As if that wasn’t the plan in the first place,
Juhg thought. He regretted the time spent thinking the thought. Sarcasm, as it turned out—even when it was instinctive and quick—cut into the time one had to manufacture one’s escape.
Shoving himself to his feet, Juhg bolted for the wizard’s room because there simply was no place else to go.
And I’ve got to be here anyway.
His first step, however, sent him sprawling as he tripped over the broken door knocked off its hinges by the goblin’s axe blow.
Juhg landed on his face, bruising his chin terribly and almost knocking himself senseless. He groaned and rolled over weakly, barely managing to keep his mind focused. He glanced up as the first goblin grabbed the doorframe and hauled itself into the room.
“This is the wizard’s room,” one of the goblins behind the first cried out.
“I know it is,” the first goblin said. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“It’s death to be in the wizard’s room. The cap’n told us. The wizard himself told us.”
“Would you rather go back to the wizard and tell him we allowed the halfer to rummage through his things?”
The second goblin looked perplexed. “No…”
“Well, then, let’s kill the halfer and be quick about it.” The first goblin took its battle-axe in both hands.
“Remember the snakes from the other night?” the second goblin asked. “They almost done for us.”
“The snakes are gone.”
“There’ll be other … things.”
“I don’t see no—” The first goblin suddenly screamed in fear. “It’s got me! It’s got me! I’m blind! I’m blind, I tell you!”
In total disbelief, surprised that he wasn’t already dead, Juhg glanced up and saw that Gust had somehow found his way into the ship’s hold. Evidently the monk had seen the danger Juhg was in and chose to do something about it. He squatted on the first goblin’s shoulders and held his hands over the goblin’s eyes.
“It’s a monk,” the second goblin said.
“A monk?”
“Aye. A monk.”
“Well, get it off me before it puts my eyes out.”
The second goblin reached for the monk. Seeing his danger, Gust vaulted into the room and landed on Juhg. Immediately, the monk clambered atop Juhg’s head and wrapped his arms tight around his neck and under his jaw.
The goblin drew back the battle-axe again.
Abandoning his attempts to free the monk from around his head, Juhg threw himself at the desk where the book was kept. Confident of themselves against a dweller and a monk, the goblins thundered after him. In front of the desk, Juhg caught the handle to the drawer, felt the tingle of whatever magical spell protected the book, and yanked the drawer open.
All three goblins gathered around the desk. The creatures grinned in wicked anticipation.
“Ah, little halfer,” the first goblin said, “you’ve certainly picked the wrong place to hide.”
Juhg, with Gust still wrapped around his head and a hairy arm over his right eye so he could only see from his left, sat on the floor under the desk in mortal terror. He pressed his back against the wall behind him and bitterly cursed the luck that he was having. Evidently the wizard had removed the spell of protection.
“C’mere, halfer,” the first goblin coaxed, reaching under the desk for Juhg. “Let me fetch you out of there so’s I can get a clean chop. I swears I’ll have you outta your misery quick-like.”
Gust howled mournfully in Juhg’s ear, obviously fully aware that the end of his own existence was at hand.
Just before the goblin’s massive hand clutched Juhg’s ankle, shadows suddenly twisted inside the room. Memory told Juhg that the only light had been a thick candle on the desk that barely served to beat back the darkness. Against the opposite wall behind the trio of goblins, the bobbing shadows looked massive.
“Oh no,” one of the goblins whispered in a hoarse voice as it looked up at the desktop.
Screams out in the hallway let Juhg know that Raisho was still hard at work fighting goblins.
The goblin that had hold of Juhg’s ankle looked up as well, then swore a vicious oath. In the next instant, Juhg watched as a snake head the size of a water barrel snapped down and gulped the goblin down to its head and shoulders. The goblin screamed in terror, but it sounded like its voice was coming out of a cave.
The snakes were much bigger than Juhg remembered. Instead of ending the enchantment that protected the book, Ertonomous Dron had obviously strengthened them. Fat coils of impossibly huge snakes started hitting the floor and kept coming.
The snake that had hold of the goblin that had hold of Juhg pulled. The goblin went up into the air and Juhg came out from under the desk.
“Yaaaaahhhhhh!” one of the two free goblins yelled. The creatures pushed at one another in their haste to flee the room. Before the goblins got far, the second snake whipped down and snatched one of the two up. Coils of snake blocked the third goblin’s escape.
Screaming in terror himself, Juhg kicked out at the goblin holding him by the ankle and tried to pry the monk from around his neck. Gust had a stranglehold on Juhg that shut his wind off.
The goblin’s strength, especially when frightened, proved too strong to break, but luckily when the snake opened its venomous jaws to take a bigger chomp of its intended repast, it knocked free the goblin’s hand from Juhg’s ankle.
Horrified at the sight before him, Juhg watched as the snake’s head came low to the floor, then tilted up so the mouth pointed toward the ceiling. The goblin’s legs kicked frantically as it yelled for help. Then the snake’s head swelled as the jaws slid all the way down the goblin. In the next instant, the goblin’s boots shivered just beyond the snake’s snout, then they too disappeared.
Juhg grabbed Gust’s fingers quite by accident, only because one of them had slipped into his eye and created stabbing pain. Still half-blind, his wounded eye smarting severely, he managed to disentangle himself from the monk. He looked up just in time to bump noses with the giant snake.
The snake’s nose was bigger than Juhg’s head. In the candlelight, the scales glittered iridescence and possessed an oily sheen. Plumes of heated air from the snake’s nostrils pushed into Juhg’s face as he sat there hypnotized by the presence of imminent death. Gust was not so enthralled. With a shrill cry of alarm, the monk hurled himself from Juhg’s shoulders and dashed toward the door.
Then the snake grinned, or so it seemed, because the jaws widened to reveal the pink and white mouth and the wickedly curved fangs. Just as Juhg was certain the snake was about to swallow him whole, the goblin came surging back up from the snake’s throat.
Attacked, quite literally, by a case of indigestion, the snake clamped its jaws shut and swallowed its gorge once more.
The action released Juhg from his stunned state and he stood. Information he’d read came to mind. Two days ago when he’d confronted the snakes the first time, he hadn’t been able to think about the source of the spell of protection. During his time at the Vault of All Known Knowledge, he’d read a lot about magic and wizards because the subject had fascinated him. Especially after coming in contact with some of the magical items Grandmagister Lamplighter and he had found over their years of roving. Cobner, the stouthearted dwarf who belonged to Brant’s gang of thieves, still carried a magical axe that they had found when they’d gone questing for the riddle of the Quarhavian Toad Emperor. Cobner also still carried the scars that acquiring that axe had given him.
Spells of protection, Juhg knew, depended on an array of tokens infused with power by a wizard. The problem was that those tokens could be anything. However, they had to be things that were the same, each identical to the other so the necessary resonances could be used by the spell’s energy.
Juhg’s quick eyes scanned the room. There was no hope of escaping through the door because the second snake blocked the way.
“Juhg!
Juhg!
” Raisho called from the door.
From the corner of his eye, Juhg saw his friend valiantly, but ultimately ineffectually, hacking at the snake’s body with the cutlass and the knife. Neither weapon truly harmed the magical constructs that guarded the mysterious book.
The snakes continued to move restlessly. The second one snatched up the final goblin and started choking the creature down.
Gust scampered around the room, mad with fright and knowing he was running for his life. His antics drew the attention of the first snake from Juhg.
Then Juhg’s quick eyes noted the bright copper coin set squarely under the snake’s chin as it swiveled its head to follow the monk. He glanced around the room, looking for copper coins, knowing there had to be some.
Candlelight brought the coins, now that he knew what to search for, into bright relief. One was on the other side of the room, and one was inset in the ceiling almost over the snake’s weaving head. Juhg knew more coins had to be placed inside the room to create the protection spell, but he was all out of time.
The snake struck at Gust twice but missed both times.
Knowing he would never get to the other side of the room past the snake, Juhg set his sights on the one inset in the ceiling. All he had to do was pry the coin out. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a tool to do the job. He glanced at Raisho, who was still struggling to cut his way into the room.
“Raisho,” Juhg called. “I need your dagger.”
Reacting at once, Raisho reversed his dagger and held it by the blade. A quick flip spun the knife through the air.
Panic flooded Juhg as he watched the dagger embed deeply into the back of the snake’s thick neck.
Drawn by the sudden pain, the snake lost interest in tracking Gust and turned its baleful attentions to Juhg, as if holding him responsible for the sharp pain in its neck. Knowing he had no choice now, Juhg set his fear aside for the moment as he’d learned to do in the mines when the pit bosses had come along to taunt and terrorize the shackled dwellers digging in the deep earth.
The snake opened its jaws and struck, but Juhg was in motion by then. The snake’s head smashed the writing desk into a thousand pieces. He put a hand at the side of the snake’s jaw and ran forward, vaulting up onto the snake’s back. If he’d been wearing shoes of any kind, except perhaps for Jalderrin Stickyfoot climbing shoes made of Vankashin spider’s web far to the south and knitted with magical dreamthorn, which could grip any surface, he would have slipped and fallen on the tight, smooth scales.
The snake shifted, though, as it coiled back to view the dweller running up its back. The angle of its back straightened and Juhg couldn’t run straight. He dug his toes in and leapt, catching hold of the dagger’s haft and hoping scales would hold it fast. Holding on to the dagger, he flipped and scooted up behind the snake’s head.
Feeling someone on its head, the snake bobbed and weaved in an effort to dislodge Juhg. He held tight desperately.
I’mgonnadie, I’mgonnadie!
With his legs wrapped snugly around the lunging creature, he took a fresh grip on the dagger haft and yanked the blade free. Bilious blue ichor spewed from the wound, but the bleeding slowed almost immediately as the puncture started closing because of the snake’s innate magic nature.
Juhg’s effort to get the knife threw him off balance. He slid down the snake’s neck, looking at the same time for the copper coin embedded in the room’s ceiling. Knowing he had only one chance, he sprang from the snake’s back. Faster than Juhg would have believed possible, the snake snapped its jaws open and struck at him.
Great gleaming fangs rushed at Juhg as he drove the dagger at the coin embedded in the ceiling.
Letmehitit! Letmehitit!
He put out his free hand to keep his face from smashing into the ceiling. He shoved the dagger at the coin, missed by two inches, and cut a deep groove across the wooden ceiling. The snake’s mouth lay open like a dark fanged pit beneath him. The forked tongue flicked out and caught him in the ear.
Then the dagger’s point caught the edge of the coin, slid into the deep wood, and the coin spun free. The snake didn’t disappear immediately as Juhg had thought. As gravity overcame him and he fell, he dropped into the snake’s mouth, felt the cold and wet rush of reptilian flesh around him, and knew he wouldn’t stop plummeting till he reached the thing’s gullet.
He closed his eyes.
That’s what you get for thinking you know so much!
Then he landed flat on his back on the floor hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling, realizing only then that he wasn’t in the snake’s belly as he’d feared he would be.
Without warning, Raisho leaned in over him with a worried expression.
Startled by the unexpected sight of his friend, Juhg yelped in fear.
Pumped up by his own battles and the near thing that had just happened, Raisho yelled back, thinking he was under attack from behind. He whirled with his sword in his fist. Gust, frenzied from being chased around the room by the huge snake, chose that moment to leap on Raisho’s shoulders from the cabinet space he’d taken refuge in. Evidently the monk believed Raisho was an island of safety in a suddenly insane world.
Raisho yelled again and grabbed the monk. He drew back his cutlass as he swung the monk around.
“No!” Juhg said, scrambling to his feet. “It’s just Gust!”
Chest heaving from his exertions and the panic that had seized him, Raisho managed to stay his hand. Held by the scruff of his neck, the monk dangled and whimpered with his hands over his eyes.
“Stupid monk,” Raisho growled. He opened his hand and Gust dropped to the floor on all fours.
Gust retreated quickly and hid under the wizard’s bed. He leaned out from under the edge of the bed and shook his fists at Raisho while screaming monk imprecations.
Raisho quickly surveyed the room, searching for enemies and surprises. Then he looked at Juhg, hugged him tight for a moment, and grinned. “Ye’re alive.”
“I am.” Juhg, still somewhat stunned by that fact, ran his hands over his chest to make sure he was still whole as well.
“Where did the snakes go?”