“You owe price for warriors. Pay family something good and heavy,” Balt replied. Expecting resistance, he raised his chin defiantly and planted the butt of his spear on the wooden floor.
Phyrra stood and dusted herself off. “What about more beads and trinkets?” she asked Kaverin in a Cormyrian dialect meant to baffle the goblins.
He shook his head. It was clear in the goblins’ faces that the time for petty bribery was over. “Name your price,” Kaverin told the queen.
Slowly she leveled a scaly finger at the winged monkey. The creature shrieked and hopped to its master’s shoulder. “Feg is very valuable to me, and I treasure him greatly,” Kaverin said, though his eyes remained as cold and lifeless as his hands.
Balt pointed his spear at the creature. “We go easy. Take monkey and all baggage. That be heavy enough.”
“What?” Phyrra exclaimed. “How are we supposed to survive here without any supplies?”
Kaverin sat down, rested his elbows on the chair, and knit his jet fingers together before his face. “You need to be paid something valuable, but also of equal weight to those warriors I killed, is that it?” At M’bobo’s curt nod, he sighed. “Skuld, you do not eat. Am I correct in assuming that?”
“I have not consumed a bite of food or swallowed a gulp of wine in a thousand years,” he reported proudly, though his filed teeth would have made any casual observer think otherwise.
“And you do not speak unless I ask you to? I find idle chatter very annoying in a traveling companion.”
“That is so, master.”
Kaverin nodded. “You know sorcery, of course… .”
Phyrra al-Quim was a quick-witted woman, and it was only a moment before the direction of this conversation became startlingly clear to her. She pulled a small sphere of pitch from her pocket and raised her hands. The spell she intended never came to pass, though. Skuld grabbed her hands and lifted her from the ground. With his other set of hands, he clamped her mouth shut. Her glasses clattered to the floor. “It is fitting for you to be punished, witch. You caused me great discomfort.”
Kaverin gestured casually to Phyrra. “She should be enough to cover most of the debt,” he said. Then he turned to the sorceress. “Sorry, my dear, but you were correct about the supplies. I cannot sacrifice them and hope to uncover my prize.” A frown crept across his thin lips. “It’s too bad you aren’t heavier, though. I would have preferred not to have lost Feg, too. It gets rather hot without him fanning me.”
Gently he nudged Feg off his shoulder, and the winged monkey sailed across the room to M’bobo. “I must insist on the right to use him to spy on my enemies, if the need arises,” Kaverin noted.
M’bobo nodded absently, caught up as she was in pampering and cooing over the bat-winged ape. For its part, Feg seemed thoroughly disgusted by the whole situation.” The monkey cast a longing look back as M’bobo left the room.
Balt called in a contingent of warriors, and they took the struggling mage from Skuld. Phyrra thrashed about, her eyes wide with terror. As she was carried from the room, her gaze fell upon the skulls lining the walls. She screamed, knowing she would become part of that grisly collection—just as soon as the Batiri had their dinner.
“Do be careful to keep her mouth closed and her hands bound,” Kaverin called after them.
When the commotion had at last died down, the stone-handed man turned to his new servant. “As I was saying before that costly interruption, we have one more task to complete before we can set off in search of this very important artifact.” He picked up Phyrra’s glasses and twirled them idly in his ebony fingers. “We must go down into the pit in the center of the village and see if your previous master is still alive.”
When Kaverin gazed through the glasses, the lenses made his lifeless eyes huge. He blinked and settled the spectacles on a table. “In a way,” he said, “I hope Cimber survived his encounter with Grumog, so we can present his corpse to the Batiri. It would be fitting to have his bones set on display in here next to Phyrra’s. She would have wanted it that way, poor girl.”
Nine
Artus held the torch up to the tunnel’s low ceiling. With his dagger, he probed the packed earth. It looked promising. A few hours of hard work and he might be able to loosen some of the larger stones, perhaps even bring the walls down. The trick would be blocking the passage without burying himself, too.
“We could help, you know,” Byrt offered brightly. “Wombats are constructed rather well for excavation. It’s our lot in life, really—a burrow here, a furrow there.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Artus murmured.
The wombats had been following him for hours, though they had little choice in the matter. Grumog’s tunnel had proved impassable, leading as it did to an underground lake. In silent frustration, Artus had returned to the pit and crawled through the hole Byrt had so helpfully widened during the battle. That was, after all, the only way left to explore.
Artus had done his best to keep the wombats at a distance. That proved simple with Lugg; the brown-furred creature trundled along, minding his own business. Byrt, however, was annoyingly curious and insufferably cheerful. He blurted out a constant stream of questions and inane comments. Still, Artus suspected a keen intelligence lurked behind those vague blue eyes.
“This isn’t the place for bringing the house down, you know,” Byrt offered, expression blank as ever. Artus, engrossed in studying the balance of stones in the wall, ignored him completely. The little wombat tugged on the explorer’s boot. “I don’t believe you heard me, old man. I said—”
“I heard you,” Artus sighed. He leaned back against the cool stone wall. “Look, I don’t have anything against you two, but I really don’t want anyone tagging along with me. I have important things to do.”
“As do we,” Byrt said sincerely. “We need to find a way out of this jungle. You actually don’t think we’re locals, do you?”
Raising one eyebrow, Artus studied the gray-furred creature. With all the other strange things he’d encountered in Chult, he had, as Byrt suggested, simply dismissed the unique duo as yet another example of bizarre local fauna. “If you’re not Chultan, what are you?”
Lugg opened his mouth to speak, but Byrt launched into a complicated tale of thievery and kidnapping on the high seas. The brown wombat shook his head and sat in the shadows, brooding.
“Where we’re from, Lugg was a passable second-story man,” Byrt began theatrically, “and I was a … well, let’s just say I made my living as a jack-of-all-trades. A year ago a ship out of the City of Splendors found our island—a happy little place off Orlil, just prefect for wombats. Lugg was burying some loot on the beach when the captain of this pirate ship came ashore. Thinking Lugg would make a wonderful addition to Waterdeep’s zoo, he grabbed the poor fellow. When I tried to rescue my comrade—as I am wont to do now and then, being the valiant sort—I was snatched, too.”
Lugg snorted. “There you go, rambling on again. That’s what got us into all this trouble, if you ask me. You don’t know when to be quiet!”
The comments went unchallenged, and Byrt continued blithely on. “The ship was bound first for Refuge Bay, but by the time we sighted this dreadful place, the captain had decided to strand us. That dashed poor Lugg’s hopes for a life in show business, and I had left off pining for home and rather looked forward to seeing a city larger than fifty wombats and the occasional odd platypus—though, to be perfectly blunt, I’ve never met a platypus who wasn’t rather odd.”
“Awright,” the brown wombat grumbled, “that’s enough of that. You want I should fill in the rest of the story? I could finish this yarn in ten words or less, I’ll bet.”
The vacant look fled Byrt’s eyes for just an instant. Then he shrugged. “If you’d rather continue, Lugg, by all means do. Your storytelling is better than any sleeping draught, and I need a bit of a snooze. In fact, we could all use a good sleep, if we’re to spend much more time in this dratted jungle….”