Jig crawled back to take another look. Four cats lay dead, two from Ryslind’s magic, and the others from more mundane wounds. The corpses didn’t seem to deter the other cats, which were as stubborn as they were dangerous. Several more of the snarling beasts had joined their fellows and now waited for the chance to attack. Only a narrow bottleneck in the tunnel kept them from charging as a pack.

Riana scooted close to Jig’s side. The instant she started to whisper, Jig knew what she was going to ask.

“Do you know where the rod is?”

Jig bit his lip to keep from sighing. In the past few days, everyone had pulled him aside to ask if he knew the rod’s hiding place. Barius had threatened to torture him. Darnak hinted that helping to find the rod might be Jig’s only hope of getting through this alive. As for Ryslind, when he asked about the rod, Jig had sensed Straum watching him from behind that glowing gaze. Jig hadn’t been able to think of anything except Straum’s terrible jaws closing over the helpless dragonchild.

“No,” Jig answered. Didn’t they realize he would happily give them the rod if he could only go home?

He watched as Darnak and Barius charged up the tunnel, the former shouting a dwarven battle cry. They returned a few seconds later, Darnak swatting furiously at the cat that had locked its jaws onto the dwarf’s forearm. If not for his thick bracers, Darnak’s arm would have been nothing but shredded meat. He managed to hurl the cat against the wall. It whined and crawled away, dragging its paralyzed hindquarters along the ground.

Jig closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He wasn’t worried about the cats. The adventurers would win or else they wouldn’t. Either way, there wasn’t much Jig could do about it. He just wanted to be done with it.

Was he imagining things, or could he smell the faint spice of Golaka’s ever-simmering cauldron? Thinking about food made his mouth water painfully. He reached up to his shoulder and stroked Smudge’s head. The fire-spider evidently recognized home as well, for his head was high, and he kept turning around, as if searching for familiar landmarks.

Although it felt good to be home, everything seemed strange as well. Knowing his fellow goblins would likely kill him didn’t help his comfort, but there was more. Like the smells. He never would have noticed them before. The tunnels themselves felt smaller, too. Was it only because he had been beyond them, because he knew how much more there was past goblin territory?