Goblin Quest (25 page)

He pulled out at least half of the skeleton in assorted bits and pieces before he managed to snag the noose. Once he had rope in hand, he stood up and redid his loincloth. Feeling decently dressed once more, he hurried back to the Necromancer’s throne room.

The rope measured seven feet once Jig untied the knot. It would have been longer, but he had sliced off the last few feet when he cut it from his neck. Jig sat down at the edge of the pit and began to work.

The rope consisted of three cords twisted together, and Jig guessed that any one of those cords would hold his weight. He wouldn’t have wanted to haul Darnak around with one, but goblins were skinny and light. It took a while to get the cords unraveled. The rope acted almost alive, the way it twined about itself and tried to tangle into knots.

In the end, Jig held a thin rope about twenty feet long. He tugged on the two knots that bound the cords end to end. They didn’t give. Satisfied, he tied a loop in one end and tried to toss it over the arm of the throne. Looping the arm of a floating throne in pitch blackness would have challenged even the most coordinated of heroes. Jig took close to an hour before the rope caught.

The plan would have worked, save for his cut hand. As he lowered himself into the pit, his hand flared with pain. His arms were already tired from throwing the rope so many times. With blood on one hand and sweat slicking the other, his hands slipped free, and Jig followed his companions into the darkness.

He landed on his backside on something springy and damp. The sudden light blinded him. After so long in silence, the noise greeted Jig like a long-lost friend. He heard a breeze blowing. A rustling sound surrounded him, and in the distance, he heard the whistling of birds. Birds, in Straum’s lair? He shrugged. Sparrows and other birds flew into the tunnels from time to time. They made great snacks. Perhaps there was a crack leading to the surface, small enough for birds to fly in and out.

“Jig? Is that you? We were wondering if you’d be joining us.”

“Darnak?” Jig turned toward the sound. Everything was still too bright, but he could make out the dwarf’s stocky form a few feet away. “It was either follow you down or stay there and starve.”

“Good choice.” Darnak’s hand clapped Jig on the shoulder. “Since you’re here, mayhaps you can help us with a bit of a dilemma. See, this isn’t exactly what we were expecting to find down here.”

They waited for Jig’s eyes to adjust. When they had, he looked around in amazement. He sat in a field of soft green grass. Trees ringed the field at a distance of roughly a hundred yards. Sunlight warmed his skin, and he could smell the soft sweetness of pollen in the breeze. He scraped at the damp ground, digging up a clump of grass to find, not cold stone, but moist, black soil.

“I’m outside,” he whispered, not knowing whether to rejoice or cower at the news. He raised a hand and saw his shadow on the ground. It didn’t waver, as it would have done in torchlight. Clear and sharp, his shadow-hand followed his real one perfectly. Slowly Jig looked up at the sky.

“Wow.”

He even stopped breathing as he stared. He saw no sign of the rope he had used to climb down. Nothing but blue sky, and clouds like white clumps of fur drifting past. He reached out, but the clouds were too far away to touch. How high were they? They looked to be at least thirty or forty feet up, higher than anything Jig had ever seen.

And the sun! An orange circle that shone with warm, perfect light, like a thousand thousand torches all burning together. He squinted, trying to see if it burned like a normal fire.

“It’s not real,” Darnak said. “If ’twere, you’d be blind right about now.”

Jig ignored him. Real or not, this was the most incredible thing he had ever seen. He didn’t know how they had come here or even where “here” was, but none of that mattered. After spending his whole life underground, knowing nothing but the lair and a few dark tunnels, Jig had discovered a completely new world. Still gaping, he managed to tear his eyes away from the sun long enough to say, “It’s so
big
.”

CHAPTER 12

Big Prints, Mad Prince

“I take it then,” Darnak said dryly, “that you wouldn’t be knowing how to find the dragon.”

Jig shook his head. From time to time, he had fantasized about sneaking down and making off with some piece of Straum’s treasure. Every goblin dreamed about it. A few of the older ones told stories about their search for the dragon’s lair. Some even claimed to have made it past the Necromancer.

Nobody had ever described anything like this place. Jig had known they were lying, of course. Oh, he believed goblins tried to explore the deeper levels. What he didn’t believe was that any of them survived to come back and tell stories about the experience.

Staring again at the world around him, he wondered if he would get the chance to share what he had seen. The grass tickled the backs of his knees when he moved, and he laughed with delight. He lay back and stared into the sky. So open and endless . . . after a lifetime of living beneath solid rock, he felt as though he could fall into that blue sea and float forever. A wave of vertigo made him gulp, and he gripped the grass with both hands.

“It’s an illusion,” Riana told him. She ripped out a clump of grass and sniffed the roots. “No smell. The sun’s too orange, and I can only see one kind of tree.”

“How many kinds are there?” Jig asked.

Riana laughed. For a second the anger vanished and she looked like a child. “Hundreds. Thousands. Oaks as proud as the gods, willows that sway and dance in the wind. There are trees with leaves as pointed as rapiers, and trees that need rain but once every six months to survive. I’ve even seen trees only a foot tall that mimic their larger cousins in every way.” She laughed again at Jig’s delighted expression.

“Elves and trees,” Darnak grumbled. “Something unnatural about their love for plants. Besides, I thought you were a city type. Where’d you learn about trees?”

Riana’s face hardened. “I spent a month hiding out in an arboretum, behind the Monastery of Batoth.”

Darnak held up a hand. “Don’t tell me the details. I’m still the prince’s man, and I’d not like to be arresting you the second we leave this mountain.” Turning to Jig, he asked, “How is it that you’ve never seen the outdoors?”

“I just haven’t,” Jig said. Goblins didn’t go outside. They rarely ventured past the shiny room where he had first encountered the adventurers.

There was no reason for them to stay inside. No monster guarded the entrance, as far as he knew. The gate locked itself when closed, but it could be opened easily from within. Goblins simply felt no need to explore the surface. Everything they needed, the mountain provided.

Besides, goblins weren’t welcome outside. Throughout history, every surface-dweller who came through that gate saw goblins as vermin to be wiped out. Bad enough that the occasional party came through on a killing rampage every few months. The outside world must be even worse, with thousands of people who would put an arrow into Jig as soon as they saw him. His ears would end up on a trophy necklace before he made it ten feet past the gate.

Still, it might be worth sneaking out some night if I could see all of this.
That led to another thought.
I wonder if we’ll see
stars
while we’re down here.
From a little way off, Barius stood and shouted, “Darnak, come and see this.”

Darnak and the others hurried over to join the prince. On the way, Jig noticed the tied and bruised body of the wizard stretched out in the grass. Ryslind glared at him as he passed, and Jig glanced away quickly. He hoped they wouldn’t untie Ryslind anytime soon. A hundred years should be long enough.

Barius stood over the huge body of an ogre. Jig yelped and grabbed for his sword when he saw it. But the ogre wasn’t moving. To judge by the deep slashes across its chest and throat, it would never move again.

He noticed that Darnak’s hand had also gone to his weapon, which made him feel a little better.

“You did this, lad?” Darnak sounded impressed.

“Not I.” Barius knelt and pointed to the cuts on the chest. “Three deep cuts, all in a row. A fourth scraped the skin here.”

“Claws. Aye, I see it.” Darnak chewed at his thumb. “But what beast could best an ogre?”

A good question,
Jig thought as he stared at the body. He had never seen an ogre, and now he prayed he would never see a living example. It must have stood over eight feet high, with muscular arms as long as Jig was tall. Its callused green skin looked tough enough to serve as light armor. Ragged black hair topped a long, oval head. The teeth, while shorter than goblin teeth, still looked sharp enough to do serious damage. The huge mouth meant the ogre had a lot more of them, too.

Something shiny caught Jig’s eye. A battle-axe, six feet long and double-headed, lay discarded in the grass to one side. Jig bent down and grabbed the handle to take it back to the others.

The axe didn’t budge. Off-balance, Jig stumbled to the ground.
Maybe they should come here instead
. “I found something.”

Darnak whistled when he saw the axe. The dwarf could lift it, but he needed both hands to raise it in the air, and Jig doubted even Darnak could swing such an axe in a fight.

“You think he was waiting for whoever fell through?” Darnak asked.

“If so, then whatever slew the beast has my gratitude,” Barius said.

“Aye. So long as it’s not coming back for dessert, that is.”

The dwarf’s wary tone made Jig see the distant trees in a different light. What creatures might be hiding in those shadows? This place was so open, with too many places for an enemy to hide. He knew nothing of surface monsters, but anything that could destroy an ogre was, in Jig’s opinion, a good argument for staying in the tunnels.

“Strange, though.” Barius peered more closely at the wounds. “Whatever killed the ogre wasn’t interested in food. A kill such as this would feed an animal for days. Why then did it not at least drag the ogre off for safekeeping? Unless it was a territorial dispute, perhaps.”

He pointed to a patch of grass behind Riana. “The tracks lead back to the center of the field.”

Jig stared at the grass. It looked green, the same as everything else down here. Had madness now touched Barius, that he could communicate with plants?

“Spread out,” Barius ordered. “Search for anything unusual.”

As they retraced their path, Jig’s sharp ears caught Darnak’s grumbling comment. “A hundred feet underground, in a fake field beneath a fake sky, with an ogre slaughtered like no more than a rat to a cat, and he sends us to search for the unusual.”

They found two more ogres. Together with the first corpse, the bodies formed a rough triangle around the spot where the adventurers had appeared.

“Ambush?” Darnak asked.

“Most likely. By the time we recovered from the fall and drew our weapons, they would have been upon us.” Barius chewed his lip, one of the only times Jig had seen the prince show anxiety.

“Even if you and I could stand against such beasts, they still outnumbered us.” He clearly didn’t consider Riana or Jig worth counting.

The pit was a trap. Anyone who beat the Necromancer was supposed to die here
. Sizing up the two-handed sword one ogre had dropped, Jig tried not to think about how long he would last in a fight against ogres, let alone whatever beast had killed them. Perhaps the party had arrived in the middle of a power struggle. Hobgoblins and goblins occasionally slaughtered each other when food ran short, when one group was caught stealing from the other, or when the younger warriors simply grew bored with bullying their own. Jig prayed that the creatures here would finish each other off before he had the poor luck to meet one.

Barius touched the wounds on the third ogre. “Whatever did this, it killed this one last.” He crawled around the grass for a few minutes. “It left for the woods, in this direction. We should follow.”

“What?” It came out more as a squeak, but Jig didn’t care. He must have misheard.

But Barius only nodded, a determined glint in his eyes. “This way we are the hunters instead of the prey. Better this than to sit and wait for it to creep up on us in the night, wouldn’t you say?”

“Maybe it only kills ogres?” Jig suggested weakly.

“It pains me to be saying it,” Darnak said, “but his highness could be right. Until we know the dangers of this place, we’ll be as children walking blindly into the bear’s cave.”

If we find those dangers, won’t we be walking blindly into the bear’s jaws?
Jig didn’t say anything aloud, however. He knew Barius and the others too well to expect them to change their minds.

“Know thy enemy, eh Darnak?” Barius said cheerfully.

He was enjoying this. Jig’s mouth hung open in disbelief. He
wanted
to go chasing after this creature. “What about the rod?”