“Aye. So long as it’s not coming back for dessert, that is.”

The dwarf’s wary tone made Jig see the distant trees in a different light. What creatures might be hiding in those shadows? This place was so open, with too many places for an enemy to hide. He knew nothing of surface monsters, but anything that could destroy an ogre was, in Jig’s opinion, a good argument for staying in the tunnels.

“Strange, though.” Barius peered more closely at the wounds. “Whatever killed the ogre wasn’t interested in food. A kill such as this would feed an animal for days. Why then did it not at least drag the ogre off for safekeeping? Unless it was a territorial dispute, perhaps.”

He pointed to a patch of grass behind Riana. “The tracks lead back to the center of the field.”

Jig stared at the grass. It looked green, the same as everything else down here. Had madness now touched Barius, that he could communicate with plants?

“Spread out,” Barius ordered. “Search for anything unusual.”

As they retraced their path, Jig’s sharp ears caught Darnak’s grumbling comment. “A hundred feet underground, in a fake field beneath a fake sky, with an ogre slaughtered like no more than a rat to a cat, and he sends us to search for the unusual.”

They found two more ogres. Together with the first corpse, the bodies formed a rough triangle around the spot where the adventurers had appeared.

“Ambush?” Darnak asked.

“Most likely. By the time we recovered from the fall and drew our weapons, they would have been upon us.” Barius chewed his lip, one of the only times Jig had seen the prince show anxiety.

“Even if you and I could stand against such beasts, they still outnumbered us.” He clearly didn’t consider Riana or Jig worth counting.

The pit was a trap. Anyone who beat the Necromancer was supposed to die here. Sizing up the two-handed sword one ogre had dropped, Jig tried not to think about how long he would last in a fight against ogres, let alone whatever beast had killed them. Perhaps the party had arrived in the middle of a power struggle. Hobgoblins and goblins occasionally slaughtered each other when food ran short, when one group was caught stealing from the other, or when the younger warriors simply grew bored with bullying their own. Jig prayed that the creatures here would finish each other off before he had the poor luck to meet one.

Barius touched the wounds on the third ogre. “Whatever did this, it killed this one last.” He crawled around the grass for a few minutes. “It left for the woods, in this direction. We should follow.”

“What?” It came out more as a squeak, but Jig didn’t care. He must have misheard.