The rock spanked off the cave floor and shot up under Jozan's scale mail kilt, hitting him in the groin hard enough to double him over. He managed to remain on his feet, but he had to close his eyes and work to keep from throwing up. It crossed his mind that if he asked nicely, Pelor might take him into the next life right away.
"Hey!" Lidda cried, then grunted loudly at the goblin women in their primitive tongue.
Jozan heard three more rocks hit the floor near him, and he straightened up, blinking, only able to hope that he wouldn't get hit again. Lidda grabbed his arm and pulled hard enough to make him stumble.
"We should just leave," she said, her voice pitched even higher than normally and her face red in the lanternlight.
A stone bounced off her shoulder and she shouted, "Ow! What's it gonna take?"
Jozan turned and was finally able to take a deep breath. A stone bounced off his armored back, and he scowled. It was his turn to pull Lidda away from the growing crowd of feral goblin women.
"An eye?" she yelled at them even as she followed Jozan into the darkness. "Will that make you happy...when someone loses an eye?"
"Let's just go, child," Jozan hissed through clenched jaws. "They aren't what we're here for anyway, and they obviously don't want our—"
Jozan and Lidda leaped to either side when a short goblin javelin whizzed between them. The weapon clattered to a halt on the stone floor behind Jozan. Lidda, who was sitting on the cave floor, drew her sword and sprang to her feet.
Turning his attention to the source of the javelin, Jozan squinted into the darkness ahead. He tightened his grip on his mace and tried to think of a spell that might help them, but nothing he'd prayed for that morning would have been of immediate assistance.
A goblin stepped out of the darkness, then another right on the heels of the first. They both drew back their arms to hurl javelins. Ahead of him and to his left, Jozan saw a particularly fat, squat stalagmite—one that might provide cover from the javelins but that would also take him farther away from Lidda and the light of her lantern.
The goblins threw their javelins, and Jozan made up his mind. He ran toward the stalagmite, ducking a javelin on his way, and came to a skin-scraping halt behind it just as a second javelin clattered across the ground next to him.
"Watch it!" Lidda shouted, her voice an ear-piercing squeal.
He saw her making for similar cover, and when she passed behind a stalagmite, Jozan was thrust into almost total darkness. There was a pool of orange light ahead of him. He peeked over the top of the stalagmite and saw that one of the goblins—Jozan counted eight of them in all—was carrying a torch. They also seemed to have no shortage of javelins.
Jozan began to consider the odds against them when his face was pushed into the top of the stalagmite by a blow to the back of his head. He didn't hit hard, and neither did the rock—he doubted there'd be a dent in his helm—but it stung, reminding him that there was a threat from the rear as well.
The stone that hit him in the head bounced off and struck one of the advancing goblin warriors in the chest just hard enough to get its attention.
Jozan heard the telltale smack of stone on skin, then a deep, guttural grunt that couldn't have been Lidda. A goblin warrior charged him, and he stepped from behind the stalagmite with his mace at his side and back enough to put some momentum into a blow. Just as he was beginning to bring his arm forward to block the goblin's bent, rusted short sword, another rock flew past his head so closely he could hear it whistling through the air. The rock hit the charging goblin square in the face, and the little warrior dropped to the floor in a spinning flurry of arms and legs.
Jozan tried to get out of the fallen goblin's way but got tripped up in the thing's legs and went down hard, bouncing off the smooth, hard edge of the stalagmite that had been his cover.
He fell onto his back and saw more stones—at least four or five of them—shoot through the air over him. All but one bounced off a grunting goblin warrior and were followed by that ululating wail from the goblin females behind them.
"Looks like the ladies are on our side!" Lidda called from the darkness.
It took only a few whispered words for Regdar to determine that Naull wanted to follow the goblin jailers and their prisoner as much as he did. They were both at a loss as to how else to find their way out, and loath to get involved with what appeared to be a goblin prison. Regdar tried not to imagine what these goblins might have done that would cause other goblins—humanoids known to be particularly unpleasant—to lock them up.
The goblins had passed to their left, and Regdar couldn't see where they were going. Following them would mean walking right past the cages. Remembering that the caged goblins hadn't seemed to notice his torch going out, Regdar risked moving closer to get a better look.
Still hugging the cave wall to his right, he stepped up a good fifteen feet as quickly as he could without making too much noise. He peered around a corner to his left, just at the edge of the light from the torch stuck in the wall. The cave opened up into a large chamber with a floor that sloped rather precipitously downward. There were three cages full of goblins in all and another pool of water beyond them. The cave continued on past the pool and into darkness.
On the wall opposite the three cages was the black mouth of another side-passage. A torch was stuck in the wall near the entrance, a dim glow from inside the passage, the sound of goblins' grunting voices, and scuffling noises told Regdar that the goblins had gone that way.
He looked at the cages and saw that several goblin prisoners had finally noticed him. They were practically groveling, their mouths clamped tightly shut, their eyes bulging with what Regdar thought was surprise, mixed with fear.
The spider finished webbing the cage shut and scuttled off the stone bars and onto the floor.
When Naull touched his arm, Regdar jumped, scraping a pauldron on the wall. The sound was enough to startle the spider, and it turned on them, its row of black eyes glistening in the torchlight. It scuttled toward them quickly, and Regdar drew his arm back.
Naull started chanting in a quiet voice that still seemed like a roar in the otherwise quiet cave. Regdar ground his teeth and squinted, not sure what Naull was conjuring up but ready to smash the spider with his greatsword if she failed to stop it.
She stopped speaking, and as if on cue, the spider skittered to a halt, its striped, segmented legs ticking up underneath it, sending it rolling gently onto its back.
"It's asleep," Naull whispered, "but not for long."
Regdar released the breath he just then realized he was holding and said, "We need to risk it."
"Risk what?" she asked.
In lieu of an answer, Regdar took her thin forearm in his left hand and pulled her out with him into the torchlight. The goblin prisoners shifted back in response, but Regdar didn't wait to see what else they'd do. He pulled the young mage along behind him, across the treacherous sloping floor to the wall next to the side-passage.
He let go of Naull and whispered, "Take the torch."
She grabbed the torch that had been jammed into a crack in the wall next to the cave mouth and waited for Regdar to peek cautiously into the side-passage.
There was another torch set in the wall toward the back of the ragged cave. He could see that stalagmites had been cleared from the floor. Their round bases were like tree stumps. The ceiling was low enough to see and hung with slender stalactites that might brush the top of Regdar's helm. A gentle orange glow emanated from a hole in the cave floor and was slowly fading along with echoes of footsteps and the odd goblin grunt.
"Follow me," Regdar whispered and stepped into the side-passage.
At the edge of the hole, Regdar stopped and looked down. A rope ladder almost identical to the one they'd descended from the surface hung down into inky darkness. Naull stepped up to him and held the torch out over the hole. The floor was too far down for the torchlight to reveal.
Regdar knew that every second they hesitated meant the goblins would be farther ahead. If there were any more side-passages, intersections, or holes in the ground ahead of them, there would be no way to follow the goblins.
He looked at Naull, who was looking onto the dark pit with thin lips and shaking hands. She looked young, innocent, frightened, almost frail.
"Damn," she whispered.
Regdar blinked a couple times and said, "We could try something else if..."
She looked at him with anger in her eyes he hoped wasn't directed at him.
"Hold this," she said, thrusting the torch out toward him.
She crouched in front of the rope ladder, tested the knots where it was tied around the base of a broken-off stalagmite, and said, "They might be our only chance to find a way out of here or at least find out what's going on. I climbed before, I can climb again."
Regdar smiled and was surprised by a tightening in his throat.
"Wait," he said, then tossed the torch into the hole.
"What are you—?"
The torch fell maybe thirty feet before clattering to a stop on the cave floor below. The spidersilk ladder hung all the way to the floor. Naull breathed a sigh of relief that was so hard Regdar imagined he felt his whiskers riffle.
"After you," he said.
With a smile, Naull, started down the ladder. Regdar sheathed his sword, crouched, and steadied it for her. When she was almost to the floor, he swung down onto the ladder and was surprised to see that it held both their weight. In no time they stood on the floor of the narrow tunnel below. Naull bent to retrieve the torch.
They stood in silence, listening. At first there was nothing—just the sound of water dripping somewhere, the sound of their guttering torch, the sound of their own breathing, the sound of Regdar's heart beating.
When a grunt echoed around them, Naull drew in a breath. At first Regdar thought it had come from above, but Naull was pointing into the darkness. There was another grunt, then the clatter of steel on stone, and Regdar thought the mage might be right but couldn't be sure.
"This way," she said, her voice sounding more confident than her face looked.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
Naull looked up at him and shrugged. "Not really," she said. "This is my first time in a cave two thousand feet underground following goblins into a pitch-black tunnel that's probably full of huge spiders—you?"
Regdar blushed and stepped past her in the direction she'd indicated.
"No reason to be sarcastic," he grumbled, and instantly regretted it.
He was rewarded, though, by a quiet giggle from behind him. He smiled, knowing she couldn't see his face, and started walking faster.
"We should hurry, to gain ground on them," he said.
They followed the tunnel for a long time, passing one fork that briefly troubled them both. A quick detour showed them the error of their ways, and they only wasted a few minutes before finding the dead-end and going back.
When they saw the edge of the goblins' torchlight ahead of them, and the grunting voices came much more loudly, Regdar slowed and put a finger to his lips to tell Naull to be as quiet as she could.
The tunnel went on and on, and it was easy enough for them to keep the goblins just in sight in front of them. They were gradually moving upward, and Regdar was starting to feel as if they might be on their way out after all. The angle was slight, though, and he started to hope it would become more intense. At that angle he figured it might take them days to get all the way back to the surface.
As if designed to make him feel better, the cave floor did indeed start to rise at a greater angle. As they ascended, the sounds of goblin voices grew not only louder but decidedly more plentiful. Sounds of a struggle echoed down to them, followed by goblin shouts and what might have been a cheer.
Regdar stopped, listening, and the sounds didn't get any farther away.
"The tunnel must end up here somewhere," he whispered to Naull, who moved in close to him. "I think we—"
"Wait," she whispered, moving closer still. "I couldn't hear you."
She tilted her head and bent closer to Regdar. He leaned in and almost pressed his lips to her ear. He had the brief but uncomfortable notion that he should kiss her, but he pushed that aside. They were in danger, and there were more important things to think about than that, however good it made him feel.