Chapter 19 of Under the Goblin Trees
Campaign adaptation by Thomas Kelly
Whilst we thrashed and protested and cursed at Regus, the wererat calmly tidied up his desk and straightened his papers. The roots and creepers that snaked about the walls, floor, and ceiling of the den held us fast like ropes tightly binding hand and foot. If ever I managed to pull a limb free of one tether, another would wrap itself about all the more tightly.
“No password, no admission,” the rat hissed at Bruin and his goblin assistants: William and Myron. “Leave the victims here with me and be gone with yourselves.”
“We’ll get the password and return to ye!” William wept and pled with the rat as he struggled. “Release! Release!” he begged. One of the vining creepers constricted around his neck, choking him into silence.
The Dead Rat
From a sloping passage at the back of the room, two heavy-set hobgoblin soldiers lumbered up into the chamber. One of the guardsmen dragged an axe; the other brandished a spiked club. William choked out a terrified objection, “Nay! Nay! We bring the Lord Wuluruch his tasty morsels!”
The hobgoblins focused their attention on Bruin. They sized up the big, armored man with some visible apprehension. The one with the spiked club poked at him. “Who’s this big fella you got tied up here?”
Regus climbed over the top of his table on all fours and scampered down to where Bruin still struggled against the entanglement. His twitching nose sniffed cautiously at the man before he declared the verdict, “He’s one of the wolf boys. I smell it on him. Didn’t say the password. Then he then he took a swipe at me.”
The rat did not notice that Bruin had, by then, managed to free one hand from the entanglement, but Myron saw it and understood what was about to happen. He tried to warn his companion, “Bruin! Strike them not!” Too late. Bruin’s long knife was in his hand, swiping at the rat and slashing away the restraints that still bound him. The hobgoblins lunged toward him. Bruin tossed one back with his knife hand, but the second one leapt upon him and dragged him down to the ground.
William began to wail, “Please, my lord, against my will have I been taken from my lord’s estate by these!”
Myron hissed, “Another word, William, and I’ll boil your tongue in your mouth.” William’s mouth snapped shut.
“What’s that? Secrets?” Regus turned and poked at the goblin.
William stammered, “Nay, lord. Only that I wish the Lord Wuluruch had not sent me to thee with such as these, for they are wearisome.”
Meantime, Bruin and the hobgoblin struggled on the floor at the feet of Myron the goblin. With his free and unentangled foot, Myron kicked at Bruins’s helmed head and scolded him, “Have you a single thought inside that metal bucket?”
Bruin drew strength from his brother’s additional provocation. With a great shout, he threw the snarling hobgoblin from atop him and clambered to his feet. The low ceiling forced him to stoop low, making him appear all the more menacing. He snarled ferociously and bared his teeth.
In a flash, Regus had a sword in his hand. Speaking now in a hissing lisp of the common tongue, he commanded Bruin, “Think twice, big dog, or I’ll stick you with my silver-alloy blade. Get out of my tree!” Utterly unintimidated by the armored warrior, he jabbed and poked at the much larger man though he was three or four times his size.
The hobgoblins guffawed and hooted. Whack! The spiked club smacked Bruin up the side of his head and spun him around. Regus slid his slender silvered blade through a joint in Bruin’s armor and thrust the sword up under the his ribs. Bruin collapsed.
By then, Cirili had also slipped free of her bonds. Unobserved by the others, she invoked her pagan charms to command control of the roots and creepers that yet tethered the rest of us. With all their attention fixed upon the fight with Bruin, neither Regus nor the hobgoblins noticed her work. We were, all of us, quickly free of restraint. Myron extracted weapons from the magic pocket concealed in his garments and distributed them: my sickle, Ivan’s axe, Sir Belvenore’s sword, and that magical dagger he carried.
I struck first. Invoking the power of our Lady of Changing Seasons, I smote the rat with a divine bolt. Regus spun around to see what had hit him. Myron and Belvenore greeted him with blades. Cirili dropped to her knees beside Bruin to attend to his wound with what druidic healing craft she could muster.
Being not but children, we had a hard fight of it. Regus the rat showed himself to be a fine swordsman. He struck little-boy Belvenore a critical blow. When Ivan raised his axe above his head, his intended victim merely snatched the weapon from his hands and tossed it aside. The hobgoblin spun little Ivan around and grappled him in one strong arm.
My own childish swings of the sickle cut no flesh and drew no blood, nor did Myron’s wild jabs with his enchanted blade. We were sure to be snatched up and fed to the wolves had it not been that Bruin found strength in Cirilli’s administrations and planted his knife deep in the rat’s back. Leaning in with all his weight, Bruin forced the squirming rat to the ground and shoved the knife in deeper. Life left the rat’s flailing body with a high-pitched scream which makes me shudder to recall.
These proceedings sufficiently alarmed the guards to force them to rethink their involvement. Without turning their backs on us, they began to withdraw from the fight, one of them still dragging along little Ivan.
“Stop them!” I squeaked, “Before they bring the whole tribe on us!”
Myron found his magical arts. He showered the retreating hobgoblins with darts of light that leapt from his hands. At least his magical missiles seemed undiminished in strength and potency despite his diminished stature.
Cirilli snatched up a piece of severed root. It became in her hand a long whip of thorns which she snapped in the air. With a second flick of her wrist, she snared the one goblin around the throat, then yanked it back like a fisherman with a sturgeon on the line. The thorny whip crushed the goblins throat; he fell dead to the floor. The second hobgoblin tripped over his fallen companion. I brought down the sickle of Merikka upon him.
Down to Goblin Town
I wiped the splatter of the fight from my face and hands. William emerged from under writing desk where he had been hiding since escaping his bonds. Myron scolded Bruin, “You are an idiot! We could have negotiated our way through all of that and persuaded the rat. Now we have a mess!”
Bruin, still wounded and breathing hard from the fight ignored Myron. “Children, don’t quarrel,” he snapped at us. “Let’s go finish our visit.”
Before leaving the porch and plunging into the depths, we made some half-hearted attempts to hide the bodies of our victims. We found no place to properly stow them away or means to conceal our crimes. We abandoned the effort lest by tarrying we be discovered in the act. Regus and the guards remained lying where they fell.
“This way!” William beckoned. He gestured toward the hole from which the guards had ascended.
We came beneath the goblin trees by a sloping, winding tunnel of steps formed of natural trunk and tree and root and branch. Myron followed him (disguised again as goblinkind by his illusory magic). Then came Bruin, stooping beneath the low ceiling of the tunnel. A rope in his hand pulled the rest of us along. We had allowed him to tether our hands for the sake of appearances. First came the child Ivan, then little Belvenore, followed by Cirilli, and finally myself, tripping along as the last and least of the batch. The way down was dark and treacherous. The winding stairway of root and stone had been long polished smooth by the coming and going of many trapsing feet. With my wrists tied together in the knot of Bruin’s rope, I could not easily balance or recover myself when I slipped.
That dark tunnel breathed with the filth of a goblin hole. My eyes stung and wept from the sting of the stench of piss. Presently, as we came to the end of it and around the last bend, we could hear the chatter of many voices. With a bit more slipping and scrambling, we emerged into a dimlit crowded cavern hollowed out beneath a broad earthen vault which was supported by rafters of enormous, tangled roots.
What did I expect to see? I did not expect to see a crowded city market with many shops and booths and vendor’s carts such as filled every nook and cranny of that hole. As much as I could tell, the goblinkind beneath the goblin trees engaged in commerce like unto our own, trading and bartering for goods and foods and commodities like folk in the Shambles of Hochoch or the Merikkan Fair at Orlane. Goblin hawkers shouted, customers haggled, and the whole of the hole in the ground teemed with the foul fellows like a nest of cockroaches.
Scuffle in the Market
William and Myron picked their way through narrow market streets lined with all manner of enterprise. Smokey torches and sooty lamps provided the light. Only the gods know what foul things cooked and simmered in the pots and pans of the concessionaries. Here was a shop with bolts of cloth and fine fabrics. Next a haberdashery of strange-shaped hats. A shoe peddler of wooden clogs. A cabinet maker and a carpenter who made two-legged stools. A tinsmith with a rack of cooking pots. Across the street a butcher’s stall displayed horrid cuts of nasty things. The spice shop made me sneeze. Then a basket weaver, a ropemaker, a chandler, and more. A crude chalk drawing on the sign over one hovel depicted a pair of pliers yanking a tooth.
“Come buy, come buy!” the merchants hawked.
The foul folk crowding the street ducked out of the way when they saw big Bruin coming, but they leered and poked at the children roped behind him. Brother with sly brother, signaling each other, they closed in around us as we passed. Some tramped along beside us. One naked fellow crawled out on all floors, begging for attention and sniffing at our feet. Little clawed hands pinched my ears and tugged at my hair. The foulest of them had a cat’s face. “Pretty child,” he purred as he groped at Cirilli. She replied with a kick that doubled him over.
“Cirilli,” Ivan warned her. “Do not provoke them. Do not even look at them. It only encourages them.”
A shopkeeper with an ogre at his side dared to confront us. He stepped into the road to block our path. “How much for these?” he demanded in uncouth tongue.
Myron replied in the same foul language, “Fah. These be for the Lord Wul.” That seemed to settle the issue. The shopkeeper and his ogre stepped aside.
“Dates and dried fruits, blood berries and choke cherries, figgy paste to fill your stomach, sweet to the tongue and good to the eye!” cried a goblin man behind a cart laden with baskets of winter fruits. “Come buy!”
Bruin signaled to the fruit vendor, eyeing the goods hungrily. Cirilli yanked at the rope to pull in his attention, “Goblin fruit? Are you certain? It may be enchanted. It could be anything.”
Some dickering over the merchandise and confusion forced William to serve as translator. “He needs food for the children, and wants to buy,” he explained to the vendor. After some more back and forth, William negotiated the purchase of some badly withered late-winter apples and pale melons.
Bruin reached for his purse. He discovered the coin sack missing from his belt. Frantically looking about, he spied a little slinker making away with the purse in his hand. “Hey! You there!” Bruin shouted. He let our rope go and lunged after the thief.
The culprit slipped into the crowd. Bruin pursued. Immediately, three goblins rushed up and took hold of our rope, and began yanking us away. Before we could be dragged off, Myron and William grabbed onto the other end of the rope and began a tug-o-war, with the rest of us stumbling back and forth in the middle. Myron and William shouted and jabbered at the would-be kidnappers in the goblin tongue, but they could not be persuaded to stand down.
More goblins swarmed to join the tug-o-war.
“Bruin! Leave off!” Ivan shouted. “Bruin! Help us!”
Like a dog on the trail of a rabbit, Bruin was deaf to all else around him, including our shouts for help. He attempted to tackle the little thief that had his purse, but the goblin ducked away under a vendor’s table loaded with clay pots, cups, and saucers. The heavily armored man could not stoop so low or stop so abruptly. Bruin crashed into table. More chaos ensued.
The thief was long gone, but half a dozen angry goblins surrounded the prone man, cursing and kicking at him and demanding compensation for the damages he had done. A cloth merchant knocked on his helmet with a yard stick. Bruin rose to his knees and tried to wave his assailants away, but they dodged and leapt away from his flailing arms.
While Bruin clanked about in his heavy armor beneath a heap of broken plates and cups, the tug-o-war for custody of me, Cirilli, Ivan, and Belv continued. That cat-faced fellow produced a knife from his jacket and cut the rope. Still hauling on their severed end of the rope, Myron and William toppled backwards. The sudden yank from the goblin-end of the rope unbalanced me and the other children as well. We lost our footing. A moment later, the goblins dragged us away like a line of fish on a stringer. “Don’t let them touch me!” Cirilli wept. I squirmed and twisted to free my hands from the rope. The skin of my wrists burned and bled, but I could not pull free. I cursed Bruin for tying the knots so tightly.
