The Goblin Corps (21 page)

“Look! Down! Now!”

Muttering all manner of obscenities, Gork glanced downward. At which point he lost all interest in the peculiar scorching—and very nearly his hold on the rope as well.

“Oh, dragonshit…”

It looked rather as if a segment of the cliff face was moving, shimmering and shifting in the shadows of the evening. But the kobold’s vision quickly detected what had probably taken Gimmol some time to perceive.

It wasn’t the wall that was moving. It was the thousands upon thousands of worms, centipedes, and grubs that were swarming over it.

Gork’s heart seized in his chest and his muscles went stiff; but the thought of lying helpless as ten thousand tiny bites stripped the flesh from his bones broke his paralysis just as swiftly.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” he squeaked, voice shaking.

The gremlin opened one eye. “Did you figure that one out by yourself, or did someone read it to you from a book?”

“You know, for someone in a spot as shitty as yours, you—”

“Hey!” Cræosh’s voice wafted down from above. “Who’s strutting now, wefkoo?”

Gork just sighed.

“Worms!” That wavering cry, of course, from Jhurpess. A momentary pause, presumably while Cræosh strained to see farther down into the chasm, and then…

“Shit on toast! Gork, get your ass up here!”

“What about me?” Gimmol screamed.

“We’ll handle it! Gork, get up here!”

He obeyed, hugging the rope the whole way like a long-lost (and very tall) lover.

Cræosh and Katim lay belly-first upon the slope, as near to the edge as they could go without sliding. Yards away, on far more level ground, Fezeill and Gork awaited their next move. And Jhurpess…

Jhurpess hung, one-handed, from Gork’s piton, now driven into the earth much nearer the quivering gremlin. But even with the bugbear stretched to his utmost, Gimmol remained a few feet beyond reach. They might have tried the kobold’s rope, but the worn hemp probably wouldn’t support the weight of any member of the squad strong enough to haul Gimmol to safety.

“Hurry!” the gremlin moaned pitifully up at them. “They’re so close I can hear them!”

Katim hissed once in irritation. “How sturdy is…your armor?”

The gremlin blinked in confusion, glancing at the scrounged, mismatched leather covering his chest and limbs. “What?” he asked finally.

Another hiss, with just a hint of aggravated growl sneaking in beneath it.

“It’s all scavenged,” Gimmol amended. “But it’s real thick, and the straps are tough.” He whimpered, trying not to look down into the chasm. “But it’s not going to do any good against…”

The troll wasn’t listening. With obvious reluctance, she uncoiled her
chirrusk
from her belt and passed it down to the dangling bugbear.

“If you drop that…weapon,” she told Jhurpess, her voice tight, “you had better…be prepared to chase…after it.”

“Jhurpess not drop weapon,” the bugbear muttered, insulted. “Jhurpess knows what Jhurpess is doing!” Then he glanced down at the hooked chain in his hand. “Umm, what Jhurpess doing?”

Cræosh sighed loudly. “Use the damn hook!” he called before Katim could answer.

Comprehension finally dawned. “Oh! Yes, Jhurpess understands!” The bugbear tossed the haft from his free hand to one of his prehensile feet. Then, his entire face scrunched in what, on him, passed for concentration, he began to twirl the chain.

Cræosh looked over at the troll. “If he ‘understands’ this as well as he understood the concept of standing watch, we may be cleaning gremlin guts off your
chirrosk
for a week.”

In lieu of any more meaningful comment, Katim snidely corrected his pronunciation.

Gimmol, having caught a glimpse of the chain in the bugbear’s grasp, was clearly having a few doubts along similar lines. “Are you insane? He’s going to kill me! I don’t want to die here! I eeeyaaaagghhhhh!!!!!!”

The four-pronged hook came hurtling over the edge, flashing brightly but briefly in the sun, and the gremlin was absolutely certain that he was about to die.

But Jhurpess, for once, not only performed up to expectations, he exceeded them. The hook lodged not in soft gremlin flesh, but around the straps of the leather breastplate.

Gimmol’s feet slowly rose from the tiny spur of rock that had saved him. He twisted slowly in the air, nothing but a single length of chain and the strength and skill (whimper) of the bugbear between him and the horror below.

And then he was falling!

It was a brief drop, barely a foot. He glared upward, determined to find some way—once he was back on solid ground, of course—to murder the bugbear for his carelessness. But the childish expression on Jhurpess’s face suggested a panic akin to Gimmol’s own. So what…?

Another brief jolt, even shorter than the first, and the gremlin realized with a growing sense of dread just what was happening.

The piton was slipping!
Designed to hold only a curious kobold, it had performed admirably in standing up to the bugbear’s weight—but now, between the swinging chain and the extra load of gremlin, it was right about ready to quit in disgust.

Gimmol did the only sensible thing: he screamed his head off in a girlish falsetto. This was too much for the panicking bugbear, and he too started screaming, loosing that now-familiar wail.

“Well,” Cræosh snarled between clenched teeth, “that should make sure we attract any surviving yetis. Thanks, guys!” He pivoted toward Katim, but she was no longer there. She was, in fact, halfway down the slope already, her claws finding purchase in the stones that Cræosh wouldn’t have trusted to support Gork, let alone the troll. Was she actually risking herself for
Jhurpess
and
Gimmol?
Had he misjudged her that badly? Had…?

Oh. Of course. She was after her
chirrusk.
Never mind, then.

When the slope grew too steep for her claws and powerful fingers to prevent her from sliding, Katim drew her massive axe and, utterly unconcerned with any potential damage to the blade, drove it into the first crevice she could find. Metal screamed and sparks flew, but the weapon felt secure enough to hold. Then, as Jhurpess had done, she allowed herself to drop until she hung by a single hand above the chasm.

Grunting with strain, ignoring the sounds of Gork and Fezeill placing bets on what would happen, she twisted, stretching as far as her lanky arms would reach….

There! She was hanging very near horizontally, her body forming a sideways cross, but she’d just been able to get a grip, not on the bugbear but on the piton. Muscles bulged, her snout twisted in agony—but slowly, so slowly, the spike slid fully free of the stone and began to rise, Jhurpess and Gimmol still hanging from it.

Everyone above, and the pair dangling below, held their breath. The troll’s entire body quivered, and for a moment she froze, struggling and failing to lift the load any higher. She heard Cræosh shifting above, perhaps even looking for a way to help, but she knew he wouldn’t find one.

But Katim wasn’t finished. With a supreme effort of will, she again set the dangling pair in motion: not upward, this time, but side to side.

Jhurpess, clinging to the piton and the
chirrusk
with everything he had, whined once but otherwise remained silent. Gimmol, who wasn’t using any of his own muscle to stay aloft, apparently felt justified in resuming his screams.

Back and forth, higher and higher, until finally the gremlin-end of the living pendulum, at its apex, reached Katim’s own level. “Jhurpess,” she rasped, voice nigh incomprehensible with strain, “haul…Gimmol up…a few more…feet. Then…when I…tell you…let go!”

“What?” the bugbear squeaked.

“Of the…
chain
, you…brainless imbecile! Not…the piton!”

“Oh.” A very small, quiet voice now. “Okay.”

A moment more Katim waited, summoning the reserves she would need to pull off this particular miracle. And then, a simple whispered “Now!”

The bugbear released the
chirrusk
, abandoning the screaming gremlin to his fate.

So much of this half-assed plan could go wrong. If she’d misjudged the remaining length of chain, or the height of the swing, or her own pain-dulled and cold-addled reflexes…If
anything
went wrong, they were dead.

Even as Jhurpess let go of the chain, Katim was once again hauling with all her might. The bugbear’s weight was hardly negligible, but without the added load of gremlin, she managed to thrust him up toward her axe. Using it as a step, and jamming the piton into the wall as he went, Jhurpess scurried over the edge of the slope.

Katim didn’t see it. The instant she was no longer holding the bugbear, she lunged, both arms stretched—one in each direction—boots scrabbling for just a few seconds of purchase on the same rock that had saved Gimmol’s life.

She’d ordered Jhurpess to let go at the highest point of the arc, so when Gimmol had sailed off to her right, he’d also been traveling
up.
And that gave Katim the extra instants she needed. At the very last second, just before the gremlin plummeted out of reach, her fingers snagged the butt of the
chirrusk’s
handle. Katim shuddered in pain as the arm with which she held the axe dislocated itself at the shoulder, but she had him.

And
her
chirrusk!

Wrapping the chain over and over about her wrist, she hauled the gremlin up until she could grasp his collar, and then hurled him back over the lip of the canyon, trusting that one of her companions would catch him before he slid back down. And finally, though it took some doing with only one good arm, she hauled herself up and over the axe that she would never take for granted again.

For long moments, the squad just sat
—well
away from the slope—and gasped for breath. A loud pop and a howl of pain suggested that Katim had dealt, brutally but effectively, with her dislocated shoulder.

Gork wandered over to Gimmol, who lay faceup and panting, in the snow. “Hey,” he said to the supine gremlin. “You owe me a new piton.”

Gimmol punched the kobold in the testicles and then lay back, smiling, as Gork toppled over beside him.

Even Cræosh, anxious as he was to keep moving, recognized the need for a few moments’ rest. As the minutes passed and the sun slid closer to the horizon, however, he decided they’d had long enough.

“All right, kits and cubs, naptime’s over! Feet: On ‘em!”

Jhurpess immediately climbed to his feet, and Fezeill was already standing—but Gork, Katim, and Gimmol just glowered, united in their sudden burning hatred of the orc.

Cræosh decided to try something unexpected and
reason
with them.

“Those yetis,” he said, “are still out there. If they come back and find you all lying here like pimples on a dwarf’s ass, they’ll pop you accordingly.”

“And we’ll do any better if we’re walking when they find us?” Gimmol asked sullenly.

But Katim, though wincing at every movement, was slowly standing. “I’d rather have…the option of running. And if we can…bring them together, the…yetis remain our best chance…of studying Jhurpess’s worm…creatures in action.” She very specifically turned on Gimmol. “Unless you…want the chance to…examine them again. Up…close and personal.”

The gremlin quickly stood. Gork, cursing all orcs and gremlins, realized he was the only holdout and did the same.

Thankfully, they didn’t have to go far. They’d followed the tracks for little more than another mile before they stumbled across the yetis.

Or what remained of the yetis.

“Ancestors!” Cræosh whispered. Gork muttered something similar invoking the Stars, and Katim just hissed.

Strewn about, the snow around them churned and bloodied by what must have been a ferocious battle, were five large corpses. Each had been chewed by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny mouths. Most were stripped bare of skin, partially bare of flesh and muscle; one was nothing but a blood-encrusted skeleton. And the positions in which they lay—limbs splayed, jaws agape—suggested that they’d been very much alive even as they became something’s banquet.

The squad swiveled as one toward the faintly trembling bugbear. “Jhurpess not like worms,” he confided in them.

“No shit ‘Jhurpess not like worms!’” Cræosh barked. “You
escaped
from these fuckers?”

The bugbear nodded. “Worms not run very fast.”

Katim nodded. “Useful information…Cræosh. In case your…brilliant leadership and strategic…skills should prove…insufficient.”

“All right, you listen, you dog-faced, flea-ridden—”

Fezeill screamed in a convincing imitation of a
real
bugbear and pointed a shaking finger behind them.

From the depths of the snow rose three figures, humanoid but blatantly inhuman. Their outlines writhed in the glow of the setting sun, while centipedes and maggots dripped from them in a horrible perspiration. Their features were nothing but gaping hollows, and their hands were raised, extended toward the exhausted goblins.

Cræosh glanced back the way they’d come, mouth open to order a retreat, and nearly swallowed his tongue. A fourth worm-creature had appeared from behind, but this was no more humanoid than Cræosh was a halfling. Yes, it had two arms and two legs, but it stood eight feet tall, and it was wider than three orcs side by side. In fact, it almost resembled…

“A yeti,” Gork breathed from somewhere off to his left. “It’s the damn yeti!”

He was right, the orc realized with a sudden surge of terror. Six yetis, but only five corpses. They must have arrived before the worms could do—whatever it was that they did—to the other bodies.

And…
Oh, Ancestors!
It meant that there were worse fates out on the tundra than death. The sun sat, mocking him, mere inches above the western horizon.
Damn, damn, damn! If the fucking creatures had just waited another hour or so, we’d have been away from this frozen hell and back—

Four crawling arms rose, four wiggling hands opened, and a veritable storm of worms and centipedes hurtled at the Demon Squad.

Cræosh dove and rolled, coming to his feet well away from the wriggling projectiles now freezing to death in the snow. Unwilling to give his foes the opportunity to—was “reload” the right word?—he set his blade, took a single deep breath as he willed away his fatigue and his fear, and charged.