Chương 64: Fieldwork

"I'm glad we left Domonkos with his truck," I said, scanning the trees beyond the creek at Chestnut Ridge.

"Why is that?" Megan asked.

"We ribboned this whole stretch last time." Megan looked around.

"You're right. We had the start of a trail mapped out. A couple might fall in a bad storm or something, but a few would have survived."

"And we'd see some ribbons snagged somewhere."

"Mmmhmm." I reached for the radio.

"You near your walkie?" After a burst of static, I heard Domonkos say, "You bet."

"Looks like goblins have been busy. Wanted to give you the heads-up."

"Roger that. Thanks for the warning." I didn't feel the need to have an arrow nocked, but I did put on my helmet. Reacting to a surprise attack was easier with all of my brains inside my skull, I figured. Megan seemed to agree and put hers on as well. If goblins tore down all the ribbons, at least one of them had to have left evidence behind, so we started searching around what we recalled of the trail we marked out, tying new ribbons as we went.

I wasn't hopeful that the goblins would leave them up this time, but helping us find our way back to Domonkos even once made it worth the effort in my eyes. Megan whistled. I joined her squatting near the base of a tree, eyeing a runny brown pile.

"What does goblin scat look like?" she asked.

"Like a toddler with a bad diet shit in the woods?"

"Huh. That's a pretty good description." I shrugged.

"Being an English major comes in handy when you least expect it."

"So now we look for the next step," Megan said as she began searching.

"Does that look like a shit print to you?" Yep. The goblin that shit on the tree, or I suppose it could have been a friend of theirs, stepped in it and walked away.

"Something slipped in the mud right there." I pointed to a small groove. Megan didn't immediately find the next track, or the one after that, but then we found a few dozen. I suppose we did need what we learned about tracking to find it, but I suspect we would have dumbed into the obvious trail eventually. Following this marching band wasn't the brain teaser I expected tracking to be. We went deeper into the woods, marking the trail as we went and practicing the step-by-step landmark system Domonkos taught us.

I wasn't very good at remembering the trail–down the hill to the right of the stump with the green sapling, straight ahead along the fallen log, up the muddy hill–but I was still new to the process, so much so that I don't know that I would have trusted myself to do this without the ribbons. Reaching the top of a small rise, we looked down on a small creek. Megan gasped. There were so many footprints. The mud was like the pocked surface of a sponge.

I suppose this could have been the result of one very active goblin, but the obvious answer was the most likely: a bunch of goblins lived in these woods. I caught a shift in my peripheral vision.

"Don't turn now," I said as I crouched as if looking at the tracks.

"Goblins to your left. I saw five but could be more."

"I don't hear any running to get help."

"Same. They're coming toward us."

"On three?"

"Yep," I said.

"One… two…" Megan drew her sword and pivoted hard to her left. While she charged forward, I nocked an arrow and got a full view of the battlefield. I saw seven goblins stalking our way. Four moved directly at us, while three seemed intent on circling behind our position. Since we interrupted them, those three were more like an off-center backrow than a separate front. For now. Oh. Those three had bows and arrows. That was new.

Until that point, we hadn't encountered goblins sophisticated enough to make a functional bow.

"They have bows," I said to Megan.

"Roger." I fired at the goblin archers. The first arrow took one off its feet, a direct hit between the eyes. The second missed, and the third thunked into a tree when the goblin ducked behind cover. As I drew and loosed, I tried to remember my T-Form, the shape my body was supposed to make when I used my bow.

This problem was similar to my early habit of not properly aligning my upper body with the shot, but Tailf3ther suspected the draw weight increase that came with my ironwood bow created a common bad habit: my lead shoulder shrugged, an unconscious compensation for the change in weight. That shrug "collapsed" my T-Form. The four goblins Megan attacked dramatically underestimated her speed and strength. She brought her sword down on one as it raised its club to block.

Its eyes bulged in surprise as Megan's sword blasted through its club and sliced the top of its skull open. Both goblin archers fired on me. I was far enough away that I could slip behind a tree for cover, but they were impressively relentless. They alternated firing in an attempt to keep me pinned. I was faster.

"T-Form shoulder," I told myself. Megan probably would have been fine without my help, but I winged one of the three bearing down on her. The shot was open without me leaving cover, so I took it. She activated Rapid Attack, and I didn't bother watching the rest. She had it in hand. I nocked an arrow. As soon as a goblin arrow soared by my tree of choice, I popped out and waited. A little green fucker popped up with its bow. I got it in the nose. The last one tried to run.

It was smart enough to weave through the trees, keeping me from getting a clear shot. But instead of worrying about me, it should have worried about Megan. She ran it down in seconds, cutting it in half without slowing her run. We both scanned the forest around us as we carefully regrouped. Neither of us saw signs of movement, so we moved in the direction the goblins attacked from.

"Can goblins kill a wild boar?" Megan whispered. I too was shocked to see a young boar, not exactly a piglet but definitely not fully grown, stippled with goblin arrows.

"That was a hunting party, not a scouting party," I whispered back. Megan nodded.

"Hunting parties have much looser timetables. That's good for us." I agreed. We continued onward, the goblin footpath making it easy to intuit the right direction. Our guard was up, and we searched diligently for another ambush. Then we came upon the most curious thing: tree stumps. Dozens of them. Chopped down by axes and dragged away. We heard the dull thunk of more axes at work. They weren't on the path of the trail, so we paid close attention to the cadence.

If all of the axes suddenly went quiet, that would be a big clue as to whether or not those goblins spotted us. Stopping at a rough-cut treeline, we saw the entrance to Domonkos' cave. It reminded me of my first ever dungeon gate. The mouth was wide but squat, but the goblins didn't need to duck to go inside. The area immediately around the entrance was stomped down with packed dirt from heavy traffic. Stolen novel; please report. The goblins milled around it like ants.

They had a pile of human trash off to one side, everything from old tires to corrugated sheet metal, like you might see on a hunting shack. A batch of goblins chopped at felled trees, cutting them into smaller pieces. Larger goblins stood by, watching the smaller ones work, shouting at them occasionally, sometimes hitting them too. Thirty-seven goblins. I counted thirty-seven goddamn goblins, and that didn't include the lumberjacks in the forest and who knows how many inside the cave.

If we were spotted now, we were screwed. As if reading my mind, Megan gently retreated from our lookout point. I was happy to follow suit. When we returned to the site of the battle, Megan put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. She had contained her sense of utter shock until that very moment.

"Holy shit," she whispered.

"We can't fight that many."

"Not a chance." Megan looked around at the mild carnage our skirmish had left behind.

"If they find a bunch of buddies sliced up, the whole nest will know humans are around and heighten their defenses."

"Or get more aggressive."

"That too," Megan conceded.

"Don't laugh, but what if we smashed them up? Pulverize their bodies to the point you can't tell swords and arrows were involved." Her head tilted backward.

"I hate that idea so much."

"Sorry."

"No, it's a good idea. I hate it, but it's worth a try. Did you count your arrows?"

"That's insulting." Megan stifled a giggle and grabbed a log.

"Let's get this done." So we spent the next ten minutes brutalizing a batch of goblin corpses. We were so insanely new to hunting wild goblins that I had no idea whether or not this was worth our time. If there was a chance it could work, and we had the opportunity to try it, I figured we might as well. That was by far the messiest we had ever gotten hunting wild goblins. When we finally got back to Domonkos' truck, he jumped out of the cab and rushed toward us.

"Oh no, oh no." Megan held up her hands.

"None of it is ours." Domonkos put his hands on his knees.

"Oh, thank the Lord. You scared me out of my loafers."

"The nest is enormous," I said.

"How many?"

"We saw over forty outside of the cave," Megan answered. Domonkos put a hand over his mouth. I added, "The nest is advanced enough that they are making better weapons and gathering resources."

"Is that bad?" I shrugged.

"I know it's not good."

"What next then?"

"We need to figure that out," Megan said.

"That's enough for today, though." Domonkos eyed our gore-covered clothes.

"Do you mind riding in the bed of the truck this time?" Megan and I set a box of Domonkos' family files on the dining room table to learn as much as we could about the cave and the broader area around it. Beth and Nathan joined us.

"I always liked how old photos are so grainy," Beth said.

"They couldn't capture the actual moment, just this crude shadow of it. That's more magical, I think." Megan leaned over to look at a family photo in Beth's hand.

"I know it's because of cameras at the time, but they always look so miserable. I don't see magic. I see coal dust and hard times."

"Whoa," Nathan said.

"This is a newspaper clipping from 1802. Two dudes from Smithfield got lost and were in the caves for three days. This says they were in each other's arms 'waiting for the end.' And here's an article about a car park going up near the caves."

"Car park?" I asked.

"When was that?" Nathan squinted.

"1926 or 1928. The print's fuzzy." He continued flipping through clippings.

"Holy cow," he added a moment later.

"A plane crashed near the entrance in 1936."

"A whole plane?" Megan asked.

"As opposed to what, they dropped off part of it?" Nathan teased. Megan rolled her eyes.

"Ugh, I deserved that. I made it too easy."

"This whole stack is all notes and research from a Ralph Bossart," I said.

"He's got maps, geological data…

'In total, I believe that once fully mapped, this cave system could equal five miles or more.'" The map we did have was intimidatingly large. The cave opened into a straight stretch with formations in the middle. The crisscross of passages to the left of the entrance looked like the cracks on a dry lakebed, and the passages to the right went from four down to three. The shape reminded me of a pistol with its grip chopped off.

The map had notations for locations like "Devil's Staircase," "Grand Canyon," "Dining Room," and "Hall of the Mountain King." Everyone else stopped reading and looked up." Five miles?" Beth asked.

"That's huge."

"I was picturing a fancy hole in the side of a mountain," Megan said. Nathan pulled a map out of my fingers.

"This is crazy. Look at all this. This note here says, 'belly crawl passage,' oh no way. Fuck that."

"This is a dungeon," I declared.

"Right there on the surface of our world." Megan gestured for Nathan to pass her the document.

"Whoa. Yeah, this is bigger than a lot of gates. What do we do next, then?"

"Our jobs. We're going to clear this dungeon."

"You said that coffee prices might come down," Beth said, setting a cup of tea in front of me.

"How long do you think something like that takes?" This tea shop was one of the first places in Pittsburgh I showed her when she moved in. She had remarked about the novelty of seeing coffee for sale back then too. I answered, "Years, maybe? There's a whole lot of economics involved in that. A whole lot that I don't understand."

"Maybe next time we're here it will be cheaper," she mused.

"If it is, I'll buy you a cup to celebrate finishing your internship. If it does take years, we'll find something else to celebrate."

"I'll hold you to that." Beth smiled and looked out the window at a cold, rainy Pittsburgh morning. That rain would be snow before long.

"Beth… We can't keep putting this off."

"Putting off what?" she asked.

"You lied to me." Her expression fell. Her eyes followed it down into her cup.

"Yes, I did."

"I don't know what to do here," I admitted.

"Are you kicking me out?"

"Jesus, no. I mean that I don't know how to handle this. Do I get mad? Do I yell? You hurt me, and it's felt like we can't talk about it."

"Because of Jonathan."

"Yeah." Beth wrapped both hands around her cup but didn't drink. She still hadn't looked up either.

"I thought the risk was worth it. Saying that now, it sounds so obviously stupid, but I really believed that before. And like you said, I've killed a lot of goblins already… No, forget I said that. None of this is your fault."

"We have to be able to trust each other. There are no safety nets for us if we mess up. We fall off that tightrope? It's going to hurt, and I've fallen enough from lower heights to know."

"How do I make it up to you?" I shrugged.

"This is one of the things mom and dad never taught us."

"Apologizing?"

"Having hard conversations that actually improve our lives when they're over," I said.

"Oh." The move I knew best was to yell, talk about how disappointed I was, and then threaten to get my belt. Truthfully, that was my first instinct, and I felt it bubbling within me there at the tea shop. I had spent days knowing that was the wrong route to take, but it seemed so natural. So easy. Beth spoke softly, "I'm really sorry."

"I know, and making you feel bad isn't how I want to handle this. I'm not trying to punish you, and I'm not demanding you atone, or anything like that."

"What are you trying to do?" That was a good question. I thought.

"I worry about you every minute of every day. I guess I'm trying to get that back down to the level where we were, where you getting arrested or killed wasn't even a thought. Does that make sense?" She nodded.

"If you can promise not to hide something like this from me again, I can move on. I like trusting you. Having you back in my life has been so good for me. I don't want to lose you, for any reason, but I don't know that I could survive another lie like this one."

"How does this work? Do we not have any secrets?"

"No, I don't think that's what I mean," I said. Fuck. This was so hard.

"It's all the same reasoning you gave me when you busted me going hunting. I care about your safety, and I want to know when you're in danger. Even if I can't do anything about it, I need that truth."

"I want the same."

"I promise to trust you. We can't change what happened, but I won't hold it against you. As soon as this conversation is over, I'll go back to knowing you are making good choices when I'm not around. This was an anomaly, and it's sucked enough for both of us already."

"Just like that?" Beth asked.

"You can really trust me again?"

"I think so. This is new for me too, remember. The Carmino method is different." Chuckling, she replied, "You mean burying it but staying angry about it forever?"

"Yeah. Instead, we can know it's squashed and move on. No keeping scorecards for rights and wrongs, and no rubbing each other's noses in a mistake we already addressed."

"I'd like to try that." I stood and pulled Beth to her feet to hug her.

"Neither of us knows how to be an adult, but if we're genuinely trying to be better, that has to count for something, right?" She hugged me back.

"It counts for everything." See you in book 2!