the rat swarm, ahead of me was a good twenty feet of tunnel, pierced by jets of steam, sharper than swords made completely of edge. The jets were not perfectly consistent, though; rumblings percolated through the plumbing, uneven pockets of air that interrupted the steam in a sort of rolling pattern.
The rats would be upon me in a moment, swarming and seething, and I would be engulfed as easily as the tiny, doomed Light spell. If I stepped into the steam, the rats would dine on me without even having to cook me first.
But if I danced through the tunnel, as I had once danced with the wind, and slipped between the steam jets like a leaf in the breeze… maybe I stood a chance.
I slipped the straps of my backpack over my shoulders and let the treasure fall to the ground behind me where it would not get in my way. The swarm was almost here now, only feet away. I fixed my eyes on the pale, obscured, glow of my waystar, let my hindbrain find the patterns in the jets, took a deep breath, and leapt into the geysers.
I bounced off my fingers and did a quick forward handspring over two horizontal jets, and then hurdled over the next. I paused for a moment in the temporary lee of another, and leapt again as it choked and sputtered to life. A cartwheel, a belly flop, a mad forward scramble; and then the steam came at me in a rotating spurt of several punctured rivets in quick succession, and I ran up the wall, bouncing side to side and then using my momentum to go up and over, two quick steps on the ceiling, one more final leap… And I was through.
[Dexterity check: Success]
I sank against the curving wall, my hair a dripping mess of sweat and steam, while next to me the blushing mushroom gave off its steady, valiant little light. The rat swarm, like any angry mob, got stupide
r as it got collective, and ran right into the geysering tunnel, the hissing of the pipe almost drowning out the hissing of the dying rodents.
[Save the Storm Drains: Quest update!]
[Optional objective: Eradicate the Rats – COMPLETED]
“Erg.” I managed.
[Achieved Level 4]
[Acquired: Stat increase (Dexterity +1)]
[Class acquired: 2nd level Rogue, (Total: Ranger 2, Rogue 2)]
[Granted abilities: Evasion, Rogue Talent (Minor Magic)]
[Granted (1d6) maximum Hit Points: 5]
[Hit Points: 6/20]
<…ta DA! EVASION! Screw that Area of Effect damage nonsense! And, ooo, nice Hit Points. It’s about time for a good roll on those.>
“I thought you liked the area of, err, AOE stuff.”
Stray rats were still trickling into the steam trap, so I settled into the curve of the wall and let them kill themselves off. Something shifted in my wraps. Curiously, I felt around until I pulled out the rotting leather case I had last taken off the dwarf. The clasps were rusted away and the leather thin and moldy, but inside was a very small gilded picture frame, about the size of my hand, complete with a glass front, but no picture. There were four small opals set into the corners of the frame, and the faint tingle of magic ran through my hands.
“What’s that?”
“What’s the magic word?”
“Screenshot?” I repeated.
The illusi-frame flickered for a moment. I peered closer at it, and then turned it around. It looked just the same as before. I shook it few times, turned it upside down, and then my fingers brushed over one of the other opals. It flickered again, and this time there was a picture in the glass; a perfect still frame of my nostrils, lit from below by the glowing mushroom.
“Whoa, neat!” I held up the illusi-frame again. “Screenshot!”
This time I got a picture of the far wall of the tunnel. After a bit more experimentation, I found that the illusi-frame would take a picture of whatever it was facing, so long as I could fit it in the bounds of the gilded frame. I took a picture of the steam geysers, but the water condensed on the glass, making it look runny and wavery. Finally I got a nice close up of my little mushroom, which I was very pleased with. Voice gave more instructions on how to erase the pictures I didn’t like, and I scrolled through my experiments, getting rid of the four dark blurs of the tunnel wall and the one sort of grey blur of the steam jets.
I snorted. “And I suppose by ‘detail’ you mean ‘boogers’? Why in Cerulea would I keep this?”
I rolled my eyes. “I can get a better picture than that. ‘Delete’.” I commanded. The illusi-frame flickered again, and my nostrils were replaced with a picture I hadn’t taken. I looked closer. It was of a section of the sewers I’d never seen before. I scrolled through a couple more, and realized with a queasy feeling that I was looking at the last pictures taken by the dwarf; snapshots running backwards in time, away from the point of doom, and into some past where the future still held possibilities.
I stopped and examined the picture in question. It was framed by dark edges of pipes, as if taken from a hidden vantage point, and there were indeed goblins. Lots and lots of goblins. They were crowded into some kind of large open space lit by a hard blue glow. Grand pillars held up the ceiling, and a freestanding shrine or temple with a marble facade faced the light. The crowd had its attention on one large goblin who was standing on some kind of altar and was bedecked from squashed head to long tail in gaudy, stolen trinkets and finery; bright feathers, bone bangles, and necklaces made of ladies’ rings. He was holding a scepter crafted from polished bone with a darkly glinting garnet set into the head.
“He looks like some kind of priest.”
I scrolled back another picture. It was the same scene as before, but angled slightly to get a better view of the light source, which turned out to be a huge crystal fragment, mostly buried in the wall. The brick face had sloughed away, leaving a large expanse of prism, set slightly off kilter, to fill the room with the eerie, odd light.
We were both silent for a moment.
“You don’t suppose…” I began.
I scrolled back few more pictures. One was a close up of the altar. It was covered in bones and debris, not quite randomly; green algae was strung between small vertebrae, glittering beetle carcasses decorated the corners, and a garland of rat skulls with glittering garnet eyes edged the rim.
“Not if they’re all rabid.” I replied. “They won’t have the common sense to stay away from goblins.”
I went back to the picture of the glowing crystal, then back to the altar. I was getting a bad feeling about this.
“I don’t think the goblins are powering any of it.” I replied. “I think they’re stealing the mana.”
I did, flipping between the two views of it.
“No what?”
“Like what?”
“You mean like the lunar eclipse that’s coming up tonight?”
Voice said nothing.
I said nothing.
The visions unfolded in our heads anyway, a series of illusi-frame still lifes, paving the road to doom. A power surge to the necromantic altar, and the influx of uncontrolled mana to the Protection vs Pests spell. Isha’s precise tones echoed through my memory; It is a variation of the Death Shell spell, an anti-life aur
a. The spell spreading like a shock wave, pushing every living thing below a certain size limit away from it, and out of the sewers. All of the diseased rats beneath all of Triport, fleeing the underground like a sinking ship, to the streets and alleyways above. The smaller creatures, bugs and moss and mushrooms, ripped from their niches and rolled through the tunnels until they couldn’t anymore, a mass of organic matter plugging every drain in the city.
“They couldn’t possibly be that stupid.” I said after a minute. “Surely they will find a way to stop it, destroy the altar, or something, once they realize what’s going on.”
I looked down at the picture in my hands, of the big goblin standing on his altar of bones, his grin heady with power, his eyes mad with purpose.
“We have to get this information to the Temple.” I finally replied.
The last of the rat swarm had finished itself off in the steam jets. My backpack, however, was still on the other side. I stood up, stretched, and gave the deadly jets a measuring look. They were still spurting in the same pattern as before.
That was a good idea. I searched around for a way to control the steam, but came up with no way other than the valve Smart Mouth had snapped off. It still looked like it would twist close if I could get some kind of leverage on it. Carefully, I pulled out my dagger, and inserted the edge of it like a screwdriver onto the broken metal. It was still hissing steam, and I had to be extra attentive to make sure that I didn’t shoot any of it this way. Even so, the metal of my dagger was heating up.
A Fist Full of Sand: A Book of Cerulea (Sam's Song 1) Page 25