'Very,' agreed Toede, nodding. 'I notice how she never during the entire morning got within an arm's length of me. Not like you are now.'
The kender guard was about to respond, but the words (and several of his teeth) were shoved back down his throat by Toede's iron-manacled forearm.
The guard went down like a lump of suet, and Toede reached out and grabbed his spear before it hit the ground. Then he kicked the guard for good measure, watching the kender curl up in a small pain-filled ball.
The mastiff growled and was rewarded with a hard rap across the nose from the spear shaft. The hound retreated two paces and growled again, crouching. Toede raised the spear to throw it, and the dog bolted for the woods, yip-ping.
The kender was still down, spitting blood. Groag looked at Toede in shock. 'Why did you do that?'
'Couldn't you see? He was about to read us a poem,' snapped Toede, and started dragging his compatriot toward the fallen log. 'Come on.'
'But we can't get very far in these,' whined the lesser hobgoblin, rattling the manacles and chain between them.
Toede turned and glared at his companion. 'But she has the key, and there are two of us. Now come on.'
Groag said nothing, but reluctantly followed the high-master to the edge of the thundering stream.
The passage had gotten very slick indeed at the center of the beam, and Tay win had reached out her arms to both sides to balance herself. Now she looked back for a moment and spotted Toede starting to inch along the beam, shuffling sideways along the span. That was her first clue that something had gone wrong. The second clue was the fact that he held the guard's spear, about a third of the way down from its flint-tipped head, and was using it as a balancing pole. The third clue was that Toede was smiling. It was a frightening, ear-to-ear smile.
'What's wrong?' Taywin shouted to make herself heard over the rushing water. 'You shouldn't come out here!'
Toede shouted back, 'The guard just took ill! Bad berries! You'd better come back.' Indeed, beyond Toede on the near bank, the guard was clutching his mouth and stomach in obvious pain. Groag stood about three paces behind Toede, feeding out the chain and looking worried.
Toede saw a look of concern cross Taywin's face, and she tottered, just slightly, on the slippery log. She bellowed, 'Hang on, I have to turn around! Ifs worse than it looks.' She made a quarter-turn so she faced downstream, the opposite direction as Toede.
'Here, take my hand,' said Toede, reaching out with one chained limb. The other, carrying the spear tightly like a dagger, was tucked behind him. Groag followed him out onto the beam a few careful paces.
'No, you're rocking the log,' shouted Taywin. 'Look…'
The next word was hypothetically 'out,' but Taywin merely screamed as she pitched backward, her large basket flying in the opposite direction and quickly disappearing in the rapids.
Toede instinctively leaped for the key. However, his hands were chained together, with a second chain leading to those connecting his feet, which were in turn chained to a similar arrangement on Groag, who did not leap forward, at least not voluntarily. The result was that the chains pulled taut, pulling Toede's arms and legs backward suddenly, and pitching him headfirst after the falling kender.
He dropped the spear, but did manage to catch the kender with a firm grip, snaring the top of her blouse between clenched teeth. This would normally have been an extremely embarrassing situation for both of them, but at the moment such proprieties were not the top priority.
Groag, as Toede had oft pointed out, was not the brightest of hobgoblins, but as he saw the chain connecting him to the falling hobgoblin play out, he immediately realized what would happen to him. With a quickness gained by his several-months' tenure as a servant, he dropped to the log and held on for dear life.
Nonetheless, Toede and Taywin splashed into the torrent and were immediately dragged back under the log and downstream. Toede still had his arms and legs pulled tight behind him, but Taywin was already grabbing him and pulling herself up the chain to shore. As soon as she had a firm grip on the chains, the submerged hobgoblin released his jaw-grip on her shirt-front.
Slowly and painfully, Taywin clambered back up the sheer rock to where Groag stood. The hobgoblin on shore shouted encouragement and put out his foot for her to grab on to as she pulled herself up the final few feet.
Taywin swept back her matted hair and spat water, trying to force air back into her lungs. 'I owe you two my life,' she said between pants.
Groag replied, 'It was nothing, I… Oh! Toede!' and with that started hauling on the chain that had disappeared into the swirling white water and (presumably) was still attached to his former master.
'Toede?' said Taywin, shaking her waterlogged head. 'As in Highmaster…'
'Gotcha, you rat!' shouted the kender guard, as he smacked the back of Groag's head with a good-sized, more than adequately heavy rock. The guard's mouth was coated with drying blood, and his eyes burned with vengeance. 'Teach you to take a shot at me!'
Groag perforce dropped the chain and lost his grip on the log. The force of the water dragged Toede downstream and pulled Groag in as well.
Taywin grabbed for him, but her fingers closed on empty air as the pair of chained hobgoblins disappeared in the torrent.
'Serves them right,' muttered the guard, tenderly touching his swelling lower jaw. Taywin's response was most unladylike (and is best not quoted, as the main thrust of the tale had moved suddenly and precipitously downstream).
The low falls below the fallen maple was little more than a bump, and after constricting into a still-smaller chute, passed through a pair of hydraulics and into a wide, fast-moving pool. Groag's head broke the water briefly, sank again, then crested a second time. Dog-paddling madly in his chains, he could barely keep afloat.
Groag felt a tug from the connecting chain. 'Toede?' Groag asked, and was rewarded with a mouthful of water as he sank slightly. The small hobgoblin sputtered and dog-paddled harder. He heard nothing in response, though whether that was because of the thunder of the river or an aftereffect of Miles's well-aimed rock was unclear.
Highmaster Toede surfaced three feet away, water streaming from his nostrils in a fine spray. He looked angry, and a little afraid.
'You all right?' sputtered Groag, gaining another mouthful of cold river water.
Toede raised an iron-shod wrist and pointed at one of the banks, slightly upstream.
Groag tried to shake his head. 'Upstream? Better try to make land a little downstream.'
Toede pointed again, frantically.
'If we go downstream, then we have the river going with…' Groag's voice died out once he realized that he could not hear his own words over the increasing thunder-the sound of water falling from a very high place to a very low place.
Then it suddenly became obvious why Toede wanted to swim against the current. Groag began dog-paddling madly alongside him. Both were extremely aware that the surrounding banks of the river were slipping past them, and the thunder was growing louder, until it reverberated in their very bones.
The river erupted over a high barrier of hard shale, through a narrow passage no more than five arm-spans across. The force of the water was such that it flung itself out ten feet into the air before gravity finally got its due and pulled it into a cascading plume of white tinged with rainbow drops reflecting the afternoon sun. Also spewed out this distance were two humanoid figures connected by a length of metal chain. One of them, the smaller one, was screaming at the top of his little lungs.
The falls thundered into a quiet, wide pool of deep green. The sound of the two figures striking the water was lost, and the ripple of their splash erased by the time those ripples reached the shore.
Some time later, the two hobgoblins crawled onshore, still chained together and making small motions with their arms and legs. Both were bloody and battered, but still breathing. Water streamed from Toede's nostrils as Groag panted and cursed between openmouthed gulps of air.
'We're bloody doomed,' Groag panted. 'We can't run. We can barely walk. Every kender in the countryside is going to want our backsides for breakfast, and I can't say I blame them. That was the kender leader's daughter you attacked, and she's going to see us put up on spikes once the guard tells her it wasn't our intent to rescue her, and we can't move with all this iron, and why are you smiling that damned smile?'
