The warriors spread out along the cave's edges, and Richard used the moment to look them over properly.

  Most resembled the guardians from the arena — broad across the chest, thick through the limbs, built like something designed to absorb damage and dish out more. They carried the same short clubs, though these ones had large pouches strapped to their sides. But a few were different. Leaner, with a coiled stillness that the brutes didn't have. Less muscle, more precision. The kind of build that didn't need to hit hard because it could get close before you realized it was moving.

  Richard filed the distinction away. Even the biggest of them, he estimated, would stand no taller than a short human once fully grown. Goblins were not a large race. That was useful to know.

  A commotion near the entrance pulled his attention back.

  Two workers had followed the group in. They carried baskets, wide ones, stacked high. Without ceremony, they upended them a short distance from the entrance. Blue stones cascaded out in a rattling heap — enough for every pup in the cave, by the look of it, and then some.

  The big goblin stepped forward, pointed at the pile with his club, and grinned.

  "Take a stone and GO!" he bellowed, punctuating it with two sharp cracks against the ground. "GO! GO!"

  Richard was already moving.

  He wasn't the first — a handful of the quickest pups had lunged the instant the club hit the floor — but he was in the second wave, close enough behind that the pile was still full when he reached it. He snatched a stone, felt the familiar cool smoothness of it in his palm, and ran.

  Behind him, the sounds of the cave were illuminating.

  The thud of clubs. Yelps. A few short screams cut off quickly, replaced by the slap of feet scrambling on stone.

  Richard kept running. He counted his paces, mapped the distance to the junction he'd glimpsed on the way in, and didn't look back.

  He ran until the noise faded to an echo.

  Then he stopped.

  He pressed himself against the cave wall, chest heaving, and listened.

  More feet. More pups pouring past the junction, funneled into the passages by the same instinct to get away from anything holding a stick. Some were limping. One was crying quietly, a sound that started strong and then muffled itself, as if the pup had thought better of advertising its location.

  A few stragglers — three, four — passed him without noticing where he'd pressed himself into the shadow.

  Then, for a while, nothing.

  He risked a glance back toward the entrance cave.

  Two pups remained on the floor near the stone pile. One was curled up, arms wrapped around its head. The other was trying to push itself upright and failing, arms shaking with the effort.

  The warriors stood among them.

  And didn't touch them.

  Richard blinked.

  He had expected a second round — a prodding kick, another swing to finish the job. That was how the arena worked. Down meant target. But the warriors simply watched the two pups with expressions of total disinterest, the same way you'd watch rainwater run off a rock. One of the lean ones had already turned away, eyes moving to the passages.

  The pup still trying to rise managed it, finally. Wobbled to a standing position, grabbed a stone from the pile — still plenty left — and staggered toward the passages. The warrior nearest to it watched, did nothing, and let it go.

  "The Beatings will continue until morale improves," Richard thought with a snicker, a saying his uncle lowed to repeat.

  He turned and went deeper.

  The passage split almost immediately. Then again. Then again.

  Richard chose left at every junction, marking the pattern in his head: left, left, left. Simple. Consistent. A rule he could reverse when the time came. The cave system branched with what felt like malicious creativity — some passages widened into small chambers before narrowing again, others dove downward at angles steep enough to make his knees ache on the descent. The moss did what it always did, lighting some sections with its dim green-blue glow and leaving others in thicker shadow.

  After the fifth junction, the sounds of other pups disappeared entirely.

  That was either good or very bad.

  He kept moving.

  At the seventh junction, he paused. The passage ahead had a stretch of near-darkness where the moss was thin and patchy. He crouched, scooped a handful of the nearest growth from the wall, and held it in his palm.

  It glowed for a few seconds. Then the light faded, smoothly and completely, leaving him holding a handful of damp nothing.

  "Of course," he muttered.

  He dropped it and kept moving by the ambient light of the passages that still had coverage.

  The mushroom cave announced itself with smell before sight — something earthy and faintly sweet, like wet wood after rain.

  Richard stepped through a low arch and stopped.

  The chamber was large, substantially larger than the nursery. And it was full.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Mushrooms covered the floor in dense clusters, their stems pale white, almost luminous in the moss-light from the upper walls. Most had wide, flat caps in shades of blue and green, spreading outward like shelves. Many had grown tall — chest height on a full adult goblin, he estimated. But at the middle of the cave, some had reached true height, three adult goblins stacked one atop another, their caps spreading broad as wagon wheels, casting the floor beneath them in deep shadow.

  Several pointy-capped ones were also scattered among them, yellowish and sparse. He made a note not to touch those until he knew more.

  Richard stood at the edge and thought.

  The red stone was hidden in the caves. Somewhere. He'd been walking for what felt like the better part of an hour and found nothing resembling it on any floor or wall he'd passed. Which suggested the hiding wasn't casual — either the stones were small and easy to overlook at ground level, or they weren't at ground level at all.

  He looked up.

  The large mushrooms in the middle had caps wide enough to walk on. And height meant vantage.

  He studied the smaller clusters near him, looking for one with a cap low enough to reach. Most were too tall to jump to directly. But a few had grown in tight groups, their caps overlapping at the edges — a series of steps, if you were willing to commit to the first one.

  He found a candidate: a mushroom whose cap bent slightly outward, close enough to the ground that a running jump and a good grip might do it. He tested the stem with his hand. It didn't flex much. Solid enough.

  He backed up, took a running start, leaped, and caught the cap's rim with both hands. His nails — short but surprisingly sharp, something he'd never appreciated about his goblin body until now — dug into the firm flesh of the cap and held. He hauled himself up, arms burning, and rolled onto the surface.

  It held. Barely. The cap dipped under his weight but didn't crack.

  He stood carefully and looked at the neighboring cap, a few body-lengths across a narrow gap.

  He jumped.

  Landed. Caught. Pulled himself up again.

  Four mushrooms later, he was on one of the large ones, his feet planted on a surface wide enough that he didn't have to worry about the edge. The view opened up around him — the whole cave laid out below and to the sides, the clusters of caps forming a rough canopy at various heights.

  He turned slowly, scanning.

  Most of the caps were clean. Blue or green, flat, unbroken. But some, scattered among the rest — maybe one in ten, maybe fewer — had something on them. Small protrusions, brown, and rough, jutting from the surface like pebbles half-buried in soil.

  He almost dismissed them.

  Then he looked closer.

  One of the protrusions, on a cap two mushrooms to his left, had corners. Not the irregular, organic edges dried fungus. Actual corners. And where those corners caught the light, the color was wrong — lighter, more uniform. A shade he recognized.

  His pulse picked up.

  He mapped the path between here and there. Two jumps, neither trivial. He took them anyway.

  Up close, the protrusion was exactly what he'd thought it was: a red stone, the same rough oval shape as the one the big goblin had held up, its surface coated in a thin layer of something brownish — dried spore, maybe, or fungal growth.

  He dug his nails under the edge and pried.

  It came free with a soft pop, and he turned it over in his hands. Under the coating, it was identical to the demonstration stone. Same texture, same weight, same dried-blood color.

  He closed his fingers around it and allowed himself, briefly, to feel pleased.

  He scanned the nearby caps. He could see two more protrusions from where he stood — and with patience, probably find a dozen if he kept climbing. Unfortunately he didn't have the space to carry, already having one of his hands occupied with the blue stone was limiting. A problem to be solved later.

  One stone. One win. Don't be greedy.

  The route back was simpler in principle. Right, instead of left, at every junction. Same count, reversed.

  He moved faster than he had on the way in, less worried about what lay ahead and more focused on what might be coming up ahead of him. At each junction, before going in, he pressed his ear to the floor.

  He'd picked up the trick from the nurses' songs — something about listening for water through stone — and it worked for more than water. Sound carried through cave rock in odd ways, arriving earlier than it had any right to.

  Most junctions were silent. He moved through them cleanly.

  At the eleventh junction, counting backward, he heard something.

  Footsteps. Light ones. Coming from the right passage — the one he needed.

  Richard stepped back and looked around. The passage behind him had a section where the moss thinned to almost nothing, leaving a stretch of genuine shadow against the wall. Acting rashly he removed even more of the moss near it. Then he pressed himself into it, tucking his chin down, stilling his breathing.

  It would have been easier to just take another path. Cut around, find a different route. But 'easier' had a cost: he didn't know this cave system well enough to guarantee a second route would get him back in time, or at all. The left-then-right method was his anchor. Abandoning it meant navigating by guesswork.

  He waited.

  The footsteps grew louder. Then a shape appeared at the junction — a pup, one of the mid-sized ones he vaguely recognized from the nursery. It moved with a strange, loose confidence, not cautious at all, arms swinging, eyes forward.

  It walked past him at a distance of maybe four body-lengths.

  Richard held his breath.

  The pup didn't slow. Didn't glance toward the shadow. Just walked on, carrying whatever it was carrying, disappearing into the passage ahead.

  Richard counted to ten.

  Then he stepped out and continued right.

  He used the same trick twice more before the passages began to widen and the smell of the entrance cave — bodies, stone, and food being cooked.

  He slowed to a careful walk, listening. "Close, maybe two or three junctions" thought Richard.