The Savage Caves

9

There was a loud hiss and everything went black, but that was the least of Regdar’s worries. He could feel himself being pulled underwater even as he was whipped to the side. His nose filled with water, and his eyes burned. He clamped his mouth shut and struggled to hold his breath while the fast-moving water had its way with him. His sword was ripped from his hand, and he hit rock—maybe a rock wall—and he was falling.

He could feel his face come out into air, and he drew in a quick gasp, managing to clamp his mouth shut again when water splashed into his face. He bounced off something hard—another rock—and it hurt, but he knew nothing was broken. The air was forced out of his lungs, though, and it was painful, desperate seconds before he came out of the water again long enough to draw in a breath.

There was a splash that whipped his head to one side, and the sound might have been loud enough to deafen him, if his ears hadn’t filled with water. He was submerged and sinking, but he wasn’t being beaten against rocks anymore. Regdar could feel the water shove him down and backward, then he came to rest on the bottom.

Wrapped in thirty pounds or more of steel armor, he sank like a stone wrapped in thirty pounds or more of steel armor. His feet were on the bottom, a hard stone surface that Regdar was happy to note was less slippery than he’d expect the bottom of a pond to be. He opened his eyes in the frigid water but could see nothing at all. He pushed against the bottom with both feet, confident that he could at least get his face above water long enough to breathe, maybe even to call out for Naull.

The top of his head hit stone only a foot or less above him, and he might have knocked himself out but for the sturdy helm he still wore. The strap around his chin had secured it through what Regdar realized was worse than a one-way trip down a waterfall. The stone above his head kept him submerged, though. His lungs were beginning to ache. He tried again, holding his hands up above him, but felt the smooth stone before he even bothered trying to kick off the floor again. He was completely blind, and he was drowning.

It took Jozan a few moments to realize that the webs were full of goblins. The fine, sticky strands stretched from stalactite to stalagmite and to one uneven, curved wall of the huge cave up into the darkness past the reach of Lidda’s lantern light. Studded throughout the chaotic mass of grayish white webbing were bundles of almost pure white, shaped in the outline of the squat little humanoids. Some seemed to be missing limbs, a few were missing heads. Others were hanging upside down or at odd angles. Most were packed into the web in uncomfortable, even unnatural positions, with arms forced at odd angles, legs broken and smashed up against backs.

Lidda stopped at the edge of the mass of webs and, gazing along its length, stepped backward until her back came to rest on Jozan’s thigh.

“Let’s go,” she whispered, her voice echoing in the cool air that was growing ever closer with a strong stench of decay. “Let’s just—”

The priest put a hand on her shoulder, and she stopped speaking.

They stood there looking at the webs for the space of a few heartbeats, then Jozan said, “They’re all dead. None of them are moving.”

“Thank the Nurturing Matriarch for that, at least,” Lidda said.

Jozan offered similar thanks, silently, to Pelor, then said, “This could be Fairbye in a week… a month… maybe a year, if these spiders—”

“Then we won’t go back to Fairbye,” Lidda cut in. “What are we talking about this for, Jozan? There must be dozens of goblins stuck in there. There could be hundreds, maybe thousands of those spiders or more.”

Jozan’s heart sank. As always, at least to Jozan’s mind, the right thing to do was evident. They needed to continue. They needed to eradicate these spiders before they ranged any farther on the surface, before they established a pantry like this in the village.

But Lidda was right. There would have to be more of the spiders than the two of them could possibly kill. Regdar and Naull were gone—who knew where. They might be dead, at the bottom of a deep shaft if they were lucky, in a web like the goblins if they weren’t. He and Lidda were lost. They’d thought they were going back to the bottom of the shaft but must have gone deeper into the labyrinthine cave. Regdar and Naull could be alive, like them, but lost. There might be miles of caves. They might never find each other, might never find their way out.

Jozan began to whisper, “Pelor grant me the wisdom—”

Lidda had to reach up way over her head to clamp a cold hand over his mouth, but she managed it. He looked down at her, and she held a finger to her lips, her sword dangling upside down in that hand. Her eyes darted away, in the direction of the web, and Jozan could have sworn one of her ears actually twitched like a dog’s.

He nodded once, and she took her hand away, then brought her sword back up and slid the lantern off the loop at her belt. She set the light down on the cave floor and seemed to almost sink into the side of a stalagmite. It was all Jozan could do to keep track of her slow, deliberate movement as she crept ever closer to the web.

Not sure what to do, he stood next to the lantern and waited.

The sound of that pained, desperate wail washed over him. It was the voice Lidda had mistaken for Regdar’s, and it was coming from the web.

Jozan closed his eyes and tried to center himself, hoping to wrap himself in the reassuring presence of Pelor, but he could feel his hands shaking. He hated that sound.

There was a grunt that broke through the low wail, stopping it cold and sending echoes of the two sounds passing each other from cave wall to cave wall. There was a growl that Jozan thought might be Lidda, then another growl, then two rumbling grunts. It sounded like voices—muffled, heard from far away through intervening walls.

Jozan scooped up the lantern and dared to whisper, “Lidda?”

There were two more grunts, then Lidda called back, “Jozan, up here.”

The priest held the lantern high in front of him and did his best to follow the sound of the halfling’s voice. In the time it took for him to find her, standing in front of a wall of webbing, there were at least three more of the grunting couplets, and Jozan realized that Lidda was speaking to someone.

The halfling barked out two harsh, nonsensical growls, then turned to Jozan as he slipped past a stalagmite to stand next to her. A tear traced a curving path down one of the halfling’s dirty cheeks. Her eyes were red, and her face was quivering.

“Jozan,” she said, “you have to help him.”

She turned away, and Jozan followed her gaze to the wall of webs. Stuck there, hanging nearly upside down, its right arm twisted behind its back at such an extreme angle that its shoulder joint, obviously dislocated, bulged under its pale yellow skin, was a goblin—and it was alive.

“His name is—” Lidda barked out a harsh grunt that sounded like it might have begun and ended with a “k” sound.

Jozan studied the goblin. Its—his—skin was wrinkled, and there were splotches of orange and muddy brown showing through its tissue paper surface. Age spots, Jozan assumed. The goblin looked up at him with one bulging, cloudy eye. His other eye was swollen closed, a gray bruise flowering around it.

Lidda pronounced the goblin’s name again, more slowly, and Jozan repeated, “Kink.”

“He is chief of the Cavemouth Tribe,” Lidda said.

“You speak their language?” Jozan asked her, still looking at the pitiful old goblin. “You never told us that.”

“Can you help him?” she asked, ignoring his question.

Jozan hung his mace on his back and crouched down in front of the restrained goblin. He reached out but stopped just short of touching the web. The strands were fine, at least compared to the spidersilk strands of the rope ladder he’d climbed down earlier. The spider that made this web was smaller.

“If we can get him out of the web,” Jozan said, “I can try.”

“You healed Regdar,” she said.

He turned to look at her. Though he was crouching, he looked the little halfling in the eye.

“I can do that again,” he said, “but it will mean one less of another spell.”

Lidda drew in a breath. She was probably going to ask him what other spell might be more important, or tell him that the old goblin wouldn’t last long enough to debate it, but she stopped herself.

“You have a dagger,” the priest said. “We should try to cut him loose.”

She reached to her belt, then visibly sagged. “I threw it,” she said. “It’s still stuck in the—”

She looked at the old goblin, whose one eye rolled up to meet her gaze. The goblin barked out two grunts, then two more, then two more. Lidda listened with narrowed eyes, then grunted herself twice. Jozan couldn’t imagine that was really a language, that ideas could be transferred with these simplistic, guttural vocalizations.

“What did he say?” Jozan asked.

“They keep the spiders for food and…” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not sure, maybe something like ‘livestock’? The spiders turned on them, because of something another goblin tribe did.”

Jozan said, “Keep talking. Find out as much as you can while I try to figure out how to get him down.”

It took the better part of an hour, but Jozan, using the lantern flame to make a tiny torch out of a broken crossbow bolt, managed to get the old goblin out of the web. As he worked, Lidda grunted her way through a halting conversation with the dying humanoid. Jozan brought to mind the prayer that would help him replace one spell with another that would at least begin to heal the goblin’s grievous wounds.

When the old goblin was laying still but alive on the floor of the cave, Lidda said, “He’s speaking a funny dialect and can’t manage the sign language, but I think what happened was—”

She stopped short when a spider appeared as if from nowhere. Jozan went sprawling backward from his crouching position to clatter onto the floor. The creature was on top of the old goblin, and before either Jozan or Lidda could react, it sank its sharp fangs into the old goblin’s chest. There was an awful wet, cracking sound, and the goblin let loose another low, long, echoing wail.

Jozan fumbled for his mace while trying to kick the spider, but he was at an odd angle, wrapped up in his own armor like a turtle rolled on its back. The old goblin went limp, and Jozan knew he was dead. There was a flash of reflected light, and Lidda’s sword came down at the spider. The thing released its grip on the dead goblin and launched itself backward with all eight legs. Lidda’s blade sank an inch into the already dead goblin, where the spider had just been. The halfling barked out a curse that, under normal circumstances, would have made Jozan blush.

Instead, he scrambled to his feet and managed to get his mace in front of his body just as the spider leaped at him. It smashed into the mace, and it took all of Jozan’s strength to keep the weapon from rebounding into his own forehead. The enormous brown spider wrapped its legs around the weapon and clapped its mandibles together, snapping at Jozan’s face.

The priest almost threw his weapon away, then he saw Lidda skip in front of him, dragging her blade along the spider’s back as she went. There was a splash of yellow ichor, and the spider dropped off the mace.

Jozan couldn’t help but smile. There was something reassuring in Lidda’s reaction to the spider on his mace. It was like something Regdar would do.

He looked over to her and said, “Thank you, L—”

“By the Protector,” Lidda interrupted, still holding her short sword in both hands, looking up into the darkness. “We need to run away—as fast as we can.”

Jozan looked around and saw shadows move and come together and pass through each other. The webs were waving as if in a stiff breeze.

“Spiders,” he whispered.

Lidda grabbed him by the arm and pulled, shouting, “Lot’s of ’em—let’s go!”

Regdar hopped up and down in the cold water, moving gradually to his left, but all he felt above him was the same smooth rock. He kept his eyes closed and tried not to imagine what might be in the water with him. His chest burned, his throat burned, his eyes burned… he had less than a minute to live. Regdar was determined to spend that time trying to save his life.

When the darkness behind his eyelids turned glowing red, Regdar was sure he was dying. Was that Pelor’s light? Was it his time to pass into the embrace of No, he thought, don’t give up.

Regdar opened his eyes, and there was a shaft of bright light in the water with him. He could see everything all at once: the water, clearer than any he’d ever seen; the smooth gray-white rock above his head; the slivers of black fish no longer than his thumb; and the surface of the water in front of him.

The shaft of light bounced up and down, and Regdar could see that it was a staff of wood that was somehow glowing with a cold white light. He reached out and grabbed it, and someone pulled the staff up. It slipped out of his hand, but he bounced after it, coming out from under the little ledge that might have been his tomb for the fact that he didn’t know that air was two steps in front of him.

He pushed off the bottom and grabbed the staff again. When his head came out of the water he drew in a deep breath, and his head spun. It was the finest air he’d ever breathed.

“Thank the Lord of All Magics,” Naull said. “I thought you were going to drown.”

Regdar reached out and with Naull’s help managed to get a firm hold on the side of the clear pool. He coughed, hearing and feeling a little water rattle in his throat. He crawled the rest of the way out of the pool. Regdar was shivering and self-conscious in front of the young woman.

He saw that they were in a small chamber at the foot of another waterfall. His eyes settled on Naull’s plain wooden staff, aglow with obviously magical light.

“If you… could do that,” he said, still panting for air, “why… were we… fumbling around with that damn torch?”

Naull opened her mouth to form an excuse but burst out laughing instead. Regdar laughed with her.