Mountainheart had regained his feet and moved up to stand on her right, a step or two in front of her.
“Where?” he asked simply, eyes scanning the cavern behind them, hands white on his weapons.
“Left,” Sabira said, but then she saw more movement on the other side of him. “And right!” she called as their enemies finally showed themselves.
Their opponents were the boulders themselves, unfurling from fetal positions to reveal blocky stone bodies and stubby appendages that served as rocky arms and legs.
Mountainheart swore. “Duhr!”
“What are you talking about?” Sabira asked as she dodged one flying rock and swatted another away with the cheek of her shard axe.
“Galeb duhr disguise themselves as boulders. But boulders are surface features, formed by water and wind erosion. You hardly ever see them underground, except for in the beds of large subterranean rivers.” He shook his head in disgust. “I should have suspected when I saw them grouped around the hot springs, but I was too focused on finding Goldglove’s fissure.”
As he spoke, he ducked to avoid one rock and took another, smaller one in his left thigh.
“Great, so how do we fight them?” Sabira asked as more of the duhr advanced. She counted half a dozen standing now, and nearly the same number still rolling toward them from their former places around the larger springs.
“Our weapons,” Mountainheart replied with a shrug. “Unless you’ve got a fireball up your sleeve.”
“You’re the one with the magic rings,” Sabira reminded him, casting a quick look over her shoulder to the south to make sure they weren’t being flanked. If there were any duhr on that side of the cavern, they were keeping themselves hidden.
She briefly considered retreating in that direction, but quickly dismissed the idea. Without knowing what was over there, they were safer where they were. There could be more duhr. Or the fissure might actually be there, farther away than Goldglove had calculated, and Sabira didn’t particularly relish the idea of stumbling into it while fighting off animated boulders. At least here, between two of the smaller mudpots, the approaches from the east and west were cut off, leaving the duhr only one avenue of attack. Well, Sabira amended as a rock the size of her fist bounced off the knuckles of her right hand, make that two avenues.
“I guess I could teleport back to Aggar’s rooms at the Tankard, track down some scrolls or WANDS, and come back, but I’m not sure how well you’d fare in the meantime,” Mountainheart replied, reaching up to snatch one of the rocks whizzing past. As he hurled it back at one of the closer galeb duhr, he added, “Because other than that, I don’t know what these rings do, if anything.”
Sabira didn’t bother to reply. She was too busy trying to keep her footing as the ground began to heave and she came perilously close to being dumped headfirst into the mudpot on her left.
Then she realized the floor of the cavern wasn’t just rolling beneath her feet, it was growing up around them!
“Orin!” she shouted as the ground rose up to engulf her legs in a ghastly parody of a hand.
“I see it!” he called back, dancing from foot to foot to keep from being caught in the same trap. “Keep your arms up, out of the way!”
Sabira did as Mountainheart instructed, keeping her shard axe clear. The fist of stone reached her waist but came no higher.
And then it began to squeeze.
She didn’t need the dwarf to tell her what to do next. As the crushing grip inexorably tightened, Sabira swung her adamantine urgrosh down at the stone “wrist.” Again and again she slammed the axe-blade into the rock, and with every blow it sank deeper, until she’d created a deep, bloodless gash that cut halfway through the false appendage. Meanwhile, a muted crack and a burning pain in her side signaled a broken rib, if not a punctured lung. If she didn’t get out of this now, her pelvis would be next, but it wouldn’t just snap—it would shatter, and she’d be as good as dead.
Fighting against the earthen grasp, she threw all of her weight back and forth, again and again. Finally, her painful struggles were rewarded by another crack, this one sharp and reverberating. Next she was falling to the right as the force of her oscillation broke the rock hand from its weakened wrist. As she toppled, the stone encasing her fell apart, and by the time she hit the ground, she was free.
She quickly clambered to her feet and then kept moving, dancing from side to side, making sure neither foot stayed in the same place too long. If she had to be a target, she would at least be a moving one, for the duhrs and the ground both.
She watched as the duhrs tried the same tactic on Mountainheart. The ground roiled beneath him but, forewarned, he was able to leap away whenever the fist started to form, and if his feet were not in contact with the earth, it seemed the grasping hand could not clutch him.
Too late, Sabira saw that the stone fist was just a distraction. One of the duhrs was hoisting up a boulder easily its own size. She called out a warning as the duhr heaved the huge rock at Mountainheart. The dwarf looked up, saw it, and nimbly danced out of its path.
If it had been just an ordinary rock, Mountainheart would have avoided it easily. But as it flew over his head, a stone leg shot out and kicked him square in the jaw, sending him sailing backward.
Right into the other pool of boiling mud.
Sabira could only watch helplessly as the dwarf’s back hit the far rim of the mudpot and the full length of both legs splashed down into the thick liquid, sending up globs of scalding mud to splatter his chest and arms.
Mountainheart’s scream was the most horrible thing Sabira had ever heard, a guttural sound of pure, primal pain wrenched uncontrollably from the depths of his lungs and expelled outward by the sheer magnitude of his agony. It echoed throughout the cavern, the fungi-covered walls sending it reverberating back to them for long moments after Mountainheart was too far gone in torment to hear it.
Sabira, heedless of her own safety, sprinted around the edge of the small hot spring to where Mountainheart lay, his hands beating weakly against the cavern floor as he tried to pull his legs out of the boiling mud with muscles that had already been burned away.
Dropping her shard axe, Sabira grabbed the dwarf under his arms and yanked him away from the pool. The sudden movement was too much for Mountainheart, and he lost consciousness, his head lolling against her chest as she struggled to pull him clear. As his legs came free with a wet squelch and Sabira got a good look at the ruin, it was all she could do not to vomit bile mixed with Onatar’s Blood all over him.
His clothes had been almost completely burned away from the waist down, and small flames licked the edges of what was left of his shirt before Sabira swatted them out. The exposed skin of his torso was a livid red, and covered in huge, oozing blisters. His thighs were a morass of melted flesh, muscle, and bone, and there was nothing left of his legs past the knee joint.
Sabira was amazed he was even still breathing, though those breaths came in shallow, panting gasps. And if she didn’t get him out of here soon, he wouldn’t be doing even that much.
She looked briefly at the rings he wore, but didn’t know which one would send him back to the Tankard, or how to activate its magic even if she could identify the right ring. And without her there with him to get help, all teleporting him would do is change the location of his final resting place.
Sabira grabbed the gold ring on the middle finger of her left hand and twisted it three times, clockwise.
“Aggar! Aggar Tordannon! I need you!”
Aggar appeared beside her, shirtless and just finishing lacing up his breeches. He looked up, startled.