Kalev raised an eyebrow. Vix held up the glowing crystal for him to see. “We’re all issued one. It’s not safe to have flames burning unattended in here.”
The room around them proved to be a storage space for fabric. It was lined with shelves stuffed with bolts of cloth in all textures and colors. Vix unlocked the door and let them into a hallway lined with doors.
“What are these?” Kalev asked as they walked into the corridor.
“Store rooms, mostly,” replied Vix. “Doors to other stairs, to the work rooms, pump rooms, light rooms.”
“How big is this place?”
“No one knows. There are rumors about whole families having lived down in these tunnels for generations.” She ducked into another store room, surveyed the shelves, and reached one handed between two bales of fabric. To Kalev’s surprise, she pulled out a spear made of a piece of black glass tightly lashed to a wooden shaft. She handed it to him and then brought out its twin.
“These rumors …,” he began, but she looked at him in a way that said quite eloquently she would answer no question that followed those words. Clutching his new weapon, Kalev turned away, but froze.
A trail of footsteps showed up plainly in the grime on the floor.
“Well, someone’s been this way recently.”
Vix held the crystal high and swore. “Sheroth.”
“Are you sure?”
Vix pointed to the print of a huge, flat foot. “What else has a print like that?”
Kalev said nothing, just gestured with his spear, indicating that she should lead the way.
Following the faint trail in the dust, they traversed a series of ancient store rooms filled with the dusty detritus of the theater: pots and jars and crates, stacks of wood, coils of rope, folds of canvas. They passed through rooms filled with props, looking as if the contents of whole homes had been stacked in corners and piled on shelves. The corridor doors had been placed at strange angles, seldom directly across from each other, so each exit was a quarter turn from the entrance. The result was the uncomfortable sensation of going in circles.
Mildew permeated the stale air. A constant rustling accompanied them, and Kalev glimpsed the flash of red eyes as rats scuttled away from the unexpected light. Rickety stairways, their entrances half hidden by piles of debris or crates led them farther down. Kalev found himself quietly praying Vix’s crystal didn’t fail. Without the light, they’d be permanently lost in this labyrinth.
To keep his mind off that highly uncomfortable possibility, Kalev turned over the thousand questions that thronged his mind. What had convinced Sheroth to come down here? Had he truly followed a skulk in Vix’s shape? But who controlled the skulk? How? It would have to be a powerful spell, or …
Kalev remembered the sight of Vix fighting the skulk, shapechanger facing shapechanger. Could a skulk mesmerist itself be under the spell of another kind of mesmerist? Someone who could not or would not enact their own murder. Someone who had a quick mind, and the glib tongue to cover any small inconsistencies.
Someone who had a predictable routine and could hide in plain sight, if they had the help of the Memory Eye …
They came to a stair that was stone rather than wood. They saw no more trail, but there was also no other exit from the room, so they headed down. It ended in a small space with walls of rough stone. Sewer stench permeated the draft that curled around Kalev’s neck. Icy water leaked through the mortared joints and puddled on the ancient flagstones. For a moment he thought they’d hit a dead end, but then he saw a low crawlway near the floor.
Must go under the sewers, he thought.
Vix saw the crawlway too, and she held the crystal close to it, but the white light only penetrated a few inches into the stinking dark. Kalev looked at the changeling armed with her makeshift spear. “You’d better head back. I’ll find Sheroth and bring him out to you.”
“No,” she said flatly, as he expected. “Sheroth has always stood by me. I’m not abandoning him to whatever’s down there.”
For a moment Kalev considered telling her who he was, and who he worked for. She was trustworthy. She could take a message back to his control for him, to let them know what had happened, just in case he never came out of this hole.
But all he did was nod once. “Then let’s end this.”
To Kalev’s surprise, she let him go first, handing over the crystal without argument. Awkwardly, because of the spear and the crystal, Kalev crawled into the tunnel. It bent like a saddlebow and was coated with a stinking slime Kalev did not care to speculate about. His breath steamed in the crystal’s light.
Finally, every joint aching, Kalev emerged from the tunnel into what he felt to be an open space. He held the crystal up high.
They stood in a strange, irregular chamber. Its filthy walls and ceiling curved sharply inward, making Kalev think it might be a juncture of sewer tunnels. Fetid heaps of dirt and refuse filled the many corners.
In its center stood Sheroth.
“Sheroth!” Vix cried as she emerged from the crawlway and darted forward. “What …?”
“Get back, Vix!” bellowed Sheroth.
In the next heartbeat, the warforged drew his broadsword and charged, straight for Kalev. Kalev sprang to the side. Sheroth’s momentum carried him past, but he pivoted faster than Kalev would have credited, and charged again.
“Sheroth!” cried Vix. “Stop!”
“He’ll kill you!” Sheroth aimed a swing at Kalev’s head. Kalev skipped back. He didn’t dare parry. The spear’s shaft would snap like a stick against Sheroth’s blade.
“No! He’s a friend!”
“He’s a liar!” roared Sheroth.
If Kalev were facing a human, he’d just keep him on the run, using his speed to stay out of range and wear the other down. But he would wear down long before the warforged would.
Desperation giving him strength, Kalev hoisted himself one-handed up the pile of debris.
“Coward!” bellowed Sheroth as he charged again.
“Sheroth!” Vix leaped into his path. “What’re you doing?”
“He’s the murderer!” The warforged’s eyes glowed with his outrage. “He killed the duke!”
“The skulk killed the duke!” Vix grabbed the warforged’s raised sword arm and hauled down with all her strength. “Who told you this?”
Sheroth looked at her, momentarily paralyzed with confusion.
“I did,” said a man’s smooth voice, and Kalev was absolutely unsurprised to see Gledeth Shore emerge from the shadows, flanked by two skulks.
“What are you doing here?” Vix asked. Gledeth smiled indulgently down at her.
“He’s a psion,” said Kalev, not taking his eyes off Sheroth. “He’s using his mind to control the skulks. He made them steal for him. He’s convinced Sheroth you’re in danger from me.”
“So I very much suggest you get out of his way,” said Gledeth to Vix.
“Sheroth’s not going to hurt me,” replied Vix calmly, looking up into the warforged’s dull eyes and shifting, revealing her true form. “Sheroth will never hurt me.”
Sheroth met Vix’s amethyst eyes, and his body swayed.
Gledeth’s eyes narrowed. “Hmmm … you may be right. Ah, well, Kalev, you’ll just have to set your skulks on her.”
The skulks roared and lunged forward. Vix screamed and stabbed out, catching one skulk in the shoulder. The skulk howled and reeled, and she pivoted on her heel to face the other sneering murderer.
“Kill them!” Gledeth shouted.
Sheroth plowed into the unsteady pile of debris that Kalev had climbed upon. Kalev leaped for the warforged’s armored shoulders and bounced off, scarcely jarring Sheroth at all. He hit the floor hard, barely staying upright. Vix shouted again as both skulks charged her. She sliced one on the arm with her blade, sending it staggering backward, and with the back stroke slammed the butt of her spear into the other one’s guts.
“They’ll kill her!” Kalev bellowed to Sheroth. “
You’ve got to do something! They’ll kill Vix!”
Sheroth froze, just for an eye-blink. Kalev could practically feel the wave of power pouring from the psion, but it was not enough. It could not be enough to break such loyalty. Sheroth roared and turned, brandishing his blade in one massive hand. With the other, he grabbed the nearest skulk and tossed it aside.
Kalev faced Gledeth, spear poised. “Who are you working for, Gledeth?”
“You expect me to name my masters to you?”
Kalev smiled patiently. “You must be at your breaking point. You can’t let the skulks go—they’re just as likely to kill you as us. You can’t let Sheroth go because he and Vix will take you down. If I want, all I have to do is wait it out, and you die.”
The half-elf’s eyes glittered. “Perhaps all I need do is wait until my skulks kill your pathetic allies. Then you are mine.”
“You think I won’t fight?”
“I think you don’t want to,” said the psion. “What I know is too useful to you and to your little queen. You need me to name my spy master. You know that you do.”
He did. He wanted to bring Gledeth back alive, to see him questioned, to find out what the half-elf’s plans were, why he had murdered, and who he was working for or with. It could be a threat to the whole of the realm and he, Kalev, could end it all, be a hero to the queen. If he could just capture Gledeth Shore alive.
Kalev swayed on his feet. “I … need … you.”
Just then, Sheroth bellowed and stomped down on one of the skulks. There was a sickening crunch and squish as the creature’s skull splintered beneath the warforged’s foot.
Gledeth grinned and turned his shining eyes onto Kalev, in time to see Kalev’s dagger flying toward him, but not fast enough to dodge before the blade embedded itself in his throat.
“But I want you dead more,” said Kalev.
Gledeth gurgled and fell as a welter of blood spilled down the front of his silken tunic. Kalev turned in time to see Sheroth grab the remaining skulk and hold it so Vix could run her spear straight into its wide-open mouth, slitting flesh and crashing through bone. The skulk gagged and gurgled and sagged, spouting blood, and Sheroth flung the creature away.
Vix and Sheroth faced each other, panting, shaking, their friendship unbroken, the slow understanding of true circumstances that comes after a battle washing over them. Kalev retrieved his dagger and wiped the blood and gore on Gledeth’s sleeve before he tucked it back into his sash.
“Come on,” he said to his comrades. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sarah Zettel is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author. She has written nineteen novels and a roughly equal number of short stories over the past ten years in addition to founding the author cooperative Book View Cafe, practicing tai chi, learning to fiddle, marrying a rocket scientist, and raising a rapidly growing son. She is very tired right now.
WATCHERS AT THE LIVING GATE
A TALE OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS
PAUL PARK
He lived with his own kind in the forest, away from the towns of the human world, because of what he was. But once a year since he was small he’d come away to the ruined city on the mountainside where his own people never ventured, nor full-blooded humans either, a place of old magic and old defeats. That first time he’d been hunting on the cliff top, and a wounded ram had led him far from home. In a bowl of mist and leaning stones he brought it down, a lucky shot with the small bow, but soon he heard the hounds yelping behind him. Before he could claim the kill he had been whipped away by men on horseback, shouting and cursing the mother who had borne him. Some dismounted and threw stones. Helpless, he had watched them pull the ram away, his arrow still lodged in its throat.
When he ran away it had not been in shame or fear so much as rage. Toward sunset he came out on the mountainside above the clouds and watched the red light cut across the rocks amid the tussocks of coarse grass. There was the fallen gate, its stone posts inscribed with runes he couldn’t read, not yet. He approached, and came into the first of the ruined streets, the ruined houses built into the cliff side.
Carved statues lined an avenue. Some had lost their arms, legs, heads, but even so, he could see a vision of ideal beauty in the broken stones. He paused to study the statue of a boy about his age, yet more beautiful even than a human child, tall and slender, with long eyes and delicately pointed ears.
He stood at the lip of a stone pool, gesturing down into its depths, and in the last rays of the setting sun, the living boy squatted over it and saw reflected in its surface, as carefully as in any mirror, his own distorted features, his heavy jaw, protruding teeth, mashed nose, bulbous eyes under heavy ridges of bone. In such circumstances even the small attempts at decoration, the shards of broken glass that his mother had tied lovingly into his shaggy hair, appeared to mock him as they caught the light.
Then it was dark. He looked around for the door of a stone hall that still retained some of its roof. The black doorways seemed suddenly menacing. Who knew what ghosts and spirits prowled these ruins, who had died here when the city fell? Instead, shivering with cold, he stayed beside the pool, until the moon rose behind the shattered peaks, and moonlight struck the surface of the water.
That was the first time he had seen her. Every year since then he had returned, when the first full moon of summer fell into the water. He had changed since that first time, grown in stature and in skill, but she never changed. Always she stroked to the surface as if swimming up from underneath, from some submerged tunnel, he had thought at first.
Then, because he was a boy, he had worshiped her as a boy does a woman, worshiped her goodness, as he imagined it, striven to be worthy, and to fulfill every command. Later, full-grown, his shoulders tattooed with his clan’s symbols of manhood, his ears pierced with iron rings, he had moved into another kind of worship, as she had stood with the water to her knees, her body clothed in wet silk, and a phosphorescent sheen that had followed her from the depths. Later still, reckless, he had staggered down into the pool, only to find himself enmeshed in weeds, while she pulled laughing away. “How ugly you are! How is it possible for a living creature to be so ugly? You disgust me—truly, you disgust me.” But when he was exhausted and discouraged she came close to him again, and with flashing eyes she told him once more what he must accomplish to prepare himself. He’d done everything she’d asked.
These commandments, as if from a goddess, had led him far from his own people. Not for him the brawls between the clans, the comforts of marriage and children. Instead he lived with his widowed mother in the forest, away from the clan’s hearth, despised, he imagined, by the purebreds in his village. With a dedication born of rage, he studied human lore. He learned the languages of men and other creatures. He studied old books by candlelight, and parchment scrolls from the libraries of the abandoned city. He spoke the words the goddess brought to him until the trees came alive. And in the spring he cut his totem stick from a piece of bone, and carved the length of it in a pattern of braided hair, and fashioned its knob in the shape of a wolf’s head, with lumps of agate for its eyes.
On the night of the full moon he slept most of the day. His mother woke him for supper, as he had requested. Yawning, he sat down on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream, washed his body, shaved his face, combed his hair and knotted it with iron beads. Then he dressed himself in the clothes he had laid out the night before, his father’s shirt, made from doeskin as fine as linen, salvaged by his mother after he’d left them, mended and patched over the years. The tribe wore furs and harder, heavier leather when they wore anything, but she had kept this human garment for the wedding of her half-human son.
Now she brought him porridge and blood sausage from the fire. She stood watching him, holding the food in the wooden bowl. Long before, she had learned not to question his choices, because it was common for the men in the village to abandon their old mothers and fathers to the wolves, the totem of their clan, when there were too ma
ny mouths to feed. But her son was a powerful hunter. Others claimed to see the deer and elk search for him in the meadows and the woods, and lay their horned heads in his lap.
“Haggar,” she said.
He looked up, smiling into her coarse and wrinkled face, until he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. But you are going far away.”
He expected some sort of complaining then, and when it didn’t come he started to say all the things that he’d rehearsed in order to forestall her: “I won’t be long. I’ve left seven necklaces of iron cash. In the digging pit there’s a wooden box with agates and opals you can sell in town. Humans love them for their games. The smokehouse is full of meat and fish.”
But when she said nothing about any of that, he stood up to comfort her. “I won’t go far,” he said, which was a lie, the first he’d ever told her.
“There’s my cousin,” she said, referring to a girl in the village. “She waits for you.”
When he put his arms around her, she relaxed into his chest. “Me, too,” she said, fingering the bone buttons of his father’s shirt.
Later, as it got dark, he left the encampment. Barefoot, he ran uphill through the woods. When the trees gave way among the rock piles, he clambered onto the ridge, then stood looking back for a moment at the firelight among the trees. It was the first night of the summer festival, and the men were lighting the bonfire in the charmed circle. They were already drinking their honey beer, and soon the women would dance to the rhythm of the drums, while the old shaman marked their foreheads from a bowl of blood—he’d never seen this ceremony. He missed it every year.
He stood on the ridge as the darkness gathered. “I know you’re here,” he said without turning round. The she-wolves picked their way over the stones, their heads low. He ran among them up the slope into the high meadow, among the red-star columbines. The wolves coursed after him but could not reach him, because as he ran he gripped his totem stick and muttered his evocations, until he could feel the coarse hair on his back and down his arms, and he dropped down to all fours.
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