The Upper Room

The lower cave smelled of standing water. Two pools caught a thin waterfall from somewhere above — practical, in that cave-engineering sort of way that goblins occasionally stumble into — and four more of them waited in the dim, probably believing they had the advantage of ground.

They didn't, particularly.

Blix opened proceedings with a chaos bolt. It was the kind of spell that didn't announce itself quietly, and the goblin who received it had no opportunity to object. The fog came next — a thick cloud that turned the reservoir into a guessing game for anyone relying on sight. Respin threw his handaxe into the murk and felt it connect. Blix found another one with fire bolt, a sound like the snap of a struck match followed by something considerably less pleasant. And Helluva — who had by this point become a wolf spider, which is exactly the sort of sentence that takes some getting used to — killed the last one.

The goblin fight music stopped, as Respin later put it. He had a gift for understatement.

Stairs led up to another level.

Clarg was up there, as expected. Clarg, who was mean. Clarg, who had Ripper, and also two goblins who had apparently decided that their loyalties lay with the bugbear rather than with whatever passed for authority among the Cragma tribe — traitors, by goblin reckoning, which is its own kind of distinction. The fight that followed was the kind that earns a pause afterward, a moment to breathe before looking around the room and taking stock.

The room, as it turned out, was worth looking at.

Sacks, stacked and marked with a blue lion — the Lionshield, a merchant company's crest, on goods that had no obvious business in a goblin's quarters. Provisions. A light wagon's worth of supplies. A treasure chest that, once opened, yielded six hundred copper pieces, a hundred and ten silver, two potions of healing stoppered and intact, and a jade statuette of a frog with golden orbs for eyes that Respin valued at roughly forty gold and found faintly, inexplicably unsettling.

They took one of the Lionshield sacks.

Somewhere in the interim, someone had untied themselves. A goblin — the one Respin had trussed up, or one very much like him, with the distinction between these possibilities left open — had worked free of the rope and released the wolves from the pit to the east. The wolves, presented with a choice between a cave full of armed and irritated adventurers and the open forest, made the only reasonable decision available to them and ran.

Sildar Hallwinter had been freed. Respin confirmed that himself. The man was alive — which was more than had seemed certain for the better part of a week — but he was in no condition to speak. Whatever the goblins had done to him in the time since the ambush, it would take a while to come back from. The questions would have to wait: about Gundrin, about the urgent discovery that had started all of this, about the name that kept surfacing in the background of the story like something not quite ready to be seen clearly.

The Black Spider. A castle, very far to the north. A jade frog watching from someone's pack with its golden eyes.

Respin had been in simpler jobs than this. Most of them, if he was honest. But the supplies — or half of them, or something that looked a great deal like half of them — were stacked against the wall, and Sildar was alive, and the cave was quiet.

It would do, for now, to hold onto that.