The Goblin Corps (44 page)

In only one way did it deviate from the human norm, in that it had three arms: two on the right, one on the left. The two “proper” arms pointed out and downward, while the third was held out before the statue, index finger pointing up. On its chest, beside that extra arm, were over a dozen lines of shallow scratches that might or might not have been deliberate.

As Katim could find no clue to aid her in deciphering whatever meaning or symbolism the statue was meant to convey, she quickly grew bored. And more bored still, when Josiah returned with the others, since Cræosh, Gimmol, and Fezeill insisted on repeating the examination she’d just concluded.

“And?” Cræosh asked when he was done. “What the fuck now?”

“Obey the statue,” the acolyte said.

“What? Boy, if you don’t start making some sort of sense…”

Josiah shook his head. “Hey, I’ve never been down here either, okay? I’m trying to piece this all together from ancient writings.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Even back then,” he said more softly, “the druids had enemies. The members of this sect constructed a hidden chamber in which they stored their holiest items, their most powerful magics, and a library that was said to equal, if not surpass, that of King Sabryen himself. If Emmet figured out how to get down to it, that’s most likely where he’d be hiding.”

“Great,” Fezeill said, his patience obviously running as thin as the orc’s. “How helpful. So how do we find it?”

“As I said, obey the statue. Sect writings say only that the statue points the way.”

“Yeah,” the doppelganger countered, “but it’s pointing three different directions!”

Josiah shrugged. “I don’t know, dammit!”

It was Katim’s turn to grab Josiah by what was at this point becoming a very rumpled collar. “What about these?” she asked, practically shoving his nose into the markings she’d noticed. “Did the druidic sects not…have their own script?”

“I don’t believe it!” Josiah whispered. “I haven’t seen the ancient script anywhere except our oldest books!” Then, “Ah, give me a minute, if you please. It’s been some time since I’ve had to translate this sort of writing.”

Katim stepped away, allowing the young druid to go about his work. Somewhat impressed despite himself, Cræosh appeared at her shoulder.

“Nice thinking, Dog-breath. I thought those were just random scratches. The damage of years, maybe.”

“One of the…many advantages of possessing…a brain,” she said, choosing not to mention that she’d initially thought the same. “Perhaps you should…give some thought to acquiring one…the next time we’re in town.”

“I’ve got it!” Josiah announced, saving the orc the trouble of responding. “But, um, I don’t know that it helps us. It’s just a few random passages from our holy books.”

“Great,” Cræosh said. “Fucking nutcases, the whole lot of you. This is what worshipping gods does to a person.…”

“Read them to us,” Gimmol suggested.

Josiah did just that, and yep, they sounded like the standard doggerel to be found in any of the human faiths. For a long while, the goblins and the druid milled about in silence.

“Well,” the gremlin said finally, “it starts with a passage about your sect being the ‘one chosen’ to speak for the World-Mother, right? And that extra finger could mean one, too.”

“One, two?” Jhurpess asked.

“No, not ‘one, two.’
One, too.”

“Three, four,” the bugbear continued, puzzled.

Gimmol shook his head.

“So…What?” Fezeill asked. “One of what?”

“Two other hands,” Cræosh said. “We’re supposed to pick one, maybe?”

Katim scowled. “This is awfully…convoluted.”

“I’d have said stupid,” Gork corrected.

But Josiah was shaking his head. “No, it makes sense. Instructions that nobody outside the order could puzzle out.” He frowned. “There are two different references to the forces of evil as ‘the right hand of darkness.’”

“Something to be avoided, then?” Cræosh asked.

“I’d think so, yes.”

“Anything about
left
hands in there? Or left
anything
?
“

“Not a mention.”

“Good!” Jhurpess said, clearly having gotten tired of waiting around. “Then Jhurpess will go left!” Before anyone could react, the bugbear vaulted over to the left side of the altar and begun fiddling with the arm. With an ominous click, the pointing finger twisted in his hands.

The altar and the stone to which it was fastened slid aside on brilliantly concealed tracks, as smoothly as if they’d been oiled just yesterday. And that was followed immediately after by a deafening roar and a torrent of flame that towered all the way to the cavern’s ceiling.

The smell of charred flesh and burnt dust assailed their nostrils; embers rained down upon the entire squad, singing skin and setting clothes and fur alight. Jhurpess avoided roasting into shriveled jerky only because the blast sent him staggering back into the lake, where his flaming fur was quenched with a loud hiss.

Katim followed with a quick dip of her own, putting out her own smoldering hair, though she kept a tight grip on the island’s edge. The others hopped around the isle, beating the sporadic flames from their clothes.

The tower of flame died, and the altar slid back into place of its own accord.

“Of course,” Josiah said, absently fingering a singed hole in his sleeve, “it might have meant the
statue’s
left, not ours.”

Cræosh, who had a truly impressive welt running down the right side of his face, stomped over and placed his nose less than six inches from Josiah’s own. “I really,” he informed the druid, “really,
really
want to kill you.”

Behind him, a sequence of wet splats and some sniffling whimpers announced the return of the sodden bugbear to solid ground.

“So,” Gimmol said with a feeble grin, “what now?”

What now, indeed? The missive on the statue had told them to make but one choice, and apparently it was going to hold them to that. A frantic check confirmed that the finger on the other hand refused to move, no matter how hard they twisted at it.

“Okay,” Cræosh muttered. “Fine. So we do it the hard way.”

“It would be a great…deal easier if we could have…brought Belrotha with us,” Katim said.

“Yeah, it would be, but she ain’t here. That’s why it’s the
hard
way. You up for this, troll?”

Katim’s snout rumpled in a sarcastic grin. “Lead the way.”

Since the fire had emerged from beneath the altar, the only possible location left for the
real
hidden passage was beneath the statue itself. It took them over an hour, with Cræosh, Katim, Jhurpess (singed and whining), and Fezeill (still in bugbear form) taking turns, but eventually they succeeded in reducing the sculpture into chunks so tiny that they’d have had to work out to become smithereens. One final blow from Cræosh and the heavy portal concealed beneath finally swung inward, dangling uselessly from broken hinges.

Of course, they weren’t about to dull their blades against the stone. No, the tools they’d chosen were the arms of the statue itself, broken loose with the aid of Jhurpess’s club. Josiah remained seated beside the altar, limbs sprawled, gazing in horror at the ruined sculpture.

The hanging trapdoor revealed only a series of metal rungs descending infinitely into the darkness. With a few more choice curses directed at the druids, at Gnarlroot, even at Queen Anne, they began to climb.

Fezeill went first, carefully testing each rung with his prehensile feet. He had descended well over thirty yards into growing darkness, the others following carefully behind (and, in some instances, panting with the exertion), when he suddenly halted.

“I’m not taking another step,” he announced, “until we do something about the light.”

“What light?” Cræosh asked from directly above.

“My very point.”

“Heh. And just what exactly do you propose we do?”

“I don’t care. Just do
something
.”

Gork yanked a torch from Katim’s pack, lit it, and let it drop. The flame flickered dramatically, but it didn’t go out, and the plummeting brand halted not twenty feet below the doppelganger’s toes, illuminating a rough stone floor. That, apparently, was enough to alleviate Fezeill’s doubts, and the faux-bugbear quickly shimmied down the rest of the way, moving the torch and stepping aside so his companions might follow.

Cræosh was next off the ladder, his boots echoing against the stone. He lit a torch of his own off Fezeill’s, but even the pair of them struggled to penetrate the gathered gloom. The orc cursed once, vilely even for him.

“All right! Everybody—and I mean
everybody
—grab a torch. I wanna see just what the fuck we’ve gotten ourselves into. That means you too, druid.”

Entire constellations of sparks speckled the underground night as flint and steel scraped together, and the feeble glow of those first torches was quickly augmented by five more. And that, finally, was enough to let them see.

“What the fuck…?” Cræosh asked eloquently.

“Oh, good,” Josiah said. “We’re here.”

“Here” was a perfectly square platform of stone, perhaps forty feet on a side. In fact, it appeared to be the top of a squared pillar, for there was nothing but a deep, dark drop on every side. Equidistant between the four corners, a thin case of metal stairs descended from the platform. Each connected, about twenty feet out and fifteen down, with a stone catwalk. It, too, was a square, and it, too, had staircases descending from it. These reached beyond the torchlight, but Josiah assured them that they connected to
another
stone walkway beyond the first.

“So, um, ‘concentric squares,’ is it?” Gork said.

“Well, yes, basically,” the acolyte admitted. “That’s as accurate as anything.”

“I see. And are
all
druids this insane? Or just ancient dead ones?”

“Uh…”

“What’s down there?” Gimmol asked, gesturing toward the nearest edge. Given the catch in his voice, the others imagined that he was probably reliving his near-fatal plunge back on the Steppes.

“Down there—is down,” Josiah told him. “To the best of my knowledge, not even the ancients knew. They used magic to hew this place from the rock, but even they had no real idea how far down it went. My best advice would be: don’t fall.”

“Gee,” Gimmol said sourly. “Thanks ever so much. So much as one worm pops up, I’m gone so fast….”

“So what’s the damn point?” Cræosh asked. “What the hell is this place, and what the even more hell are we doing here?”

“Come with me to the outermost walkway,” Josiah said, “and I’ll show you.”

They chose the northern stairs—entirely at random, for lack of any better way to decide—and crept with excruciating care across the narrow metal steps. Even Katim and Gork, either of whom could most probably have skipped down the stairs blindfolded, seemed oppressed by the seemingly infinite drop below.

There were, it turned out, three sets of rings—well, squares—surrounding the center platform. Gork was the first to reach the outermost. Peering out over the unguarded edge, he saw nothing but darkness, and a whole lot of it. Nothing below, nothing beyond—they might as well have stood in the center of an infinite void.

One that could not, frankly, have existed in the soft earth beneath Ymmech Thewl, but Gork had dealt with enough magic lately that he’d long since ceased to consider the laws of nature to be anything more than friendly advice.

“I think now would be a marvelous time for an explanation,” Fezeill suggested. Everyone looked at Josiah expectantly. It took him a moment to answer, for he gawked raptly about; a few tears of wonder trailed down his cheeks.

“Symbolism,” he said finally, in an unknowing echo of Queen Anne. “Both sacred and mystical. The four elements, the four winds, the four seasons. Earth, sun, moon, and stars. Childhood, adulthood, old age, and death. Most druidic iconography is circular, but the holiest, most important? Patterns of four. Oh, I’d never hoped to see this…”

Katim nodded. “And so, four levels of…squares. Four times four. How…primitive.”

“Okay, yeah, symbolism,” Cræosh muttered impatiently. “Great. But all this”—and here he waved vaguely, as though the others could possibly have failed to realized what he was talking about—”seems just a little excessive.”

“This was the heart of one of the greatest druidic sects,” Josiah huffed, drawing himself up. “Such a shrine calls for nothing
less
than magnificence!”

“What’s wrong with gold fixtures over a simple altar?” Gork complained. “I
like
gold fixtures.…”

“Somewhere here,” the druid said, “is hidden the entrance to the repository of the ancients. We just have to find it.”

It didn’t take long, as this outer catwalk wasn’t entirely featureless. At each of the four corners was a wooden door within a freestanding frame: a door that pretty obviously led nowhere at all, since they all faced out onto emptiness.

“Well, this,” Gork said, his tone very similar to Cræosh’s, “is starting to really chafe my buttocks.”

“The ancient druids,” Cræosh told Josiah, “were some sick bastards. This whole thing is the result of a truly twisted sense of humor. Were they
smoking
their holy symbols, by any chance?”

The acolyte, however, only smiled. “It’s more magnificent than I’d ever imagined!” he whispered softly.

“Huh?” the orc asked.

“I agree,” said Gork. “Huh?”

“Open the door,” Josiah told them.

“Umm, hello? Anybody home?” Cræosh actually rapped lightly on the man’s skull. “Anyone? There’s nothing behind the door, human! I can bloody well see that
without
opening the damn thing!”

The druid would not be swayed, however. “Open the door,” he repeated.

Gork and Cræosh both continued to stare.

“Which one?” Gimmol asked timidly.

“I doubt it matters. Patterns of four, remember? They probably all lead to the same place.”

Gork and Cræosh continued to stare. Katim finally grew sick and tired of the lot of them, stormed over, and yanked the door open.

Instantly, the other two that they could see, way down the catwalks, vanished from their corners; the goblins could only assume that the fourth had disappeared as well.