The Goblin Corps (61 page)

Jhurpess, in the midst of his unintelligible shrieking, decided that waiting for Gork to do something with the lock was clearly going to take too long. His massive club flashed over the kobold’s head—close enough to rustle the hair Gork didn’t have—and split the wood straight down the middle. There was plenty of room beyond for the entire squad, except that Cræosh, Jhurpess, and Gork had all dived for the opening at once and succeeded in firmly wedging themselves into the doorframe.

Katim leapt, digging her talons painfully into the crevices in the stone, clinging to the ceiling above; a vicious, malformed arachnid. Gimmol just cowered into a little ball as far from the center of the path as he could get without rolling off into the vermin beyond.

By the time Belrotha reached them, she’d ceased running at all, having already built up what even she recognized as an excessive amount of speed. The ogre held herself completely stiff, legs locked in a crouch, arms extended for balance, and still she slid rapidly across the ice, slowly rotating as she came. A look of bemusement plastered across her face, she glided beneath the quivering troll, past the cowering gremlin, and plowed full tilt into the flesh-packed doorway.

The sounds of impact finally faded, the dust and the splinters and the frost settled into a thin haze, and Katim allowed herself to drop to her feet, shaking her aching fingers as though to slough off the pain. She felt the ice crack beneath her soles and shivered as a spray of cold water splashed over the tops of her boots. Gimmol’s spell was quite clearly giving out. She nonchalantly reached out, lifted the gremlin-ball, stepped through the now-vacant doorway, and promptly dropped him again.

Some yards ahead of her was a haphazard collection of limbs that Katim assumed accounted for the rest of the squad. Even as she watched, Belrotha rose and shook herself, sending more splinters—and also Jhurpess—into the air. Cræosh dragged himself rather more slowly to his feet: staggering, blinking owlishly, and leaning vaguely to his left.

And Gork—Gork lay, facedown and unmoving, on the hard stone floor.

Well, there was no blood, at least. Carefully, Katim knelt beside him. “Gork? Gork, you need to…get moving.”

“Go away,” the kobold muttered, his voice muffled by the rock into which his snout was pressed. “I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead. Now…get up.”

“I’m dead,” he insisted firmly. “I got run over by a herd of rabid wildebeests, and now I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead,” Katim said again.

“I—”

“But you’re
about
…to be.”

“—suddenly feel a whole lot better,” Gork finished smoothly, rising to his feet. His arms were mottled with fresh bruises, and he favored his right ankle just a bit with his first few steps, but otherwise he appeared remarkably unscathed by his collision with the “wildebeests.”

Satisfied that the squad would be hindered by neither the kobold nor, after a few moments to regain his equilibrium, the orc, Katim examined the room around them.

“Room,” as it turned out, was something of a misnomer. Apparently natural, to judge by the veritable forest of stalactites and stalagmites, the cavern must have been over a hundred feet on a side. Fires—not torches, these, but small bonfires—burned at seemingly random intervals. Large slabs, apparently leftovers from the formation of the Demias Gap, lay scattered throughout those various protrusions, creating a stone hedgework not dissimilar to Queen Anne’s maze of plants.

“Katim, left flank,” Cræosh barked. “Gork, right. I’ll check the center. Belrotha, Jhurpess, and Gimmol will fill in the gaps and provide reinforcement should any of the three of us find anything.”

“Are we giving orders…again, Cræosh?” Katim asked him. “I thought we’d broken you…of that particular habit.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Cræosh challenged.

“As a matter of fact, I…don’t.”

“Then get the fuck moving, and save the arguments for some other time when I might give a shit what you think.”

Katim flared her nostrils at that, but said nothing more.

Slowly, the squad spread out, moving carefully ahead. Most of the cavern looked just like what they’d already seen, but the far left portion…
flowed.

“Ancestors,” Cræosh exclaimed. The others could only nod in agreement.

If the hallway had contained a river of worms, this was the ocean to which it ran. Cræosh would not have believed that all the worms and all the maggots in all the world could have formed so large a mass. It possessed its own tides, that sea, caused by the individual writhing of millions of component creatures. It ebbed and fell, sometimes subsuming this rock here, other times disgorging that stalagmite there.

No, not the rising and falling of a tide, Cræosh decided reluctantly. The beating of some vast heart.

“So,” Gork said, grinning through clenched teeth, “which one of them do you suppose is Sabryen?”

“NONE!
I
AM
THY
RIGHTFUL
KING!
I
AM SABRYEN!”

The expanse surged again, the first half of that horrid heartbeat, but this time, when it contracted, it left a figure standing in its wake. Arms spread wide, King Sabryen emerged from the embrace of his loving subjects.

The Charnel King certainly hadn’t stinted on his curse. From the waist up, Sabryen’s flesh was pale, tinged with the faint blue of death, decorated with ragged tears that flapped like ghastly lips when he moved. A few strands of thick, stringy hair clung to his skull, and a thin film of maggots roiled in his empty eye sockets.

And this was his better half. His flesh was torn at the waist, jagged and uneven. The tip of a spine dangled obscenely from within, tracing random patterns in the dust. From beneath his dead flesh his innards drooped, intestines and strings of muscle and meat—only they were no longer organs at all, but unthinkably long worms that tensed and clenched and pushed his body across the floor.

Gimmol retched. Jhurpess whined and covered his head. Even Cræosh looked somewhat greener than usual. “I thought King Morthûl was bad,” he whispered hoarsely.

Katim licked her chops, a thin string of drool splattering the toes of her boots. “No troll alive has anything…like
that
waiting on them…in the next world,” she cooed.

“Is that all you can think about?!” It was as near to panic as Cræosh had ever heard his own voice, but he couldn’t help it.

“What else is…there?”

“
PUT
THY
WEAPONS
ASIDE!” Sabryen boomed at them, the profane thing that was his body sliding ever nearer. “
THOU
CANNOT
HARM
ME!
AND
I
NEED
NOT
HARM
THEE
.
THOU
SERVE
THE
USURPER
,
BUT
THOU
ART
NOT
MY
FOE
.” He spread his arms even wider and smiled, making his face even more obscene. “I AM A
BENEVOLENT
KING
,
AND
I
GRANT
THEE
THIS
OPTION
.
TURN
THY
BACKS
UPON
THE
FOUL
USURPER
OF MY THRONE!
SWEAR
TO ME
THY
ALLEGIANCE
,
THY
FEALTY!
THOU
SHALL
BE
THE
HIGHEST
OF MY
SUBJECTS
.
LAY
LOW
THINE
ARMS
,
AND
THOU
SHALL
BE
EXALTED
BEFORE
ALL
MEN
.
WOULD
THY
CURRENT
MASTER
,
THY
CHARNEL
KING
,
PROVE
SO GENEROUS?”

“He’d prove even less generous once he found out we’d turned traitor on him,” Gimmol mouthed quietly.

“You know,” Cræosh called more loudly, “you’re the second, um,
person
to ask us to betray Morthûl.”

“
INDEED
.” Sabryen sounded less than impressed. “
AND
WHAT
REPLY
DID
THOU
MAKE
TO
THE
FIRST?”

“We told him to pull his ass cheeks over his face and sing hymns.”

“I don’t remember anyone saying that,” Gork said.

“Shut up!” Katim rasped.

“I
SEE
.” The maggots contorting in Sabryen’s sockets seemed to grow agitated. “
AND
WOULD
THOU
MAKE
SO
RUDE
A
RESPONSE
TO MY
OFFER
AS WELL?”

Cræosh made a show of pondering for a moment. “We don’t have to,” he finally said. “Can you suggest a more polite way of saying ‘Fuck off sideways’?”

“I
SUSPECTED
THOU
WERE
FOOLS
, TO
SERVE
THY
TREACHEROUS
LORD
SO
WILLINGLY
.” The last traces of affability had dripped from his voice like the roaches cascading from the Dark Lord he so hated. “
STILL
DID
I
GRANT
THEE
THE
OPPORTUNITY
TO
SERVE
ME
VOLUNTARILY
,
THAT
NONE
MIGHT
CALL
ME AN
UNREASONABLE
MAN
.”

“None might call you a man at all,” Cræosh observed. “Spread out!” he hissed at the others, who were already doing just that.

“
BUT
WILLINGLY
OR
NOT
,
THOU
WILL
SERVE!
ALL
OF
KIROL
SYRRETH
SHALL
BE
MINE
AGAIN!”

“I think that’s our cue,” Gork said.

“
FEAST
, MY CHILDREN!” Sabryen cried, his horrific innards thrusting him across the ground at astounding speeds.

“Cræosh!” Gimmol shouted as the entire quivering mass of worms began to flow toward them, “we’re going to have a hard time getting to Sabryen if we’re covered in that!”

The orc glanced aside from the oncoming king long enough to curse. “Can you slow it down?” he called back.

The gremlin shook his head. “Even at full strength, I couldn’t hope to affect
that!
I—”

“Gimmol, go help kill man with worm-guts,” Belrotha said. “Me can stop worms.”

“Belrotha, no! You can’t—”

“Gimmol not argue, or me get mad!” she screamed at him. “Gimmol not want me to get mad at him! Me be very sorry after, but Gimmol still be squished into very small lump, and me not be able to undo!”

“I’ll just go help with Sabryen,” the gremlin agreed uneasily. Almost unwillingly, he turned away.

Belrotha offered a single grunt of approval and then calmly surveyed the onrushing tide of worms, maggots, millipedes, and other things for which she had no names. Even she was smart enough to realize that her fists and her sword would prove useless against such a foe. But not once in the entire history of her race had futility ever prevented an ogre from acting—and besides, Belrotha had a
plan.

It was a new experience for her, having a plan; but she’d watched the others do it, and it didn’t seem that tricky. What she had learned in her months of traveling with this motley group was that “having a plan” basically meant “finding a new way to kill whatever it was that had caused the need for the plan in the first place.”

Belrotha took a step backward, bent down, and smoothly lifted one of the massive slabs that lay strewn about the cavern like the toys of a messy (not to mention exceedingly large) child.
Fist squish only a few. Sword squish only a few. Big rock squish
many.

The stone, taller than she was and equally as wide, crashed into the oncoming tide. Ichor and sludge spurted from beneath, and the ogre imagined she could hear the death screams of a thousand thousand worms. Grinning wildly, she reached for the next rock.

The others were faring somewhat less well. The instant Sabryen had shuffled into range, Cræosh leapt forward, sword raised high. With a vicious cry he brought it down, determined to cleave Sabryen’s head completely in half.

It didn’t happen that way. With a contemptuous twist of his arm, the hideous thing caught the blade in an open palm. Sword broke skin, but only a trickle of a thick, brackish sludge oozed from the wound. The shock of impact ran up the blade and through the orc’s arms, very nearly enough to make him drop the weapon. Sabryen’s other hand slammed into Cræosh’s chest, and the orc found himself on his back a dozen feet away. Groggily, his chest screaming in agony, he staggered back to his feet. A massive palm print had been dented into his breastplate, and only the steel’s protection, feeble as it had proved, had saved him from a new array of broken ribs.

Katim’s
chirrusk
whistled, its razor-tipped barbs sinking into the flesh of Sabryen’s extended arm. She twisted and yanked, the chain snapping taut. It was a traditional trollish maneuver, supposedly capable of toppling any opponent through a combination of agony and main strength. Katim had once seen it used to pull down an ogre even larger than Belrotha.

But here and now, she might as well have been trying to topple the Iron Keep with a skein of yarn. The chain reached the end of its slack and just stopped. Her mightiest tug couldn’t so much as move the creature’s arm, and he appeared perfectly content to ignore a degree of pain that should have sent any living thing into shock.

Sabryen flexed that arm in the opposite direction. Katim, snarling like a rabid dog, allowed the
chirrusk
to slide from her fist rather than find herself slamming into the floor at the worm-thing’s “feet.” The former king glanced curiously at the chain dangling from his skin and then, without so much as a flinch, tore the barbs loose from his flesh and dropped it behind him. Grinding her teeth so loud the others could hear it, Katim drew her axe.