Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 8: Welcoming Hands

Silence reigned in the forest around the Fangsparks’ camp.

It was nothing like the air of serene reflection around Stone Ring Pond, nor was it the reverential hush of learning that filled the Dawnflower Library during reading hours. No. This quiet reminded Lisavet of nothing so much as the deafening emptiness that had rung in her ears when she’d come gasping back from the brink of death, scorched and battered and welted with pain, after falling to the zombie horde under the redpitch pines.

It was that kind of silence: the kind that seemed only to be waiting for the carrion flies.

Lisavet held her breath, half-consciously, as they came to a clutter of crumbling huts and dilapidated heaps of stone. Nothing moved among the ruins of the Fangsparks’ homes, not even birds or butterflies. Emptiness and rot had claimed their village as surely as it had seized the Gullcrackers’.

Gristleburst hopped over a low, bramble-covered stone wall and poked at the weeds on the other side. The goblin held up a dirty reptilian skull. “Food lizard,” he explained, tossing it aside and rejoining the little group. “All dead in that pen. They starved. Big lizards ate little lizards first, but then they died too.”

“Where are the kobolds?” Wendlyn asked, looking around at the village ruins. “Are they all zombies, like the Gullcrackers?”

“No.” Gristleburst’s voice was small and taut, wrapped tightly around his anger. “Not all. Fangsparks surrendered. Fangsparks helped. They did not fight the foul ones. They will not all be zombies.”

“Then where are they?” Lisavet tried to subdue her fear as she asked the question. Facing the goblin zombies had been the most terrifying experience of her life. The stench, the wet putrid squelch of their flesh, the way they just absorbed her blows with empty-eyed apathy, never flinching or showing any pain as they pushed indifferently past her desperate struggles to survive. They hadn’t cared. They hadn’t cared about anything.

She understood now why Sarenrae had a special hatred for such creatures. There was no reasoning with, or redeeming, carcasses animated by malevolent magic. One could only destroy them, or die trying.

Lisavet didn’t know if she could handle that again. If the Fangsparks were the same…

“Kobolds live underground,” Gristleburst told them, plainly baffled that he had to spell out something so obvious. “Aboveground is only for growing food and tricking outsiders.”

“Well, how do we get underground?” Wendlyn asked. Eleukas shifted his weight behind her, glancing from side to side as if he could already see earthen walls closing in around him.

“Tricksy, tricksy.” Gristleburst paused for a moment, then waved them all back. When he was satisfied that they were far enough away, the goblin began planting thin sticks all around the village ruins. Each stick was as long as Lisavet’s arm. One end, which Gristleburst thrust into the dirt, had a bulbous, pointy-tipped clay cap on it. The other end was oddly fluted.

Gristleburst set them about thirty paces away from each other, zigzagging the sticks around in a pattern that Lisavet couldn’t follow. About five minutes after he’d set the first, it detonated in a small, controlled blast that didn’t even dislodge the stick, but did cause a curiously deep note to bellow from the fluted end. A moment later, the next stick went off, and then the next, all around the wreckage of the Fangsparks’ village.

The bombsticks’ explosive notes all sounded much the same to Lisavet, but Gristleburst seemed to hear something more nuanced in their all-bass choir. The goblin narrowed in on one particular collapsed shack, setting a new series of sticks in a denser arrangement around its periphery and then listening to the notes that these sounded in turn.

“Here,” he said at last, flipping up his blast goggles with great satisfaction and digging in the abandoned lizard pen next to the shack until he seized upon a fallen branch that came up with a dirt-covered wooden trap door attached. “Tunnel surfaces here. Other tunnels all around, but this is biggest. Made big enough for prisoners and foul ones. Best for you.”

“Good to know we get slotted in with prisoners and foul ones,” Wendlyn said dryly. She tightened her ponytail and refilled her lantern, eyeing the gloomy hole in the ground. “I just hope the tunnels are big enough for us to defend ourselves.”

“Do they know we’re coming?” Eleukas asked, fingering his axe haft. There was no way he’d be able to swing Viserath in the tight confines of a kobold tunnel, Lisavet knew, and the prospect of being functionally disarmed had him unnerved. “The noise from those sticks might have warned them.”

Gristleburst snorted, tugging his blast goggles back into place and rearranging the bombs in his pants, pockets, and satchel with experienced efficiency. “Fangsparks knew this already. Knew long time ago. Spies and scouts everywhere, hearing your heavy stompings, seeing your big heads crash through trees. Blaststicks tell them nothing they don’t know. Blaststicks only shake and break their traps underground, trip up triggers, make them worry we have powerful magics. Better to scare them. Already they know we’re coming.”

“Makes sense to me,” Wendlyn said. “Everyone ready?”

“Yes.” Lisavet hoped it was true. She rubbed the nervous sweat from her palms as she watched Gristleburst and Wendlyn drop into the hole. The glow of Wendlyn’s lantern flickered against the tunnel’s rough dirt edges for a moment, and then they were gone.

“You’re up next. I’ll take the rear.” Eleukas grimaced, shaking his head at the tunnel. “I hope they know what they’re doing.”

“I know I don’t,” Lisavet sighed, and plunged into the dark.

Gray gloom swallowed her. The tunnel twisted and dropped almost immediately, shrinking Wendlyn’s light to a feeble firefly lost in a maze of bends. Lisavet put a hand to her holy symbol, praying to the Dawnflower for light.

Sarenrae answered. Golden radiance flooded the tunnel, soothing Lisavet’s fears with the welcome warmth of her goddess’s presence.

Dark though this place was, she wasn’t alone in it. She had her friends, and she had Sarenrae. With the ornaments chiming in her hair as reminder, Lisavet moved cautiously down the tunnel, clearing the way for Eleukas to follow.

“You’re getting better at that,” Eleukas said, when he’d dropped into the warren and gotten his bearings. He’d moved Viserath to a sling across his back and had a long knife sheathed at his hip instead. “The magic, I mean. It seems to come faster now.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Lisavet agreed. She hadn’t exactly sat and thought about it, but he was right: she had more confidence in Sarenrae’s blessings now, and the urgency of their quest gave her far less time to doubt herself. She could trust that the goddess would be there when she needed help, and that assurance steadied her in a way that she’d only been able to feign before.

Still, unease crept over her as they moved deeper into the Fangsparks’ warren. The air was close and musty, with a dry whiff of reptile droppings and a bitter, nose-burning smoke that Lisavet couldn’t identify. The tunnel was little more than a burrow clawed into raw earth, and loose soil crumbled into Lisavet’s hair as she squeezed between the scattered logs that braced it. Although her companions weren’t far ahead, the bent and narrow corridors blocked them from view. Only their footsteps, echoing dull and strange in the earth, carried back to her.

“I wish they’d slow down,” Lisavet muttered. “Let us catch up.”

Eleukas grunted something affirmative behind her, and then let out a second grunt of sudden alarm. Lisavet whirled back just as the ceiling and floor and walls all erupted simultaneously into a mad whirlwind of flung dirt.

Rotten hands thrust out from the walls, grabbing at Eleukas and Lisavet with brittle claws and sharp fingerbones bared by decay. Some were scaled, some soft-fleshed, all cold and dead and riddled with squirming vermin. Half-buried faces rose from the walls behind them, trying to moan through dead throats choked with dirt, staring blindly out of dead eyes weeping soil and worms.

Lisavet screamed. Then she prayed. Her holy symbol’s light intensified, searing the nearest half-buried zombie so it thrashed like a hooked fish and then collapsed back into its shallow, vertical grave. Eleukas stabbed another, again and again, dirt flying around his knife.

Yet still there were more, so many more, pulling at them from all sides, blinding them with flailing arms and a hailstorm of foul-smelling earth. A zombie in the ceiling grabbed Lisavet’s topknot, hauling her to her tiptoes and raking at her scalp. Maggots rained into her hair, jolting her ornaments into a cacophonous clatter as they burrowed between her braids.

Again Gristleburst saved them.

Lisavet blinked blood and dirt from her eyes to see the little goblin standing in a clear part of the tunnel, out of the trapped zombies’ reach. He dumped the contents of a small vial into a larger bottle and hurled it into the fray, steam and droplets spiraling out of its open glass mouth. An arm’s length from Lisavet’s face, it exploded into a burst of sizzling acid, eating away at dead flesh with such fury that Lisavet felt its heat sizzling against her own skin.

The zombies couldn’t move. They bubbled and frothed in the acid, and Lisavet hit them with blind panicked fury until they went limp under her cudgel. She didn’t run; she was far too frightened to run, and anyway the one in the ceiling still had its ghastly fingers knotted in her hair. She just hammered at the zombies, splashing dirt and acid and dissolving flesh everywhere.

Gristleburst threw more bombs all around her, launching a steady barrage of caustic blasts into the zombies. Even though the goblin was hurling acid rather than fire, presumably so he wouldn’t burn out all the tunnel’s air and suffocate them, Lisavet felt her lungs ache with the need to breathe. So much acid steamed off the zombies’ scalded corpses that it filled her eyes with stinging tears and heated the cramped corridor to near boiling. Acid dripped from the ceiling, and the zombie’s fingers dripped off with it, pattering down onto Lisavet’s head in a final, horrifying hail.

She didn’t look up. She just jerked away and thrust her cudgel into the dirt overhead, smashing anything that felt soft or solid enough to be flesh instead of soil. Globs of bubbling putrefaction tumbled down around her with every blow, and then finally the zombie fell down in pieces too.

It was the last one, or at least the last one she needed to worry about. A few were left struggling in the walls behind them, but they were trapped in their graves and couldn’t reach out to hurt anyone. As long as Lisavet and her companions didn’t try to turn back, they were safe.

Giddy and sick with relief, Lisavet stumbled forward. She had a few cuts and bruises, and some blisters from Gristleburst’s acid, but her worst wound was a headache from having her hair pulled so badly. What she wanted, more than anything, was a bath. No hope of that down here, though.

Eleukas had an ugly gash on his forehead and was holding his arm gingerly. “Zombie wrenched it,” he explained, wincing.

“Do you want one of Worliwynn’s potions?” Lisavet asked.

Before Eleukas could answer, Gristleburst cut in: “No.” The goblin gestured dismissively at the handful of zombies still twitching along the walls like flies on honeyed paper. “These are nothing. Only the beginning. Waste good healings here, none left for bigger dangers. Then you die. This is what the foul ones hope. So we will not do that. No potions for now. Only when hurt worse, later.”

“You’re that sure we’re in for worse later, eh?” Eleukas laughed mirthlessly.

“Oh yes.” Gristleburst’s smile showed a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth. “Much worse.”