Toede was scanning the perimeter of the room for the barest hint of another opening. The juggernaut put in, "You'd better abandon all hope at finding another exit. There ain't one. The passage behind you leads up to a solid stone plug. And there ain't nothin' else lives down here, not even little blind cave fish. Unless you bore yourself a new opening, you're stuck. It's just the two of us."
"Just wonderful," said Toede, sitting down on the top muddy step and setting the rope and food satchel down next to him. "I take it you think I should just wade in and sacrifice myself to you, since I can't get out."
"Save you some time and trouble, little breathing pal," said the juggernaut. "I mean, I like the company as much as the next denizen of the Dark Lady's pit, and I want to know whaf s going on topside, but more than anything, I want my six-fifty-two."
Toede sat on the step, looking pensive.
"I mean, starvation is an ugly, ugly thing. You get so you're just begging for death." Jugger sighed. "Whereas, I'm quick! You'll never feel it. Death is like that, you know."
"I know," said Toede. "I've died before." He toyed with the idea of throwing himself under the juggernaut's roller, and maybe returning somewhere else in his third life. But with my luck I'd come right back here, he thought, three hundred and forty-eight more times.
"You died before?" asked the juggernaut with curiosity.
"Couple of times, so far," replied Toede. "And you're right, while there's a lot of pain leading up to it, the exact crossing over into death is a relatively painless thing."
The juggernaut let out a low whistle that sounded much the way steam escaping from a kettle would, if the kettle were the size of a hay wain. "Boy, I don't know. If you kill someone who has already died before, does that mess up the bookkeeping? I don't know if I can count you or not." The fiend was silent for a while.
"You've been down here since before the ogres were… ogres?" asked Toede.
"Yep," responded Jugger. "I was real peeved the first couple hundred years after they lured me into this pit. First I think, Okay, I'll sink to the bottom and slowly wheel my way out, but the mud's just thick and heavy enough to keep me afloat. So, then I think, Okay, I can empty the mud by splashing it around a lot. So I do that for a couple hundred years. The mud gets nice and thick around the edges, and then dries up and falls right back in, so guess what? I'm still hosed."
"You've tried waiting for the mud to dry out?" asked Toede.
"For a thousand years or so," answered Jugger. "A cou-pla times, actually. First I waited a century, not moving, until a thin crust formed on the mud. Then I shifted into low, and it all broke up. Then I waited two centuries, then three, and each time it broke up as soon as I set the wheels spinning. So I waited a real long time, and then the bump came along and knocked everything back to the muddy state."
'The bump?" said Toede.
"Bump," repeated the juggernaut. "Just one, but it was a loop of one. Gave the whole room a shake, and all the crust just caved in. That's when the other feller was here."
"Other fellow," said Toede dully.
"Some human spellcaster from Istar," said the juggernaut. "Seems the gods got PO'd at Istar and dropped a mountain on the place. He teleported out randomly and ended up here. Thaf s how come I know your modern language, and also how I learned that starvation is such a horrible way to kill yourself."
"He was number six-fifty-one," surmised Toede.
"Right, and ever since then, I've gone back to spinning my wheels, hoping to generate enough heat and traction to get out."
"So you've been running your rollers for over three hundred fifty years?"
"I guess," said the juggernaut, adding defensively, "I don't get out much, you know."
Toede was silent, weighing his options. He had rescued Charka out of his own hunger, and lived to regret it. If he helped Jugger, then he would surely die, and over three hundred others with him.
But if among those three hundred were Groag, Charka, or Hopsloth…
"I'm going to help you," said Toede.
"Wha' the?" said the juggernaut.
"I'm going to get you out of there," said Toede. "I can't get out on my own, and neither can you." He picked up the rope and walked to one side of the passage, where he chose something that might have been a statue and started pounding on the mud. It flaked away in thick clumps to reveal what looked like an egg rendered in pale brown stone. Toede tied one end of the rope around it.
"I should tell ya, little live one," said Jugger, "that if you wade in here and get close, I may just try and run you down. It's what I'm supposed to do. Can't help it."
"I'll take that chance," said Toede, taking the trailing end of the rope. He tested the muddy steps with a toe. Slippery but solid enough. He started to wade in.
"Three things should stop you from grinding me into the mud," Toede continued, slowly moving down into the mire. It supported his weight easily, as he guessed it would. After all, it supported an Abyss-spawned killing machine made of cast iron.
"First, if I die, you get one kill, whereas if you escape you can make your quota and go back to where you belong. Second, figure it out. If you get one visitor every three hundred fifty years, it'll be over a hundred thousand years before you see the Abyss again."
"One hundred and eighteen thousand years and three centuries," noted the juggernaut, and Toede could hear the faintest touch of wistfulness in its voice.
"Right. And third, you don't know if I count for your tally or not."
The hobgoblin was swimming through the mire at this point, dragging the rope behind him and moving to the side of the great crimson monster, near the front roller.
Once a whale had washed up on the beach near Flotsam, and Toede and a delegation of merchants went down to investigate it. It was a huge, black monster and towered over them, stinking in the sun. The gulls pecked at it, and it smelled horrible, and at length Toede had dispatched a crew of prisoners to bury it then and there. Something that large made Toede feel extremely vulnerable and small.
Touching the huge front roller, still smooth and shiny after millennia, made him feel the same way.
"I'm going to dive down," he told the juggernaut, "and slip the rope under one end of your roller. Don't move."
Toede took a deep breath and submerged in the mire, feeling his way alongside the creature. The mud grew thicker and harder to move through as he plunged downward, but at last he touched the underside of the roller. He shoved the line underneath it and ran it up the interior curve of the creature's body.
The juggernaut remained inert, but Toede could feel a vibration that seemed to rise in intensity as he worked.
Finally, he surfaced, sputtering mud and wiping the thick grime from his eyes.
"What now?" asked Jugger, and Toede detected a sense of impatience in its voice.
"I'm getting on board," said Toede. He took the leading edge of the line that ran under the front roller, in his teeth, and climbed up the side of the creature. As he climbed, the mud slid off him in clumps. Toede looped the rope beneath the rocker arm holding the front roller, and now stood directly above the creature's face.
"Okay, give me a little power," said Toede.
He almost hurtled from his perch as the juggernaut lunged forward, but managed to grab hold of a cast iron eyebrow. Even so, he fell flat on his face and could taste blood.
"Enough!" he bellowed almost immediately. Jugger subsided.
The rope was looped around the front roller for two revolutions. Toede grabbed the leading end and pulled it to the back, dropping it in front of the rear roller. In the process, he noted a human skull jammed between the body and the roller cavity. Six-fifty-one, no doubt.