Goblin Corps, The

  Entire constellations of sparks speckled the underground night as flint and steel scraped together, and the feeble glow of those first torches was quickly augmented by five more. And that, finally, was enough to let them see.

  “What the fuck…?” Cræosh asked eloquently.

  “Oh, good,” Josiah said. “We're here.”

  “Here” was a perfectly square platform of stone, perhaps forty feet on a side. In fact, it appeared to be the top of a squared pillar, for there was nothing but a deep, dark drop on every side. Equidistant between the four corners, a thin case of metal stairs descended from the platform. Each connected, about twenty feet out and fifteen down, with a stone catwalk. It, too, was a square, and it, too, had staircases descending from it. These reached beyond the torchlight, but Josiah assured them that they connected to another stone walkway beyond the first.

  “So, um, ‘concentric squares,’ is it?” Gork said.

  “Well, yes, basically,” the acolyte admitted. “That's as accurate as anything.”

  “I see. And are all druids this insane? Or just ancient dead ones?”

  “Uh…”

  “What's down there?” Gimmol asked, gesturing toward the nearest edge. Given the catch in his voice, the others imagined that he was probably reliving his near-fatal plunge back on the Steppes.

  “Down there—is down,” Josiah told him. “To the best of my knowledge, not even the ancients knew. They used magic to hew this place from the rock, but even they had no real idea how far down it went. My best advice would be: don't fall.”

  “Gee,” Gimmol said sourly. “Thanks ever so much. So much as one worm pops up, I’m gone so fast….”

  “So what's the damn point?” Cræosh asked. “What the hell is this place, and what the even more hell are we doing here?”

  “Come with me to the outermost walkway,” Josiah said, “and I'll show you.”

  They chose the northern stairs—entirely at random, for lack of any better way to decide—and crept with excruciating care across the narrow metal steps. Even Katim and Gork, either of whom could most probably have skipped down the stairs blindfolded, seemed oppressed by the seemingly infinite drop below.

  There were, it turned out, three sets of rings—well, squares—surrounding the center platform. Gork was the first to reach the outermost. Peering out over the unguarded edge, he saw nothing but darkness, and a whole lot of it. Nothing below, nothing beyond—they might as well have stood in the center of an infinite void.

  One that could not, frankly, have existed in the soft earth beneath Ymmech Thewl, but Gork had dealt with enough magic lately that he'd long since ceased to consider the laws of nature to be anything more than friendly advice.

  “I think now would be a marvelous time for an explanation,” Fezeill suggested. Everyone looked at Josiah expectantly. It took him a moment to answer, for he gawked raptly about; a few tears of wonder trailed down his cheeks.

  “Symbolism,” he said finally, in an unknowing echo of Queen Anne. “Both sacred and mystical. The four elements, the four winds, the four seasons. Earth, sun, moon, and stars. Childhood, adulthood, old age, and death. Most druidic iconography is circular, but the holiest, most important? Patterns of four. Oh, I'd never hoped to see this…”

  Katim nodded. “And so, four levels of…squares. Four times four. How…primitive.”

  “Okay, yeah, symbolism,” Cræosh muttered impatiently. “Great. But all this”—and here he waved vaguely, as though the others could possibly have failed to realized what he was talking about—”seems just a little excessive.”

  “This was the heart of one of the greatest druidic sects,” Josiah huffed, drawing himself up. “Such a shrine calls for nothing less than magnificence!”

  “What's wrong with gold fixtures over a simple altar?” Gork complained. “I like gold fixtures.…”

  “Somewhere here,” the druid said, “is hidden the entrance to the repository of the ancients. We just have to find it.”

  It didn't take long, as this outer catwalk wasn't entirely featureless. At each of the four corners was a wooden door within a freestanding frame: a door that pretty obviously led nowhere at all, since they all faced out onto emptiness.

  “Well, this,” Gork said, his tone very similar to Cræosh's, “is starting to really chafe my buttocks.”

  “The ancient druids,” Cræosh told Josiah, “were some sick bastards. This whole thing is the result of a truly twisted sense of humor. Were they smoking their holy symbols, by any chance?”

  The acolyte, however, only smiled. “It's more magnificent than I'd ever imagined!” he whispered softly.

  “Huh?” the orc asked.

  “I agree,” said Gork. “Huh?”

  “Open the door,” Josiah told them.

  “Umm, hello? Anybody home?” Cræosh actually rapped lightly on the man's skull. “Anyone? There's nothing behind the door, human! I can bloody well see that without opening the damn thing!”

  The druid would not be swayed, however. “Open the door,” he repeated.

  Gork and Cræosh both continued to stare.

  “Which one?” Gimmol asked timidly.

  “I doubt it matters. Patterns of four, remember? They probably all lead to the same place.”

  Gork and Cræosh continued to stare. Katim finally grew sick and tired of the lot of them, stormed over, and yanked the door open.

  Instantly, the other two that they could see, way down the catwalks, vanished from their corners; the goblins could only assume that the fourth had disappeared as well.

  “Of course,” she said, gazing through the doorway. Beyond lay a brown-carpeted, smooth-walled corridor, albeit only a couple of yards long. Along the rightmost wall, in a shallow alcove, stood a statue, a smaller variant of the hooded figure above. At the hallway's end was yet another door, on which was carved a massive tree.

  Slowly, one hand firmly on the hilt of his sword, the orc approached. He peered through the doorway, very slowly and very methodically taking in every detail of the short corridor. He then stepped to the side and stuck his head around the door frame and peered equally long at the vast emptiness.

  “Have I mentioned lately,” he inquired of the room at large, “just how much I’m growing to despise magic?”

  Katim tapped him on the shoulder, waited until he moved aside, and shook loose her chirrusk. Sniffing furiously for any sign of deception that her other senses might miss, she tossed the hooked end into the passage. It landed with a muffled thump on the thick carpet, exactly as it should have done. Slowly she dragged it back, its barbs leaving deep furrows in both the shag and the thick layer of dust that coated it.

  “Well,” she said, “the floor certainly seems…real enough.”

  “Unless your hook thingy did fall through,” Gork pointed out, “and an illusion just made it look like it didn't.”

  It was the druid who solved the dilemma for them by simply stepping into the hallway. “You coming?” he called back over his shoulder. “This has got to be the library! If Emmet's alive, he must be in here!”

  Stepping as lightly as possible, with many a mistrustful glance at the floor, they crept in one at a time and followed. Despite the surfeit of dust, and the fact that this hallway hadn't been used in centuries (with the possible exception of a maddened Emmet), no mildew marred the walls, no rot perfumed the air. The corridor was odorless and ageless.

  “Okay, boys and bitch,” Cræosh said as he reached the second door. “Stay alert. One side, Shorty.” The orc leaned back and launched a kick that a warhorse might envy.

  Wood cracked, and the portal swung with a thundering retort. Immediately Cræosh leapt through, hands tight on his sword hilt, Katim on his heels and the others following after. What they saw was enough to impress even the least literate among them.

  “Many books,” Jhurpess said succinctly.

  “Wow. I didn't know you could count to ‘many,’ Nature-boy.”

  Globes, drifting in lackadaisical p
atterns up near the ceiling, glowed without benefit of visible flame, shedding a painfully white illumination throughout the room. Walls that stood twice the height of the troll and stretched on for dozens of yards were lined almost to the last inch with bookshelves. A gargantuan hardwood table ran down most of the length of the room; it, too, had bookshelves built into it along the center.

  And all these shelves were full to bursting: Leather-bound or wood-bound, neatly stitched or haphazardly stuffed into covers, small as a human's handspan to large as a heavy shield, and written in more languages than the entire squad had ever heard of. Cræosh hadn't thought there were so many books in the whole of Kirol Syrreth and the Allied Kingdoms combined.

  Gimmol, with a faint squeak of ecstasy, made a beeline for one of the shelves across the room. The others, rather less taken by the sundry tomes, retained sufficient presence of mind to notice—even if it did take them longer than it should—that they were not alone in the great library. Sitting at the far end of the obscenely long table was an older human clad in robes similar to Josiah's. His hair looked as though it had once been a bird's nest until it was condemned for safety reasons, and if his cheeks had even seen a razor in weeks, it was only in artists’ renderings. Trembling, bloodless fists clutched a small wooden icon, over which he was mumbling an endless stream of slurred syllables.

  He spotted the goblins at about the same moment they spotted him, and he rose from his chair. His lips curled, and while Cræosh wasn't precisely an expert in spellcraft, it certainly appeared that the sounds he was making now were a whole lot more dynamic than his previous mutterings.

  “Stop him,” the orc snapped at Josiah, “or we will!”

  The young acolyte advanced, one hand extended in supplication. “Emmet!” he called. “Emmet, it's me!”

  The older druid seemed not to hear.

  “We've been looking for you, Emmet,” Josiah continued, slowly covering the length the table. “I've been looking for you. I couldn't have found you without the help of these kind folk.” He grinned—a wide, exaggerated expression that did ugly things to his face. “Wasn't it nice of them to help me find you, Emmet? Thank the nice people, Emmet.”

  The hairs on Cræosh's neck stood tall and saluted as a thick blanket of dread fell over the library. Something was very, very wrong.

  “Josiah,” Gork called from behind the orc, “what are you doing?”

  The acolyte ignored him. “And now that we've found you, Emmet, you have to go away. Good-bye, Emmet.”

  With the sound of wet parchment and a faint crimson spray, the young man's outstretched palm split down the middle. From within uncoiled a twisting tendril of wood and leaves. It whipped across Emmet's face as he tried to spin away; shredded skin and shattered skull glistened in the phantom light. Having passed completely through the old man's head, the branch continued onward, dripping with gore, halting only when the tip had firmly buried itself in a bookcase along the far wall.

  For long seconds the old man's body stood—as though merely confused by what had happened—and the goblins gaped, overwhelmed and disbelieving. And then Emmet spasmed, legs and feet beating an impromptu dance across the rapidly reddening floor. His fingers unclenched, and the Tree of Ever toppled from his fists.

  Even faster than before, the tendril ripped free of the bookcase and retracted toward the arm of the thing they had called Josiah. What remained of Emmet's skull blew apart, and the holy relic hadn't even reached the floor before it was snagged in digits of leaf and twig.

  By now, the squad had shaken off their paralysis, minds finally catching up with their eyes. Expressions grim and weapons raised, they spread out across the library, alert for any twitch of that grotesque, impossible limb.

  “So hostile?” Josiah asked, his grin growing even wider. The skin on either side of his mouth had begun to tear. “I thought we were friends.”

  “Gnarlroot, I…presume?” Katim rasped.

  “Why, there's actually a brain among you,” Josiah—Gnarlroot—said. “How remarkable.”

  “And Josiah?” Cræosh asked, stalling for time (and, frankly, for the faintest idea of what the hell to do). “What about him?”

  Still the grin grew. Blood was leaking from the sides of “Josiah's” face, revealing the wood within. “So simple, really. A tiny scratch, back when the fools thought that I served them. I planted a seed, enough to begin the transfer of my newly awakened mind. He felt me germinating inside, felt every instant as I consumed his innards. I wouldn't even give him the freedom to scream. Emmet had by far the easier death.” The grin faded. “But we do what we can. I'll not be so quick next time.”

  “Next time?” Cræosh asked. Wait for it… “You wouldn't have anyone in particular in mind, would you?”

  “Well, since you asked…”

  It was an obvious cue. Blades and blunt objects rose, and over half a ton of angry goblin converged on the druid-wearing tree.

  They never reached him. The skin of Josiah's face finally split completely, peeling away in flakes resembling a layer of wax, and then the acolyte burst like an overripe melon. Cræosh was flattened by the concussion, and Gork and Gimmol both flew through the air to land painfully amid tattered pages. A monsoon of blackened, half-congealed blood coated the library. Scraps of sodden skin stuck to clothes and exposed flesh, tiny pennants flapping with every movement.

  Fezeill, farthest from the carnage, was the first to blink the gore from his eyes, and the nigh-unflappable doppelganger stood stunned by what he saw. Gnarlroot, the true Gnarlroot, stood exposed in the midst of tattered rags that had once been Josiah's skin and clothes. It couldn't have fit inside an overweight yeti, let alone crammed itself into a human, but somehow it had managed. Covered in bark, spotted with leaves, yes, but this was no tree; it had no trunk, no branches in any normal sense of the word. Had some mad vivisectionist acquired an array of thick, rubbery tentacles—perhaps the limbs of an obscenely fat octopus—pasted bark all over them and tied them about the middle so they formed a single sheaf of limbs, writhing at the top and bottom, this thing might have been the result. It loomed over them, its uppermost tendrils screeching against the stone ceiling like fingernails on glass.

  “Well,” Katim said, her chirrusk beginning to hum as it whirled at her side, “this is not…the most promising event of the…day.”

  Half the library abruptly filled with wooden whips and bark-skinned spears. Katim jumped high, feet curled tightly beneath her, clearing the first barrage by inches. She swung her axe in a blow that should have severed one of those limbs before her boots touched the floor, but the edge only scraped across a surface far stronger than any armor. She retreated, weapons at the ready to parry.

  Cræosh, too, had learned the hard way that his sword was nigh useless; his mightiest blow, though scoring a deeper wound than the troll's axe, had not even drawn…Blood? Sap? Whatever. Jhurpess's club rebounded harmlessly, and the rest of the squad's blades couldn't even penetrate the bark.

  Gnarlroot, unfortunately, wasn't nearly so ineffectual. Here, a jagged needle of splinters drew a wail of pain from Jhurpess, left a ragged and bloody furrow down the bugbear's arm. There, a branch slammed Cræosh over the central table to land in a boneless heap on the other side of the room. Unsteadily, the orc dragged himself to his feet, but the side of his face was already turning a bruised and mottled brown. Katim's mighty axe and swiftly whipping chirrusk parried tendril after tendril, but she could deflect only so many attacks. It was only a matter of moments, and not many of those, before one would get through.

  The Demon Squad was about to fall, and every one of them knew it.

  And then Gimmol entered the fray. He'd extricated himself from the heap of ravaged books and stood at the rear of the library, forgotten not only by the foe but by his fellow soldiers. And no wonder. He was Gimmol the joke; Gimmol the useless appendage, the gremlin who'd been assigned Demon Squad duty either by some cosmic screw-up or by a superior so incompetent he probably needed a compass to
find “up.”

  He'd hoped, despite the grief it caused him, to keep it that way. Gimmol had never wanted to stand out, never wanted to be anything but another gremlin. He'd already been disowned by his family, who couldn't understand how he could be…what he was. He'd spent his entire military career avoiding posts where it might come out, but somehow the Charnel King's wraiths had known. They must have; there was no other reason to choose him. And still he'd hoped…

  Hell, he wasn't even that good at it, really. His greatest fear—well, second-greatest, after worry that one of his companions would throttle him in his sleep—was that the squad would come to rely on him, that they'd expect him to pull them out of a jam that was far beyond his capabilities.

  But now, none of that mattered, not against a foe for whom all the squad's vaunted skills, their weapons of murder and mayhem, were meaningless. Gimmol took another step, raised his hands, and finally did what he'd been assigned to the Demon Squad to do.

  Gimmol cast a spell.

  Swords and axes and clubs froze in midswing; eyes went wide and jaws hung slack as a stream of crackling flame flashed from the gremlin's palm into the side of the thing called Gnarlroot. The unnatural bark refused to ignite, but the roar of pain—and yes, they all could hear it, of fear—was enough to shake the walls. Several of the more precariously balanced tomes fell from the shelves with a series of dull thunks, and the Tree of Ever tumbled from the branches to bounce from table to floor.

  “How…how…?” Gimmol grinned wide to see Fezeill at a loss for words.

  “Well,” he said, wiping a gathering film of sweat from his forehead, “you didn't think I was just the comic relief, did you?” And then he spun from the doppelganger-turned-bugbear to the stammering kobold. “And we won't be having any more misunderstandings about my hat, will we?”

  Gork was saved the indignity of a reply by Gnarlroot's sudden and redoubled efforts to kill the lot of them. Clearly, the tree-thing was no longer playing; it wanted them dead, and fast. They were finally a real threat.

  That, and the room was on fire.