Goblin Corps, The

  As though launched from a catapult, Katim soared over the top of the rise. Blood covered her snout, her armor, her axe, dripping a trail across the pristine white of the snow. And even as she landed the scream continued, reaching registers that Cræosh could scarcely hear. The yeti was practically writhing in pain.

  Her feet barely touched the snow as she broke into her long-legged lope. In the blink of the orc's blood-gummed eyes, she was near, she was beside them, she was…Past?

  Cræosh staggered and only then realized that he stood once more on his own two feet. And though those furry fists remained clasped about his neck, those fists were no longer connected to the yeti's wrists.

  Prying the claws from about his aching throat, Cræosh lurched toward his fallen sword.

  Her ungodly screech finally fading in the distance, Katim switched to a hiss of frustration. The yeti's flailing stumps were long enough, and certainly strong enough, to keep any sane opponent at bay, and the thing didn't look as though it would bleed out any time soon. Around and around she circled, probing for any opening with her axe, and wished her chirrusk wasn't still hanging, caught, in the thick hide of the other yeti.

  But even worse, it was all so useless, a waste of time and effort. Yetis, so far as she knew, were just beasts. Cunning, quick to learn, but beasts all the same, not people. No matter how many she fought, how many she killed—and there had been quite a few, since their flight from the detritus that had once been Ebonwind's cottage—she was adding nothing to her stable of slaves in the world to come. Had this one not threatened to take the orc she'd already claimed, she probably wouldn't even have bothered….

  Steel glinted from behind the bleeding yeti, and all she could think was Finally!

  Cræosh rose up and struck like an enraged serpent (albeit an injured, gasping serpent that could barely stand on its own two—umm, on its own). This time, the orc was prepared for the impossible resilience of yeti flesh. This time, he drove the sword into the beast's shoulder with every bit of strength he had left.

  This time, Cræosh was also weak and shaky, and was rewarded with only a pathetic trickle of blood seeping through the fur. He actually wanted to cry as the yeti pivoted, the stump of its arm raised to deliver another crushing blow to the same damn side of his face!

  But the Ancestors still had one benevolent eye turned his way. Katim's voice rang out in another soul-shriveling scream, and her axe struck true before the beast had even finished its spin. The musical sound of splintering bone tickled Cræosh's ears, and he exulted in the blood that splattered across his face in a warm soup.

  The yeti toppled, jagged edges of bone screeching across Katim's blade. With a grunt of annoyance, the troll yanked a rag from her pack and began wiping the gore from her axe.

  “Certainly…took your time,” Cræosh gasped at her.

  Katim looked up from her task. “I’m sorry, I didn't…hear you right. It almost sounded…like you said ‘Thank you.’ But…perhaps you better repeat it…just to be sure.”

  Cræosh grumbled. Then, “Thank you.”

  The troll shook her head. “Maybe you should…practice that more. It sounded…awkward.”

  The orc grimaced. “Now I didn't hear you right. That almost sounded like ‘you're welcome.’”

  “No, it didn't,” she said, returning her attention once more to her blade.

  With a grunt, Cræosh knelt and began applying snow to the bruising on his face and throat. “Any more of those things show up,” he said through a powdery white mask, “we're buggered so hard we're gonna be sneezing shit. You realize that, don't you?”

  “I’m aware of that…Cræosh, although I doubt I…could have phrased it so…poetically.”

  “Yeah, well, you can be awed by my lyrical speech later, Carrion-breath. Right now, we can decide what the hell to do about—”

  “Hey, guys!” Gork called from behind them. “We've finished stripping the meat off of…What the hell happened to you?”

  “What happened to me?” Cræosh's voice was absolutely calm as he rose to his feet. “What does it look like happened to me?”

  “Well, umm, that is…”

  “It looks,” the orc continued, “as though Katim and I fought a second yeti. By ourselves. While the rest of you were butchering one that was already dead. Or that's what it looks like to me, anyway.”

  Casually, he reached out and, once more palming the kobold's entire head, lifted Gork off the ground. “Is that what it looks like to you?” he asked.

  For his own part, Gork clearly decided that Cræosh wouldn't have left his mouth free unless he actually expected an answer.

  “You—uh, you did tell us that you could handle this one, Cræosh. Remember, we were fighting the big one, and you saw the little one on the dune, and you said, ‘You guys finish this one off. I'll get the other one.’ And then—”

  “But you did finish the big one off. Why didn't you come help?”

  “Well, Katim did go to help, didn't she? We, um, well, we sort of figured that, between the two of you, you could handle anything.” He grinned. “And hey, you did!“

  Cræosh dropped the kobold with a disgusted snort. “I guess you've got a point. But next time, I don't care if I’m fighting an elf or an ogre, a dog or a dragon. Once you've finished with yours, you make sure I've got things under control before you start in on something else.”

  “Ouch,” Gork agreed, rubbing his head.

  “Good.” Then, raising his voice for the sake of the others, Cræosh shouted, “Get your asses over here!”

  Fezeill, Jhurpess, and Gimmol appeared over the rise, each dragging several chunks of yeti that still needed to be butchered and salted. “Wow!” Gimmol yelped, catching sight of Cræosh's face for the first time. “What happened to you?”

  Cræosh snagged a large haunch of yeti and proceeded to use it to hammer Gimmol into the snow like a tent spike.

  “So,” Gork asked—respectfully, as he eyed Gimmol's bright red plume, which resembled nothing so much as a flower poking up from the churned powder—”what's the next step?”

  “Same as it has been,” Cræosh said, tossing the slab of meat to Katim. “We take whatever we can use, and we get a move on before the rest of the pack gets here.” Even as he spoke, a distant howl sounded on the arctic winds.

  “Someone dig up the turnip,” Cræosh ordered. “We've got to go!”

  They went, but the cold, the shifting snows, and the beatings they'd taken in the day and a half since fleeing Ebonwind's house conspired to slow their progress to a crawl. Cræosh hadn't felt this bad since he'd been a teenager, the day after he'd been caught in bed with his father's favorite mistress.

  “Look!”

  Cræosh twisted his already-aching neck, seeking the cause of the gremlin's warning. An entire pack of yetis—six in the open, perhaps more out of sight—howled their rage from atop a distant dune. Far away, Ancestors be thanked, but in the squad's current state, maybe not far enough. It was to be a race, then, to see if they could keep ahead of the creatures long enough for Shreckt to call them home at the day's end.

  Or rather, it would be a race for some of them. Jhurpess, however, took one look behind and finally came unhinged. His rapid, four-legged lope quickly carried him over the next rise, his shrill keening and uneven tracks all that remained to prove his existence.

  Cræosh and Fezeill blinked at each other while the others stared in the direction Jhurpess had gone. Several times each opened his mouth as if to say something, closing it again when he realized that there wasn't a damn thing to say.

  “Well,” Cræosh said finally, “at least he's heading the right way.” He pointed at the mountain range, the same they'd been pursuing since their arrival, now stretching across most of the northwestern horizon. “Sooner or later, he'll stop and wait for us.”

  Katim snorted once. “Assuming he doesn't…stumble into the Demias…Gap.”

  Technically, the infamous canyon was actually many leagues to the south (assumi
ng the squad were where they thought they were, a fact of which Cræosh wasn't entirely convinced). But a handful of smaller crevices reached this far north and even farther, and for convenience, most of Kirol Syrreth's natives just called the whole chain by the name of the largest.

  Cræosh just shrugged. “Either works for me.”

  Some miles and minutes later, the bugbear under discussion finally slowed to a brisk walk. It had taken some time, but Jhurpess had finally come to the realization that it wouldn't do him much good to escape the yetis if it meant his friends weren't here to help if something else popped up to eat him. And so, after a few bone-chilling moments of running through a list of everything that could pop up to eat him here—arctic eels, ice dragons, ogres, more yetis, blizzards (Jhurpess didn't actually know what a blizzard was, but he'd heard them mentioned in fearful tones, and assumed they were at least as nasty as yetis)—he finally decided to halt and wait for the squad.

  The bugbear slumped down, legs stretched out before him, ass planted in the snow, and began digging shapes into the thick powder with a finger. He had just finished his third attempt at spelling the words “Demon Squad” when the snow beside him hiccupped.

  Or that was the best way Jhurpess could find to describe it, anyway. As near as he could tell, the snow had simply bulged, as if something beneath it was trying to…

  Dig its way out?

  With a startled (if belated) yelp, Jhurpess shot to his feet. His gnarled war club was held fast in his hand, his fur-shrouded gaze fixed solidly on the ground. The snow bulged once more, and out slid a worm.

  Jhurpess blinked. A worm? The bugbear might not have known a lot, but he knew well that no worm should—could—survive here. Any one of a thousand dangers made it impossible, the cold being only the most obvious.

  The least obvious but, as it turned out, the most relevant, was a suspicious bugbear with a club.

  Once more, Jhurpess began to settle himself into the snow, smugly satisfied with his quick and efficient handling of the situation, when a second worm appeared a few inches beside the gooey smear that was all that remained of the first. It was followed swiftly by a third worm, two millipedes, and a handful of maggots.

  This, Jhurpess decided as he stood up once again, was moving beyond strange. One worm was a fluke; a whole mass of them was wrong. And “mass” was certainly the right word. Over the span of seconds, the writhing heap of worms, centipedes, millipedes, maggots, and the occasional grub had grown to the size of the bugbear's hand.

  And then it was a hand! The crawling things actually formed themselves into a shape eerily approximating fingers and a palm. Jhurpess retreated slowly, fighting to convince himself that the resemblance was coincidental….

  A fight he lost when the fingers flexed, digging into the snow, and pulled. An arm—an actual arm, also consisting of various flopping and crawling and writhing vermin—followed. A second “hand” appeared a few feet to the left. And the snow around him was hiccupping again, in half a dozen spots.

  Jhurpess was left with only two viable options. He could attack, despite his absolute incomprehension of what it was he faced, or he could run.

  Another scream on his simian lips, Jhurpess leapt and brought his club crashing down on the head—or what looked like it might be becoming a head—of the first creature. The cudgel sank deep into the snow, leaving smashed invertebrates and pupae in its wake. One entire side of the club was coated in ichor and flaps of worm skin, and any coherent shape had been completely obliterated by the bugbear's blow. The worms and millipedes that had made up the hands and arms collapsed. Some burrowed downward, perhaps to join others beneath the snow; others writhed for a few seconds and then lay limp, apparently dead.

  Jhurpess found his spirits rising. They might be unnatural; they might be revolting. But they were not, apparently, very tough. A grin settling across his features, the bugbear stepped back and allowed the other creatures to rise—six of them, if he counted right—and faltered, just a bit, when he finally saw them in their entirety.

  Humanoid silhouettes shifted constantly, as though viewed through a heat mirage, as thousands of component creatures skittered and slithered across one another. Scores of the tiny creatures tumbled constantly from those “bodies,” only to be reabsorbed on their way down. A thick ooze splattered, slowly but steadily, into the snow around them, exuded by who-knew-what.

  And they had faces! No true features, not exactly, but shallow hollows where eyes and mouth should sit. Here, for a depth of perhaps an inch in each orifice, no worms crawled, no maggots twitched. It was just enough for an imaginative observer to fill in the features, and the expressions, on his own.

  Jhurpess wasn't all that imaginative, but if he had been, he might just have realized that the creatures appeared to be screaming in silent torment.

  The nearest swarm drew back its hand and whipped it forward, as though it was throwing something. Jhurpess assumed he was safe—the creature held no weapon, after all—right up until a few tiny projectiles smacked into his leather breastplate and landed, skittering and writhing, at his feet.

  Jhurpess screeched at the handful of worms before him. He had no idea what the vermin would have done had they connected with something more yielding than his armor, and more importantly, he didn't want to find out.

  Instinct had him grasping momentarily for his bow; but no, arrows probably wouldn't do much good against these “swarms.” Instead, the bugbear dropped his club, reached into his pack, and brought out two of the chair legs he'd taken from the dakórren's hut. Wishing only that he had time to light them first—he had intended them for use as torches, after all—he hurled them both at the thing that attacked him.

  The first, spinning wildly, careened off the target's shoulder, taking only a smattering of crawling creatures with it. But the second flew true. With a satisfying and surprisingly solid thump, it struck just above the hollow mouth, embedding itself deep in the creature's head and sending huge numbers of worms and centipedes tumbling free. The swarm-creature dropped to its knees, hands raised uselessly to clutch at the thing protruding from its “face.”

  The bugbear directed his attention at the next in line—and squinted, puzzled, as it just pointed at him….

  A brilliant blue gleam formed around the thing's fingers. Jhurpess barely had time to yelp before two needles of ice coalesced in the air beneath that hand and launched themselves his way. And then the bugbear was lying on his back in the snow, blood soaking the ground around him.

  Magic! Not fair! Jhurpess struggled to rise, but his left arm proved unwilling to obey his frantic commands, and his right—though mobile—was uncomfortably numb. Thrashing the arm back and forth, impressing half an angel into the snow, the bugbear snagged the end of his club more by luck than intent. Using the massive weapon as a cane, he hauled himself to his feet.

  They were coming! The swarm-creatures shambled inexorably forward, the nearest practically within arm's reach. Screaming stridently—he seemed to be doing a lot of that, lately—Jhurpess spun and raced back the way he had come, as fast as a two-legged gait could go. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw several of his pursuers lift their hands as though to cast another spell, but the rises in the tundra's snows swiftly blocked them from his sight. He whimpered, but he never slowed.

  So they definitely should have run across the fuzzy bastard by now. Cræosh was starting to wonder, in a distant sort of way, if maybe Katim hadn't been right. Could Jhurpess have been so stupid, in such a blind terror, that he had barged over a rise of ice and snow to plunge into one of the ancillary canyons of the Demias Gap? Was his corpse even now scattered like lichen across some rock face?

  Alternatively, had something just eaten his face?

  Probably neither, but one could always hope.

  The rising wind began to whistle as it whipped through the rocky crags of the mountains that were finally drawing near. Except no, Cræosh realized, that was no trick of the wind at all. Now that he was paying att
ention, he recognized it as a scream—and a very familiar one, at that.

  Jhurpess appeared over a snow dune and charged toward the squad, running, for some reason, on two legs rather than four.

  “Well, it's about fucking time, Nature-boy,” Cræosh snapped. “Where the hell have you…?”

  Five heads swiveled, staring, as the bugbear continued past them without slowing even a little bit, vanishing again into the distance back the way they'd just come.

  “Um,” Cræosh finally observed, tearing the quilt of stunned silence that had settled over them.

  “Should we follow him?” Gork asked.

  “He was running from something,” Fezeill said. “Perhaps we ought to go see what it is.”

  “No. He'll be…back. And we can let whatever…he's running from come to…us.” Katim snorted in disgust. “Assuming it's…anything at all. Skittish…creature.”

  The orc was already sculpting a hollow in the snow, to serve as a makeshift chair. “‘Skittish’ is putting it mildly. I’m surprised Monkeybutt doesn't drop dead of shock every time his dick slaps his calf. And frankly, I’m sick and fucking tired of chasing his ass.” He started to lean back, froze beneath Gork's and Fezeill's shocked stares. “What?”

  “Slaps his calf?” the kobold demanded.

  “Yeah.” Cræosh sounded puzzled. “What about it?”

  The others traded suspicious looks. “Is he messing with us?” Gork asked.

  “I don't know,” the doppelganger said with a shrug, “but I’m going over there to turn into an orc and find out.”

  Cræosh shrugged as they wandered away—Who the hell understands these guys?—and settled in, relaxing with a wide stretch. “Give a yell when Jhurpess shows up. Or whatever was chasing him, either way.”