Shroud of Four Silences - Chapter 10: Collapse

The kobolds’ alarm horns rang through the cavern.

Gristleburst froze for a beat on the climbing ropes, stunned by the shock of discovery and the sheer tide of noise rising up from the eerie green lights below. Then, cursing, the goblin anchored his claws in the rough hemp and looked down, surveying the scene.

A sea of danger seethed beneath them. The surviving Fangspark kobolds were sick and starved, but there were lots of them—three or four tens, at least—and they brandished their picks and shovels viciously. None had slings or bows, but there were plenty of broken rocks littered around the cavern, and several Fangsparks were already grabbing them to throw.

A stone clipped Gristleburst’s earlobe with a stinging bite. Another hit Wendlyn, eliciting a grunt. In seconds, these early shots would turn into an overwhelming barrage.

Worse yet, the foul ones had drawn out small crossbows and were fitting ugly, notched quarrels to their weapons. Gristleburst would have wagered every tooth he still had that those bolts were poisoned.

No good, no good. The humans couldn’t fight on the ropes. They’d get knocked off by stones and stuck with venomed quarrels, and then Gristleburst would be alone again.

He didn’t want to be alone.

The goblin shook loose one of the bomb-festooned bracelets he’d looped around his wrists before beginning his descent. Unlike the humans, apparently, he had planned for this. Once more it fell to Gristleburst to save his companions, who had, yet again, shown themselves to be far too dense to manage on their own. Lucky them, having such a clever goblin to rely on.

He took aim at the biggest cluster of kobolds, whirled the bracelet to build up enough momentum to stabilize its arc, and flung the bombs against the cavern floor.

Six explosions went off near-simultaneously, tearing apart the Fangspark mob. Shards of wood and metal ricocheted off the wall as their picks and shovels shattered. Burning kobolds staggered out of the blast, screeching and tearing at their smoldering rags. A few lay motionless on the ground, but Gristleburst hadn’t killed many.

That was all right. He hadn’t been trying to. Only two of the bombs on that ring had been real explosives—just enough to frighten the kobolds into thinking that they all were.

The rest were smoke bombs, meant to give them cover so they could get down the ropes alive.

“Move!” Gristleburst hissed at the humans, as thick gray smoke spread across the cavern. “Now! Before Fangsparks can see again!” A crossbow quarrel zipped past them in the haze, punctuating his words.

With commendable speed for such big, ungainly brutes, the humans hurried down the ropes, stones and quarrels whistling by. Though the Fangsparks scored a few blind hits, none were serious, and all the humans made it safely to the ground.

Coughing and wiping at their tear-stained faces, they tried to clear their eyes of the smoke. Gristleburst could have told them it was hopeless. The smoke was specially formulated to irritate unprotected targets. Only he, with his blast goggles, was immune.

He didn’t bother saying this, though, because it was clear that nothing he ever told them was going to break through the humans’ incurable habit of blundering into everything unprepared. Instead, Gristleburst focused on their enemies.

The Fangsparks and foul ones were in gratifying disarray, blind and shouting uselessly for order. The nearest foul one had pushed back its cowl, probably hoping that might help with the smoke, and as Gristleburst looked at the foul one’s face, he froze.

The foul one wore a mask of tattooed human skin patched together with frayed brown cloth in a diamond pattern. Over the mouth was a strange black spiral, painted or stitched of some light-swallowing material that Gristleburst didn’t recognize. The spiral seemed to suck at the world around it, expanding and contracting as if it had some cursed pulse of its own.

The effect was hypnotizing. Gristleburst had to tear his gaze queasily away before it pulled him down too deep. His stomach lurched; sweat prickled behind his ears. There was a wrongness in that spiral, a secret and twisted evil that waited within the mask to be whispered into the world.

But it wasn’t the only, or even the most urgent, danger in the cavern right now. Something else was coming. Something enormous. Gristleburst couldn’t hear anything above the clamor of battle, but he felt its thudding footsteps vibrate through the earth, and he knew that whatever was approaching was huge.

“Better get ready,” he warned the humans, who were still struggling not to choke in the smoke and not paying attention to anything important. “Big monster coming.”

“What monster?” Eleukas had, sensibly, given up on trying to wipe the smoke from his eyes and had instead used their brief respite to pull out his big axe, now that he had room to swing it. The weapon’s acidic edge sizzled in the fume-filled air. “Where?”

Before Gristleburst could say anything, a furious bellow answered the question for him. A huge ogre strode out from one of the lower tunnels, swinging a massive hook from side to side. Rusting plates of pot metal covered its hairy body in a scabby patchwork. A bloodstained leather whip was coiled at its side. Its sweeping blows swirled the smoke away, offering them a clearer view than Gristleburst, for one, really wanted.

The kobolds screamed and fled when they caught sight of the ogre. Even the foul ones moved respectfully, or warily, away from the behemoth’s reach.

Gristleburst could see why: the ogre was smashing anything that got in its way. One unlucky kobold, struck by the ogre hook, went flying away in two messy, half-crushed pieces.
 
“How do we kill that?” Lisavet gasped.

“Same way you kill anything,” Wendlyn said, skirting to the right with her short sword drawn. “Stab it a bunch in the places that bleed.”

Gristleburst didn’t think it was likely to be that easy, although he did approve of the plan. Keeping a wary eye on the Fangsparks and foul ones, he fished out a firebomb and hurled it at the ogre.

The bomb landed just above the ogre’s hip, hitting a metal plate, and exploded in a smoke-edged flower of flame. But the ogre’s armor, as rusty and pitted as it looked, was surprisingly solid. The metal plate deflected most of Gristleburst’s blast, leaving only a ring of charred hair and pinked flesh around its edges.

Roaring in outrage, the ogre charged straight at him, scything the monstrous hook. The weapon alone was nearly twice the goblin’s size.

Gristleburst swallowed. His knees suddenly felt all watery, and his throat had closed tight with a terror that he’d previously only felt upon realizing that he’d dumped the wrong reagent into his mixing cauldron. This was a very bad mistake.

Well, there was only one thing to do when a bomb failed: throw another.

And if the ogre’s armor meant he couldn’t get through with fire…

Gristleburst felt around for the telltale triple ridges of a smoke bomb, grabbed it, and punched in the cap with a thumb. He could hear the Fangsparks surging back to the attack, but he couldn’t concern himself with them. Not with the ogre looming close enough that Gristleburst could smell the rotten meat wedged between its yellow teeth.

The humans would have to handle the kobolds. He had his hands full.

Gristleburst threw the bomb high and hard, straight into the ogre’s face. Just one. It was all he had. He hoped it would be enough.

The ceramic cylinder smashed into the ogre’s forehead, square between its eyebrows. As the monster went cross-eyed trying to see what had hit it, acrid liquid dribbled out across its face, boiling off into a fresh wave of irritant-laden smoke.

Gristleburst dove to the side, and not a second too soon. The ogre hook swiped through the air where he’d been standing, leaving a vicious arc cut clear through the smoke.

The lunge left the ogre’s side stretched and exposed. Wendlyn danced in, jabbing her short sword viciously into a gap between two of the rusting metal plates. She stabbed in hard and twisted her blade on the way out, opening a deep wound that poured a steady river of dark, venous blood.

It was a lethal strike. Yet the ogre, with terrifying speed and strength, turned and swung at Wendlyn. Blood spattered across her face and leather jerkin as the ogre spun. The redheaded female threw herself into an impossibly deep backbend, and the massive hook swept over her chest, sparing her life by inches.

Eleukas hit it from the other side, swinging Visperath hard with both hands. The acid axe screeched off an armored plate in a shower of rust flakes and sparks, then chopped into the ogre’s right arm. Not a devastating blow, but it did hurt the beast. Thick rivulets of smoke and blood flowed together down its body.

The kobolds were regaining their confidence, so Gristleburst lobbed a few more firebombs at them to keep them at bay. He darted a quick glance over at the foul ones, and was astonished to realize that they weren’t fighting at all. Instead, while the ogre and Fangsparks kept the humans distracted, the foul ones were retreating toward a side tunnel.

“The foul ones are escaping!” Gristleburst cried, running after them. The foul ones looked back at the goblin at his cry and, astonishingly, fled faster.

They’re afraid of us. The foul ones were actually afraid of them. The realization first shocked Gristleburst, and then filled him with a white-hot joy. He had never imagined that the foul ones who had murdered his entire tribe might run from him.

But run they did, and Gristleburst screamed with the delirious hateful happiness of it, and threw a bomb at their robed backs. It overshot the foul ones, only shaking some dirt from the mouth of the tunnel they were running toward, but still he cackled at how they recoiled from the blast.

“We need help with this ogre!” Lisavet yelled.

No. No. Disappointment flooded Gristleburst’s mouth with the taste of ashes. He was so close to killing the foul ones…

The sight of the tunnel’s crumbling earth, jolted by his misaimed bomb, gave Gristleburst an idea. “Lure ogre here!” he shouted back to the humans, already reaching for another ceramic ball. This time he threw it past the foul ones on purpose, landing the explosion between them and the tunnel.

It worked. Again they hesitated, and this time they didn’t try to push forward through the sticky carpet of alchemical fire. The tunnel’s support beams, hastily laid and rocked by two bombs in close succession, were listing dangerously. Its ceiling dribbled dirt and pebbles like a wounded thing, and the smoke made it hard to see just how bad the damage was.

The foul ones pulled back, abandoning the original tunnel and retreating down a secondary path instead. This time, Gristleburst was content to let them go—for now.

“Lure ogre this way!” he yelled again.

“We’re trying!” Eleukas shouted back. The big male was bleeding and bruised, but the ogre must not have hit him solidly, because he was still alive. As the two females retreated toward the tunnel, slashing and hacking at any kobolds who tried to stop them, Eleukas began a slower withdrawal from the fray.

The ogre followed him, bellowing threats and obscenities. Blood still poured from its side where Wendlyn had stabbed it, and a dozen other lacerations slashed gory red across its body, yet the behemoth seemed no more troubled by its wounds than it would have been by fleabites. Tiny eyes squinted in fury, chest flecked with blood and spittle, it stomped after Eleukas like an avatar of rage.

Wendlyn hesitated, eyes widening, when she saw where Gristleburst wanted them to go. “You’re going to let it trap us in the tunnel?”

“Not trap us. We trap it.” Gristleburst hoped he was right. All he actually knew was that this was the tunnel that the foul ones had wanted to take—but why, he had no idea. Maybe it led to safety, or to treasure.

Or maybe it led to another five-and-ten ogres they’d been about to call as reinforcements.

No use frightening the humans with that idea, though. He coaxed them forward, deeper into the narrowing corridor. “Come. Deeper. Almost there.”

The ogre lumbered after them. As the walls closed in around it, the ogre hurled its unwieldy hook aside and lowered its head, brandishing boulder-sized fists instead.
 
“Where are we going?” Lisavet demanded as she skittered back alongside the goblin. “Is this a dead end?”

“No,” Gristleburst said, feigning confidence. He gauged the ogre’s position critically, ignoring his companions’ increasing panic and counting the seconds, as calmly as he could, until the beast stood between the support beams that he’d cracked with his earlier bombs.

Then he launched one more explosive out of his fast-dwindling pile, aiming not at the ogre but at the weakest point he could see on the beams. “Run!” he yelled to Eleukas, just as the ceramic globe cracked and the detonation went off.

Gristleburst didn’t dare look back. Taking his own advice, he pelted blindly down the tunnel as fast as he could go. He hadn’t used his biggest bomb—in these close confines, that would have been suicide—but the shockwave of even a small blast, trapped in the tunnel, still punched the breath from his lungs and knocked him stumbling forward. Heat licked at his back, singing the small hairs on his neck.

It wasn’t the explosion he was afraid of, though. It was how far the collapse might follow.

With a terrible creaking crash, the support beams surrendered. Gristleburst heard the sharp snap of wood, the dull avalanche roar of earth, and one last choked roar from the ogre as the tunnel came down to bury the creature alive. Billowing soil rolled forward in a gritty cloud, enveloping Gristleburst and his companions in its choking grasp.

But the ceiling didn’t come down on them. The tunnel stabilized, its collapse dwindling to a few final groans and shudders. The ogre was gone, vanished under tons of earth and splintered wood.

Ahead, through the dust, there was light.