The Runt of Cragmaw Deep

Chapter 1: The Kicked

The mushroom was poisonous.

Snik knew this because he had fed the same variety to a cave rat two days ago and watched it twitch itself to death over the course of an hour. The cap was the color of a bruise, mottled purple-black with white spots that glowed faintly in the dark. Pretty, in the way that killing things sometimes were.

He plucked it from the damp stone wall and tucked it into the leather pouch at his hip, right next to the three good mushrooms he'd already harvested—fat brown caps that tasted like dirt and kept you alive. In Cragmaw Deep, that was the only distinction that mattered.

"Snik!" The voice boomed down the tunnel, bouncing off wet stone. "Where is my runt?"

Snik flinched. Not because he was afraid—he was always afraid, fear was the natural condition of being the smallest goblin in three caverns—but because the voice belonged to Warlord Targ the Devourer, and Targ's moods were as unpredictable as the flood-tunnels in storm season.

He scrambled up from the mushroom patch, his bare feet finding purchase on the slick rock with the ease of long practice. Snik was small even by goblin standards, barely reaching the chest of an average warrior, with knobby limbs and oversized ears that stuck out from his skull like leather sails. His eyes were large and yellow, better suited to the deep dark than most, and his fingers were long and clever—good for picking locks, setting snares, and staying out of the way of fists.

He rounded the corner into the main gallery and nearly collided with Grubb, one of Targ's bodyguards. Grubb was everything Snik was not: thick-armed, heavy-jawed, and stupid as a stone. He cuffed Snik across the ear without breaking stride.

"Warlord wants you," Grubb grunted.

"I heard," Snik said, rubbing his ear. The pain was familiar, almost comforting in its predictability. He'd been cuffed by Grubb so many times that the left ear had a permanent ring to it, a faint high whine that never quite went away.

The main gallery of Cragmaw Deep opened before him like the ribcage of some buried giant. Stalactites hung from the ceiling in jagged rows, dripping mineral water into pools that glowed with bioluminescent algae. The walls were carved with crude pictographs—hunting scenes, mostly, though some depicted the various warlords who had ruled the warren over the generations. Targ's likeness was the largest, naturally, rendered in charcoal and bat blood with a jaw that could crack stone.

The gallery was crowded. Nearly four hundred goblins called Cragmaw Deep home, and most of them seemed to be here now, squatting around cook-fires or squabbling over scraps of cave fish. The air was thick with smoke, the smell of unwashed bodies, and the sharp tang of fermented mushroom beer. Children—runts, really, since goblin society didn't distinguish between young and small—darted between legs, stealing what they could.

Snik navigated through the crowd with practiced invisibility. He'd learned long ago that the key to survival was not being noticed until someone needed you, and then being exactly useful enough to justify your continued existence. Too useful and someone bigger would feel threatened. Not useful enough and you became a meal when rations ran thin.

It was a narrow ledge to walk, and Snik walked it every day.

Targ the Devourer sat on his throne—a chair carved from a single stalagmite, padded with the pelts of surface creatures that raiding parties had dragged underground. He was enormous by goblin standards, nearly five feet tall and broad enough to fill a tunnel by himself. His skin was the dark green of deep-cave moss, scarred and pitted from decades of fighting. A necklace of teeth—goblin, human, and animal—hung around his thick neck, and his eyes were small and red and perpetually angry.

But not stupid. That was the thing about Targ that most goblins missed. He was brutal, yes, and cruel in the casual way that all warlords were cruel, but there was a cunning behind those piggy eyes that had kept him alive and in power for eleven years. Eleven years was practically ancient for a goblin warlord.

"Snik," Targ rumbled, leaning forward on his throne. "Come here. I want to know about the lower tunnels."

Snik approached, keeping his head low—not too low, which read as fear and invited a kick, but low enough to signal proper deference. It was a precise angle he'd calibrated over years of trial and bruising error.

"The lower tunnels, Great Targ?" Snik kept his voice pitched just right—helpful, eager, a touch simple. Never let them think you were smarter than them. That was rule one.

"The ones past the Drip. Grugg says he heard noises. Tapping."

"Tapping," Snik repeated, and something cold moved through his gut. He knew the lower tunnels better than anyone in the warren. He'd mapped them in his head because no one had ever taught him to write, carrying the knowledge like a treasure that only he could spend. The tunnels past the Drip ran deep, cutting through limestone and shale, and some of them—the ones that went truly deep—intersected with natural fissures that led toward the surface.

Tapping could mean a lot of things. Water finding new channels. Rock settling. Cave creatures.

Or it could mean someone was digging in.

"I'll go look, Great Targ," Snik said.

"Take Grubb. And Frek."

Snik's heart sank. Grubb he could manage—the big goblin was too dull to cause real trouble and too loyal to Targ to cause trouble on purpose. But Frek was one of Drux's creatures, and Drux the Schemer was the second most dangerous goblin in Cragmaw Deep.

Drux sat in the shadows to Targ's left, watching Snik with eyes like wet coal. Where Targ was big and blunt, Drux was lean and sharp, with a face like a hatchet and fingers that were always moving, always counting, always calculating. He'd been Targ's second for three years, which meant he'd been plotting to become Targ's replacement for two years and eleven months.

"Of course, Great Targ," Snik said, bowing. "Grubb and Frek. We'll be quick."

As he turned to go, Targ's voice caught him. "Snik."

"Yes, Great Targ?"

"If there's something down there, you come back and tell me. You don't try to handle it yourself. You're not big enough to handle anything."

Laughter rippled through the gallery. Snik let it wash over him, let his ears droop in the way that signaled acceptance of his place, and scurried away. The laughter followed him like a shadow.

In the tunnel outside the gallery, he paused and let the mask drop. His jaw tightened. His yellow eyes went hard.

He was sick of being kicked.

The thought came and went, quick as a cave fish, because dwelling on it was dangerous. Dangerous thoughts led to dangerous actions, and dangerous actions from a runt led to a short trip and a long fall. But the thought was there, lodged in his brain like a splinter, and it had been growing for months.

He found Grubb waiting at the junction, picking his teeth with a bone splinter. Frek lurked behind him, thin and watchful, his hand resting on the crude iron knife at his belt.

"Let's go," Snik said.

They descended.

The lower tunnels were Snik's domain in the way that the throne room was Targ's—not because anyone had given it to him, but because no one else wanted it. The tunnels were tight, wet, and unpredictable. They flooded without warning when the underground rivers shifted. They were home to blind cave spiders the size of a goblin's hand and pale centipedes whose bite could make your arm swell up like a rotten fruit. The air was bad in places, heavy with gases that could put you to sleep and never wake you up.

Snik knew all of this. He'd spent years learning it, mapping every passage in his head, noting which tunnels breathed (good air) and which ones didn't (bad air, stay away), which walls wept water that was safe to drink and which ones oozed mineral deposits that would turn your guts inside out. This knowledge was his currency, his shield, and his reason for existing.

They passed the Drip—a place where the ceiling lowered and water fell in a steady curtain from a crack above—and entered the deeper passages. Here the stone changed color, from the gray-brown of the upper warren to a darker shade, almost black, veined with something that glittered faintly in the light of Snik's fungus-lamp.

"I don't like it down here," Grubb muttered.

"Nobody likes it down here," Snik said. "That's why it's mine."

Frek said nothing, but his eyes moved constantly, cataloging, reporting back to Drux in his mind.

The tapping was audible now. Snik stopped and pressed his ear to the wall, closing his eyes. The sound was rhythmic, mechanical—not the random percussion of settling rock or dripping water. Something was hitting the stone on the other side with purpose and precision.

*Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.*

Tools. Metal tools.

"What is it?" Grubb asked.

"Trouble," Snik said quietly.

He pressed his palm flat against the stone. It was warm. Stone in the deep tunnels was always cool, sometimes cold. Warm meant activity on the other side—bodies, fires, machinery.

"How far away?" Frek asked. It was the first thing he'd said, and his voice was sharp enough to cut.

"Hard to tell. The stone carries sound funny down here. Could be fifty paces. Could be five hundred." Snik pulled his hand away. "But they're coming this way."

"Who?"

Snik looked at Frek, then at Grubb, and weighed his words carefully. "Humans. Has to be. Nothing else digs like that. Dwarves would be quieter, and there aren't any dwarf holds within a hundred leagues."

"Humans," Grubb repeated, and his hand went to the stone axe at his belt. Grubb's relationship with humans was simple: they were big, they were dangerous, and they had nice things worth taking.

Frek's eyes narrowed. "We should tell the warlord."

"We should," Snik agreed. "But first I want to know how many and how far." He moved down the tunnel, following the wall with his fingertips, reading the stone like a blind goblin reads a face. The tapping grew louder. He found a side passage—barely more than a crack—and squeezed through it, his small body fitting where Grubb's never could.

The crack opened into a natural chimney, a vertical fissure that connected several levels of the cave system. Snik climbed, his clever fingers and toes finding holds in the dark, until he reached a ledge that overlooked a new cavity—one that hadn't existed the last time he'd been down here.

Below him, in a space carved from the living rock, humans worked.

There were dozens of them. They wore heavy clothes and leather aprons, and they carried tools Snik had never seen—metal picks that gleamed in the light of oil lanterns, pulleys and ropes, and carts on iron rails. But it was the soldiers that made his blood run cold. Twenty, maybe twenty-five of them, wearing metal armor and carrying weapons that Snik didn't recognize: long metal tubes mounted on wooden stocks, with mechanisms of springs and levers.

And barrels. Wooden barrels, stacked against the far wall, marked with symbols Snik couldn't read.

He watched for a long time, memorizing everything. The layout. The numbers. The routines. The way the soldiers moved, confident and organized, nothing like the chaotic scramble of a goblin war-band. These were professionals.

When he'd seen enough, he climbed back down and squeezed through the crack. Grubb and Frek were waiting, Grubb nervous and Frek impatient.

"Well?" Frek demanded.

"Humans," Snik said. "A mining operation. Soldiers guarding them. They've broken through the outer rock—they'll be in our tunnels within three days, maybe less."

"How many soldiers?"

"Enough."

Frek's lip curled. "The warlord needs to know. Now."

For once, Snik agreed with one of Drux's creatures.

They climbed back to the main gallery in silence, each carrying the weight of what was coming. Snik's mind was already racing, turning the problem over and over like a stone in a stream, looking for the angle, the crack, the way through.

Because there was always a way through. You just had to be small enough to find it.

Targ received the news the way Targ received all news: with violence. He threw his mushroom beer against the wall, kicked over a cook-fire, and bit the ear off a messenger who happened to be standing too close.

"Humans!" he roared. "In MY mountain!"

The gallery erupted. Warriors grabbed weapons—stone axes, iron knives, clubs studded with cave crystal. The war drums started, deep booming things made from stretched bat leather, and the goblins began to work themselves into a frenzy. It was the goblin way: when threatened, get angry. When angry, charge.

Snik watched from the shadows and said nothing. He'd learned that the moments after bad news were not the time to offer solutions. Let Targ rage. Let the fury burn itself out. Then, when the warlord was tired and scared—because underneath the rage, Targ was always scared; that was what kept him alive—then you could talk.

Drux, however, had no such patience.

"We should attack now," Drux said, stepping forward with the practiced smoothness of a snake uncoiling. "Before they break through. Hit them in their own tunnel, where their numbers mean nothing."

It was, Snik had to admit, not a terrible idea. The tunnels were narrow enough that the humans' advantages—size, armor, organization—would be diminished. But it was still wrong, and Snik knew why: those metal tubes. Those barrels. He didn't know what they were, but he knew they were weapons, and he knew that attacking an enemy whose weapons you didn't understand was a good way to die.

But he kept his mouth shut. Rule one: never let them think you're smarter than them.

Targ, predictably, loved the idea. "Yes! We hit them tonight. Grubb, gather the war-band. Every warrior who can hold a blade."

The preparations took hours. Snik used the time to slip back down to the lower tunnels, alone this time, and watch the humans again. He needed to understand those metal tubes.

He got his answer sooner than expected.

From his perch in the chimney, he watched a soldier demonstrate the weapon for a group of miners. The soldier poured black powder from a small horn into the tube, tamped it down with a rod, dropped in a lead ball, and then aimed at a target—a plank of wood propped against the far wall.

The sound was unlike anything Snik had ever heard. A crack of thunder, concentrated and vicious, that echoed through the cave until his ears ached. The plank exploded into splinters.

Snik's hands were shaking. Not with fear—well, yes, with fear, but also with something else. Understanding. He'd just watched a human kill a piece of wood from thirty paces away without touching it. No arrow, no thrown stone, no blade. Just thunder and death.

He watched the soldier reload. It took time. The powder, the tamping, the ball—each step was precise and slow. Snik counted in his head. Fifteen heartbeats, maybe twenty, between shots.

Twenty heartbeats. That was a long time in a fight.

He filed the information away and climbed back up to the warren, his mind churning.

The war-band assembled in the lower galleries as the fungus-lamps guttered and the shadows grew long. Two hundred warriors, the best Cragmaw Deep had to offer, armed with stone and iron and fury. Targ led from the front, as he always did, his massive stone hammer resting on his shoulder.

Snik was not invited to join the war-band. Runts didn't fight. Runts stayed behind and cleaned up afterward. But Snik followed anyway, slipping through side passages and crevices, keeping pace with the main force while remaining unseen. He needed to see what happened.

He needed to understand.

The humans broke through at midnight.

The wall between the human mining operation and the goblin tunnels collapsed inward, showering the passage with rubble and dust. For a moment, both sides stared at each other across the breach—humans with their lanterns and metal tubes, goblins with their fungus-lamps and stone axes.

Then Targ roared, and the goblins charged.

The thunder-weapons spoke.

The first volley cut through the front rank like a scythe through mushroom stalks. Goblins flew backward, torn apart by lead balls they never saw coming. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space, a rolling barrage of cracks and booms that turned the tunnel into a hell of noise and smoke and blood.

Snik, pressed into a crevice twenty paces back, watched through a crack in the stone. His yellow eyes were wide, but his mind was working, always working.

The humans fired. The goblins fell. The humans reloaded.

Twenty heartbeats.

In those twenty heartbeats, the surviving goblins closed the distance. Stone axes met steel armor. Iron knives found gaps in the metal. The tunnel was too narrow for the humans to form proper ranks, and the goblins—smaller, faster, more at home in the dark—swarmed around them like cave rats around a wounded snake.

The second volley was ragged, disorganized. Some humans fired, some didn't. The ones who did hit as many of their own as they did goblins. The smoke was blinding, the noise apocalyptic.

Then it was just killing. Close, ugly, desperate killing in the dark.

Snik watched forty goblins die in the first three minutes. He watched humans die too, pulled down by sheer numbers, their armor dented and cracked by relentless blows. He watched Targ wade into the thickest fighting, his stone hammer rising and falling with mechanical precision, crushing skulls and breaking bones.

But the humans were organized, even in chaos. They fell back in stages, each rank covering the one behind it, and the ones with thunder-weapons reloaded and fired again and again. The goblins pushed forward, but each step cost lives.

Snik saw the pattern. Charge, die. Charge, die. The goblins were winning through sheer numbers and ferocity, but they were paying a price that Cragmaw Deep couldn't afford.

And then he saw something else.

The ceiling above the breach was cracked. The mining had weakened the stone, and the vibrations from the thunder-weapons were making it worse. Dust fell in streams. Small rocks pattered down like rain.

Snik looked at the ceiling. He looked at the humans. He looked at the support pillars the miners had erected—thick wooden beams holding up tons of fractured rock.

He moved.

It was not bravery. Snik would have been the first to say so. It was calculation, pure and simple. The goblins were going to lose this fight if it continued. The humans had too many thunder-weapons, too much discipline. But the ceiling was ready to fall, and Snik was small enough to reach the support pillars without being noticed.

He squeezed through the crevice and dropped into the tunnel behind the main fighting. The smoke was so thick he could barely see, which meant no one could see him. He crawled along the wall, staying low, until he reached the first wooden beam.

It was thicker than his body. He couldn't break it, couldn't move it. But he'd noticed something: the base of each beam sat in a shallow socket carved into the floor, held in place by nothing more than the weight of the stone above. If he could shift the base...

He pulled out his iron knife—a pitiful thing, barely longer than his hand—and started digging at the socket. The stone was soft here, weakened by water, and it crumbled under his blade. He dug frantically, sweat pouring down his face, the sounds of battle crashing around him.

The beam shifted. Just a fraction, but enough. A crack raced up the ceiling like a living thing.

Snik ran to the next beam. Dug. Shifted. Ran to the next.

The ceiling groaned. A sound like the mountain itself was in pain.

Targ was in trouble. Snik could see him through the smoke, surrounded by humans, his hammer swinging but slowing. A soldier with a thunder-weapon was taking aim from ten paces away, the metal tube leveled at the warlord's broad chest.

Snik hit the last beam with his shoulder. It didn't move. He hit it again. Nothing.

He looked up at the ceiling, at the web of cracks spreading outward from the first beam, and made a decision. He jammed his knife into the base of the beam and used it as a lever, throwing his entire weight—such as it was—against the handle.

The knife snapped. The beam shifted. The ceiling came down.

The collapse was selective—Snik had aimed it, as much as anyone could aim a cave-in, at the human side of the breach. Tons of rock crashed down on the soldiers, burying thunder-weapons and armor and organized ranks under a mountain's worth of stone. The dust cloud was immediate and total, a choking white fog that turned the tunnel into a blind man's nightmare.

Snik was thrown against the wall by the shockwave. His head hit stone, and stars exploded behind his eyes. For a long moment, he lay still, tasting blood and dust, wondering if he was dead.

He wasn't. The dead didn't hurt this much.

When the dust settled, the battle was over. The collapse had buried most of the human soldiers and sealed the breach. On the goblin side, survivors coughed and groaned and pulled themselves from the rubble. Targ was alive—battered, bleeding from a dozen cuts, but alive. The soldier who'd been aiming at him was somewhere under ten feet of rock.

Snik pulled himself upright and limped toward the warlord. His left arm hung at a bad angle, and his vision kept going gray at the edges, but he was alive and that was enough.

Targ stared at him. The warlord's red eyes were wide—not with gratitude, goblins didn't really do gratitude—but with something that might have been surprise.

"Did you do that?" Targ asked, gesturing at the collapsed ceiling.

Snik considered lying. Rule one said he should. But there were witnesses—other goblins who'd seen him crawling along the wall, digging at the beams. Lying would be worse than the truth.

"Yes, Great Targ."

Targ stared at him for a long time. Then he laughed—a deep, rumbling sound that shook the dust from his shoulders.

"Thinking-runt," Targ said, and clapped Snik on the back hard enough to nearly break his spine. "From now on, you are my thinking-runt."

It was the closest thing to a promotion that existed in goblin society, and it changed everything and nothing. Snik was still the smallest. Still the weakest. Still the most kickable creature in three caverns.

But now he had a title, and in Cragmaw Deep, a title was a shield—thin and brittle, but better than bare skin.

After the others had moved on, carrying their wounded and their dead back to the main gallery, Snik lingered in the rubble. He told Grubb he was looking for salvageable weapons, which was true. But he was also looking for something else.

He found her under a fallen beam, unconscious but breathing. A human woman, younger than most of the soldiers, wearing not armor but a leather apron stained with black powder. Her hands were burned and calloused, and she had a satchel strapped across her chest that clinked with small metal tools.

Snik crouched beside her and studied her face. Pale skin, dark hair matted with dust and blood, a strong jaw set even in unconsciousness. Not a soldier. Something else.

He could kill her. It would be easy—a rock to the temple, and another human threat eliminated. It was what any sensible goblin would do.

But Snik had watched the thunder-weapons, and he'd watched this woman—or someone like her—handle the black powder with careful, knowing hands. She understood the thunder. She knew how it worked.

Knowledge was worth more than a corpse.

He dragged her into a side tunnel, one of his secret passages that no one else knew about, and hid her behind a fall of loose rock. He splinted her broken arm with strips of leather and a piece of wood, left her water in a clay cup, and covered the entrance with stones.

Then he went back to the main gallery to be congratulated by a warlord who would have eaten him yesterday.

In the shadows behind Targ's throne, Drux the Schemer watched Snik receive his new title with eyes that missed nothing. His thin fingers drummed against his knee in a rhythm that might have been thoughtful or might have been murderous.

Probably both.