The wind runner book 10.., p.59
The Wind Runner: Book 10 (The Wandering Inn), page 59
Midges, to begin with. But a mosquito buzzed past Numbtongue as he walked down the hill, careless of the mud that got on his feet and the foot wraps he wore. Down the hill. Up the next. By that time, he could smell the humidity and aftereffects of the rain. That smell that almost conveyed the image of grime. Not fresh rainwater here. Not good to drink.
Numbtongue had taken nothing but a mana stone, the bundle of wood, his sword, and two healing potions at his belt. He’d even left the pickaxe along with his guitar in the inn. What was the point of taking extra weight, after all?
No point. And Numbtongue was aware of the merits of magical-door based travel. With that in mind, he set a fast pace, as fast as Garen Redfang would have pushed him on the march. Down the hill, heedless if he slipped. Up, digging his toes into the muck. A green thing buzzed past Numbtongue’s face. He nearly swatted at it until he saw the glowing abdomen. He paused, eyed the acid fly, and without knowing what it was, decided not to hit it.
It wasn’t interested in Numbtongue anyways. It was circling with the other bugs, looking for dead fish trapped in the valleys. Or the bodies of the undead.
The undead Goblins were mostly gone. They’d been eradicated by days of adventurers killing them and burning their bodies. But some had fallen in the valleys or lay submerged, buried. Waiting. Or just decomposing as the magics animating them failed. It was to these things, dead fish, dead flesh, that the bugs and these acid flies congregated.
“Not a fun place to live.”
That was all Numbtongue decided. A place that rained for one month and was muddy and nasty for the rest of spring wasn’t his idea of a good spot. The High Passes were at least honest about the misery you got. He kept moving, aiming for the nearest mountain. That was to say, the base of the towering mountain that disappeared into a cloud above him.
Miles away. But Numbtongue kept moving. Up a hill. Down a hill. Underhill? No. The Goblin’s pace was a mix between a jog and a run. By the end of the third mile, he was sweating hard and swearing as he nearly fell down a hill. Numbtongue picked himself up, spotted a giant rock, swore again, and saw it begin to scuttle his way.
The Rock Crab was sated. It had eaten well during the rains and had even had a good meal afterwards from all the wandering dead things. True, they hadn’t sat quite well with it, but food was food. And because the Rock Crab knew the value of food, it wasn’t about to waste a potential meal.
Its many legs pierced the mud, giving it a firm purchase going down the hill as it scuttled towards the green thing it had spotted. Two huge pincers prepared to lash out from beneath the rock and tear the green thing to bits. The Rock Crab passed over the slope, paused—
And saw nothing. The green thing was gone. There was just mud, some growing flowers and grass, and a long bit of wood. And a glowing purple light. But the Rock Crab’s eyes didn’t function like Human or Goblin eyes, so it regarded the purple thing as a mere irritant. Certainly not food.
Frustrated, the Rock Crab cast about for a while and then crawled off. It would search the muddy valleys for food instead. The place where the green thing had been was quiet for a good few minutes after Rock Crab had left. Then the door opened, and Numbtongue climbed out.
It was awkward, walking through the door in the inn and having to haul himself up out of the door which was lying on the ground. But it was a small price to pay. Numbtongue plucked the mana stone from the door, dismantled it, and kept moving.
The adventurers had been surprised to see Numbtongue jumping through. One of them, the half-Elf that Numbtongue couldn’t stand—Falene Skystrall—had asked if he wanted her to chase off the Rock Crab. If the other one, the one with the skeletal hand, Ceria, had asked it, Numbtongue might have said yes. But he remembered Ylawes from Esthelm. The Silver Swords weren’t bad, but they reminded Numbtongue of the adventurers who’d sometimes come to battle with the Redfangs.
Righteous. That was the word for them. And it summed them up so well. Well, maybe not the Dwarf. But Falene and Ylawes? Yes.
Keep moving. Numbtongue ran up the hill, looked for the Rock Crab, and kept moving. He was sick of hills by the time he got to the point where they stopped. Then it was actual grass, a slope going up at a steep, steep incline…
Here was what Numbtongue did. He climbed. First up the grass, on two legs and on all fours if he needed better purchase. Higher, to a point where grass became broken stones, large boulders. Easier to climb; they reminded Numbtongue of the High Passes.
Higher. Ever higher. Vegetation became sparser as Numbtongue went. And he climbed as fast as he’d run, trying to get at least a few hundred feet higher. He had a suspicion that anything below two hundred feet would probably have been checked by Liscor’s residents over the years.
About two hours in, Numbtongue was exhausted. He’d been going full-speed, his hands were cut a bit, he had dried mud all over his legs, and he wanted some water. So he reached for his pack and unrolled the bundle of wood.
It was, in fact, wood slats. Not the prettiest of things, held together by little bits of rope as they were. But unrolled it formed a kind of…of bedroll? If you laid it down, sure. But it would be the most uncomfortable bedroll in the history of beds if you lay on it. But if you placed it just so against a bit of rock, and put a doorknob you’d been carrying in your belt pouch in the little hole? And if you slapped a mana stone on the door and opened it?
You got nothing. Damn. Numbtongue waited. After thirty seconds, the inn appeared. Ishkr jumped as he saw Numbtongue appear. The Goblin walked through the door.
“Numbtongue!”
Drassi waved at him. She was helping in the inn, serving the adventurers. Numbtongue saw they hadn’t really moved much since he’d last seen them. From the looks of it, some were gambling while they took turns lugging their door north.
“Trouble?”
Ceria looked up sharply as Numbtongue entered the inn. The Goblin shook his head and grimaced.
“Thirsty.”
Ishkr eyed the Hobgoblin’s disheveled state.
“I’ll get you some water. Stamina potion?”
“Water. And I need…”
Numbtongue gestured at his muddy clothes. Ishkr nodded.
“We have some buckets in the kitchen. I’ll refill them from Liscor’s wells later, so use them as much as you need, yes?”
Drassi waved a claw urgently.
“And Erin had better invest in a well. Because getting to that stream of hers is a nightmare with all this muck! I’ll talk to Lyonette about it.”
Within minutes, Numbtongue had washed the mud off of himself outside and gotten a long drink of water. Then he took a ten minute break next to the fire. He watched Dawil lose an arm-wrestling competition to the old Human [Mage], Typhenous, and vaguely approved of the blatant magical cheating. Then he got back to work. He missed Apista flying out the door and the chaos that ensued.
Slower now. Numbtongue stopped his mad dash up the base of the mountain and took a more leisurely pace. Still a decently fast hike, but he was looking around now. Checking the mountain, the distant rocks, the odd tree growing on a flat bit of land, the flowers, and the bird that flew past him. It was peaceful up here. Quiet.
It was what Numbtongue needed. He had just his thoughts to deal with. And Pyrite’s. It had led him up here, where Numbtongue wouldn’t have ventured. After all, why bother climbing a mountain? To look for food? Sure, if you were desperate, but the valleys held enough. No, you only climbed if you had a reason. And that was to mine. It wasn’t Numbtongue’s idea. It was Pyrite’s.
Numbtongue was trying to consolidate the memories in his head, understand them rather than lug them around. It was like…the difference between knowing that fire was hot and feeling the heat of a flame on your skin. Numbtongue could think and pull out the information he needed, but it was a conscious effort. He would rather know, and the part of Pyrite was insistent that mining was important. It was strange how Numbtongue knew how important it was to Pyrite.
He had never met the Hobgoblin. But he could imagine him climbing beside him, peering at the mountain and rocks around them, grunting and pointing them out. It was eerie. It felt like more than just Numbtongue’s imagination. Was this what Chieftains could do? See the past Goblins, talk to them? But the Pyrite in Numbtongue’s head didn’t turn or make conversation.
He was still dead.
But he was showing Numbtongue what to do. How to navigate the terrain without wasting energy. What to look for. Numbtongue followed the instincts in his mind. He climbed, and now he was thinking. Remembering what was, to Pyrite, knowledge bordering on the subconscious. But all fresh to Numbtongue. And what Pyrite was telling him now was all about caves.
Caves. Pyrite had been an expert on caves and rocks, and he’d found that not all caves were made equal. There were six basic cave types, or so he understood.
The first were meltwater caves. That was Pyrite’s name for them. They were distinctive and the type Numbtongue knew of best. Stalactites hanging from the ceiling, large, cavernous networks. The Dropclaw Bat cave adjacent to the dungeon had been one such. But what Numbtongue hadn’t known was that each cave was made up of a certain type of rock, usually limestone.
These caves existed because groundwater and rain would eat away at the stone, dissolving it bit by bit over centuries and millennia. Hence the caves were usually one type of stone predominantly and had the stalagmites, columns of stone, and other distinctive features. It was usually the den of animals, bugs, and opportunistic monsters.
Two other caves were due to water as well: stream caves and sea caves. Pyrite only differentiated the two because sea caves were a product of waves and the oceans carving out stone, and stream caves could come from anywhere. Ice that melted and froze over centuries, redirected streams slowly eating away a tunnel, and so on. Like meltwater caves, all three were natural and largely unhelpful unless you were looking for something to eat. Sea caves sometimes got interesting as [Pirates] would stash loot there, but there was nothing intrinsically special about such places.
On the other hand, the last three caves were interesting indeed. The first of which were tube caves. They were long, winding, smooth caves that were the product of some incredible force pushing its way out of the mountain. They were winding and, unless they’d collapsed, tended to go down a long, long ways. Useful, in short, if you wanted to hunt about. But Numbtongue knew that the High Passes were too old for tube caves to be common; instead, he’d most likely find fracture caves.
The fifth type of cave that Pyrite knew of were fracture caves. Products of earthquakes, seismic events, or something else that made weak stone crack and collapse, giving rise to natural pockets or places under the earth. They were helpful as much as tube caves were; you never knew what you’d get or how the cave would turn out. If you were on the hunt for gemstones, you’d look for tube caves or fracture caves to find as much variety as possible; meltwater caves were usually of one type of stone, not what you wanted.
And yet, all these caves were natural. And thus, the odds of finding anything in them were still remote. That was why the sixth type of cave was Numbtongue’s best bet. And he spotted one after two hours of climbing.
At first, he thought it was a fracture cave. A product of chance. And perhaps that was how it had started. But as soon as Numbtongue had gotten ten feet inside, he realized it was the sixth type of cave: monster caves.
If caves were by and large products of nature, that was because few things could make a dent in earth and stone without considerable effort. Even the best of Human and Drake mines took ages to expand. And they weren’t caves, obviously. They had supports, structure, annoying Humans with pickaxes every few feet in…
But monster caves? They could be large and winding. And it wasn’t hard to see why. Give a creature the ability to eat, dissolve, or otherwise break stone and a few decades and you’d get a cave. They were the sixth type of cave, and honestly, probably the most common. And if you were lucky, they were exactly what you wanted when hunting for rare stones. Because there was a trick to monster caves that few people, even adventurers, had realized.
The trick was that monsters dug towards mana. Some ate it, while others simply couldn’t ignore the allure of gemstones or felt the tingling in the air and gravitated towards such spots. They didn’t always unearth whatever that source of mana was, but the odds were heightened that, if you poked around in such places, you’d have a better chance of finding gemstones. Especially magic ones.
Was it useful information? Numbtongue paused as he stared at the knee-high tracks and distinctive nibbled look of the rock walls. He looked up—there was a lot of space not bearing the nibbling marks. The monsters must have collapsed the rock by accident. An adventurer might pick up on this information, but the hint about mana? Why would they bother?
After all, if you were an adventurer, you killed monsters for loot. Caves weren’t a good source of loot; most monsters didn’t have pockets or covet gold like people did. And if you were a [Miner], you tended not to want to run into monsters. On the other hand…
“Gemhammer. Are they miners too? Do they mine?”
Numbtongue remembered Erin telling him that Gemhammer was a former group of miners who’d learned to fight after a particularly nasty monster infestation had invaded their work space. So they probably weren’t familiar with the monster cave theory either. Perhaps it was only Pyrite. Perhaps…he had been unique.
That gave Numbtongue some comfort as he unrolled the door and set it up against the cave wall. Here was knowledge only a Goblin had time to learn. Only a Goblin needed to learn. Because they couldn’t settle a place and exploit it like people. Here was how Goblins mined.
Numbtongue opened the door, retrieved his pickaxe, his guitar just in case he needed to throw a lightning bolt—he doubted it could be used inside a cave, but you never knew—and a lantern. Then he stepped back into the cave and walked forwards, pickaxe in hand.
A Goblin entered the caves, pausing, staring up at the ceiling. The first thing you checked for was faults, signs you wouldn’t have the cave collapse on you. The next thing Numbtongue checked for was gas, anything in the air that was dangerous. He did that by inhaling rapidly a few times and deciding he didn’t feel faint.
The third thing Numbtongue checked for was what he knew was there. Monsters. He found traces of them after a minute of walking into the cave. The tunnel expanded and shrank, turning into one nesting cavern—buried by rocks—another tunnel, at one point so low that Numbtongue had to duck, and then more exposed space.
Pyrite’s memories told Numbtongue what he was probably going to find before he found the first cracked, dried up shell. Only a few species were so careless in tunneling that they let the stone above them collapse and slowly excavated the entire damn place. And that was the small, roly-poly insect with lots of legs and a curving shell that scuttled past Numbtongue. He stopped.
Rockmites.
The little things filled the next bend in the tunnels. They were all over the walls, scurrying from place to place, industriously widening their domain. Their little jaws were incredibly strong, but the real trick to them was the dissolving acid they squirted. Not enough to be used in combat, but just enough to weaken the stone so they could tear chunks of it away.
They ate stone, or at least, Pyrite thought they did. But stone is a poor diet, so Rockmites also gave lichen a place to live. It was that which constituted their diets. Lichen, rocks, small insects that came to feast on the lichen…Rockmites had it simple and good. They could hollow out huge nests where they lived in quiet peace, creating an ecosystem to live in without disturbing anyone.
Oh, and if you disturbed them, they’d swarm all over you and tear you apart. Numbtongue recalled that pressing bit of information a moment before he stepped into the cave. He froze. But Pyrite was calm. Or he would be, if he were here.
This was all you had to do. Numbtongue slowly walked forwards, watching each step he took. The Rockmites sensed him instantly; they didn’t really pause in their tasks for the most part, but the ones closest to the ground let go and fell off. Then they scurried towards the Goblin.
Step. Step. Numbtongue kept his balance, guitar raised, pickaxe held at his side. He stopped when the little shapes crawling around him grew too many to avoid stepping on. Then he waited.
The Rockmites were investigating this intruder warily. They scuttled around him. Thousands of eyeless little bugs, clicking on the stone floor. Numbtongue wondered what they tasted like. Pyrite answered for him.
Not good, unless you boiled them with a lot of salt. And even then, not worth the effort. They could take chunks out of you fast. If they attack, run and don’t stop.
But they wouldn’t attack. Numbtongue had to believe that. He held very still, waiting, until the first Rockmite scuttled up his leg. It didn’t take long. Numbtongue felt the prickly, painful legs crawling up him, and before the first bite could take a chunk out of his flesh, he opened his mouth.
Click!
It wasn’t a word, but a sound. Numbtongue made the clicking sound as loud as could be and felt the Rockmite let go at once. The others around him fled back a few feet. Numbtongue waited. They scuttled around him and then approached.
Click!
Again, the Rockmites fled. And now they had the hang of it. Scuttle forwards, and Numbtongue would click loudly. After four attempts, the Rockmites decided that this strange thing was neither food nor danger. So they left him alone and scuttled back towards the walls. Numbtongue exhaled slowly.
That’s all you had to do. Just click as loudly as you could and they’d realize you weren’t food and leave you alone. If one bit you? Shake it off. But don’t step on them, take no sudden moves…Rockmites weren’t predators. They didn’t want to kill you, just live. If you left them alone, they’d leave you alone.
Humans never understood that. But Pyrite had, and he’d walked through countless Rockmite caves, sometimes passing by the bones of creatures who’d come with malice aforethought. And now Numbtongue walked past them.
