While the goblin was thinking, I shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, casting anxious glances along the green corridor. Sagot be praised, everything was quiet (that is, if you didn’t count the yelling of the orcs and the goblin’s furious argument with himself).
Now I could take a proper look at the Labyrinth. The thickets of green towered up ten yards into the air, and it was pointless even to think of trying to climb over the wall. Apart from being so appallingly high, all these bushes were so dense and thorny that it was frightening just to look at them. I was very surprised by the floor of the Labyrinth—it was completely paved with small gray tiles, set tightly against each other. And there wasn’t a spot of dirt anywhere, as if the place was cleaned every day.
“I didn’t spot a single trap.”
“No, you won’t,” the goblin growled. “They’re all on the central pathways, and usually nobody’s stupid enough to run that way.”
“Apart from us, perhaps,” I sniped.
“Uh-huh. Let’s go, know-it-all, I have a short cut!”
Glo-Glo led me back the way we’d come. When he was sure he was going in the right direction, the goblin started running. We plunged back into the green abyss of the Labyrinth and dashed along between the walls until a creature that looked like the twin brother of the ones that had attacked us near the entrance appeared ahead of us. But some zealous individual had hacked off one of its four arms. Spying outsiders, the green skeleton started trotting briskly toward us.
“Ah, darkness!” I swore, and took out my sword.
Glo-Glo had obviously lost it completely, because he went running straight toward our death—he even growled in outrage when I tried to stop him. There was nothing I could do but run after him and hope he knew the right thing to do. The goblin suddenly stopped, held out his hand, swung round on his axis, swinging me round with him, said something in a rapid whisper, and wiggled the fingers in his mitten. At first nothing happened, and then the creature hurrying toward us stopped and lots of little yellow flowers started sprouting all over it. The same thing was happening to the nearest section of the wall, too.
“Let’s get as far away as possible,” Glo-Glo said in a perfectly calm voice. “Just in case it hasn’t worked properly.”
We retreated.
“It won’t work a second time; I had that spell ready since before they put the mittens on me,” Glo-Glo declared smugly.
Meanwhile the little yellow flowers completely covered the wall and the creature that had attacked us. Then they burst, and the creature fell apart into something that looked very much like dry hay. The same thing happened to the section of the wall. It simply collapsed, opening up a way through into the next corridor.
As bad luck would have it, an astounded orc walked out through the gap. The Firstborn was armed with a long spear with a broad head, which I was not glad to see. The orc spotted us and promptly got down to work.
Neither I nor Glo-Glo had any intention of letting some Hunter have our heads just like that. So we went dashing off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately for us, the orc was rather quick on the uptake, and he came dashing after us, shaking his spear. The orc spectators started baying.
I took my lead from Glo-Glo again and simply followed him. The goblin ran to an intersection and took a couple of turns, and we found ourselves in a corridor running parallel to the one where we met the orc.
“That Firstborn thinks he’s smarter than I am,” the old shaman suddenly said with a giggle.
He’d definitely flipped! What kind of time was this to gloat!
The secret of the goblin’s happy mood was revealed a few seconds later. There was the huge hole that had appeared in the wall thanks to the goblin’s shamanism; we dived through it, and were back in the corridor we’d just been forced to run out of.
“Now straight … right … straight, past four intersections … that’s it … three … four … fifth on the left…”
I was amazed that the goblin, who had only been here once, could be carrying such a precise route in his head. We came out into a fairly large round space with six passages leading off it and started dashing across.
“Third on the right!”
But we stopped short of the passage we needed, because Glo-Glo hissed: “Freeze and don’t move a muscle!”
I squinted sideways at the shaman, who had turned into a very convincing statue. What was wrong with him? Then my eyes moved from the goblin to the center of the open space, where something green had appeared out of nowhere. It looked like a cross between an immense soap bubble and a spider, except that instead of legs it had human arms—either six or eight of them. I couldn’t see any head, or eyes, or mouth. The creature just sat there with its arm-legs folded up under it, gurgling quietly.
“Harold, don’t move, and keep quiet,” said the goblin, keeping his eyes fixed on the spider. “It won’t touch us as long as we don’t move.”
“What is it?” I whispered anxiously.
The goblin decided not to favor me with an answer. Then a very smug-looking orc came dashing out into the space with his spear held at the ready. When he spotted the spider, the Hunter’s face suddenly fell and he stopped dead, too. The spider jumped to its feet (or rather, its hands), gurgled a couple of yards toward the orc, and then sat back down on the ground—it had clearly lost view of its motionless quarry.
The Firstborn glared at us furiously with his yellow eyes, and even though the situation was so dire (at least, judging from the way the orc and the goblin looked), I couldn’t resist winking at the Hunter. The orc seemed to find this gesture quite unbearably annoying, and he started growling. The spider promptly moved another two yards closer to the orc, who was forced to shut up.
Glo-Glo started muttering to himself again and then he made a sound as if he’d snapped his fingers, even though he was still wearing those idiotic mittens. The orc howled in surprise and jumped a yard into the air, as if someone had stuck a red-hot needle in his backside.
The spider leapt forward nimbly and grabbed the howling Firstborn with all eight of its arms. I didn’t see what happened after that, because I was dashing like grim death after Glo-Glo. But I don’t think the orc was to be envied. Well then, we’d got rid of one of the Hunters; that just left the other three. Eventually Glo-Glo decided that after such a long run it would be a good idea to get our breath back, and we stopped at an intersection.
“What … was … that?” I wheezed, gasping for air.
“That? It’s a monster that appeared … in the thickets of the forest after the elves and the orcs experimented with battle shamanism. That’s what the experiments produced. In principle, it’s perfectly harmless.”
“I thought you said the same about those things with four arms?”
“No, it really is harmless. The important thing is not to disturb it. A bubblebelly is just very protective of its territory and thinks everyone who enters it is an enemy. You just have to stay still and wait for it to crawl away. It doesn’t even eat anybody, just chews them up into mush and spits them out again.”
“That’s a very encouraging thought—being chewed into mush. By the way, that was a clever trick with the orc.”
For some reason Glo-Glo seemed a bit flustered by that and he muttered, “Actually, my magic was supposed to strike the bubblebelly with lightning, but thanks to the mittens, it made the orc jump.”
Mmm, yes. The gods be praised it wasn’t us who jumped!
“And by the way, what are you doing with lightning? I didn’t know goblins had any battle magic. You only have defensive shamanism.”
“Who says so?”
“Well, I thought you said—”
“We told you men that so we wouldn’t have these Orders of yours wandering around in our forest! Why should we want to share our secrets with your magicians? Shall we go?”
“Is it far now?”
“About the same distance again,” the goblin told me after a moment’s thought.
I groaned.
Left, left, right, right, straight on, left again, then right, then straight on, then back at full speed to get away from another of those skeletons with four arms. Those beasts were agile, all right, but they turned out to be pretty stupid. We ran into a dead end, waited until the creature made its final leap, and simply dropped to the ground. The creature went flying over our heads like a huge grasshopper and smashed into the wall. The wall immediately came
