Eggs squeezed in beside Morwen and Goron and began to slurp at his soup. Goron edged away from the hairy legs.
Szat downed his stew in a few greedy gulps and didn’t wait to be offered seconds.
“I’ll help you under one condition. The slaugs are ruled by a single female, Gagurt. Once she’s dead the colony will die out. Slaug queens won’t tolerate other females and devour them on sight.”
“So you want us to kill her?” Morwen said holding her breath and lifting the bowl of soup to her lips. She pretended to take a sip. “Mm, delicious,” she said and elbowed Goron in the ribs, “Drink,” she hissed, “you’re being rude to our host.”
Skruc grinned at the culinary compliment. “Exactly, but it won’t be easy. I’ve tried and never been able to get close to her. She’s…ah…always engaged in repopulating the colony—it’s a full-time job. There might be a way, though. Once a week the slaugs and boggarts gather for a melee. Any slaug who distinguishes himself becomes her lover for a night.”
“Sounds tempting, we risk our lives for a chance to spend the night in the bed of a slug,” Morwen replied.
“Slaug,” Skruc corrected.
Goron took a sip of soup. He couldn’t distinguish its consistency from mucus. He forced himself to swallow, but his gag reflex kicked in and coughed the glob back up. It remained in his mouth, as unappealing as a wad of phlegm hacked up from a diseased lung. It wouldn’t do to spit it out, and to swallow it was out of the question. Instead, he discreetly raised his shirt to his mouth, pretended to cough and left behind the mouthful of slaug soup whereupon it slid down the inside of his shirt and came to rest in his belly button.
“What’s to stop us walking out of here?” Morwen said smirking at Goron who’d gone very pale.
“It’s not for me I ask, it’s for all the boggart slaves and the memory of my father. They don’t accept me as one of them, but I feel a family obligation. They live and work in such horrible conditions. I’d be a fool to trust you’ll do the right thing. After you kill Gagurt, I’ll give you the antidote. If you don’t do what I ask, you’ll spend the rest of your lives as slaugs.”
“I think he’s got us there,” Morwen said.
The droopy hat waggled in agreement, and Skruc clonked over to the rows of labelled, glass-stoppered bottles lining a shelf at the farthest end of the cave. He selected a bottle from the fluorescent range and poured out a dose of the shimmering liquid. The potion tasted no different from the soup. Goron gagged and moaned as he tried to keep it down. A solid mass, the elixir sat in Goron’s stomach until it began painfully to expand. Goron doubled over and curled up into a foetal position. Morwen was going through the same agony but with more cursing. Only Szat seemed indifferent to the pain. The glug inside Goron continued to swell until he lost shape and became a gelatinous blob. He was a ball. His limbs were swallowed up. He screamed in pain, but his voice was a gurgle. The last thing he saw, as his head retracted like a turtle’s, was the spider, Eggs, and his hungry eyes. They were going to eat him. He was sure of it. Everything went dark. All senses were lost to him. He was alone with his fears, unable to do anything but quiver.
Firelight and the hazy outline of the room appeared. He could smell the bubbling slaug soup, hear Egg’s excited chittering, and Morwen’s frightened gurgles. The blob he’d become began to shrink—take form. Arms emerged, the skin turned grey and slimy. Something sharp dug into his shoulder, and he scrabbled beneath him to find the culprit. His right hand clasped a familiar shape, the head of his axe. The cold steel brought comfort to him. Goron’s vision returned as his eyes crept from the blob on stalks. He saw Morwen, or he hoped it was her, a giant male garden slug with arms, holding her staff. Her face was a nondescript slab of grey flesh. The mouth was only a hole and her nose resembled a large knot. Szat, a miniature version of his mistress, was sitting on her shoulder.
“You look hideous,” she burbled in another language. But he could understand her.
“We’re all hideous.” Goron took a step forward and realised he didn’t have legs. He tried wiggling his bottom half like a snake while he kept his top upright. It worked but was slow and sluggish. A few circles around the room and it felt a little more natural.
“Right, are you ready? You can take your weapons. The slaugs are great scavengers and use whatever weapons they can find. Just do whatever everyone else is doing and you’ll fit in fine.”
The secret passage led to a well-used corridor lit by the mellow, green light of fluorescent mushrooms. Wraith-thin boggart slaves, clad in threadbare rags, pushed the laden minecarts. Their haunted eyes stared from dust-coated faces as the slaug guards urged them forward with threatening prods and gurgled commands. The surface of the tunnel was thick with slaug slime, and traction was difficult for the slaves who slipped and slid and often fell face first into the muck. Goron and Morwen followed closely behind an empty minecart pushed by two boggarts and guarded by three slaugs who, oblivious to gravitational restraints, glided along on the ceiling. “I didn’t know we could do that,” Goron said excitedly and slithered up the wall to join them.
He shouted for Morwen until, irritated by his badgering, she attempted the ascent. Morwen expected her single foot to lose its suction and drop her on her head at any moment, but it did its job.
The minecart led
