He slid his mace from behind his back and held it high. The goblins were afraid of him enough to quiet down and stop jittering when they saw it. The weapon was impressive, even to Rezrex. It was given to him by his father—or, more to the point, he’d taken it from his father’s dead hand—who had stolen it from a human priest who was guarding a caravan his father had robbed. It was a fine weapon that everyone around him assumed was enchanted, and maybe it was. Rezrex did fight better with it than any weapon he’d ever used.
“The man,” he shouted to the assembled goblins, “has dared to desecrate the caves of the Stonedeep Tribe! Find him, and the enemy chief Glnk, and k—”
The goblins stared at him blankly, and Rezrex huffed, realizing he’d been speaking his native tongue. When he talked to goblins, he had to talk like he was addressing an infant.
“” he shouted—Find man. “”—Kill man—“”—Stonedeep belongs to Rezrex—“”—Cavemouth belongs to Rezrex—“”—Goblins belong to Rezrex.
The goblins started bouncing up and down on their toes, gathering their courage, and Rezrex knew they’d do what he told them to do. He wanted them to follow him, he wanted them to attack.
He screamed the battle cry: “”
Follow me, goblins! Attack, goblins!
The pain in Regdar’s right leg had dwindled to a dull throb that was easy enough for him to ignore. He was running, which was loosening the muscles, and he was finally on the way to confront Rezrex and rescue Naull, and that made him feel better too. His blood was racing through his veins, his senses were growing more acute, his muscles were tensing for the fight to come. Even running down the uneven rocky cave floor through darkness cut through only by bobbing wedges of torchlight, Regdar was in his element.
Behind him were Jozan—clanking along in his unsubtle armor—Lidda, her lanternlight strangely absent, the two goblin chiefs, and maybe a score or more of the Cavemouth goblins. The hive spider queen took up the rear, emitting an irregular series of clicks and whistles as it scurried along. The sounds popped and pinged off the walls and stalactites, mixing with the footsteps and grunts of the goblins, and the clattering of spider feet that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Regdar didn’t let his attention wander to the spiders, but he could sense them gathering. They came from every crack, behind every stalagmite and stalactite. They were on the ceiling above and behind him, and on the walls all around. They were coming from everywhere, answering the calls of their queen.
Several of the Cavemouth goblins were carrying torches behind him, and at the edge of their wavering light Regdar could make out the shape of the hulking hobgoblin. Though he couldn’t see well enough to be sure, Regdar got the sense that there were others behind it. He couldn’t see Naull.
Regdar, his greatsword trailing behind him in his right hand, ready for a running slash, his shield in front of him to deflect javelins or whatever might be thrown or fired at him, ran into the fight, anxious to get on with it.
Jozan’s voice rose above the din of the massed charge, and Regdar smiled when he heard the prayer to Pelor, the Shining One, God of the Sun, ring through the cave. He could feel the power of the prayer wash over him—they were no mere words. It was as if the sun somehow broke through the two thousand feet or more of rock above them to shine on Regdar and the cause for which he fought. Pelor himself would help guide his hand—for the sake of justice.
By the time Regdar—and, more importantly, the torchlight behind him—was close enough to see that the hobgoblin in front wasn’t Rezrex, it was too late for the human to turn his charge. The hobgoblin—obviously one of Rezrex’s cronies—was spinning a heavy length of chain studded with cruel, curved spikes. The polished steel links reflected flashes of orange from the bobbing torchlight and made the first attack harder to see.
Regdar brought his shield up just in time to block the chain that was speeding toward his face. The cruel weapon clanged off the protective metal, and Regdar batted it away. The hobgoblin drew the weapon back in with a flick of his wrist in the time it took for Regdar to get within slashing range.
The chain whipped up and past the hobgoblin’s right side and in front of him to wrap around Regdar’s blade. The hobgoblin made the mistake of trying to pull Regdar’s greatsword toward him, hoping to yank it from the human’s grip. Regdar, whose hand was wrapped around the comfortable pommel of the greatsword like an iron vise, leaped into the air. The combination of the momentum of his charge, the leap itself, and the hobgoblin yanking on the chain wrapped around his sword pulled Regdar through the air and onto the hobgoblin so fast and so hard it sent both of them sprawling.
Regdar didn’t know the hobgoblin was standing in front of a pool of ice-cold water until they both splashed into it, arms and legs splaying, bodies twisting in the air in mixed attempts to land on their feet, avoid each others’ weapons, or kill each other. Before he had a chance to worry that he’d sink again, he hit the bottom of the shallow pool hard enough to drive a grunt from his chest and make his ears ring.
He felt the hobgoblin under him and jammed his knee down, pushing himself up. When the hobgoblin rolled out from beneath him, Regdar almost went back under but managed to scramble away, his back scraping against a rock wall that rose out of the middle of the shallow pool like a column that disappeared into the darkness over his head.
He drew in a deep breath the second his head came out of the water, and he blinked to clear his eyes. The hobgoblin was in front of him, just at the edge of the pool and was sputtering and coughing up water even as it gathered its spiked chain in a coil. Behind the hobgoblin, Glnk was smashing apart the dull brown carapace of a hive spider.
Regdar took one step forward in the water, which slowed him considerably. His greatsword was raised above his head, ready for a downward hack at the hobgoblin, when a roaring voice shattered his concentration.
“Stop!” Rezrex shouted, stepping into the torchlight, a third hobgoblin at his side.
Jozan shouted, “Naull!”
The hobgoblin with Rezrex was holding the young mage with one of his big, brutish arms wrapped around her chest. Blood was seeping from her nose, and a huge bruise was blossoming on her round face. She was hanging limp in the hobgoblin’s grip, eyes closed. She was breathing, but Regdar feared she wouldn’t be for long. In his other hand, the hobgoblin held a wicked serrated dagger, similar to the one that had mangled Regdar’s leg. He was holding the weapon to Naull’s soft, exposed throat.
Rezrex laughed, and Regdar’s blood boiled.
“Stop now, man!” Rezrex called. “Stop now or female bleeds out!”
The hobgoblin with the spiked chain stepped up out of the pool, regarding Regdar with cold contempt.
Rezrex grinned and said, “I give word—one word!—and female is—”
The hobgoblin was interrupted by a feral shriek from Glnk. The new chief of the Cavemouth Tribe, oblivious to Naull’s danger, rushed at the hobgoblin, brandishing a stone club that was still dripping with the hive spider’s sticky yellow ichor, and traces of the spidersilk that marked it as one of the bars from the queen spider’s cage.
Regdar wanted to scream for the goblin to stop, but the chief wouldn’t have understood him, as he hadn’t understood Rezrex, who was speaking his grunting, halting Common.