It was only as they were departing what had probably been a barracks, picking their way through broken flagstones and clinging weeds, that something caught Katim's notice. Recognizing what might have been a hand protruding from beneath, the troll hurled aside a mess of sodden wood that had once been a bed, or perhaps a table, to reveal a partial skeleton, half buried in the soft dirt.
“What was it?” Gork asked, peering around her left knee.
Katim squinted. The skeleton was only visible from the thighs up, and a great portion of the rib cage appeared to have been shattered by a narrow object: a blunt axe perhaps, or possibly a gardening tool. The skull had also been partly crushed, this time by the furniture collapsing atop it, but she recognized the shape of a snout, shorter and broader than her own….
“I think,” Katim said slowly, “that this…might've been a troglodyte.”
Now it was Gork's turn to peer closer. “You know, you may be right. I thought they only lived in the Brimstone Mountains. Too cold elsewhere, or something.”
The troll shrugged. “I thought the…same, but here…he is.”
Gork poked a hand into the soil by the skeleton. “Damn swamp! Things rot so fast. I can't tell if this skeleton's been here ten weeks or ten years.”
“Does it really…matter?”
“Well, I'd sort of like to know if there's a bunch of troglodytes with sharp, pointy things waiting for me around the next tree.”
“When you figure…it out, let me know. We…haven't checked the outer…structures yet.”
The first one of those, another barracks, smaller and far more cramped, was even grimmer. Several rows of bunks stood rotting along the walls, half a dozen of which were occupied by the corpses of their former owners. Just to be thorough, Katim moved body to body, checking the remaining scraps of cloth and the smaller footlockers beside each bed.
“Can you tell what killed them?” the kobold asked nervously. “Dying of plague's not real high on my list of things to do.”
“No plague,” Katim reassured him, moving on to the fourth skeleton. Could you even catch plague from bones? She wasn't sure, and she wasn't about to admit her ignorance. “Two of the ones…I've examined have scoring or…scratch marks on the…neck. These men had…their throats slit.”
“Oh. Good.” A pause, then, “I wonder why? It's not like Jureb Nahl fell in a war or anything.”
“My guess would…be that these men stayed behind…to guard against looting or…some such. I'd say…they didn't succeed.”
“Nothing in the lockers, huh?” Gork asked disappointedly.
Katim had reached the fifth corpse. “Not a thing worth aaaah!”
Even as she recoiled, the kobold was skittering up the nearest decrepit wall, presumably fleeing from whatever had elicited her cry. She heard him calling out for help as he climbed. “Belrotha! Cræosh! Jhurpess!” And then, far more quietly, “Fezeill…”
It hung from Katim's forearm, mandibles chewing unmercifully through fur and hide and flesh. It was something akin to a normal millipede—if one discounted the fact that, judging just from the portion she could actually see, it had to be almost as long as she was tall. It must have been coiled tight within the corpse, or perhaps lairing in the mattress beneath.
Howling in fury, Katim retreated, dragging it from its hidey-hole. With her free hand, she yanked her axe from its thong. She had little room to swing, but between the sharpened blade and her own strength, she didn't need much. Laying the steel against the segmented chitin, she began to saw. The millipede thrashed, twisted, and then just opened. Yellow ichor spattered across the floor. The thrashing grew even more feverish as the thing went mad, unaware that it was already dead, and finally fell limp.
Even in death, the mandibles refused to release.
Grimacing against the pain, Katim shoved the tip of her blade along her arm, preparing to pry the creature loose, and collapsed as all sensation fled from her legs.
The wound wasn't that bad! she protested silently as she slid to the floor. I've dealt with far worse—oh. Realization hit her as her vision began to blur. Oh, fantastic.
Her last conscious image was that of the kobold dropping from the wall and racing toward her, blade held high….
Her vision returned first, albeit poorly: she could barely make out basic shapes. What she first took to be ants or other bugs crawling across her legs swiftly erupted into a thousand white-hot pins, but she welcomed it nonetheless, for she'd feared the feeling might never return to her limbs. Her sight cleared, the world swimming into view, and her ecstasy faded somewhat at the various faces staring down at her. True, any lesser creature would be dead, but it galled her to have lain helpless before the rest of the Demon Squad.
“Well, well,” Cræosh oozed, and Katim could smell the condescension in his voice. He was clearly planning to milk this for all it was worth. “Is trolly-wolly feeling all better after her nappy-wappy?”
Katim decided to test the movement in her tingling legs by kicking the orc in the groin. This elicited a single yelp, so high-pitched that the less sensitive members of the squad might not even have heard it. Without even seeming to have fallen through the intervening distance, Cræosh lay facedown in the dirt, knees bent, ass in the air, hands clutching at his privates as though someone were trying to steal them.
“A bit crude,” Katim admitted in answer to the various expressions around her, “but I’m…afraid I’m not at my…best at the moment.”
“Oh, I don't know about that,” Gork said, gazing down at Cræosh with a beatific smile.
“What happened?” the troll asked.
Gork's grin vanished. With some obvious reluctance, he jerked a thumb in the direction of…
“Gimmol?” Katim sounded not only incredulous, but almost outraged.
The gremlin stepped forward and nodded shallowly. He presented a truly bizarre appearance now, with only scattered flecks of his bright red armor visible through a coating of mud. “I've made sort of a habit of studying natural substances,” he told her. “Herbs and juices mostly, but a few animal toxins, too. I used these”—and here he held up a handful of dried stalks and leaves he'd removed from his pack—”to draw out most of the poison. You should be just fine in a day or so.”
“Gimmol…” It took a moment for her even to remember how to say the words. “Thank you.”
The gremlin beamed.
“If we're through ssstanding around admiring each other,” Fezeill broke in, his tongue flickering wildly—on a real troglodyte, Katim would have assumed it to be a lizardly gesture of impatience, but coming from the doppelganger, she had no idea what it meant—”you'd better come with usss. Jhurpessss and I have found sssomething you should sssee.”
At the southwest corner of the long-dead town stood yet another thick copse of trees.
“Wow,” Cræosh breathed, the air around him growing even thicker with sarcasm than humidity. (He tried to ignore the fact that, to his own ears, his voice still squeaked. Fucking troll.) “It's a big bunch of trees. I’m so glad you dragged me over here, Fezeill. All the other fucking trees in this swamp just weren't doing it for me.”
“If you'd lisssten for jussst a moment, you jackassss, inssstead of running your mouth like a rutting ferret, you'd know that we found sssomething inssside the thicket.”
“Oh. And that would be what?”
“Building!” Jhurpess said, unable to contain himself any further. “Jhurpess found big stone building! Many holes in roof and walls, but still sturdy.” He frowned. “Jhurpess peeked inside, but Jhurpess didn't see anything worth eating.”
“So what did you see?” Gork asked. “Even for you, ‘nothing worth eating’ covers a whole lot of ground.”
“Oh. Just books,” the bugbear replied, dismissing the very notion with a halfhearted wave. “Nothing interesting.”
“Just books?” Gork repeated, not certain he'd heard right. “Just books?!”
The bugbear exhaled in what might actually have been
a sigh. “What bothering Gork now?”
“We're trying to find clues to the tower, you stupid monkey! Maybe even a map! Where else are we going to find that but the library?”
“What library?”
“A place with books!” The kobold was actually screeching now.
With a grunt, Cræosh once more lifted the little soldier by his head and plunged him facefirst into the soft mud at their feet. Gork came up spitting, but it had had the desired effect: He shut up.
“Now,” Cræosh said, “here's the way we're gonna play it. Fezeill, do you read?”
“Sssome,” the not-troglodyte responded thoughtfully. “Doppelganger, Gremlin, a sssmattering of Hobgoblin. A decent amount of Manssspeak, but sscertainly not any eight-hundred-year-old dialectsss.”
“Gork?” Cræosh asked next.
“Barely a word.”
The orc frowned. “Then why were you so hot about Jhurpess not recognizing the library?”
“I, uh…” The kobold looked at his feet. “Maps and pictures could be helpful.”
“Right.” There was precious little point in asking either Jhurpess or Belrotha, so…“How about you, Katim?”
She nodded. “Manspeak, Gremlin, some…conversational Orcish. And, of course…Trollish. But I do not think…that I would have much better…luck with writing this old.”
“Fuck!” Cræosh shook his head. He read both Orcish and Gremlin better than most of his fellow soldiers back home, but he had trouble with big words. He could speak Manspeak like a native, but he couldn't read more than a few snippets. He sure as shit wouldn't be the one to puzzle this out.
“So let me get this straight,” Gork said, clearly getting worked up again. “We've actually found something that might just tell us where this damn tower is, and nobody here can read it?”
“Seems to about cover it,” Cræosh acknowledged. Then, before the kobold could explode once more, he added, “Though as you said, if we can find a map, it doesn't really matter if we can read most of the words, does it?”
“It's a long shot.”
“And your better idea is…?”
“Um, so what are we waiting for?”
It was a mistake, and everyone knew it the instant the words left his mouth. Nobody was even a tad surprised when Cræosh, a huge grin splitting his ugly green face, answered, “We're just awaiting your report, Shorty.”
From his seat on Belrotha's shoulder, which had somehow become his standard post, Gimmol watched the kobold wander away muttering darkly. He was such a joke to his companions that even after he'd treated the troll's wounds, no one had bothered to ask if he could read the books they might find. On the one hand, he was just as happy not telling them; the revelation that he'd studied ancient languages would raise questions he'd prefer not to answer. On the other, they had a job to do, he was as sick of this swamp as any of them, and he'd have loved to have seen the orc's smug face fall when he realized the gremlin was their best hope.
Ah, well. Maybe they'd get lucky and find just the sort of map Cræosh was hoping for. Chewing his cheek in thought, the gremlin continued staring into space long after the tiny scout had vanished into the foliage.
The structure, which Gork located after only a minimum of cuts, scrapes, and abrasions, was exactly as the terrible twosome had described it. A squat building, it was constructed of stone and clearly intended to last. Sure, there were gaps in the walls, and various vines crept through every tiny nook and cranny they could find, but overall it was in better shape than even the sturdiest portions of the keep had been.
The architecture was a little odd, though. The second floor was smaller than the first, leaving an open space, perhaps a balcony or something, above the entryway on the building's south side.
Those doors looked to be the only means of ingress, not counting windows on the upper floor and the sporadic holes in the walls. Standing proud despite the rigors of time, the double portal was some sort of varnished wood. The rightmost of the two doors was hanging open an inch or so, its latch and one of its three hinges having given up the ghost where the wood had not.
A thin smile passed over the kobold's face. He'd always wanted to try this, but traveling in the company of creatures so much larger and stronger than he, he'd never dared, lest he make an ass of himself. Here, however, with nobody watching and such a fragile, precarious obstacle…
Gork took several steps back, broke into a charge, and launched a massive kick (well, massive for him) at the loosely hanging door.
He frowned, standing on one foot, the other hanging in the air, at the peculiar sound. It hadn't been the crunch of splintering wood, or the door smacking open, or even bone breaking. It had sounded almost sodden…
“Oh, dragonshit.”
The door hadn't budged at all. Instead, the rotten interior had given way, allowing Gork's foot to pass completely through. Where, by virtue of the clinging gunk and the long slivers formed from the door's cracking exterior, it was now firmly stuck.
The kobold found himself torn between the conflicting urges to laugh, to cry, and to scream, and settled for a compromise whimper. Gently, thanking the Stars for his tough hide, he began hopping side to side and rotating his knee, looking for an angle from which he could pull free with a minimum of splinters.
This went on for about a minute, perhaps longer. And then all thought of slow, methodical escape disappeared faster than roast elf at an orc banquet when something behind the door grabbed Gork's heel.
He only became aware of his scream when the shrill sounded echoed back to him from between the doors. Whatever had gotten hold of him let go just as swiftly, apparently startled by the kobold's outburst. Unmindful now of splinters, Gork yanked his leg violently from the hole and hobbled away. His calf bled shallowly from a half dozen spots, but somehow, that felt a small price to pay. He'd gotten a good seven or eight paces from the building and stanched the worst of the bleeding before his companions burst through the foliage.
“The fuck happened, Shorty?” Cræosh demanded.
Casually, Gork drew himself up to his full three-foot-five. “Well, I'd just gotten around to examining the front doors,” he said, pointing at the large portals, “something that I don't believe Jhurpess or Fezeill bothered to do.”
“We only made a brief examination,” Fezeill protested. “We wanted to report back to the ressst of you immediately.”
“Uh-huh,” Gork said. “Whatever. Anyway, see that hole there? Toward the bottom? Well, I'd stuck my arm in there, trying to reach the latch, and I'd just about gotten it open, when something inside grabbed me.”
“And that's when you screamed, you little pansy?” Cræosh asked.
“What? No, that wasn't me! I yanked my arm back, of course, and I guess I startled whatever was inside, because that's when it started screaming. I backed away from the door, and that's when you all came running.”
Katim approached the doorway, giving the entire frame a good onceover. Her gaze passed over the missing hinge, and her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the hole. She said nothing, but Gork could see her fighting to hold back a snicker.
“All right, then,” Cræosh said. “Let's see what you ‘startled.’ Belrotha?”
“Yes?”
“Knock for me.”
The double doors crashed completely out of the frame and into the chamber beyond, where they landed as sodden lumps of rot. Cræosh and Katim were the first ones through, weapons drawn. The rest of the squad followed on their heels. And sitting on the ground before them, barely a foot from where the doors had landed, was…
“What that?” Jhurpess asked in bewilderment.
Not even half Gork's height, it was covered in soft brown-green scales. A tiny tail twitched behind it, accompanying the strange, seemingly random movements of the hands and legs. The little thing gawked up at them and began a high-pitched keening.
Cræosh glanced down at the strange little creature, then over at the doppelganger. Yep, I was afraid of that.
br /> “This,” he said glumly to the rest of the squad, “would be a baby troglodyte.”
“But if it's a baby,” Gimmol asked from Belrotha's shoulder, “where are its—”
The room echoed with a sudden chorus of hissing, rather resembling the war cry of an entire battalion of angry teapots.
“—parents,” the gremlin finished lamely.
Katim cocked her head, listening to the approaching sounds. “And uncles, aunts…brothers, sisters, cousins…grandparents…”
“I think,” Cræosh said, “that outside has suddenly become a much better option than inside.”
The goblins bolted for the door and stopped short, plowing into one another just past the threshold.
“Yeah,” Cræosh muttered, shaking his head, “I should have figured. That had to be next in the script, didn't it?”
Neither the squad nor the two dozen sword-or club-wielding troglodytes felt the need to respond.
Several of the reptile-men stepped aside, clearing a path from trees to library. A single troglodyte, limping dramatically and using a large branch as a crutch, slowly approached along the makeshift aisle.
“If we take out the leader,” Gork suggested under his breath, “the others might surrender.”
“Or they might decide to shove this building up our asses sideways,” Cræosh said. “So shut the fuck up before they hear you.”
The old troglodyte—and he was old, that much was obvious from the dull-hued scales that sagged loosely from his body—stopped just beyond arm's length. (Belrotha's arms, more specifically.)
At first, his attention remained riveted on Fezeill alone. He tilted his head and sniffed twice, even leaning forward to let his tongue flicker and twitch in the doppelganger's direction.
“You wear our form,” he hissed in stilted, halting Gremlin, “but you are not one of usss.”
Slowly, so as not to startle, Fezeill allowed his shape to shift for the first time in days. His scales melted away, quickly subsumed by the pinkish flesh that oozed around them like some horrible growth. Dirty-blond hair sprouted from his bald head, and he once again wore the human shape in which the squad had met him.